Helpful Disasters
Teri starts plotting...
Transmigrated Teri is a WIP that is part of a “post 200 words a day during July” challenge issued by
. Episodes posted daily will be of various lengths and sometimes will stop in the middle of the scene. You have been warned!The set up:
Teri Travers, a nearly-50 bitter “office lady” who has not led a happy life gets in a massive car accident after being sent home on the first day of COVID lockdown in 2020. She (and her dog) wake up in a strange new world that is also strangely familiar…that’s right, she’s been transmigrated into the world of her favorite 1990s fantasy novel series, the massively popular, critically disdained, and incredibly tropetastic Allisar Fireborn Chronicles (AFC) by the infamous Chadwick Jarvaldson, aka “Fuckin’ Chad” to all his very annoyed fans who are still waiting for the final book to be published.
Previously: The more she could keep Lady Elisandar talking before the doctor returned, the more she would learn.
The woman in question made a tutting noise. “Naming your familiar after the lost prince, though,” she said, then paused, giving Teri a surprisingly fierce glare. “I had expected you would know better than that.”
“Oh. Theodorian.” Teri tried not to grimace. “I’m sure I was, uh, thinking of honoring Our Great Emperor at the time of crisis.”
Lady Elisandar frowned, her disbelief clear. “I would have thought you were thinking more about the void howler trying to eat you.”
Teri primly tried to pull herself up to settle against the headboard. “Thinking of His Imperial Majesty’s grace and forbearance in his lost son’s name is quite appropriate, I would say.” She tried to sound as prissy and haughty as possible, but it just made her sound like her mother in all the worst ways.
You really do sound like her, Theo said, looking up at her with big, limpid, apologetic eyes.
Which one? She tossed back at him mentally, feeling snappish, but he just gave her a doggy shrug.
“As you say, Milady,” Lady Elisandar said while arranging the blankets around Teri. “What’s done is done. You have a familiar at last.”
She did not sound happy about it, and it took a moment for Teri to mentally screen through the entirety of AFC lore to remember why: Lady Greyrage had always taken pride in not needing a familiar, deeming them lesser beasts for weaker magic wielders. Which, by all rights, she had been expected to be as a girl.
There wasn’t much known about her childhood — Fuckin’ Chad either didn’t care or was holding out on purpose there — except that she had been born weak in magic and so developed a major, psychotic chip on her shoulder about it. It was the supposed reason she hated the Allisar children in her care, since they were all fairly powerful in their own ways, especially Gervyn. There were a few references in the series to a disastrous shadow hunt in her youth that somehow resulted in her powers blooming unexpectedly...Teri’s thoughts came to a screeching halt.
One of her favorite fanfics had speculated about that event, and mixed up some other lore to suggest that Lady Greyrage had somehow become possessed by the foul magic of the thornspine serpent demon she had been hunting. It immediately became a popular head canon in the fandom, and Teri thought it might just be her way out of her current predicament…at least in regard to pretending to be someone she wasn’t.