“Girls, are you OK?” Lily asked.
“We’re fine,” panted Kirsty, “but we have to get the goblins off these bulldozers!”
Lily nodded. “They’re disrupting the rain forest ecosystem,” she said with concern. “That means they’re putting all the plants, animals, and trees in danger.”
“Let’s fly up to the canopy,” Rachel suggested. “It’ll be quieter, and maybe we can come up with a plan.”
Lily and the girls fluttered higher, and landed on a tree with large green and yellow fruits clustered near the top of the trunk. The goblins were still charging around in the bulldozers and whooping gleefully whenever they hit a tree or one another.
“What can we do?” Lily asked sadly. “I don’t have enough magic to stop them.”
Rachel and Kirsty looked around for something that might help.
“But all I can see are leaves, flowers, and fruit,” Rachel said to herself. She stared at the fruits hanging around them. She didn’t know what they were, but she could see that the young fruits were green, while the ripe ones were bright yellow. Some of them were rotting on the branches. Rachel pushed one and it fell to the ground, just missing the nearest bulldozer.
“Oh!” Rachel gasped out loud. “I think I have an idea. Kirsty, Lily, follow me!”
Rachel zoomed off through the canopy. Puzzled, Kirsty and Lily flew after her. But they soon realized what Rachel was up to when they saw her gently knocking down the big ripe, rotten fruits onto the goblins below them. The fruit landed on the bulldozers, splattering their windshields with pulp and seeds.
“Great idea, Rachel!” Kirsty said as she and Lily started knocking the fruit down, too. “If the goblins can’t see, they’ll have to stop!”
As fruit rained down on the bulldozers, the goblins shrieked with annoyance and drew to a halt. They all turned on their windshield wipers, and began clearing the mess away so they could see. Rachel, Kirsty, and Lily tried desperately to knock down more and more fruit, but it was very difficult to do it quickly because they were so small.
“This isn’t working!” Rachel exclaimed in dismay, shaking her head. “We’ll have to try something else.”
Meanwhile, the goblins had cleared their windshields and were revving up their engines again. Clouds of black smoke belched from their exhaust pipes. As Kirsty watched, her face suddenly lit up.
“Now I have an idea!” she announced.
“Maybe we can still use fruit to stop the bulldozers,” Kirsty said.
“But we know that won’t work.” Rachel sighed.
Kirsty grinned. “We can use the fruit in a different way,” she replied, and she pointed to a bunch of bananas down below them. “We can stuff it in the bulldozers’ exhaust pipes! I saw it work in a movie once.”
“Are you sure?” Rachel asked. “That sounds kind of dangerous.”
“But we’ve got to stop those bulldozers,” said Lily thoughtfully. “How about we take out the bananas as soon as the bulldozers’ engines stop? Then we can make sure no permanent damage is done.”
Lily and the girls flew down to the clearing, keeping far away from the bulldozers. A few magic fairy sparkles made Kirsty and Rachel their normal size again, and then the girls crept over to the banana tree. Standing on tiptoe, they pulled down a few bananas from the big clump hanging on the tree.
Quickly, Lily zoomed over to the bulldozers. She flew around trying to distract the goblins, who all stopped the bulldozer engines to swat at the fairy.
Meanwhile, Rachel and Kirsty crept into the clearing. They both went about putting bananas into the bulldozers’ exhaust pipes. When Lily saw that the girls had blocked all the pipes, she flew high into the canopy. The goblins immediately turned the bulldozers’ engines back on, and the machines began to move slowly forward again.
But the bulldozers had hardly moved at all before they started sputtering and choking to a halt. The goblins looked puzzled.
“What’s going on?” the goblin with the wand roared, hopping down from his cab. “My bumper car stopped!” Suddenly, he spotted Rachel and Kirsty darting across the clearing. “Those girls are interfering again!” the goblin shouted angrily.
The other goblins jumped down from their bulldozers, and they all charged at Rachel and Kirsty. But Lily was quicker. She dashed toward the girls and snapped her fingers. Immediately, Rachel and Kirsty shrank down to fairy-size, and the three of them flew up into the air out of the goblins’ reach. Lily waved her arms again and the bananas magically popped out of the bulldozers’ exhaust pipes.
“We don’t know what kind of trouble the goblins will cause with my magic wand!” said Lily. “We shouldn’t get too close to them.”
“Give us the wand back, please!” Rachel called to the goblins below. “It belongs to Lily, not you.”
The goblin with the wand chuckled. “Catch me if you can!” he taunted. He jumped up onto his bulldozer, grabbed one of the long vines hanging from a tree, and swung away through the rain forest. The other goblins did the same.
“They’re getting away!” Kirsty cried in dismay, as the goblins swung speedily from vine to vine.
“After them!” Lily yelled.
The three friends gave chase. The goblin with the wand glanced over his shoulder and saw Rachel coming up fast behind him. Grinning, he gave the wand to the goblin swinging past him, like a runner in a relay race.
Rachel made a desperate grab for the wand, but the second goblin immediately handed it to a third, who quickly swung away from her.
“Keep your eye on the wand, girls!” Lily called, as the third goblin passed it neatly back to the first goblin.
It didn’t take the goblins long to get the hang of swinging on the vines, and soon they were moving along incredibly fast. Rachel, Kirsty, and Lily did their best to fly faster themselves, while also trying to keep track of the wand. But it was very difficult, because the five goblins passed it back and forth so often.
“We need help!” Lily panted as the goblins pulled far ahead of them. She snapped her fingers, and Rachel and Kirsty saw some fairy sparkles dancing in the air.
A few moments later, the girls heard rustling noises in the leaves behind them. Glancing over their shoulders, they were amazed to see a whole army of animals and birds appear. There were orangutans and other different kinds of apes and monkeys. There were macaws and toucans and lots of brightly colored birds, as well as lizards, snakes, and insects. Right at the front was the scarlet-and-blue parrot Lily and the girls had met earlier.
“Thank you for coming, everyone,” Lily said gratefully. “We have to catch those goblins and get my wand back!”
Chattering and cooing, whistling and chirping, the animals and birds of the rain forest swung, jumped, hopped, wriggled, and flew after the goblins.
“They’re much faster than we are!” Rachel laughed, as the animal army easily sped ahead of the fairies.
“But how will they stop the goblins?” Kirsty wondered. Then her eyes widened as she watched the goblins swinging from vine to vine. “Oh! Maybe we could use the vines to trap them!”
Lily nodded. She zoomed over to the parrot and whispered something to him. The parrot then squawked something to the array of animals.
Rachel and Kirsty watched as the parrot led the other animals and birds after the goblins. They grabbed long ropes of vines in their teeth, beaks, or paws on the way. Some went in one direction, some in another, and some of them even managed to get in front of the goblins. Soon they had the goblins surrounded on all sides.
“Now!” Lily called.
At once the animals swooped forward while still holding the vines. They trapped the goblins.
“Hey!” the goblin with the wand shouted furiously as the animals and birds began neatly wrapping the vines around them. “What’s going on?”
In just a few moments, all the goblins were tightly bundled up like a vine-wrapped package. They yelled and struggled, but they were tied too tightly to get free.
“Nice
work, everyone!” Lily laughed.
Rachel and Kirsty flew over and took the wand from the goblin, who glared at them. They carried it to Lily, and the instant the fairy touched it, the wand shrank to match its rightful owner’s size. Rachel and Kirsty grinned at each other.
“Now, you’ve caused enough trouble for today!” Lily said, pointing her wand at the goblins. A stream of fairy dust shot toward them, and the vines that held them prisoner untied themselves. “It’s time you went home to Jack Frost’s castle.”
Grumbling bitterly, the goblins swung themselves through the trees and out of sight.
Lily turned to the girls. “Thank you for being brave enough to come with me,” she said, smiling. “Now that I have my wand, I can send you safely home. But first, I must get rid of those horrible bulldozers!”
The friends hurried back to the clearing. Lily quickly waved her wand and used her magic to heal the damaged trees and stand them upright again. Then, with a shower of magic dust, she reduced the huge machines to fairy-size. “At least the loggers who own these bulldozers won’t be able to do any more harm for a while,” she said.
“I need to get back to Fairyland, girls,” Lily said, “and I will tell everyone there how wonderful you’ve been today! I couldn’t have reclaimed my wand without you. Now I can begin my work of protecting the rain forests — and there’s so much to do!”
“I wish we could do more to help.” Kirsty sighed. “The rain forests are so beautiful, but they’re also so far away from where we live.”
“You can help by telling other people about the rain forests,” Lily suggested. “Let them know more trees are being cut down every day, and that we have to stop it.”
“We will,” promised Rachel.
Lily smiled and pointed her wand at the girls. “Good-bye!” she called as a stream of fairy sparkles lifted Rachel and Kirsty off their feet and whirled them into the air.
In the blink of an eye, Rachel and Kirsty found themselves back in the forest on Rainspell Island. The rain had stopped now, and the sun was peeking through the clouds.
“It’s not as warm as the rain forest!” Kirsty laughed, kneeling down to place the mushrooms in her basket. “Wasn’t that a fantastic fairy adventure, Rachel?”
Rachel nodded. “And, like Lily said, we can tell everyone all about the trees in the rain forest being destroyed.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe we could get in touch with a school in one of the rain forest countries, like Brazil, and start a tree-sponsoring program?”
“Oh, that’s a great idea,” Kirsty exclaimed, picking up her basket. “And we could organize some fund-raising events at our schools. We could have one where everyone dresses up as rain forest animals!”
Rachel laughed. “There are lots of things we can do,” she said, “but right now our mission is to make these mushrooms into a delicious soup!”
Rachel and Kirsty found Nicole, Isabella, Edie, Coral, and Lily’s missing magic wands. Now it’s time for them to help
Join their next adventure in this special sneak peek. . . .
“It’s definitely colder than yesterday,” Rachel Walker said, as she and her best friend, Kirsty Tate, strolled through Rainspell Park. “I can’t believe we were so warm on the beach at the start of the week — and today we’re all wrapped up in our cozy sweaters!”
Kirsty grinned at Rachel. “And I can’t believe we were swimming in the ocean with Coral the Reef Fairy a few days ago,” she said in a low voice. “Imagine how freezing cold the water must be right now!”
Rachel shivered at the thought. “She’d have to use a lot of fairy magic to keep us warm today, wouldn’t she?”
The two girls smiled at each other as they walked through the park. It was fall break, and they were both here on Rainspell Island for a week with their parents. Rainspell Island was the place where Kirsty and Rachel had first met. They’d shared a very special summer together . . . and now this vacation was turning out to be every bit as magical!
“Oh, I love being friends with the fairies,” Kirsty said happily, thinking about all the exciting adventures they’d had so far. “We really are the luckiest girls in the world, Rachel.”
“Definitely,” Rachel agreed. Golden-brown leaves tumbled from the trees every time the wind blew, and Rachel noticed just then that some of the trees were already bare. “Well, it’s definitely windy enough today to sail our boats,” she said as a yellow oak leaf floated down and landed at her feet. She glanced at the paper boat she was holding. Both girls had made one back at their cottage that morning. “They’re going to speed along with this breeze behind them.”
“Here’s the lake now,” Kirsty said as they rounded a corner and saw the stretch of blue water ahead of them. . . .
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e-ISBN 978-0-545-62228-8
Copyright © 2009 by Rainbow Magic Limited.
Previously published as Green Fairies #5: Lily the Rainforest Fairy by Orchard U.K. in 2009.
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, by arrangement with Rainbow Magic Limited.
SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. RAINBOW MAGIC is a trademark of Rainbow Magic Limited. Reg. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and other countries. HIT and the HIT logo are trademarks of HIT Entertainment Limited.
First Scholastic printing, July 2014
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