the second occasion

[deepest_magic]

House. Wardrobe. Coats.

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[neverbeatme]

"Thank you, your majesty!"

[charning]

"Of course. What is your name, dear child?"

[neverbeatme]

Not feasible to conceal.

"Elizabeth," she says.

[charning]

"What a lovely name. When you come back with your friends you must go straight to my palace, you know, and not talk to any seditious creatures you may encounter. There are all kinds of beasts in Narnia who might say anything to dissuade you from attending your party and try to send you on errands of their own instead."

[neverbeatme]

"I'll remember," she promises.

[charning]

"Good girl. You shall make a fine Princess."

[neverbeatme]

"I'll do my best, your majesty!"

[charning]

"I am sure." Jadis strokes Elizabeth's hair, and presently they are at the lamp-post. "Here you are. Hurry back."

[neverbeatme]

"Thanks for everything!" she says, and scurries off.

[charning]

"It is no trouble!" says the Queen.

Trees trees trees coats coats.

[neverbeatme]

As soon as she reaches the trees/coats boundary, well out of sight of the queen, Elizabeth takes off her backpack and scoops it full of as much snow as she can fit.

Then she zips it up and keeps going.

[alicornucopia]

Coats coats door.

[neverbeatme]

She compares timepieces.

Almost an hour passed in Narnia; barely two minutes in the house.

Okay. Time to go visit Bella, who alone out of all the kids in town might actually be able to handle this. Elizabeth gets on her bike.

[deepest_magic]

Bella is sitting outside her house under a tree with a notebook.

"Hi, Elizabeth!"

[neverbeatme]

"Hi," says Elizabeth. She gets off her bike. She glances around for other observers and sees none. She plops herself in front of Bella and opens her backpack.

[deepest_magic]

Bella peers into the backpack.

"...Um, what is that?"

[neverbeatme]

"Snow," she says. "I have had a really weird day."

[deepest_magic]

"Why do you have snow in your backpack in the middle of summer?"

[neverbeatme]

"At this point I'm pretty sure the only remaining explanation is magic," she says. "Do you want the whole story?"

[deepest_magic]

"Yes."

[neverbeatme]

"Okay," she says. "So, first, I got bored one day and went to that abandoned house to poke around for anyplace somebody could have feasibly hid a body, because I have a morbid imagination. I didn't find any bodies, but I found this huge old wardrobe full of weird-smelling coats, and I wedged the door open and went in past the coats, and then I was in the middle of a snowy pine forest. That was weird enough by itself, but then I saw a guy with goat legs and a tail and little horns, who was just about as surprised by me as I was by him. He introduced himself as Tumnus the Faun and asked if I wanted to come have tea with him, and I went, and we talked for hours all about Narnia - that's what he said the country was. Apparently it's always winter there, has been for hundreds of years, but never Christmas, by order of the Queen of Narnia, also called the White Witch although I got the distinct impression nobody says it to her face."

She takes a breath.

"Then he burst into tears and admitted he was being paid by the Witch to keep an eye out for any humans he might see and lull them to sleep and then turn them in. I told him it was fine and I wasn't going to tell anybody, and got him calmed down, and he took me back to where he'd met me and I found my way back to the Narnia end of the wardrobe and went out. When I stuck my arm back in the wardrobe, there was no forest, just the back of the wardrobe behind all the coats. And it hadn't been hardly five minutes, even though I'd spent hours and hours talking to the faun. So I wasn't sure what to think about the whole thing, and I decided to leave it alone for a while until I could figure out a good way to verify what was going on. That was the day you came over to play cards - I wanted to meet your dad partly so I could get the story of the disappeared kid out of him, because now I had an alternate explanation for where the kid had gone."

Another breath.

"Which brings us to today. I went back in with a backpack and a watch—" She shows Bella the clockwork one and the digital one. "This one I took with me, this one I left behind. When I came out, it had been a minute or two on the one and almost an hour on the other. So that part's the same - time goes by faster in Narnia, you get a lot there for only a little bit here."

[deepest_magic]

"...So you filled your backpack with snow to prove it."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah, I'm getting to that part. First I went and sat under a tree for a while to get a time comparison - and while I was there, this really tall scary-looking woman pulled up on a sled to ask me who I was and what I was doing there, and if I was human or not. With the heavy implication that she wasn't. And when I said yes, she smiled the creepiest smile of all time and invited me to come sit with her on her sled and have a hot drink. Which I didn't want to do, but I didn't like my chances if I tried to run away, so I went with it. And she asked me a bunch more questions - and the first time I tried to lie to her after the drink she gave me, when she asked if I'd seen anyone else there, instead of 'no' I ended up saying 'a faun'."

[deepest_magic]

"That's really creepy."

[neverbeatme]

"No kidding. I got through the rest of the conversation without giving away anything else I didn't mean to, but it was hard. I don't even know if I still have the spell on - I could try lying to you or something, but I don't know the parameters, it could only prevent lying to her or only if I really mean to deceive somebody or only work in Narnia or something like that. Anyway, the next part's even creepier - she asked me if I had any human friends my age, and when I said I knew some other kids, she said I should make up some reason to get them all to follow me into the wardrobe and lead them all to her castle without telling them anything about her first, and when we got there she'd throw a big party and make me a princess and all my friends dukes and duchesses."