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

"Thanks."

From:

infinitely_stranger

"A nice start, all in all. I wonder what it'll look like in another century."

From:

imeanforever

"In a century I'll have enough books to justify a third story library."

From:

infinitely_stranger

From:

imeanforever

"I'm getting better at transcribing things by sorcery. I have good handwriting but writing out entire books is exhausting."

From:

infinitely_stranger

"Is it just a matter of practice or do you think better tricks would help? I like transcription spells."

From:

imeanforever

"I don't know that they wouldn't help, certainly."

From:

infinitely_stranger

"Well, let's see."

It turns out that when Arcane says he likes transcription spells, what he means is that he has an extensive and well-researched understanding of all the ways people have tried to use sorcery to transcribe books and which ones of them are better than which other ones in which ways for which purposes. He has even invented variations of his own that he can successfully explain to people who don't sense harmonics.

From:

imeanforever

Eeeee, geeking out over spells. With Arcane.

Promise is a very clever sorcerer, especially for her age, and a quick study.

From:

infinitely_stranger

Arcane notices these things! Arcane appreciates these things. Arcane tells her so.

From:

imeanforever

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

(She graciously accepts the compliments without eeeeeeeing out loud.)

From:

infinitely_stranger

She is so successful at concealing her urge to eeeeeeeee. Arcane has no idea. He can tell she's pleased, though! It's nice that she's pleased.

From:

imeanforever

She's very pleased. And wonders (once they have exhausted this topic and she has fixed them dinner) if he has tips about other sorts of spells.

She is sad when he has to leave in a few days but does her best not to be very demonstrative about it.

From:

infinitely_stranger

He indicates an intention to find and close that gate near her tree, and then to come back in ten or fifteen years and see how she's doing.

Then, off he goes.

From:

imeanforever

And Promise resumes her business as usual.

From:

alicornucopia

Meanwhile -

Rose has a singular advantage. She is mortal, and therefore shiny and appealing to fairies who like to acquire vassals. And she cannot be vassaled. She can eat their food, she can even give away her true name - and she can pretend to be bound by their orders until the moment she is not.

Rose still wants to choose her faux master carefully. Ensnaring lone fairies won't get her anywhere fast; going after the wrong fairy with the strategy she has in mind will make for a very unpleasant, perhaps impossible, period of time. Not all masters are going to think of her as a charming pet before they let her feed them a sunflower seed from the supply in her pocket. And Rose is still mortal.

She uses her "Aunt Maria" - it's pretty hard to get used to calling her anything else; she has always been Aunt Maria, and it's not like she has a real name - as a spy, of sorts. Feeding Maria fairy food will seldom get anyone anywhere, Maria has no name to give up, and Maria, being a fairy - now supplied with a backless shirt from Rose's closet so her wings can come out and she can fly - is not as interesting a target. Rose parks in Uncle Jeff's house and sends Maria on exquisitely well-defined missions (Rose has a friend who is attending law school and thinks this is a book Rose wants to write) and acquires maps and lists and intel and samples of local fairy food.

Aunt Maria finds some moderately friendly individuals and a nasty-looking small court and she also finds a large colony of "breeder" fairies that has moved into a new home recently (in fairy terms). Their patriarch spends his time sitting on top of a wall of hanging gardens his descendants maintain, being brought news and curiosities, and has a taste for being hand-fed.

Perfect.

It's a hike and Rose is too heavy for Maria to carry her flying, so Rose goes to fairyland with good boots and some emergency food in case foraging is hard and her compiled maps and plenty of water and Maria waiting in the attic to come bail her out if she takes too long.

Fairyland is gorgeous and the hanging gardens, when she gets there after a day and a half of hiking through glorious summer wildflowers, are even better. They're maintained by a swarm of the cutest little fairies. They look like Indian paintbrushes, orange-red or yellow with tufts of matching petals instead of hair, averaging eight inches high, with wings that look like those helicopter seeds. They're so cute, and they look at her when she wanders near, and immediately six of them buzz up to her.

"Mortal?" "Are you lost?" "Who's your master?" "Are you hungry, mortal?" "Thirsty?"

And Rose pretends to be indignant: "Who's my master? Excuse me, who's your master?"

And the fairies mutter to each other and say "He is this way, mortal, come and he'll give you some juice, you look thirsty."

Rose goes with them, marveling openly at the gardens, and she crouches when they bring her to the patriarch, and she smiles and acts dumb. He gives her juice. She drinks it. He tells her to stay right where she is. She does, now letting a little of her lingering apprehension show through. He lets a few of his court also give her juice, and tells her to drink it, and she does. He has someone braid her hair and someone make her flower garlands to pretty her up because she's so drab. He sits on her shoulder.

And when he tells her to give him his supper, she slips a sunflower seed in with it.

And when all the fairies of the court have gone to sleep, she wakes him up.

And she says, "Shush."

He shushes.

"One by one, wake up all the others and don't let them sound any alarms and tell them to eat what I give them."

And he does, because what else can he do?

Rose had three hundred and thirty-five Indian-paintbrush-fairy vassals before the night ends (which, when it occurs, pauses at dawn for an oddly long period of time). She asks them what the Indian-paintbrush-fairy kind is called and they tell her they are called sunshine tepals. She has three hundred and thirty-five sunshine tepals and some of them know magic and they can fit in her backpack six at a time if she's willing to crowd them.

She sends one to tell Maria that all is well and Maria should join them. Rose doesn't plan to go back to the mortal world for a long, long time.

Especially since one of these sunshine tepals has read in a book somewhere that it is possible to de-age mortals with sorcery.

Rose makes them all call her Princess. She is a fairy princess. Everything is wonderful.

She contemplates her next move...

From:

feel_so_free

"Aunt Maria" is... well, dissatisfied.

Dissatisfied is a huge improvement on what she was before Princess inherited her. But it's not exactly pleasant. Rose leaves fewer loopholes than Jeff did. Rose has more ambition than Jeff did. Rose is not going to let her Aunt Maria go anytime soon - and Rose is not going to get sick and die. Rose, if she manages to chase down that rumour about de-aging, might never die at all.

In the midst of all that spying, she learns things about fairy culture that were not included in her starting package. Everyone goes by nicknames. They pick their nicknames themselves. Names like Petal and Sundown and Greenest and Flutter, Mirage and Duet and Evoke and Abyss.

Rose calls her Maria, and Rose can go on doing that, can probably not be dissuaded from doing that - but in her head she names herself Secret.

From:

alicornucopia

Princess snaps up a few neighbor fairies who would notice sooner or later the changes in the sunshine tepal court. She has several sorcerers at this point, but none who think they'll be able to learn to de-age her before she hits forty, fifty, later, fairies are fuzzy on time - before she slows down, at any rate. She doesn't want to slow down.

Princess sends vassals to leave notices at libraries. She is not above actually paying for what she wants when it's important.

From:

imeanforever

Promise spots the notice. Sought. Sorcerer capable of reversing mortal aging. Negotiable pricing in vassals or resources.

Promise, admittedly, does not currently know how to reverse mortal aging. But she's very good at healing spells and thinks the theory likely to be similar. She looks it up just in case - the librarians are forbidding relevant books to be taken offsite while the notice stands, so the books are there, although there's a meadowjoy snoozing in the stacks nearby with a partially finished transcription, probably interested in the same job.

Promise reads through old writing and diagrams and A Harmonic Map Of The Mortal Form. It doesn't look hard. She'd have to spend a lot of time around the mortal in question, but she could do that.

Promise does her own transcription of the book with sorcery - nice and quick, thank you Arcane. She goes home and packs food and a notebook and this spell and flies the several hours it takes to go from her tree to the described court with a mortal they don't want to lose.

From:

feel_so_free

The court is very pretty. Hanging gardens and lovely flowers. Nearly everyone present is a sunshine tepal - there are a few miscellaneous fairies of miscellaneous fairy sizes -

And then there is that one. Six feet tall at least, with fragile rainbow wings whose edges dissolve at the merest brush of her hair and then re-form a moment later. She spots Promise and zips over curiously, leaving a faint rainbow trail of wing-dust.

"Hello! I don't know you! Who're you? Are you new?"

From:

imeanforever

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

From:

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?"