My Words Mondays - A Plot Ninja

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Ninja Monkey! I love monkey's! I was excited when I found this picture to go with my weekly sharing of some of my writing :) This week I'm going to share a piece I wrote as a result of a Plot Ninja. What's that you ask? At the Kick Off party for Portland area WriMo's we passed around 3x5 cards and wrote Plot Ninja's for each other. They were ideas that we could throw at our story if we got stuck. Well, I never got stuck enough to use mine, so I opened it after it was all over, took one my main characters from Misfits, and used it as a writing prompt! My card said, "Your main character climbs a tree and breaks a leg."

This is the result... 

*****

Alina had wandered off for some time to herself. Their pack of misfits was a lot of fun, and she loved being with the others, but sometimes a girl just needed some time to herself to think, or not think, and to have no external pressure to do either. The woods she was walking through were lovely, but she only half-noticed them. She was entranced by the fact that she was alone for more than five minutes for the first time in days, and everything else was just peripheries.

She had no idea how much time had passed. It was still afternoon, the light told her that, but nobody expected her back so the time was relatively irrelevant except for realization that she'd been walking for awhile, and she probably should start paying more attention to her surroundings if she was going to make her way back to the other's any time soon.

Looking around Alina realized that she was in a relatively sparse area of the forest. A fire had obviously passed through here some years before, and while there were a few of the big tree's that had survived, the majority of what was around her was new growth. Looking at the old tree's, the one's who had survived through wind, rain, and fire, she noticed that one of them had something purple up in it's branches.

"That's strange." She muttered to herself, and decided to get a closer look at it. She wound her way through the bushes to the base of the tree and started looking for hand holds. From the black marks along the trunk she suspected the old fire had made her job harder, but she'd climbed a few tree's in her day, and soon she was working her way up towards what appeared to be some fabric.

The tree was tall, from it's height and girth it was likely one of the oldest tree's in the surrounding area, and the purple fabric was high in it's branches. It looked like the wrong shape for a kite, but that was about all Alina could tell, even as she slowly drew closer.

Suddenly she heard some loud barking, and even though she should have been used to it by now, she started, losing her footing, and fell. As she bounced off of branches, trying desperately to grab hold (and nearly succeeding) she had just enough time to think, "We were tempting fate when we named that damn dog Trouble," before she hit the ground with a thud.

Alina blacked out for a few minutes, and when she came too Trouble was licking her face eagerly. She glared at him and pushed him away, taking stock of her injuries. Her body was covered in bruises and small cuts, but what consumed her attention was the pain in her leg. From the angle it was lying at the bone was obviously broken. She attempted to move it and blacked out again, but for only a few seconds this time as far as she could tell. Realizing that moving was futile she laid back and tried to figure out how she was going to get a message to the rest so they could come set her leg and help her back to camp.

How could an afternoon that had started out so right end up so wrong?

*****

I hope you liked it! 

~ Ruthie ~ 

Ps. If you had a plot ninja last month (for my WriMo friends) what did you do with it?