THE NOSE AND HIS PERFUME

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen: Rescue

Bunny saw the two guards they had escaped earlier searching the crowd for them.

“Quick, let’s get out of here,” she said.

The children ran through the jostling crowd into the hedge maze. They exited the Gingerbread Village through the hidden hedge door into the basement. The basement seemed deserted, but as they approached the Nose’s workshop, Mr. Hartford and the Nose could clearly be heard shouting at one another inside it.

“If you don’t make the extractor work,” Bunny heard Mr. Hartford yell from behind the closed door of the workshop.

“Quick, in here,” Beau whispered.

Bunny and Penny followed him into the storage room across the hall from the Nose’s workshop, where the wickless fireworks were kept.

“What are we going to do?” Beau said.

“Create a diversion like before and rescue everyone?” Bunny suggested, looking around at the wickless fireworks.

“We got caught before,” Penny said.

Beau began digging through a box of wickless fireworks and fished out a confetti canon.

“I have an idea. Can I see that perfume you took?” he asked Bunny, and she gave him the bag of XEssence that she had taken from the clearing in the hedge maze.

“What are you doing?” Bunny asked, as Beau poked a hole in the confetti canon he was holding.

“Weaponizing this confetti canon,” he said, carefully pouring XEssence into the hole that he had made in it. “Now when this goes off, it should spray XEssence everywhere.”

Bunny started helping Beau fill wickless fireworks with XEssence.

“What are you going to do with those?” Penny asked.

“Set them off and rescue everyone. The guards will be so out of it from the XEssence, we’ll be able to get away,” Bunny said.

“But won’t the perfume make us out of it too?” Penny asked.

“She’s right,” Beau said. “If we set off all these XEssence bombs, they’re going to effect us as much as everyone else.”

“We’re going to need the Nose’s help,” Bunny said. “He can’t smell. XEssence has no effect on him.”

“But what if he doesn’t help us?” Penny said.

“We’ll just have to take our chances.”

“How are we going to do this?” Beau asked. “Just walk into the Nose’s workshop? I feel like we’d get caught before we had a chance to set any of these off.”

“I know, we’ll set them all off at once,” Bunny said.

When a wickless firework was shaken up, there was a minute-long delay before it went off. Bunny thought if they put all the XEssence-filled wickless fireworks into a box, and then shook up the entire box, they would all go off at once, creating one enormous diversion.

They used up all the perfume Bunny had found to fill as many of the wickless fireworks as possible, and then Bunny emptied a cardboard box and put them in it.

“Ready?” she said. “We’re only going to have about a minute after I shake this box.” 

They went out into the hall. Bunny shook the open cardboard box she was holding as vigorously as she could without spilling it. Beau threw open the door to the Nose’s workshop, and they ran inside. Beau slammed the door shut behind them, and Bunny dropped the box down on the floor.