::Welcome, everyone!

Gosh, it's been ages since I last wrote any kind of real fanfiction. The last time I tried, I'm pretty sure I was still sporting cat ears and spouting broken Japanese. It's okay, though. Things have changed for the better. I'm wearing bunny ears now. [polite audience laughter]

But seriously, this is going to be a big fic. (This chapter is just about 4k words alone!) I was introduced to Ib, Mary, and Garry a few summers ago and it was like love at first sight, so like a lover I'll give them the extensive treatment they deserve and try not to put them into a canvas too small for the painting. If there are any mistakes in characterization, dialogue, etc. etc. I'd love any kind of feedback.

As a writer, I'd prefer the story tell you about the setting, but as a little transition I'll state that this is College/Real Life AU for both Mary and Ib. Garry...well, he's not in college, but you'll see him later.

That's all I have for you so far! Happy reading!


The lakes were like bright eyes in the middle of a pallid face-iced over in the too-long winter, they seemed to be ringed with the remains of celestial mascara and too much crying. Long stretches of time, as well as the roads, wound around impossible turns. Old soft snow hardened into bumps under the bus tires, the noise like someone thudding their head against a pole every time they sped up. The middle-aged driver muttered something colorful and irritable under his fetid breath as they sped over yet another pothole.

It wasn't normally this ugly, or at least she didn't think it had been, but the season of joy had hit them hard enough to leave the city with an icy hangover and the ensuing bruises sustained by the spring were an eyesore. It was like life imitating art. The college students, returning after an extended Easter holiday, had drunken themselves into fits of miserable apathy. At least they would have the day off. Many of them had a bruise or two to show from the winter as well.

All except one, in fact. Isabel Moore-Ib-was perfectly sober and also perfectly lonely, her voice tired from the brief visit to her worried parents and phone still buzzing in her pocket as she chewed the stubs of fingernails on both hands. She shoved her wrecked fingers into said pocket after a while and shut off the unerring buzz, the device itself at nearly twenty percent of its battery and useless-and that was a shame, because it left her eyes hungry for something besides the faces of her fellow students. Looking around with distaste, she found herself surprisingly unable to feel remorse for the poor souls with vomit churning in their abused stomachs, and turned to the side of the bus and away from her peers. She would be seeing them soon, anyway. It wasn't a college town they were returning to for nothing.

She shifted, her fingers already returning to her mouth. The dusty windows were thick with the smog of wasted breath, but she used her scarf to wipe off a decent rectangle and peered through it, expecting something as stark and boring as she felt. It was only fitting. As she pressed one free hand against the glass, the city of Artas flashed its gloomy morning assets into her all-seeing gaze.

...

It was barely noon. The Sketchbook was packed with hungry and hungover students, the typical indie instrumentals on the overhead speakers, and everything ten times brighter than anything outside. Two very long legs in even longer stockings sauntered toward a metal table smacking of Parisian influence, heels clicking as she came to a stop.

This image, like so many others in the world, would be a misleading one. As a reader, one would assume this was Ib being unaccountably and inexplicably alluring as she approached an empty table. But this was not so. If one were to, say, pan up to our character's ridiculously fancy green dress and beyond, they'd find this was not the leading lady but a bright young individual with flowers climbing up her skirt-form curvy, stance perpetually defensive. This person's name was Mary Guertena, and she was the most recognized person this side of the state.

"Here's your health drink," teased Mary as she handed over a hot cup of tea to the not-so-empty table's other occupant. She sat with elbows on the table, legs crossed underneath; her smile was as subtly overzealous as always behind the veneer of whitened teeth and bright blonde hair. Over the steam, baby blue met coppery brown, and she showed no signs of interest in her newly-bought coffee as she tucked her small fists beneath a heart-shaped face. "I didn't hear a bag, but… You're still nibbling on those carrot sticks all the time, aren't you?"

"I've upgraded to celery." Ib was decidedly less alluring than the first paragraph suggested, her thick woolen socks peeking over grimy brown boots and with a sensible sweater-jeans combination above them. Nevertheless, her pale lips quirked up into a pretty smile, eyes brightening with familiarity as she straightened up in her chair. It was such a relief to be welcomed back to Artas by someone she actually knew. She gave Mary a nod of thanks, her hands going immediately to warm themselves through the thin plastic of the cup, and took a moment to appreciate the smell of sweetness that wafted from the small hole in the cap.

"Ew, don't smell it! Just drink it!" Mary's nose wrinkled in distaste as she loosened one fist to the table, raising her own cup-some mixed coffee drink, no doubt, and high in all kinds of sugar-and taking a noisy sip. "What are you, a tea afishy-aficio-someone who drinks tea all the time?"

"It's my tea, and I can smell it if I want to." She didn't need to add that this was her first cup of anything she had genuinely grown to love on campus since she got back, since that would be a waste of words. She sniffed again almost spitefully and shot Mary a challenging look.

"You're so weird," said Mary, making a face, but laughed and dropped the subject. Leaning in secretively and baring a good inch of perfect cleavage, she mock-whispered: "It's good you came home, though. It was literally torture waiting for you at that stupid bus stop! Everyone's so mean to the pretty people."

Ib shook her head, smiling ruefully now, and took the cup away from her nose before she imbibed it through the wrong face-hole. "Poor Mary."

"I know, right? It's dumb that I can't be part of the pathetic pact they have. They all thought I was stupid, I bet, when they have the brains of ants." She wiggled, feigning frustration as the fleshy curve that went into her collar did a little dance, and her lower lip puffed out as though she'd been stung there. "Not my fault I'm beautiful and successful and they're...not."

Ib sipped cautiously, not wanting to offend her by not offering support, but still disagreeing that Artas was made up of people she could write off like underlings. Mary was just out of control sometimes. And Ib had texted her a few hours before, telling her she had the freedom to wait at the dorm instead...

"Anyway," sighed Mary, pausing to drink. "As I was saying. This carrot stuff has gotta stop-you really should try to eat less like a rabbit, Ib! Drink milkshakes in the morning, eat candy during lectures, have steak for dinner every night! You're like a stick! A stick that someone whittled down to practically nothing!" As if on cue, her hand slipped into her dress pocket as easily as breathing and extracted a baggie filled with cookies of varying shapes and sizes: one moment her fingers had crept inside, the next, her mouth was filled with muffling crumbs. Her lips were covered in them, too. "Iff's whike...the Mwary diet. I weally wecommen' it!"

Ah, and there it was. Mary had a bad habit of generalized preaching, almost like she was filling in for the parents Ib had been glad to leave, and she had no words for that either. Suppressing the urge to retort with something sarcastic, she handed over a napkin from the little tray on her left and watched with slight disgust as Mary completely ignored the gesture in favor of wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Time to change subjects.

Her eyes, resourceful helpers that they were, flicked around the newly renovated café with more interest than she'd originally planned to try and find something new to bring up. Thankfully, she had a lot to talk about. Everything was in a subtle shade of pastel-flowers everywhere she could see, and the heated air thick with the artificial perfume of clean linen. Even the chair she sat on had been switched out from the previous ones, now more like black single-seat park benches than the comfy armchairs they'd had in winter. She had to give Mary credit for how quickly she'd changed everything around in the span of just a few weeks. "I don't know about that, but the café looks nice."

"You think so?" Mary asked, sitting up a little in obvious pride. With how quickly she was able to change subjects, Ib guessed she'd chosen to forget about the rabbit issue in order to talk more about herself-which, of course, was exactly what Ib had planned. All of this was Mary's, after all: she was wealthy enough to own a business that she didn't have to take care of personally. Instead, almost as if this place was her dollhouse, she had the freedom to change the surroundings with no ill repercussions and had as much pride in it as she did her actual sketchbook. "I knew you'd like the little pick-me-up when things are so bad outside! Isn't it interesting? I was trying to focus on Spring..."

"I can tell," said Ib, her smile amused at her friend's enthusiasm. "I love it."

"I know! It's-" Mary stalled. "Hey, wait a second. Are you trying to pull a subject change on me, Ib? We were just talking about you!"

Damn. Ib pretended to act shocked by this accusation, her hand going immediately to her chest. "Who, me?"

"You're so sneaky sometimes-good thing you're too cute to be mad at." Just her luck-it didn't work. Mary's face steeled with friendly resolve, and Ib could tell she was going to delve back into the topic of Ib's personal life. "So! Tell me, how was Lyndewood? How are your parents? How's your fish?"

"In order? Boring. Fine. Wet." Ib adopted a deadpan expression, her tone turning suddenly sour. Another sip of tea.

Mary pouted. "Okay, okay, I get that you hate your hometown! But are you serious about the boring thing? I'd have given blood to just get out of this place, especially out of state!"

"Lyndewood isn't worth all that," said Ib dismissively, and she meant it. Although the landscaping was immaculate and it was as picturesque as a postcard, all of the events were for people that had retired into wealthy free time. Her parents were playing golf and going to wine festivals in Europe, visiting the country club, buying art-she wondered if they even knew about the idea of poverty as anything besides those African orphans they threw money at. They were still good parents, to be sure, and made certain of her own future through their financial stability; it just annoyed her that she had mountains of pink rabbits at home and an aquarium filled with disposable fish and here she learned of artists who had barely had a bed before college. (Excluding Mary, but she could buy the whole of Artas and still have enough to live off of comfortably for a few generations, so Ib assumed she was a bit of an outlier.)

"Well, we could switch places next time. After I'm freed of that stupid death ruling about my dad, you can take my place and stay, and I'll go home to your parents and be their daughter for the week."

"Sounds good."

Mary pulled back, her smile eye-catchingly bright. "I'll hold you to that! You agreed to a binding promise, Ib!"

"Yeah, yeah." With a wave of her hand, she took a long drink from her cup, emptying it with a smile. Mary was always good about coaxing those out of her. "Just tell me about what I missed."

The bookstore was like a translucent handkerchief in a sidewalk crack: ghostly, half-submerged, but still very visible to anyone that hadn't trodden over it. White Rabbit. The weathered sign that swung from its outstretched metal arm shivered in the blustery breeze and so did she, her bag held tight to her side like a protective lover. Her phone was still dead to the world in her pocket, and with good reason-she didn't want any distractions.

She'd stopped off at her dormitory-one of the bigger ones in the Chrysanthemum building, of course, since she was rooming with none other than Mary Guertena-and grabbed what she usually did when she headed to the bookstore: a thermos, her bag, and the silence it took to go into such a solemn place alone. It was her sanctuary. For her, the White Rabbit was a landmark of change and a place of almost holy knowledge, because it was the first bookstore she ever felt truly at home in...and the first place Artas had deigned to show her outside of campus.

For all her reverence, the place wasn't nearly as solitary as she made it out to be. It was owned by two old men who interchanged duty at the checkout desk, as owlish as they were affectionate, and college students often came to the bookstore to just get away from things. Ib would often walk in to find her peers checking out books in the fiction section, writing up new ideas by the windows, or such like-it was just that they didn't take notice of one another, or preferred ignorance to disturbance. Following tradition, she stepped past the threshold of the door with her lips shut tight, making her measured way past bookcases that creaked with the weight of so much knowledge.

The non-fiction section passed, and the fiction, and the poetry, and then she was there at the very back of the store where the smell of old paper permeated every pore of her small body. It was a slightly bittersweet scent, as she'd never had reason to enjoy it so much before, but she was happier that she could now experience it without that longing she'd had as a child. She picked up a worn book from the fiction section, punctuating her mental statement, and slowly but surely read one paragraph about the armored bears in the country of Svalbard.

She set it down again, enjoying the freedom she had to simply jump out of one book and into another, and picked up a book where Alice was jumping down the rabbit hole...and then a book about unfortunate events happening in a series...and then another, something dark, two sisters killing for fun and profit. And then another, and another, and another. They were all interesting. Tucking them under her arm, she picked up Carrie Careless and the Galette de Rois before she realized she'd made her way through half of one of the fiction stacks, and beneath Carrie Careless was an old book she hadn't seen for several years.

Almost dropping her previous stack in surprise, her shaking hands made contact with the book in question, five years' worth of anticipation straining on her face.

In bed, several hundred miles from Lyndewood and with Mary gone, she opened the book and became a little girl again.

It wasn't in the best condition, but it was a lovingly worn thing, and not simply damaged for the sake of damage. Emblazoned with the title The Fabricated World in faded white lettering on the spine, it smelled like the remnants of coffeehouses and dust from the stacks themselves. On the inside of the cover, someone had scribbled in a number: xxx-xxx-xxxx, call if lost. It had been crossed out once, twice, replaced. The most recent of them had an Artasian area code.

(She supposed it was too late to call the number if it had turned up at White Rabbit. And anyway, she was much too scared to lose this book again.)

Pages were turned, and past the brilliant title illustrations the first line of the story popped into view, the letters spelling out that phrase she had read so many years ago:

In the early afternoon, under a gray sky…

She remembered tracing these words with her tiny fingers, sounding out every word with difficulty-as a fourth grader, she still read like she was in first. The letters simply never came. If it wasn't a part of her harshly stunted vocabulary, it just turned into squiggly marks in front of her eyes, the bane of many a tutor and child psychologist and the loss of several thousand dollars from parents who only wanted to 'fix' her. Nothing worked. She was still kept behind a year. And little nine-year-old Ib, ignorant of most things but knowing she had the potential for knowledge far beyond her reach, was frustrated beyond belief at the idea that she might never learn what the other kids learned.

It was then, in the haze of negativity and words from professionals bouncing around in her mind (what, exactly, was the term learning disability?) that she found it.

The timing had been perfect: Lyndewood had once been a place she had been very fond of. She walked home by herself in those days, little red skirt moving freely over littler legs, and her mary-janes clicking against the concrete as she strode along the little shops of Lyndewood's main street. It was a compromise of freedom, really. She would be allowed to walk home alone if she stayed proficient in any other field of talent-mostly things that required little reading, such as amateur piano or occasional dance classes. Competent and reliable (albeit a little runty for her age), she always made sure to keep up her end of the bargain, and so the arrangement had no problems at all.

Many of the stores she'd pass would either be making their way through eventual devastation or just getting started, since the main street was not used for much besides the occasional stroll. To go downtown would mean window shopping, which the shops certainly didn't profit from, and Ib was always curious as to how they stayed open for more than a few days with such little interest. They were fun to look at, though. One month a bead shop, the next a bakery, and in the empty square of land where the yeasty smell hadn't yet gone away there was a bookstore springing up right after that.

She remembered that store best. It was the prettiest to look at because it looked so suddenly old, like a willow tree that had been planted years before any semblance of a neighborhood, and its metaphorical roots dug into the concrete behind an illegible sign. The windows bragged about novels as complex and sinister-looking as a plate of fancy duck's guts and she was always just a little afraid to look inside-until the day a splash of color reflected itself into the glass and through to her eyes.

Taught not to judge a book by its cover, she was nevertheless intrigued enough to press her nose up against the display day after day. Loud, bright, colorful-it looked like a children's book made for adults, the front covered entirely by what looked to be a bendy canvas stretched to cover the pages, and a little girl dwarfed by the colors. The painting itself was mesmerizing and Ib found herself drinking in every vaguery, picking out a flower here and a building there…

It was fate, almost. She bought it after the fifth day in a row staring at just the front cover, when the shadowy owner peeked his head out from the door and asked if she was going to loiter there all afternoon, and her pockets felt considerably lighter after using up her money on something she actually wanted.

And oh, the feeling of reading that book was indescribably precious! Even though she had to work extra-hard to get it into her head, the story was so-and the characters, and the scenery! And the pictures she didn't have to decode, they were just there, and the way the narrator was telling her everything was just like a puzzle and by the end of the book she'd actually been able to make out what they'd been saying. With the help of a dictionary and countless hours of reading and re-reading, she even learned what some of the underlying information had been missing. It had been the kickstarter for her newfound motivation for reading, her flashcards always on hand, and she'd gotten good enough by her last year of middle school to read at the normal level.

There had only been one problem.

She had never told her parents about the book-as a nine-year-old, she wasn't allowed any secrets. Her clothes were chosen for her. Her media was restricted to whatever family-friendly channels she could watch on television. Even her library was made up mostly of readers, the 1-2-3 type that had more pictures than substance. No, Ib couldn't show her parents this adult book, something that had violence in it and blood and a smattering of implied romantic things. And so this secret was shoved into her dirty laundry hamper, where no one ever went except for when she took the laundry down to the washing machines, and up until the day she was about to enter high school that was where it stayed. She treated the now-dingy book like a faithful dog that just happened to reside in her laundry hamper, and when it disappeared-

She wept, unable to do anything but accept the loss as her worried parents wrote it off hastily as anxiety. It wasn't something she could scour the house for, no matter how she tried, and the hopelessness hit her square in the chest when she woke up on one of the most important days of her life. No one really knew why she had been crying, but on the first day of high school she entered homeroom with lips trembling and eyes puffy from the strain.

Her fingers traced the first words again, biting her lower lip with a suddenly teary smile. Magic. That was what it had to be in the end. Some kind of magic wound and rewound her paths until it brought her back to the one thing that had turned her life from miserable to beautiful.

As if the universe agreed, loopy cursive in the margins said: Curling up in bed and crying. I'm stepping back into the world I never want to leave.

[End Chapter One.]


::And there you have it! Was it a fun enough read so far?

I know it's a little dry due to the exposition pieces, but that last sentence does contain a clue as to where the story is heading. Anticipate the introduction of our final tritagonist into the story next chapter!