🌼Rapunzel At The Beach🏖
Rapunzel shrieked in terror as the ground grew closer and closer.
She had only meant to lean out the window a little bit to catch sight of an adorable baby bunny that had wandered just below the tower, but one clumsy trip later and she now found herself headed straight for the deadly thorn bushes.
She braced herself, squeezing her eyes shut and covering her face with her arms. But instead of crashing into the piercing thorns, Rapunzel felt herself land on something… soft? She blinked open her eyes and found herself in a world of sand. She gasped in delight, as she had only ever seen sand in the books she read at the tower. Fascinated, she picked up a handful of sand and then slowly poured it out, watching as it sprinkled down like an hourglass. Then she gasped again, but in fear this time. The tower… she had left the tower! How had she even ended up here? What would her mother do when she found the tower empty?
Rapunzel bit her lip, then sighed. Clearly something magical was happening, and in most of the books she’d read that included magic, things had always seemed to sort themselves out in the end. She sat up looked around, hoping that perhaps she could see some kind of portal or fairy wand that had taken her here, but nothing in the area seemed magical.
“Oh, well,” she murmured to herself. “The best thing I can do for now is explore… and hope that Mother won’t be too mad at me. But the moment I find out how to get back home, I’m out of here. I hope the people here aren’t the type who’ll want my hair… but it’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
Rapunzel stood up, then grimaced as she realized that there was sand littered throughout her long golden hair. It would take weeks to wash all that out!
Shaking her head, she stared around, suddenly feeling anxious and self-conscious when she saw the amount of people here, and how oddly dressed they were! Young children played in the sand, building impressive-looking castles made of sand and running around, laughing joyfully. The adults lay on their backs on long, flat chairs, shaded from the Sun by a large umbrella protruding from the ground. They wore strange dark coverings over their eyes, like hard, rectangular masks without any eye holes that curved at the bottoms. In the distance, Rapunzel saw that there was an ocean, and she caught her breath as she beheld its beauty. It was so much more than the illustrations in her books, and for a few moments, she simply stood, gazing at it. The people here seemed to like the ocean too, as several were rushing towards it and splashing each other playfully.
Then, the girl’s eyes widened when she saw that a few people were actually ON the ocean’s tall blue waves; they stood balancing atop long flat boards, smiling and waving to those on the sand.
“How can that be?” she whispered to herself. “They must be magical! Perhaps they can help me get home!”
As the wave subsided and one of the ocean-riders stepped off his board onto the shore, Rapunzel quickly ran over to him, lifting her dress above her ankles so as not to trip clumsily as she had in the tower. When she reached him, she panted for a few moments before simply asking, “A-Are you magical?”
“Huh?” he said, and the people around them began murmuring uncertainly. Rapunzel wasn’t sure if these people wanted her hair or if they just thought its incredible length was strange, but either way she ran her hand over her golden locks anxiously.
The man didn’t seem to understand, so Rapunzel pointed at the board in his hands. “You used that thing to ride on the ocean! It must be magical, right?”
The man blinked and gave her a slightly concerned look at first, but then he just shrugged and gave her a friendly smile. “Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not magic. It’s surfing.”
“Surfing?” Rapunzel echoed, amazed. She grinned. “Can you teach me?”
“Sure, come on.” The man beckoned her with a wave, and Rapunzel quickly followed, excitement bubbling within her at the thought of this new adventure.
Perhaps going back to the tower could wait.