Hey everybody! I am SO SORRY for the unexpected hiatus! The past few weeks have been really busy; we've been in a play, driven upwards of 15 hours to San Antonio for a week, and are wrapping up summer swim with our biggest meet this weekend. So yeah, BUSY! But I stole a little time to write a Rapunzel!POV chapter. Yeah, I know, not exactly what everyone's waiting for, but I promise, next upload will be a Spidy/Rapunzel chapter (and it's already halfway done, so hopefully no more long waits). Anyways, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for your lovely reviews and follows! :D You guys are awesome! Enjoy!

CHAPTER 3: In which Rapunzel finds herself in a strange new world

Half an hour earlier...

Rapunzel gasped as lights brighter than the sunrise surrounded and stabbed at her, whirling like a hurricane of stars and snapping like wooden timbers in a storm. Her body whipped and whirled around, her mouth was open in a scream that couldn't be heard, and then-

UMPF! She landed on stone, her arms breaking her fall.

But her ears still rang with noise. Loud, sharp sounds like angry geese filled the air, a rumbling like thunder that never clapped swirled over her head, and loud shouts rose over the chaos like her baking timer announcing a freshly burnt pie during a storm.

Rapunzel trembled and covered her ears, daring to look up. Her mouth dropped open.

Towers made of glass loomed over her like they were holding up the sky. Flashing pictures, moving and morphing and mesmerizing, slipped across the fronts of the towers like water. Long silver beams held up flashing, colorful lanterns over a huge slab of black rock, and a sea of moving, polished, and painted stones, larger than she was, zipped along the black rock, blaring their sharp goose-like calls.

Rapunzel's gaping mouth wound into a humongous grin, and she laughed.

"Pascal! Pascal, you've got to see-."

But that's when she saw them. Moving around the sides of the black rock, on a ledge a few feet across.

Ruffians! Thugs!

People!

Rapunzel whipped around, but they were behind her too. All around her, talking, jogging, silently watching the stones beneath their feet as they passed.

"Pascal!"

She started running, calling his name as loud as she could, when-

"OUCH!"

She was jerked to the ground. Rapunzel shrieked and tried to jump back up, but her hair was stuck. Looking behind, she saw that a little girl was standing on it, wide eyed-and staring right at her.

"Mama!" the girl yelled. Rapunzel made wild "shhh" signs, but the girl didn't understand.

Then, a flash of green came out of nowhere, and whirled up the girl's leg, arm, and onto her shoulder. A horribly piercing scream ripped through the air, and Rapunzel was free.

"Pascal!" she called, ecstatic with relief, but her green friend was suddenly scooped up by a man who seemed to pop out of nowhere. He wore a dark blue jumper and had a bald head and a nametag that said "Phil Martizzi, Zoo Maintenance".

"Eh, what're you doin out of the zoo?" he asked in a strange accent, putting a fuming Pascal into his shirt pocket. He turned and started walking away.

"NO!" Rapunzel fled after him, running into several angry people but suddenly not caring. She had no idea what a "zoo" was, but she had a pretty good idea about how Pascal felt about the insides of pockets.

She gathered her hair as she went, to avoid any more curious little girls.

Phil Martizzi rounded a corner suddenly, and as Rapunzel caught up, she caught her breath. There was a break in the towers, and a large stone building with a pretty metal gate read "Repicci's Zoo of Exotic Creatures" and a smaller sign read, "Grand Opening Today!"

Pascal's captor walked to a smaller blue door beside the grand entrance and let himself in. Rapunzel took a deep breath, counted to ten, then followed.

The room past the door was muggy and small, and Rapunzel coughed as the stench of some kind of smoke stung her nose. A desk to her left was covered in all manner of disgusting things, like a half-eaten sandwich with a long piece of meat inside, a strange looking bag of crumbs, a greasy shirt, a glass of something, and little paper rolls that looked burnt on one end. Above the desk, though, was something infinitely more important to Rapunzel; rings of keys, dangling from hooks stuck in the wall.

"What kind of a horrible place needs this many keys?" she wondered aloud, grabbing one of the rings.

A hacking cough caught her attention. It came from the other side of the room, from behind another door. Rapunzel tiptoed softly and pushed the door open a crack.

Her jaw hung open-again.

Huge cages lined a cobbled walkway, where workers dressed a lot like Phil milled around with buckets, checklists, and those gross little burnt paper rolls sticking out of their mouths. And inside the cages? All sorts of animals, hunkered down under artificial rocks or pacing restlessly around their undersized "habitats".

"What is this place? What have they done to deserve this?" Rapunzel half whispered. "And where is-."

"Got ya a new iguana, or lizard or something," Phil's voice came from her right, on the other side of the door. Rapunzel opened the door a tad more, and looked at a particularly tall cage that was already almost brim-full of lizards of all kinds. Another man was dumping some nasty looking pellets into what looked upsettingly close to a food bowl on the inside. He looked up and groaned as Phil got closer.

"'Ow many times do I have to tell ya, quit bringing in every frigging varmint you see on the streets of New York. This is supposed to be an exotic zoo."

Phil's back was to her, but his voice was whiny. "This is the lizard's cage, and most people won't know the difference. Just slap a funny name on the card and everybody'll oo and ah, I guarantee it."

"I don't have time for this," the other worker huffed as he finished dumping the pellets. "We have an employee's meeting in five. Toss the thing in there and we'll deal with your captives afterwards."

There was a lot of muttering as Phil opened the cage, pulled Pascal (who was shaking with pure fury) from his pocket, and literally tossed him inside. The two workers walked off in sullen silence, neither particularly glad of the company, Rapunzel thought, but she knew this was her moment.

She went back inside, grabbed as many keys as she could carry, and slipped back outside.

"Five minutes," she whispered, tiptoeing towards the lizard's cage. "Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight..."