Isla of Adventure: Welcome to the Island

Scribble, scribble, scribble, loooong scribble, swoop de loop.

Isla Verde bit the end of her pencil as she looked at her notebook. The sunlight in her backyard was just right.

Everything fit together perfectly on the island of Sol. Even the breeze blew gently, as if it were waving hello instead of scattering her pages.

“What do you think, Fitz?” Isla asked her best friend, Fitz the Gecko.

Oh yes, Fitz was a gecko. But he had also been Isla’s bestie for as long as she could remember.

Fitz lay on a warm rock and took a long look at Isla’s art.

“My tail isn’t that long, you know!” he said.

Isla huffed. “It’s called creative freedom! Plus, I’m not even done yet.”

“Mmhmm. If you say so!” Fitz said.

He returned to his sunbathing, enjoying the heat.

Fitz and Isla’s friendship was special, and not just because they did everything together. It was because they could speak to each other. In fact, Isla could speak to all the animals on Sol. This was Isla’s secret. No one else knew.

Well, except all the other animals on the island… and now you. To Isla, communicating with all creatures was as natural as breathing.

“Okay, I have good news and bad news, Fitz,” Isla announced. “Good new, I can redraw your tail.”

“And the bad news?” asked Fitz sleepily.

“I’ve drawn you so many times today, I think I’m starting to see two of you,” Isla admitted.

Fitz stood as if he was going to walk a runway show.

“That sounds like good news all around. Who wouldn’t want two! of me?”

Isla let out a giggle. “Fitz, hold that pose! It’s perfect!”

The gecko groaned. “Isla, you know I need my beauty sleep. Why don’t you visit the tree frogs? I hear they’re planning a croaking concert tonight.”

Isla nodded. “Trust me, I know. i wanted to be their DJ, but tree frogs don’t like to share the stage.”

“They are experts in their craft,” Fitz replied.

Isla listened for the tree frogs, but she heard a new noise instead.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

“What was that?” Fitz asked as he jumped up from his rock.

“That, my friend, is a truck,” Isla said.

And it wasn’t just any truck… it was a moving truck.

“New neighbors!” Isla cried out.

There were only three houses on Isla’s street: Abuelo and Abuela’s home, Mama and Isla’s home, and then a third lonely house where no one lived. The house was rough around the edges, but nothing a new family couldn’t fix up. And it looked like they had arrived.

“Fiiiiiiiiiiitz,” Isla sang, clapping her hands. “You know what this means.”

“Oh, no,” Fitz said. “You want me to march on over there and be your tiny spy. I’ll go–but if I get a whiff of dog breath, I’m out!”

Isla grinned widely. “Aw, you’re the best!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Fitz grumbled as he slipped away onto a tree and towards the new family. A few leaves fell behind him, landing in Isla’s hair.

Fitz liked to pretend everything was too much work, but Isla knew he loved new adventures just as much as she did. And this was the start of the biggest adventure of Isla’s life.