43

You sit in silence for some time, trying to gather your thoughts. All the while, you feel your grandma's eyes on you, anxiously waiting for what you will do.

But all of this is so sudden. Your grandma has had days, weeks, to mull everything over, and now you've been thrown in at the deep end. As far as you can tell, though, you have two options: try to put together enough evidence that Mr. Clarence's company has been doing something they shouldn't—enough that it might keep the forest safe from the developments, even if it doesn't stop the developments altogether—or forget about Mr. Clarence and focus on your grandma's plan to save the forest's magic.

It's difficult to weigh up the benefits of the latter option when you don't know what the plan is. But even if you only take the first idea into consideration, you can see right away what the advantages are. According to your grandma, her plan that she's been working on would only keep the forest's magic safe, and not the forest itself. This other option, however, might end up protecting the forest as a whole if it actually works (at least, according to your grandma).

But if you wanted to try and expose some kind of mysterious secret or even illegal activity, you would have no choice but to put yourselves in the public eye. You would have to announce it loud enough that it couldn't be ignored. That might be bad enough on its own, but if it turned out you were wrong—or if you couldn't convince the right people to believe you—then what would the reaction be? What would people say—what would the company itself do? Could they say your claims were slander and try to get you in trouble?

You have no idea. But from where you're sitting right now, the thought of actually trying to do this is: