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Taji was practicing very hard at being good (which, in this case, this meant staying in her sandbox and not bothering her brother Rhine, who was sitting on a bench and looking very crossly at a book.) She determinedly began building a great big sand lump -- the biggest sand lump of all time! -- while trying to keep from dirtying her clothes too much.

But Taji was Taji, and soon the star spirit's attention began to wander. The jungle gym was already swarming with squealing, happy children, leaving not much room to romp; the swings were mostly empty but she was not very good at it without someone to push her. And there was no one to watch her show off on the monkey bars either, and playing in the wood chips was not much more different than sand.

Her gaze soon settled on a very cold-looking girl with neat horns and everything, and a blaringly empty spot on the teeter totter in front of her. Well. Well. Rhine only said "Stay here," it was not as if he had ever specified where 'here' was -- so as long as she was vaguely in the vicinity of Earth, she should be fine, right? So the teeter totter was far from being out of the question!

The girl, by this time, had begun attempting to teeter and totter all by herself, a rather pathetic sight that immediately drew Taji's sympathy. Standing up and wiping her sandy hands off on her skirt, Taji immediately dashed towards the empty seat. Grabbing the edge of the teeter totter just as Shayla began attempting to kick off again, Taji pushed down on as hard as she could and simultaneously vaulted onto it with a cry of "THUNDERCATS HOOOO~!"

This eventually resulted in Shayla finally being raised to the top, while Taji slammed down into the ground on her new seat. "Hullo!" said Taji, beaming at her new victim playmate. "I'm Taji!"

"Is a See-Saw!" Taji kindly explained to the other girl, impatiently beginnig to bounce in her seat. "I push and then I go up and you go down, and then you push and you go up and I go down. You can only see or saw with one person, you can't do both. Like this!"

To better demonstrate this, she finally summoned her strength and pushed off against the ground as hard as she could. This, predictably, launched her into the air, sending Shayla falling down -- but Taji had barely even made it to the pinnacle of her see-saw-y flight before the weight differences between the two girls made itself known and, before either of them could react, left Taji slamming back into the ground again with Shayla once again in the air.

"...Weee-eell, sometimes you can have more than one person on one end, to balance the other person out."

Her hair. Her... hair? All this time, the absolute bane of her being and the reason why she was never allowed to ride in the grocery cart was her hair? Taji clapped her hands to the side of her head, over her pigtails, and warbled bewilderedly, "It has betrayed meeee!"

Presently she realized she had caught one of her plastic heart charms in the process, strangling it in the giant heavy mountain that was her hair, and she finally pulled her hands away to allow it to flutter a little shakily back into her gravitational orbit. Today, everything was accompanied by very healthy dusting of sand, and sand clumps, and long sand-rivers, and sand. It was very obvious where she had been playing before she had come across Shayla.

"Things," she said proudly in response to Shayla's question, "Things like me so they come to do a dance around me all the time. Mama says I can only have a few things with me though, if any at all, cos people look at me weirdly and it is not normal." Of course it wasn't. She was a star. Who else could claim the same thing, except those extra-special hollywood people whose club she was never invited too even though she was the same thing?

Perhaps it was because she was not old enough. Blinking away her self-induced disappointment, Taji's gaze settled on Shayla's locket. "Ohh, wow, that's really pretty! Does it do anything? Can it dance?"

At Shayla's confession that she had no clue as to its origins, Taji wrinkled her nose and plopped her chin on her hand, supported by nothing at all, in thought. A moment later, she nearly visibly brightened as an imaginary lightbulb went off over her head. "Hay! No, see, I've heard -- people wearing their hearts on their sleeves --" She flailed her arms excitedly as she began rambling almost too fast for her tongue to keep up. "--See, and it is in your sleeve, around your arm, well maybe that part of your arm is a sleeve too, maybe, but there's a heart there and it is on your sleeve so maybe it is your heart! It is gold."

She accentuated this with a very wise nod of her head.

"That's too bad," Taji frowned a little, scratching her nose, "Ice thingies would be cool. I am collecting planets, see?" She pointed up to the only one currently in her orbit, green and shiny and very obviously a large marble. "My friend -- Elazu -- he gave that to me. It is Planet Elazu! If you made me an ice planet, I could name it Planet Shayla, and it would be..."

She had to stop and think about this before finally pronouncing, "Shaylariffic." With that, she swung her legs over the side of the teeter-totter and, sliding off and grasping the edge, gently allowed Shayla to descend from the heavens once more.

"Maybe we can find a way to stop ice from melting," Taji continued rambling the entire time, "Like we can bribe them! Or.. Build a very tiny freezer! I don't know how but I got a brother, he's older than me and mean but he's very good at building things so I bet he knows. He's sitting over there on the bench. My other brother can freeze things too but he never makes any thingies for me. Okay!" She finally paused and took in a deep breath before spinning around slowly to look at their options.

"What shall we play? We can play swings, or -- or monkey bars! Do you know how to do monkey bars? Or hide and seek, or tag, or--" She admittedly didn't know any other games. Tilting her head to the side, she finally fell silent for a while to allow Shayla to interject with her opinion.

"Uh-hunh!" Taji beamed widely at the question. "I seen him at the pet store, he got a puppy named Roxy, an' he wasn't a cat. Then we went to the zoo. If he's your friend too we should all play sometime! You can come to my house an' we can play hide-and-seek and watch Hamtarrrrrro," she drew out this last word reverently, nearly rolling the r's in her excitement. It was probably unsurprising that Taji liked dancing singing little furry creatures with big soul-eating eyes.

Her attention directed towards the swings as Shayla decided what they would be doing next, she nodded in agreement of her new friend's assessment. She could, of course, probably get her older brother to free up a swing for her, but he usually did so in the meanest way possible. He was not nearly as useful as Cianan, who could do magic tricks aside.

"Monkey bars, monkey bars~!" She began to sing happily, grabbing Shayla's hand and leading her towards the jungle gym. Letting go so she could scramble up one of the plastic slides, she led her across one of the wooden bridges and towards an empty platform where the top metal part extended out into the horizontal ladder structure that were the monkey bars.

"It's easy! The ground is not that far away, you just have to be careful to land on your feet cos it hurts to land anyplace else." Beaming a confident grin at Shayla, Taji promptly launched herself at the nearest rung, catching it expertly in her hands. Kicking her legs to swing her body even further forward, she quickly stretched and reached forward for the next rung, and then the next, until finally she was in the middle. Shifting her hands around each other so she could turn around to face Shayla, she kicked her legs again. "Come on!"

"Yaaay Shayla!" Taji had started to cheer as the other girl leaped forward to join her on the monkey bars. Her own glee was only a little longer-lived than Shayla's though; she stared in confusion at the other girl for a moment, trying to process what could possibly be wrong, and it was only with the realization that Shayla was beginning to cry that she remembered she had to do something.

With a great and hurried heave, Taji pulled herself up and shimmied through the bars at the top so that she was scrambling over the top of it to get to where Shayla was hanging. "Shayla, can you--" she was about to say 'take my hands?' when she stopped, leaned forward and squinted, and realized that she was literally frozen to the thing.

This, of course, meant wrapping her hands around Shayla's and trying to pry them off the bars herself, her tongue rapidly moving faster than her mind as she struggled to help her friend, "Where's your mom -- is she here -- HEY, CAN ANYBODY ELSE HELP? SHAYLA'S MOOOM!"

"SHAYLA'S DAAAD," Taji chimed in helpfully with her trademark bellow, earning an odd look from her own older brother across the park. Rhine would've gotten up and reluctantly gone to see what sort of awkward position she'd gotten stuck in now (there was one memorable incident with the monkey bars that neither she nor her brother ever told their mother) except, seeing someone else approach the two girls, he figured the situation was 'handled' and thus returned to his book.

"Don't cry, Shayla," Taji said meanwhile, uselessly moving her hands over her friend's own frozen ones, "We will get you down! Even if I have to gnaw through the bars!" And she leaned forward to try and do just that when someone finally appeared to help.

It was Shayla's father, and he very easily loosened the young girl from the bars and set her down on the ground. Taji watched a little shyly, suddenly less eager to make so much noise after the realization came that Shayla wasn't allowed on the monkey bars anyway. When he left, she swung back through the bars and let herself land heavily on her feet, dashing over to give Shayla a big hug.

"I'm sorry! I didn't know that would happen -- I wouldn'ta asked you to play on the monkey bars if I did -- but you are ok now, right?" She worriedly took a step back and peered at Shayla, wondering if she was even just a little mad at her. She was not at all used to the idea of other kids not being able to do the same things she could, and the fact that Shayla might have been in danger for it...

...Oh hey look it was the ice cream truck! "Hay! Haaay! I can buy you an ice cream, for surviving the deadly ordeal that was Sticky Monkey Bars!" The star spirit grinned widely.