“Easy does it,” Athena exhaled through gritted teeth. “Easy… Fucking… Does it… Nnnngh…!”
Good news, Athena split off from the fairies. This had involved bribing them with a game of hide-and-seek—Primrose was off hiding somewhere, Marigold was left counting up to some arbitrarily high number. Ideally, they’d get bored and go terrorize someone else. Athena shuddered at the thought of being hunted down and jerked back into their candy-colored chaos, even though her fairy instincts had eased back somewhat. Technically, getting as far as humanly possible counted as hiding, and this was a game of hide-and-seek, so…
“C’mon…!” she cried.
Bad news, Athena had encountered one tiny, infuriating snag. Jon’s royal bedroom was supposed to be a safe haven. Free from fairies, free from servants, free from guards prowling around for fairies. One problem: The door was closed.
But that was fine, right? Athena was little. She could just slip under the gap below.
Her ass was too big.
“C’mon!” she repeated, caught halfway, legs flailing into the air.
She lay flat on the floor, rear smooshed under the doorway like overstuffed pillows. An awkward attempt at rolling her hips to the side, but all that managed to do was get her even more stuck, trapped and wiggling uselessly in place.
“Almost—there—!” she screeched, hands scratching the polished wood. Her ears began to ring from her own rising pitch, all honey and helium. Athena winced.
Deep breath. Purple features went reddish. Lavish hair fell past Athena's shoulders as she forced another shift—curving from the side to shimmy only a single pillowy mound at a time.
Heave. She advanced by maybe a millimeter.
Another heave. Another few millimeters.
Then, finally—Pop!
Athena rolled onto her back, panting, swearing, and blinking back frustrated tears.
“…I—pant—hate this,” she announced to the world, for the however-many-th time today. “I hate this. I hate this. I. Hate. This.”
“Well that’s not a very nice thing to say!” chirped a voice. “I think you did a great job, Miss Pretty-purple-fairy!”
Athena’s breath hitched. A razor-thin, glacial silence as the world snapped into focus. Piles and piles of gargantuan books, teetering into impossible heights—last she saw them, she was drunk and flitting between them. Now, they loomed like skyscrapers. Same with the ceiling. Stretched out and impossible, it was only now when she had a moment to lie down that Athena grasped the inescapable truth of her new reality:
She was teeny-tiny.
Athena permitted herself all two seconds to grieve being, like, just a normal person, before tearing her attention to the actual horror here. A grinning green figure dressed like a farm boy.
“Applejack,” she grimaced mournfully. The first fairy she met as a fairy.
“Plumdrop!” He beamed. “You flew off so fast yesterday, I feared I’d never see you again! But then I found you! Here! In this room!”
He… Found…?
Nope. Nope. Nope. Athena wiggled in place as her face flushed even deeper, helpless as a warm, fuzzy pressure built in her chest.
He… Found…!
Stupid. Fairy. Instincts! Thighs slammed together as Athena bit down the surge of whimsy. We are not playing hide-and-seek. We simply ran into each other.
“The hell are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Talking to you, silly!” Applejack tilted his head, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Yeah, no, I got that.” Athena massaged her temples in slow, irritated circles. “Why did you come here?”
A pause. Applejack tilted his head to the other side, still smiling wide and vapid. “To find you?”
“Dude,” she said, slowly. “Why did you come find me?”
“Ah!” he said. “I want to marry you!”
“What.”
The giant door clicked open.
Impressing Applejack with her very large vocabulary of swears, Athena grabbed him by the arms and dove for the nearest cover—the cranny by the farthest-most desk leg, only slightly fouled by dust and cobwebs.
The door opened in earnest, forcing out a powerful gust of wind that would’ve sent both toppling had they not found a hiding spot. With it entered Jon—good—and… Sarah McMillan. Less good.
She looked absolutely pissed.
Bad.
…and she was holding a red, round stone.
Bad. Really, really bad.
“Sarah!” Jon cried. “You have to understand…”
“I wish you’d sit right there.” She cut him off with a voice that could curdle milk. “And that no one would interrupt us.”
Flash. Flash.
Athena breathed out another curse as her body went rigid. Muscles, limbs, wings—all slow and uncomfortable, as if she were trapped in cement. Barely, she twitched her gaze to the side; Applejack also stayed in place, expression shocked and confused. She shifted her gaze back, just barely able to make out the two humans. Jon was white with panic, uncontrollably sauntering over to his bed, and Sarah…
Christ. Sarah’s eyes were all red and glassy. Had she been crying?
One second of silence. Two. Three. Jon sat and shifted uncomfortably in place, Sarah seemingly content to just stare him down.
“Jon. What the fuck.” Athena whispered.
Jon spoke first “Sarah. I didn’t mean to…” He faltered.
“I know you didn’t mean to! That’s the problem!” Sarah spat out. She paced along the room in a quick circle. “You didn’t mean to make a kingdom. You didn’t mean to give your people a ruler. You didn’t mean to have me serve under you. But you did, and you won’t even take responsibility for it!”
“I am!” Jon shot back. “Why do you think me and the queen were trying—”
Sarah cut him off once again. “That’s not taking responsibility, princess”—she stopped in place, fingers wrapped so tightly around the stone they had gone white—“you were running away.”
“By fixing everything?!”
“Fixing!?” Sarah shouted. “The world you described is horrible! Your citizens here are happy! Literacy is at an all time high! No one has known hunger or poverty in decades! We live in paradise! And you want to steal that all away?”
Jon went quiet, lost on how to respond. Athena, meanwhile, reeled internally. Whatever was happening, it was bad. Sarah McMillan— most spoiled, arrogant, self-centered bitch in all of Lake Point—with the wishing stone spelled infinite trouble. What if she took Linda’s place as queen? Recreated Lake Point, again, into something even stupider and hornier? What would happen to Athena and Jon? To Zoe?
“I’ve failed, princess,” Sarah said shakily, catching both Jon and Athena off-guard.
“...What?” Jon said.
“I’m your lady-in-waiting. Even if you only remember being princess for only a couple days, I should have been more vigilant. Guided you better. But for the kingdom, I’ll at least start now.” She gripped the stone even tighter.
Jon paled. “Sarah! Wait!”
“I wish,” Sarah said. “That the crown princess would be given more serious responsibilities than just sitting around at her own leisure. And I wish you’d fulfill them to the best of your ability, just as the queen does her own.”
Flash.
She continued, words spilling out quicker and quicker. “I wish the queen and princess would both be given the opportunity to see the good of this kingdom.”
Flash.
“That they’d seriously consider leaving it as is.”
Flash.
Sarah slowed, and pursed her lips. “Also, I wish both you and Her Majesty would be unable to make any more wishes—”
Jon gasped.
“—until she’s had you meet a few suitors. No more pushing that away, princess, it's getting politically awkward.”
Flash.
Athena could only stare dumbly from the corner.
What the hell. What the hell.
This couldn’t be Sarah. Sarah was supposed to be… Like, a haughty, arrogant queen-bee who only thought about herself. Rich. Apathetic. Insufferable. The worst possible person to get her hands on the wishing stone.
And this Sarah…
She was wishing that Jon would consider leaving things as they were? That he would have more responsibilities? That was it? Seriously; what kind of Lake Point was this, if freaking Sarah McMillan grew up as someone who wouldn’t abuse a wishing stone?
Of course, that was nothing. What came next would leave Athena and Jon both stunned and perplexed, shaken to their very cores.
Sarah took a deep breath. “Finally. I wish to forget about this stone and the world Princess Jeanne described.”
And with that, in a simple, casual motion, she tossed the wishing stone over to a dumbfounded Jon’s feet.
Flash.
