I hit 50K! And I’m stopping tonight at exactly 50K because my wrist is killing me and I need to get up for a 5am shift tomorrow. But, in the mean time, here’s the last chunk of the word count. My 50,000th word is “all.”

Current Word Count: 50,000

Matt let out a noise and put his eyes back on the page. She glanced over and saw that he wasn’t quite as far along as she was, but decided to be polite about it at least. After all, the two of them were being shoved together as partners and it probably wasn’t best to annoy him this early on.

“How far did you get?” Shea asked. “In the book, I mean. What chapter did you end up on before you said something and ended up here.”

“Oh,” Matt said, hesitating. “I kind of just flip through and work off random pages. I’m not really doing the specific order thing or anything. Just picking up things here and there and reading the theory bits and making it up as I go along. It’s like learning a language, right? Once you get how to make sentences, the rest of it is just vocab.”

Shea nodded, not sure how to take it. He didn’t have a method? He was just going randomly though the book? Could you really pick up all of this like that? It was a magic spell book with gradually increasing theory. It didn’t make sense to her that anyone could do it like that.

And yet Matt continued to do so, flipping from page to page, reading a couple words and then flipping through to another one to read a couple more. He seemed to be picking something up, anyway, though she had no idea how he was getting any of it at all.

Yeah, I’ve been out for the past few days. I haven’t been home to update, but here’s the next bit now! Also, I’ve discovered that I’m rather not good with this slice of life stuff, so I’m quite happy that the whole reality thing is about to completely go away very soon. And in the morning, I shall get to finish this scene and the stuff I know will begin!

Current Word Count: 37289

When Shea came back, she was standing and T was quiet again in the back of her mind. She stepped back to catch herself, the world very slowly coming back into focus as she leaned back against something that moved under her touch and felt like she was outside despite the lack of breeze. Come to think of it, she could smell the trees, which struck her as very odd.

She leaned against whatever it was, anyway, waiting for her vision to come back and her mind to clear. She didn’t have her backpack on anymore and she couldn’t hear the others, so she assumed that she must have run, though how it happened she wasn’t sure. What had happened? She was hazy on those last moments, but remembered the fist coming at her and T saying something.

Maybe they’d beaten her up and left her in the woods to see what would happen to her. It was probably hard to carry her body out, at any rate, and she hoped something bad happened to them along the way. Though she didn’t actually feel all that terrible. Just a little weak and dizzy. It was like the punch to the face never connected, which would be a feat. She couldn’t even dodge a ball in class, much less a fist. Maybe she was just numb, though.

Slowly, though, there were more odd things coming to light. Like the face that she saw a wall and the door that she had been pulled into. She looked down at herself, finding her hands to be trembling a little, as were her knees and legs, but she was otherwise fine. She just needed a minute to rest and figure out what happened to her. She just needed to find her backpack too and maybe she could head home while she was being left alone. Home was close now and she shouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. Maybe a teacher came by and scared them off.

She went to the wall and leaned against it, raising her head to look for her backpack and her eyes opened wide upon seeing what happened in the room. Her voice escaped her before she’d properly registered what had even happened in there, a scream coming out of her from seeing what had happened and not understanding what she was seeing yet.

No one had left. Everyone was still there. They were just unconscious and trapped in strange plants that had grown out of nowhere at all, the plants looking like they’d strangled them into unconsciousness before letting them relax and breathe again. She could see the breathing clearly enough, shallow though it was, the vines gripping them all around to keep them from moving and still holding some of them much harder than others to restrain them.

Shea had her back against the wall, collapsing against it and falling slowly down to the floor when someone burst in. It doesn’t matter which teacher, who was horrified at the sight and looked down at Shea, who was equally mortified at what was going on. Shea, confused and unable to string a word together, couldn’t get a grasp on what was even happening, the situation too bizarre to contemplate and process for her mind. The vines came literally out of nowhere, The roots of them were actually suspended an inch above the ground and not in anything at all. And her teacher rescuer was of no help either, looking down to Shea and back up at the students in awe and not sure what to do in case of magical growing vines attacking students.

It’s day one of Nanowrimo. I’m on auto pilot on the videos for the month and I’m doing an excerpt a day, just like last year. And here’s the padding from today! Posted early because, well, I don’t want to worry about it as I keep going into the night.

Current Word Count: 5511

Shea got off the bus. Someone else had hit the button and she pushed through the crowd of people which suddenly appeared so that I could add in more words. It smelled of the bus, the aroma thick with the smell of people who both had and had not showered, then were well ventilated because the windows were open enough to keep things from getting that smelly. Really, the aroma wasn’t that bad, but there were definitely people.

Shea made a point not to look up too often on the bus. She worried that peering around would garner eye contact with someone that she didn’t want to make eye contact with, but she brushed past a good number of people on the way out. Some of them were wearing nice jackets, others not so much. Some she knocked the bags and purses of. Some were sitting. Some were listening to music on headphones. A lot of them were, actually. And a few were on phones.

Not that it made much difference, because Shea wasn’t really looking at them. She just wanted to get off the bus and made her way off of it from her seat near the back to the back door.