"Papa, Mama, I wanna go there!" Lyra shouted, "Let go, let go!"
Mother and father released the grip they had on their rambunctious daughter, smiling in weariness from the inexhaustable amounts of energy she possessed. Mouth agape with wonder and awe at the playthings presented before her, the child surveyed the unfamiliar area, encapsulating every little detail of the old equipment with her sunny, golden eyes.
"Ah, she's growing so fast," Theodore commented, sighing wistfully to himself, "It makes me feel so...sad. Time flows so cruelly in this world."
"It flows differently in the Velvet Room, right?" the woman besides him asked, sharing a sorrowful smile.
"Err, yes, basically," Theodore replied, figuring out it would be best to save the physics jargon for a less sentimental moment, "Even I can feel the temporal configuration here taking a toll on my body. It seems to be accelerating at an exponential rate in regard to our daughter's growth." Closing his eyes thoughtfully, he added, "A temporal paradox, it seems."
The woman chuckled; Theodore said such weird things sometimes. But, to her, it was just one of his many strange, strange charms that she would probably never fully understand, another reason why she fell for him at such a young age.
A sonorous gasp then filled the air, capturing the attention of her nostalgically onlooking parents.
"What is it, Lyra?" her mother asked, amused at her child's total disregard for vocal quietude.
Lyra, her right arm outstretched dramatically, pointed to a simple, rusty structure near the outskirts of the playground, "Look!"
"What about it?" Theodore inquired, holding in a laugh at his cute little girl's decisive expression.
Eyes flaring up with an irreconcilable determination, Lyra approached the horizontal bar, and promptly (tried) to stand on top of it.