The Cafe
Keeping her head down, Taynara moved quietly through the swirling red dust and deafening roar of Buriticupu.
Heavy timber trucks rumbled past, shaking the ground like earthquakes and kicking up grit that burned her eyes, while the screaming steel blades of open-air sawmills bit into ancient hardwoods on either side of the dirt road. Nobody paid any attention to a small, mud-spattered indigenous girl moving through the shadows—they were far too consumed by counting timber loads and making money to even glance her way.
Tuning out the blinding noise, Taynara listened closely to that quiet, steady inner feeling—the deep gut instinct her grandfather had taught her to trust. She let her feet follow that inner knowing without overthinking, turning down a narrow, sun-baked alley.
She navigated past grey concrete block houses, rusted tin shacks, and groups of rough-looking loggers drinking cold drinks in the shade.
Listening to her quiet inner voice, her feet brought her directly to a small, ramshackle building with a buzzing neon sign hanging above the door. Through the smudged glass window, Taynara saw rows of glowing blue screens sitting on dusty wooden desks.
Even though she had never set foot in a town before, Taynara recognized those glowing boxes instantly. A brief wave of gratitude washed over her as she remembered the scientist—a gentle woman who had visited her tribe years ago to study canopy birds. The scientist had brought a portable computer into the forest and taught Taynara Portuguese and English, as well as how to operate the machine by tapping out words on the keys. To Taynara, learning to navigate the screen and use those strange symbols had felt less like studying and more like remembering something her soul had known a lifetime ago.
She slipped through the doorway, keeping her steps completely silent.
The air inside was cool, blasted by a rattling window air conditioner that smelled faintly of stale coffee and plastic. Behind a high counter near the front, the café owner—a round, sleepy-looking man—was completely absorbed in a flickering television screen, barely glancing up.
Taynara darted behind a partition and slid into a plastic chair at the furthest, dimmest computer terminal in the back.
Waking the sleeping machine with a gentle tap, Taynara opened a browser window. She didn’t know website addresses or how the global web worked, but she didn’t need to. Letting go of logic, she let that warm, quiet feeling deep in her chest take over. Without even knowing how or why, her fingers moved across the keys on pure instinct, opening a live global discussion board and clicking directly into an open chat box.
She didn’t hesitate. She typed straight from her heart:
“I need help. The loggers are destroying my forest. My grandfather said someone out there is listening. Please, if you can hear me, help us!”
On the screen, the cursor blinked in the quiet dark. One second. Two seconds. Then, messages began popping onto the board in rapid succession from users around the world:
“Is this a bot?” one username posted.
“Nice roleplay thread, kid lol,” another added.
“Loggers? What forest are you even talking about? Brazil? Canada? Indonesia?” a third user asked, skeptical.
“Wait, what if it’s real?” someone else chimed in. “Where are you located? What’s the name of your town or country?”
Taynara stared at the flickering words, her heart racing. She didn’t know country names, state boundaries, or global maps. She typed back with trembling fingers:
“I do not know maps or towns. My name is Taynara. I am Iwari. My home is the forest of the ancient trees. The men with big iron machines are burning our village. Please, my grandfather said someone out there would help me!”
Thousands of miles away, Shock D sat at a computer terminal in a dim, hidden room of a temporary hideout, on high alert while on the run with her fellow Star Kids—Jai and Io—who were gathered around her. She hadn’t been planning to check public forums that night—they were already up against hostile forces and scrambling to handle urgent crises of their own. But moments earlier, a sudden, powerful hunch—an undeniable inner feeling deep in her gut—had pulled her focus away from whatever emergency they were dealing with at the moment. Trusting her intuition, Shock D had opened that exact public discussion board, feeling in her soul that someone out there was calling across the internet for help.
When the name Taynara appeared on her screen, Shock D froze, an instant surge of electricity shooting down her spine. It was the exact name that had whispered across her mind during her quiet breathing.
“Taynara! It’s me, Shock D!” Shock D typed back directly into the thread, cutting through the chatter. “I hear you! I felt an inner urge to check this exact board right now—I knew it was you calling across the frequency!”
Taynara stared at the screen, her breath catching in her throat. Seeing the name Shock D flickering in front of her eyes, a wave of soothing starlight-blue warmth flooded her chest. It was the exact name—the comforting presence—that had echoed like a gentle note in her heart when she sat still in the ancestral hut, breathing in rhythm with the forest. She realized instantly that her inner listening had brought her straight to the soul her grandfather had promised would be waiting.
Beside her in the dark room, Jai groaned loudly. “Shock, what are you doing? We have too many battles to fight—we don’t have time for silly internet adventures right now!”
“Yeah, Shock, come on,” Io chimed in, leaning right over the back of her chair to peer at her monitor. “We’ve got major emergencies popping off everywhere. Don’t fall for a public thread troll.”
“It’s not a troll!” Shock D insisted firmly, looking up at them. “Listen to me—I felt pulled directly to this thread. It’s her!”
Jai and Io exchanged a look. As much as they hated distractions during their mission, they both knew one indisputable truth: Shock D’s intuitive hunches were almost never wrong.
“Alright, alright,” Io muttered, flipping open his own high-powered laptop on the desk beside her. “If you’re trusting your gut, I guess I’d better run the tools. But if this turns out to be a bot… wait. Did she say ‘Iwari’?”
Io’s message flashed onto the public board as he spliced into the window: “Hold on, everybody shush! Scraper tools running… BAM! ‘Iwari’ is an indigenous ethno-group in the eastern Amazon sector of Maranhão, Brazil! Cross-referencing academic databases and satellite logging feeds right now… connection speed is older than my grand-uncle’s tractor, but Shock was right—I got her sector pinpointed!”
Jai sighed, crossing his arms and leaning back against the table, half-impressed and half-resigned. “Okay… so your gut was right again. But how are we supposed to help her all the way over here?”
Shock D popped back on the board: “We hear you, Taynara! But why are you doing this alone? Where is your tribe? Where is your family?”
Taynara’s fingers trembled over the sticky keyboard. The chatroom was scrolling quickly, filled with questions from people half a world away who couldn’t possibly understand the danger she was in. She swallowed the heavy lump in her throat and typed the words before she could second-guess herself:
“They killed my grandfather!”
For a split second, the entire chat froze. It was as if all the bandwidth in the world had suddenly held its breath.
Then, a rapid-fire cascade of text flooded the screen:
“Oh my god,” Shock D typed.
“What?! Who did?” someone posted.
“No… that’s horrible! I’m so sorry!” another user chimed in.
“You need to get out of there right now! It’s not safe!” Shock D urged.
“Call the police! Get to an embassy!” another added.
The collective horror of dozens of strangers washed over her. For the first time since the attack, she wasn’t carrying the grief entirely on her own. But seeing their panic also grounded her. The police wouldn’t help. An embassy couldn’t stop what was coming. Only she could.
She wiped her eyes, her resolve hardening, and typed back:
“I do not have time. I have to finish what he started. My grandfather told me I must go to the Tataendy-Okẽ. He gave me the sacred glowing crystal, but he didn’t tell me what the words mean or how the crystal works. Do you know what Tataendy-Okẽ means?”
“Tataendy-what now?” Io typed back, his fingers flying across his laptop keyboard. “Hang on, let me run a Tupi-Guarani linguistic search… BAM! Cracking codes is my specialty! It translates to ‘Portal of Light’. And get this: satellite thermal imaging is showing an uncharted stone structure right in your sector, hidden under the canopy. I bet it’s a pyramid, and I bet it’s got a portal inside! Look at this image preview!”
An image preview popped up inside the chat window—a dark, thermal rendering showing a massive, stepped stone shape buried beneath the green canopy.
Taynara stared at the image flickering on the monitor. She didn’t know the word pyramid, but seeing that towering, stepped shape, her blood ran ice-cold. She recognized it instantly—it was the dark stone mountain hidden deep beneath the trees that had haunted her dreams since she was a little girl. Her grandfather had told her she would have to go there, but seeing the shape lit up on the screen made it painfully real.
Shock D popped back on: “That crystal your grandfather gave you is the key! That structure holds a dormant gateway. If you can go inside and activate the portal using your crystal, we can link our energy and step right through across the world to help you! You’re the only one on that end who can open the doorway for us!”
Taynara’s fingers froze over the plastic keyboard as the full truth hit her like a physical blow.
She knew she had to go to the ancient place, but she hadn’t understood why. Now she realized the sacred crystal wasn’t just a glowing stone—it was the key to unlock a doorway through space, bringing Shock D directly to her forest. But to do that, she would have to step right into the mouth of the place she feared most.
Cold dread seeped into her bones.
Her mind flashed back to the recurring nightmare that had haunted her childhood—the dark, suffocating stone valley, the toothy archway of that crumbling structure buried under the trees, and the writhing shadows waiting inside.
Her breath hitched in her throat. But as she listened past the panic to the quiet truth resting deep in her heart, she remembered her grandfather’s words: You survived so that our people’s light would not go out.
Slowly, firmly, she typed her reply:
“Ok. I will do it.”
As her fingers hit the enter key, a sudden surge of adrenaline and relief made her pull her hands back. In her excitement, her elbow bumped an open, half-empty can of soda someone had left sitting on the edge of the dusty wooden desk.
The can tipped over, splashing sticky liquid straight into the vents of the humming computer tower below.
POP!
A bright shower of electric sparks burst from the machine with a loud sizzle. Smoke curled into the air as the screen flickered wildly and died with a high-pitched whine.
“Hey! What did you do to my machine?!” a harsh voice roared in Portuguese.
The sudden electric pop instantly shattered the café owner’s TV trance. He stormed around the counter, grabbing a heavy wooden broom and glaring at the smoking terminal with a red, furious face. “Get out of here, you little pest! Look at what you did!”
Taynara didn’t wait to argue. She slid out of the plastic chair and darted past him, bolted out the front door and back into the dusty street. Her heart hammering against her ribs as the owner’s furious shouts faded behind her into the noisy streets of Buriticupu. She didn’t look back.
She sprinted through the alleyways, not stopping until the blaring sawmills and diesel fumes faded behind her. Reaching the border where the dead dirt met the edge of the wild, she ducked into the shadows of the tree line.
A brilliant, swirling mist of emerald and gold materialized before her. With a soft, comforting trill that vibrated deep in Taynara’s chest, Ka’a shifted back into his physical form, lowering his massive, feathered head so she could wrap her arms around his warm neck.
“We have to go to the ancient stone mountain, Ka’a,” Taynara whispered into his emerald feathers, her voice steadying. “My guide is waiting.”
Ka’a let out a low click of his beak, his golden crown feathers flaring with a brave, protective light as they turned to make their long trek into the dark heart of the jungle.
It was time to face her fears—and save her people.
Sacred Roots – Chapter 5 – Star Kids Media
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