The Stables, Friday

[bookbeltof_love]

Nina's own escape had been nowhere near as dramatic as Regina's. She didn't have access to most of her magic (and toy fireballs and round droplets of plastic water were not much use at all) without tools and time to prepare (she was making a note to herself, under all the screaming she wasn't doing, to fix that later) she was sort of… stuck.

And short of ripping a limb off and hoping it had a sharp metal bit in it to scratch a summoning circle in the floor of her prison cell, Nina hadn't had anything she could use, and no way to confirm that her stupid plastic body would actually have sharp edges if she ripped herself apart unless she actually went ahead and did so…

So, like, no. But the very fact she'd considered it said… well, a lot.

Nina had fallen back on her other strongest skill, when it came to getting out of situations: lying.

The kerfuffle with all the other toys—something about a break in? or a mass rebellion? she wasn't really sure, the details didn't filter very well down to other prisoners—and meant that her case was much, much more effective when she pled that she really was a Good Toy and that she'd been throwing a party, which is what only Good Toys did, and that Prompto had had the very best of intentions but that he'd been wrong, he'd taken happy exhaustion after a party for not happy enough--

And it took her a while, it really did, but when her transgressions were held up against the real traitors, why, it was like she wasn't a Bad Toy at all! They let her out, since she was obviously a Good Toy and, gushing her thanks, her praise for the Toymaker, and her total understanding for the whole mix-up, their warnings to make sure she avoided such confusing situations in the future because they would be watching…

Nina couldn't throw up or cry in her current form but, once she was far, far enough away from the Toybox, she collapsed against a building, shuddering until she was all shuddered out, and then, because she desperately did not want to be caught again, crept her way through town, making one of her priorities to find and get a pencil crayon so that she wasn't left without a way to summon things again, as she headed towards the dorms.

The dorms loomed in front of her, both reassuring and terrifying. She wanted to go in, check on Miss Dozy and Foomy, but she wasn't sure she dared. If she met Prompto again………………………

Nina picked her way around the outside of the dorms instead, skirting around the principal's tower, vaguely intent on the Preserve, but when she spotted the stables, she detoured there. No one else was there, just a few stuffed, toy horses pretending to eat their plastic hay, and that… that was just about the most relaxing thing she'd found.

Paranoia (though was it really, when they really were out to get them?) meant that she still made herself search every nook and cranny and…

"Like, what is this?????????????" she wondered, picking up the weird little nesting doll and turning it over in her hands. "What??????????????????"

There was an illustration of the dorms on the front leading to the Preserve on the back of the doll and that seemed...

Nina had been on the island for almost a year at this point. This was the sort of thing that, like, seemed important.

Hugging the nesting doll to herself, Nina peeked outside the stables. Important meant she was going to have to leave the relative safety of the stables and she didn't want to… but she was going to have to… but maybe, just maybe, she'd take stock here first, for a little bit longer…

[Open post, naturally! And this tag hasn't been used since 2012?!]