Hello, Everyone!
It's time for the second part of this short side story! Last time, we took a peek into our dear Mary Windfiddle's past as she spent a very intense evening in the Frinkeltong library, where a group of her schoolmates had decided to perform a shady ritual. Mary, being a shy bookworm, wouldn't have interfered, but then a girl lit a book on fire and she had no choice.
One thing let to another, and Mary was left with a girl whose name began with a 'K'.
Also, in this part there's a name-drop that only hard-core Mary Windfiddle fans will get! It's so obscure, it's not even in the Glossary! Be sure to tell me if you get it!
Friendship
“Good riddance!” ‘K’ said, making a face. Then, she turned to Mary and cocked her head. “So, yur name is Windfiddle?”
“M-mary. Mary Windfiddle.”
“Karina. Nice to meet ya.”
The girl held out her hand, left instead of right. Mary hesitated.
“Ok, I get it,” Karina shrugged. “Not very friendly with the library intruder. Smart.”
"You burned a book," Mary pointed out.
“Yeah,” Karina said, “an' the book burned me. I’d say we’re even.” She took her right hand from behind her back and waved it for Mary to see. It was swollen and covered with red blisters.
Mary gasped. How could that girl be so nonchalant about such injury?!
“Oh, my Ioun! D-doesn’t it hurt?”
“Oh, it hurts like hell!” Karina laughed grimly. “But I deserved it. The whole idea with the magic circle was stupid. It wouldn’t have worked as intended anyway.”
“How was it intended to work?” Mary asked.
“I was hopin’ for something to take me away from here. Not possess 'n' control me.”
“You were possessed?!” Mary gasped.
“You were,” Karina said. “When ya stepped into that circle, it got pretty surreal.”
Mary frowned. All she remembered was black smoke and some wierd sounds. But Patricia had called her ‘a monster’ and ‘a freak’, and that had been weird.
“What did…” She swallowed. “Did I d-do… um, did I do something bad?”
Karina looked at her for a long time before answering.
“Nah, don’t worry ‘bout it,” she said, finally. “I dealt with it in time.”
Mary took a look at the chalk outlines on the floor. Part of them were smeared, as if someone had dragged something over the circle to break it.
“Oh, look!” Karina said. “Yur glasses!”
She leaned down and stood up, with Mary’s spectacles in her good hand. The frame was awfully crooked and one of the lenses had cracked under what could only have been immense pressure.
“Wow!” Mary said. “What could have done that?”
Karina gave her a weird look.
“Ya know what?” she said, “Don’t worry ‘bout it. Anyway. Good thinking with the bucket. It did the job real’ well.”
The bucket?
Oh, no! The burnt book! Mary stared at it and the feeling of the floor vanishing under her feet returned. She was going to get in so much trouble!
“If that’ll help ya calm down, the book was s'pposed to be destroyed,” Karina said. “It said so in the foreword. Something 'bout having only one chance or somethin’.”
“But it’s a-a-a… a mess!” Mary squeaked, her hands fidgeting nervously. “Mr. Pruste hates a mess! He’ll never forgive me about this!”
“I can fix that,” Karina smiled.
She straightened her back and lifted her hands--both the healthy and the injured one. She spoke a single word and ran one palm over the other, like she was dusting them off. It must have hurt, because she winced while doing it, but that wasn’t what Mary was paying attention to at that moment.
From Karina’s hands, a rain of sparkles came out. It swirled around the bucket and the charred stone beneath it, and suddenly, all the dirt and grime disappeared, leaving only the clean floor below. Even the book had seemingly disintegrated into nothing.
“That… that was magic!” Mary squealed. “You can do magic!”
“Well, yeah,” Karina shrugged. “Only a little, though. We should take care of the rest of the mess by ourselves.”
Karina's hand healed up in a couple of weeks. Ally's broken ribs took a little longer, and she spent that whole time dramatically hiding at home.
Patricia, however, was at school, spreading rumours and turning the other students against the two girls. She never told the actual story of what had happened in the library, but alluding to something freaky and unnatural was enough to stir up the other’s opinion. It wasn’t too hard to persuade the kids to avoid Mary--they were kinda doing that anyway--but that attitude had now spread to Karina as well.
She didn’t seem to mind.
“I didn’t like them anyway,” she said. “They say the sweetest things when they think ya can do something for them, but bite like vipers the moment ya turn your back to them.”
Mary had a slightly different experience with her peers. Being a human raised by gnomes, she had never been able to fit in any of the two groups. The gnome children started calling her ‘giant’ and ‘bean pole’ the moment she began getting taller than them, and ever since, they hadn't wanted to hang out with her. The human children, on the other hand, viewed her like just a larger gnome. She didn’t know their games, their holidays, their culture… and so they didn’t really pay her any attention.
But Karina did. She actually seemed to enjoy spending time with Mary.
It was nice.
The two of them would sit together in class, and when school ended, they would rush to the Windfiddle home to get snacks and write their homework. Karina loved spending time with Lilly and Bramble, and although she didn’t care much for Leefie, she happily listened to Mary enthuse about his toddler-antics.
They went to the library, too. Mary had never thought of reading as something that could be shared, but it turned out to be wonderful. Every time, Kari would bring out a stack of books on one mysterious corner of the world or another, and they would spend an afternoon or two researching that particular place. Kari would make Mary imagine the two of them travelling there, meeting new people and getting into adventures.
When she went home, Mary would write down everything they had imagined, to the smallest detail. The following day, she'd show Kari the story and they'd read it together and imagine, once again, the adventure they'd go on.
They each invented a character to represent them in those adventures. Mary was Rinka Autumnburry, a sorceress with a heart of gold, and Karina was Imre Stormbringer, a mighty warrior of questionable morals who, in the end, always did what was right.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. After they started hanging out more, Mary realised that Kari had a strange temper. One day she would be laughing and jumping around, full of energy and enthusiasm. The next, all of that would disappear and she’d become gloomy and closed off, hissing and barking at everyone around her.
The first few times Mary got really confused, thinking that she’d done something to upset her friend. She tried asking what’d happened, tried calming her down or cheering her up. She even tried writing new stories just for her. But it was all in vain. When her friend was in her ‘fowl moods’, she would shoot down every attempt at a conversation.
One time, when Kari had been especially cruel with her words, Mary came home crying. Lilly hugged her and held her until she calmed down, then asked what had happened. Mary told her everything.
“Life is full of ups and downs, muffin,” Lilly said. “A good friend is there for you in both. If she matters to you, just go with it. Cheer with her, when she is happy, sulk with her when she is not. If she pushes you away when she is sad, just give her space.”
And Mary did.
Each time, a day or two after her outburst, Kari would come to apologise. If Mary asked why she had been upset, she’d just say “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”
“Don’t worry ‘bout it” was Kari’s go-to phrase. She was always ready to say it, regardless of the situation.
A teacher scolded her for talking out of turn? “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”
Someone threw a snowball at them during recess? “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”
They didn’t hear what they had for homework because they were deep in a book? “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”
The only time Mary saw Kari get worried about anything was when Lilly asked to meet her parents.
“Your friend spends so much time with us,” she’d said one day. “Won’t her parents get worried about her?”
“I don't know,” Mary said. “She says they’re always working.”
“I’d like to meet them. After all, our daughters are such good friends, I’d love to get to know them, too.”
“But they’re probably human.”
“Muffin,” Lilly smiled and brushed a strand of hair from Mary’s face. “When has that mattered to me?”
The next day Mary told Kari about Lilly’s request and that was the first time she saw her friend flustered. She went all pale and bit her lip so fiersely that it almost bled.
“They’re very busy,” she said hoarsely. “They work all the time. No point in trying to reach them, really. But, hey, they let me do whatever I want, so you should tell Lilly not to worry.”
And that was the last they spoke of that.
Hey there! Did you like this part of the story? Did you get the obscure name-drop? :)
Fun fact about Mary and Kari's relationship - it was inspired by a friendship I had in my youth. My friend and I, we were great fans of 'The Lord of the Rings' movies and books. We often came together and thought of ways we could feature in the stories told by Tolkien, and I wrote them all down. Now that I think of it, those were pure 'self-insert fanfics', but we didn't know what that was at the time. It was the dawn of the Internet and we were just happy to imagine stuff.
Have you had a similar friendship? Or relationship of any sort that inspired you so greatly?
I hope to see you next time when we'll conclude this flash-back!
Take care and be well!
(Also, here's a link to the Chapter Guide, the Glossary and the Map for the series. You're welcome!)
An important disclaimer: Mary Windfiddle's story is my notes from a D&D game turned into a narrative. All the worldbuilding and NPC encounters belong to our DM, and all the actions of the other main characters (Aurum, Bruno and Agatha) belong to my co-players. My contribution to the story is only everything Mary-related (actions, reactions, inner thoughts), as well as the writing itself.