Falling,
falling,
falling...
Vanellope hit the ground with a thud. "Ow..." She sat up, rubbing her head. "Okay, not fun." She looked around and realised that this wasn't anywhere she knew on the Sugar Rush map, which she knew like the back of her hubcaps.
Huge mountains rose up on the horizon, and white drifts piled up around her as tiny flakes fell from the sky. She poked her finger into one and cautiously licked her finger, then recoiled as she realised that it wasn't powdered sugar, but some sort of water.
"Okay... step up the weird scale to a definite level 2..." She muttered, shaking her finger to get the last of the white stuff off of it.
She shivered, it occurring to her that it was actually quite cold out here, so she decided to go try to find some sort of shelter while she figured out what was going on. She trudged through the white stuff, her sneakers leaving clear-cut prints of what direction she was headed.
The last thing she could think of was everyone running for the surge bunkers. In the arcade, there were 'bunkers', places that all of the game characters, like Felix, Ralph, the Nicelanders and Calhoun, could shelter during a power surge, for example, a lighting storm. It was also where they went when their game was unplugged, if they couldn't reach Game Central Station.
One such surge was imminent, and after making sure all of her friends were safely inside the bunker, she went to enter it herself and found that she couldn't enter. She was an official character in the game code again, but the entry and exit codes were still a little flaky, and surge glitches were the primary cause of character death, thus the reason why the surge bunkers were created.
The initial power surges were flaring through as she and Ralph were trying, once again, to get her through the barrier and out of danger. Vanellope looked back, looked at Ralph, looked back at the oncoming bolt, and made the only decision that was available to her. She tried to glitch through the barrier just as the bolt hit it, and then... and then...
She tried to remember what happened next, but the next thing in her memory was waking up in this cold, white world.
A cave loomed out of the ground up ahead, and she broke her even pace, alternatively running and glitching towards it. One inside, she pulled her hoodie over her head, possibly for the first time ever. 'When did I even get a hoodie?' She wondered, rubbing her hands together for a few seconds before shoving them in her pockets. She found a level, solid place to lie down, and, exhausted, and quickly fell asleep.
XXX
Simone woke with a start. There was something just... wrong. She got up and walked into her kitchen to make herself a cup of cocoa. She turned, suddenly hearing a not-so-gentle snore, of all things.
She tiptoed to the doorway and peeked in, seeing a small, obsidian-haired girl curled up, fast asleep on her living room floor. She grabbed a spare blanket from her closet and wrapped it around the little sprinkle-covered moppet.
Sitting back in the kitchen, she wondered whether this girl was from the Candy Kingdom, then decided against it. After all, she didn't appear to be made of candy, just covered in little pieces of it.
