Author's Note: I have a very... loose understanding of the book. I read parts of it *hangs head in shame* my main devotion focuses on the musical. So I apologize for any blips in Ozian geography or landscape, or anything for that matter.
Chavillia Thropp
Shoes clattered on a dark stone staircase, going up.
"Are they following?" gasped the one in the hat.
"Uh, yeah; of course they are!" spat the one clutching the book.
"No need for attitude, Delgi."
Two women with panic-splattered faces swung around the corner of the spiral steps.
"Go, go, go!"
"Like I need prompting! The entire Gale Force is right there!"
"Why do you insist—" Delgi broke off, panting. She nearly tripped into Villa. "—on wearing a full-length black dress?!"
"I'm the only one left to wear it, of course."
They came to a large, cavernous, circular attic. Villa paused near the Melting Site. Her skin tingled.
"Time to fly."
She allowed Delgi to clamber onto the broom behind her, jumped nimbly onto the rusty black railing of the balcony, and took off into a storm.
.
.
Like Elphaba, she spent the better part of her childhood in Quadling country, but had been born elsewhere. Chavillia Thropp (with the given last name Ordling) had been born of the Winkie variety, in a disgracefully small Winkie village, where the best lighting was at sunset. Orange and red lit the village on fire, mingling with purple and blue shadows. A true treat for artistic eyes, the one pride of the village.
But she was only half-Winkie, on her mother's side.
Her father had, in retrospect, beaten the Wizard at his own twisted game of transcending Ozian-Kansas boundaries. When he was only eighteen, he had arrived on the outskirts of Oz, stumbling into the curious view of the Winkies. They took him in, feeling no need to announce a strange young man to the world, much less make him their leader. He had arrived in far less a spectacular way than a hot air balloon. As Chavillia recalled from his story, he had been carried in, dangling unimpressively from the talons of the biggest bird Oz had ever seen. He'd nearly died on the flight over, had no memory of the transition, and was merely glad to see people again.
He lived among them until he met Susetta, a Winkie woman exactly his age, betrothed to a dull man from a city miles away. How thrilled was she to run away with the exciting local celebrity.
Erdolf Ordling (whose family had an impressive history of unfortunate names) had come from a star he called "New York". He said it was the brightest one.
Now, don't go thinking that there are men dropping out of every state in the continental U.S. and landing in Oz. That would be a wicked lie. The truth about Ozian-Earthly boundaries is that they are very unstable, very unreliable, and that time is a strange variable in between. Erdolf Ordling was the first, and perhaps the luckiest American to ever land in Oz…
.
.
Over two decades later, his memory almost completely washed clean of pre-Ozian existence; Erdolf Ordling lounged on a sunny porch in Quadling country with his Winkie wife, Susetta, and a tiny daughter named Villa. Winkieland had been unsatisfactory to Erdolf, a flimsy and meaningless country. And so he convinced his Susetta to come live among the Quadlings.
Willing to follow him anywhere was Susetta. She hated her homeland as much as he did. Quadlings, she concluded, were a bit of a step down, but at least they had personality.
"Falabalaba," Villa, only five, babbled quietly. "Fabala." The child, sitting in the lush, marshy grass of Quadling country, played with pebbles in the dirt. Her parents seemed to think nothing of the jibberish.
"Don't get too dirty, Lovey," Susetta called, an ever-present sunhat protecting her from the rays. "Fetching bathwater is such a hassle..." Their bucket had a mysterious hole in it, and the Ordlings often had to borrow from the Thropps. Old Frexspar Thropp, being the uneventful person that he was, often offered to help fetch from the river. He was gray and a tad plump, but Villa and Susetta both liked him.
How famous was Elphaba, yet? Not at all. She was a mere teenager, skin bizarrely brownish with Quadling Sun sunburn, a neighborhood marvel… and nothing more.