imeanforever | pumpkin princess

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

imeanforever

Promise sits in it and watches the Princess.

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

From:

feel_so_free

"Maria" is not asleep.

"Hi, Promise."

From:

imeanforever

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

From:

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.

From:

imeanforever

"You didn't pick your own?"

From:

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."

From:

imeanforever

"This... sounds like a story."

From:

feel_so_free

"I guess it is one. Do you want me to tell it?"

From:

imeanforever

"If you don't mind. We're a little too far from where I live for me to commute, so I have to pass the time, but I don't mean to pry."

From:

feel_so_free

"I don't mind," she says.

"When I started, I was in a little field not far from here, and there was a mortal in front of me. He said somebody'd told him not to eat any food here and he wanted to know why, so I told him about vassals, and he said that was a shame because I wouldn't ever get to try his mortal candy, he said it was so good that mortals eat it even though it kills some of them. And I knew he was lying but I was a minute old and I hadn't ever had candy before, so I took the candy. And he took me home and kept me, and made me clean his house and cook his food and have sex with him whenever he wanted, and he wouldn't let me talk to anyone or leave his house."

From:

imeanforever

"I'm sorry that happened to you. Is the Princess better?"

From:

feel_so_free

"She's his niece. He gave me to her when he got sick and was going to die. She asked me what I wanted, and I said I wanted to go back to the fairy realm and be free. She decided that she wanted to be a fairy princess instead of letting me go. But she doesn't rape me and she doesn't make me smile when I'm not happy, so she's not as bad as Jeff."

From:

imeanforever

Promise nods slowly.

"I had an awful master. But he gave me away to someone else who didn't want to keep me." Which is something of an understatement all around.