The Mysterious Visitors

It was only a matter of time
before someone beyond the screen spoke.
But this is no virus, nor a mystery —
it is a voice looking for a home.

When Anne found the computer turned on again a few days later, she didn’t even get angry. She simply didn’t have time — the screen was already flashing with a bold message: “Do not touch the keyboard!”

Reflections on the scene

⸻ ❦ ⸻

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Sometimes, the smallest creatures carry the greatest meaning. In this charming and quietly unsettling scene, we discover that Anne has unknowingly brought ants from Antazonia into the real world. It’s a moment that perfectly captures the book’s uncanny mix of realism and fantasy: the creatures are not magical, but they operate her computer with shocking precision, under the command of the quietly brilliant Engineer Dan. The idea that a band of ants has occupied the keyboard to communicate through the computer is both funny and disturbing. What child hasn’t imagined their machine having a secret life?

The return of Pouchy—Anne’s beloved backpack—is equally heartwarming. Their reunion, handled through the ants’ new communication method, is written with perfect lightness. It marks the reawakening of the magical connection to the Ghost Forest, but also reveals how fragile and incomplete that connection has become. The blackened glass sphere, once a portal, now sits inert—its silence a sign of how distant the Forest feels. Yet the scene refuses despair: it teases a new path, a solution, maybe even a reinvention.

This first scene is all about quiet beginnings—signals in the static, whispers from a world we thought unreachable. The entire final book of the trilogy begins not with a bang, but with a tiny step across dimensions: a single ant, crawling across a keyboard.