Chapter 8: In which the owner of Crystel-Sparkle Weyr is about to approve Mary's persona sheet, but gets distracted by an unfortunate e-mail...
Escaping to a life of drudgery
A few seconds short of hitting the 'send' button on her e-mail window, Anna heard the double-beep that signified the arrival of another new message. She'd been approving charries for Crystel-Sparkle Weyr all evening, and was just about done with sending out replies, but if this was another persona-sheet she might as well read it first. The last one she'd read had had some fantastic ideas, and so long as that Mary girl didn't mind her charrie slotting in with the existing ranking members of the Weyr ('hierarchy' not being part of Anna's lexicon), Anna reckoned that they'd have many fun hours of RP ahead. Maybe Kyllyryanna could become best friends with her own Weyrwoman Allairyanna? Or they could be long-lost half-sisters? The options were endless! Anna idly touched up her cherry-flavoured lipgloss, and opened her newest e-mail.
Unfortunately for Anna, it wasn't another poorly-written persona sheet after all.
The first sentence was so surprising that Anna pushed her chair back and blinked. She'd waited so long to get this kind of recognition from other people. Of course, her friends all knew how wonderful her writing was anyway, but most other people on the internet were just sad old bitches obsessed with 'grammer', who wouldn't know one end of a good story from another. Wondering how those words would sound aloud, Anna read the opening sentence again.
"Owing to the unprecedented levels of excellence displayed in your fan fiction...'' the message began. Unprecedented levels of excellence! Anna hadn't had an OMG! moment like this in, like, hours!. She read on, enthralled.
It was all just nonsense, of course, but a small part of Anna's brain wanted to give it a try anyway. She re-read the last paragraph on last time - it was all some kind of legalese, about visualising th destination clearly and specifying conditions for return - and forumlated an image of her ideal life on Pern.
She could be just like Annessa! Annessa, her greatest character, who did what Lessa should have done. And had plenty of Teh Hawt! Secx! with F'lar, and loads of twin babies, and didn't take any nonsense from the Oldtimers but made them reform, and stuff like that. Really, it was the obvious choice - what other piece of her fan fiction could this e-mail be talking about, other than her masterpiece?
But where to begin the story, when to start living Anessa's life?
Anna flicked through her notebook, refreshing her memory. Page after page of purple glitter-ink covered paper passed through her fingers, and she realised she had only one choice.
This story was too good to miss a single second of it. She'd have to begin at the beginning, as a drudge in Ruatha.
Closing her eyes, Anna began to visualise her Pernese life. An early morning, with mist still clinging to the valley floor, the Watch-wher safe in his den, and a bribed guard on the fire-heights watching the rising sun glint off the metal blades of Fax's invading horde. It was the most creative image she'd ever strung together in her short life, and when she opened her eyes again, it was onto a view of the image as reality.
In the years that followed, Anna would often find herself desperately looking at the same view, then clenching her eyes and wishing herself home. It would have worked, if the conditions of her return that she'd decided on at the moment of transfer had been met... but Annessa's life had taken a very different route to the contents of Anna's notebook, and it would have taken a miracle to reconcile the differences.
The changes had begun mere hours after Anna's arrival. That was the first day, the day Fax had invaded, the day she'd suffered the same consequences as every other young woman of her age in the Hold. As time moved on, the life that Annessa should have lived diverged more and more from the realities of life as a drudge in an occupied Hold. It didn't help that she had to live with the consequences of her situation. Even the fact that Pern didn't have cosmetics or indeed decent shampoo, and that the filth and physical strain of her lifestyle rapidly ruined her looks, didn't change the misery of Annessa's life by much.
It might have been bearable if she'd had a friend to turn to, but Lessa was a pyschopathic bitch who made Annessa's life hell, and took great pleasure in her continued misfortune. On the fateful day when one of her tormentors was killed, and the other was Searched for Ramoth's golden egg, Annessa found herself silently cheering. It didn't matter that her last chance of meeting the conditions of her dreamt-of future were slipping through her fingers, and that any hope of returning home was disappearing with them. By then, Annessa was a broken woman, fit for nothing more than the life of drudgery she'd escaped to.
