Chapter 2
Tanya Degurechaff, ex-salaryman, ex-Japanese, ex- man in all but spirit, woke up on top of the most comfortable bed in the world, or that was what she thought.
The last thing she remembered was…
She brought her hand up to her head to clear the fog covering it. Or at least, she tried to. Instead, her hand smacked her face in an ungraceful manner, akin to a drunk.
She had never let a single drop of alcohol pass her lips in all of her career! It would have been a breach of her contract as a salaryman active-duty soldier!
Of course, she had been underage for all of her career as an active-duty soldier too, but that was not the question she was facing at the moment. The question that she faced first and foremost was regarding her current situation
She shot up from her resting place. She remembered being sent to the frontlines on the Rhine for her first actual use of the Elenium Type-95. She remembered engaging the enemy mages, killing two in their first meeting and then escaping to twenty thousand feet above the ground to gather time to begin her spell,
Tanya felt queasy from the pit of her stomach just thinking about how she would go about with her spell of mass destruction. The spell was her ‘own idea’, wherein she asked the mad doctor Schugel to craft a spell akin to that of a thermobaric bomb with two stages, namely primary ignition of the shell carrying the magic and a secondary ignition of the magic spread by the shell’s explosion.
Magic in itself was a weird form of science, so the mad Doktor instead fine-tuned a spell that would convert nearby oxygen into carbon dioxide to further fuel the explosion. He estimated that the blast radius of the spell would be at least two hundred metres.
These facts might have been enough for others to get queasy, but not Tanya. She had made her peace with the choices she would be making over the course of her career long before she applied on that fateful day. After all, she had over six years to grapple with her morals.
No, what made her queasy was the fact that, to perform her spell, she needed to chant a hymn in the glory of the damned petty-beyond-all-belief non-human entity she refused to call anything other than Being X.
It would have been understandable if she had blacked out after casting the spell. After all, it had been the very first of its kind, and she could have fudged her numbers a bit. An embarrassment to be certain, but not something that could have flummoxed her so badly.
Her last memory before waking up under a beautiful blue sky free of clouds on the most comfortable grass lawn in the world was not the explosion, burning her enemies to a crisp, but her getting hit in the face by a golden-yellow wall of solid magic.
She remembered seeing the wall rising from the west, sweeping through the battlefield and obliterating everything in its path. She saw her opponents being vaporised with just a single touch, their optical spells offering no respite for them at all.
She remembered aborting her spell, instead utilising her Type-97 to near-burnout to fly as far and fast away from the golden wall of death.
And finally, she remembered failing in her task.
But that could not explain why she was in what the Bible described as Eden. Tanya could see an apple tree from the corner of her vision as well, with delicious fruits hanging off the lowest branch with a smell so potent that she could smell the delicious aroma even from over fifty feet away.
And thus, the young girl with the blood of the Faerie Queen in her veins got up from her place of rest at the Garden of Eternal Sleep, dislodging countless unseen little fairies and sprites from her body.
Their reaction was to shred every piece of her past in the Germanian Empire, with the sole exception of the chain around her neck that held her Type-97 and her Type-95.
And thus, a little girl dressed as finely as she had been the moment she came into the world bit into the finest food the fairies had to offer freely and without coercion.
And thus, Tanya Degurechaff unwittingly allowed a beautiful collar in the shape of the most breathtaking tiara in the magical world to be placed on her head, her left eye to lose their piercing blue shine, instead replaced by the golden glow of the fair folk.
Of course, as with all things dealing with magic, her newfound fortune, unwittingly obtained as it may have been, came with a price.
Tanya Degurechaff was a human no longer. No longer would she remain as one of the short-lived. Magic was her birthright and flowed through her blood akin to a raging flood.
The price that she paid, above all, was losing her ability to reliably say untruths. Any question, if asked to her thrice, would force a truthful reply from her, as was the case with all fairies.
With her second bite, the golden glow of her left eye intensified and her right eye regained a fraction of its original sharpness. It took Tanya three apples to fully satiate herself and come to the realisation that she was in the middle of a perfectly maintained field of grass with no visible caretaker.
It took her another apple to realise that she was essentially stealing someone else’s apples to fill her own stomach.
Before Tanya could freak out over essentially performing an act of petty theft, her sight darkened. It was like her eyes suddenly decided to stop working. Tanya blinked and rubbed her eyes as she grumbled about her low blood pressure.
But, when her sight cleared up, she was not in a forest anymore, with an apple tree before her. Instead, she was in a massive and open hall, with obvious Greek and/or Roman inspirations. Right at the centre of the indoor amphitheatre was, much to Tanya’s shock, a simple three-legged white table meant for the outdoors, complete with two chairs.
There was nothing else of note to be seen in anything Tanya put her eyes on. The walls were a plain off-white colour, sporting the odd mural every twenty feet or so. The soldier in Tanya noted the complete lack of any and all cover for her to take in case she were to encounter any hostile forces.
She also noted internally that the murals were not individually unique. In fact, they seemed to be repeating in a cycle of twelve.
By the time Tanya reached the table, her throat was burning like she had been doing stamina training under the blazing sun for several hours.
No matter how mature her mind was, it was a fact that she was a nine-year-old-girl in a situation where no nine-year-old should be.
So, Tanya took the best option amongst those presented to her. She sat down on the seat nearest to her.
It was only when she plopped herself down on the chair did she realise that she was stark naked, and only because she could feel the chair exquisitely through her bare flesh.
Tanya was too far gone at this point to let simple nudity bother her enough. Despite the thirst ravaging her throat, something made the girl delicately pour the coffee (tea?) in the teapot at the centre of the table to the teacup directly in front of her, filling it to its exact halfway point, while also filling the other cup on the table to its own halfway point.
Before taking her first sip, Tanya looked into the rich-brown fluid in her cup. It smelled exactly like her favourite blend of coffee, and she was certain that it would be the absolute best blend she would ever have the fortune of tasting in her life.
But that was not what had her attention. All of her attention was on the coffee itself, or more specifically, her reflection within.
Her eyes were not their normal piercing turquoise. Or at least, one of them wasn't. Her left eye had somehow turned into a solid gold.
“Quite an interesting sight, is it not?” The sudden voice that came out of nowhere broke Tanya from her shock-induced stupor.
Tanya snapped to attention, wielding her teacup at the intruder like a weapon, spilling hot coffee all over the table as she swung her cup.
Or so it would have been, had each and every individual droplet of coffee not suddenly decide that they did not want to follow the law of physics any longer and flow back into the cup.
The cup, which had somehow turned into a proper coffee cup, held primly by Tanya in an outfit that a noble Victorian lady would not be ashamed to wear outdoors, complete with an oversized white hat to block out the sun.
“Wha- What is happening?” The little girl cutely fumbled around in confusion at the sudden wardrobe change, as well as her opponent’s general lack of surprise or wariness at the situation.
Before she could bring herself together and act on her first and second instincts, the woman opposite her snapped her fingers.
Suddenly, Tanya found herself seated on a comfortable rocking chair, wearing a sundress more suited to an innocent girl of her apparent age than herself, the cup of coffee in her hand replaced by a mug of delicious smelling hot chocolate.
Unable to stop herself, Tanya took a sip of her drink and felt all of her resolve, anger and wariness against her foe flowed out of her. When she finished her cup, for the first time in her current life, Tanya Degurechaff relaxed.
It was at this time that the woman with mischievous and mismatched eyes showed herself to the calmed cutie that was to be her successor.
Titania sighed at the task she had cut out for herself. But before she could stop herself, she felt laughter bubbling up from deep within herself.
So, she put aside her worries and did what she did best. She brought out the spring that had been frozen deep, deep, deep within her little protege’s heart. The Leshy had done quite the number on her.
Titania did not understand what kind of magic the Leshy could have possibly used to have twisted her successor so thoroughly. Had it not been for the sheer coincidence that she had happened to have been awoken by the little girl entering an extremely life-threatening situation, escaping by the skin of her teeth.
But in doing so, unlocking the barest minimum of her potential, which, in accordance to faerie law, sent a shockwave of her magical energy through the Kingdom Under The Hill till it reached Titania, waking her, and her Court from their sleep.
It had been quite a while since Titania and her Court had their fair share of fun, and she had a perfectly good excuse right in front of her after all…
The poor girl had been put through quite the wringer by the Leshy. It was almost like she had gone through an entire other mortal life in addition to her life fighting in wars no child of her stature should have been in miles of. Leshy had cruelly wrapped up her soul in a cunning, almost insidious spell.
Titania may not have the know-how to cleanly untangle the bramble thorns that held her protege’s soul in place at the moment, but she did know of the easiest way to make her successor break free of her bonds on her own.
In fact, ironically enough, the process had begun the very moment Tanya had entered the Kingdom under the Hill. The food of the fae held no enchanting properties. At all.
The girl knew exactly what she needed instinctively. Her inner faerie of the summer wished for freedom above all else, and that urge for freedom manifested in her conscious self eating the apples.
Eating the food of the mystical host was the basis for many very powerful magicks.
Not the least of which was the food of the fae. Any who ate the food of the fae who do not claim a place among the fae may not leave the Kingdom Of Eternal Summer for a year and a day.
Another, lesser known power of the ritual was to break down any and all magical walls between the soul of the ‘guest’ and the ‘host’. After all, why should there be such pesky barriers between friends?
But the apples did not work as intended on Tanya. Somehow, the shackles around her soul only loosened. It had taken Titania multiple tries to finally let her successor’s soul escape the icy chains holding her.
But the Lashy had one last trick up his sleeve in the form of a shackle around the soul of one Tanya Degurechaff.
No matter how the soul might wiggle and try to pry the shackle off itself, there was but one way for it to escape.
And Titania knew the perfect person to help her ill-fortuned daughter out. He just happened to work in her Court.
She whistled nine times, in sets of three, with every set of whistles getting shriller. On her ninth whistle, a middle aged man dressed in a fine suit walked into the clearing they were in from behind a tree.
He was her Jester, and he would go by the name of Anthony.
Anthony Gonzalves.
He could easily free her daughter from her chains, and all it would take was to let him break into song.
And so, the man in the fancy suit clapped his hands.
And the world changed around the little girl. Her dress was now a simple yellow sundress, complete with a hat to protect her from the sun.
And what hat is complete without a huge feather?
Before her, the ‘Jester’ clapped his hands with a charisma that forced all onlookers to forget any distraction. When he moved his hands away from each other, his left hand held a black cane, while his right one held a teacup.
He drank deeply from his teacup, finishing the contents in a single gulp before smashing it onto the floor.
Except when it did smash onto the floor, it transformed into bubbles that floated up and popped right in front of Tanya’s eyes.
And thus, with his sole audience member’s rapt attention on him, the man opened his mouth and spoke.
“Ya see, the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere”
Tanya blinked. She could not process what exactly the crazy person that she could not take her eyes off of was saying. Before she could formulate a response, he continued.
“Because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own publicity!”
Before Tanya could stop herself, she felt a sign of her exasperation escape from her lips, “What?”
The man smiled, flourishing his cape around, only to appear from behind her and continue his weird script, except this time, in song.
“My name is Anthony Gonzalves!”
So maybe he just wanted to introduce himself to her for some reason? As he sang, he bowed with such grandiose flair that his cape burst out from behind him. And from the cape, five back up dancers emerged, all in black and white versions of the Disney TinkerBell costume of all things for some reason.
With a kick at the air before him, Mr. Anthony continued his song and dance.
“In this world, I am the one and only”
At this, he took off his hat, spun it on his right index finger and put it back on, all while on a unicycle.
“In this wonderful world, I am all solitary.”
At this, the music in the background flared up again. The man, Anthony, self-corrected Tanya, again began singing, but this time, with an angelic voice.
“My heart is empty… My house is empty…”
Suddenly, Tanya was hit with her memories as a boy in highschool, before she had found her bible in the form of the Chicago School of Economics, all alone in a room full of kids her age.
But, all she felt was a strange hot flame in her heart that she did not recall ever feeling before.
“But it is here that my luckier half will fill, whoever she may be!”
Tanya could feel her shock and negative emotions falling away from her, giving way to an emotion she had not felt since before she could remember.
On her face, she felt her lips curving upwards, something bubbling up from deep within her, something that had been locked away for a very, very long time.
Her entertainer, in the frenzy of music that followed, exploded into a burst of confetti. Before she could respond, he appeared from behind her, now dressed as a proper gentleman, wearing a monocle over his left eye, a three-piece suit complete with excellent boots.
And of course, an intricate pocket watch that he popped open to check the time on before continuing.
“When I am remembered, my house can be entered at any time”
Tanya felt tears running down her face for some reason, just as she felt her cheeks turning upwards for some reason. She felt cracks in chains that she did not even know that she had tied around herself.
The man freeing her from her confines winked at her as he told her the address of his home.
“Transformation Manor, The Alley of Love, House number being 420!”
“My name, is Anthony Gonsalves, I am unique in this magical world.”
Tanya blinked as the lights switched off, her chair transformed into birds from underneath her, causing her to hit the floor with her ass. Oddly enough, all this did was make her burst out into genuine, heart-filled laughter.
She could hear the cracks coming from the icy blue chains intensify as she laughed, but she could not care a single whit less than she already was.
Anthony pushed her final button with his crescendo, his job was being a jester, and he truly let his audience laugh their hearts out and enjoy themselves with his performance.
“Ya see, the extenuating circumstances of the linear”
“Whaaaat?” laughed Tanya at the ridiculous statement.
“Coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance”
“Yes! Tell me more!” Tanya, for once, looked exactly like a child her age should, her eyes bursting with curiosity and her mouth upturned into a permanent smile.
Her entertainer knew his work was almost done, and he nailed down the final nail in the coffin of the chains holding his beloved princess hostage.
“You see…”
Tanya watched in rapt attention as he burst into white smoke that bellowed from the tufts of his suit. From within the smoke, his voice continued,
“The coefficient of the linear…”
The chains holding Tanya’s true self at bay were themselves merely hanging on a thread, but the magic of being a jester…
“is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin of the atmospheric pressure in the country!”
Was in making magic out of ridiculous statements, and bringing smiles to the eyes of ones who had lost their light in a time they themselves have forgotten.
“My name is Anthony Gonsalves!”
Out of the smoke appeared an adorable white cat with overly large ears. Just looking at the cat blew away any and all of the magics engrained onto Tanya by the mysterious chain.
Unable to help herself, the little girl attacked the cat with an impressive, even by professional football standards, tackle. The cat did not even try to escape his fate.
As soon as Tanya nuzzled her new pet however, her sense of propriety returned to her and an impressively deep red colour overcame her skin, all the way from her chest to the roots of her hair.
Before she could regain her composure, the faerie queen kissed her forehead deeply with a loud smooch.
Before she could process that, Titania picked her up and spun her around.
She was dropped directly on top of Titania’s lap, and the scenery around them shifted. They were sitting in what could only be described as a great audience room for a monarch.
The queen was dressed in an extremely pompous dress that did absolutely nothing to cover up her natural charms as a woman, Tanya, on her lap, was dressed in a similar dress, albeit much more conservative and puffier. And covered in pink lace.
“Listen here and listen well, subjects mine, I have an announcement to make.”
“Listen here and listen well, subjects mine, I have an announcement to make!”
“Listen here and listen well, subjects mine, I have an announcement to make!!”
Tanya did not understand why she had to repeat the same statement thrice, but clearly the people the announcement was for did.
By the time the queen had begun speaking for the third time, a pin could drop and be heard through the whole hall.
Then, she smiled a charming smile at her compliant audience. An audience held entirely at the thrall of her overwhelming charm.
Her smile turned a tiny bit predatory as she looked at the cute little girl on her lap, who held her reddening forehead with both of her tiny and very, very red hands.
She hoisted up her little Tania on her shoulder and made her announcement.
“Your Queen has found an heir! Rejoice! For a year and a day, rejoice!”
And thus, Tanya found herself in the world of a very happy fae folk without any idea of what to do or to make of herself.
Good thing she had her cat and had lost her scepticism of humanity.
Better thing that she learned fast.
Best thing she did not learn that she had not worn a single thread since she woke up in the land under the hill.
It took a year and a day, but Tanya, now Titania, managed to plan and execute her escape from her overly enthusiastic mother.
Of course, the place she had escaped to was nothing like the one she remembered. She had come back to the world of men.
By the common christian calendar, the year was 1991, and it was the end of August.
Whilst planning out the rest of her life away from her mother, Titania happened to receive a letter addressed to her name in the well-kept cottage she had been using in a very friendly place called Godric Hollow.
It had come to her via owl and it completely overturned her ideas for the future.