She's been out all day. She doesn't know where she's going, but she trusts she'll be able to find her way back later if she needs to.

Mostly she just wants to be away. She's finished all the chores they assigned her and doesn't want to be around for them to make up more.

She's seven. Her aunt drags her out of her cupboard and tells her to cook breakfast. When she burns the bacon, her aunt swings a pan at her.

She's good at dodging now.

She really just wants to be gone from there. She doesn't have anywhere to go yet. But she wants it.

She keeps walking, climbing various walls and jumping gaps as needed. She wants to be farther away.

She's eight. She brought home a better grade than Dudley. He complained. 

"How dare you! You bloody cheat, I'll beat it out of you, boy."

Another grab, more bright lines of pain.

Hailey carefully doesn't get good grades now. Good enough to pass, but worse than Dudley. It's a narrow needle, but she manages it.

They want her to be small and obedient and crush herself out of being any of the things that make her herself.

She wants out.

She can't walk all the way to London, but she'll bloody well walk as far as she can.

Her eyes track across her surroundings, watching everything around her as she wanders.

She probably has to go back to Privet Drive at some point today, but she'll put it off as long as she can. And watch — though not really hope — for a way not to.

One of the walls she comes across is an old brick wall, the mortar turning black and starting to crumble with age, the bricks themselves slightly uneven and a orange-yellow instead of the usual brick red. Set into the wall is a door made of metal, rusted over and slightly bent, so that it no longer quite properly fits into the rusted metal doorframe.

The wall itself has no graffiti, but someone has taken some sort of implement to the door to scratch (or melt, upon closer inspection) words into it. "Be Sure," the words say, in unrusted letters each a hand tall, scrawled diagonally from top corner to bottom corner. 

...Huh.

How would someone melt words into a door and not have access to spray paint instead? That's... odd.

That's really odd.

It's a great way to make sure it can't be washed off, but "be sure" is the kind of tosh nobody'd bother with making that permanent, yeah?

Bloody hell she's curious now.

She hops off the wall she's walking along and goes to try the door.

It's hotter through the door, hotter and darker, and it smells different too -- a mix of mushroom and rot and sweat and soot and ozone and something that makes her nostrils tingle, like she touched her tongue to a battery, but only inside her nose. 

The door opens onto a cobblestone street, with tall walls or buildings on either side of the narrow alley that the door opens into. A couple dozen feet from her (as best she can tell in the dim blueish light) the alley turns to the left about 60 degrees and disappears from view. The walls that Hailey can see are made of the same kind of orange-yellow bricks and crumbling mortar that the wall the door is in is made of. Far, far above her head, in the sliver of sky she can see up through the tall walls on either side of her, is something curved and blueish and flickering slightly, tinting the sunlight coming through a sickly greenish color. The alley itself is dirty, and poorly kept -- though this looks to be mostly because it is untraveled, there is no obvious evidence that a person has stepped in the caked dirt here for quite some time. 

Huh. This is really different. She didn't think there was anything like this in Little Whinging or any of the surrounding areas.

And the sky is different.

That's a really short distance for the sky to be different. And have a sudden unexpected thing in it.

She's really confused about that. But weirdly a little hopeful?

What's around the bend in the alley?

The door closes behind Hailey with the sound of metal scraping against metal. 

The alley narrows after the turn, quickly becoming only wide enough for her to move through while turned sideways at her current size; an adult would find this impossible. In fact, most children her age would find it difficult if not impossible, it's only because she's so scrawny that she has little trouble moving down the narrow passageway. 

After one more turn in the other direction, the comes to 3-way split, giving her two choices: left or right. The left passage is a little narrower than the right passage, but not by much. 

Lefty girl gonna go left. She scrapes herself past walls as needed — it's not like that even rates next to her uncle's bloody belt.

After a couple bends in the alley she comes to another junction, split 5 ways this time. 

Right, any different sounds or anything? Smells?

If she strains her hearing, she might be able to hear the sounds of people down the right-middle path. Hard to tell for sure, though, it could just be her imagination. 

Pros: people.

Cons: people.

Probably useful even if tiresome.

Middle-right, here she goes.

Another bend, another junction. This one is a four-way split, but the sounds she was hearing before are now unmistakably the sound of human hubbub, and the noise is coming from the middle path. 

She'll head down the middle path. And not like it, even if she's very curious.

Can she tell what kind of hubbub?

As far as she can tell, from the distance she's at, it's mostly the sound of people walking and moving about, with some talking thrown in, as though a relatively busy area full of people. 

There is some shouting going on, which she can detect if she concentrates, but she's too far to make out anything like specifics about it. Though something in the tone might send a familiar feeling through her body. 

Okay that's not a great sign, someone down there's awful. She clenches a fist and keeps going, careful to move quietly and not be seen.

There is another branching soon in her path. The way towards the sounds of people is rather obvious, though -- she can see all the way straight down the long, thin passageway, and see moving shapes at the end, to go along with the sounds of movement and voices. 

She moves slower, the closer she gets. Someone's going spare out there, and she doesn't want their eyes on her just yet.

As she gets closer, she can start to make out the words. 

"--put all this work into defending you in the wilds from the vile creatures out there, not to mention the darkness, and you mean to tell me that a dozen baskets are missing?" 

There's a reply, but it's too soft for Hailey to make it out. 

"Obviously imps got into the wagon. It's the job of your men to watch for imps on the return trip. Or maybe they were just enjoying the lighter load like the lazy commoners they are, and that's why they didn't say anything?" 

More muttered replies. Whoever is doing the talking is still out of view, but Hailey can see some of what's going on now -- she's coming up on some sort of city square, with various blankets set on the ground with wares of various kinds for sale on them. Here and there there's a rickety stall made out of some sort of bamboo and cloth, but for the most part all she can see are blankets. People weave in and among the blanket-stalls with a practiced ease, wearing, for the most part clearly well worn clothing. A few of them are looking in the direction of the commotion, but the majority of them are pointedly ignoring it. 

Commoners? Imps? That's not normal. Either way, the person sounds like some kind of controlling noble prick. She scowls and gets as close as she can without being easily seen.

As close as she can without being seen is actually quite close -- she can come to near the end of the alley, squeezed between the buildings on either side of her, and look out and see much more of the area around her. 

The shops, or stalls, or what-have-you, are packed around the edges of a large slightly misshapen pentagon, at the center of which is a large ornate fountain of water, which some people are standing at and filling buckets with water from before leaving. There's a long line of people stretching off further than Hailey can see, clearly waiting impatiently to fill their buckets. 

The biggest and broadest edge of the pentagon is near some sort of enormous gate, complete with portcullis and giant wooden doors. The doors are currently open and the portcullis is at the top of the gate, almost seeming ready to fall at the slightest provocation, though perhaps it's the way the guards standing near it are clearly on edge, peering out through the open gate with an tense anxiety. There is a procession of a dozen wagons coming in the door, made of a mixture of yellow-orange stone and aging wood and thick canvas. The wagons are pulled each by four men, wearing nothing but a set of trunks, their bodies clearly strong and covered in sweat. One of the wagons is pulled off to the side, and it is here where a man in slightly nicer clothing than the rest is being berated by a man with much nicer clothing than the rest. The man in slightly nicer clothing is hunched over, crouched, looking afraid of the other man. The men who were pulling the wagon look worried, but make no move to bolt. 

She figures out a few things very quickly: not the same world or time, abusive nobles, less tech, hard labor.

That's a problem. She's got questions she needs to ask some people, but she doesn't want the noble prick or the tossers on the gate to notice her yet.

She waits carefully.

The somewhat one-sided argument continues for another minute, with the man in rich clothing berating the other men who seem to mostly be cowering. He's just worked up a full head of steam when something pokes its head out of the wagon. 

It's about the size of an oversized rat or a small cat, but looks more like a gaunt wingless bat than anything Hailey has seen before. Its skin is essentially almost entirely black, and its limbs are strangely bent, with skin stretched between the top and bottom part of each limb, the combined effect making the creature look almost hunched over. The creature has a wide, drooling mouth full of sharp teeth, with a long tongue lolling out of it, and small pure-black beady eyes. In one of its front claws it's carrying a large piece of ovoid fruit larger than it is. 

"Imp!" one of the men nearby shouts, pointing, and everyone turns to look. The well-dressed man snarls, and points at it, and a bolt of purple fire erupts from his finger, hitting the imp dead-center. The imp opens its mouth and keens, a horrible high-pitched sound, then it explodes in a puff of black smoke, sending the fruit rolling on the cobblestones. 

"Lazy unobservant uneducated commoners!" shots the well-dressed man. He turns to leave. "I don't care how much product you lost, I expect to be paid in full. Now, I have to go do things more important than argue with the likes of you." With that, he stalks off, clearly still muttering to himself. 

The market, which had paused at the commotion for a moment, quickly returns to its original hubbub, once the man has turned a corner out of sight.

Bloody hell that was magic. She wants to learn to do that. See Uncle Vernon try to take a belt to her if she can blast him the second he grabs at her.

Okay, she needs to figure out what the fuck to do about learning from someone here. Also, maybe she can find some food around here.

She steps into the market, looking around carefully. Does anyone look like they sell food? Or like they might be... softer than average? Less of a prick than usual?

There a number of sellers of food, mostly clustered in one area of the market, as though there is a bit of a self-organization going on. Most of them are selling fruits, which can be seen in pyramids or other shaped piles on their blankets, though there are a few selling some kind of warm flatbread and a couple with baskets of varieties of spices, and one selling some kind of dried meat. Some of the merchants do look like they might try to cheat her (and anyone else who comes to their blanket-stalls), but one of the fruit sellers has an actual stand with raised bins of a variety of fruits and vegetables for sale, and he looks like he's doing rather well for himself -- he's much rounder than most of the people here, who look somewhat less well nourished than most of the people she's used to seeing. And his disposition and the way other people treat him seem friendly, not antagonistic, so he may not have achieved his status via taking advantage of others -- though of course this is somewhat hard to judge from her limited view.