Hello my beautiful readers and reviewers! You rock! *group hug* Your reviews are like happy thoughts, they lift me right up!
Disclaimer: Peter Pan, all the characters, places, and etc. contained therein, the immensely brief passage I quote from it in oi-oi-oi's shout-out, and such belong to somebody who isn't me. You guys all belong to you. Basically the rest is mine; I'm making no money so leave me alone!
Shout-outs:
PButtercup - *thinks about Mush in a pot* Yummy! And probably really, really sweet! What is it about the adorably naïve guys, huh?
Clips – Actually I don't know if I'm gonna pair anybody with Peter, but he and Raven definitely have something special. I would say that I think every girl is in love with Peter Pan, but Sallie has proven me wrong. So apart from Sallie, every girl is in love with Peter Pan. ^_^ Would you like Alicia to find someone special in Neverland? Just say so in your review if you do, either way is fine by me. I am planning many OCs (original characters). *Rubs hands together evilly*
oi-oi-oi – Poor Sal. Her life has pretty much sucked so far, huh? And I just figured that if she saw a boy fly in the window it might up her chances of becoming a believer, LOL. No boyfriend, right? *Checks notes* Right. Gotcha. And yeah, Peter's a little sexist *giggles* but it works both ways. I happen to have a copy of the book Peter Pan from my local lending library, and one passage says this:
(John) 'Why, she is only a girl.'
'That,' explained Curly, 'is why we are her servants.'
'You? Wendy's servants!'
'Yes,' said Peter, 'and you also. Away with them!'
So you see, he may be sexist, but he's also a gentleman. ^_~
Raven – Girl, your review had me in fits! It was so funny! Yes, I am worried too . . . I mean, will we ever escape? Are there spiders down there? What will become of us? *sob* *brightens up* But hey, Peter's on the case. We should be okay. ^_^
Sugar High5 – That's cool, you used two of your special words in your review, LOL! Spiffy neat-o! And yeah, if I get the chapters out (I'm workin' on it) Kaela will get a boyfriend. *grins*
AnimegirlH – Glad you're excited! Happy readings to you! Dear me, an Italian romance sounds nice . . . *slips into daydream* I do that a lot, LOL. I'll see what can be arranged. ^_~ Otherfolk is imaginary, but a good book a lot like it would be The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were. It's a great read.
Girlies that are gonna get boyfriends, eventually: Nora, Anna, Raven, Katrina and Kaela
If your name is not on this list and you want to change that, now's the time to act! Put in a request for a boyfriend in your review and I'll see if I can pencil in a little romance.
"I've got my happy thought," Charlie says, fingering her father's medal. It's pinned to her shirt and has a soft luster in the moonlight pouring through the window.
"Me too!" Anna says cheerfully, holding her book close to her.
"I've got one, I've got one!" Madeline cries, forgetting in her excitement about the necessity of pixie dust and leaping from a bunk. Nora manages to catch her only just in time.
"Easy, Madeline! Let's not get ahead of ourselves," she says, putting Madeline's feet back on the cold wooden floor.
"Who's going first?" Peter asks, opening the bag of pixie dust.
"We are!" Kaela and Katrina say at the same time, bouncing up and down with excitement.
Peter grins. "Ready? One, two – " and he blows the pixie dust onto them!
Kaela soars into the air so quickly that she bumps her head on the ceiling and dislodges a little plaster. "Look out below!" she cries, giggling and wincing at once. Peter and Alicia dodge out of the way to avoid being hit by falling bits of ceiling. "Come on Kat, the water's fine!"
Katrina closes her eyes and concentrates for a moment before shooting up towards her friend. Luckily she manages to avoid smashing her head like Kaela. "I'm flying, look at me!"
"Technically you're floating," Nora says dryly, impatient to be blown with pixie dust.
"She's right," Katrina says seriously, looking up to Kaela. "Tag, you're it!" The ensuing race is quite a comical sight; neither Kaela nor Katrina are very good at flying yet, this being their first time, so they're constantly running into each other and swerving at the last moment to avoid walls.
Peter takes another handful of pixie dust and blows it onto Madeline, Nora, and Alicia. All three are off the ground in less that five seconds and bobbing around in the middle of the room.
"I'm flying!" Alicia says. "Whee! Sallie, check it out!"
Sallie watches with a strange kind grimness.
"See, Gracie was telling the truth," Charlie says to her. "And all this time you've been calling her a liar."
"Shove it!" Sallie snaps, turning away.
Madeline dives towards her bunk and grabs her teddy bear. She flies up again, spinning in circles.
"You're it!" Katrina laughs, tagging Nora.
"No I'm not!"
"Hey, no tag-backs!"
"Can't catch me!" Peter taunts good-naturedly, leaping into the air and joining the game. Nora makes a hysterical if futile attempt to tag Peter, who is by far superior to their fledgling flying skills and makes them look like so many wet chickens trying to fly compared to a speeding hawk.
"Peter!" Charlie says. "Come on, you haven't blown the pixie dust on us yet!"
"Oh, right. Time out!" he announces in a commanding tone none of the girls have heard before. That's his captain voice. They do their best to freeze in their positions while Peter blows pixie dust on Charlie, Anna, and Sallie. "Alright, time in!" And the game resumes again, twice as wildly as before.
"What is it, Sallie?" Alicia asks, landing next to her ground-bound friend. "Why aren't you flying?"
"Leave me alone!" she snaps.
Alicia's eyes flare at this treatment. "Fine, be like that!" She rejoins the game with even more gusto than before to prove that Sallie's attitude isn't bothering her.
"Halt!" Peter says suddenly, again in his captain voice. "We have a rescue mission to perform!"
The girls nod.
"Do you know how to get into the cellar?" Peter asks.
Nora answers him. "Once I spent an afternoon there for mouthing off," she says. "It's inside the orphanage down a set of steps right by the back door."
"Here's the plan." The girls draw closer and listen intently. "We fly around the back of the orphanage, then Nora and I get inside and rescue Raven and Gracie. The rest of you . . . do you think you can find some toilet paper?" he asks with a mischievous grin.
Katrina and Kaela exchange glances. "Most definitely!"
*
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*
Meanwhile, in the cellar . . .
"I'm gonna soak ya, ya dirty rotten Matron!" Raven cries, pounding on the cellar door. "You're gonna wish you were never born!" She continues on in this vein for a few minutes. When her anger drains away she begins to get frightened. "Gracie, what if they leave without us?"
"Peter wouldn't do that," Gracie says confidently.
"Are you sure?" Raven paces the tiny cellar, back and forth, back and forth. She begins to scratch her wrist agitatedly.
"Itchy?" Gracie asks, quirking an eyebrow.
"What?"
"Um, you're scratching kind of a lot. Stop it, you'll bleed!"
Raven looks down at the hand that's compulsively scratching her wrist. The wrist is turning a violent pink. "Uh-oh," she says, folding her arms after much effort. "That's just something that happens when I get nervous."
"The great Raven, nervous?"
"Don't get smart!" Raven says harshly. "I can't help it, I've been scratching my wrist since I was a baby."
"Sorry," Gracie apologizes, sitting down and pulling her legs up beneath her chin. "Look, you can relax. I've been stuck here before and there's nothing to be afraid of except the spiders."
Raven's eyes widen. "Spiders?"
The girl nods. "It must be the damp air or something, but they get pretty big down here."
*
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*
Peter counts as one by one seven orphans fly out the window. "Wait, I'm one short," he says, perplexed. He turns and sees the seething Sallie glaring at him.
"I can't do it," she says flatly.
"Why not? I blew you with pixie dust, didn't I?" he asks, pulling the strings of the bag open in case he forgot to.
"Yes, you did!" Sallie says angrily. "That's not the problem!"
"Well?"
"What do you mean Well?, you idiot!" she says, doing a pretty fair impression of his voice. "Does it look like I'm flying to you?!"
Peter is not used to being spoken to in this manner, and certainly not by a girl. As a rule girls tend to adore him, though he doesn't understand why any more than he understands why Sallie practically bit his head off.
Sallie gives him a minute to say something but she's succeeded in stunning Peter into silence. "I don't have a happy thought," she says bitterly, resenting the fact that she has to spell it out for him.
Peter's jaw drops. "No happy thought?"
"Did I stutter?"
Peter looks at her in confusion. "Why are you so angry?"
"Why do you care?"
"Because I'm a gentleman and you're a lady."
Sallie snorts. "Yeah, right."
*
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*
Five minutes later Nora pops her head back in the orphanage window. "Peter? What's going on?"
"Change of plans," he says. "Take Charlie and rescue the girls, I'm still teaching Sallie how to fly."
Nora looks at Sallie in mild disdain and flies back around the orphanage rolling her eyes.
"Charlie, c'mon!"
They manage to jimmy open a window and sneak around down the flight of stairs to the heavy cellar door.
"Raven? Gracie?"
Raven and Gracie's heads snap around at the sound. "Hello?"
"It's Nora!"
"And Charlie!"
Raven sighs with relief and rushes to the door. "Can you get us out of here? Do you have the key?"
Charlie and Nora look at each other worriedly. "No." Somehow getting into the cellar had seemed like less of a problem when Peter was going to do it with them.
"Where does Matron keep the key?" Charlie asks Gracie through the door. "Do you know?"
"On her keyring," Gracie says. "But that's no use, she sleeps with it on her nightstand!"
Nora glances back up the flight of stairs. "I'll go get it. Raven, Gracie, don't move!"
"We sort of can't," Raven says with exasperation. "Be careful!"
*
*
*
The other girls, with the exception of Sallie, are having the time of their lives. Toilet papering is taken to a whole new level when you can fly up high instead of having to throw.
Katrina shakes a bottle of whip cream and starts spraying the upper-story windows, skipping Matron's so as not to wake her up. Kaela is covering the lower-story windows at the same time.
Alicia turns the hose on and leaves it running just inside the front door, smothering wild laughter all the time.
*
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*
"There must be something you like, Sallie," Peter says.
Sallie is about to shake her head but changes her mind. "I guess I like Captain Kidd," she reflects. "And scaring the other girls."
"Who was Captain Kidd?"
Sallie grins. "He was a pirate."
Peter makes a wounded face. All of a sudden Sallie shoots off the floor.
*
*
*
Nora opens Matron's bedroom door inch by inch, cursing the squeaky hinges. She begins to tiptoe over to the nightstand as quietly as possible, holding her breath.
It is at this moment that Madeline gets a little over-zealous outside and throws a double-thick roll of toilet paper at Matron's window. To Nora's everlasting horror the window shatters and Matron jerks up in bed just in time to see the toilet paper stop rolling at her feet.
"What on this earth do you think you're doing?" Matron screams, in her sleepy state supposing that somehow it was Nora who broke the window.
Thinking quickly Nora screams, "Charlie we're busted, find another way to get them out!" then runs upstairs instead of downstairs, Matron in hot pursuit.
Nora flings open the door to the attic bedroom. She runs past Peter and Sallie and leaps to the window frame.
Matron springs after her, stopping short at the sight of Peter. "A boy? You smuggled a boy into the orphanage?!" She cries, the vein in her forehead visibly pounding as her anger mounts. "I'm going to whip every last one of you!"
"Not this time," Nora says, jumping out the window.
Frightened that Nora's death might lose her her job Matron rushes to the window and looks down to see if the girl is done for.
"Up here, Matron!"
Matron Hallis looks up in horror. Nora smiles down at her for a moment then flies off to join her friends.
Sallie taps Matron on the shoulder. "I just want to say thank you," she says.
"For what?" Matron asks nervously, not liking Sallie's tone.
"For the bracelet," Sallie answers, holding up the silver bracelet that she's managed to steal.
"How did you-"
Ignoring her entirely, Sallie and Peter fly out the window.
*
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*
"Oh, I've got it!" Charlie cries. She quickly pulls the bolts from the hinges and pulls the door away.
"Good work, Charlie!"
"Come on, let's go!"
*
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*
Peter blows Raven and Gracie with pixie dust the second they get out the orphanage window. In no time at all they're flying.
"Are you ready?" he asks them, landing on the roof where all the other girls have congregated. Raven lands well but Gracie half-crashes into Charlie.
"Watch it!"
"Sorry, I'm a little new at this," Gracie giggles.
"Of course we are!" Alicia says brightly.
Anna nods. "Let's just leave this awful place."
"Follow me," Peter says, leaping into the air. "Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning!"
Please review, y'all! I do so love reviews. Actually I love them so much that it's a bit frightening, LOL! But no flames. Flames are like getting an F after spending hours studying for a test!