Lila
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 118086
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Fred accepted. Of course she did. Feeling what it was like to be human again was all the convincing she needed. Ginnie grinned. "Marvelous to hear it. Let me show you to your shared chambers, and you can pick out some clothes." Fred was led to a long room filled with ten simple cots, where a few people were still sleeping, and the rest were simply talking quietly together. It was a good thing they quickly handed off a simple dress to her, because she would have had no idea what she was doing, choosing an appropriate outfit for herself. Being a female toad was one thing. At least she'd been well used to it. Being a female human again... was going to be a rough ride. At least at first. They asked, "Which one were you?" and she tapped her throat and shrugged her shoulders in a helpless gesture. They were surprised, but understanding, and they began the rounds of introductions, and at last she began to get to know this group of truly traumatized and dysfunctional individuals she'd been living with for years. One of the black cats had been a woman named Daisy who'd been transformed by her sister when they'd both wanted the same man. An ex-roach had been a middle-aged man called Herbert who'd been transformed alongside his wife, but she'd been fed to the witch's cat not long after. And the youngest of the lot, a woman called Hillia who now appeared somewhere in her late forties, had been changed into a bat after a perceived slight by a crotchety woman in the woods who'd thought it would be funny to make fun of her poor eyesight. She'd been fourteen years old at the time. Rhys had killed every one of their keepers. They'd all professed they'd hate witches till the day they died. But they were so enormously thankful to be human again that they were willing to wait and see if Ginnie might be different. As they talked, more trickled in, and Fred heard a lot of repeated information. After some hours, all nineteen of them were in the room together. Not a single one had said no. Hardly surprising, in retrospect, she supposed. Ginnie appeared at the front of the room, and everyone turned to face her, the ones already familiar and comfortable enough with their new bodies standing at attention. She smiled, and said, "Much better, right?" Various sounds of affirmation rose from the crowd. "All right, so I'll do my best to try to remember your names. I've got all of them noted down..." Her gaze alighted on Fred. "Except yours. There's no way you can write, that skill would've deteriorated long ago." Fred's eyes widened in alarm, but she wasn't confident enough that the opposite was true to even think to argue. "No way to figure out your name, but I've gotta call you something. Let's go with... oh, I don't know... Lily. Too on the nose? Fine, Lila. That work?" Fred blinked, suddenly overwhelmed again. The name's similarity to the one Belboz had tried to saddle her with was certainly not helping the garbled mess that was her mind right now. Ginnie seemed to take her silence as consent, and moved on. "You may notice that there aren't enough beds in here for the lot of you. To be honest, I wasn't sure exactly how many of you there'd be, and nineteen beds? That'd take up a lot of space. So, there might be a loose rotation, but essentially, half of you will be spending each night in your animal forms, and the other half'll get the beds. Here's rule one: it takes a lot more space and resources to keep humans alive than it does the types of creatures you all were just yesterday. So you have to earn your time as humans. Savvy?" The notion was properly horrifying, but all the same, Fred, along with everyone else, nodded energetically. They had to communicate that they'd do what it took, after all. "And I think I'll have a similar system for earning back lost years. If you do a job exceptionally well, I'll knock off a few years. Somethin' along those lines. Those of you whose animal forms are small and unobtrusive can expect to be used to gather information. The bigger ones will be doing plenty of herb gathering. The flying ones will deliver messages. Things like that. You do the jobs you're given, you get to spend time as humans. Go above and beyond, and I'll even improve those human forms. That's the gist. Just know this: your default is still your animal form. You go off grid, you step far out of line, you think you can walk out on this contract? You can't. You'll revert eventually, and then you'll be stuck. That's the new reality. Understand?" Again, they nodded, wide-eyed. And thus it began. Several of them went mad from the stress of turning back the first time. Some recovered, others didn't, and were put out to pasture. Others had so many nervous tics, nightmares, and debilitating signs of trauma that Ginnie decided they weren't worth her time either. Fred—or Lila, as she was being frequently and consistently called—had her own set of issues, but they somehow seemed more manageable than others. She thought she'd sink completely into despair for the first few minutes after she returned to her toad form. But she had to remind herself that things had changed completely. She was no longer in that helpless, hopeless situation. She could be human again. Even if she could never be a man again. Even if she could never be a knight again. Yes, Lila had her fair share of nervous breaks, but she never toppled headfirst into madness. It didn't really help that Ginnie seemed to be in the habit of singing that bewitching song of hers quite frequently, and every time she did, Lila's brain—whether it was a human or a toad brain!—stopped working, and each time it seemed like it took longer and longer to start up again. It was a while before Lila was put into the game. For several weeks, she simply stayed in Ginnie's home, occasionally taking walks outside—true to form, she lived in the middle of a forest—transitioning constantly from human to toad and back. Every time Ginnie waved her hand and made her human, she was given a time limit. It was imprecise, but normally it was a good several hours. She could usually feel it a few minutes before she abruptly changed back, her clothes growing into a formidable chasm around her. One time, though, Lila was outside, and though dark was a couple hours off, she was terrified as she suddenly realized she wouldn't be able to get back inside before she returned to her true toady form. She ran, and fell flat on her face as the tingles in her legs suddenly became overpowering. She left her dress and shoes behind and hopped as fast as her legs could carry her back to Ginnie's, her terror mounting as the sun dipped below the trees. It was very, very close to dark by the time she made it back, her tiny heart threatening to pound right out of her tiny chest. She stuck close to home after that, barely even venturing outside for weeks. It was creeping in outside her notice, but strange as it was, that was how she was beginning to think of Ginnie's tower: home. Fred had been in his early thirties when he'd been changed into Lilith. Lilith had been only a few days for the world before she'd become a toad, and that toad had been around for a total of five years, spending about half by Wenda's cottage and half in Rhys's. She now had more freedom, more choice, and more dignity than she'd had since being Fred, and though it was still more limited than she had every right to want, that didn't change the overwhelming and undeniable gratitude she felt every day for the privilege of being here. Maybe she'd have been able to overcome these feelings and see that her situation was still totally unjust, something she should be trying to escape, except... Ginnie was a witch, and every time she sang, every wheel in Lila's brain stopped turning. She was enchanting. Maybe Lila didn't feel an overwhelming fondness for her, or a desire to please her, but... she did feel, unavoidably, that this was as good as she could ever expect her life to be again. Finally, some months into it, when there were only twelve of them left and several had been sent on simple missions—with one not returning—Ginnie sat Lila down and said, "Look, Lila, let's get into this. I've been racking my brain trying to think of a way to put you to use. My thought was to send you to spy on some of my rivals, but here's the thing—you have no way to bring me back any information! What, am I supposed to just ask a series of yes/no questions? It's just a waste of both of our time. And you're too old to go out there and reliably bewitch people with your looks, bend 'em to my desires. I can't do very much with you, Lila. Not without some remedies for your voice or your age that, frankly, would be too time-intensive and costly, without any guarantee of payoff." Lila shook her head vigorously, eyes wide. She pressed her hand over her heart, pantomimed, used every trick under the sun to try to get Ginnie to see that she could be useful, she could earn her humanity back. Now, if Lila had been in her right mind, had been free of any manipulation or trauma or desperation, she would never have chosen this. She was, at this moment, desperately attempting to communicate that she was willing to "bend" people to Ginnie's desires—no questions asked. It was not something the noble Sir Frederigo D'Honaire would ever have chosen, ever considered for even a moment.
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5/10/2021 7:06:53 AM
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