Welcome to Gaia! ::

"This is the place," Helen mused as she stopped in front of a large building that was decorated heavily on the outside, presumably in light of the holidays; looking through the blinding lights and clutter of ornaments, she could make out the words Candy Mountain sported just above the doorway.

While Helen had never been there herself before this day, she heard the establishment was an overall good place, aimed at entertaining kids with various assortments of games and treats; even though her protégé was quite young, she figured the effort could still be appreciated, not to mention it was close, so that meant less time spent in the cold. With that thought, she nudged open the door and cradled the baby close, staring at the interior.

She immediately noticed a sign that said, "Follow me!" in bold, bright letters, with some sort of odd animal pointing towards the counter. Choosing to ignore it, whatever it was, she followed suit.

Helen abandoned her coat at a table, deciding to stake her claim before going anywhere. She was almost tempted, almost, to stay and watch the animatronic performance by the licorice letters and other candies, but, really, it couldn't keep her attention past the first verse, though they were amusing for a few seconds.

Something that did catch her attention was Whack-A-Unicorn, starring the two annoying sidekicks, or so she assumed, of Charlie's. Whether it was the desire to make them shut up with their choruses of dumb phrases or the need to fight off boredom, she wasn't sure what it was that made her want to play and ended up just sitting Orenda down, saying to herself, "Hey, she's just a baby, there's not much trouble she can get into," despite her experience taking care of kids and knowing that was a complete and total load of crap.

Seconds later, said child had managed to wriggle herself out of her blanket, which was hard, mind you, and crawl a few feet away.

Orenda, not knowing what else to do at this point, stared blankly around the surrounding area she was being dragged through, and upon seeing food reached a chubby arm out in that general direction; though she wasn't sure what kind of food it was, it was just there and was she kind of getting hungry all of a sudden.

When the food didn't come to her, or when she didn't go to the food, and it seemed to be going even farther away, she gave up, pouting. When she and her captor neared the ball pit, her hunger temporarily ceased, as well as her sadness, as she found something else to be entertained by; a rainbow! She babbled a bunch of incoherent nonsense and smiled upon seeing the rainbow, reaching towards it instead, not even anticipating her doom.

The ball successfully hit its target in the back of the head, causing the kid to turn around, glaring at the toddler that had thrown it. "Jus' what d'you think you're doin', throwin' that at me," the big kid said almost threateningly and crossed her arms over her chest, looking, overall, intimidating. She and her friends exchanged a few looks, like they were formulating a plan with their eyes or something, and picked up a few of the balls in preparation.

Orenda looked on curiously, barely managing to stay afloat in this massive ocean of rainbow; she didn't even try to grasp the concept of picking up the balls and throwing them, 'cause that was just a little too much to do at one time and she was just too little.

Suddenly, someone yelled, "attack!" and everything went crazy, or, at least, from the baby's perspective. The big kids launched their attack against the defenseless duo and she kept getting pelted, though her mushroom cap deflected most of the shots, but ended up flying in Pell's direction in the process.

With the big kid's focus off of Pell, the onslaught grew greater on Orenda's half and, despite the balls not weighing much of anything, it was really starting to hurt. While it was entertaining for the first few seconds, the rainbow and everything, it wasn't fun anymore and she couldn't see anybody and she was drowning in the rainbow, which was not supposed to happen.

"Orenda, look who just got high score on this game," Helen grinned, collecting her bundle of tickets, ready to leave, much to the relief of toddlers in the surrounding area. "There has to be, like, a thousand tickets in this pile, you know, and I bet we can get a good prize from this," she went on before noticing that, wait a minute, there was a blanket, but no baby. Helen looked around frantically before an extremely loud scream rang through the building, and she dropped all of her tickets, running off toward the ball pit; a few kids came behind to collect the abandoned tickets.

Helen cradled the mushroom baby steadily, murmuring a few positive things here and there until she successfully calmed her down; she was about to leave until, of course, some little kid came towards her and started chastising her baby. She glared at the child, trying her hardest not to explode, instead opting to state, calmly, "She's a baby; she can barely walk, much less throw anything. I'm going to assume you're the one who took her, too," she frowned. "You could've suffocated her by dragging her in there, you know?

"And as for you kids," she directed her anger at the children trying the get themselves straightened up after their fall, "how dare you even have the audacity to do this! Tell me, right now, where are your parents?" The kids, hearing this, immediately scrambled out of the ball pit and ran as far away as they could, ignoring her cries of, "Get back here, you brats! Don't you run away from me!"

Seeing that this wasn't going to work, she sighed, turning back to Pell. "What do you have to say for yourself, huh?"

Helen's right hand met her forehead in a matter of seconds and she muttered to herself, "Why do I even bother, she doesn't understand much of what I'm saying anyway," and shook her head furiously. She didn't come here to have a fight with a five year old, she came here to have fun with her kid, and that wasn't going well so far. She should've just put her in the play pen or something, but, no, had to go and play that stupid game.

"Hey, wait, what happened to my tickets," she turned to look back towards the Whack-A-Unicorn station and realized that they'd disappeared. Well, damn, these people were raising little thieves, weren't they?

"Look, I'm not gonna fight you. I'd win anyway," she droned, "since I'm, like, two times your size, kid."

"Aliens?"

Wait, what was she going on about now?

Helen would have gone through a lengthy and informative speech explaining that, no, they were not aliens, because, really, did they look like they had green skin, but decided to forgo it and instead looked toward the rocket ship ride, inspecting it to make sure that it was not just baby safe, but Orenda safe. It passed her inspection, if only for the fact that they were, "just rocket ships," and they couldn't possibly do more harm than good; maybe she would have fun on them.

"I guess that'd be alright for her."