Chapter 223 - Blue Heart

"You want to do this the hard way, huh?" Petunia said with a frown to the cloud that was still out of control.

"Is she going to use her Gummy cloud to battle against that angry cloud?" Von asked with a slightly amused tone which made Gem hit him lightly in the arm for making a very serious disaster into a joke.

"Wait… There's another cloud there! I forgot about it!" Lei said and started walking back and forth with his hands over his face.

"What do you mean there's another cloud back there?" Gem said and tried to make sense of what Lei was saying.

"A jar! There's a jar inside that room with another cloud that's similar to that one!" 

"And?" Gem asked while paying full attention to what Lei was trying to say.

"And it will cause more problems for Petunia if it also manages to escape its jar!" Lei said and peeked inside the laboratory through the glass window of the door with haste.

"What does it look like? I'll go get it," Gem said and was about to open the door when Von suddenly held her wrist and stopped her.

"Or we could just tell Petunia about it, I'm sure she can handle it," Von suggested and was already ready to chat Petunia with his stat-hut but stopped mid-way when he saw Gem shaking her head.

"I'll go help her. You two stay here," Gem said and pushed Lei aside from the door and went inside of it without hesitation.

And because of the strong current of the whirlwind inside of the laboratory room, the door quickly shut itself behind Gem, blasting the boys with a splash from the cloud's rampage and leaving them alone on the previously spotless hallways which have never experienced something so tremendously chaotic and destructive before.

"Do we have a dryer or something to fix ourselves with down here?" Von asked while staying in a frozen position and letting the water drip down his body and clothes to the glossy white floor.

"I think there's a full-body disinfection chamber inside one of the rooms down here."

"Does it help with drying wet clothes or something?" 

"Probably… we'll just have to go and see. And also help clean this mess later," Lei said and eyed the mess that his clumsy hands made before gliding down the hallways with Von.

***

"Petunia! I came here to help!" Gem said and dodged a flying microscope, making her wearier of her surroundings especially after hearing a frustrated growl from Petunia.

"Oh, you're fighting back now, huh?" Petunia growled with a lower voice than usual which made Gem second guess her decision to tell Petunia about her plan to help.

"I-I'll just look for the other cloud in a jiffy and go back outside," Gem muttered silently without an intention to distract Petunia before taking a deep breath and roaming her eyes around the chaotic room to look for the other cloud in a bottle.

"You really want to do this the hard way, huh?!" Petunia said and purposely dropped the glass bottle she was holding, making a shattering sound that rang across the whole room.

"Whoa!" Gem jumped and then hid under the tilted table beside the windows.

"Where is it?!" she said frustratedly while watching Petunia go full-on rage mode towards the dim clouds in the ceiling.

And without even being able to take one step away from her hiding place, Gem was once again caught by surprise by the loud thunder that hit a part in the walls which was most likely the electric system of the whole room, judging by the emergency lights that just suddenly stopped from blinking after being hit by that lightning.

"Glass. Jar. I  need to find a glass jar with a cloud in it!" Gem thought to herself with haste while looking around and stressing about the lights going out especially when she needed them the most.

"AAAARGHH!" Gem heard Petunia shout before jumping to the cloud with a glowing blue vial that was wrapped tightly around her left hand.

"FREEZE!" she heard Petunia shout, but instead of watching the rest of what was happening between Petunia and the cloud, Gem turned her head around and went to look for the glass jar of that other cloud.

"What if it has already escaped and joined that big cloud up there?" Gem thought and turned her eyes towards the dark cloud that was slowly gaining a blue light from the inside.

"What-?" Gem thought and slapped herself to just focus on her goal, but the distracting blue light kept calling her eyes to look back at the cloud again.

"What is Petunia doing?" Gem asked herself after noticing that Petunia was nowhere to be found in the classroom anymore.

Not even to mention the rapidly increasing size of the cloud that was making the room look smaller every second.

"I wish Fily was here," Gem said and made her way through the chaos and to the door where she paused for a minute because of the glowing blue thing inside of the cloud.

"What is that?" Gem thought and looked back to her hands that were already ready to open the door any minute now.

"I should go and check it out first," she said and let go of the door's handle, looking for a way to stop the increasing size of the cloud that could be very dangerous to the whole island if not contained immediately.

"Where is it getting its size from?" Gem asked herself while looking around the room with her narrowed eyes.

Aside from the scattered objects on the ground, Gem noticed a weird pipe made of cloud that was connected to the tree sinks on the two corners of the room.

"That must be where the cloud is getting its size from!" Gem said and immediately made her way towards one of the cloud pipes on the nearest right corner of the room to maybe try and stop it with whatever method that she can use.

But to Gem's surprise, the pipe in front of her just suddenly stopped working and became frozen, similar to what was happening on the other parts of the cloud which must have been the work of Petunia.

"Crush it!" Petunia shouted from the inside of the cloud which surprised Gem as she thought that Petunia had already run away from this chaos.

"O-Okay!" Gem said and quickly grabbed the nearest thing she could find that would be able to help her crush the frozen cloud pipe, which was the same microscope that almost hit her earlier.

"That too!" Petunia said while pointing at the other corner of the room where the other frozen pipe was and told her to hurry before disappearing inside of the cloud again.

"Okay! On it!" Gem said and leaped her way towards the other end of the room where the cloud stopped from inflating and just left a space that was already just enough for a child like her to fit in.

If Petunia had just been a minute or a second late, there wouldn't be any space for Gem to crush the frozen cloud pipes anymore.

But just as Gem thought everything was finished already, the cloud started sprouting more pipes in every corner of the room, trying to get to the faucet again and fill itself with water that was already flooding the room.

"Oh no! Petunia! Help!! The cloud's flooding the whole room!" Gem said and tried to see if she could pass through the cloud just like how any normal cloud could be passed through easily.

And although it was not easy, Gem made a relieved sigh after noticing her hand sinking inside the dark cloud whose texture was almost as similar as Petunia's gummy cloud, only heavier because of the overloaded water in every vapor.

"Maybe I can make my way to the door by passing through the cloud?" Gem thought and used her super strength and super speed to push the cloud out of her way.

But unfortunately for her, the more Gem pushed the cloud away from her, the more water gets dropped into the floor which was already as high as her knees at that point.

"Petunia!!" Gem shouted with a loud heartbeat. Not being able to understand how they got into this mess in the first place.

But just as Gem was about to have a mental block from the stress, the blue light coming inside of the cloud piqued her attention again, calling for her to just go there instead of heading for the door which seemed to be an impossible task anymore.

"What is that?" 

"Careful! Gem!" Petunia shouted when she sensed Gem's presence joining her inside of the more dangerous body of the cloud where the cloud could feel exactly where they are and target them with all of its resources.

"Can you see that blue light? It's like coming from the heart of the cloud. We should head there!" Gem said and noticed Petunia's frown.

"I have been trying to go in there for the past five minutes but the security is just too much! I even ran out of Freezing potions," Petunia said and threw the now-empty vial of the freezing potion outside of the cloud while standing back-to-back with Gem.

"Let's get this over with," Gem said and started kicking off the dangerous things that the cloud had been throwing at them ever since she joined Petunia inside of it.