Akiko and the Great Wall of Trudd

by Mark Crilley

  At first Akiko thinks the message is a joke, but before she knows it, she’s heading a rescue mission to find the King of Smoo’s kidnapped son, Prince Froptoppit. Akiko, the head of a rescue mission? She’s too afraid to be on the school’s safety patrol!

  Read the following excerpt from Akiko on the Planet Smoo and see how the adventure began.

  Excerpts from Akiko on the Planet Smoo and Akiko in the Sprubly Islands copyright © 2000 by Mark Crilley

  Akiko on the Planet Smoo and Akiko in the Sprubly Islands

  Published by Delacorte Press

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  Appears by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  All rights reserved

  My name is Akiko. This is the story of the adventure I had a few months ago when I went to the planet Smoo. I know it’s kind of hard to believe, but it really did happen. I swear.

  I’d better go back to the beginning: the day I got the letter.

  It was a warm, sunny day. There were only about five weeks left before summer vacation, and kids at school were already itching to get out. Everybody was talking about how they’d be going to camp, or some really cool amusement park, or whatever. Me, I knew I’d be staying right here in Middleton all summer, which was just fine by me. My dad works at a company where they hardly ever get long vacations, so my mom and I have kind of gotten used to it.

  Anyway, it was after school and my best friend, Melissa, and I had just walked home together as always. Most of the other kids get picked up by their parents or take the bus, but Melissa and I live close enough to walk to school every day. We both live just a few blocks away in this big apartment building that must have been built about a hundred years ago. Actually I think it used to be an office building or something, but then somebody cleaned it up and turned it into this fancy new apartment building. It’s all red bricks and tall windows, with a big black fire escape in the back. My parents say they’d rather live somewhere out in the suburbs, but my dad has to be near his office downtown.

  Melissa lives on the sixth floor but she usually comes up with me to the seventeenth floor after school. She’s got three younger brothers and has to share her bedroom with one of them, so she doesn’t get a whole lot of privacy. I’m an only child and I’ve got a pretty big bedroom all to myself, so that’s where Melissa and I spend a lot of our time.

  On that day we were in my room as usual, listening to the radio and trying our best to make some decent card houses. Melissa was telling me how cool it would be if I became the new captain of the fourth-grade safety patrol.

  “Come on, Akiko, it’ll be good for you,” she said. “I practically promised Mrs. Miller that you’d do it.”

  “Melissa, why can’t somebody else be in charge of the safety patrol?” I replied. “I’m no good at that kind of stuff. Remember what happened when Mrs. Antwerp gave me the lead role in the Christmas show?”

  Melissa usually knows how to make me feel better about things, but even she had to admit last year’s Christmas show was a big disaster.

  “That was different, Akiko,” she insisted. “Mrs. Antwerp had no idea you were going to get stage fright like that.”

  “It was worse than stage fright, Melissa,” I said. “I can’t believe I actually forgot the words to ‘Jingle Bells’.”

  “This isn’t the Christmas show,” she said. “You don’t have to memorize any words to be in charge of the safety patrol.” She was carefully beginning the third floor of a very ambitious card house she’d been working on for about half an hour.

  “Why can’t I just be a member of the safety patrol?” I asked her.

  “Because Mrs. Miller needs a leader,” she said. “I’d do it, but I’m already in charge of the softball team.”

  And I knew Melissa meant it, too. She’d be in charge of everything at school if she could. Me, I prefer to let someone else be the boss. Sure, there are times when I wish I could be the one who makes all the decisions and tells everybody else what to do. I just don’t want to be the one who gets in trouble when everything goes wrong.

  “Besides,” Melissa continued, “it would be a great way for you to meet Brendan Fitzpatrick. He’s in charge of the boys’ safety patrol.” One thing about Melissa: No matter what kind of conversation you have with her, one way or another you end up talking about boys.

  “What makes you so sure I want to meet Brendan Fitzpatrick?” The card house I’d been working on had completely collapsed, and I was trying to decide whether it was worth the trouble to start a new one.

  “Trust me, Akiko,” she said with a big grin, “everyone wants to meet Brendan Fitzpatrick.”

  “I don’t even like him,” I said, becoming even more anxious to change the subject.

  “How can you not like him?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “He’s one of the top five cute guys in the fourth grade.”

  “I can’t believe you actually have a list of who’s cute and who isn’t.”

  That was when my mom knocked on my door. (I always keep the door shut when Melissa’s over. I never know when she’s going to say something I don’t want my mom to hear.)

  “Akiko, you got something in the mail,” she said, handing me a small silvery envelope.

  She stared at me with this very curious look in her eyes. I don’t get letters very often. “Are you sure you don’t want this door open?” she asked. “It’s kind of stuffy in here.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Better keep it closed.”

  It was all I could do to keep Melissa from snatching the letter from me once my mom was out of sight. She kept stretching out her hands all over the place like some kind of desperate basketball player, but I kept twisting away, holding the envelope against my chest with both my hands so she couldn’t get at it.

  “It’s from a boy, isn’t it? I knew it, I knew it!” she squealed, almost chasing me across the room.

  “Melissa, this is not from a boy,” I said, turning my back to get a closer look at the thing. My name was printed on the front in shiny black lettering, like it had been stamped there by a machine. The envelope was made out of a thick, glossy kind of paper I’d never seen before. There was no stamp and no return address. Whoever sent the thing must have just walked up and dropped it in our mailbox.

  “Go on! Open it up!” Melissa exclaimed, losing patience.

  I was just about to, when I noticed something printed on the back of the envelope:

  TO BE READ BY AKIKO AND NO ONE ELSE

  “Um, Melissa, I think this is kind of private,” I said, bracing myself. I knew she wasn’t going to take this very well.

  “What?” She tried again to get the envelope out of my hands. “Akiko, I can’t believe you. We’re best friends!”

  I thought it over for a second and realized that it wasn’t worth the weeks of badgering I’d get if I didn’t let her see the thing.

  “All right, all right. But you have to promise not to tell anyone else. I could get in trouble for this.”

  I carefully tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper with that same shiny black lettering:

  And that’s all it said. It wasn’t signed, and there was nothing else written on the other side.

  “Outside my window? On the seventeenth floor?”

  “It’s got to be a joke.” Melissa had taken the paper out of my hands and was inspecting it closely. “I think it is from someone at school. Probably Jimmy Hampton. His parents have a printing press in their basement or something.”

  “Why would he go to so much trouble to play a joke on me?” I said. “He doesn’t even know me.” I had this strange feeling in my stomach. I went over to the window and made sure it was locked.

  “Boys are weird,” Melissa replied calmly. “They do all kinds of things to get your attention.”

  Next, travel to the Sprubly Islands!

  The mission to save Prince Fropto
ppit continues! Unfortunately, something happens to Akiko and her crew on the way to Alia Rellapor’s castle. They get lost—hopelessly lost—in their flying boat somewhere over the Moonguzzit Sea. Their only chance is to find Queen Pwip of the Sprubly Islands, a clairvoyant who can point them in the right direction. As Akiko, Mr. Beeba, Spuckler, Gax, and Poog attempt to locate the queen, they must survive a skugbit storm, make their way out of the belly of a giant sea snake, and sail the seas to safety. But the Sprubly Islanders aren’t at all like Akiko’s friends and neighbors back on Earth. When Spuckler and Mr. Beeba disappear one night, Akiko is left to fend for herself in this strange and magical new world.

  Read the following excerpt from Akiko in the Sprubly Islands and continue the adventure.

  I opened my eyes. I’d been sleeping so soundly that for the first few seconds I had no idea where I was. Then it slowly came back to me: I was on the planet Smoo with my new friends Spuckler Boach, Gax, Mr. Beeba, and Poog. We were floating peacefully above the clouds on our little flying boat, resting up before the next leg of our journey.

  I was a little embarrassed to notice that everyone else was already awake. Mr. Beeba was steering the boat, Poog was floating quietly by himself just behind the mast, and Spuckler was giving Gax a little tune-up. (After all that poor robot had been through lately, I’m sure he needed it.)

  “Hey there, Akiko,” said Spuckler, smiling as always. “How ya doin’? Feels good to get a little shut-eye, don’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, yawning and stretching my arms. “How long was I asleep?”

  “Not particularly long,” Mr. Beeba said, turning his head to join the conversation. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, dear girl. I would encourage you to get all the rest you can.”

  “Yeah, ’Kiko,” Spuckler agreed. “’Cause there ain’t nothin’ else to do on this boat.”

  “You have entirely misconstrued the meaning of my statement, Spuckler,” Mr. Beeba said wearily.

  “I’m right though,” Spuckler insisted.

  “You most certainly are not,” Mr. Beeba answered. He was never one to pass by a good argument with Spuckler. And who was I to stop him? Watching the two of them go at it was as good as any television show. Poog was interested too, apparently. He floated over and gave himself a good view of the debate.

  “I’m sure there are any number of interesting activities for an intelligent child like Akiko to do on a boat such as this,” Mr. Beeba continued.

  “Name two,” Spuckler grunted, tightening a bolt on Gax’s underside.

  “Well,” Mr. Beeba began, “she could practice memorizing the names of all the books I’ve written—”

  “That don’t count,” Spuckler interrupted. “You said interesting.”

  “She could follow that up,” Mr. Beeba continued, ignoring Spuckler for the moment, “by memorizing passages from the books themselves.”

  “Well, that just proves my point,” said Spuckler victoriously. “There ain’t nothin’ for ’Kiko to do on this boat but sleep.” Gax clicked and whirred quietly as Spuckler tightened another bolt underneath his helmet.

  “Hmpf!” Mr. Beeba snorted, apparently losing interest in the argument. There was a long pause, during which neither of them said anything. I found myself staring at the clouds and secretly agreeing with Spuckler.

  After a long while I saw some orange-winged creatures flying overhead. They were the same creatures I’d seen way back when we’d just begun our journey.

  “Hey, look, Mr. Beeba,” I said, pointing up at them as they passed over us. “There’s some more of those reptile-bird things you were telling me about before.”

  “Yumbas, Akiko. Yumbas,” he replied, sounding slightly disappointed that I hadn’t remembered the name. “An odd species, actually. All Yumbas fly in precisely the same direction by instinct. Northeast, I believe. Or was it southwest? Well, in any case, it is said that the average Yumba literally circles the planet once every fourteen days.”

  “No kidding,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun as I watched the Yumbas fly off into the distance. “Where I come from, birds fly in pretty much any direction they want.” I thought for a moment about my science teacher, Mrs. Jackson, back at Middleton Elementary. She had this big lesson plan one time about birds and how they fly south in the winter. She actually took us out into the school yard so that we could see real birds flying south. We didn’t end up seeing anything, though, and all I remember is how cold it was and how I wanted to get back into the classroom as quickly as possible.

  I leaned back on my elbows and looked up at the clouds again, wondering what direction the Yumbas were flying in. I wondered if they got tired of seeing the same scenery over and over again.

  Then a really weird thing happened. A second flock of Yumbas passed overhead, and I thought for sure they were crossing over us in a slightly different direction. The time before, they had come from the left-hand side of the ship and had flown across to the right. This time it was just a little more from the front of the ship, heading toward the back. I sat there and waited to see if more Yumbas would pass overhead.

  Sure enough, another group flew over us, and this time it was even more obvious that they were changing direction.

  “Hey, Mr. Beeba,” I said, “I think you might be wrong about those Yumbas.”

  “Me?” Mr. Beeba asked, as if I’d just proposed something altogether impossible. “Wrong?”

  “It’s nothing personal, Mr. Beeba,” I explained cautiously. “I just think that maybe sometimes they fly in more than one direction.”

  “Really, Akiko,” Mr. Beeba clucked disapprovingly. “It’s one thing to postulate a theory contrary to my own, but quite another to do so without offering any proof whatsoever to back it up.”

  “Well, look up there and see what I’m talking about,” I said, pointing at yet another group of Yumbas in the sky. Mr. Beeba coughed, cleared his throat, and watched as they passed over us, this time coming a little from the right and heading slightly to the left.

  There was a long, awkward silence as Mr. Beeba followed the path of the Yumbas with his eyes.

  “Inconceivable!” he said at last, scratching agitatedly at his head. “Yumbas never change direction.”

  “Now, wait a gol-darned second here,” Spuckler said, jumping to his feet.

  Mr. Beeba and I turned around to face him, a little surprised that he had any interest whatsoever in the conversation. Spuckler paced back and forth across the deck, looking up at the clouds and down at the Moonguzzit Sea beneath us, a very grim expression coming over his face. Gax watched him nervously, as if experience had taught him to be prepared for sudden drastic changes in Spuckler’s mood.

  “Those birds ain’t changin’ directions,” he announced. “We are!”

  “Us?” Mr. Beeba asked, his eyes widening. “You mean the ship? Don’t be ridiculous!” There was a slightly uneasy sound in his voice, though, as if some terrible truth had just begun to dawn on him.

  “We’re goin’ around in circles is what we’re doin’,”

  Spuckler said, now starting to sound angry. “No wonder we been flyin’ all this time and we still ain’t past the Moonguzzit Sea!”

  “F-flying in circles?” Mr. Beeba stuttered, “Nonsense! I’ve been steering this ship in an absolutely straight line!”

  “You don’t get it, do ya, Beebs?” Spuckler exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air. “We are lost! L-A-W-S-T, lost!”

  “We . . . ,” Mr. Beeba began, trying rather desperately to defend himself, “we’d have finished this mission by now if your Sky Pirate friends hadn’t destroyed all my books!”

  “Aw, you an’ your stupid books!” Spuckler said. He was actually kind of shouting. “You ain’t in your cozy little library anymore, Beebs. This is reality out here—take a good look!”

  This argument seemed more serious than the little spats I’d seen so far, and I figured if I didn’t interrupt they’d end up throwing punches or something. I cleared my thro
at and jumped in between the two of them.

  “Look, we’re never going to get anywhere if you two don’t stop arguing all the time!”

  Without even a pause, they stopped, turned, pointed at each other, and said (at exactly the same time), “He started it.”

  Honestly! You’d think they were first-graders or something.

  “I don’t care who started it,” I said, putting on my best bossy voice and wagging a finger in front of both of them. “I’m in charge of this mission and I order you to stop fighting.”

  And it worked, too. They both got quiet and just stared at the deck for a minute. A soft breeze blew over us and flapped through the sails as I allowed the silence to continue a little bit longer. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and we were all covered in a warm yellow glow.

  “All right,” I said finally. “We’re going to sit right down here and have a little meeting.”

  “A meetin’?” Spuckler asked, with obvious disapproval.

  “Yes. We’re going to talk about how we got into this mess. Then we’re going to find a way out of it.” This was a little trick I’d learned from my history teacher, Mr. Moylan, back at Middleton Elementary. He said you always need to have a little meeting like this whenever you’re in a tough situation and you can’t figure out what to do next. Under the circumstances I think he’d have agreed this was a pretty good time to follow his advice.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

  Mark Crilley was raised in Detroit, where his parents sometimes wondered if he wasn’t from another planet. After graduating from Kalamazoo College in 1988, he traveled to Taiwan and Japan, where he taught English to students of all ages for nearly five years. It was during his stay in Japan in 1992 that he created the story of Akiko and her journey to Smoo. First published as a comic book in 1995, the bimonthly Akiko series has since earned Crilley numerous award nominations, as well as a spot on Entertainment Weekly’s “It List” in 1998. Akiko on the Planet Smoo, Crilley’s first work of fiction for young readers, was published by Delacorte Press.