I trudged up the back stairs. It was as dark as my mind. Weariness had crept into my shoulders, my spine, my spirit. This body might have been newer, but my mind was still worn from a lifetime of struggle in my original world. Great! I wasn’t homeless, or starving, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of loss that soaked into me.

At home, I had trouble sleeping most nights. I’d set up a routine that helped, a routine that I couldn’t possibly follow here. If I was home, I would have gone to the bathroom, kissed and hugged my family good night, and snuggled with my cat and a book for a few solid hours before finally being exhausted enough to fall asleep. Routines were good for me.

It took a few tries to find the door my key fit into. I probably should have brought up a candle or something, but that’s one of those things you don’t think of when dumped into a new world that didn’t have electricity.

My room was a tiny windowless box. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw movement, but it was just a square mirror reflecting the shadow of me in my own doorway. From the trickle of light that creeped around the corners from the balcony down the hall, I could barely make out a small bed, a side table, and a little stool. I propped the door open with the stool so I could see while I kicked the bedding suspiciously. Nothing came scurrying out that was big enough for me to see, so I sat on the straw-filled bed, pulled the stool into the room, and kicked the door closed.

I don’t know why I held onto that stool like a lifeline in the pitch black of the room. You’d think I’d grab the blanket or something softer, but I didn’t. I didn’t even have the courage to try to see my own reflection in that dark mirror on the wall. I hugged a stool to my chest and cried all over it, like it was my best friend’s shoulder. They were big, ugly tears born of a mix of terror, self-pity, loss, and loneliness. I wanted my family. I wanted electricity and my cat, Terra, and toilet paper!

The outhouses were out behind the stable. There had been two of them. We shall not discuss the horror of a medieval outhouse. It made me never want to shake hands with another living thing in this world. I blamed my traumatized bawling on those outhouses, and Beau the bastard, and the lice I imagined to be crawling all over me. Trusting that the tavern was loud enough to cover up my ranting and raving (and it was), I was loud with wailing sobs that sputtered out curses on everything that had ever been wrong with anything. After all, who was going to come check on me? No one here cared!

“Oh, for cripes sake,” came a gruff voice that had me throwing my best friend in this world, the stool, at the shadow in my room.

The only thought in my head was that I should have locked my door. I might have squealed like a little girl, but the full scream I wanted to express got caught in my throat on a hacking cough that ended in a very strange and embarrassing hiccup/burp.

Your Fairy Godmother has arrived to guide you in your story.

The label “Fairy Godmother” was actually hovering over this person’s head as they waved a little wand that brightened up the place.

I gaped like a guppy drowning on the floor of a broken fish tank, which was another thing I missed from home. My fish tank full of happily swimming… Yep, my mind was slow again. It was only the five hundredth time that day I wondered if I was absolutely insane. What did it say about me that even my Fairy Godmother was a weirdo. Not that I normally had anything against weirdos. I was one. My family was proudly full of them.

He was at least six feet tall, with football player shoulders, a beer belly, and a two-day scruff on his chin. His hair looked like he’d driven here in a convertible. He wore pink tights, a leather jacket, and a rainbow tutu. There was a tiny frog-prince crown on that unruly black hair, and honest to goodness dragonfly-like wings that weren’t big enough to carry my stool across the room.

“Sorry it took me so long,” he said, reaching behind him to pull his purple leotard out of his butt crack. “You got a race and a name,” he went on, checking off something on the officious-looking clipboard in his hands with a quill that looked suspiciously like the one that scrawled stuff across my vision. “That’s good. Some skills and stats are racking up, so you haven’t wasted too much time. That’s good too. I’m not seeing anything too far from a good start, so if you don’t need anything, I’ll be on my way…”

“Wait!” I screeched, torn between the idea of grabbing at his arm and cowering back into the corner of my bed to avoid him.

“What?” he said, blowing out a breath of impatience. He flapped his clipboard twice before it got tucked under his arm.

My mind scrambled for a question to keep him here and barely came up with, “Where am I?”

“You are in the world of Temble, on the continent of Park Four, at a grimy little tavern on the Royal Road 66, between Siff and Paragrol,” he answered politely with names I wouldn’t remember. I didn’t really care much for the names of where I was. I figured I could ignore them totally since this person was going to teleport me home if I had to…. Well, whatever I had to do!

“I want to go home!” I clutched at his leather-clad sleeve; eyes wide, desperate.

“That I can’t do.” He nodded and patted my hand.

“I want my family!” I sputtered on, on my knees on that little bed, grasping at his sleeve. “I want electricity, and health care, and my kitchen stove! I want a bath and a book and scented candles! I want my bed and my nightlight and my fish tank and …”

“Yeah, and a pony and the latest doll.” He pulled back, rolling his eyes. “What do I look like? Santa Claus?”

“And my cat!” I ignored his sarcasm. I ignored his answer. I ignored his everything because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

“And a big chocolate cake with lots of frosting and a million gold coins?” he shot back, his eyebrows in his hairline and his voice pitched high.

“No!” I pushed away from him and back onto my heels, sulking. “I just want my family.”

In that moment I think I saw him as a piece of the environment that had stuck me in this place. I was still caught up in my self-pity session. There wasn’t much in the way of rational thinking going on anywhere in my head. For a change, my mind could only think one thing; home.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“I want my home!” I cut off whatever he was going to say just as he was opening his mouth. “My home. The home I’ve spent fifteen years filling with joy and love and stuff that makes all of us happy. The home I spent tears and sweat to build into something that was the only place in any universe that I could be happy! That home!”

“Yeah, that’s not happening, kid,” he tried to say but I rushed on.

“The home I was ripped out of because of some petty, awful moron who’s probably stuck here because of some other sick joker who hated him. I don’t normally hold a grudge, but Beau probably deserved it after all the other-people’s-wives he’s slept with. I could totally see how Beau had been dozens of people’s nemeses! But I do not deserve this at all!”

“Yeah, that’s not my department.” The Fairy Godmother had the grace to look more pitying than officious.

I picked up my best friend, the stool, and wrapped my arms around it to put something between me and my psychosis-induced hallucination. Fairy Godmother had to be my subconscious code for I’d gone totally wacko-ville with a cherry on top. “You hear that, stool buddy? My Fairy Godmonster says I can’t go home. He says I’m stuck here with you. He can’t even give me my cat!”

“Actually,” he interrupted (the Fairy Godmother, not the stool), “I identify with the pronouns they/them, not he.”

I stared at him, them. I set my stool gently beside me on the bed and scrubbed my face with my hands, leaving them cupping my cheeks as I stared at… They, the Fairy Godmother, must have seen something cracked in my wild eyes. At least they would have seen it if they hadn’t been staring at their dusty, lace-up, combat boots.

“Is this a Klinger thing or are you serious?” I babbled, not caring if they knew who Klinger was.

“I’m also not comfortable with the term ‘fairy,’ or ‘mother’ for that matter,” he-they went on, ignoring my crazed shock by looking at the ceiling or hi- their feet. “Don’t even get me started on the term ‘God.’”

I buried my face in my hands and just cried. I’d lost it. It was only a few minutes before I felt them sit next to me on the bed and put a comforting arm over my shoulders. I buried my face in their shoulder and was granted an honest-to-goodness, two-snorts-of-my-running-nose-and-it-was-shredded tissue. They handed me five more of them before I was done. With one final sniffle, I raised my head and grabbed the box of tissues out of their hand and held it to my chest like it was made of gold.

“Okay,” they said, arm still over my shoulder. “That’s fair. You can keep that.”

I grunted agreement, putting the little box of tissue on my bedside table as far from them as I could put it. I then set my stool near the table to guard my prize.

“Let’s try to get you back together, huh?” they asked more gently and reached for their clipboard, flipping a few pages.

I nodded mutely, like some pathetic five-year-old.

“You can get your family back,” they told me slowly, as if I was dense. Who knows, maybe I was at that moment. “You’ve read the quest and know that you can bring them here.”

I rolled my eyes at them.

“You’ve got a name,” they went on encouragingly. “Karma, how… nice. And look, you’ve got some good skills and stats.”

I cocked my head to the side and glared.

“Don’t worry,” they said, wings fluttering in what I realized was nerves. “Those stats are going to go up and down pretty fast over the next few days while the system figures out where they should be. Ten is about average and you’re not quite there yet, but it’s only your first day.”

I pulled up the character sheet.

Name: Karma

Class: Undetermined (don’t sweat it kid, that’s what I’m here for)

Level: 0 (but there’s only up from here, right?)

Health: 10/10 (default minimum)

Mana: 10/10 (default minimum)

Brains: 10

Brawn: 12

Beauty: 15

BS: 19

Skills: Cooking (8), Bartering (2), Dodge (2), Intimidation (2), Woodworking (1)

“Brains, brawn and beauty are all over ten,” I sniffed out. “And BS is almost up to twenty. Whatever that means.”

“Well, that’s just a simplified version that we’re trying to help out the noobs,” they hedged. “Most folks are a little overwhelmed by too many numbers and stats and stuff.”

“Do I look like numbers scare me?” I snorted in a very unladylike gesture that would have made my mother frown, her very worst insult.

“Um, well.” They looked studiously at their paperwork. “Maybe just a little overwhelmed?”

“I’m overwhelmed by a world of crazy,” my voice rising at the end of each point. “And a very evident lack of my family! And everything I’ve worked all my life to achieve, not that it was much, but it something! And my family is everything!!”

“Okay, okay.” They tried to placate me with air-patting hands and flitty wings.

“Am I overwhelmed by this everything?” I waved my hands around in the air to gesture at the world in general, punctuating my ands with pokes at their harder-than-my-stool shoulder. “Yes. Overwhelmed and pissed and possibly just this side of totally insane! What I would like? What would make me less insane? What would start to make something in this stupid, overblown mess of a situation even get close to less insane is straight answers!

“No. Numbers are not going to upset me. And simplifying with confusing crossovers? Like Brains? My notifications mention Intelligence and Perception while my character sheet has a whole category of B…S…! Nothing matches, nothing means anything at all. And it’s all had pithy comments that are incredibly insulting to my intelligence, which is NOT ZERO!”

“Of course not!” they rushed into the breath I took in my tirade. “Your intelligence is up at five right now!” My eyes bulged at them angrily and they rushed back in. “And it’ll be up to almost twenty so fast you’ll barely be able to blink, but, as I said, the system takes a while – “

Intelligence +2 (see how fast that went up)

Intelligence -2 (insanity is not intelligence)

“System.” I grabbed onto the word and cut off their patronizing. “A system has rules and programming and RULES! I need rules, not platitudes!”

“Rules?!” they blinked at me, eyebrows still dancing in their hairline. With a wave of their wand the room was filled with stacks of paper that sucked all the oxygen from the air, and a second later it was all gone. It was like a dozen lawyers had walked into the room, given us all a good stare, and then walked back out again. Terrifying. “There are enough rules to smother a dragon! I can’t give you all those rules or you’ll lose what’s left of your mind!”

I rolled my head on my shoulders and my neck popped.

“Brains is a combination of Intelligence and Will,” they lectured, turning the topic deftly. “Brawn is Strength and –“

I put my stiff fingers two inches in front of their mouth with all the mom-intimidation I’d earned in sixteen years of motherhood. “Just un-idiot-proof my character sheet.”

Name: Karma

Class: Undetermined

Level: 0

Health: 10/10 (default minimum)

Mana: 10/10 (default minimum)

Intelligence: 5

Will: 5

Strength: 5

Constitution: 7

Charm: 7

Beauty: 8

Perception: 9

Dexterity: 6

Luck: 4

Skills: Cooking (8), Bartering (2), Dodge (2), Intimidation (2), Woodworking (1)

That looked a little more like what I’d seen dancing across my vision all day.

Intimidation +1

Intimidation -1 (one must not intimidate Fairy Godmothers)