"-ocksucking, motherf…oh. OH… Okay then" she trailed off from a yell to a whisper. "Why am I laying down and what happened to the light?" she quietly wondered to herself. "It was just daytime, wasn't it? I was sitting at my desk, and. I must have just stroked out, right? Wait, I don't smell toast."
Jean remained motionless. Partially from confusion about her situation, and partially from not wanting to draw any attention from her cat to pounce on her face should she be laying in her own bed. Slowly, however, she began flexing her fingers. Smooth chilled sheets of the bed she lay on greeted her. "These are nice," she murmured. "But I don't have any nice sheets like these. I don't even have clean sheets to begin with". Worried, Jean slowly began to sit up. As she did, she felt something touching her back. Cautiously she reached her hands above her head to confirm a strange new truth. "Long hair is new. I must have been in a coma". After a moment of shock, her eyes began to register more details. Looking down she saw a strange wooden bed with ornate carvings. But a smaller more intimate detail is what set her on-edge, "I definitely don't have nice pajamas. Who put me in these?" she shivered as she spoke. "Some mouth breather must have traced my IP, knocked me out and kidnapped me" as her heart began to palpitate.
She sat nearly paralyzed for minutes. Her mind raced in circles as she tried to understand just what had happened to her. But every cycle of questioning, another detail seemed to make light in her mind. Trembling, she started to notice the tapestries covering the stone walls. Ornate wooden furniture atop what looked like bearskin rugs sat next to a fireplace with burning coals in it. Small candles placed on tall candle holders throughout the room seemed to be lighting the whole place. None of this made sense… This was absolutely not her tiny apartment in Denver, this was the fucking Witcher. "I was just online, at home with my cat. I was messing around online, and now I'm on a low-budget movie set" she mumbled to an empty room. "No one cares about me enough or has enough money to kidnap me into a prank like this".
Jean had always been the odd one out. But for that, she had always been independent and thought she was able to take care of herself. Why have all the strange knowledge accumulated from reading history books, and manuals, and playing strategy and puzzle games if she couldn't put it to use? Instead of feeling helpless, she needed to take action. As thoughts of 'He who dares, wins' came into her mind she became determined to act.
"I can't get out of here if I don't know where HERE is". Trying to remember all of the old military manuals she used to read she remembered the phrase 'SERE training'. Unfortunately, she had no clue what that stood for. Instead of being clever and spending more time doing nothing but being scared, Jean thought it may be best to just leave the room and see where fate had taken her.
She pulled back the fabulously expensive bed covers and furs and stood to leave the bed. The stone floor was freezing. The whole room was freezing. Of course, she didn't notice the fur slippers next to the bed. She didn't know why, but she just stood there. "This is real. This is happening right this moment to me, and it's real. You don't feel pain in dreams. You don't feel anything in dreams and I'm freezing". She stood there saying this to herself over and over as if this would somehow transport her home.
Standing in the freezing air, a thought violently forced its way into her mind, "The drawers- the writing table near the door". Jean felt suddenly compelled to act. She didn't know why, but this suggestion was now the most important thing she had to do. She wasn't as concerned about the place she found herself. Whatever was in that drawer would make things clear. But, before that- she had to keep herself from freezing to death.
Looking for anything to put on over her modest pajamas, she navigated to a set of large wood dressers near a door. A dresser HAD to have something warmer to wear, right? One step on the hard stone floor, and another… walking silently wouldn't be the issue, not freezing her feet off would be the issue. "I'd kill for my plushy tank slippers right now" she cursed herself. Suddenly, she heard a noise outside the door, and she froze. The world no longer made any sense at all.
A face surrounded by occasional flickers of candlelight confronted her. In a mirror on a low chest of drawers she saw pale skin. She saw ice-cold eyes, a fine nose, and piled on top of that ornately braided auburn hair with bangs. Now, a hand with a ring on it was touching the curls framing either side of this alien face. More worryingly, Jean noticed she had just been touching her hair at that moment.
A strange feeling in her stomach started to present itself. Not like the performance anxiety she felt when speaking to a Lockheed Martin HR Exec, or a Senior Systems Engineer for her intern project. This was something altogether different. This was dread. This was how some poor soldiers felt right before they were made to stand in front of the wall.
She meant to perhaps quietly say something along the lines of, "that's not me" or, "oh no", or simply "nope". What erupted from her mouth was quite different.
"OHFUCKNOOOOOHMYGAWWWWWWD" she screamed. Recoiling, she fell backwards knocking over a candle stand and curling into a ball trying to scramble backwards away from the mirror.
Minutes, hours, moments passed as Jean lay in a catatonic state on the floor staring into the void. The frumpy mid-20's intern from Minnesota had been replaced. She was clearly not in Kansas anymore, but where was she? Who was she? Slowly she began to think, "Who's gonna feed General Sherman?" she cried thinking of her single-braincelled cat. She kept looking at her hands in the dim light. Gone was the olive skin and the fine black hair on her forearms. "Why'd I get turned into some white lady? What's wrong with me?!"
She didn't know how long she had been lying there, sick to her stomach, but the cold uneven stones stopped mattering to her. She knew somehow her old life was gone. The tinder date she had setup at the local shooting range this weekend wasn't going to happen. Her future salivating over drone footage and the newest 6th Gen fighters had to be lost forever. Her sister, her mom, her cousins? "Why… WHY?! Goddamnit NO!" she yelled into silence. Not being able to think of anything else she kicked the fallen candle holder next to her. It made a satisfying clang and clatter as it skittered away.
Round and round she asked the same questions, not finding any answers. Pondering out loud, "What if someho- OW, AUGH!" she yelled as a door opened directly into her hand.
"Dutchess Veronica, I heard you yelling and then something crashed in your room" chirped an unfamiliar voice. "Are you alright? You're on the floor, and your hand is bleeding". Looking up, Jean saw what must be a maid dressed in a black dress with a patterned robe thrown over it. "My lady, you've-"
"NOPE! I'm fine. It's all fine. I was, uh… looking for socks and tripped. It's all good, you can leave Astrid". The maid frowned at this and snapped her fingers. The candles in her room brightened making everything in the chamber plain to see.
Disapprovingly, the servant asked, "Veronica, mam. What is a sock?" "Never mind, go- it's ok, I'll find it myself, you can go." Jean said hurriedly, standing up and shoving the maid out a door and locking it behind.
As Astrid spent the rest of the night wondering what a sock was, a stranger in a strange land came to several realizations, each more worrying than the last. Which didn't help her already awful situation. "That's Astrid…. Asterisk? No, I totally said Astrid… like some Norse lady. I KNEW her name. I KNOW her. I've never seen her in my life, and I KNOW her". Jean's mind raced. She had never seen the slight woman before in her life, and yet she knew that 2 hours after sunrise Astrid would return with warm water to wash her face. She knew that Astrid had served her personally for years, and that when she wasn't working, she enjoyed wine and one of the blacksmiths besides. "Okay… I totally had a stroke. I can't know that. I can't know any of this" she said, holding her head in her hands.
The next thought Jean had was the stranger one. That fact seemed pretty wild considering she was having repressed memories of having walked in on her maid naked in a hay loft several months prior. "That bitch knows fucking MAGIC!"
The candles in the room still flickered as one might expect, but every square centimeter of the room was totally illuminated. Years of paying way too much for way too many scented candles had taught Jean that a candle really isn't all that bright. Jean's normal reaction to a bad week was to buy as many candles as she thought she'd need to recreate a stereotype. After that, she'd go home and take a long candle-lit bath. All the while reading about how Edward Teller was an actual super-villain or something like that. Even with 30 candles, you still needed a headlamp to read a book.
And this maid, Astrid- with a snap of her fingers changed the room from dim to dazzling.
"Magic Exists…" was forced to the front of her mind.
Jean quickly attributed this to her not having taken her adderall this morning. That had to be why she kept having these weird thoughts. As she was about to put her hand on her head to try and concentrate, she once again saw her hand. She gazed at the ring on it. She couldn't remember which hand people wore their rings on. Never one for jewelry, she never wore anything apart from small stud earrings. But her mom wore her old wedding ring on her left hand, right? This piece of strange metal was on her left hand as well. As she stared at the ring yet more, she saw its single green stone seemed to swirl as if filled with a whirlpool. "That…this could be weird" she muttered to herself.
Jean stood by the door. Confusion, existential dread, real fear, and surprise. All emotions usually horrifying to her played into her mind at once and meant nothing. She didn't know if she was disassociating or if her mind had just broken, but she stopped being able to process anything new. Her life was gone, magic existed, her maid got laid more than her, maybe she's married, her cat was going to starv- "GO TO THE WRITING TABLE!"
Jean almost felt as if she had been kicked in the head. "The table, the desk; I need to look in the desk" she thought to herself. Compelled, she hurried to the other side of her new surroundings and began tearing the well curated writing desk apart drawer by drawer.
Surrounded by papers, pens, strange devices and stones, she stopped. The chilly room didn't bother her at the moment. The last few hours and the confusion were blunted. Her pain, both psychic and physical, meant little. Jean had what seemed to be the cure for her woes. She had a semblance of an explanation in her hands. A diary.
"Year 47, Freeze 17- it's lucky we grew so much this year and Harvest had such good weather. The newly annexed lands have many more mouths to feed but fertile cropland to compensate. We should be able to feed our holdings until well through the Fallow season. That is of course, unless we're called to go on campaign again. Who knows these days? Things change, they remain the same- surprises happen… too many surprises. But that is life, isn't it? Surprises like Tristan being said to return in just a few days from his mission, that's a surprise. I am interested to have words with him. Learn what he has learned, and of course- I look forward to greeting him properly besides.
Today has been long, today has been cold… time to retire for the evening.
Before I go- the stars from my window seem different and strange. I'll need to speak to Mattia about this in the morning.
Goodnight humble diary,
-Veronica"
Jean read the last page of the diary. Confused, intrigued, scared, she sat at the desk. She stared at the last entry in the diary and didn't know what to think. "Who am I, what am I? I'm called Veronica?" she said. "YES" echoed in her mind.
"I'm a fucking princess… That's not incredible. That's like… This is non-credible!" she said to herself.
For the next few hours Jean learned about herself- about Veronica through her diary. Taking a break from learning about the Duchy of Atrium, Jean/Veronica finally gazed out the window facing her. Jean realized at this moment she was several dozen meters from the ground and looking out onto a snowy valley in the twilight as the sun began to rise. Pine forests, a small silvery river running before small farm plots, little buildings, and finally the walls and towers of the castle she knew to be hers. Everything she saw she knew ultimately knew to be hers from Veronica's writing.
The problems could wait for tomorrow. Jean knew she had had a few hours until she'd be called to play the role of Veronica. She walked back towards her bed and curled up under the opulent sheets and lush furs.
"I just wanted to finish my strategy game save" she groaned as she drifted off to sleep.