Discussed starter for @feelinsheepish!
“Dumb ol’ Taffyta, dumb ol’ teachers, dumb ol’ school trip...”
One might wonder where the frustrated muttering was coming from; at least, they might unless they looked up. One Vanellope Schweet, class reject and all around unpopular kid, had made her way up into the wood’s treetops, where she was idly hopping from branch to branch as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a nine-year-old girl to be doing.
It had all started with a school field trip. Some thing to go out to the outskirts of some woods and study some specific type of bugs in their natural habitat or whatever. Vanellope had tagged along gamely enough - she might skip school whenever it suited her (which, given that she was the favourite target of what felt like most every bully in the school, was often), but getting to go somewhere new was always good, right? Or it had started off that way, until one of her classmates in particular had started her usual thing of making fun of her
- “You should just stay out here, Vanellope; you’d fit right in with all those bugs... after all, you’re just as gross and unwanted as they are” -
and the others had joined in, and had culminated in her being shoved over into the thick mud that said bugs called home. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the cherry on top had been that the teachers had acted as if it was her own fault.
She’d beat a hasty retreat as soon as no-one else was looking; a retreat that took her into the woods and to one of her favourite kinds of hiding place - up the tallest tree she could find. From there, the child had taken to expertly hopping from branch to branch, one tree to another, all the while muttering to herself and trying in vain to pick mud off her school clothes as she put more and more distance between herself and her classmates.
She thought, for a moment as she took another hop between tree branches, arms outstretched for balance, that her sense of direction must have got messed up. She couldn’t define exactly why, but something just felt faintly wrong, like she had been all turned around without realising it.
No, that couldn’t be right. Putting a hand on her head, Vanellope tried to puzzle through this strange sensation. It wasn’t vertigo, for she had no fear of heights; it was just...
Ah, it was nothing. Couldn’t be. She knew for a fact that she didn’t want to go back the way she’d come; back that way just lay the rest of her class and a whole afternoon’s worth of mockery. Actually, she couldn’t even say which way back was; only, she knew that it was the opposite direction to the way she’d just taken her last jump.
So, keep on going, right?
Shaking off the disorientation, she continued her jumping from one branch to another, moving deeper into the woods - blissfully unaware that she’d just crossed a magical barrier that, had she been walking on the ground, would have turned her completely around without her being any the wiser.