"Inay! You're giving her too much rice!" cried Mom from across the table as Lola's nail polished wringled hands scooped a cupful of rice over my plate of daing. Shifting her accusatory glance at me, she said, "Tala, if you get any bigger, I'm not going back to Divisoria to get you new clothes."

"You worry too much about her weight, but she tells me that you hardly get her any fish in Canada!" Lola protested waving the scoop sending a couple of grains flying on the table to Mom's ire. "Besides, if I were you, I would be much more worried about her complexion. Look at her: three weeks in Tondo and see how dark she is now."

Mom flared. "Inay! Don't be racist!"

I tried hard not to snicker. Whether I am seven or twenty-seven, these two will always argue about how much rice I eat. I added albeit, "In Mom's defense, I do live on my own in Montreal. Also, Mom, I believe the best term would be colorist. Sorry Lola…Love you po."

Lola flashed me a proud smile as she added more rice to my plate. "And this is how we will get another doctor in the family."

Mom glared at me, "Tala Christiana Mercado Dizon: what did I tell you about talking when adults are talking? God give you two ears and one mouth to listen…"

Lola muttered under her breath. "As if any of own daughters actually listen to me…"

Mom rolled her eyes. "Who needs more coffee?"

Lola and I raised both our mugs, and Mom waddled to the kitchen to refill the coffee pot.

After Mom disappeared through the kitchen door, Lola quickly motioned to me to lean towards her. Lola quickly slipped a long pendant on my neck. The pendant had a faded bronze medal with a third of it missing. On the cracked medallion was inscribed what looked like the sun with large rays, and the words "Fortis Potens."

"I was my Father's," she explained. "It protected him from Spanish guns, American bombs and Japanese bayonets in all those three wars. It protected me well when I was stationed in Tay Ninh. Now it will protect you."

"Thank you!" I replied, stunned that she would give such a thing to me. Though I did not really believe in magic, one does not turn down a family heirloom from one's grandmother. "But shouldn't Mom have this instead of me?"

"Bah!" she exclaimed. "That thick-headed daughter of mine will think it's demonic and will use it for the fire next time we grill fish."

She did have a point. Ever since Dad died, my Mom's first love became Jesus and her Lawrence West Bible study.

"What are you two talking about?" Mom asked now with a full pot of coffee on her hand.

"Vietnam!" I quickly answered. "Lola was just telling me about one American soldier in Tay Ninh."

Lola gave me a wink. "Ah yes…you see this young man literally got shot in the balls…I managed to stop the bleeding and sew enough of it back up. And his wife still writes me to this day…"

"And how big was his, um, equipment?" I asked.

"I've seen much bigger."

I did not have to turn my head to see Mom hang her head in shame.

Those two annoyed each other endlessly and I love them to bits. Mom even took leave from the hospital so she could come with me. It was one reason why I was back the hometown that I could hardly recognize.

While it was a relief to escape the February snowstorms in Montreal, adjusting back to the Manila heat, the bugs, the incessant beeping of jeepneys, and the almost non-existent wifi for the past month was a bit of a challenge. At the same time, I marveled at the gigantic shopping malls that cropped up near our old house, which almost obscured crowded shanties behind its walls.

I was back in Manila as part of my funded Phd project. Months before I wrote a few NGOs, activist groups and some university students within the Tondo area to assemble people for community media workshops in the hopes that they get to build their own podcasts or community radio. The idea was to equip members of these communities to tell stories within these communities.

The task was not easy. Nonetheless, despite the general sense of fear that I sense from the surrounding communities, we got to work. That day after breakfast, I proceeded to that town hall, where my students showed me samples of stories they collected from the previous day. Many of the stories were grim, such as those about forced relocations, horrible living conditions, and gang wars. But the students and NGO participants got to work assembling these into a month-long program for a podcast.

Just before we finished for the day, one of the attendees asked me if Jenny, one of the students who used to come to the workshops a few weeks prior has made any attempts to contact me. When I replied that I did not, I was told that she disappeared from home the past week, and that her mother was very worried.

As I packed up for the day, I wondered what could have happened to make her disappear so suddenly. Jenny had wanted to tell a story about her brother who had been arrested by police for drug use. It was a story that everybody cautioned her to write, as it can be that kind of story that can reveal something worse or can get one person killed. But she was determined. So we lent her a recorded and she never came back.

Just as I was driving though the rainy traffic on España Boulevard, my phone buzzed. My eyes lit up in surprise when I saw when I saw the caller ID printed in large letters: JENNY.

Almost as soon as I picked up, her voice broke through my phone's speakers, "Hello, Tala?"

"Jenny?" I answered on the speakerphone, "Why don't you come home? Everybody has been so worried!"

"They're after me!" she cried.

"Who's after you? Why don't you call the police?"

"I can't!" she screamed. "They will find me. Please come and get me—"

The line cut off. A minute later, I got a text: Wanda's Sari-sari Store. I remembered that name. It was a general store near the town hall where I conducted the workshops. Almost instinctively, I shifted lanes to turn my car around the next U-turn.

That was the last thing that I remembered from my own world.

When I opened my eyes in this new world, the snow almost blinded my eyes.

I was seventeen the first time I saw snow. Growing up in the perpetual summers of Manila, I had only seen them in tacky American Christmas movies and fluffy winter Korean dramas. Mostly the latter. In these dramas, if one makes a wish on the first snowfall, that wish will come true. If one meets another person during under the first snowfall, one would fall in love with that person. At least, those were always the rules in kdramaland.

That year, Mom and I just migrated to Canada—she in Toronto and me in Montreal to start university, in a school that to me looked a lot like Hogwarts. But this Hogwarts was not magical at all. Everybody spoke English and French, but they spoke in a pace that was a bit too fast for me at that time. Nobody seemed to know where I came from even though it was in every world map. A lot of people looked at me like I was strange. In my mostly white first year dorms, it was a bit difficult to fit in, especially if one did not grow up collecting hockey cards, watching the Heritage minutes or Degrassi, or if one is almost completely ignorant about what people do when it snows. And no one spoke Tagalog.

I severely missed my Lola, who had to stay behind with one of my aunts until they process her grandparents visa. Lola always knew how to make me feel better with some tablea hot chocolate. That day, I found out that my mom was earning money by scrubbing other people's toilets. My mother, who was a well-known vascular surgeon in my hometown, gave up a job that she loved just to send me to university. And a week before that, I had a huge fight with her after I asked her if I could transfer back to a university in Manila. Mom already suffered enough heartbreak, first when police identified Dad's body in a mass grave in Mindanao after he disappeared while covering election fraud. As usual, the official word was that the NPA did it, but of course no one believed that. I was twelve then. And I tried my best then not to cry for Mom's sake. And then I broke her heart again, just because my grades were mediocre, because I felt like I couldn't fit in, and because I simply missed being Hermione Granger in my old school.

I cried a lot in my room that day until I saw the white flakes touch my window. Then I looked out and marveled at how within the span of twenty minutes, the dull gray and orange campus suddenly turned white. So I went outside, lifted my arms and wished.

Bring me home, I pleaded. Bring me home.

Of course, it didn't happen. I didn't see Lola again until a few years later and my hometown until about ten years later.

In the meantime, I graduated, got citizenship, found good friends, helped build a couple of migrant radio collectives, finished two MAs and was well on my way to finishing a Phd in Media Studies.

If my life taught me anything, it's that there is no magic other than that we create ourselves.

I specifically organized everything in my scheduled research project so I could avoid at least one more snowy winter in Montreal. As my feet trudged uphill through the blizzard, the unavoidable thought came.

Putang Ina. How the fuck am I back in Canada? And where the fuck am I in Canada?

The cold pierced through my jeans and hoodie, and my rain boots could not keep anything from leaking through my socks. When I finally got to the top of a large hill, I peered through the pouring snow.

In the distance, I spotted a large stone temple on top of a hill bordered by two massive statues. Down below, armored knight-like figures marched single-file and robed figures carrying staves marched on another.

I had seen this before in a videogame that I played for about 200 hours in an RA project with Prof. Williams on representations of gender and sexuality in games: Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Of course! VR! That was why everything felt so immersive. But then, I remembered that the last time I tried VR, my entire lunch ended up on the floor.

No. I am in video game. Putang Ina.

The memory came of what will happen to the stone structure before me each time someone starts a new game. But just as that thought came, a green light flashed around me, and I was suddenly knocked back into the cold snow.

My world flickered around me. It was cold. I had long stopped shivering. Maybe I was dying. I could not feel anything, and my mind slowed.

There is no such thing as magic. There is no such thing as magic.

I repeated that to myself. If I was in a dream, maybe I could wake up.

My sense of time faded. After what seemed like hours or ages, I heard voices close by.

"Commander!" exclaimed one voice. "Another survivor!"

After debating about who I was or the strangeness of my clothes, I felt someone haul me up. Whoever it was had metal arms, a metal torso, and smelt like someone's grandfather.

There is no such thing as magic. There is no such thing as magic.

As if in reply, the person carrying me muttered. "If only that were true…"

Then my world went black.


Glossary of terms:

Daing: sundried milkfish

Divisoria: a popular market-area in Manila.

Espana Boulevard: a major thoroughfare in Metro Manila connecting Manila to Quezon City

Fairview: a predominantly suburban residential district North of Manila

Inay: Tagalog word for mother

Jeepney: a popular form of public transport in the Philippines, a number of these were repurposed military jeeps left after World War II

Lawrence West: a street in Toronto with a huge Jewish and Filipino population

Lola: Filipino word for grandmother.

Mindanao: a large island in the Southern Philippines where much of the military action in the country occurs. While this is definitely fiction, the event that got Tala's Dad killed is based on the Maguindanao massacre in 2009 that got many journalists killed.

NPA: short for New People's Army, which is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Putang Ina: literally translates as "Your Mom's a Whore," which can mean the same as "Son of a Bitch" or "Fuck."

Sari-sari store: a type of local general store found in Filipino communities

Tablea: blocks of cacao that are heated to make hot chocolate

Tondo: a district in Manila known for its wide slum-areas

Tay Ninh: a province in Vietnam. In 1954, the Philippine chamber of commerce dispatched a group of nurses and doctors to this region.

A/N: I wrote this in response to one post I made (plus the conversations in it) in the Dragon Age fan fiction facebook group about not having a lot of women-of-color in Modern-Girl-in-Thedas fics. I wanted to write a protagonist who looks a lot like me. Like the protagonist, I am also very busy with grad school so I will make no promises about posting schedule. But I will not abandon this fic.

Next chapter: My Avatar is So White