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hootysblog · 3 years

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Hoot hoot everyone! First off, sorry for not posting in a couple weeks. I got a new job and I forgot to post. I don't know if I'll post here every week or every other week, but I promise it'll get posted.

So, next story was written before "Knock knock knocking on Hooty's Door." Enjoy!

Luz's Deepest Wish

The Owl House crew have been busy the past few days, from Luz and Hunter's team up, the revolution invitation from Raine, to King still trying to find something out about his dad. Now, Hooty's in the mix.

Surprisingly, he's really good at listening to others people's issues and offering solutions. He was able to give Eda and King great advice about their problems. Hooty is up for a challenge, helping Luz with her problem.

Luz has been focusing on the echo mouse almost all day. He has revealed some things about Philip and the portal, but not the key component that Luz is missing.

"C'mon little guy," begged Luz, "can you play one more entry?" The mouse was sleeping and couldn't be bothered. Luz, in frustration, laid down on her sleeping bag.

"Why is this so hard?" Luz thought. "Am I doing something wrong? What if I never get back home? I'll have to stay on the Boiling Isles, which isn't bad. I'll have Eda, Willow, Gus, Amity...." Luz blushed at that thought.

She hasn't seen Amity since that fateful night at Blight Manor. Her thoughts roamed back to Amity and her newly cut and dyed lavender hair, which Luz loved. Of course, she thought of the kiss. The feather light kiss Amity had left on her check. If her brain was working at that moment, she would've kissed her back, but Amity sped off into the Manor, leaving Luz awestruck.

Lost in thought, she didn't hear Hooty pop his head through the window. "HOOT HOOT LUZ! YOU'RE BUDDY IS HERE TO HELP YOU!"

"AHHHH!"Luz screamed while throwing a pillow at him. "Sorry Hooty. You scared me."

"It's okay Luz. I didn't mean to scare you. I thought I could help you with your problems!"

"My problems?"

"Yeah! I've been so good with Eda and King that I wanted to help my Luz out!"

"Please don't call me my Luz ever again. It's creepy" Luz told him.

"But Amity can call you that right?" He smiled, getting a little closer to Luz.

Luz, blushing like mad, choked out "H,h,how did you know that?!"

"I heard you mumbling it up here after the fight, hoot!" he said.

"Please tell me you don't listen to my conversations all the time?"

"I try not to, but sometimes they're interesting!!"

Luz pinches the bridge of her nose. "Okay, you're here to help with my problem?"

"Yes!"

"Do you even know my problem Hooty?"

"Well I know you have problems," he replied smiley, but Luz didn't find that amusing and gave him a death glare. "But I think your problems stem from one problem in general."

"I'm not following."

"Well, take your palisman for example." Luz remembers that day, and she didn't like it, even though she was able to save the palismans and Eda and King were able to steal palistrum wood so she could create her own, when she was ready to. "You said your wish was to be a witch right?"

Luz nodded. "And then you wanted to go back home to your mother, stay in the Boiling Isles, or wait to reveal your wish until you saw your mother hoot hoot?"

"I know what happened that day Hooty, just get to the point," Luz annoyingly said. "Why did I agree to this?" Luz thought.

"Maybe, your wish is to be liked for who you are. I think you came here for a reason. You found a second family that loves you for you and a certain someone who really loves you and your personality." Luz blushed and turned away from Hooty, going that he didn't notice.

"So you're saying, that my wish is that I want someone who loves me for me and doesn't find me weird?" Luz turned to look at Hooty. "And that if I tell this person that I like them that most of my problems will be easier to solve?"

Hooty nods. "And I think you know who that witch is, hoot hoot."

Luz was lost in thought for a few seconds. Suddenly, it hit her. Hooty was right. It all makes sense. "HOOTY, YOU'RE A GENIUS!" Luz exclaimed.

*Gasp* "I've never been called that before!!!" Hooty said, crying tears of joy.

Luz gets up and hugs Hooty. "You're right Hooty. You really did help."

"No problem Luz. Now, are you going to tell her how you feel?"

Luz, feeling confident now, replied yes, sprinted downstairs and bolted out the door. She ran right past her mentor, who didn't even have the time to ask where she was going.

Eda, stunned by Luz's sudden departure, yelled to Hooty "What did you tell her?"

"I was able to help her with her problem!" Hooty exclaimed.

"Which one, the portal or the Blight one?"

"The Blight one, hoot hoot!"

"Huh, never thought I would say this, but," Eda swallowed, "Good job Hooty."

Hooty goes and wraps Eda in one of his signature hugs, which she secretly enjoys.

-----------------------

Luz reaches Blight Manor and knocks on the door, anxiously waiting for the door to open.

"Luz, I haven't seen you all week," Edric said while opening the door.

"Where's Amity?!? I need to talk to her!" Luz loudly said, gasping for air.

"Calm down Luz. She's not here", he explained. Luz felt defeated. "But.." Luz perked up when Ed started talking again, "She's at the library if you need to see her."

"Thanks Ed!" Luz ran away while waving good bye.

Minutes later, she arrives at the library.

"Malphas, have you seen Amity?" Luz asked the head librarian.

"Yeah. She's in, like, her study room" he replied with a smile. Luz thanked him and made her way to Amity's secret room.

Amity, doing research on the human realm, Thank Titan for my own room. I would never hear the end of it from Ed and Em, she thought and heard her secret room starting to open.

Scrambling to hide the book, she was about to go off on the twins. "Can you two please stop bargaining in here?!? It's called a secret room for a..." Amity stopped mid-sentence after she saw Luz standing there.

Luz, closing the room, made her way over to Amity. Amity, starting to blush, was about to say something, but Luz was able to talk first.

"You missed palisman day."

"I know, I wasn't happy about it, but I couldn't go," Amity said, trying to avoid eye contact with Luz.

"I know why you didn't go."

Amity looked at Luz with confusion. Luz continued speaking.

"It's because you were avoiding me. I've done what you did back at home," she nervously admitted.

"Luz...." Amity tried to say.

"No Amity. I need to say this and I think you should know what happened that day. I didn't get a palisman."

Amity was surprised. Surely, Luz, who is the most emotional person she's ever met, would've matched up with a palisman. "Why?"

"I said I wanted to become a witch, then stay here on the Isles, but also go home to see my Mami. Then, later that night, I said that I had to see my Mami before I could decide my future, but Hooty made me realizes something." Amity was in shock. That bird tube was smart?!? "He made me realize that I needed to tell my crush that I like them, and now I'm ready to do that."

Amity, still processing what Luz had said, "I'm sorry you didn't get a palisman, but why do you think telling your crush you like them will help you?"

"Because then my future could be a little bit clearer," Luz said while moving closer to Amity.

"Luz, what are you doing?" Amity said, while backing away from Luz.

"Sneaking into your heart, like I always do", Luz said confidently while grabbing Amity hands.

Amity, turning into a blushing disaster (that Luz loves), tries to talk to Luz, but Luz's lips are on hers and she melts into the kiss.

The kiss, which only last a few seconds, was magical and better than they both could've imagined.

Luz, on cloud nine, pulls her lips away from Amity and looks into Amity's golden eyes and smiled.

Amity was left speechless. She saw Luz, with her goofy smile and her brown eyes sparking in the dim light of her study room. Amity gathered up her courage to speak. "Luz, you shouldn't have done that."

Luz's expression changed. She frowned and felt her heart drop, stammers out "Oh no! What did I do? What did I do? I just ruined our friendship with that kiss! I thought you liked me because you kissed me at your house! Oh no oh no oh no!" Luz falls to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest. Amity was heartbroken.

"Luz, calm down. Luz... Luz... Luz, look at me," Amity rushed over and comforts Luz. Luz looks up at Amity. "How can she be so beautiful after crying?" Amity thought.

"I do like you, like really like you," Amity smiled.

"Then why didn't you want me to kiss you if you say you like me? And why didn't you come to palisman day?" Luz sniffled out.

Amity started laughing, "I didn't mean to avoid you Luz. I'll admit, I was scared to see you at school after what I did, but you are not the reason why I didn't go to school. And I did want to kiss you, but now we're going to have a problem on our hands."

"Why?"

"I was just getting over the Common Mold." Luz looked confused. "It's a sickness we witches get. We sneeze, get a fever, chills...."

"LIKE A COLD!" Luz finally caught on. "Sorry, we call that the common cold in the human realm."

"Oh, well, um, I'm still recovering from it, but I felt okay to come to my study room, but we just kissed so...." Amity looked over at Luz, with an apologetic look on her face.

"Great, now I'm going to get sick with a Boiling Isles disease.....Awesome!" Luz practically screamed.

"Only you would be excited to get a disease from here," Amity said with sarcasm.

"Well, when I get sick...."

"You mean if you get sick?" Amity cuts her off.

"No, when I get sick. I always get sick during cold season at home; I can have my girlfriend take care of me," Luz beamed at Amity. "If that's okay with you?"

Amity, grabbing Luz's hand, replied "Yep. I'll take care of you."

Luz, slightly upset that Amity didn't hear her "girlfriend" comment, didn't notice that Amity was leaning in and kissing her again. Pulling away, Luz had a puzzled look on her face.

"What?" Amity smiled, "I can't get my girlfriend even more sick."

Luz, realizing how happy both her and Amity were, snuggled closer to Amity.

Both finally got their wish, and they can't wait to see how their wishes plays out.

#lumity #the owl house

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thisisnotasafari · 6 years

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Bus Magic

Yes, that’s my bus, stuck in the mud. You try getting a better picture.

Before I begin, let me state that buses should stay flat on the ground. I think we can agree on this. Yet, ending up at wide angles with respect to horizontal is well within the realm of possibility on a Tanzanian bus. This will usually be rectified within a few hours by a team of shirtless men who show up out of nowhere to dig the bus out of thick mud or deep water or whatever obstacle in which it has entrenched itself. I swear, these guys showed up every time one of my buses got stuck. It might have been the same guys every time, I have no way of confirming. Maybe there’s a team of heroes who are dispatched to rescue stuck buses. Even on the deepest, darkest road in the most uninhabited stretch of land in southern Tanzania, they appeared at any hour with shovels and picks, and bravely struggled to dig out the tires and push the bus out of the hole into which it had plunged. Nine times out of ten, I’d say, they were successful. I was always slightly concerned I’d handed a shovel and get drafted into helping, but I remain thankful that never happened.

To set the scene: I was on the way to Mahenge after a lengthy spring holiday in Cape Town, South Africa, about which more later, but the shock of being back in Tanzania after two weeks with hot showers, strong coffee, and fast internet hadn’t fully set in. I arrived armed with the steely conviction that I would survive my last months in Mahenge as safely and happily as I could, or die in the process. It was this attitude that I assumed as I boarded the bus.

The journey started as propitiously as it could, under the circumstances. Morogoro was hot and dry, the sun stuck flat in the middle of the sky, but I knew further south the rains had come and would be in full swing by the time I arrived home. I bought my ticket the day before with surprisingly limited hassle (after I confirmed the hour of departure three times) and arrived at Msavu, the Morogoro bus stand, an hour early. After waiting for twenty minutes, the assembled crowd was told to walk across the street to a gas station. Buses pay a small fee for entering the bus stand, and as the bus was already en route from Dar, it was easier to pick up passengers at the gas station along the highway than deal with the traffic inside Msavu. Fine. The busI got on, and discovered I had two seats to myself. Enjoying my surprising luxury, I quickly assumed bus Zen mode and stared out the window, watching as the houses and people thinned and gave way to acacia and baobab and vast swaths of brown, swaying grass and clouds draped over distant mountains. Things were going well.

We departed Morogoro at 9:30 am. It was an hour or so before I saw the first dark puddles at the sides of the road. A few people had already gathered around to fill buckets with water before balancing them on their heads and walking on. As puddles go, these were small, I thought, only a few inches deep and nothing to worry about. Amateur puddles, a few years away from signing a college contract. About an hour later, the puddles had begun to spread across the road. Thin creeks tinkled under makeshift log bridges at the road’s edge. The bus slowed once or twice to ford a stream that had bisected the road and cause all of us in the back to fly out of our seats. It was an ominous development but the sun was out, the road was still paved, and I was determined to stay positive at any cost. (At the time, I was inwardly screaming at the absurdity of everything: “I want a beer, I want a pizza, I want Peanut M&Ms, I want to be off this bus, I want a bed, I want to go home.”)

At the Cape Town airport, I had purchased 1Q84, a brick of a Haruki Murakami novel, and brought it out of my bag to keep my mind occupied. I didn’t normally read on buses, it was often too bouncy and dusty, but I felt an ill-defined sense of uncertainty rising at the base of my neck, just out of reach. The fact that Murakami's novel takes place in an alternate world that often crosses over into a parallel reality seemed appropriate for my current situation.

“What if we get stuck?” a voice asked, quietly. “Where will you go? What will happen to your backpack, stowed out of reach? How will you get home? What will you eat? Do lions get hungrier during the rainy season? How long can you survive by drinking you own pee?” These are questions that used to plague me before any journey, my mind running through endless loops of contingency plans and emergency procedures. In my travels to this point, at which I’d been in Tanzania for about eight months, I’d learned to silence them, or at least to ignore them until they subsided. There was a way for everything, I knew, even if it was unpleasant or unexpected. Things were fine. They would be fine.

At about 3 pm, the bus switched with a lurch from the paved road onto the local dirt highway that stretched the rest of the way to Mahenge near the entrance to Udzungwa Mountains National Park. The park is home to the second largest biodiversity of any national park in Tanzania, and contains the magnificent 170 meter-tall Sanje Waterfalls—popular with backpackers and hikers—a glimpse of which I saw tumbling grandly down the mountain between a break in the clouds. It’s also home to a hell of a lot of water, much of which fell from the mountains and collected into rivulets that fed into larger streams along the roadside. The jungle, dense to the point of entering the bus by force and buying us dinner, was held back by the force of flowing water. A channel about four feet across flanked the road on both sides and deepened and widened as we progressed. It looked like we were driving not on a road, but on a thin, dirt-covered bridge over a vast river.

After another forty minutes of bouncing along over rutted tracks, things suddenly became not fine at all. The road curved around a hillside and disappeared. Like a river cutting through a canyon, the road, or what was left of it, was subsumed completely into a flowing mass of murky, silty mud bordered by towering walls of red clay and brown grass. The delineation between the dirt and the mire was clear: as if painted by hand, brown earth gradually gave way to black sludge for about one-hundred meters. The bus slowed to a stop. From the other direction, a Jeep heaved its way through the morass, its engine revving mightily as the tires cleaved into the ground and sprayed inky mud in every direction. I watched its progress enviously through the windshield. It eventually cleared the mud and drove past us, jauntily honking its horn as if to say, “Good luck, suckers.” At this point, everyone around me started to whisper quietly, which for Tanzanians is as close as they’ll come to true panic. I looked around at my neighbors, trying to gauge the seriousness of the situation by their expressions. One by one, they rose and began to walk toward the front of the bus. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I groaned to no one, and picked up my bag.

All of us congregated on the side of the road in the shade of some banana trees while the driver, a stout man wearing rubber sandals and a Manchester United jersey that nicely accentuated his paunch, conferred with his friends. At least, I assume they were his friends—they might have been strangers from a nearby village. Maybe they were from a nearby village but they were actually his friends, and he stopped the bus here on every journey so they all got a chance to hang out. In fact, I never had any inkling of where people appeared from on the road, or how they got there. People just seemed to appear from the tall grass, like those dead baseball players in Field of Dreams, perhaps drawn by the prospect of watching some bus drama unfold. I can imagine that was the main activity in a lot of towns.

I took a seat on a damp log, trying to keep my new black Converse shoes, fresh from Cape Town’s shopping district, from sticking in the mud. It turns out it is possible to be vain about one’s appearance even while stranded with a group of people who don’t speak your language while sitting on a log by the side of a swampy road. If I’d been in a better frame of mind, perhaps seated in a comfortable reclining chair with seven cold beers and a bag of chips, what unfolded might have been highly amusing. I would’ve recorded the entire process and submitted it to one of those TV shows that feature videos of people getting defenestrated or accidentally tossing their toddlers down a flight of stairs, with a studio audience of buffoons cackling madly in response. “Schadenfreude for Idiots” is the genre, I think. Anyway, it would’ve fit in perfectly.

I finally figured out, after spending twenty minutes waiting and listening to snippets of the conversations of people around me, that the driver asked us to leave the bus in order to lighten its weight and make it more buoyant (or so I would guess). In what seemed a strange group dynamic, even for laid-back Tanzanians, no one seemed perturbed or even slightly worried about our situation. The men quickly formed small groups as if they were socializing after church, many laughing and slapping each other on the back like they’d just found wads of cash in the tall grass instead of being forcibly removed from a sweaty bus after a truncated seven-hour journey. (If you’re counting, which I was, seven hours was the time the entire journey usually takes from start to finish. It had taken us that time to make it about a quarter of the way before we stopped.) Women quietly gathered in separate groups and spoke softly, the younger ones watching the men reverently, many using banana leaves to shade their faces. I sat on my log and continued to watch while I wiped spots of mud from my shoes.

The driver, clearly having reached an accord with his associates, boarded the empty bus and, with a theatrical roar of the engine, took off as fast as he could. “Hey dudes, watch this! I’m going to see how stuck I can get this bus and then we’ll ditch all these people and go back to town and get drunk!” he shouted out the window. After a few seconds, he accelerated sharply and turned the bus at a slight angle, hoping to skid across the mud and use the bus’s force and momentum to arrive pointed straight, more or less, on the other side. He, I’m sure, had more experience than I have piloting a two-ton metal block through waist-deep mud at high velocity, so if I ever see him again, I will admit that I didn’t do incredibly well in high school physics, so my opinion probably isn’t worth much. I do know, however, that in order to move a wheeled craft forward in a set direction, one must point the wheels to travel in that direction. It makes sense, does it not?

The front set of tires bit into the mud and held tightly, churning the bus forward with a thunderous force before succumbing to a lack of traction and spinning aimlessly as the rear wheels became mired in the tracks the front wheels had created. The weight of the bus was pulling it down into the mud, and the tires, traveling at an angle, forced themselves in deeper until they were completely stuck. The bus stopped, its front left tire spinning madly in the glare of the afternoon sun, with its nose pointed at a 15-degree angle into the ground, and the rear tires elevated slightly, so that all of the passengers, had we still been aboard, would have been dumped toward the front.

The driver hopped lightly out of the side door and landed with a splash in the mud, his feet sinking a few inches with every step. He seemed supremely unconcerned. This, I suppose, in retrospect, worked in his favor. Since most Tanzanians rarely get visibly frustrated or flustered, they’re able to shake off any failures and carry right along. There's something to be learned from that, I suppose. Life lesson: when you’re stuck in the mud, go get beers and things will be fine.

After conferencing again with his advisors, he stood for a moment and surveyed the scene, his stance suggesting, maybe only to me, the rugged determination of a prizefighter about to enter the second round. I’d like to say that everyone grew silent and apprehensively hopeful as he climbed aboard the bus, but really, no one seemed even to notice. For all I could tell, this turn in the road was our destination all along and, having successfully reached it, people were content. Maybe this was where the journey was meant to end. The thought of a lion stumbling on our party of castaways, as if a lion stumbles onto anything by chance, was arresting enough to cause me to remain stationary on the log with my head propped up on my chin. I love lions, but only in certain situations. This was not one of them. The sun bore down through a thin veil of cloud that fluttered across the cyan sky, and ripples of gauzy heat radiated up off the road in the distance.

His second attempt was more successful. After a slow start, the bus lurched ahead, jittering and shaking madly like an unbalanced washing machine, and with a great deal of pushing by the driver’s advisory council, some of them sinking to their knees in mud (part of the job, I guess) the tires gained a grip on solid ground. The small groups standing around in the shade looked up as if someone had announced that dinner was served, and made their way slowly back to the bus. We climbed aboard and in five minutes were on our way again.

The Titanic. RIP. We only made it a short distance, however, before another natural waterway hindered our progress. After successfully extricating ourselves from the first dig-out, we arrived at Ifakara and spent three hours waiting to cross the Kilombero River because the ferry was was “broken.” You’ll notice my skepticism. After watching people (it was hard to tell who were the officials and who were overzealous observers) spend two hours attempting to resuscitate a second ferry, rusted and half-sunk in the shallows along the riverbank, I found another seat in the shade of a banana tree. The rescue crews made their way to the Titanic, which is what I named the rusted ferry, in shallow canoes and rowboats before nearly capsizing in the Kilombero’s swift current. I made a game of guessing which canoe or boat would make it to the Titanic’s rusty hull first. Would it be Speedy, the showoff in the flashy red canoe? Or Baldy, making his way slowly but surely in a homemade brown rowboat? It made for an entertaining afternoon of competition.

About an hour after I sat down, Speedy and Baldy had both boarded the Titanic, but it turned out that the first ferry actually did work, and the friendly driver forgot to put the key in or wanted a break from the monotony of driving back and forth. Maybe be had an existential crisis. Maybe he suddenly realized that life is about the journey, not the destination, since his destinations were literally the same two every day. It was impossible, and indeed probably detrimental to my mental state, to know what actually happened. My resolution to remain happy and positive was shaken, but on the plus side, this delay afforded me quite a lot of time for forced relaxation and quiet contemplation.

Eventually we all climbed aboard the functioning ferry. The driver or captain or whoever, apparently still in doubt about his chosen profession, didn’t pull it close enough to the bank, forcing all of us to wade through ankle-deep water. So much for my black Converse. By some miracle we made it across the river, waited for another thirty minutes for the bus to catch up with us on the other side, and pressed on into the mountains.

We got stuck four more times over the course of the next ten hours between Ifakara and Mahenge, a trip that took one hour during the dry season. It was the same every time: the bus got wedged in waist-deep sludge the color of rusty blood, everyone climbed off and waited at the side of the road, the driver recklessly attempted to extricate himself from the mire, failed, and a group of guys with picks and shovels appeared to dig it out. I can’t confirm whether he knew all these guys, but the chances are pretty good. Maybe they have a phone tree or a Facebook group.

My favorite instance of getting stuck was at 11 pm, in complete darkness, at a point where the road narrowed drastically and the red clay soil gummed up the tires. We had once again exited the bus, as we did each time it got stuck, and were standing on the side of the road with a wall of dense forest at our backs. It was hard to see anything under the pitch black sky, but the mood was more subdued than earlier, and many people were propped up against each other dozing. The only light that filtered down through the trees was from a ghostly moon, imbuing everything with an eerie glow. It was at this moment, perhaps under the influence of the the pale moon, that an adventurous spirit stirred in me and I decided I was going to make it home. Armed with positive thinking and two working legs, nothing would stop me, I decided, not even the lack of adequate vehicular transport. Okay, maybe a lion would stop me. Or a hippopotamus. Or the fact that I’m hopeless at navigation and would probably have ended up eaten by a crocodile in the river. But I was on an adventure, god damn it, and I intended to see it through.

At that moment, cutting through the silence, I overheard someone say, “Simba atajkuja (The lion is coming),” laughing. “Simba atakuja hapa, sasa hivi! (The lion is coming here right now!)” It took a few moments for my brain to process this statement in the context of where I was and what I was doing there. What kind of reality was I living in such that the appearance of a lion in the depths of a black night made any rational sense? I had heard tales of a rogue lion patrolling this part of the jungle, roaming far outside its territory in Selous Game Reserve. I chalked it up as one of those local legends that people like to use to scare the white folks, even though I was the only one around at the moment. In actuality the lion probably wouldn’t challenge such a large group of people. At that moment, it didn’t matter. To hear someone say, “The lion is coming right now,” accompanied by a maniacal laugh, while standing by the side of a desolate, moonlit road in rural southeastern Tanzania with no means for escape—well, it’s hard not to take that seriously.

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