Amelia adamantly disagreed on the point of Laurel being a failure, of course. No joking embargo on flattery could make that true. But even if ze were - and they’re convincing themselves even now that they’re not wrong for not saying this part - they couldn’t call that the cause of Sophie’s ills. Not in any good conscience.
By the time they step into the caravan, and thus the open door of the Dimension, they’re already formulating a theory of their own.
Sorry to interrupt, but I wanna take quick advantage of this mostly-townies post to give some behind the scenes pop-up trivia. Before the whole First Hiatus thing happened, I was originally gonna use the poses I used here for a sort of ‘karma to the child’ scene: Sophie would’ve been beaten up by the rest of the playgroup denizens, not gotten sick. This plan was averted for several reasons, including that by the time I got around to all this, none of the RP children were young enough that they’d still be IN playgroup - but since I’d also gotten tacit permission to give Sophie a rougher time of it than before, I figured this would be a good middle ground.
Don’t worry, though, it’s not sickness for sickness’s sake either - you’ll see why she’s feeling so rotten later.