pumpkin princess

[imeanforever]

Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.

When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.

She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.

Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"I'm - here about the library ad. I'm called Promise."

[feel_so_free]

Well, no use holding it against this perfectly nice fairy that she might end up prolonging Secret's captivity forever.

"It's nice to meet you, Promise! I'm called Maria. I guess you want to talk to the Princess, then, huh?"

[imeanforever]

"I guess." What kind of nickname is Maria? "Who's the Princess? Where did she get a mortal?"

[feel_so_free]

"Oh - the Princess is a mortal," she says. "Did you not know? I guess it wasn't in the ad. Anyway I can tell the Princess you're here to see her."

[imeanforever]

"Huh. Anyway, yes, I don't know that the job and I are right for each other but I thought I'd look into it."

[feel_so_free]

"Okay!"

Off she goes in search of the Princess.

[imeanforever]

Promise follows.

The Princess is peering at some maps with some of her favorite sunshine tepals. Another sunshine tepal admits Maria and Promise.

"Hello?" says the Princess, who is wearing a flower crown and a tastelessly large amount of gossamer.

"Hello," says Promise. "I'm called Promise and I'm here about your library ad, if you haven't already found a sorcerer for it."

"Oh! Can you do it?"

"I never have," says Promise, "but the theory looks straightforward, at least with my sorcery background."

"How long would it take you?" the Princess inquires.

"I'd need to spend time around you to get sufficiently familiar with you as a spell target," says Promise, "but probably not more than six months of frequently interacting or just watching you do whatever you do all day, maybe less. I could be a little quicker if you have a harmonic map of an area around here where I could do the casting."

"And what would you want for this?"

"The ad said vassals or resources. I'd prefer the former; ideally not the sunshine tepals since there are a lot of them and I don't fully understand what social structures I'd be breaking up. I'm pretty comfortable in the resources department. But I could probably be convinced to take a significant quantity of books."

"I've got a pair of creekpearls."

"I'm willing to learn to de-age you and then do it at least once for a pair of creekpearls." Which Promise will then send off to do as they like as far away as they care to, because she knows how nice that is to hear.

[feel_so_free]

The fairy with the odd nickname watches this exchange. She's kind of curious about sorcery, and it seems like this Promise person is better at it than the local sorcerers, or the Princess would be making them do it instead of paying Promise with two whole vassals.

[imeanforever]

"What if you can't do it?" asks the Princess.

"I think I can do it, but if I can't, no need to pay me anything except letting me loiter around your court until I figure that out," says Promise.

"Do you know someone who can?"

Promise decides to phrase this as - "I've met people who are better at sorcery than me, but none of them live on this continent."

[feel_so_free]

(Secret giggles.)

[imeanforever]

"Hmm," says Princess. "Very well. You can hang around my court and whenever I'm doing things that don't require privacy you can hang around me."

"I'll need to come and go to forage."

"My court can feed you."

"I'm sure they can. I'll need to come and go to forage." This is a mortal she's dealing with.

"As you like, then."

[feel_so_free]

(Secret giggles again.)

[imeanforever]

"What are you? I'm a leaflet," Promise says to "Maria".

[feel_so_free]

"Oh. I don't know," she says. "I'm the only me I've met."

[imeanforever]

"You didn't start knowing?"

[feel_so_free]

"No-o. Should I have?"

[imeanforever]

"Is this relevant?" asks the Princess.

"No, probably not," says Promise, still looking at Maria. "If you're going to be in here a while and I'm supervising you is there a chair I can have?"

"Maria, go get her a chair," says the Princess.

[feel_so_free]

So she goes and gets Promise a chair and brings it back and puts it down for her. It is a Maria-sized chair; Promise is not quite Maria-sized but she's certainly closer to that than to a sunshine tepal.

[imeanforever]

Promise sits in it and watches the Princess.

Later Promise goes out foraging, and comes back when the Princess is asleep.

[feel_so_free]

"Maria" is not asleep.

"Hi, Promise."

[imeanforever]

"Hi, Maria. That's a strange nickname."

[feel_so_free]

"My first master gave me it."

Technically she isn't forbidden to talk about Jeff; she usually doesn't anyway. But usually people don't ask about her nickname.

[imeanforever]

"You didn't pick your own?"

[feel_so_free]

"He was a mortal and he had all mortal friends so he called me a mortal name so they wouldn't know I was a fairy."

[imeanforever]

"This... sounds like a story."