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Aangie lay quietly on the piano bench once more.
Stareing intently at the children while they sleep, hmmm.

Olivia would have smiled if she could have, but as the hour of her awakening had not yet come, she couldn't. Moshi was so kind and considerate. He was a really good person. He treated the dolls with all the respect and consideration that anyone would show to a real, live human being, and he was teaching Samantha how to take care of the dolls in that way too. When Moshi smiled at her, she wished she could have smiled back at him.

Though the idea of being out of the dollhouse for the night was a bit scary (who knew what the consequences might be?) Olivia was touched by Samantha's affection for the dolls. Her mind was rushing through possibilities: being rolled on? would their porcelain bodies break or not? Samantha seemed like a fairly small child, so maybe not. It wouldn't feel very good to be smooshed even if she didn't break, though that might not happen at all anyway. She breathed a sigh of relief at the knowledge that, at least tonight, she would be back in the dollhouse. That was good. Olivia wanted to be with the rest of the dolls tonight. She was so relieved to be alive and in one piece that she thought she might even try talking to some of the other dolls tonight, and maybe she'd play a board game with someone. For some reason, Bartleby's face came to mind when she thought about doing these things. She wondered why it was and how it could be that he both set her at her ease and flustered her at the same time.

She wondered if Rytogu and Bartleby were as relieved as she was at not having to share a bath and changing session with dolls of the opposite gender. Well, she knew that she was definitely relieved - and thankful!

Olivia's mind wandered back to the possibility that Samantha had suggested - sleeping with the dolls. Olivia wondered, hopefully, "Would she hold me on her lap and read to me? Would she brush my hair and tell me that she loves me?" Olivia never would have admitted it aloud to anyone, because she was too proud to say it, but those were the parts of being a doll that she missed. She positively thrilled at the prospect of being treated in that way by either Samantha or Moshi.

Olivia worried sometimes about thinking such doll-like thoughts as "I want to be held on someone's lap and read to," and "Oh, I want to wear that dress! Please change me into it!" or "I like it when she brushes my hair." Sometimes, she worried that thinking those kind of things would turn her into "just a doll" forever. They were all so much more than mere objects. They lived - they had emotions, thoughts, hopes, and dreams. It was like something out of a fairytale, all of this. She just wished that it would continue. When she was really, really worried, she would imagine what it would be like to be eternally conscious: thinking, feeling, etc. - but never able to move!

"I worry far too much ..." she had to keep stopping her mind from jumping to various frightening possibilities. It urked her proud heart to be helpless 12 hours a day and she really wasn't very brave except at night when she could move and didn't feel so much at the mercy of their owners. She was especially afraid of Alec ... she trembled at the thought of him ... She was quite sure that he would break a doll to bits without remorse. Whenever he was in the room, she would just try to focus on being invisible. There wasn't any way she could hide, but she foolishly hoped that if she just didn't think about him while he was in the room, nothing would happen to her. It was horrible to be at the mercy of someone else's whims ...

Oh night, please hurry up and come so that we can be free!

"Tick tock tick tock ..." So close now ... soon it would be time and they would be freed from the restraints of immobility. So soon ... Sometimes those last few minutes were the hardest to wait through. Olivia focused on trying to move. Nope, not yet, but soon. It would be nice to hear Bartleby play the piano tonight, to sit in the parlor, in the golden light cast by the lamps and listen to music and talk - and maybe even play chess. Olivia chuckled inwardly as she remembered the night the dolls had tried to play croquet. No one knew the rules at the time, and it wasn't until later that they had remembered the book of game rules that was on the shelf. 'They had had to make up their own rules for that first game, and it had been very interesting.

"Oh please ... please let it be night soon ... " she thought, wishing she could make the hands of the clock move faster.

Olivia suddenly realized that she was wearing the blue dress and groaned inwardly. A lovely dress, to be sure, in its old fashioned way, but ... it knocked over everything it touched! Sometimes, it even knocked over the other dolls, which was really embarassing. Olivia couldn't count the number of times she had had to apologize for that. People seemed to take it in stride though, seeming to take being knocked over like bowling pins for granted since it happened so often. Olivia frequently ended up in that dress before the end of the day because it was the outfit that had been made specifically for her when she was first created. It was "her" dress. She would have liked to wear it in a grand ballroom, dancing like Cinderella, but the dress was a bit wide for the small rooms of the dollhouse.

"Oh, I am going to need to go change, but I will be right back down soon wearing ... maybe the black and white boucle tweed dress that I like ..." She didn't really feel like taking very long on her hair tonight - she just wanted to be with the other dolls soon - she was still sort of shaken up from the events of the day and did not want to be alone.

"Oh ... I forgot how itchy this stiff fabric is ... Wait a minute! Itchy?! It's almost time - I wouldn't be able to have that level of a sense of touch if it weren't almost time! Oh! I'm saying this out loud, aren't I?" She put her hand over her mouth and looked down at Bartleby sitting on the piano bench. She tingled from head to foot with eager excitement - "I can move again!" She reached up a hand slowly, experimentally flexing her fingers, examining her hand in the moonlight. It somehow seemed like a miracle every time the change from "immobile" to "moving" happened.

She looked at Bartleby apologetically and said, "I'm going to try to get out the door without knocking you or anything else over, but I can't be sure that I'll succeed, so in case I knock you over, I just want to go ahead and say I'm sorry ahead of time."

She gathered her skirts as close to her legs as possible, trying to reign in the bulk of stiff, puffy fabric, and walked toward the door. She heard a crash and turned around. "Oh no! I'm so sorry ... Are you okay?" she said, horrified to see that what she had hoped was only a piece of furniture falling down had been both a piece of furniture AND Bartleby - the piano bench and Bartley to be exact. She had a brief moment of being glad that it wasn't the piano and Bartley she had sent flying, as the piano could have landed on top of him, and that would have been fairly painful ... though having a piano bench land on top of you couldn't exactly be pain-free either ... She stepped forward, reaching out a hand to help him up, and too late, realized she had stepped on the hem of her dress. For a moment, the world seemed to freeze, and then it tilted the wrong way and she hit the floor too, taking the coffee table and some other furniture down with her in one disastrous pile.

"Oh!" Olivia gasped, hiccuping with the effort of trying not to cry. She was so embarassed, and when she felt his worried hazel eyes turn on her, she looked down quickly. She took a deep breath to reign in the sobs that were welling up inside her throat and paused for a moment before speaking a bit shakily "I'm alright, are you okay? Bartleby, I'm so sorry! It's this stupid dress ..."