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10:15 a.m., Thursday, 11th July, 1946
Top Secret Estate
... Derbyshire, Britannia
... Off the A624, just past the Chapel Milton railway viaduct, near the Tesco car park where all the fistfights keep happening
Dimension GCC #332/S

The prince was alerted to the fact she'd missed her alarm by the gentle caress of a balled-up copy of the Times upon her head.

She emerged from amidst a quite startling amount of toy sharks - a gift she had requested from the Baltlandic ambassador, for reasons nobody else had quite been able to ascertain - grumbling about something-or-other and rubbing at her forehead. The cause of his wakefulness was smirking in the corner like a cat with a newly-satisfied grudge.

"Hullo, Bin," said this cause, getting ideas quite above his station.

"Good morning, brother," the prince replied, restraint self-evident from her brother's lack of stab wounds. "Is there any important news, or did you just decide to wake me up for the fun of it?"

"Option two, obviously." The boy's grin widened. "Oh, but Mama said you ought to check the military dispatches once you woke up, said it would be relevant to your interests." He sauntered over to the door and opened it. "So really, I'm doing you a favour. You ought to thank me, and yet, not a word of gratitude. What's become of manners in this benighted age?"

The door slammed shut behind his sprinting form just as the first shark crashed into the lintel.

The prince, now awake (though at what cost she could not begin to speculate), picked up the shark and placed it back with its fellows, along with an apology and a tenderness quite absent from her dealings with, for example, irritating family members. With that vital business concluded, she dressed in her morning suit and wandered groggily down the stairs towards the breakfast table.

A low and husky voice emerged from the withdrawing-room as he trudged past. "It moves! It breathes! Some dare call it alive!"

"And a hearty good morning to you too, mother. Today is just a fountain of family goodwill, isn't it? First Ben, and now yourself." The prince did not peer round the door. She would only see the sparkle of the tonic water in a heavy-bottomed glass, and then would come an argument, and the day would be ruined for both of them once again.

"Did he remind you to check your little magazine?" Her voice echoed like the aftermath of a pistol shot in a secluded well.

"Yes, mother," the prince ground out, "though he did not say why. I can only presume his mind was on that Beetle character of whom he is so fond."

"His name is Bettel, as well you know," came Ben's voice from the same room.

The prince rolled her eyes, invisible to both, or perhaps to neither; she found she could not care. "I bow to your superior dedication as always, brother dear. Mother, I shall take my breakfast in the sunroom today, if you will forgive my absence."

"As you wish, dear," she said, her attention already elsewhere - on some new scheme to further bolster the estate's fortunes, the prince had no doubt. So she continued her slow march down the hardwood stairs until they had transitioned into marble, their rich, almost purple colour suddenly shattered into black and white. At least they were colours she favoured, though she supposed white and black were hardly colours at all.

She picked up the opened dispatches from the Neuroi Front, a thing almost like a tabloid magazine for the rear-echelon of military staff. It was the kind of publication that during the First Neuroi War would have been most welcome in the latrines during one of the milder dysentery outbreaks, or perhaps as a lining to prevent trench foot, but for all that it was unserious on a fundamental level it was at least something she could read other than society rumour-mongering. It was military rumour-mongering instead, of course, but such things could not be helped. There was no idle housewife quite so prone to gossip as an officer of the Britannian Armed Forces stuck behind a desk in the middle of a war.

She suspected a prank, of course; some tale of woe involving a poor unfortunate who looked like her, or wore a cravat the same way, or some other such mild insult that only family could get away with. Still, she thought as she leafed through the listings, it was something better to do than daydream about the multicoloured leaf-spirits that lived in the garden and gave small household objects to tiny men from space-

She turned the page and stopped dead. There it was. A lead. A lead.

The prince sprinted back up the stairs, breakfast forgotten, shoes clicking on the carpet. She dashed into her chamber and shut the door, locking it and placing a heavy bar into the brackets to ensure it was impassable without her knowing. Such secrecy was both necessary and not; her family knew she had a passing interest in this particular subject, but not the extent, and if she had her way they wouldn't until it was far too late.

She crawled under her bed and dragged out a corkboard, which she rested on her dresser before unlocking the heavy wooden cover and letting it thud to the floor. Her dresser drawer produced a thin pair of scissors; she trimmed the page out neatly and pinned it into place like a dying butterfly, and yet she felt as if wings of her own were blossoming from her shoulders.

Rittmeister von Katädien's smiling face would do that to a girl - many girls, in fact, and girl-adjacent identities of countless places - but to the prince, it was something that bit more special. She had no magic. She had no knowledge of the techniques of the Zauberschüle. For all that she was a prince, the principality of Kalaino was about twenty-eight square miles of turnip country near what used to be the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, and in any event her mother the Queen still held power there. In short, she had neither powers nor power, and was treated as any other young woman; a frippery at best and a tiresome distraction from issues of real importance at worst.

It was nothing like the real Kalaino, a world of its own, who knew how many worlds away.

"I'll find you, Gryphon. I have to find you. I have to. If anyone can get me home, it's you."

Thursday, July 11th, 2411
Royal Palace, Tellada City, Tellada
Kalaino, Indi sector (formerly Aidoru-Esekai sector)
Dimension GCC #100/W

"Do you think she'll come home again?"

It was a ritual, every morning, between the woman and the snail. It was a distraction from the latest squealing tantrum emanating from the throne room, if nothing else; Rinako Bellerose hadn't been the worst person for the job of ruling Kalaino, she might well have been the worst lifeform. There were crusted lumps on an unwashed frying pan that could govern a nation better than her. At the very least, they wouldn't have been quite so shrill.

"I have to," she replied. "I have to, Snebby. What choice do I have?"

"The same one I have," replied the snail. "None at all."

"I miss my wife." The woman turned her head, her eyes clouded over with distant thunder. "I want her here. I only want her here, these days. Everything else seems, I don't know. Faded, somehow."

Snebby inched across the breakfast table and rested his antennae on her hand. "She's fighting to come home, Juna. It might be hard to remember sometimes, but she is. I can feel it in my shell, just as you can in your cartilage. We just have to keep the home fires burning."

"I know," said Juna Unagi, her eyes downcast, her lightning meek little crackles. "I know."

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"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

i mean if it's open season on vtubers then it feels improper not to include John Vtuber herself. =]