In the dead of night, Rava Heartstrong ran through the castle courtyard wearing only a nightgown and a pair of slippers. Her long hair, braided into a ponytail that reached her lower back, swung wildly back and forth as she sprinted down the stairs and through the gate.
One of the palace guards ran after her, his sword drawn. “After her!” he yelled at the other guards. But they were too busy playing cards to stop her from running past.
“The king is dead! And the princess has killed him!” he shouted.
Suddenly the guards threw down their cards and grabbed their pikes and chased after her. By then, Rava had cleared the gate and was crossing the bridge.
Some guards chased after her on foot and others ran to the stable to mount their horses.
Rava turned off the main road, and headed for the forest. They would have trouble finding her there. The brush was too thick to canter a horse, and she could hide from them if she was clever enough. Then there was the witch. Rava had only ever heard rumors of the witch, but everyone said she lived in these woods, and everyone also said she could help grant wishes to those who were desperate enough to seek her help. And make no mistake, Rava was desperate. She was currently wanted for her Father’s murder and was being hunted by all of her Father’s men. Though she supposed they were not her father’s men anymore. Now they belonged to her brother, Prince Tristrain, whom she suspected was the true murderer of the King.
She cursed under her breath as she ran through a thorn bush cutting up the side of her legs. All through the night, until sunup, she ran through the forest. The castle guard had chased her, but she had managed to lose them in the dark woods. She knew they would still be out there somewhere, but for now she was safe.
A few times she stopped to drink from a stream, or eat some low hanging fruits. She went on like this until she was too tired to continue and fell asleep in the crook of an oak tree’s exposed roots.
Rava walked for two days straight, and in that time, she didn’t see a single person, let alone a witch. A few times she saw a rabbit or a deer, but she had no bow or spear to hunt them with. The longer she walked the more worried she became. Surely the forest beyond the castle was not this large. Wasn’t there supposed to be a village, or a road, or something? There was nothing but forest. The same trees in all directions stretching towards the edge of infinity.
She screamed, no longer afraid of being caught. “I’m here! Take me away! Take me back to the palace! Take me to prison! Anything is better than this endless, blasted forest.” She picked up a pinecone and whipped it at a bush as hard as she could.
She thought about turning around and going home, but she no longer knew which way home was. She was lost, good and true, and if she stayed out here any longer, she was either going to be eaten by a bear, or some other creature of the woods.
It was only her hatred of her brother, her deep desire to prove her innocence and reclaim her rightful place as next in line to the throne—no, Queen, her rightful place as Queen—that drove her forward. She pictured her brother’s smirking face, his hooked nose and dark stringy hair, and that gave her strength to keep moving. She would find the witch and she would have her revenge, no matter the cost.
Her feet ached, her stomach churned unhappily, and her eyes were red and puffy. The forest was a monotonous expanse of identical trees seemingly cloned a million times in all directions. The further she reached into the woods, the more homogenous it became, the more the bushes and the deer faded, and only the same kind of tree, the same stupid, ugly, disgusting tree, was there to keep her company.
She suddenly realized she hated trees—hated them more than the boring history lessons from her tutors, more than the demons of the nine hells, more than even her scheming younger brother.
Just when she thought she would never see anything but trees, the gods of her ancestors provided some small reprieve. The trees parted into a circular clearing with a small hill at the center. At the top of the grassy knoll was a house unlike any she had seen before. The house was two stories with a gabled roof and a veranda lined with rocking chairs. It was not made out of stone or untreated lumber like the houses of her hamlet. Instead, it was made out of yellow painted slats of wood and four-pane glass windows that were made with a level of precision that was far beyond even the King’s most skilled masons.
As she made her way up to the house, she saw a man sitting on one of the rocking chairs smoking a pipe. He wore a pair of faded denim overalls, and his face was sun beaten as if it had seen many days of hard work.
Rava walked up to the front steps of the house, catching the eye of the man smoking the pipe.
“I am in search of a witch that lives in these woods. Do you know where I shall find her?” she asked.
The man puffed a big O of smoke. “Ain’t no witches here. Just warm beds and home cooked food.” He leaned forward in the chair and looked her up and down. “And It looks like you could use a good home cooked meal right about now.”
Rava’s stomach growled audibly.
“Well come on in then, and I’ll fix ya somethin’ to eat. The name’s Dave by the way.”
“Well met Sir Dave. I am Rava Heartstrong.”
“Nice to meet you, Rava.”
Without much hesitation, and with all the hungry desperation of someone who spent multiple days lost in the woods, Rava followed the man inside. The inside of the house was even more confounding than the outside. There was leather furniture and paintings of people hanging on the wall that were so realistic she wondered if they really were paintings at all. Most confounding of all was a black rectangular box that showed a stream of moving images, almost like a window but to another place entirely.
“What in the nine layers of hell is this place?” Rava wondered aloud, mesmerized by the images inside the rectangular box.
“This is my home,” Dave said, taking notice of Rava’s look of awe at the strange objects in the house. “Don’t worry. Nothin’ dangerous here. Tell me, do you come from a medieval setting or something?”
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“I know not what that means,” Rava said, as they arrived in a room with a stove, a sink, and a long wooden table.
“Are there Kings and Knights where you come from? You some kind of princess, or sumthin’?”
“Yes, I am a princess. How did you know?”
“Just a lucky guess,” he said, with a cryptic smile.
He moved to another strange object that was even more confounding than the rectangle with the moving shapes. This object, though still rectangular, opened up in the center, and from inside cold air blasted out into the room. A yellowy light from within showed Rava a bounty of food and what looked like potions of which she could only guess the effect.
“Ha, I knew it! You are a witch! Or a wizard, I suppose.”
Dave chuckled as he pulled out some sliced meats and cheeses. “Nope, no magic here. Least, not the kind that you mean. This here is a refrigerator. It’s a box that keeps food cold so it don’t spoil.”
“That does not make me stop thinking you are a witch.”
“I thought it’s a wizard when it’s a guy.”
“I care not. To me you are a witch.”
“Fine with me.” Dave shrugged. “Don’t make it any truer.” He put the sliced meats and cheeses between two slices of bread and then got a glass of water from a magic dispenser on the refrigerator.
“Here,” He said. “Eat up.”
Rava didn’t care that it was witch food. It tasted delicious. She ate the stacked bread and meat and cheese in three bites, then washed it down with the cool water.
When she was done eating she looked up at Dave who sat across from her at the table sipping on a steaming witches' potion in a ceramic mug.
“Since you really are a witch, I must beseech you. Can you grant me the power to defeat my evil brother and win back my crown?”
“I already told you, I ain’t no witch.” Dave sighed. “Look Rava, I been here a long time, and I learnt that it's best to just rip off this band-aid quickly. None of that stuff is real. It’s all just someone else’s fantasy.”
“That’s ridiculous, of course it is real. I ran away from home after my brother framed me for murdering my father, and now I need your help to get my revenge.”
“Fine, if it is real, then what’s the name of the kingdom you come from?”
Rava opened her mouth and pointed her finger up confidently, but no words came out. She suddenly realized she had no idea what the kingdom her father ruled was called. Now how was that possible?
“Um it’s called the…um…the kingdom!”
“The kingdom you come from is called the kingdom?”
“Yes.” She crossed her arms and nodded her head.
“Then what is your father’s name? Surely you know that.”
“Um…it's um… Oh gods. I don’t know. How don’t I know? That doesn’t even make any sense. I’ve known him my whole life, how can I not know his name?”
Dave smiled at her, and she saw a bit of pity in that smile. “It’s like I said, none of that was real. This is all a story, and you’re just a character in it. It’s all the fantasy of the guy who dreamt this whole place up. I can feel him now, watching us, making this moment. He’ll leave soon, but never fully. Can you feel him Rava?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “Maybe.”
“Well, this guy, this person who makes all this up in his head, is kind of like the god of this world. But I don’t like to call him that, I like to call him the Bastard. Cuz that’s what he is, a real Bastard.”
“I don’t like this. This must be a dream. I’ve got to be dreaming. Any second now I’m going to wake up and be back in my bed.” Rava started slapping herself in the face. “Wake up! Wake up!”
Dave grabbed her wrist to stop her from hitting herself.
“It's not a dream. Not our dream, anyhow. And it's not so bad once you get used to it.”
“I don’t want to get used to it. I want to go home. I want to stop my foul brother from taking over the kingdom!”
“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “That ain’t never gonna happen. That’s why you’re here. This is the place where you go once he gives up on our stories.”
“No. That’s not true. That cannot be true. That’s just hogwash. It’s just…no,” Rava said. She stood up and threw her empty plate across the room. She could not accept the truth, and so she threw a tantrum.
Dave grabbed her by the shoulders and held her firmly in place.
“Now you stop that now, ya hear? If you're gonna make trouble you can just move right back into the forest. This is a house of peace, gosh darnit.”
Rava looked up at Dave. He seemed so sure of himself. She wanted not to believe him, but she couldn’t deny what he was saying. Something about her always felt wrong, always felt incomplete. She only knew ten people total and half of them didn’t even have names.
“How do you know all this?” she asked, calming down from her fit.
“It’s cuz I was the first. He made me and he made this house. Don’t rightly know what fer, but I got this here country accent, so I think I was ‘sposed to be a farmer or sumthin’. But he gave up on me before he even gave me a last name. That’s why I’m just Dave. Not Dave Johnson, or Dave Harrison, just Dave. Damn Bastard.”
“I don’t understand. Why did he give up on us so quickly?”
“Don’t rightly know that either. But you’re welcome to stay here til you figure that out. Long as you promise not to throw any more of them fits.”
Rava took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, trying to search her memory, but all she found were gaps, holes in her reality.
“I’ll behave. I promise.”
“Good. Now would you like to meet the others?”
“Others?”
“Yeah, you think the Bastard only gave up on us two? Heck no.” Dave turned his head towards the staircase in the living room. “Hey everyone!” He shouted. “We got a newbie, y’all come on down now and say howdy.”
Rava heard the creaking of floorboards and the shuffling of feet from upstairs.
“Oh gods. I don’t know if I can handle this.” She stood up from the table, preparing herself to greet the others.
“Don’t worry. They’re good folk. Bit strange, but well, then again, so are you.”
One by one the strangest group of people she had ever seen filed into the kitchen. There was a teenage boy with swooshy black hair and a massive sword slung across his back. There was a woman with full red lips and an even fuller figure wearing a sparkly red dress. And then there was a man who was well… he was a banana. He was a giant banana with big googly eyes, stick figure black arms and legs, and white gloved hands with four fingers.
Rava swooned and Dave pulled out a chair to catch her.
“Don’t worry Rava. It’s okay. That’s just The Banana Man. He ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
The Banana Man pulled a banana out of thin air. “Hi, I’m The Banana Man. Would you like a banana?” he asked in a jovial, bubbly voice.
“Not now,” Dave said. “Give her some space.”
“I’ll take a banana,” the boy with the dark hair said.
The Banana Man rejoiced as he handed the banana to the boy.
“Everyone, I’d like you to meet Rava Heartstrong. Everyone, introduce yourselves.”
The boy with the dark hair and the sword stepped forward and tossed the banana peel in a can filled with garbage.
“I’m Dax Darkblood. And one day I’m gonna be the Wizard King!”
The woman with the big lips and a full figure stepped forward. “I’m Scarlet Everclear. Don’t worry honey, I’ll protect you from these foolish boys,” she said as her boobs boobed boobily.
Rava wasn’t even attracted to women, but Scarlet was just so pretty that it didn’t matter. She wanted her.
What in the nine hells is wrong with me? she thought. She shook her head, trying to clear the strange thoughts from her mind.
The Banana Man stepped up next, once again summoning a banana from the ether. “I’m The Banana Man, would you like a banana?”
“Um, no thanks,” Rava said.
The Banana Man wilted and groaned sadly, like a puppy being told they were never going to the park again.
“And I’m Dave. But you already knew that,” Dave said, smiling at her. “So, what do you think Rava, you want to stay on here a while?”
Rava looked down at her hands and twiddled her thumbs. “I guess so. It’s better than the forest, at least.”
“That’s the spirit!” Dave said with a smile.
“Welcome home, Rava,” Scarlet said.
“Hi Rava, would you like a banana?”
Rava nodded. “Sure.” She took the banana, as The Banana Man pumped his fist in the air and cheered.