Chapter 43: Echoes of Durga
The crimson haired woman had tried and failed to put the mask in place so that she could cope with the rejection and scorn bound to come her way, but then she saw him. In a single moment, her mask completely vanished and her emotions were on display for all to see. She had definitely been frightened when she realized that she couldn't conceal her heart so she distracted herself by gathering the wild creatures called children and helped them sing a song from the animated feature Mulan 2.
Seeing the looks of relief from the adults, she came to the conclusion that, at the very least, she was not a threat to the young ones. When the children gathered around her after she sat down begging and pleading with her to tell them a story, she was beyond shocked. No child in Storybrooke dared get close to her, commonly crying or screaming when she drew too close to them by accident. She almost started crying, she actually did shed a tear when a little boy named William climbed into her lap and said that he liked the pretty lady.
That single comment alone made her heart soar to the sky and beyond, her eyes glowing in a soft electric blue light. William brought her back to Earth when he wrapped his fingers around her Tardis pendant. She smiled at him and decided to tell them the story of her personal hero; the champion of the stars, the hero of time, and the saver of worlds. The once wild little tykes were completely enraptured by this most thrilling tale and the longer she was with them, the happier she became.
These children were not afraid of her, they liked her, cared for her, and were happy that she was with them. It was one of the happiest moments of her life, but then the children were summoned for mealtime and she was once again on her own. For a brief moment, she thought that the inhabitants of the encampment were about to turn against her, only to be approached by a blondish brown haired woman...wheat or barley, not a dark blonde but not a brunette either...she settled on wheat due to the blonde being more predominant of the two hair colors.
Imagine her surprise when the young woman smiled brightly at her, thanking her for her help with the little hellions called children, and even introduced herself...Lilith Romana Avalon. Artz damn near had a heart attack because she had created a character with that exact name, heck she was even pretty close to the physical description and even went by the nickname of Lily.
The wheat haired woman smiled softly at her, a rather familiar look of fond exasperation in her eyes. That was weird...it almost felt like she and Lily had met before which was impossible yet the instant the woman took her hand, her emotions calmed. She raised an eyebrow because she was now about eighty seven percent sure that Lily possessed either some form of magic or a variant of empathy similar to Jasper from the Twilight saga.
It certainly didn't stop her from dragging Artz all over the place so that she could keep her mind occupied and her heart relatively calm. Things went sideways when she started having difficulties with simpler tasks and her emotions started surging; mainly frustration for not being able to do what normal people could do, anger because it made her feel so useless, a growing apprehension as she continued messing up, and fear began to trickle in every time she lost sight of Killian.
Fortunately a woman named Monica noticed her heightened emotional state and asked for her help with a rather knotted and stringy conundrum. She almost sighed in relief, her brain immediately switching to probability mapping, by far one of the best skills she had and it usually made her feel refreshed from solving a complex problem. Unfortunately, the task ended too quickly and she floundered about a bit.
A man named Charlie ran over to her and asked if she would mind accompanying their hunting party. Apparently, food and provisions were in rather short supply due to the aftermath of the Dark Curse and some rather bothersome ogres. She was more than happy to help, especially when the Captain of the Jolly Roger shadowed them. He kept watching over her and she knew that he was starting to get confused because she was quite adept at hunting and foraging.
She wasn't half bad at tracking either...twenty eight years and a not so evil queen insisting that a certain Huntsman turned Sheriff teach the ginger everything she needed to know about surviving in the wild. To this day, she still didn't understand why Ginny had been so insistent. She asked Goldeneye about it and his best guess was that the mayor wanted her to know everything the sheriff knew in order to have a competent leader in a crisis when neither she nor Graham were unavailable or elsewhere.
She had given him a look that said Why do I not believe you? He simply smirked and gave her a knowing look. He may be her father figure but he was still a twisted little imp of a lizard man. A comment she vocalized, resulting in the not so Dark One laughing quite heartily. It was one of the few moments about her life in Storybrooke that she loved and would cherish it forever. Who else can say that they made the legendary Dark Wizard and her captain's notorious Crocodile laugh for a good solid three minutes?
After a short but rather successful hunt, some of the warriors wanted to show her how to use a variety of weapons and she fought desperately to keep the smirk off her face, listening attentively while they explained. Then came the practical application of their teachings, only to have their butts handed to them by a five foot nine inches tall girl that weighed less than one hundred and fifty pounds.
When it came to weapons, she was naturally gifted. Every weapon or tool she picked up, she knew exactly how to use it or wield it...though to be fair, she specialized more in swordsmanship, archery, and hand-to-hand combat. She was only slightly better than average with everything else but that's because she didn't practice constantly. Her favored weapons were a bow, a pair of short swords, a reverse blade katana, a staff, mixed martial arts and a pressure point technique that she learned by watching Xena: Warrior Princess.
When they finally moved on to archery, the smirk that she had been fighting made its way onto her face at last and they immediately paled. She made certain to emphasize that the bow was something she was highly proficient and skilled with; short, mid, and long ranges, stationary targets, moving targets, multiple targets, and quite a wide variety of vectors including some rather tricky shots, some shots that were insanely difficult to target accurately, but her favorite kind of targets were the ones that required the archer to ricochet off other objects in order to actually hit them at all.
She simply calculated the distance to the target while factoring in the momentum required to reach the target, adjusting for the decreasing kinetic energy as it hit each object, and then determined the specific degree of each angle needed to achieve a successful shot. For her, this was incredibly fun because it was one of those rare moments where she could actually show off and not be shunned for her strangeness. Pre-curse breaking people thought she was some kind of medieval freak with an unhealthy obsession for archaic methodologies and customs.
Now though, she was in the Enchanted Forest where such skills are not only required for the continuance of survival but also revered and respected because of the discipline needed to gain mastery of that weapon. In fact, they actually called her a weapons master and a master forger because of her innate abilities in regards to weapon utilization and the knowledge and skill required to identify the materials used, the process in which it was made, and the creation of duplicate weapons but with a quality superior to the originals.
The crimson haired dimensional traveler had actually stood there and blinked owlishly at them because that was some pretty high fucking praise that she was pretty sure that she didn't deserve. After getting over the initial shock, people started challenging her to a test of archery skills, mainly to evaluate their own proficiency with the bow. It was the first time that she didn't feel Killian's gaze so she glanced about inconspicuously for him and she felt a sharp ping of disappointment slice through her heart, her expression becoming subdued and crestfallen.
The ginger hadn't meant to chase him away. She just got so caught up in the moment and now he was gone. Maybe he thought she was a freak too or worse...an enemy. That thought nearly had her in tears but then a certain feisty Celtic woman with a remarkable resemblance to Merida from Once Upon A Time and a similar tone and lilt practically pounced on her. The redhead was not entirely comfortable with how the fiery ginger kept invading her space...like they had known each other for years instead of minutes.
Said ginger dropped one hell of a bombshell when she told Artz that she knew who Killian was and was more than willing to introduce her to him but the crimson savior declined, unwilling to create an even bigger division than she believed she already had. Then the spitfire issued a formal challenge and identified herself as Remaria Beltone McCreedy ...yet another character she had created for her stories a long time ago though Rem did keep her voice down when telling the redhead her name. Apparently she had a bit of a reputation for pulverizing many a man's royal jewels into figurative mulch, a downside to being a physically attractive and highly independent woman. So many men wanted to conquer her and thus the reason why she was trying to keep a low profile.
The dimensional traveler accepted the challenge but on the condition that should she win, her rather obstinate opponent would fire up the rumor mill to suss out just how Killian Jones felt about her and perhaps result in a proper introduction. Rem agreed on the condition that if she won, that Artz and the blacksmith would be meetin' and greetin'. Once sorted, the challenge began and to her credit, the fiery ginger was actually quite good, most definitely an expert archer, but there was something in the way she used it. Her stance, her technique, and overall performance seemed like an echo of her own, not a carbon copy and obviously lacking a certain refinement but there was a definitive influence that simply could not be ignored.
The redhead had yet another puzzle to solve; an opposites spell making everyone in Storybrooke treat her like shit or simply non-existent, the strange warmth and familiarity that she had with both the Crocodile and the Snow Queen, her rather volatile friendship with the not so evil Queen, the extreme aversion of the Huntsman, the almost obsessive compulsion that caused the savior to seek her out time and again, the still unknown circumstances surrounding the distinct lack of Belle after the curse was broken, her papa's motivations for summoning the wraith like creature given that Belle was currently not a defining factor, and why his eyes looked so ancient, so tired, a burden so heavy that it caused him such bone crushing sorrow and heart wrenching guilt, and the intense shift of emotion from those she cared for like Rumple and his ancient eyes, Ingrid and her sorrowful gaze, Emma and her enraged glare, and more importantly, the look of utter contempt and hatred in Snow's eyes.
Now in the Enchanted Forest, a new list of mysteries was being made; the sudden emergence of magic from herself, her miraculous recovery after being slammed into a rather hard surface with a shit ton of debris using her body like a fucking trampoline, the quite blatantly obsessing Killian Jones constantly watching her and staring at her with such intense desire, the children's almost immediate liking of her, the sheer amount of positivity, acknowledgment, respect, admiration, and kindness being shown to her from the villagers, the existence of a possibly empathic woman named Lily that was very similar to an OC of hers, and now, the crazy ginger named Rem that had met her captain before in Neverland, was a dead ringer for Merida, and whose archery style seemed heavily influenced by her own.