Philippa Fisher and the Fairy's Promise Read Free

the seat with her and waited while the screen booted up. Before long, we were having ketchup-bottle gunfights, bursting balloons over each other’s castles, and chasing each other around virtual mazes.
    I scanned the site’s list for a game we hadn’t played yet. As I looked down the screen, something caught my eye. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a tiny little star flashing in different colors around the screen. First it was orange, then it changed to yellow, then blue, flashing on and off so gently and moving around the screen so swiftly, it was hard to follow.
    “What’s what?”
    “Wait, it’s gone. You’ll see it in a minute.”
    A moment later, it was there again, flashing at the top of the screen, so faint you would miss it if you weren’t looking out for it. “That!” I said.
    Robyn shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t noticed it before.”
    The flashing star had caught my curiosity. “Let’s see what it is,” I said.
    We tried to trace it around the screen, while I pointed and shouted “There!” every few seconds, and Robyn chased after it with the mouse and clicked — just a second too late each time.
    “It’s impossible!” she said, passing the mouse to me. “Here, you try.”
    I tried for another minute or two with no luck. I was about to give up and suggest having another ketchup-bottle fight instead when the star appeared again. This time, I somehow managed to click at the right moment, and the star was instantly replaced by a bright white box with some squiggly text slowly coming into focus. “Got it!” I said with a smile.
    “I hope we get more than a little box saying congratulations after all that effort,” Robyn said.
    We stared and stared at the squiggly writing, but it didn’t get any clearer. It just squiggled across the box, rising and falling in sharp peaks and valleys.
    “Not even that!” I said sarcastically. “Great game, I must say!” I moved the mouse over to close the box. “Come on, let’s go back to —”
    “Wait!” Robyn grabbed the mouse. “Look. What does it remind you of?”
    I watched the lines squiggle up and down across the page a bit more. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe those charts you get in hospitals that record your heartbeat and stuff.”
    “Exactly. It’s showing the levels of something. Hold on a sec.” Robyn moved the mouse to the volume button in the corner of the screen. The volume was muted. She clicked the icon and instantly a crackling, screeching sound came through the speakers.
    “Yikes — what’s that?” I clapped my hands over my ears.
    “I don’t know! Hang on.” Robyn adjusted the levels of the various audio controls, and the crackling died down to a faint hum.
    “What’s that one?” I asked, pointing to an icon that stood apart from the others. It looked as if it had been added on separately. The others were all square boxes with a circle inside them. This one contained a star with a red line through it.
    “No idea,” Robyn said.
    “Try it.”
    She clicked the star. As she did so, the red line disappeared and the humming sound instantly stopped. The computer was silent. For about two seconds. Then something incredible happened. We heard voices coming through the speakers! And not just any voices.
    “That’s — that’s —” Robyn stared at the screen, watching as the squiggly lines danced up and down in perfect time with the rise and fall of the two voices.
    “I know!” I said, although I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “It’s Daisy!”

“What did you think you were doing?” My supervisor’s voice boomed through my MagiCell so loudly, I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
    “I — I —” What could I say? I’d run out of the office so fast, I hadn’t even thought of making up an excuse. Since then, all I’d focused on was trying to get a message to Philippa to warn her about her mom — which had turned out to be impossible when I couldn’t appear as myself. That