Chapter II: Halflance

“You don’t know what a man is?” I said, half-whispering. At this point I was almost at the limit of my surprise. If I discovered anything new, I decided, I was going to faint right there and wait for someone else to figure things out.

“I really don’t, dear. I’m sorry to disappoint you with my lack of biology training. Perhaps Amina, the natural philosopher, would know what a man is. And why you used to be one for that matter…” the woman trailed off, looking towards the door. And now she thinks I’m crazy. Was I crazy? I looked down at my chest again. Given that I was still in need of a bra, I put that down as a “maybe”.

“A man is a kind of human, I guess? Similar to this except without breasts like this, and narrower hips, and different stuff down there,” I stammered, gesturing vaguely at my torso. The woman raised an eyebrow.

“That sounds like a kind of cancer,” she said, in a voice suggesting that she didn’t believe me. I sighed, flicking my eyes around the room once again. It was more ornately decorated than at first glance, with carved wooden moldings all around the ceiling and floor.

“Where am I?” I said.

“You’re in Lady Halflance’s estate, in one of the guest bedrooms. We found you facedown in the street, half-naked, and decided to bring you in.”

“Thank you, I remember that. I mean what city am I in?” I said.

“You’re in Amrinval.” That definitely wasn’t any city I had heard of.

“And what country?” The woman frowned with concern.

“The Republic of Bluerose…” she said, haltingly. That settled it then; I was hallucinating. I was unconscious after getting struck by lightning, and now I was having some sort of dream where I was a woman in a magical fantasy land. I leapt out of the bed and set off towards the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked, standing up from the stool. I chuckled, grinning widely. To be completely honest I wasn’t sure.

“I’m going to find out what my head can really come up with!” With that, shoved open the door and ran out into the hallway. From there, I picked a direction at random and started jogging. What I quickly discovered was that this place, wherever it was, was huge. I ran down what a hallway that felt like it was as long as a passenger jet, stopped to take a breath, then slid all the way down the bannister to the lower floor. Well, not all the way considering I fell off the well-oiled dark wooden rail about five feet before the bottom step. But I clambered back to my feet and chuckled. I had already survived a bolt of lightning to the face, so why not get in a little bit of trouble.

Just then, I ran into the first new person I had seen since leaving the bed. She was wearing a black dress, of a similar cut to the one the other woman had been wearing before, albeit with slightly more in the way of lace accentuations on the hem and sleeves. She was middle-aged, with streaks of grey in her neck-length black hair. Her skin was dark coppery brown and slightly pockmarked, and her face was rounded and soft, albeit with an expression of overwhelming shock. I think that last part was because of me.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you not wearing clothes?” I looked down again. I was technically not naked; however, the thin cotton dress which I had on as my only item of clothing was maybe not the most modest. Also I was wearing a dress, which was weird for me.

“Well, apparently my hallucinations have a sense of propriety, that’s good to know. I should get going,” I said, halfheartedly pointing a thumb over my shoulder. Then I booked it again. She started yelling.

“Get back here you unruly tart! The Lady won’t stand to have random, uncouth women running around her home, half-naked!” I was already well away from her, and I no longer cared. Maybe, I thought, I should get actually naked. If I was going to hallucinate, might as well see something interesting, right? I was shaken out of that thought by the sword pointed at my face.

It was a curved saber, probably something meant for horseback. Holding onto that sword was a tall, athletic person in a black military uniform whom I briefly mistook for a man. One look at her face dispelled that misconception, because she looked like a face you’d see on a magazine, with high cheekbones, perfect pale skin, a narrow nose, and squinting grey eyes. Regardless of that, she exuded militaristic pragmatism, with her blonde, spiky hair cut short, her body toned and seemingly ready to fight at any instant, and her expression, a suspicious grimace aimed in my direction.

“You have ten seconds to give me a reason why I shouldn’t kill you for breaking into the Lady’s home.” I put on my best poker face as if I wasn’t very close to pissing myself, and feebly lifted a finger in her direction.

“You aren’t real…” I pointed at myself. “And I’m probably already dead, so you can’t kill me.” Before the scary sword woman could react, presumably to cut my head off, the woman in the cream dress from earlier arrived, hurrying as fast as she could across the perfectly polished marble floor. Now that I was no longer in imminent threat of death, I could take an opportunity to more closely examine my surroundings. From the bottom of the stairwell, I had made my way into the entrance foyer of what I had begun to realize was some kind of sprawling Victorian manor. The whole room was light in color palette, with blue-grey paint and striped white-grey wallpaper on the walls. With the dull orange sunlight still streaming in through the windows, the place might have been fairly pretty if I wasn’t too preoccupied.

“Please don’t hurt her! She doesn’t mean any harm, really. At worst, she’s a harmless lunatic!” It was the woman who had first welcomed me into my wonderful new world. Now calling me a lunatic. Then again, if I was hallucinating all of this, she was right.

“A lunatic? Then might I ask, Anna, what this lunatic is doing in the manor?” asked the soldier. I finally had a name for her.

“We found her, face-down in the street, barely able to talk let alone move. Sir Margaret saw her, and suggested we take her in until she got better. And when she woke up, well…” Anna looked at her feet, ashamed. Poor thing. She wasn’t real of course, she was just a figment of my imagination.

The soldier flared her nostrils. “Of course it was Sir Margaret’s idea. We shall have to wait for Lady Halflance to decide what is to be done with this… wastrel.” I wasn’t sure what the word ‘wastrel’ meant, but from the way she said it, it didn’t mean anything good. I decided to make an attempt at peace, extending my arm towards the woman who was still aiming a sword at my face.

“Hi, my name’s Marcus, what’s yours?” After several dozen consecutive awkward moments, the scary soldier woman sheathed her saber.

“You shall refer to me as Miss Rook, Master of Arms. Just because I feel no need to kill you now does not mean you have escaped all judgement.” At that, Rook spun around on her heel, and began absentmindedly pacing the foyer.

“Pleased to meet you… Mar-cus,” said Anna, bowing her head slightly. “That’s an odd name, I guess you aren’t from around here.”

“No, I’m from a place called Chicago, on Earth. But, you’re a hallucination so there’s not really a good reason to tell you that,” I said.

“You keep saying that I’m a hallucination. But I’m real, I know that. What makes you think that this is a hallucination?” Anna asked.

“I mean it’s really obvious, isn’t it? I got struck by lightning, which probably did all sorts of things to scramble my brain, and now I think I have a different body,” I pointed vaguely in the direction of my breasts, “and I’m in a world that doesn’t exist where everybody dresses like it’s a BBC drama. It makes perfect sense.” Anna rolled her eyes.

“First wondering why you’re a woman, now this. You really are a philosopher aren’t you. Come Mar-cus, let’s get you dressed before you get a public indecency charge.” Anna took me by the arm and pulled me back towards the stairwell upwards. Just as we reached the doorway separating the bright foyer from the darker, more beige room at the bottom of the stairs, another stranger stepped out from behind the doorframe, blocking our path.

She was tall, seemingly a giantess compared to my own frame, and wrapped in a long riding jacket. Given how tall she would have to have been otherwise, I realized might have been smaller than before. In a stark contrast to Miss Rook, she was skinny, almost skeletal, with bony fingers and gaunt features. Her eyes, looking down at me with almost casual disdain, were deeply-set and icy blue. That, combined with her hooked nose, created the impression of a bird of prey surveying the land from above.

“Lady Halflance, hello there! I was just guiding this young lady to the dressing rooms!” said Anna, wilting before the Lady’s gaze. Halflance paused for a moment before speaking.

“Is this the ‘half-naked wastrel’ I was told of?” She spoke slowly, as if having to carefully choose each word.

“Yes, her name is Mar-cus. As I said, I was just about to remedy that by bringing her to the dressing room!” Anna was still holding onto my arm, trying to pull me forwards, but Lady Halflance had me pinned down with her eyes.

“And what leads you to believe that this young woman is entitled to be dressed by my household?” said Halflance. The color instantly drained from Anna’s face.

“I...I...Sir Margaret brought her in. I thought we were giving her hospitality?”

“Margaret told me everything. I would not have done the same, but Margaret is certainly a softer personality then myself, and I respect that. My question is why this girl belongs here, rather than in an asylum where she might cavort with the other mental patients,” said Halflance. Her voice was deep like a storm-wracked arctic sea. It would have terrified me if it were real.

“You can’t scare me. You’re not real,” I said, staring into her eyes. She couldn’t have been real, because none of this was real, right? But then why was everything so consistent, and so normal? It didn’t make sense for any of this to be real anyway. Halflance, meanwhile, crossed her arms and sighed in thought. After a long moment, she reached into a small pocket by her chest, pulling forth a small hardcover book.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“If this is a hallucination, if I am a hallucination, then myself and everything on my person are merely a construction of your damaged mind, no?” I furrowed my brow. Apparently my hallucinations were unusually self-aware, or…

“Yeah.”

“Are you a poet, Mar-cus?” Halflance continued.

“No, I’m not.” I grabbed the book out of her hand.

“These are the collected works of the poet Leseon. Perhaps her words will prove enlightening,” said Halflance, reverting to her collected stance. I opened the book to a random page. It was… poetry. Poetry with meter, and imagery and things that I vaguely remembered from my high school english class that I got a C in. So I flipped it to another page. More poetry, a different poem, also with structure and meaning and evocative words. I could never have imagined something like that. So I flipped to another page, near the back and found more of the same. All of this was real, everything I was seeing was real. I dropped the book, and one of my hands gently nudged one of my breasts which I had now, because all of this was real.

By the time I realized I was getting lightheaded, I had already collapsed into Anna’s arms, and was getting dragged away.