#mistle toad

Oof.

Toad Hollow:  Would rather reluctantly send kids on a rescue mission instead of sending actual adults who might know what they’re doing.  They could have at least sent one or two as escorts or something.  They are unwilling to change, even when it could benefit them (ignoring the Outsider’s medical breakthroughs, not really finding any way to help toadlets aside from the occasional tunnel toad).  Won’t let frogs live there despite the fact that they easily could fit.  

Mistle Toad: Initially breaks away from Toad Hollow in an act of action and rebellion.  Ambitiously sets off to find the ancients.  Decides that being on his own is better than helping who knows how many toad children (there could have been more groups in the past before the toad patrol).  Even after he helps them he almost immediately calls them back out in the middle of a canadian winter to help retrieve him from an icicle.  He means well, but ends up accidentally achieving the opposite of toad hollow, endangering children in an attempt to help them. 

The Ancients:  Save children from winter by essentially putting them into fantasy-cyrostasis.  Makes the cure for this be a needlessly elaborate musical piece that punishes any mistake with the player(s?) also turning into toadstools, for some reason (really this makes no sense, this wouldn’t prevent any sort of potential ill intent, the only reason that is sort of plausible was that it was just a thing that happened and the ancients had no control of this clause). The moment one of the instruments breaks they immediately panic, stow a bunch of toadstools in a cave in a maze formation for some reason, then promptly go out to get a pack of cigarettes so they can fade into legend, probably so they don’t have to face any responsibility for making such a trash protection system.  Then the whole problem is solved by a bundle of children using some random log, which means the ancients could have just found or built a replacement and avoided all this.