/Author's Note: The third chapter! Thanks for the reviews so far, I'm glad this story's getting some attention. Hopefully I'll keep you intrigued enough until we get to the real meat of the story, which we will be very soon :D Enjoy this chapter, and expect another one soon! End Author's Note/

- Chapter 3 -

Mary

It was a wet and drizzly morning that greeted Mary Brunell as she descended the sloping hill into Forget-Me-Not Valley. She carried an umbrella in one hand and a bag slung over her shoulder, rhythmically bumping into her side with every step she took. Struggling to keep her footing, Mary looked up at the sky hopelessly; it looked like it would rain throughout the day. The downpour had made the trail muddy and the slope slippery, and it had taken longer than usual to make the journey. The Valley was at least in sight now, and she could make out two figures standing at the base of the hill; the sight of them quickened her pace.

"Mary!" Lumina greeted jovially as soon as they were within earshot. She was standing with Sebastian, who held a tartan umbrella over her head and a plain black one over his own. Hands clasped together, she said, "I thought you'd never make it in this weather!"

The ebony-haired girl gave her a small smile and reminded her, "I've come to the Valley on worse days, Lumi." Lumina was about to apologize but Mary sensed it, as she sometimes did, and shook her head. "It's always worth it, anyway."

Sebastian smiled and offered to take her bag, and in Mary's attempt at removing it from her shoulder with her umbrella in hand, she slipped on the muddy ground and nearly fell. Lumina caught her just in time, grabbing her shoulders and steadying the girl.

"Oh, thank you!" Mary said breathlessly, fixing the glasses on the end of her red nose. Her snow-white face contrasted with the thick, plain, black hair that was tied in a low, clumsy braid somewhere down her backside. Mary still had a baby face, and she was a stocky, awkward looking girl for the most part. Her face was adorned with a pair of large, round glasses, dirty from the rain.

"Easy now. Let's get you back to the manor before you end up blind," Lumina said with a good-natured smile, rubbing some mud off of the girl's glasses before letting go of her.

Mary attempted to say something – a cross between 'Yes' and 'Thank you' – that came out as an awkward mumble, then nodded her head and followed.

The Village was hardly large enough to warrant having a car, and it certainly didn't have the accommodations for automobiles anyway: no roads, no gas stations, no parking lots. The most one might see around Forget-Me-Not Valley were travelers on horse-back, which was how, so many years ago, Sebastian and Mistress Romana had arrived. And so, the trio set off towards the opposite end of the village, Sebastian still holding an umbrella over Lumina's head, and now carrying Mary's bag over his shoulder, unphased.

"It's still such a novelty to see you walking down that hill alone!" Lumina remarked cheerfully. Since only about a year ago, Mary's weekly trips had been made under the supervision of her father, Basil Brunell. After turning nineteen last year, she finally managed to shake him off and, with some help from her haughty mother, convince him that he needed to be her father, not her guard-dog.

Shaking her weary head, Mary said, "That almost wasn't the case."

"Oh no, your father again?"

"Not quite…" Mary's expression turned sour, "You remember I told you about that boy back in Mineral Town, Gray?"

Lumina remembered: "The grumpy boy? Who skulked into the library the last time I was there, unaware that you had company, then got mad for no apparent reason, and left?"

Rubbing her temple with her free hand, Mary nodded, "That's the one."

"What did he want?"

"Oh, it was more of the same, really," Mary mumbled, then raised her voice to carry on the story, "He saw me heading to the Valley and was appalled - as if I didn't do this every week - that I was making the journey alone."

"Sounds like your Father!"

Mary nodded and continued, "I – I told him I didn't want to trouble him, and that I was perfectly capable of making it there on my own – Or at least, I tried to explain it to him, but he became his usual huffy self, and rounded on me, getting angry for – "

"No apparent reason?"

"…Mm." The dark-haired girl looked sadly into the puddles they marched through.

"It's no fault of your own, if that's what you're thinking," Lumina said matter-of-factly, "I'm sure he was worried about you but, being the brute he is, he couldn't –"

"- express his emotions properly." Mary finished for her quietly. The two girls had, as they often did, reached the same conclusion.

"Exactly. Now really, I don't see how any girl could possibly find that kind of rubbish endearing. Where's the allure in being yelled at by some snotty blacksmith?"

Mary said nothing, and Lumina thought she noticed – though it could have simply been brought out by their bleak, colourless surroundings – her cheeks get slightly pinker.

# # #

The rainy afternoon had called for some baking. The pair of girls had been hard at work in the kitchen, with Sebastian checking in occasionally to make sure nothing had gone awry- and so far, nothing had. Aside from splashes of white flour across the aprons and faces of the young women, the two had managed to competently make a batch of cookies, which were now baking slowly in the oven.

This left Lumina and Mary to sit at the dining table, talking and awaiting their first batch of cookies to finish. Each had a metal beater in hand from the electric mixer, enjoying the cookie dough still stuck to their ends like a lollipop.

"I should pack some up for my parents," Mary thought aloud, "Mom loves cookies."

Lumina nodded, "Aunty does too, on occasion. She's become conscious about her health these days, though."

Mary knew as much as Lumina did about her mysterious parentage – that is to say, Lumina told Mary everything she knew. Mary had pitied her friend at first, but Lumina had been quick to dispel such thoughts – she did not miss the parents she had never met. She was luckier than most – she was in good health, she was the wealthiest girl in her village, and, in her rare moments of immodesty, she could admit she was talented.

Mary, she sometimes felt, recognized all this and more, and seemed to look up to Lumina with the tiniest hints of idolatry. There was no doubt that the Mineral Towner had a great deal of respect for her friend, but it often went a step further – at the least it was admiration, and at most it was adoration. Mary was… frumpy. She was not unattractive, but she wasn't pretty: Her big glasses, her thick, unchanging hair, and her pink babyface all contributed to a rather homely look. With some effort, she'd look the part of a beauty, but, as Romana had always taught her, people will dress the way they think they look – and Lumina found herself applying this logic very often to the meek and apprehensive Mary, who would never see herself as anything beyond plain.

The way she saw Lumina, however, was the complete opposite. Lumina was pretty - and this was widely acknowledged - but she had spent her childhood being groomed and tailored by her rich old great-aunt and her butler, forced into dresses and attacked with combs and brushes on a daily basis. Lumina knew, though Mary would not ever admit to it, that if Mary had been in her place, she'd look just as Lumina did. It had all to do with circumstance.

"Mom's been dieting again though, she'll probably ask about the calories in every single ingredient we used today," Mary smiled wryly.

Mary's parents, Anna and Basil Brunell, were good people and well respected in Mineral Town, though were often at odds with each other – Anna had never thought much of Basil's career as a botanist, which had left him stung. Lumina often sympathized with him - hell could freeze over a dozen times before she married a man who scorned her passion. Mary was closer with her outdoorsy father than with her haughty mother, but the family was a tight-knit one nonetheless: many Mondays in her youth had been spent with the family of three on a walk along Mineral Town's own wooded area, Mother's Hill.

In fact, it was this that brought Lumina a small amount of pain. She loved her Aunty, and she loved Sebastian, but the image in her mind of Mary and her family spending a day up in the mountain together was the kind of family scene she could never picture herself in. Her family, while loving in its own way, was a degree too disjointed for something so idyllic. Sebastian loved her like his own grand-daughter, and her Aunty had her own oppressive way of loving her, and the two of them certainly kept a pleasant – if not slightly formal – friendship, but as a family, as one unit, Lumina felt it was weak. This was attributed, no doubt, to the unconventionality of the arrangement.

It wasn't long before the topic that had been weighing on Lumina's mind had been breached."Hey, Lumi," Mary prompted inquisitively, "Any news from the Grace Orchestra?"

Lumina's breathing became shallow, "Oh, you know they are," she said neutrally. Mary gave her a look that plainly said she didn't. Impatiently, Lumina said, "Always slow with their mail. I checked this morning, but there was nothing."

"I'm sorry," Mary said in a small voice.

"Hey, now! Don't make it sound like I've already been rejected!" Lumina forced a laugh, "The letter's not here yet, that's all." Secretly, she had been aching all weekend for Monday to arrive, hoping it would finally be the day she got some confirmation.

"Y-You're right! I'm sorry!" Mary apologized sincerely. "I shouldn't have…" She trailed off, just as the oven beeped and the cookies were ready.

Distracted by the baked goods, the girls delved into cheerier topics: gossip from their respective villages, news about the Pumpkin Festival, and of course, the new chapters of Mary's novel.

"You've come so far already!" Lumina was shocked as she held the hard-covered journal Mary handed to her. Mary munched on a cookie happily as she watched Lumina peruse the contents and pick up where she had left off last time.

"It's not that exciting or anything, my characters tend to get away from me…"

"They write themselves," Lumina said without removing her eyes from the words on the page, "It's amazing, really."

Lumina knew that Mary's story was heavily inspired by her life in Mineral Town. The pastoral tale she was writing was of an abandoned farm and a heroic farmer who decided to take it up. The premise was quite basic, but what she lacked in originality she made up for in the fluidity of her writing and her firm grasp on her own characters: the dialogue was unique to each. Some of the characters seemed so unique, Lumina had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they were all penned by the same shy, plain girl in front of her.

"I can't believe it! He'd just taken the farm and then… Oh Goddess!" Lumina gasped as she tore through the story. Mary simply looked pleased at the reactions she was getting from her friend.

"How do you manage to end a chapter on a note like that?" Lumina demanded, ten minutes later, bewildered at the blank page she had come to, "I can't – You can't just do that!"

"It's called a cliffhanger, Lumi," giggled the authoress.

"I'll have none of it! Tell me what happens!" said an outraged Lumina, her friend only shaking her head and giggling uncontrollably.

"Nope!"

"Mary!"

"No, Lumi!" she laughed, "You'll just have to wait until next week."

Lumina groaned, defeated, as she was every week.

"Well now! You girls seem to be having fun," came the cawing voice of Aunty Romana as she entered the kitchen, "Mary, dear, it's nice to see you. Please excuse me for not greeting you earlier, I was in the middle of a check-up with Dr. Hardy,"

"Oh – No, that's – It's… N-No problem!" Mary stammered. Romana naturally intimidated many people, despite her small stature, but those who were easily intimidated, like Mary, found her downright terrifying, even when she addressed them in her kindest tones.

"I do hope Lumina has fed you," Romana blustered on, pretending not to notice.

"Sh-She has!"

"Well, I didn't give you much, Mary, we only made cookies. If you're hungry, feel free to- "

"Oh, n-no no, I'm fine, really!"

Romana took this as a cue to try a cookie, and she did. "Lovely!" she squawked, "I should put some tea on, that and some of these cookies would really hit the spot…"

Lumina got up to do just that, saving her great-aunt the trouble. Romana took a seat the dining table, opposite Mary, and sat there in silence while the water boiled. The bespectacled girl decided to bite into another half a dozen cookies to avoid talking to the imposing elderly woman in front of her. Romana did not notice, and helped herself to a few more herself. When the kettle whistled, Mary shot to her feet and wobbled after Lumina in the kitchen, offering to help serve the tea.

Placing an ornate saucer and teacup – an antique, no doubt, being part of the Wyndham household - in front of the aged Romana, Mary found herself the target of a compliment she had never before gotten:

"You'll make a fine housewife one day, dear. And an excellent mother, I'm sure!" Romana told her kindly.

Lumina rolled her eyes while her back was still to her great-aunt: Romana still spoke as if it was a given that every young woman's destiny was to become a prim and proper housewife. Still, it was the kindest thing someone of Romana's generation was likely to say to a girl.

"Ah, I… Er, I think Lumina would make for a much b-better one. She's the one who did m-most of this anyway."

Romana looked at the tea strangely suddenly, as if unsure what was in it. She had a faraway expression on her face, and Lumina had the strangest suspicion that she was imagining her as a housewife or mother in the distant – or near – future. Lumina was suddenly afraid Mary may have put some unnecessary ideas into her great-aunt's head. However, Romana behaved strangely:

"Hm, Yes." She said absently, her tone indifferent to the suggestion. "I think I'll take my tea into my room with me, girls. Thank you."

Her voice was stiff, and she left briskly, leaving, in her wake, an enigmatic air and a pregnant pause.

The behavior was suspicious, at the very least, and reminded Lumina that she had intended to talk to Mary about the rest of the suspicious behavior that seemed to be happening around the Villa lately; namely, Romana's and Sebastian's determined attempts to keep people away from the Shed in the courtyard.

Mary stood there with a look of confusion on her white face.

"Let's go to my room – there's something I've been meaning to discuss with you."

# # #

The rain had not let up all day, and it was into a gloomy night that Mary disappeared, back up the hill to Mineral Town. Just as they had this morning, Lumina stood with her hands clasped together under an umbrella Sebastian held over her head.

"I'm certain Vesta and her farmhands have enjoyed this day-off from watering their crops," Sebastian said conversationally.

"Oh, it's not that simple, Sebastian," Lumina said with a sniff, "Over-watering can be dire for crops…" She proceeded to explain the plights that farmers faced when rain persisted for days on end, all of which she had learned from reading Mary's surprisingly exciting tale of the farmer on the abandoned farm. After Mary was over the hill and out of sight, the duo made the trek home, following the lamp-posts positioned around the valley, Lumina wrapped up in a complex explanation of all she had read in Mary's novel.

Reaching the manor after a wet twenty minutes in the rain, Sebastian put away the umbrellas and bid the young miss good night.

Romana did not emerge from her room all night.

# # #

The next day, Lumina's heart leapt to see the mailman at the door of the Villa.