We took our time with lunch, but didn’t spend much time lounging around after, since the leaders of the caravan -- which I supposed was Kazumi and whoever else was in charge of logistics -- didn’t want to burn too much daylight. We kept a steady pace until nightfall, where we came across a small crossroads with a few buildings and I was informed that we’d arrived at the town of Steven. It had apparently been named after a local legend. The legend went that the town had been founded by a man whose name everyone had forgotten and so everyone had agreed to pretend the man’s name had been Steven.

“The history of Steven is truly fascinating,” I said with the straightest face I’d ever pulled with so much effort, when we were greeted by the innkeeper, who was also the resident blacksmith, nurse, doctor, cobbler and something called an alderman, which I took to mean that this Swiss army knife of a person was the closest thing you’d find to a mayor in the town of Steven. He looked so proud I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“What’s your name?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going so I could keep from laughing. I didn’t want to offend the man, who seemingly wasn’t too intimidated by me. I didn’t know whether this was because he’d never met Queen Eliza, which was likely, or because I’d had to enter his establishment by crouching and waddling through his front door.

“Stephen,” he said with a bright, beaming smile, his face pure honesty and kindness. It was probably the most difficult thing I had ever done to keep looking at him straight on and breathe through my nose. I heard a cough behind me, and turned to see Sabine hide her face a little deeper in her hood, but she couldn’t hide the faltering poker-face from me. The fact that I was consistently bumping into the beams that made up the roof of the inn was not exactly helping.

“Really? How… unlikely,” I said with the kind of grace I would expect from a Queen myself. But only barely.

“Thank you!” It wasn’t a compliment, and I didn’t understand why he took it as one. I looked around his establishment, hoping to give him a compliment, and got one of my horns tangled in a chandelier. Sabine made a noise that was either a barked laugh or an expert goose call.

“Excuse me,” she said and shuffled outside to join Erza, who had, uncharacteristically, left early to have a little giggle of her own.

“She has a medical condition,” I said through gritted teeth as I was trying to ignore the muffled laughter coming from outside. I managed to untangle my horn with a lot of jingle, which we all suffered in silence, while the town’s mayor looked up at me. Of course, Stephen had probably never been in the presence of royalty, and, like anyone who has ever been in the presence of people they had no idea how to react to but who are definitely higher on the social ladder, he simply smiled at everything I did nervously and hoped I didn’t commit something queenly on him, his house or his town. Kazumi only hissed softly next to me, but said nothing. When I looked down to her, I did see her clenching and unclenching her fists, so I could tell she wasn’t having an easy time herself.

I decided against sitting down anywhere. The tables and chairs looked sturdy enough and, I had to admit, the whole place looked well-maintained, but I didn’t think myself or Kazumi would survive it if I sat on a table and it crashed into pieces underneath me, so instead we rented rooms and hot meals for ourselves. I was intensely grateful the inn had downstairs rooms accessible from the main central room, so I wouldn’t have to try and squeeze myself into a hallway designed for people half my size, or, god forbid, up a flight of stairs.

Getting through the door itself was already something of an experience, but it was then that I was confronted with the unfortunate reality of the bed, which was going to be uncomfortably small, even if I tried to curl up on it, and probably wouldn’t hold my weight. So I put the blankets and pillows on the floor and tried to make myself comfortable. As I looked up at the ceiling, some things occurred to me.

The duvets I was using to create my makeshift bed were very soft. This seemed unlikely. While, sure, people had been making things soft since there had been sheep, I doubted the likelihood of these bed covers being as soft here as they’d been in, say medieval Europe. There were a lot of similarities between this world and the one I’d come from, and I had to wonder which had come first. I hadn’t given it much thought, originally, but the thought wouldn’t leave my mind. Was the game accidentally based on an existing world, or had the creation of a game world created this one?

There were things here that were definitely not in the game, for example. There were animals in the fields there hadn’t been in the virtual worlds. But there were problems with using that as some kind of proof. Perhaps the world, once it had popped into existence, had simply filled in the blanks that had been the result of technical limitations. Alternatively, it was possible that the creatures I’d seen here had been exclusive to the Dragon Queen expansion pack, though that didn’t seem likely.

I lay awake for hours, considering the possibility that the world I was in was only a bit over a year old. I wondered how the people in it would respond to the idea that their creator was a team of underpaid and overworked industry drones who had done their best to create an artistically cohesive product that would sell well. The other one was also strange. The person or people who had first come up with the idea for this world had somehow managed to create a game that was almost, but not quite, the same as a world that already existed somewhere else.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

At some point I must have fallen asleep because suddenly it was morning. I was glad neither Kazumi or Sabine had felt it necessary to wake me up so they wouldn’t make the noises they made when they saw me in my underwear. I was still getting used to what was considered proper in this world, and I didn’t like offending them. I hoisted myself into my dress, and magicked the armor back on, which again knocked the air out of me when it flung itself at me, and tried to make my hair somewhat presentable before crouching out the door into the main room. Sabine, Kazumi and Erza were having breakfast as I stretched myself out to my full length.

Kazumi and Sabine both seemed to sigh when they saw me and then looked at each other, and I couldn’t help but wonder what they’d been talking about. Erza just laughed at their reactions and mumbled something as I approached.

“... right?” I heard Sabine say, just as I joined them. Apparently they’d found an extra large stool, which had been built a few years ago when a hill giant had decided to move to the area, before they’d been drafted into Queen Eliza’s army. Breakfast was silent, with a lot of glances shot between Sabine and Kazumi as we ate, and I wondered if something was growing between them. I hadn’t pegged either of them as romantically attracted to other women, but honestly, who could blame them. Back in the old world I’d often been a little sad that I never would’ve gotten the chance to be a gay girl, and I never understood straight women.

“How did everyone sleep?” I asked the table, largely to distract myself from the feeling of missing out when it came to Sabine and Kazumi, and everyone made affirmative noises that told me they had slept fine, thank you for asking. Sabine did the polite thing, asking me about my own night. “Ehh,” I shrugged, “sleeping on the floor wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but I got some sleep.”

“Oh my god,” Kazumi said. “I’m so sorry, Eliza. We hadn’t… I’d totally forgotten…” She looked embarrassed, and even a little hurt. I didn’t like it when she was upset, so I quickly smiled and raised a hand to cut off further apologies.

“You’re fine, Kazumi. I slept fine. I kinda got used to Eliza’s big bed, but I’m honestly fine.”

Sabine looked at me with a mixture of pity and something else that would’ve made me blush if I hadn’t been purple to begin with. The vibe around the table was very strange and I looked to Erza, hoping to find something familiar and calm to hold on to, but I just found the orc woman leaning on her hand and smiling at me and I nearly yelped. I cleared my throat and stood up. “Per-- Perhaps we should get going. I want to get to Otto’s keep before the evening.”

Sabine tried to say something but her voice cracked, to which Erza responded with another soft, low laugh. While you’d expect an orc woman to laugh loudly and jovially, Erza’s chuckle was deep and gentle, like she was much larger than she actually was, and you could imagine feeling her laugh reverberate in your own chest. It was like being laughed at by a cat who is sitting outside your fishbowl. It was deeply attractive, and Sabine blushed. I was just glad it wasn’t aimed at me. The atmosphere had gotten weird, but I had no idea what had caused this change in attitude from all of them.

We got packed and ready, and all of my personal guard had already broken up the camp they’d set up in the nearby field and were standing at attention by The Carriage. The day’s journey was less animated than it had been the day before, with everyone shooting each other ‘meaningful’ glances, a phrase I hated because I had no idea about the actual meaning of the actual glances. But people looked each other in the eyes a whole lot, me included, and didn’t say anything with words, and whatever else they said was spoken in a language I definitely didn’t speak. It was late afternoon when Otto’s castle slowly drifted into view from behind a small hill. It was a beautiful white keep built on a hillside.

“Whitehallow Castle,” Kazumi said with some admiration in her voice. Considering the kind of person I’d gotten to know her as, I wasn’t surprised she preferred Whitehallow over our own castle, which was black and hung like an unspoken threat over the nearby landscape and probably had a name like “Blackstone” or “Hope’s End” or something similarly ominous. Whitehallow, by contrast, looked like a fairytale castle, and I wondered if it was perhaps another one of the end-game rewards for the downloadable content. It was beautiful, like a pearl in the sun. It was a little annoying to know that a toad like Otto von Turtlesmurfer was the sole lord of these lands.

As our arrival was signalled with horns, we rolled into the castle’s main courtyard, and Baron Otto -- “Count”, Kazumi started to correct me, but then she stopped herself with a snakelike grin and said that it wouldn’t matter for much longer -- waited for us with with his own retinue of what seemed to be silver-and-gold armoured guards.

I stepped out of the carriage first, at Erza’s advice. “Be the first to leave the cart, Eliza. Tower over him and don’t let him get to you.” It was good advice, but executing it was going to be its own ordeal. I stopped in front of Otto and just looked down at him. Offering my hand wasn’t an option. I wasn’t going to bend over just to let him do that thing where wannabe gentlemen slobber over the back of your hand, and just holding it out would’ve put it just outside of his reach. While hilarious, it wasn’t the kind of tone I wanted to set.

“It is good to see you, Your Highness. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” Otto had, apparently, been good at some things, once upon a time, warfare and strategy most of all. But though he was a remorseless sycophant, that was something he wasn’t very good at. His greeting sounded less than genuine, and I felt like I had to justify being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Considering the circumstances, Otto probably wouldn’t have expected me to leave my castle much at all. I was more than happy to prove him wrong.

“There’s someone I would like you to meet, Otto.” I took a step to the side and Sabine came forward and took her hood down. We’d done what we could to make her seem as lich-like as we could. Kept her hair out of her eyes to draw attention to their redness, put her in heels so she’d be more imposing, and she might have used a little bit of magic to make the air around her feel colder so that Otto would feel a gust of frosty air run over him as he saw her. He looked a little frightened, which was the exact kind of reaction we’d hoped to elicit, but not by much. “This is the newest member of my court. Countess Sabine, the Lich of Innshire.” That last addition had been an idea of Sabine herself.

“I’m afraid I’ve… never heard of the good Countess, My Queen. What County might be under her purview?” He fidgeted nervously, flattening his coat and playing with some of the medals pinned to it.

Sabine took a few steps forward until the slight height difference between them, improved by Sabine’s heels, became more obvious, and she smiled at him with teeth that looked slightly sharper than they should be.

“Take a wild guess, Otto.”