ONCE UPON A NOVEMBER (Open)

Though she was primarily a gamer, Annabel did her best not to spend every waking moment online. She understood without the need for lectures from her parents that it was bad for her to sit and stare at a screen for hours and so she often went out with friends or hung out in the backyard for a while. She'd play tennis with her brother or go swimming in the lake. Unfortunately for Annabel, her two hour gaming session that day ended with an empty house. Her brother and sister(-in-law) were out and the pets wouldn't make very good company. Sighing, the fourteen year old rubbed her hands down her arms and glanced out the window. Looks kinda cold, she observed. She didn't mind the cold much but she knew she'd need to dress for it.

After putting on a jacket and wrapping a scarf around her neck, Belle texted her brother's phone to tell him that she was out of the house and that she'd be at the main park in Maple Hollow if he needed her for anything. She walked down the long road that the locals called 'mansion country', the large street lined with the luxury homes of the Hollow. She then had to take a decently long walk through the gated upper-class community before she finally reached a bus-stop and caught the city bus to a stop near the park. The cold stung her cheeks but it was not so frigid as to be uncomfortable. Yet. Winter was on its way, the smell of the cold in the air.

Her peaceful walk through the park was loudly interrupted when a large dog free of its leash started barking and rushing toward her. She didn't see an owner chasing after it and the dog didn't look as friendly as Annabel would have liked and so she reacted on her gut instinct and bolted, not sure what she was planning to do but trying to avoid being bitten. It was a tree with branches low enough to be reached that gave her the idea, grasping hold and hauling herself onto the lowermost branch. She was breathing hard from the exhilaration of the chase but she was safe, the dog standing at the bottom of the tree and growling. So this was what cats felt like, huh? She laughed at the thought, voice weak with relief, and felt even more victorious when the dog lost interest and padded away.

It was only then that she noticed she had company. Blinking up at the other girl in the tree, she grinned sheepishly. "Oh, sorry! I didn't realise anyone else was up here. There was a dog, I was running..." She figured the rest explained itself and so didn't bother to go on. "What were you doing up here?" Her words were curious. It wasn't every day you chanced upon someone up a tree. The girl looked around her age, too, and Belle was friendly enough to make conversation.

As she was so social and friendly, Annabel did not stop for a moment to think about whether or not the girl in the tree would be up for conversation. She could babble a mile a minute without stopping and the smile on her lips was almost permanently fixed there. She loved making friends and connections so she automatically tended to assume that others were the same until they proved her wrong. It hurt her neck a little to crane it in order to peer up the tree at the other girl but she didn't complain, one hand wrapped tight around the trunk of the tree so that she didn't lose her balance and fall. Her brother had told her a story about how he'd fallen out of a tree and broken his wrist once and it was not a situation she wanted to replicate.

The girl, whose name Annabel didn't know, said something about enjoying nature and that made sense, at least in Belle's opinion. She'd come out here to take a walk and get some air but she definitely liked the feeling of being surrounded by nature. Maple Hollow's landscape was beautiful, a city nestled in the mountains with pine forests dotted with colourful trees in the fall. She could see the appeal even if she wasn't a nature fanatic like some.

"The park's pretty nice for that I guess," she said, peering out through the large gaps in the few remaining leaves to look at the surroundings. "Too bad winter's almost here. Unless you like the snow and stuff?" Annabel loved it, enjoying sledding and snowball fights as much as she liked swimming in the summer, but winter tended to kill off the very nature the girl seemed to be expressing a fondness for. All the grass died and the leaves fell off the trees, leaving behind a barren landscape until spring took a merciful hold over the earth once more.

Annabel reached back with her free hand and tightened her pony tail, not wanting her hair to come loose and get stuck in the branches as she climbed a bit higher, sitting a few branches below the girl and resting her back against another helpful limb. She now only had to look up slightly in order to make conversation. "Crazy how they let their dogs go like that, huh? I think there's a rule against it..." She trailed off, frowning as she realised that she wasn't sure. They'd never let Quartz run around off his leash even though he was trained to do so. "I'm Annabel, by the way."

[Sorry for the wait -- your post got buried!]

The girl in the tree seemed a lot quieter than Annabel herself but this was not something that bothered the Water elemental. She did not know whether Olivia was an elemental like herself but she knew that the girl must know of them thanks to the gates around the city keeping out everyone that lacked knowledge of elemental existence. Belle remembered when she'd lost her identification card and how her brother had been in a panic as they figured out how to either recover or replace it. The ID cards were everything in Maple Hollow, they allowed the attendance of the Academy, the acquiring of jobs, the entrance and exit of the city itself. They also meant comfort, comfort in the knowledge that she no longer had to feel like a freak and pretend to hide who she and her family were.

After agreeing with her on the rule about the dogs needing to be on their leashes, the girl introduced herself as Olivia and Annabel offered a friendly smile. "Do you come out here a lot?" It seemed like a strange place to frequent, a tree, but then who was Annabel to judge? She spent most of her free time in front of a computer perusing online worlds and so she couldn't say anything about where other people enjoyed hanging out.

Annabel found herself grateful for the jacket that she'd grabbed before exiting the house as a light breeze brought with it the chill to the air. She loved winter for the skating and sledding and other winter activities but the cold was something she was sure most people could do without. She envied her family for their ability to snap their fingers and magic the cold away with the elemental manipulation of heat. She couldn't wait until she could create ice in the middle of summer to show off like they could mid-winter. Exhaling slowly, she was relieved that she could not yet see her breath in the air. That would mean that winter was really at their doorstep.

Deciding to be bold enough to ask a personal question but careful enough to avoid being too direct, Annabel wondered, "Do you go to the Academy, then?" Not all elementals went to the Academy but the vast majority did. It was not exactly optional and so the only way to avoid it was to hide from the scouts. "I'm going into the tenth grade there in the new year." If Olivia went to the Academy like she did, that meant that she was an elemental, right? That's what Belle was thinking and that was why she'd asked. Of course, the abrupt and sudden prying into the life of another was not always a good idea. Annabel was too nosy for her own good sometimes.