As the afternoon passed, Anna was gradually feeling better. She'd had quite a shock, but she still didn't want to come over as the weakest of the group. The first few hours after the animal attack, she'd mostly been pretending to be fine, but she was still looking over her shoulder every time she heard a little crack of twigs or rustling of leaves. Sometimes, she was so sure that she saw or heard a movement. She had to keep reminding herself that the mountain lion had been scared off. Trish had assured her it wouldn't return.

Now, her fear had slowly been replaced by a new wave of excitement.

"Look at this one, Jack," she said as she pointed out yet another new plant that she'd never seen before. Jack quickly came over to scan the glossy, pointed leaves of the newly discovered plant.

"Let's see," he said, while looking at his MED-device. How he understood anything about the different waves on that tiny screen was beyond Anna. To her it all looked like lines and dots.

"Nope, just an orchid," Jack said.

"All that greenery might not be my expertise," Trish said from behind them. She'd been unusually quiet since the mountain lion, but that didn't mean she was bad tempered. "But even I know that that is not an orchid."

She was right. The leaves might have had the same shine, but the roots were behaving in a completely different way than those of an ordinary orchid, and the plant showed no sign of blooming a flower even remotely related to the orchidaceae family.

"I'm just translating Lenora's readings," Jack said, "and she places every frequency radiating from these leaves under the same wavelengths as an orchid."

"It could be environmental conditions," Anna offered, "but even then this mutation would have been beyond anything ever recorded."

Anna's fingers traced the sprouting ends of its roots. How strange ...

"Or the heat is just dabbling with the machinery, making it misread stuff," Trish said bluntly, before Anna could shut her up.

"Lenora doesn't misread wavelengths," Jack said, offended that someone had dared to question his device's ability. Then he walked some metres before them again, mumbling some incomprehensible words to himself.

Trish made a guilty look and formed an unspoken "oops" with her lips. Anna sighed and they all continued walking without saying anything for some time.

The surroundings were only increasing in beauty. The different coloured fungi decorated the soft mossy covered ground, and the lower fern trees created a variety of shadow shapes over their heads. They'd made a quick stop to pick some fruits, taking enough time to analyse and determine whether they were edible. Both Anna and Lenora 2.0 were convinced that it was okay.

The sun was slowly setting, but the heat that had formed under the thick layers of the jungle still lingered around. Trish's army coloured tank top was getting darker from the sweat, Jack had already taken off his flannel and bound it around his waist, and Anna was using her Hijab as a fan, trying to blow some fresh air in her neck.

"Thank Tangaroa!" Jack shouted from behind a Ramón tree. Right as Anna and Trish had caught up with him, they heard a loud splash. Before their feet laid Jack's clothes and shoes. How he'd gotten them out so fast was beyond Anna.

"No way," Anna said as she took in the crystal clear lake stretched out before them. Even with barely any sunlight reaching through, the surface revealed the fairest blue she'd ever seen.

"I'd thank the Scandinavian God of water, but I have no idea who that is, so thanks science," Trish said as she had also already taken off her clothes, using her light blue underwear as a substitute bikini.

"Are you both crazy?" Anna said, making the other two look up. "Only this morning we've almost been attacked by a mountain lion, and now you're going to jump into a super deep lake?"

"It's not deep, I can reach the ground with my toes," Jack shouted from the water. His mouth just reached out of the surface because he was tilting his head.

"Thanks, giant man. Not helping." Anna was not jumping in a lake where Jack could barely stand.

"Don't worry," Trish said. "The worst we'll find in these waters are frogs and fish. Maybe mutated in size." She winked.

"Not funny. What about crocodiles?"

"Dwarf crocs maybe, which are largely unharmful. Although I highly doubt we'll see any of them here. Crocodiles usually stay in lowland lakes, and we've been climbing for a whole day now. We're fine. And you know what the professor would say."

Anna smiled. She mimicked her old Flemish professor's tone as she said his favourite quote. "Never miss a chance to be immersed in new science."

"There you go. And it won't get more immersive than this." Trish was about to let herself fall into the water, but first she seemed to realise something else. "Are you alright with the clothes?"

It took some time before Anna realised what she meant. But they'd been sleeping in the same tent for nights. Now wasn't really the time to become timid. Besides, her parents were marine biologists. Travelling around the world, being surrounded by mad ocean loving scientists, Anna had gotten quite used to people jumping out of their clothes from time to time. "Yes, sure."

She took off her shoes and unzipped the lower parts of her tracking trousers so she could wade through the shallow water.

"Professor Janssens would have loved this," Trish said, floating calmly on her back.

Anna smiled. "He'd be the first to jump into the lake."

"It's like he can't help himself from becoming an utter child when he comes across something new."

"Remember when we gave him that Indiana Jones hat for his birthday?" Jack asked.

They all laughed, remembering those times when they had only just started their PhD research. The professor had bought them all a true pack of Belgian fries with lots of mayonnaise and Andalouse sauce. They had been planning their field trip to Kutabuta Jungle. It was going to be the four of them, finding magic, proving those university sceptics wrong. Why Professor Janssens had eventually decided to go on his own, none of them ever understood. And they never had a chance to ask.

Before the sun had fully set, they decided to get out of the water, so they could fully dry before going to sleep. Trish and Jack were setting up the tent, and Anna was boiling water to make some instant soup.

"Do you think we'll ever find it?" She asked while putting her hand above the pot to feel if the water was getting warmer.

The other two were silent for some time, conscious of the depth of her question. All three of them had their different reasons for joining the research. For Anna, it was as much about finding the magic as it was about proving the intelligent communication between earth and organism. She wanted to complete her beloved professor's research and keep his memory alive. She had to find it.

"Of course we will," Trish said, knowing Jack wouldn't utter such an uncertainty with such conviction.

"You can't be that sure," Jack said, and Anna could see how Trish nudged her elbow in his side. "But, chances are increasing."

Trish rolled her eyes, saying, "Well, you're a big comfort, Jack," but Anna was smiling already. If there was any magic present, it was the friendship they had formed between the three of them.

"I didn't mean it as comfort," Jack said, stomping the last pin in the ground so the tent wouldn't get loose. "Lenora has been giving me dozens of readings which show that the percentage of supernatural aspects in our surroundings is increasing."

"What? Since when?" Anna asked.

"Since the not an orchid," he mimicked Trish's tone from earlier, which would have made Anna laugh, if she weren't so curious about his findings.

"Why didn't you say so?"

He shrugged, giving some confused looks. "I thought you'd stopped liking my findings."

"Jack, of course we like your findings," Anna said, now fully understanding how she and Trish had hurt him for calling Lenora wrong. "We're not like those language students from your previous PhD that didn't appreciate your work. We'd be lost without the contribution you make to the research. You know that, right?"

Apparently, that was the only thing he needed to hear, because after Anna and Trish had both given him an apology, he couldn't shut up anymore. "In that case, here are all the readings from the rest of the afternoon. The fungi are mostly giving new wavelengths, especially the ones with the blue shine, remember. Then the low palm trees and the whole row of Heliconia. They're conifers, but their veins have been behaving as those from deciduous trees."

"Slow down," Trish said, barely able to follow him scrolling through the information on the screen.

"Oh, yes, you're right, Trish, look." He opened another screen with just as many cryptic green lines and dots as the former one. "Have you noticed the gecko's on the Kapok trees?"

"Yes?" It was a clear no.

"Lenora placed their frequencies under the same category as," he picked up the purple rock for dramatic effect, "this beauty over here."

"So the gecko's are...?" Anna didn't dare finish that sentence.

"Supernaturally mutated," Trish finished it for her.

"Jack," Anna said as firmly as possible, "don't EVER stop sharing Lenora's findings again."