PROLOGUE

The attack came as no surprise. The combat strength behind it was more than expected but should have been easily handled by her guards. In fact, they had handled it and were starting to relax back into their normal watchful state when it happened. 

A small singularity opened: A bomb was delivered.

The attack itself had been a feint. A pinpoint suicide attack with the intent of getting a teleport anchor close enough to the Princess to deliver a present. And the ploy worked. The bomb went off with a force roughly equal to ten tons of C4. Of course, it didn’t just go bang. It incorporated a significant amount of shrapnel and some nasty poisons as well.

The Princess is young, but no stranger to combat. One can almost describe her as something more akin to a Warrior Goddess. But she is as mortal as we are. Her guards’ bodies shielded her from the worst effects of the blast but a lot still got through. Enough to activate her automatic magical defenses: her outer wards, her inner wards, and finally the bracelet anchoring her last-ditch escape seal.

Injured or dead? None of the few survivors knew. Her body was gone. Teleported to an unknown destination. The system was designed to prevent attackers from being able to follow her. The guard force would need to return to the Imperial Palace and unravel the complex algorithm contained in the bracelet. Given the time she teleported, the matching algorithm in the security ministry could generate a small set of destinations. They would be able to find her but it would take some time. Weeks at least, maybe months.

Those who were aware of this crisis raised up their voices in prayer. Hoping that their Princess would survive long enough to be brought home safely.

NED: A GIFT, DELIVERED FREE

He’s sitting on the couch, staring at the wall and eating plain salted potato chips out of a small bowl.

A crimson drop of something splashes across the biggest and best chip in the bowl. Damn.

A fat red drop falls on his hand, then more drops spatter down on his head and shoulders. A smell like wet iron. Blood?

He looks up at the ceiling, but the ceiling’s not there. Instead, he sees a silvery, shimmery sort of liquidy surface, covering a large circular area of where the ceiling should have been. A bloody hand reaching down. Right above his head.

A body follows it, emerging through the silvery liquid. Floating slowly down like it’s drifting through a pool of water. Blood dripping down like rain from a macabre rain cloud.

He bails. Just in time. The silvery stuff gives way and the body drops right onto the couch where he’d been sitting. Bounces once.

He looks up to see what’s coming next but it’s nothing. The silvery stuff condenses into one point, then disappears. Like it’s been sucked up through a straw.

He drops to his knees next to the body. Checks if it’s still alive. If SHE is still alive. A woman. Bleeding on his couch.

A woman. On his couch. Bleeding.

Just another normal day. NOT!

“What the hell?” he says to himself. “Crap! Think about it later.”

He leaps into action, trying to remember details from that week-long combat medic course he took a decade ago.

“She’s breathing, heart beating. Okay. stop the bleeding.” This man has a habit of talking to himself.

There’s a lot of blood. Staining her bright colorful clothes. Rich blues and vibrant reds. He starts hyperventilating.

Squeezing his eyes nearly shut, he grabs some scissors and starts cutting off her clothes. There are too many bleeding wounds for him to take them off the normal way. Besides, they’re already ruined anyway. It doesn’t take long. He balls the rags up and throws them behind the couch.

Now he can open his eyes again, begin cataloging injuries. Trying to find what he needs to work on first. There are dozens of superficial lacerations. Like she got caught in some kind of shrapnel blast. Maybe something like a claymore mine?

The most worrying are a deep cut in her right thigh and a puncture wound through her ribs. All the wounds have a sickly gray-green color around the edges. Like some toxic substance has gotten into them.

Getting up, he runs to the linen closet. Grabs some old sheets and runs back. He stops for a moment, stunned by his first full look at her. It’s like an Amazonian Princess has gotten blown off of a movie screen into his living room. 

Shaking it off, he keeps moving. No time to think about that. Grabbing the scissors, he cuts the sheets into strips and starts binding her wounds. Stop the bleeding first, then figure out what the next step is.

He starts with the leg wound. The artery isn’t cut, but she’s still losing a lot of blood there.

“Thank God,” he mumbles to himself, wrapping a wide strip of cloth around her leg twice then tying it off tight.

Then he gets a better look at her chest wound. It’s seeping fluids and there’s a pink froth around the edge.

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“Sucking chest wound. Crap. Double crap.”

He runs to the kitchen and gets a plastic bag and some duct tape. Cutting the plastic into a square he waits for her to breathe out and slaps the plastic over the wound.

“Goddammit! Why didn’t I cut some tape strips first?” He drops the plastic and cuts some six inch strips off the roll. Then tries again.

Breathe out, slap on plastic, tape strips all around the edge to seal it off. He sits back on his heels. Checking for any more major cuts. Wraps a few up, then straightens out all her limbs so she can rest comfortably. Her perfect limbs.

“Dammit, focus!” he admonishes himself, before placing a pillow under her head so she can breathe easily. He covers her body with one of his remaining sheets and reaches for his phone.

Time to call an ambulance.

As he draws the unlock pattern, he feels a touch on the back of his head. Looking up, his gaze is caught by a pair of deep gray eyes. She says something. He doesn’t understand the words.

A moment later, the hand behind his head takes his neck in a crushing grip and pulls him in toward her chest. Her other hand reaches around his back like she’s giving him a hug. He starts to struggle but has no leverage with his knees on the floor.

Then pain happens. Soul-crushing excruciating pain. An endless helpless time of pain.

He can’t even cry out. All he manages is a rasping gasp as his lungs expel the last of his air.

Just as he’s starting to wish he could die to escape the pain, he passes out.

NED: BACK-STORY

This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a bit of a sad story, actually. Or maybe a tragic comedy. The story of a life. So let’s go back to a beginning.

His name is Ned. An ordinary guy, or he used to be anyway. Living an ordinary life. Average. That was Ned. Just average.

He’d joined the Army after high school and went into Intelligence. Translation, really. He was trained in an Eastern European language and eventually posted as an aide at an embassy in Central Europe. Right at the bottom of the food chain in a tiny office he shared with three other translators. He listened and translated, Read and translated. Submitted reports. Took lunch breaks, went to the gym, wondered if he would ever meet a nice girl and settle down with a family. Normal average guy stuff.

It wasn’t an exciting life. No cool stories to tell. He was never tapped to go on secret missions into enemy territory or anything like you’d read about in a spy novel. They didn’t even overwork him. Just 9 to 5 and go home.

Which is why he was pretty surprised to wake up in the hospital one night, hooked up to a bunch of monitors and wondering how he got a big hole in his head.

He’d gotten caught up in something. Never did find out what. He had no memories at all from the whole week previous. Not surprising given the size of the hole in his skull. Everyone was pretty apologetic, though. Both from his country and the country he was stationed in.

He was eventually discharged from the hospital, given 100% disability with a pension from the Army and a cozy place to stay on the outskirts of a small city in the mountains. A pretty good deal, really.

Unspoken context. If he ever does remember anything, forget it. Permanently.

He was pretty messed up. No longer quite average. His brain had been rewired; now extremely sensitive to sensory input. Too much of the wrong kinds of things and his brain would shut down. Like his operating system had been corrupted. Blue Screen of Death for him if he overloads. He’d end up just sitting or standing there. Staring into space until his brain did a restart. Too many things could trigger it. Bright colors or flashing lights. Strong smells or intense flavors. Even loud noises or complex musical rhythms.

So he mostly stayed home. His little house was cozy but plain. Groceries delivered from the store once a week. He had internet but only to support his hobby. Which is languages. He studies them obsessively. Over the last five years, he had become reasonably fluent in ten languages and was working on another half dozen.

He used the internet to have video calls with his language buddies. People who were willing to help him learn their language if he’d help them learn his. He had met a lot of interesting people that way. That was his social life. If things got too intense, he could just minimize the screen or mute the audio. A safe sort of social life for a uniquely average guy.

He goes out every morning for a walk in the countryside. His brain seems to be okay with greens and browns. He sometimes meets people on his walks and talks to them. The local cops know about him and check on him every now and again. Drive him home if he locks up in town. The local cows know him and watch him vacantly as he walks by.

It’s a comfortable, albeit somewhat boring life. He’s been thinking about getting a cat.

ANIKA: DESPERATE MEASURES

Anika is partly conscious. A lifetime of disciplined mental training keeps her semi-aware of what’s going on around her. She is injured: she knows this. Perhaps mortally so.

She senses one other person near her. A strange mental signature overlain by a frantic urgency. Dimly, she feels this person’s hands on her. Feels pain. Injuries.

Right. An attack happened. She casts a quick scan on her body. Cuts, punctures, cracked bones. Bits of metal in her flesh. Poison spreading slowly from them.

The scan exhausts her. Desperation colors her thinking. Warm hands on her flesh, grounding her. She forms a plan.

The hands hesitate for a moment. One more frantic bit of activity. She senses the person with her becoming distracted. Opens her eyes.

She sees a man. A small man. Hands covered in blood. Her blood.

She reaches out to him. Sliding her hand behind his head.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I wish there was another way.”

Using the last of her physical strength, she pulls him in close. Establishes a connection. Draws the life-force out of his body into her own. She feels the agony within him. Lives through the moment with him as she uses his energy to push the poisonous metal back out through the wounds they made as they entered. What energy is left she uses to push poison out of her veins and heal her broken ribs.

He passes out and she follows him into oblivion.

NED: GIVING A BABE A BATH

Ned wakes up curled into a fetal position on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. A slow stretch and he sits up. Sees the woman on the couch and panics as memories come rushing back. Pain, such pain. He had never imagined that pain could be so … painful. He recovers himself from the brink of shut down. Focuses on the here and now.

She’s still breathing. In fact, she looks much better. Most of her wounds have started healing. Even the hole in her chest is scabbed over. He pulls the plastic off of it then unwraps the bandage on her leg. The gash is still there but starting to close up. Weird.

“How long was I out?” Talking to himself again. One attribute of a loner life. Checking the clock, he discovers it hasn’t been long. Couple of hours, maybe.

He decides that he’s officially in a ‘weird’ situation. Unknown and heavily injured person (possibly an alien?) dropped in on him, tazed him (with magic?) as he was giving her first aid, and then fell asleep on his couch.

Oh, and she matches the classic image of an Amazonian Princess. He feels like that’s an important footnote.