Chapter 65: A Better Neighborhood

Soon, it gets so dark that you can only see fireflies, and you aren’t sure you want to eat those. “You win!” calls Cassie out of the darkness. “You must have been really hungry!” As your eyes adjust to the dark, you see Cassie resting on the lilypad next to you. She yawns. “Thanks again for your help today. Think you can help me again tomorrow?”

You tense up, concerned about how you are ever going to turn back to your normal self. “Cassie, I’m not even supposed to be here… I mean, I’m not even…” you break off, not sure how she will take this.

“Not even what?” she asks, puzzled.

“I’m… not even… a frog.”

“What? Then… what are you?”

“I’m human. But I had a bad run in with a ghost and, I guess, a witch, and they turned me into a frog.”

“Well, that was lucky!” says Cassie.

“No, you don’t understand… I have a lot of important things I need to do, and… well, I don’t know if I can do them as a frog.”

“What kind of important things?”

“Queen Stella has sent me on a quest to recover her lost treasures.”

She laughs. “We don’t have a…” she pauses, and turns serious. “But we do, don’t we! Queen Stella in her rainbow castle! Conqueror of Tyrannus! How did I forget about that?”

“That’s just the thing,” you say, “the treasures are what give everyone their memory. I’ve brought back a few… but, well, there’s still a lot more.”

“Wow,” she says, and you can see her wide eyes in the dark. “Tell you what. If you can help me with more little frogs in the morning, after that we can go talk to the wise old frog. He’ll know what to do. Right now, we should get some sleep.”

Is that a good plan, you wonder? Maybe it is? You yawn. Either way, you are exhausted, and with a full stomach and the lull of the chirping crickets, you drift off to sleep on your cozy lilypad.

“Wake up, sleepyhead!” you hear Cassie shout as she cannonballs into the water. You see the sun is overhead, and water from her splash rains down on you. You blink, and she calls, “Come on, Super Frog! We’ve got to head to the nice neighborhood!”

You jump in and swim after her. After a while she hops up on shore, and starts up a path into the woods. You hop after her. “What’s so nice about the neighborhood we’re going to?” you ask. “Is it far from a highway, I hope?”

“No,” she says, “near a highway just like before.”

“So… no turtles, then?”

“Oh, it has lots of turtles.”

“Well, then, what? No alligators? Snakes? Otters? What?”

“No, all those things are still there. It’s just… nicer. You’ll see.”

You shake your head. But as you hop up over the rise, to see a group of eager young frogs, you see that, wow, she’s right. Everything here is just… nicer.

Place your Supercharger into your Atari 2600, and press play on the Official Frogger cassette. Use game select 1, and set the difficulty switches to a. Play until you get 20,000 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.