THE CHRONICLES OF TEDDY BEAR FARM
🙞❤︎🙜
I woke up in stages. First, I moved my limbs a little. I seemed to be lying down on a soft, fluffy surface. Second, I heard the soft sound of someone breathing, obviously myself. That was strange because I was pretty sure that I had died earlier. Third, I opened my eyes and saw a white ceiling with gold crown molding.
“He’s awake,” said a familiar voice.
I turned my head a little and saw that it was The Dragon Who Emerges From the Waters of Renewal to Reign Supreme Over All She Beholds, aka Emer.
“No, not you. I want my mom,” I said. I threw off the covers and swung my legs to the side of the bed. I was in a lavish bedroom decorated with plenty of gold and silver. The floor was made of gold coins, and the walls were marble with golden moldings, while the furniture was gilded wood hung with cloth of gold. “Where is she?”
“I thought you were his mom,” said someone I didn’t know. He was a tall, handsome young man with long green hair and green eyes.
“Yes, this is my youngest son, The Blazing Inferno of Righteous Justice, Unyielding and Unstoppable,” she said. “We call him Blaze.”
“My name is Eggy,” I said. That was what my mother called me.
“You ungrateful child!” said Emer. She was wearing her ceremonial gold armor studded with rubies. Like me, she had long blue-green hair and eyes. “I take the trouble to greet you in the afterlife, and instead of being grateful you look for that human?”
“Is this hell?” It couldn’t be heaven because she wasn’t here. “You might have given birth to me, but Violet Is my mother.”
“It’s been almost three hundred years. Don’t tell me you’re still looking for her?”
“Of course. You should have never taken me away from her.”
“You’re my child! I’m not the one who pushed you out of the nest when you were an egg.”
No, it was my siblings. They had all hatched before me and found me an eyesore, so they had tried to get rid of me. Thankfully, a human girl named Violet had found me. The worst day of my life was when Emer swooped down on me and carried me off. Since then I have been looking for Violet. “Where is she?”
“Well, she’s not here!” Emer threw her hands up and stomped off. The unknown man, who I guessed was her latest lover, followed behind her.
Good riddance.
I exited the room and found myself in a white space with a ball of black smoke with glowing eyes staring at me maliciously.
Was this really hell?
“Welcome to the afterlife,” said the ball of smoke. “Are you ready for the next stage of your existence?”
I suddenly regretted chasing Emer away. Even though I blamed her for my separation from my mother, she seemed to be well-disposed towards me. I should have asked her what was going on first, but I was really anxious to meet mom again. “What next stage?”
“Allow me to show you.”
A black square appeared in front of us and showed a scene of nighttime on a farm. Half a dozen monsters appeared and trampled the crops then broke into the farmhouse. When they got to the bedroom, I saw a familiar figure peacefully sleeping there. I reached out a hand to try to stop the monsters, but my fingers passed right through the black square. “Stop them!”
The scene that was playing out froze. The monsters’ claws were almost touching her.
“I take it you don’t want this to happen,” said the ball of smoke. “Do you want to protect her?”
“Yes!”
“Then do you agree to reincarnate as her protector?”
“Yes!” I would like nothing better. Maybe this wasn’t hell if I was given the option to protect her.
“Done.”
There was no transition. In the blink of an eye, the white room and its strange inhabitant disappeared, and I heard a voice saying, “By unlocking this door with the key of imagination, you transcend into a realm beyond the physical world - a place where the senses are amplified, and the mind is limitless. A world of ethereal shadows and corporeal substance, where reality and ideas merge into one. You have crossed the threshold into Emberstone Farm, a mystical and magical realm where your deepest desires and wildest dreams await.”
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Then I found myself in a wooden room. From the sound of the splashing waves, I deduced that I was on a boat. When I tried to look around, I experienced a moment of panic when I couldn’t move. My limbs felt strangely light yet I couldn’t control them.
“Mr. Bear, I think you’re getting dusty,” said a voice that I had been waiting to hear for almost three hundred years.
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.
The next thing I knew, she came into view. Long brown hair, violet eyes, and a pretty face... she was just as I remembered.
It was mom!
She picked me up. This reminded me of the time when I was a baby. It was only when she brought me to a table with a basin of water on it that I saw my reflection in the water.
A plush toy??? I’ve been reincarnated as a bear doll? Couldn’t I at least be an Azure Dragon doll? Why a bear, of all things?
What had I done to deserve this?!
… Thinking back on my life and all the territory battles I had participated in, I had to admit that I hadn’t exactly been the nicest person around.
Mom used a piece of cotton cloth and rubbed it all over me to clean the dust off. “There! All clean now.”
Oh well, if I was with her, then it wasn’t too bad.
We spent the next few days on the boat. I was quite relieved to see that mother was healthy and didn’t seem to be in any danger, though she seemed rather depressed and would cry into my fur every night.
As for me, my emotions were rather muted. I should feel a lot more distressed at the fact that I was unable to move or talk, but I didn’t really feel anything much. Was it because I didn’t have a proper body? I tried to do mathematical calculations in my head and remember historical facts. All of my attempts succeeded, which told me that my mental functions were all intact. So it was just my physical and emotional functions that were lacking.
So maybe this wasn’t hell where bad people were punished before they were reincarnated as worms or insects, but it definitely wasn’t heaven where the good were rewarded before they were reincarnated as either higher-level beings. Perhaps I was in some sort of limbo?
The real question was how was I supposed to protect my mother like this?
***
I woke up with a start.
How long had I been hibernating?
Mom liked to put me in [Guard Mode] a lot, which I loved because it gave me heightened senses and a sense of purpose. Protecting her was my number one priority, and [Guard Mode] was the perfect way to do it.
When she applied to build a farm in the Westerlands, I was extremely alarmed. Unfortunately, I had no way to communicate with her and could only watch as she traveled to the Ancient Hill Forest to build a farmhouse… which looked exactly like the house that the ball of black smoke with glowing eyes had shown me.
That night, when she fell asleep I stayed awake and saw a large black square appear in front of me. A very strange scene played out on it.
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The words were in some strange language, but somehow I could read them even though I didn’t understand what it was saying.
[NoCap Games Presents]
[Noob Invaders vs. Teddy’s Farm]
A moving picture composed of thousands of tiny colored squares showed an army of monsters fighting an army of magical plants.
[A Huge Wave of Noobs is Approaching!]
Suddenly, the monsters tripled in number and overwhelmed the plant defenders. Then a large Teddy Bear appeared.
[Boss: Teddy Bear
Toughness: Max
Speed: Max]
That was me? Of course, I liked that I had maximum toughness and speed, yet the scene of mom’s farm being swarmed by these “noobs” alarmed me greatly.
The bear doll inside the black square started casting fireballs and blasting the monsters away. When the monsters had all been disposed of, the scene turned white and a new message appeared.
[Your Noob Monster Horde]
A pink cat/mouse/monkey thing appeared. It walked slowly towards the farmhouse without making any obvious attacks. Instead, it just shuffled forward while being bombarded by projectiles from the plants.
[ConcernedApe
Toughness: Low
Speed: Low
Cost: Low]
Then an image of a pimply teenage human male with saliva spraying from his wide-open mouth and a strange device on his head appeared. This one also walked slowly though it seemed to be bigger than the previous “noob.”
[Headset Screamer
Toughness: Medium
Speed: Low
Cost: Low]
Next, the image changed to that of a pudgy, sweaty guy with a device in its hands. It was slamming on the device's buttons with reckless abandon. This "Noob" moved the same way as the other two, but faster.
[Button-masher
Toughness: Low
Speed: Medium
Cost: Medium]
I gnashed my teeth when the next one appeared, a frazzled-looking individual with a broken device in one hand and a crazed expression on its face. It threw the device which exploded, killing nine plants in one go. Thankfully, it died after throwing the “controller,” but it was clearly more dangerous than the other noobs.
[Controller Thrower
Toughness: Low
Speed: Low
Cost: High]
Next came the image of a lazy human lying on a couch or chair, with a controller in one hand and a bag of food in the other. This one didn’t seem like much of a threat at first, but the bits of food that dropped from its hand damaged the defender plants on its left side.
[Couch Potato
Toughness: Medium
Speed: Low
Cost: Medium]
Puzzlingly, the next noob shown was a pair of humans. One of them was a regular Button-masher while the other was a male human with a condescending smirk and crossed arms, who peered over the shoulder of the other noob. From the words spilling from its mouth, I gathered it was dispensing unsolicited advice and criticism.
[Backseat Gamer
Toughness: High
Speed: Low
Cost: High]
Oh no!
The parade of the strange “noobs” continued until my head spun from the weirdness of it all. When it was over, a few more boxes of text appeared.
[Metaphors be with you!]
[Noob Invaders vs. Teddy’s Farm]
[©2023 NoCap Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved.]
Then came a blare of trumpets and an annoyingly screechy voice said, “The battle of the Noob Invaders vs. Teddy’s Farm begins!”
To be continued