Somewhere in the walls of the dorms, Friday evening

It was borrowing season, and Arietty wasn't taking being stuck in Fandom very well. It was bad enough that she wasn't going to make it home to her parents' place beneath James' grandmother's clock, or help out her father when he went to borrow all the strawberry cremes from the chocolate assortment. She wasn't going to be able to sneak into the church's nativity scene with Spiller again to hear the beans sing, and she wasn't even going to get to wish James a happy Christmas.

No, on top of all that, Fandom had decided to be weird again. It'd turned her sleeping bag into a peppermint scented mess -- which Eggletina had promptly eaten -- and then taunted her with lots of borrower lights up for grabs all over, only to have them turn back into giant bean lamps by the next morning. And the polar bears had been bad enough that Eggletina had refused to even leave her nest behind the vent in Arietty's room all day. How was a borrower meant to enjoy the most plentiful season of the year if everything could just change on her in an instant? She couldn't, could she?

There was nothing to do but to hide in the walls and sulk, which would be what Arietty had done all day. But then, just as night was starting to fall, she heard them, the scritching of their terrible claws against the wooden studs, the hiss of their breath through their wicked teeth.

Gremlins.

Arietty had only enough time to grab her little dart gun and hope that the irritation would be enough to drive the beasts off before they arrived, two of them towering over her as they stretched to their full height, bits of insulation caught on the tips of their ears. The taller one grunted, glaring down at her with eerie yellow and red eyes, and opened its mouth to display its fangs --

And started to sing.

Right. Okay, then.

[ooc: establishy, unless someone else has a reason to be skulking in the dorm walls.]