pippa's adventures are a rough (r o u g h) short story in progress by the player. as i hammer out more details, whether in writing or through roleplay, i'll add them. in the meantime, feel free to talk to me here about pippa, plotting, hmd-ishness, whether mcdonald's or wendy's makes better french fries, anything at all. ヾ(｡´‿`｡)ノ

The thing certain educated people tell you about jewelry is that each piece is meant for a specific type of occasion. Most people won’t tell you how many types there are because most people aren’t nearly as helpful as they pretend to be when they offer you advice, but this is some knowledge I’m prepared to pass on. There are seven types of occasions in jewelry etiquette: dining out, dining in, birthdays, funerals, afternoons spent shopping (on the main drag, when you’re preparing to buy things to replace the jewelry you’re already wearing), job interviews, and detective work. Very few people know about the seventh category. Even I didn’t know about the seventh category until five years ago, and I’ll tell you another thing—that category’s perception of time is more than a little unconventional.

I was seven years old when Grandma Clara came to live with us. She was infinitely cooler than other grandmothers because she showed me her false tooth with every opportunity she got, she smelled like cucumbers and Avon makeup remover (the cream kind), and she told me she colored her soft, fine, black hair with shoe polish. I believed every word out of her mouth. The only time I didn’t was when we played Candy Land together because she cheated during every match. And with each indignant accusation on my part, she denied it right to the end. She laughed, my parents laughed, I scolded, and they laughed some more. You see, I knew my grandmother was devious enough not only to cheat at board games but also to keep very weird, very important secrets. When she sang songs to me about marrying love-struck burglars and bubbles that made you sleepy after swallowing them, I could tell that she knew stories even stranger than these, but maybe I wasn’t old enough to hear them yet.

She might have been waiting until I was old enough not to believe them.

Grandma Clara must have guessed old enough meant about thirteen, and she wasn’t wrong. When you’re seven magic is at the root of everything, and you have no trouble admitting this to your parents, or explaining to your best friend that a flying saucer flies because that is how elves make sauce, that they toss containers of ingredients around like boomerangs which make weird shapes in photographs, and besides, wouldn’t you agree that the other way is boring? When you’re ten, you believe in magic as readily as ever, but you’re at least a little more eloquent about explaining how it works. When you’re thirteen, you’re officially a teenager. You are full of attitude and cynicism you were never born with; you are every mother’s worst nightmare; and if you still believe in magic you certainly do not speak of it. Maybe you write about it in a journal; maybe you plan to write a lot more about it when you grow up; maybe you still sleep with a nightlight, not because you’re afraid of monsters, but because you want to make sure the elves find their way home into your empty old shoe boxes. But you talk about things like boys and school dances and you demand to know why your mother won’t let you wear lipstick. You no longer find it acceptable to have a princess cake for your birthday because your crush might see, and then he might decide not to ask you to that dance, after all.

When my grandmother pressed the tiny wrapped box eagerly into my hands on my thirteenth birthday, I expected it to be the pair of earrings I’d told my mother about, who would naturally help my grandmother pick them out as if by coincidence. Mothers are good at these things. They are discreet. I hope to be as discreet as my mother one day.

“I think you’ll like this, little goose,” Grandma Clara said, watching me weigh the box in my hand as she spoke, “but you might need to grow on it.” I felt sure she’d meant to word that in reverse—the gift would need to grow on me, if anything—but I kept that to myself. I didn’t even object to her nicknames; like I said, Grandma Clara was cooler than other grandmothers, she was special. She was usually spared my teenager-ness.

I was disappointed to find not the earrings I had hoped to show off at school, but a fairly ordinary-looking necklace inside. Silver, with a likewise silver sphere pendant: long-faded, in need of a good polishing. Clearly a hand-me-down. I didn’t let on about my disappointment to my grandmother. The look in her eyes was too encouraging, expectant, like she was about to let me in on one of those secrets she’d been keeping for years. I should have trusted my instincts right then and asked her where it came from, but she was content to let me put it aside as I opened my other gifts.

It wasn’t until later that night, when I was taking stock of my haul, that I noticed something odd about the faded, silver ball pendant. When you shook it, the pendant jingled very softly, kind of like distant wind chimes. Kind of, but more like how I imagined fairy language sounded, Neverland and delicate and wish-granting. I was thirteen, though, and this was not something I would say aloud, not even to my grandmother. Instead, I scrubbed the necklace with my mother’s polishing cloth, put it on, gave it another little shake. And then I disappeared.

The first place I ended up was a suburb with no roads, but it had purple, overgrown lawns, and civilians who traveled from home to work and back again over the tall grass on devices that looked like surfboards. I distantly recalled a song about waves of grain that were either purple or amber, but I was from America even if I didn’t know the song, and this was not America. I was fairly certain that even the strangest Americans I’d never heard of didn’t live with their attics on the first floor of their spherically shaped homes.

I shook the pendant again, after several hours of panic and confusion and invitations to tea from the townspeople of Winderpush, thinking this had to be either the way back home or the way to wake up from a particularly vivid dream. Instead, I was whisked away with an upside-down whoosh in my stomach to a place where the muddy black sky dripped like molasses, and pin-striped people carried umbrellas that unfolded from between their shoulder blades. No, they weren’t wearing pin-striped suits—they were simply pin-striped.

The necklace was a mystery to me without clues. I definitely should have asked Grandma Clara about it when I’d had the chance. She might have warned me never to take it off. She might have told me the only one who could handle disappearing was me.