Hi, the chapter, as always, beta'd for you by Magikarp Karp. Thanks!
(Holidays are killing me. The lack of productivity and routine is killing me. I'm killing me. I'm the worst.)
Today's warnings: outside of a ridiculous Deus-Ex Machina pulled straight out of Isekai Protagonist's ass, none.
[Regalis: in search of Peace and Quiet!]
•chapter four•
Girl has a talk. Girl gets home. Girl blurts out the darnedest things.
•••
They make their way back with a two-day slide, due to the unforeseen wounded elf they found in the forest. Technically, they could have just have gone back the very next day, but Penelope wanted to keep the man in a stable bed for a while more and get some food and water into him, to get his energy levels somewhat up. Mostly iron-rich foods, and vitamin K, which meant a lot of liver and spinach, because those were the most readily available.
Anaemia wasn’t fun, warfarin poisoning even less so, and Adetta was not on the receiving end of the treatment, but she’d die happy if she never saw a liver dish or spinach ever again—even if all the man could ingest was a disgusting-looking, foul-smelling paste that tasted like iron and meat.
(Cooked liver had this characteristic stench, and whether it was Mary or Adetta, it made her gag.)
They still had no idea who the elf was; he was rarely conscious, feverish, and cold. Also, probably because they were the ones who saved his life, if either Adetta, or Elijah, or both, weren’t in the room with him in the case he woke up, he was prone to flying into a panic attack and wouldn’t calm down until he either passed out or one of the kids came in.
It was understandable, as he was very weak, probably delirious, and most likely associated them with his current continuous survival.
His flying into an agitated state after such severe blood loss was a really bad thing, so Adetta just moved to the room he was in and slept the second night in the armchair. When she woke up, Elijah and Fenrir were sleeping on the floor by the chair, in a nest of pillows and blankets, and she had a bad neck cramp. The elf woke shortly after, still tired and maybe a bit delirious, but when she handed him a glass of water he looked at her, drank it, and laid back down.
He actually slept that time, instead of just passing out.
Slowly, his skin started to colour back into darkish caramel from the previous pale-ashen. Or maybe that was Adetta’s wishful thinking, he still overall looked like shit.
(Maybe she just didn’t want another person to emotionally depend on her—two were enough, thank you. She really wasn’t getting paid enough for this.)
Adetta, Elijah and Fenrir ride with the elf in the carriage, whole way back. Penelope told them that he’s stable enough that he will manage few hours without her constant care, and he should sleep through the thing anyway. Rosaria insists she rides with them, and for a moment Adetta isn’t sure how in the actual seven hells is the man supposed to rest in a carriage with a toddler, one small child and two only slightly bigger children, but then she remembers she took some fairy-tale books to kill time during the ride, so she cracks one open and reads it aloud until her throat can’t handle any more speaking. She reads fluently, which would have completely pretty normal were she still Mary in modern world, but has her called prodigy in the late medieval/renaissance of the setting of [Regalis]. But thanks to her fluency, she doesn’t stumble, and her voice lulls all the others into sleep
The fairy tales of this world are conveniently almost exactly the same as those of her old world. Of course, there are also less child-friendly versions, as if straight out of Brother’s Grimm, and Adetta read them, but that was at her own discretion.
She sighs, closing the book, and looks up. She startles a bit, when she meets the amethyst-purple gaze directed straight at her, half-tired and half-curious. Everyone else is asleep but her and the elf, who’s fully and well immobilized with exhaustion and anaemia and should be sleeping most of them all.
Adetta tells him as much.
“You should be sleeping and getting stronger, you know. We didn’t save you for you to not get better.”
He smiles, a small and tired thing, somewhere between smug, cocky, and very tired. What Adetta didn’t expect, was an actual, verbal answer.
“I am getting better,” he tells her, voice raspy from disuse for past few days, and the girl visibly startles. His smile only grows, now more amused and teasing than anything. “Where are we going?”
Oh, right, he probably has no idea who they are, other than that he’s in Sheothia and they’re human.
Adetta kind-of wants to bang her hand on the carriage’s floor. Even the smartest people do the dumbest things sometimes, and she was far from being the smartest.
“I’m Adelia Bellville, but you can call me Adetta,” she introduces herself, name, house, and nickname. Because she saved his life and ruined her dress with his blood, so she might as well share a familial alias. “We’re currently travelling back to the main estate, where you’ll probably do most of your healing. It’s comfortable there, not a lot of prying eyes.”
The elf hums, closing his eyes for a moment.
“I’ve been told to be wary of Bellvilles,” he tells her eventually, and Adetta startles again.
“H-how so?” she asks in confusion.
“Not Bellvilles per say,” he clarifies. “Just the woman with pink eyes that married into them, and all the children she birthed.”
Which, obviously, included Adetta, who was growing more and more confused, and a little bit scared.
“But then, so was I warned against the queen with red hair, and her children.”
That would mean queen Scarlett, mother of Alastair and Chantal, and by extension, them.
“What the fuck,” said Adetta softly but with a lot of emotion, putting all her confusion into one simple sentence. “Why?”
The elf just smiles again, but all he says is an elusive; “you will learn eventually. It’s not my place to say.”
For the next few minutes, she just stares at him intensely, to the point where it makes him uneasy. Serve him right, for dropping such a cryptic bombshell and no more information. Adetta knew that her mother was more than a little dangerous, with a lot of secrets and probably a closet full of corpses, but to the point that elven royalty was warned about her?
And the queen of the nation, mother of the Capture Target, and Penelope’s friend, was also implicated in whatever that was?
Adetta hated it, the long-reading web of secrets. She’d like all the answers yesterday, please.
What fucker. Didn’t even introduce himself, and already gave her a mystery.
(But were the elves wary of what Penelope could do, or of offending her? How did it factor in her joining forces with them in Original Timeline after OG Adelia’s death?)
“You didn’t introduce yourself,” Adetta tells him petulantly, stomping the mystery down into some corner of her mind for the time being. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Oh, apologies, my lady,” he chuckles. It’s weak and raspy, but he doesn’t seem painful from it, which indicates that his abdomen was healed well. “I’m Shelor Alytharion, third prince of Ifa Nalore.”
“Oh,” Adetta blinks. “Okay.”
They look at one another for a moment, and then her mind comes to a halting screech.
And then it clicks.
Shelor Alytharion. Elven prince, found dead on Sheothia’s grounds. The guilt of his death shifted onto humans, a convenient pretext for Ifa Nalore to march to war with Sheothia—a war that would last seven years and devastate both countries so much so that, eventually, wracked with famine and plague, they would come to an uneasy, shaky truce.
One great war caused by the death of Shelor.
Shelor, who was weak, grumpy, and tired, but alive in their carriage.
The war that was caused by a death that did not happen this time around.
And it was all Adetta’s doing.
“I did not say it yet,” Shelor starts, ripping the girl out of her thoughts, “but I am grateful for you finding and saving me. Had I died, Ifa Nalore would have made it a pretext for war, most definitely, and it wouldn’t end well for anyone. Not to tempt the evils, but- I think you might have just prevented a devastating war with your actions.”
Oh well, Adetta thought. It sounds about right. It’s the type of shit Isekai protagonists do.
“That’s… Fortunate,” she says carefully, because otherwise she might just scream at the ridiculous Deus Ex Protagonist her life just pulled on her—that she was, unwittingly, responsible for. “You’re, uh, you’re welcome. I guess.”
“Oh? You seem spooked,” he says.
Shit, Adetta thinks, fuck, he noticed. Of course he fucking noticed.
“I’m just… I’m just thinking what would have happened if we didn’t stumble upon you,” she tells him, a quick save and it’s not even a lie. “It would have been… Bad.”
“A young child should not be concerned with such things.”
“A young child would be concerned with such things if someone close to them died because of it,” she snaps back, looking, not so discreetly, at the tiny blonde toddler snoozing in Elijah’s lap. Shelor’s eyes follow the directory of her gaze, and he hums.
“Are you perchance graced with prophetic dreams?”
Adetta jumps a little and snaps her head to look at him, eyes wide and body frozen like a deer in the headlights, because he hit much too close to home.
“Don’t worry, I won’t press,” he placates. “Precognition is unreliable at best and constantly changes until it becomes a fixed past. That’s why all big oracles are taken, while seriously, with a grain of salt. Even the smallest, seemingly inconsequential action can bring about huge changes.”
(Like being nice to her stepbrother. Like going with her father to the town and saving Fenrir via sheer dumb luck.
Like three children going into the forest to gather herbs, and stumbling upon a dying man, who isn’t even a simple man, but-)
Adetta looks at him, searching, and his eyes are earnest, if tired. She nods, satisfied.
“Then go to sleep,” she orders him. “You must have exhausted yourself with this talk anyway.”
“Don’t order me around, I’m a prince,” Shelor huffs.
“I’m going to do whatever I want, I’m a spoiled, rich noble girl and you kind-of fucked up my birthday picnic.”
“Oh,” he blinks. “Happy birthday, then, but it’s not my fault you stumbled on me.”
She rolls her eyes at him with a huff, and he chuckles. He’s right, of course, it’s nobody’s fault but Adetta who followed the stench of blood like a person with no self-preservation instincts she secretly is. But it worked out well, in the end, didn’t it? It usually did.
“I can’t sleep anymore, though. I’m still exhausted, but I’m restless. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to-“
“Do you want me to sing you to sleep?” Adetta asks, because it’s not the first, or last time she would. Shelor blinks at her, seems to consider it for a bit, then shrugs and nods. She hums, kind of surprised that a grown man—an elf, no less, and they reached maturity at a hundred and twenty—would even want an eight-year-old human brat sing him to sleep, but who she was to back out now. She proposed that to begin with.
She takes a breath and thinks for a moment—does she even know anything appropriate for now? She’s not going to sing lullaby for the stormy night in the middle of a sunny day.
But no, there’s one, thankfully.
Wandering child of the earth
Do you know just how much you're worth?
You have walked this path since your birth
You were destined for more
There are those who'll tell you you're wrong
They will try to to silence your song
But right here is where you belong
So don't search anymore
You are the dawn of a new day that's waking
A masterpiece still in the making
The blue in an ocean of grey
You are right where you need to be
Poised to inspire and to succeed
You'll look back and you'll realize one day
In your eyes there is doubt
As you try to figure it out
But that's not what life is about
So have faith there's a way
Though the world may try to define you
It can't take the light that's inside you
So don't you dare try to hide
Let your fears fade away
Shelor keeps looking at her, and it’s kind of unnerving but also kind of fascinating to see consciousness gradually slip from his gaze, as his eyelids close and body relaxes. The kids also shift, Elijak moving his legs in Fenrir’s lap and turning his head so that it bumps Adetta’s thigh.
Rosaria opens her eyes blearily and yawns, and lets her head fall back onto Elijah’s chest.
You are the dawn of a new day that's waking
A masterpiece still in the making
The blue in an ocean of grey
You are right where you need to be
Poised to inspire and to succeed
You'll look back and you'll realize one day
You are the dawn of a new day that's waking
A masterpiece still in the making
The blue in an ocean of grey
You are right where you need to be
Poised to inspire and to succeed
Soon you'll finally find your own way
He closes his eyes, shifts a bit under the blanket, and the exhaustion finally knocks him out, leaving Adetta alone to collect her screaming thoughts in peace.
She quite possibly just prevented the war that served as the background to the most of the plot of the game, and ninety-percent of the future of the world she knew.
What the fuck.
Rosaria sleep-crawls onto her lap, and Adetta sighs, making herself comfortable, and decides to also nap a little. There was little else to do, and the only other alternative, really, was a migraine.
♦►☼◄♦
She only wakes after they’ve arrived, hours later, with a mean cramp in the area of her neck and shoulders that will probably take days to get out. It’s her mother who shakes her awake, and the carriage is immobile already. All the other children are already awake, and have been for a while judging by their fairly aware expressions.
They didn’t wake her up, because it wasn’t a thing that one did, unless one was Penelope, and, quite probably, capable of bitch-slapping literal gods with a serene smile. The sun was up in the sky, but quickly falling down to the western horizon, painting reddening Bellville gardens progressively more autumn than they actually were.
Adetta yawns, stretching, and winces at the neck cramp, cursing sleeping in sitting position propped against the wooden frame, but she gets up nonetheless. She pats Fenrir on the head, immediately setting his tail off, then Rosaria, Elijah who reddens, and even Penelope, who just huffs in amusement, and then she jumps down, foregoing the carriage steps. Crawforde climbs into the carriage once it’s vacated, and soon gets back out, this time with semi-awake, blanket-wrapped Shelor in his arms.
“That looks hot as fuck,” Adetta says before she can stop herself, because her sleep-addled brain is more raw Mary than the mindset of Adetta, and she stills. Crawforde does, too, and he goes very, very red on the face. A second of tense silence passes, and suddenly Penelope is straight-up cackling, wild and unladylike but very amused and appreciative. Crawforde still stands by the carriage door, elf in his arms, the man beet-red, spluttering, and shocked, and Shelor has hidden his face in Crawforde’s shoulder, shaking with something that could be amusement as much as exasperation. Someone that sounds a lot like Elijah groans in the background, and she hears the tell-tale slap of a palm hitting a forehead.
Mary was a shameless fujoshi, so sue her, it was one of few joys in her life.
(And Crawforde—tall, handsome, blue-eyed, blonde, princelike—looked very much shippable with Shelor—also tall, also handsome, but elf on top of that, with long platinum hair and vibrantly amethyst eyes. One caring, one in need of care-
Okay, okay, stop, no. We’re not going there, Adetta, get your shit together. This is your father you’re trying to make gay in this scenario, and it would end up either with murder or a threesome, because with Penelope it really was a coin toss, and that was not something she was willing to imagine.
Thanks no thanks, brain. Can the ground open up and swallow her right about now, please?)
“A-Adetta-“ her father tries but she just, against all logic and her screaming mind, continues the narrative.
“What? Two good-looking men kissing is hot.”
Penelope began laughing so hard she started wheezing, and some maids approached her in concern. Elijah has squatted on the ground, face hidden in his hands, and Fenrir was patting his shoulder in a rare show of companionship between the two. Adetta was the oddest person the boy knew; one second, a perfect, standoffish, dainty lady who would absolutely never hesitate to stab a person, and just generally a responsible, mature person in the group, and then he turns around, and suddenly—this.
He was a child, sure, but he was old and aware enough to know very much what she meant.
She was the worst.
(He loved her anyway.)
♦►☼◄♦
After sleeping for the few good hours in the carriage, Adetta is kind of worried on how to make the other kids go to sleep during the actual night—and herself, too, while she’s at it. Children’s bodies, she rediscovered, were full of pent-up energy, and as much as Mary could just sit in one place pretty much the whole day, Adetta would have gone stir-crazy.
And so she proposes a weird combination of hide-and-seek and tag for the four of them to play. She, of course, teams with Rosaria—with Adetta’s magic-boosted speed and unexpected turns, even Fenrir has problems catching them, and with Rosaria’s nature magic, even Elijah has problems sensing them.
The boys wise up eventually and come to an uneasy truce to catch them, but by that point Adetta is rather winded, and her legs are starting to hurt, so she lets the boys catch them.
She quickly throws together some sandwiches with leftover ham and fresh herbs she picked in lieu a late dinner and leaves the other kids to be herded to bed while she heads back to her own.
About an hour later Elijah remembers that no, he still can’t sleep without Adetta, and comes to her room and then crawls into her bed. No longer than few minutes after that, Rosaria comes in hand-in-hand with Fenrir, and they do the same.
Adetta just sighs, surrounded by tiny sleeping children like some charm against bad dreams and monsters in the closet, and thinks, until the sleep takes her.
I could really use a bigger bed. We’re not going to be this small forever.
***
Bonus:
Hahaha, Adetta is so damn charming, it's no wonder she's building a Bakarina-level harem around her.
Yeah except she's fully aware of the sh*t that's happening. Or will be--when it starts.
Thanks for introducing me to that song. It's awesome <3
Psst, are you still alive?
I am alive and I am writing, but I'm also juggling driving license and hating every second of it. It's not a good environment for writing x.x
I think this is a good place to ask how fate work in this universe. Is everything based on causality or does fate favour certain outcomes? Of course, fate has different meanings in different stories, such as absolutely forcing an outcome when a prophecy has been revealed or marking those who were supposed to die for death Final Destination style.
I honestly doubt it is anything that major since the story is pointing towards the war being prevented just like that and Shelor being an important character later, but it could still be something more subtle. I'm thinking of something more along the lines of the idea that any event that isn't directly affected by a change will gravitate towards the original progression, rather than spiral away from it due to the butterfly effect.
Basically, if only causality matters, Adetta stopping the war would cause a butterfly effect on the surroundings that would cause a subtle but important shift in how everything happens - people will take a different route to work, have something different for lunch, not accidentally fall out of a tower, and so on. Having fate twist those largely unrelated actions back to the way they were would make things run a lot smoother in terms of having Adetta continue to encounter events from the original timeline, assuming that is what you want.
I'm not sure what you mean by fate, but I have regardless never been a fan of it. Ever since reading the Greek classics and how fate always wins, I was like 'well, f*ck that'. A person's life is shaped by their choices, actions, and reactions to the random events that happen to them. Maybe there is something in works somewhere deeper pushing characters to where they need to be in time we need to be (let's call it 'sheer dumb luck' or, alternatively, 'deus ex protagonist'), but there's no such thing as prophecy or anything.
There are factors at work that most characters are unaware of (yet), of course--there are many that will later come into play and make everyone go 'oh shit', but there's no such thing as actual predestined way the events will occur. Characters set goals to themselves and make hopeful wishes, and work towards them, stumble into deeper sh*t or are struck with sheer dumb luck. It is a matter of circumstance and too many parts of the clock working to count.
But yes, this timeline, as different as it is from the original [Regalis] game setting still will follow the path it would take originally, or it will adapt. The reason for it is simple; the world is the exact same, the rules governing it are exactly the same, and the only things that will ever become different are the things that come into direct or indirect contact with Adetta. She is the only thing that in actuality separates the Old Timeline from the revised One--she's the driving force that makes changes where she does, and only the changes she makes affect the world. Everything else follows the same road it did, because the world didn't change, the governing rules of reality didn't change, their life state, place and resources didn't change. In countries outside of Sheothia and Ifa Nalore nothing changes from the Original Timeline at all.
Making a change quite so huge as preventing a war will affect a lot of people, as well as the lack of famine. This will bring about a huge shift in the timeline; more people are alive, they make different connections, grow differently as people. Because of the prevention of war, Sheothia and Ifa Nalore, and their settings, will become a profoundly different places than they originally were.
It's not a matter of fate or anything, it's just another reality--a reality in which war didn't happen, and people reacted accordingly. As for Adetta and the events happening as they were supposed--only one of them after this will happen as it's supposed to, and it's the princess' accident. Outside of that, the world has changed, and I will showcase that.
As a matter of fact, there will be one rather massive shift in the pattern of the world that will make Adetta stop and thing about what the f*ck is she doing for a moment and then realize that the world she lives in is now it's own, and that she lost her future-knowing advantage. Fate will not be forcefully twisting things back to the way 'they were supposed to be'. What Adetta did, was create a whole new timeline--a whole new reality, separate from the original one.
This history is her own now, and it's no longer the setting of [Regalis: in search of love!]. It's a setting based on it, but it has became fundamentally different.
@MarqMortis Thanks. Even if you say you didn't understand the question, you still managed to answer it perfectly. Still, I'll try explain what I meant by fate.
In a lot of stories with alternate timelines or people who know the future, some events have a tendency to repeat themselves. In a visual novel/Telltale game, this could come across as repeated scenes and dialogue across multiple routes. I'd assume this is usually done so developers don't have to waste time writing the same scene five times with slightly different dialogue. However, in universe, you would expect all those small and big choices to snowball and create subtle differences in the story, such as slightly altered dialogue and interactions. The in universe way to explain this would be 'fate'. Some unseen force or tendency for (especially inconsequential) events to play out the exact same way multiple times.
You also mentioned prophetic dreams in this chapter. I take it this means they are more of 'here is a potential future' rather than 'this will happen in the future'. As for the princess's 'accident', I somehow got it into my head that it wasn't actually an accident... something about you calling the breeze 'unnatural'. Though I could just be completely wrong and have made that part up myself, we'll see.
@Thorium No, I'm a lot like GRR Martin on that department, I think (I only heard of his time-travel novels, didn't actually read them). What I mean is--when a change occurs within an 'original' timeline (who knows if it even is the true OG one) then things change and it becomes a completely new timeline. It branches out, and the world reacts to changes in the ways it would, with the resources and laws of the world and all. The world is reactive, not fate-driven. If you pull off stopping war like Adetta did, things will change. A lot.
As a game-dev-in-training myself, people utilize what Telltale does because if we wanted to make it so that the changes brought really changed things, then we'd have to make three, four, seven DIFFERENT, SEPARATE games in one game. And who would pay us for the extra work? In written stories I get way, waaay more flexibility with it. There's no war = there's no plague = a lot of originally dead people (like Rosaria and Victoria) are alive = the world works differently without having been wrought with a catastrophe.
Sure, some people, some things and some forces react in certain way, but when they react to different things, and/or at a different time, some events may happen similarly, but they will never be the same. And they're so similair only because it's the same person/thing/power reacting to something as it originally would.
It totally means 'here's some potential event in the future that may happen but who knows if you won't f*ck sh*t up and either make it way worse or prevent it completely by accident'. Prophecies are unreliable as f*ck because literally anything can change them. Time is a ball of yarn, every new thing, every choice that can be made differently, makes yet another branch. Nothing else may change, but it already is it's own timeline. Especially a far-in-the-future prophecies--those only have chance of coming true if they're super vague and can be interpreted in many ways, such a 'savior will be born'. Savior of what, from what? When? Who knows. It might very well just be a literal shepherd saving his literal sheep from a pack of literal wolves. It fits? It fits.
As for princess accident--in the original game, it was purely accidental. She just fell out of the window of a tower. This time around, though--well. Let me just say that someone wants war between Sheothia and Ifa Nalore enough to target an elven prince.
@MarqMortis Makes sense. Also, when I said that about game developers, it wasn't meant as criticism. It was litterally as you said - doing so would be way too much work compared to what you get out of it, making it a wasteful way to spend precious time and resources during development.
Good to get the princess thing out of the way. I would probably have been somewhat confused if I had kept believing that the original death was an assassination. It also makes perfect sense for the people who wanted to start a war to try again, especially since the whole butterfly effect thing from Adetta preventing the war likely would have kept the accident from happening in the first place.
@Thorium Yeah I know, I'm just stating how that works, and that games and written works are different mediums that are utilized and produced differently with the authority of someone who does both. Or, well, attempts to.
Princess' OG accident was a real, honest-to-god accident, but this time around it will be an attempted assassination, I think. I mean now thinking about it it genuinely makes sense.