Amanda's teacher droned on, and Amanda's mind began to wander. This lesson was getting really boring, and it seemed like the schoolday would never be over. Amanda glanced down at her notebook and noticed that she hadn't even copied out the last three math problems. Instead, her page was filling up with sketches and other doodles.

Amanda sighed and looked up at the blackboard. Then she looked down at her notebook again. And up at the blackboard once more. There it was again! Something was moving inside Amanda's desk! Something small and blue.

Amanda bent over to get a better look inside her desk. She gasped. A whole band of blue faeries was milling around in there!

Amanda quickly glanced up at the teacher, who had her back turned to the class and was writing on the blackboard. Amanda then looked around to her classmates, who were all either watching the teacher or staring off into space - save for the two boys in the back corner who were sureptitiously trading Pokemon cards. Nobody was watching Amanda. No one else had seen the faeries. Amanda bent down to her desk again. This time, the desk seemed to expand and then rise up to meet her, until first her head and then her whole body was actually inside the desk! Amanda tried to pull back, but it was too late. She fell right into the desk and landed with a loud thump ...

... onto a hard mound of dirt.

"Ouch!" exclaimed Amanda.

She looked about her. She was sitting on the floor of a dark and creepy forest. Amanda looked up in the direction from which she had fallen but saw only the branches of the trees overhead. There was no sign of her desk or her classroom anywhere!

The faeries were still about though. Huddled in a ring not ten paces from where Amanda sat. When they saw Amanda they turned as one mass to greet her.

"Amanda! Arise and arm yourself against our abhorrent arch-anguish!" said the most magnificent and formidable of the faeries.

"Your arch-anguish?" queried Amanda. "What is that?"

She got to her feet and backed up against a tree, seeking what protection she could against the faeries' mysterious foe.

"The Tree Trolls have trapped us in Twilight Tanglewood," explained one of the faeries.

"This hard-hearted handicap has harrowed our harmonious hatch," continued another.

Amanda was a little bit confused by the faeries' strange use of language but she had heard that faeries were wont to speak alliteratively. She resolved to decipher the plain meaning of their words for she feared that she too might now be imprisoned within Twilight Tanglewood - which didn't feel like too friendly a place - and she felt certain that her best bet for escape would be to work with the blue faeries.

"How did you get here?" asked Amanda. "How are the Tree Trolls keeping you here?"

"We were wandering willingly from world to world, wending our way with the Winsome Witch's witchery," answered the most magnificent of the faeries, "when Winsome Witch was waylaid by a wayward whelp who wheedled his way within Winsom's weirding waltz."