PmWiki | Madlands / SeamstressAndEmma

The difference is that if Keen died (and couldn't be brought back) the Seamstress would mourn, if the Seamstress died (actual died, not "oops, i was a zombie for a week, I need a shower") Keen would go full scorched earth in a way that makes Doom look like Stardew Valley. She's pretty likely to outlive him. From the way she talks she's between 90 and 300 years old. (I am intentionally not specifying anyone's ethnicity unless necessary. Silenus is a satyr, so he looks like a Greek guy with goat features and a giant dong, because that's how satyrs work)

SO what happens to the Seamstress? She was evil, then she was amoral, then she was evil again. Then she lost a war -- rather, she lost the peace right after a war of all the Madlands powers versus an external enemy -- and was reduced to a fraction of her empire, like Napoleon sent in exile to Elba. Except that instead of coming back and trying conquest again, she just didn't care anymore. It was just her and her undead servants, which she repaired slapdash fashion because it was easier than making her own sandwiches.

And that went on for... months? Decades? Seasons in the Madlands are a bit random, so it's ahrd to tell. Silenus wasn't around yet.

In the war, the eclectic rulers of the Madlands fought the New State, a gunpowder-and-crystal-radio empire that by a fluke had found a way into this liminal space via a portal that opened during the excavation of a mountain tunnel. Mad science and magic eventually loses the war of attrition against numbers and superior logistics, so the Seamstress went for a decapitation strike and collapsed the portal. When she got back, her neighboring realms had more or less annexed most of her own, just out of wartime necessity. She felt betrayed, but the decapitation strike had sapped her resources. She expected to be welcomed as a savior, but since the war with New State remnants, now trapped this side of the portal, went on, nobody paid attention. She just sort of autopiloted through ceding most of the territories.

(This is a metaphor for depression, which I would like to be obvious to be the case).

Silenus only showed up later. First was a maid, Emma. The Madlands is where people end up when they are thoroughly lost -- the Seamstress, thoroughly lost while IN the Madlands, had nowhere else to go. Emma just showed up at the incongruous sight of a White Castle in the middle of a vaguely Eastern European plains, and since her understanding of the world included those, she went there, to see if she could get some familiar food. Emma was a trans woman, circa late 1990s, running from an abuse situation compounded by institutional enmity. No money left, but maybe she could beg for a burger patty.

The place was inhabited by mismatched zombies (wearing plastic gloves, admittedly). She had a heart attack becuase she had been running, she was tired, hungry, thirsty, probably suffering withdrawal from something, and SUDDENLY ZOMBIES.

The Seamstress heard the interrupted scream and went look. Well, that's a fresh body, less work to do. And that might have been it if she didn't notice that the heart was trying to restart.

Finally one small thing she could fix and get right. She had to separate the intruder and the zombies, lest it happen again. And after the operation to restart her heart and clear blockage, she had to make -herself- presentable, so she cleaned herself up in time for Emma to wake up.

Emma woke up in the presence of what looked like a badly scarred woman wearing poorly made Maleficent cosplay. What happened? You had a heart attack, fortunately I'm a healer. Are there zombies? No, it's just me and you. Is there any food? The restaurant is abandoned but there's fresh meat and bread. Can I make a phone call? You can try but the phones have on tone.

And so they get something to eat. Not franchise-approved, but close enough to the pictures on the menu. The Seamstress having had to clean up, get up, and do things herself helped a little bit, to the point where she was willing to talk.

What made a difference is that Emma was an unashamed otaku and had a few comics in her bag. If she'd been a sci-fi fan the place would probably look very difference, but that's the butterfly effect for you.

The Seamstress doesn't ask anything of Emma; she doesn't care, at this stage. Emma just takes it as acceptance, and infodumps a bit anyway. She figures that the Seamstress is also a homeless person who is camping in this abandoned fast food restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Emma doesn't say she's trans. It might get her killed for all she knows.

Emma quickly figures out that something is weird. There are shapes shuffling out of sight. Someone, or something, is recharging the batteries -- the place is on UPS power -- and restocking the refrigerators, although not very well. There are no cars, and the road is barely a footpath. Is this some sort of Twilight Zone thing? Is she in Gensokyo? Purgatory? Limbo? In a coma bleeding out after getting beat up by a sheriff's deputy?

Eventually she asks the Seamstress, "What are you?"

"I am the Seamstress, ruler of this place. Or what's left of it. What are you?"

The question is broad enough that Emma says she's a trans woman from, well, somewhere in the American Midwest of a terran planet.

Emma thinks this is some sort of dream journey. The Seamstress mostly reacts with a shrug: suit yourself.

The Seamstress has been around long enough to know what trans people are -- she's done a the occasional GRS as a royal boon, even. To her it's not a big deal because her mad surgery and chemistry let her take care of the matter in fifteen minutes, including alchemically accelerated HRT. But that's when she has a kingdom, servants, a place to work. She doesn't, she just has a crumbling fast food building. Originally, when it had appeared, she had called dibs on the White Castle simply because it had good refrigeration!

"You have stubble. Do you want a scalpel? You can shave with it."

That sends Emma into a crying fit, understandably. The Seamstress is annoyed, before being empathetic. How dare this insignificant being cry at her? But she's also the only other living sophont in the realm. She's not insignificant.

The Seamstress realizes that she can't do anything about Emma's plight. Before the war it would've been something to do to show off her mastery of the healing arts. Right now? Even mad medicine needs supplies, and the Seamstress has just been content with fixing up a few zombies in whatever lazy way required the least amount of work. Not exactly sanitary to work on a living being with the same tools.

Emma recoils from her, and curls up in a corner, reading a worn manga for the umpteenth time, finding a bit of escape in it. The Seamstress lets her, and that's all the interaction they have for a day or so.

Being -unable to do what to her is extremely routine surgery- is what trips the bucket for the Seamstress. How did she sink this low?

"Don't go in the back. There's food in the front fridge."

Emma manages a "thank you".

(This is a manic episode in the middle of a depression, obviously.)

The Seamstress has her remaining zombies stand at attention. There's six left. If she wants them to look such that a regular person won't, well, have another stroke, she has to cut that down to two, literally taking the best pieces. The leftover parts, she puts to work cranking the generator and operating the water pump. The work is a lot harder than it used to be, she's not rusty, she's just demotivated. But once she starts, she has to finish. She has to remind herself who she is.

And so she does the job. All right. Two zombies, smelling of chlorine, hopefully sort of presentable. Hmm. What was in those comics Emma had with her? The Seamstress makes face masks and adapts what's left of restaurant or guard uniforms into something that Emma would find familiar or at least not terrifying. The masks are to avoid the uncanny valley.

The Seamstress doesn't announce anything. She gets herself cleaned up -- zombie surgery is messier than the regular sort -- and just rejoins Emma in the front room. The two zombies in the back get back to their routine; cut salted meat, bake bread, retrieve a bit of frozen veggies. This place isn't being restocked, obviously. but with only one or two people in it, the food will last for quite a while.

Emma thinks that it's regular staff for a moment. Fuck, are they gonna kick her out? Then she looks more closely. What are these things? They don't look like the decaying corpse she half-remembers when she came in. They move more like cartoon marionettes, with an efficient but slightly twitchy gait. They say nothing.

"What are these?"

The Seamstress could explain about the fifty or so common types of zombie across the cosmos, but doesn't. "Staff."

"Did you make them?"

"Yes. They'll make food and do other things. If you'd rather cook for yourself, go ahead."

"They're not going to eat my brains, right?"

"No."

Emma smiles. She's less scared. Looking at the Seamstress' tattered regalia and the zombies' improvised uniforms, she has a silly thought. "You know, if you're going for this look, why not make maid costumes? Then it's creepy cute instead of just creepy."

Emma shows the Seamstress on a convenient manga. The print is worn and the translations approximate. Some pages are mirrored, some are not, which makes the comic look a bit surreal.

"Would that make you less scared?"

"I don't... know."

The Seamstress scoops up the scraps of uniforms from various periods of her and the fast food's life, and flops them in front of Emma. "Well, make one and find out." This was purely on a whim, but it was exactly the right thing to do. And, it left Emma with a big set of tailor's scissors, something to defend herself with. So, in order to hold onto the scissors and needles, Emma gets to work. Fortunately, she is skilled in the art of cosplay.

The Seamstress watches Emma work. She doesn't have her uncanny dexterity, obviously, but this is something she has done before, and with passion. Interesting.

"You made three. Why?"

Emma says that they're different fits and, well, there were enough scraps to. The Seamstress believes her.

She tells about how she used to do cosplay stuff in secret, and how all of it was burned when her mom found the cache and took it to her pastor. She'd been to a couple of cons in her life, saving up for months and sleeping in buses and changing in handicap-accessible restrooms. That and what limited online interaction was available then, IRC and so on, had been her only safe spaces. And then it was all burned down because a mother would rather have a son that was dead inside than a daughter who wasn't, and because of a poorly translated holy text. After that, she was put in chains in every way but literally.

The Seamstress listens. She started uninterested, but the story is intense. The IRC part passes her by, but she gets the gist.

 "I'm sorry. You trusted your family and your god and they betrayed you."

Well, what's she got to do other than this or rot? The Seamstress is pretty sure Emma doesn't need to see -naked- zombies, so she swaps the uniforms herself, adjusting them a little. The result is dollar-store unsettling cuteness. She makes sure that the zombies compensate for the slightly reduced range of movement -- she doesn't want them to break what Emma put together. The zombies move a little better overall afterwards, just because the Seamstress bothered tuning them.

Emma watches the two beings get back to work, and teeters between being grossed out and find it endearing. Fortunately, endearing wins.

She tries to order a plate of sliders from them. Venison rather than beef, since that's what's there, but to her surprise, haltingly, they obey.

The Seamstress chucks the third uniform in what's left of the wardrobe, for now.

"Help me clean the wardrobe up." the Seamstress tells Emma. It's an order. It's how the Seamstress is used to talk to people at this point. Not that she talked to people much. She gave commands to her constructs, orders to her troops. She engaged in coldly polite diplomacy with her supposed peers, up until the moment when she had enough leverage on them.

Emma goes with it. The phones -really- don't work, she'd rather be inside since she knows inside is safe, and she has little to do.

They clean the wardrobe. It's obvious to Emma that the Seamstress is used to staff doing this for her in the same way that it's obvious who's a rich kid in public school. She actually offers some pointers. Working together at a simple task makes it easier to talk.

"So what happened with you?"

The Seamstress could, would, should weave an epic and slightly exaggerated tale of her patchwork kingdom, the war with the New State, the betrayal. Instead, she gives her the short version. Emma giggles, at first. "So is this the original or, like, the Funimation dub?"

The Seamstress doesn't get it. Emma stops laughing when she recognizes the element of betrayal. The Seamstress took on a difficult job for everyone's sake, and came back to no recognition and, effectively, betrayal, passive rather than active.

"My last year at school, I was valedictorian. I came out at commencement, they just shooed me off the stage. I thought it'd be, like, a movie moment, but they just... shooed me off. They wouldn't even give me my diploma after that."

The Seamstress is annoyed, for a moment. What does this have to do with war and betrayal? Then she figures out, from Emma's slightly odd body language, that she's trying to symphatise. Recognition turns into rejection.

"What was your vengeance?" The Seamstress surprises herself. That's something she'd ask a knight or a lady, not a commoner.

"Vengeance? No, I just... you know, started sending out college applications, apply for scholarships, try to survive the summer. I got beat up, so I promised I'd leave all that be, didn't want to get kicked out of the house."

"Did you seek a healer?"

"I got church counseling. It wasn't... good. I just lived through it and kept waiting for college letters."

The Seamstress realizes that Emma has one up on her. She was betrayed, and she got right back up.

"You survived. That's worthy of a story." In the Madlands it's a big compliment.

Emma finishes telling her story, how she sorted out college scholarships and loans, made it there, found a bit of acceptance -- even a small university in the Midwest has a LGBT org. She stayed there at Thanksgiving, with her mother telling her to not bother coming back for Christmas, and her father asking her to. Busting her ass to make the dean's list and falling just a fraction short.

"What were you studying?"

"Sociology."

"Will you tell me about it?"

Emma does. The Seamstress is interested. Quantitative sociology is new to her, even though Emma was only able to take a couple of intro courses, the concept is fascinating. A courtly art turned into a science.

Once the tiny wardrobe has been sorted in a better way than "heap", the Seamstress says

"Lets do the manager's office next. We need to empty it." Slightly less of an order.

"Why? I mean... is it because I'm here?"

"Yes. It's easy to clean, there's a sink, lots of light."

"You want me to sleep there?"

"I need a work room. You're a... sociologist? I'm a, hmm, healer. We need a clean room."

"Oh, if you mean my heart, it's fine, really. I have a bit of tachycardia, but... well, you know, food and water helped." Part of it is that Emma had been rationing her HRT, and the last bottles of it had been taken in the encounter that led her in this liminal space.

"I need to see your body."

"Whoa, whoa, back off! I mean... thank you for the CPR the other day, but.... I don't want to be seen naked, okay?"

"You shouldn't be afraid of your scars. You've faced worse." The Seamstress has visible facial scars -- she could've gotten rid of them at any time before falling into depression, of course, but didn't. They announce that she's not the hands-off kind of queen. She erased the ones she didn't like, and kept the ones she did.

"It's not scars."

"Very well. Do you want to help me with the office anyway?" An actual question rather than a command.

"Maybe later, okay? I need to..." Get the hell away from this person, Emma thinks.

"As you wish."

So, Emma goes back to the front of the restaurant. Nobody chases her, the constructs finish their slow work and then file themselves into one of the large freezers, at something resembling parade rest. Fortunately, it's a different freezer than the one with the meat, or Emma would puke.

"Oh, it's so they don't stink" she figures out.

The Seamstress does a bit of manual labor by herself. It's harder than the physical effort. She shouldn't be doing this. What if she was seen by other aristocrats? But that only lasts a few minutes. So what if? They're basically waiting for her to rot away. Maybe they think she did. The displaced fast food building is just one more of the Madlands' haunted ruins, just a little newer. If anything she's surprised she hasn't had to chase away treasure hunters yet, adventurous people like... Emma?

Not exactly a knight-errant, there. More like a stray cat.

And the Seamstress is proved wrong when Emma knocks and offers her help. "There's only so many times I can read Fruit Baskets."

"Thank you. Let's move the desk and get rid of everything else...."

Eventually, Emma resumes her infodump. With a GPA just shy of the dean's list, she went home for Christmas, scraping a bit for the ticket. After her dad's sister, she's the second in th family to go to university. She gets home to see that when she left, her two younger brothers moved rooms -- understandable -- and makes do with her little brother's. Despite her academic results, she's welcomed coldly, despite showing up "in drab", as she says.

"As in, no academic dress?"

"As in dressed as a boy, academic dress is only for, you know, commencements and so on."

They talk a bit about different academic traditions while they move stuff, chase off a rat, and so on.

Emma continues. Her spring semester saw her get situated, go out a little bit, and try to sort out a counselor for HRT with the school. In that particular state of that particular country of that particular zone, she was instructed to do a real-life-test for six months, as the standards of care of the time dictate. So, she does. She doesn't get out much, but some. She counts the weeks. She sees the counselor. She does make the dean's list. She signs up for Habitat for Humanity to get a couple of extra credits, and does a bit of carpentry. She makes a couple of friends.

She comes home for the summer, and - stops telling her story.

"Sorry, it's... not good what comes next. Can you just imagine I got a happy ending?"

"Yes, but it probably looks different in my head than it yours. We have very different academic traditions. If you've been a builder, can you work the pipes for the sink in the corner? Water comes, but lingers."

"I can try, if there's tools."

There's a multitool in what was the manager's locker; it will have to do.

"Would you show me?"

"Sure. I think it's just that the trap is clogged."

The Seamstress has the circulatory systems of many humanoid species memorized; she picks up American plumbing quickly.

"There, now it drains."

"Thank you. Can't have stagnant water here." Stagnant water, how about stagnant blood, she thinks? This place looks... mended. The Seamstress feels a little better. To tell the truth, so does Emma. Cleaning up and chatting can be therapy.

Emma hides a cut on her finger -- happens when you use a multitool that has blades in it. What if seeing blood turns the Seamstress into a vampire or something weird like that. She excuses herself to the restroom.

The Seamstress spots it only when she sees a bit of blood on the doorknob. A flush later, Emma gets back. "Okay, I think we're almost done here! I want some dodgy frozen orange juice."

"Let me see your finger, please."

"It's fine."

"I restarted your heart, and I'm not asking you to get naked. You did a job for me, and got hurt. I must make it right. Please?"

Emma catches the Seamstress' tone change. Sounded a tiny bit like pleading. So, she sits down, and holds out her hand on the desk. Sure enough, there's a fairly deep cut on her finger. It's not her first; she has a bunch of little scars. Nothing that looks like self-harm, just neglect and numbness.

The Seamstress produces a perfectly ordinary sewing needle, then asks Emma for one of her hair.

"Is this like a combat medicine thing? Or a magic thing?"

"Is your hair dyed?"

"No, I haven't had any money for that."

"Then it will work."

Emma's hair is messy for the simple reason that someone started forcibly cutting it and didn't do a very good job, so she has patches of shoulderblades-long hair. She plucks one of those and hands it over.

The Seamstress' fingers move with the speed and precision of a million-dollar pick-and-place machine; the stitches are microscopic. It looks like she has a splinter just under the epidermis, not like she's been stitched up. The whole thing takes maybe thirty seconds. "Ow!" Emma says by reflex, after it's all done -- it hurt for a moment, and then just a dull thud from her heartbeat.

"Don't move it around too much, and in a couple of days your body will eat up the hair. That's why it should be your own hair."

"Is this magic?"

"It's craft. I wouldn't use magic on something this small." And I barely have any to spare, the Seamstress thinks. How did I let things get so... empty?

"So that's why Seamstress. That's awesome, is that like a title? What's your real name?"

"I am the Seamstress, Queen of White Castle, Mother of Monsters, and Supreme Bio-Vizier of the Madlands!" She stands up straight while saying it. She hasn't had the occasion to use her full title in a long while. For a moment there's a hint of her regal demeanor.

"Sugoi!" Emma squees for a split second, then catches herself. "I mean, that does sound like a title, what's your name? You know, like... John or Mary."

"The Seamstress is the name I chose for myself. I earned it."

Oh. Emma gets it. "Yeah, same I guess. So what would have happened if this had been a Dairy Queen?"

"Like... cows? There are pastures further east, but how do you mean?"

"Don't worry about it. So why White Castle?"

"I needed a castle. Fortification wasn't important, and this place has excellent refrigerators, which I needed."

Emma has to explain franchise restaurants to the Seamstress. She's a little disappointed. Someone naming this type of building a castle was a pretty quirk, but if they're made in series, it's less interesting.

Emma looks at her finger, flexes it. "You're really good. So why aren't you... you know, running a clinic or something like that?"

"What good would that do? People would come to me, I would ply my craft, someone might die a little later."

"I mean... yes, that's the whole point."

"Care I why?"

"You're a doctor, you've taken an oath, right?"

"What good are oaths without men in armor behind them?"

The Seamstress' moment of self-confidence is gone now.

"I'm sorry" Emma squeaks out.

"Someone was going to talk to me like this some day. It's good that it's you." The Seamstress means that she'd rather it not be some knight-errant wanting an extra plume on his helmet.

The Seamstress sighs. She was not ready for this conversation, so she abruptly changes the subject, as people used to being in charge do.

"Your books. Could you show them to me?"

"The textbook or the manga?"

Both, the Seamstress thinks. "Your preference."

"Oh, my preference is absolutely manga! Let's see, I have both volumes of Fruit Baskets that came out and ... oh, right, that's gone... and the first half of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and..."

"May I borrow one? I'll handle it with utmost respect."

"Sure, and don't worry, they're all scrunched up to hell. I got my stuff almost stolen a dozen times lately. Do you have books here? I'm guessing there's no radio or TV."

"My library lies in ruins. One of the many things taken from me."

"Yeah, same. My mom threw out my bookshelf. I think she kept a couple of my books just so her pastor could burn them at a service."

"A barbarous god if he commands his priests to burn books. That's not something that should ever happen. I'm sorry."

After a brief explanation about radio, which the Seamstress is aware of, and TV, which she isn't yet, they find that there is in fact a TV screen for showing drive-through orders, but it's not connected to anything. Out of curiosity, they turn it on; rather than just static, the CRT shows the occasional semi-random pattern.

"The white noise is very soothing" the Seamstress comments.

Neither of them are in a better mood, so they eat in silence. The Seamstress washes her hands fastidiously before accepting one of Emma's visual novels. "Ouran Host Club?" The paperback is beat up to hell and a few pages are ripped or have bent and stuck together. Emma watches as the Seamstress uses an extremely delicate touch to separate them with barely any loss of ink.

"Yes, but that's volume two. Uh, guess I have to get you caught up on the start of the story..."

(I know I'm off by a couple of years on OOC, but eh, parallel universes. i don't want emma to have experienced 9/11)

Emma starts explaining the plot of the missing first volume, but the Seamstress practices iterative regression on her. That is, she asks about a detail, then about its general case, and so on. Before long, Emma is waxing poetic about things like cartoons (Japanimation in particular), video games...

"Before stuff happened, I was saving up for a PC that could run The Sims. Did you know someone made a mod to let two guys marry? And one for kitty headbands?"

The Seamstress, not quite sure what that means other than, apparently kitty headbands are traditional appear for a marriage between men, almost takes the chance to ask Emma what sort of stuff happened. But she doesn't.

Instead, she asks about the different cultures she's talking about. The Seamstress ends up getting a slightly distorted update of the late 1990s, seen through the lens of an admitted otaku.

"I'm impressed that the United States and Japan have such a close relationship only two generations after a cosmic war. From what you say, I assume it was largely a Japanese effort. Was there much intermarriage between the occupying army and the locals?" or "Are the West Block countries doing enough to help the East Block countries heal?"

"You know" Emma says after a drink of water "other than a bit of weird, you ask the questions we were taught to ask. Did you ever take sociology classes?"

"I am a Queen!"

Emma gets a little daring. "Well, you know what Ash said... and Jack left town."

"That tells me nothing. Who's Ash?"

"Ash from Army of Darkness? Uh, I don't think he has a last name."

"Neither do I or you, Emma. Anyway, who is he?"

Emma thinks about it. Does she have a last name? She thinks about her family. Other than her baby brother... how family have they been to her? A mother who loved Jesus more than any of the other, a father who while tolerant wasn't there when he should have been, a jock brother, and then the only friend she had in the house except for the dogs.

Emma nothing else it is, at least here.

"Oh, that's from a movie. It's weird as hell, it's this stupid guy who... well he's not that stupid, he builds kind of a tank and... anyway. Uh, the movie has a lot of zombies getting beat up, is that... okay with you?"

"Of course. Stories that see a rival necromancer brought low are my favorite."

Before Emma starts on another rant, the Seamstress thaws one of the zombie servants. Might as well get snacks.

"Okay. So, Ash and his girlfriend go to this cabin in the woods..."

".... but the Japanese version, Captain Supermarket, has a bunch of extra battle scenes, and before the fight stars Ash says "We can take these skeletons, we can take them, with science." And she builds this big hammer thing out of her car. So she can't be that stupid, no?"

"I'm sorry, is Ash a man or a woman? Did Ash too require surgery?"

"Eh?"

"Oh, you switched to the feminine there."

"Omigod! Sorry, I was telling the story and there's this gender-flipped doujin of the movie that I've heard about, a friend who was going to Japan this summer was going to look for it for me! I found a scan on the Internet but it was only the front and back..."

The Seamstress isn't quite sure about half the words Emma just said, but it doesn't matter. "I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being impolite."

"Oh don't worry about it, you're good. Just that you try is nice. Hey, you don't suppose there's something like Jusenkyo around in this weird place?"

"That being of course, the cursed training ground in the story of Ranko you told me about earlier. No, if someone had that much magic to spare, they'd rule the Madlands by thought alone."

"Just my luck. Imagine though, you can just take a cold shower and..."

"Oh, absolutely. A sex change properly done takes at least two hours, and it's one and done, no free shapeshifting magic. If that pond was anywhere near here, border crossings would force people to dunk in water!"

"...What do you mean, two hours?"

The Seamstress, by way of explanation, tells a little anecdote of a time when she was visiting a rival kingdom trying to secure an alliance. The captain of the guard, Sir Garrick Stout, was such an insufferable misogynistic buffoon that she felt obligated to have her then-champion, a flesh golem, duel him, a brief fight that ended with Stout undergoing what the Seamstress calls a combat phallotomy.

"That's a bit too much."

"It is, so I offered Sir Stout to undo the damage if he apologized. Which, he did, but with no heart behind him. So, since Sir Stout has such a disdain for women..."

"You did SRS on him?"

"Why not? I had my tools and royal guest quarters. Besides, I had to put my champion back together; Stout is a braggart, but can back some of it up. And so, Garrick found himself a woman -- in his limited understanding. You can be sure that he apologized properly after waking and needing to use the restroom. Only then I restored him truly. He spent the rest of my visit singing my praises. Oh, he wouldn't shut up. Then I reminded him, if we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear. He took that quite seriously. I hear has changed his ways in his old age, a little. "

"Wait, there are two things that don't add up."

"One, that's Mark Twain. How do you know who that is?"

"I had an -excellent- library, and good writing belongs to the cosmos entire."

"So why haven't you heard of Hayao Miyazaki?"

"My librarian wasn't aware of the art form."

"I'd like to look at what's left someday... Anyway, two, you did both operations on the same guy back to back and he just got up and tried to go pee after the first one? How?"

"I am the Seamstress! And I was reminding a rival of my power besides: I had to show off a little. Besides, I didn't quite do the entire work - it was just my little vengeance. I didn't reconnect any nerves or..."

Emma's eyes widen. She's not a medical student, but she has documented herself well on vaginoplasty. "Reconnect nerves... is this something you can just do?"

"Well, I need clean tools, rated for living beings... a decoction to remove the pain, which takes a little bit to make... a donor for the womb, of course, although-"

"Hold up. Never mind the womb. Is this something you could just do now?"

"You mean, to you?" The Seamstress asks as if she was asking to pass the salt.

"YES!"

"Well, not today. But if you give me a hand with fixing up a few things, I'm thinking in three days or five."

Emma feels faint and starts falling to the side. The thawed undead attendant, which was standing next to her with a glass of ancient frozen OJ, catches her.

"Darling, your heart skipped a beat there. I should give a proper look at it while I'm at it."

Emma grins like an idiot. "I think you just fixed it."

The next day, the Seamstress explains that her two franken-marionettes are indoor use only, or almost. And they're stupid, because they don't carry a soul.

"Is that why they keep putting the buns on the slider upside-down?"

"Probably, I hadn't noticed."

The two leave the White Castle for the first time in a few days for Emma, and considerably longer for the Seamstress. There are low mounds around the little hill, and a few ruins, barely a few stones on top of each other, mossy and dull.

"Looks like anything that happened, happened centuries ago."

The Seamstress agrees. That worries her; this is the Madlands, and the land reacts to its rulers, a little, in proportion. And if the ruler is the only inhabitant left, a little becomes a lot. It wouldn't have long before the White Castle succumbed to accelerated entropy. She doesn't share this with Emma, though. How did I let myself sink so low, she wonders.

The Seamstress describes the walled town that used to be there; her personal HQ in the White Castle was a little a ways for reasons of practical storage of ice and chemicals.

"... and here was the library. You'd have loved it. I had just expanded it enough to let it become non-Euclidean. Just a little bit. Across the street was the chocolate meister's...."

Emma tries to imagine the place, something between Halloween Town and Diagon Alley that soon starts growing Japanese touches in her mind. The Seamstress concludes, "... and here was the jeweler that made my obsidian blades. If anything is still intact, it's there." Emma enjoys the mental image for a moment more.

The former site of the jeweler's shop is a mound covered in yellow grass.

"Well, dig."

"Uh, neither of us has a shovel."

"So dig with your hand. Be mindful of the stitches."

"Gonna help me?"

"I am the Queen, I'm not going to dig into the earth with my hands."

"Ha. You know, you can't really be Queen by yourself. I don't think zombies count."

Emma didn't know it, but she had hit the nail on the head. A ruler without subject isn't a ruler. That's why what was left of her holding had decayed at an accelerated rate. Eventually, it'd have reached her last home, effectively resetting the land until another will tried to claim it. And in her mental state state she'd simply have let herself rot. The Madlands has its own ideas.

The Seamstress briefly explains this. Stop, says a voice behind her eyes, you're giving away leverage. With this one I have all the leverage I need, she replies. And that's true.

"Sounds a bit like mana." Emma means the card games, not the Oceanian cultures, although she's aware of both. "I bet I can figure out your magic system eventually."

"It has that name too, yes. Does magic has a system? Yes, but it's complicated. I can explain it to you, in time, but.. Imagine surgery. I know how it works because I've studied anatomical tables and practiced -very- extensively. You know what you know of it because you've read Jack Black. So you'd have to first unlearn a few things."

"Black Jack, Jack Black is the guy in Waterworld. Anyway. Look, if you don't count as a ruler without people, super lucky guess on my part by the way, well... here I am! "

Of course at some point Emma told the Seamstress about that particular manga, although having not in fact read it, she could only provide a few amateur reviews from a Geocities page.

"You are offering fealty, wanting to be my subject?"

"CITIZEN. I'm American!"

"Very well, I accept."

"That's it? I thought there'd be a ritual or a ceremony or...."

"Oh, yes, that. It involves digging for obsidian knives. What a coincidence."

"Let's BOTH get busy then."

The Seamstress laughs softly. "No, Citizen Emma. You dig. Be careful, obsidian is very sharp -- I can't risk nicking my own fingers if I am to work on you.."

"Oh, well, wait... that's a good point, why didn't you tell me earlier? I can dig by myself."

The Seamstress smiles smugly. But after watching Emma rip grass and try to dig, she decides to help at least with the grass.

Fortunately, they come across a piece of bronze plating -- possibly a gong bell, or part of a scale, who knows -- that helps them dig. After a hour of effort on both their part, they find a gnarled leather bag containing a set of obsidian blades mounted on silver handles, and a small box of rubies, probably belonging to another the long-gone jeweler's clients. The handles are blackened and pitted from accelerated time, but solid.

"It's crazy, digging with your hands and finding cut rubies. It's like Snow White! I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole, diggy diggy hole..."

Emma brought a bottle of water, and offers it to the Seamstress, who hadn't thought about it.

"Are there dwarves here? Am I being rude?"

"Yes, a few, and no, you're not. Now that we got my backup tools..."

"What were the main ones made of, gold?"

"Oh, no, titanium. Quite expensive. But that's fine, silver has an intrinsic alchemical connotation with healing, and it's easy to disinfect. Speaking of which: we need ethanol."

Emma exaggerates her accent. "What, boss, we makin' moonshine?"

"If you want to watch the still at night, we'll be ready sooner, yes."

"Seamstress, I refuse to believe you don't know what moonshine is. What was it you said? Some concepts have a cosmic reach."

"You got me. But yes, it'll do as disinfectant. And anesthetic, if it comes to that."

There's very little else to scavenge, but there's very little else that is needed, so the two get back up the little hill.

Over the next couple of days, the Seamstress and Emma find a good working rythm. The two zombie maids work more or less on autopilot to make food and check animal traps; all anyone has to do is get them out of the freezer in the morning. The Seamstress eventually notices the paper cat ears and headbands that Emma put on them.

"Hmm. "Thing One" and "Thing Two?" I'll admit, I imagined you'd name them something more fanciful, Emma."

Emma explains the reference. As she does, she builds a mental map; the Seamstress knows Mark Twain, but not Miyazaki or Dr Seuss. There's probably some cutoff date, and she's going to find it. If it lets her make geeky references, all the better.

The Seamstress doesn't show the zombie parts running the generator and water pump, but checks on them. They won't last long, a few months, but for now, they'll do. No magic, no biomass... she really let things go. Did she try to let herself die by self-neglect, she wonders? Maybe.

A still is easy to put together with what's in the White Castle, and alcohol can made out of almost any food waste. None of this smells good, so they end up staying away from the back. The Seamstress shows Emma a simple alchemical circle and she puts it under the still.

"Is it for not making it stink?"

"It should speed up the reaction."

"... so it's going to make it stink MORE."

"Correct. Let's retire to the front of the restaurant, it's upwind and we can open a door."

"You stopped saying castle."

"You said that it was a chained restaurant. It's not native from here, so it's possibly from your zone or an adjacent one."

"You can still call it castle if you want, you know. You're a queen, you gotta have a castle. What if time starts going too fast again otherwise."

"I see you're starting to learn about magic. Right, you were a student before..."

Emma, who had been cheerful, looks down and shakes her head. "Before other things happened. Please, just imagine that there's a happy ending."

"Very well. A happy ending for Emma. Let's see... After seeing her true self in the mirror in the atelier of the Seamstress, Emma shall take her leave of the Madlands, return to the zone of her birth, resume her studies in the science of sociology, and complete them in Japan. And then shall she bring the light of quantitatively just rulership to the benighted corners of the planet!"

"That would be awesome, actually I kind of wanted to go work for a NGO, which.. a little bit like that? I love it! But, if that's my happy end why aren't you in it?"

"It's your happy ending, not mine. Besides, when you leave, you won't come back. This isn't the land of Faerie, quite the opposite: it's easy to leave, hard to come in. It requires being in the right place, at the right time, moving in the right direction, and in the right state of mind."

"... is terrified for my life the right state of mind?"

"Yes, one of them."

The next step is to, well, shave Emma. And cut her fingernails and then blend them into a paste. "If I need to fix you up, the best material is you. It already has the imprint of your biological essence."

The Seamstress and Emma exhaust the restaurant's reserves of eggs -- and end up eating that for breakfast, lunch and dinner for two days -- to get some calcium.

"Why?"

"For the bones of course."

"I thought I was getting a vaginoplasty."

"You're getting all I can give you. If nature had done her job, you'd have a wider pelvis, yes. Things like that. Now, I can't do anything about your humours. Hormones, that is. But I can move things around so that it looks like you had a healthy puberty."

"Really?"

"Yes. Plus, I wouldn't know where to find a pregnant mare right now."

The next step is shaving Emma. The Seamstress would need a fair bit of thread, and Emma's head would be left in a mess, so at that point, might as well shave.

Emma is perfectly fine about it. The next day she's made herself a wig with a mop. It's silly, but the fact that it's not trying to look like real hair works. The Seamstress, who's taking inventory of her meager reserves of various useful elixirs and doesn't want to Emma to see that the ornate flasks barely have anything in them, asks Emma to make two more. Overnight, the two zombiemaids have them stitched on. More sanitary than zombie hair, really, and besides, it looks better.

Emma styles hers in the traditional Japanese schoolgirl hairstyle.

Now they're down to two mops, but it was worth it for the laughter.

"I do need to see you naked once before the start. Are you more comfortable with that now?"

"Yes."

Emma is lying; she's not comfortable with it at all. But it's something that needs done, so she squares her shoulders about it.

"Would it be easier on you if I too were naked?"

"Eh? NO! No, it's fine, really, thank you." Emma is blushing a fair bit.

"Your erubescence seems to be working well."

"My er-what?" Emma looks between her legs.

"Erubescence, darling. Reddening of the skin. You were blushing. Anyway, disrobe and I'll take a good look at you."

"Here? We're in a restaurant! I mean... we're in your castle. Heh, there's nobody else around either way right? Sweet, let's make it extra awkward then!"

Emma stands from the chair and disrobes. The Seamstress has made Emma uncomfortable so that she wouldn't feel other things that she might not want to feel until after the operation.

It's half regular physical ("Look up, look down, cough...") and half measurement-taking, as if for a dress.

"Actually, be a dear and get paper and pencil? You can write these down when I call them so we don't make mistakes."

Emma does, and runs back. Only then she notices she was naked. Does she care? It was embarassing, earlier, but it's just the two of them. The Seamstress takes the paper and draws a table with Dimensions: Current / Desired, then gives it to Emma, a plastic tray for a clipboard.

"I'll measure and call, you write. If you want to change anything, just mark it down. Right. Head... 56."

"Wait, head?"

"I'm not going to give you a bigger or smaller head, no. But the measurement chart is taken in a certain way and I don't want to skip a line, what if I end up using your shoulders measurement for your chest?"

What the Seamstress isn't saying is that she hasn't done this in a far too long time, not to a living being. So she's going to follow her mnemonics, like she did at the beginning of her career.

"That's a really big head, I measured it for a wig a while ago. It's 22 inches."

"Which inch? Imperial, Amsterdam, Roman? My tape measure is centimeters. Metric bounces around a lot less around zones, I find."

"You're a sorceress, in an American restaurant, telling me that I should use metric?"

"Yes. Besides, you yourself showed me how well it has worked for the Japanese. Did they not become a beacon of industry after switching to metric?"

Emma laughs, and that's it for tension -- taking measurements takes only a few minutes after that.

With the Seamstress declaring that she wants a bit of extra sleep, retiring very early, and curling up with one of Emma's manga, Emma looks at the chart. What does she want?

She's also going to have to bring the Seamstress a glass of water and remind her of the mystical power of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind to devour one's attention and turn 6PM into 3AM. That, she's seen quite a few times. Too bad it's only the first half.

Her measurement, to the next half centimeters, which is... fifth of an inch? there to see. Emma is skinny-fat due to eating what was available and cheap in the Midwest for the last few months, and having to run in bursts. Being homeless was 100% ass.

She's looking at her rearward measurements. 100% ass. What does she want?

To the Seamstress' complete lack of surprise, Emma wishes to be a bit more voluptuous. She likes her current height, which is excellent, since that cuts down the amount of work necessary.

To Emma's complete lack of surprise, the morning is utterly wasted by the fact that the Seamstress did stay up until she'd gone through Nausicaa -- twice, once for the story and twice for the art -- and only woke up around midday. Emma brings her water and lunch, partly because she feels like it, partly because, as she puts it, manga binges and missing the alarm are a not-so-proud tradition of her people.

"Americans?"

"Otaku."

The last preparations include using alcohol to disinfect the former manager's office, which by now looks more the sort of makeshift clinic one might see in a war-torn country. The Seamstress warns Emma that this may make her tipsy, which is why she won't help.

"So, I clean up, and you go through the rest of my comics?"

"Yes, exactly. Uh... if I may. They're your books, of course."

"Sounds good to me, sure. I don't really drink but what's the worst that can happen?"

The worst that can happen is that Emma, after finishing the scrubdown and sitting down -- she's not drunk, just... relaxed, and a little tired -- takes another look at her measurements chart.

Giggling a little, Emma pencils a 1 in front of a couple of numbers, effectively multiplying them by two or three. Why not? She's been missing out on things.

Then, she falls asleep.

The Seamstress is elated; she herself is wide awake and in a good mood, Emma is sleeping and will wake up only for a moment if the Seamstress is deft enough with the numbing elixir, and this should take just about the rest of the day to do. The Seamstress draws a couple of alchemical circles, then with some effort drags Emma on top of the table so that one circle is under her head and one is under her heart, and looks down.

She's rusty. What little she has left has an expiration date of weeks or months. She is, in many ways, at the end of her rope. But thanks to Emma's appearance, she's climbing it back up.

There's no staff or students to watch her work, but she feels like she's teaching a class.

"Operatio incipiam!"

The Seamstress kills Emma. More accurately, using almost the last of her priceless reagents, she pauses her life; there will be no blood or gore. In theory, she could have done this with Emma awake and talking to her, but then she would know what it feels like to be undead, even if only for a little while. The Seamstress is a skilled necromancer, and can create almost any sort of flesh construct. using many of the known methods. The putrid zombies she had when Emma showed up were the equivalent of instant noodles cooked in the microwave during a depressive episodes; normally, her work is much more elegant. Paused metabolisms are expensive, but they are the undead state of choices for creatures that have to be fast and lifelike, such as infiltrators.

What sets the Seamstress apart from chirurgeons and necromancers is that she has perfected the ability to resume life. Intermediate necromancy, plus above-divine surgical skill, plus a little bit of alchemy to prevent the soul from wandering off, plus her priceless discovery that resyncs the body and spirit. Of course, she has to do a perfect job.

And of course, she does. Unlike with the finger, she works quickly but not alarmingly so, deliberate to the micron. The Seamstress cuts Emma open, then starts remolding her body, moving muscle, turning skin, redistributing spongy tissue, spreading and adding to pelvic bones as if she was building an anatomical model.

She laughs at the measurements on the chart. Part of her is so tempted to take them at face value, but they would be remarkably impractical. Maybe if Emma could be returned to her zone in Beverly Hills, but as it is, the Seamstress whispers "I'll use your sober measurements, I think, my dear Citizen Emma." And so she does, giving the stringy woman just the right amount of squish in the desired places.

She still has some fun sculpting Emma's body; make the legs look a little longer while respecting overall height; ensure that she her foot can stand her gracefully in any manner of practical or fancy footwear. Remove a couple of moles that might develop into something worse. Clean up internal scar tissue that looks like the memory of being thrown around by a larger person. With infinite care, adjust the valves of her heart so that they'll move a little slower and much more regularly.

She wonders about the scars on Emma's skin. She had seen them and said nothing. Should she remove them? No, she decides. They're part of her story. If she wants them gone, they can do that some other time.

Why do you seek permission from a commoner, the light behind her eyes, now fully awake from this long moment of creative flow, asks. Because she is not a commoner, she is a citizen, she tells it. Now let's get back to work.

Near the end, the Seamstress works with a fluid grace rather than the measured movements she started with.

When Emma is finally done being remade, her skin is covered with black-brown lines -- her own hair used as suturing. She wouldn't know, but it looks like a network of circuitboard traces, from a distance and to someone ignorant of electronics.

Now in a state of flow, the Seamstress quickly checks that every nerve and capillary has been reconnected. The suture lines will disappear in a few days -- she could banish her now, but that would require using just a bit more magic than strictly necessary, and she can't spare it. Besides, if Emma was fine with a mop for a wig for a few days, this should be no big deal.

If the Seamstress wanted to keep Emma as a zombie, one that would last a long time, she would just have to wake her up now. A loyal servant, bound to her by the necessity of maintenance and the threads of magic. She would keep her intellect and memories, although not her creativity, and become an excellent assistant as she rebuilt.

But even the old Seamstress wouldn't have: they have a deal. Royalty cannot afford to break their word. As it is, she lets the thought drop.

Rebuild. Is that what I want, she asks herself. This time there's no hesitation. She does.

Flow, optimism. Two wonderful ingredients to use for her unique skill, restarting Emma's life.

She stitches the word of power on Emma's forehead with her hair, as she would in any regular golem spell. And then, orienting her mind just right, she takes her flow state, her feeling of mastery, and -- "Osculum vitae!" -- kisses it into Emma.

The kiss of life, the Seamstress' tongue holding the other word of power. A combination of the two traditional means of the golem spell, and the right state of mind. The flow and elation of the Seamstress' creative endeavor leave her and pass on to Emma. Creativity needs life, as a matter of course, and so the creative force calls Emma's soul to itself to rejoin her body effortlessly, almost as a byproduct.

The Seamstress transitions this unique ritual into regular mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only a little bit of which is needed. She is exhausted, her dopamine drained, a far cry to the artist's ecstasy of a minute ago. But the feeling of emptiness is replaced quickly when Emma sits up and coughs.

"Ow! Did you kiss me or was that CPR? Did I pass out? Do you need to fix my heart up before we begin? Because the-"

The Seamstress smiles. She likes to have a mirror for these occasion, but she doesn't have one. "Look down, Emma."

Emma does. She can't process her sight and proprioception for a moment. "You're... done?"

"Now don't forget. You're held together by your own hair, so - no running, no jumping, nothing strenuous for... let's say a couple of days, or when you start not seeing the lines anymore."

"What, like Madeline and Ellen in Death Becomes Her?"

Emma had been focused on what's between her legs, but now looks at the rest of her torso and a few spots on her legs.

"Tron lines? I have tron lines? Kawaiiii!"

Whatever that meant, the Seamstress figures that Emma wants to look at herself in the mirror and, a common side effect of this procedure, try to relieve herself even if her bladder is empty, a mild inconvenience. "You know where the restroom is, go if you gotta go."

Emma makes to run off, but forces herself to walk slowly instead. She mimic the Frankenstein walk, holding her arms in front of her with limp hands.

 “We are fashioned creatures, but half made up.”

This time it's Emma who doesn't get the reference as she changes her plod into a regular walk. Of course the Seamstress has read Frankenstein.

When Emma comes back, after realizing that she's still naked and left her clothes in the makeshift operating room, the Seamstress waits for her to get dressed again -- same ratty shirt and jeans and a couple of pieces of broken toy jewelry, but now Emma fills them with confidence.

"Is this what you wanted?"

Emma hugs the Seamstress enough to elicit a groan, then lets out the pressure.

"Arigatou gozaimashita!"

"If you -urk- hug me this strong any further, you will split apart from the strain, indeed!"

Emma backs off.

"I shall retire. This was a fair amount of effort. I recommend you go to sleep early." After seeing Emma's face, the Seamstress figures that she doesn't have to pretend to be an indefatigable goddess to maintain her respect. And she genuinely is tired; she hasn't done this kind of work in some time, and the kiss of life is, by necessity, very draining on the performer.

"If you want to go to bed, do you mind if I get my manga back?" Emma doesn't add "that way you actually sleep", but really, really wants to.

Emma was expecting some grand revelatory dream, and she almost remembers one starting, as if a single photogram of a film, but it's gone the moment she wakes up. Instead, she's sore all over her body -- not a surprise -- and... happy. Her movements feel natural. She looks at herself in the mirror. She drinks a glass of ice water and feels the cold in her stomach, just a little bit moved over from where it was.

It's all real. Just like that, the dysphoria is gone. It's also far too early in the morning; what can she do?

The Seamstress wakes up to find three figures in maid uniforms and mop wigs prepare what she assumes to be a very late breakfast, given where the sun is.

That's one more than there should be. That's because the cardboard headband say Thing 1, Thing 2, and Emma. And because the live one doesn't have a mask over her face.

"Sliders for breakfast? I'll take it."

"All hail the Seamstress and a bunch of other titles!"

The three figures deliver the sliders, back off and do a Japanese-style bow, a gesture that the Seamstress hadn't instilled into the two undead figures. How did Emma teach it to the two undead servants?

That takes some practice. Spontaneous magic? The Seamstress cannot afford to cast a spell to check, and she does not have magical sight. But she can guess that the joy radiating off Emma right now can probably give faery dust or trinitrotoluene a run for its money in terms of raw energy.

And that's got to go somewhere. She's been radiating bliss and self-actualization for hours now, a whole night, at least one REM period. This is the Madlands; the land reacts. Emma isn't a sovereign, but she's 50% of the population.

Add to that the simple fact that she's brought here new stories never seen in the Madlands before, and that her books weren't put behind the gentle wards of a library, and...

That's a rare case of possibly too much spontaneous magic.

"Oh. Uh, Emma, don't look outside! You'll stabilize-"

That's like asking someone to not think of a pink rhinoceros; naturally, Emma breaks formation with the two undead servants to do just that.

The yellow grass has green patches on it, the few deciduous trees that were around the building yesterday are greener, healthier, and thicker. The evergreens are a little taller.

And incongruously in this somewhat Caucasic climate, a cherry tree making a splash of pink with its blossom, right in front of the restaurant, two steps from the pack.

"... the intention of the landscape."

The Seamstress also looks. The restaurant's interior hasn't changed a bit, but the rough landscape around it has.

Emma looks out slack jawed, then does the natural thing and, maid costume and all, runs outside to look at the incongruous tree. Unlike the others, this one is young and strong. The fog outside has dissipated a little, granulating into clouds and patches of sunlight.

The Seamstress steps outside and looks around. Be it the scattershot regreening or the change in weather, what she surveys looks revitalized. She squarts, looks down, focuses on a little patch of yellow grass with no particular intention, and chlorophyll slowly rises back into the blades, just where she was looking.

The Madlands react, the Madlands know.

Still, a sakura tree? Well, the Seamstress likes cherries. Judging from how pink this bloom is, she can look forward to some.

"Did I do this?" Emma asks.

"Yes, your joy for my work did this. And your oath of fealty - I mean, citizenship, informal as it was."

"That sounds more like -we- did this to me."

"This is amazing!" Emma actually hugs the ridiculously stereotypical pink-bloomed tree.

"It is, isn't it? Magic is usually temporary, very temporary often. But what is very temporary to the land itself that lives for a billion years might as well be permanent for a large ape that lives 150 years or less."

"Sugoi... Can I do this again?"

The Seamstress laughs. "No, unless you stumble to just the right sets of circumstances. An experienced wizard would have channeled your energy to erupt a pond going down to the aquifer, or raise a hill, but the spontaneous result is better than anything I could've done. A powerful wizard I am not."

"Says the lady who made me look like me and did half the work in whatever this... this reflorescence was!"

"That's a word I didn't expect."

"Hey, just because I'm a redneck, I'm not ignorant!" Emma thinks back at her younger self curling up with whatever was available to read and immersing herself in it to escape her surroundings. It's a good way to learn a lot of words and then mispronounce them.

"So" the Seamstress says "I think we should start working on a way to get you back to your zone of birth."

Emma winces. She got the best possible version of the thing she most wanted. She can go home. The Madlands are easy to leave, hard to enter, right? Maybe she can even go somewhere else. Maybe from here she can go to the version of Akihabara that is in her head rather than in her zone. How will that work? Crop circles? Mushrooms? Ruby slippers?

"But... what happens to the Seamstress if I leave?"

"I'll be fine, darling. Thank you for the wake-up call. Besides, getting you back to your zone is also a little project, it'll take a few days. We need to do a bit of survey work for the sigils, an astrological chart with updated ephemerides, and since you're from a zone with dormant magic, a little bit of electromotive force."

"We don't have magic."

"It waxes and wanes. Now that you know what spontaneous magic feels like, think back in your life, you've never experienced a trickle of it?"

"There was this one time, when I was really young, like... five or six. I had this dog, Rocco, a golden retriever. He went missing for days. My mom told me to pray about it, and I didn't believe it would work. But I prayed anyway, not to God but to Rocco, like... 'please come back, boy.' And the next morning, he was waiting on the porch. We lived near a highway. He shouldn’t have made it back."

"Maybe coincidence, maybe magic. They get along frustratingly well. At the core, it's all about calling out with the right state of mind at the right time."

"You said it's temporary, what happens to you after I'm... after it's gone?"

"Not much. I don't need to be a ruler. Not having a domain will weaken me, but I'll survive. Most rulers here are very tied to the land, I'm not."

"I saw you use reverse laser vision on a bit of grass earlier. I don't believe you."

"The cosmos is vast, full of wonders. I'll explore, perhaps. Maybe I'm more adventurous than you imagined me." The Seamstress smiles.

"Seamstress, you're a liar. You've used most of your power to help me. Even if you had a place to go, you wouldn't make it."

That's not squeeing Japanophile Emma talking. That's social scientist Emma, who like many trans girls had to navigate enough mental health roadblocks that she had to learn a bit about it.

The Seamstress crouches in front of the tree, a couple of petals falling down in the breeze. She looks up at Emma.

"You're right. What gave me away?"

"A friend of mine had depression. People think that it means you can't get out of bed. Well, that too, but... You have the same look in your eyes and you use the same kind of sentences."

The Seamstress doesn't ask if this friend got better; she can guess.

"Yes, I was fading away. And you pushed me out of it. And we've sworn loyalty. It does go both way, you know. I wouldn't have done any less than my best with your body, and if it used a little bit more reagent, so what, I'll make more."

"Yes, but starting from scratch.... what if I help you get the basics running? I don't know if I want to leave yet. I mean, I want to go home, I do, but... this place is weird, and I feel good here. I don't feel—"

"Broken?"

Emma nods. She had never thought she’d feel whole, but here she is, standing in a maid costume next to a cherry tree in the middle of nowhere, with a body that matches her spirit.

"The Madlands attract the lost, but they don't do anything else for you you. They aren't cruel, Emma, but they aren't kind. This past week was a rarity. Staying too long, getting involved, has its price. I know that better than anyone."

Emma bites her lip, realizing that the Seamstress isn't saying everything. She's not just talking about Emma staying too long—she's talking about herself too.

"Besides, look, I can make a number of sane arguments for staying. For one, you can't have an infinity percent emigration in your country. It'd mess up everyone's statistics forever. Second, I want to learn this place. Third, maybe I can help you with starting up a clinic maybe? I can... do the paperwork, keep inventory, something. Fourth, I haven't shown you my OCs yet! No, wait that's what I was gonna say if I wanted to get kicked out."

"And... these are the sane arguments?"

"Are we not in the Madlands, my Queen?"

"Yes we are, citizen. I... Thank you. I think I do need help. We'll figure out how you can reach your zone of birth, though. That way, well, you know you can leave if you have to."

Emma sheds a tear. This is the first time in a long time someone goes out of their way to NOT trap her.

And so they rebuild. They use the tail end of the brief bloom granted by the Madlands to a new realm to replant a veggie garden; they finish cleaning up the work area; they put up dividers between clinic, backrooms, and what's left of the restaurant.

"You know, you could also sell hamburgers. You still have, like, 80% of the stuff for it."

"This is a little too out of the way to and from anywhere be a waystation, it's why I've been left alone. But I suppose if can't hurt to show hospitality to anyone accompanying a patient here."

"Mad surgery and sliders while you wait!"

"That's pleasant to the ear."

And so a bit of extra effort is taken in making the restaurant area usable. Emma alters the uniform, a little bit, and quips that if she's going to run a tavern maybe the Seamstress should have used the altered measurements.

"Oh no, dear. You'd need five sets of kneecaps with all the extra weight. And a mirror to look at your feet. And some way to not fall forward. At any rate; can you draw?"

"I can draw a bit... I mostly trace stuff. I made a two page spread of Ranko and-

"Would you draw a few manifests for me to put up in nearby towns? Something cute and funny like your comics? I can do the lettering, but my creativity lies elsewhere." The Seamstress is thinking that she'll want to partner with someone who has a wagon.

"Like... a chibi Nurse Joy? Uh, change it a bit, Nintendo lawyers and all that."

"There are very many nurses named Joy, they might as well be interchangeable to me. Sorry, but I don't get the reference."

"You just did, actually."

Emma finds that the nearest town is only five kilometers out. "That's three miles. So I just go there and give these out?"

The restaurant's office had a stack of old carbon paper, which proved extremely handy. Emma made a number of leaflets. Emma isn't an artist, but by copying and tracing various pieces of her favorite manga setpieces she had drawn a modern hospital, with a friendly-looking nurse that has absolutely nothing to do with any copyrighted properties inviting people in.

"We accept payment in kind?"

"You know, foodstuffs, a few things I need. Barter."

"Oh. I thought payment in kind for surgery would be, you know, leftover legs or something like that."

"Yes, I also take those."

"I was kidding!"

"Limb transplants exist in many zones, surely in yours..."

"Oh, yeah! I think last year some guy from New Zealand got a hand transplant. But it was really experimental, they needed a whole..."

The Seamstress smiles. Emma gets it, and nods in return.

The Seamstress had considered, since that village had belonged to her, to simply try to reclaim it. However, even her most good natured neighbor, the King of Rice, would find himself obligated to respond with a declaration of war that would in practice make her an outlaw. Instead, she's going to renounce any claim, and put that in the leaflets' small print.

"Leave tomorrow at dawn, and be sure to be back by dusk. There are things that stir at night."

"I'm more worried about people..."

"You're a member of my retinue, in official uniform, and my memory is still feared. None would dare touch you."

"you're going with my maid costume as an official uniform? YES!" She fist pumps the air.

The Seamstress wants to point out that it's the only item of clothing she has three of, but lets Emma have another moment. The hair she used for suturing have been absorbed by Emma's tissues, and there's nothing to show that she had ever been opened up and remade. The Seamstress did notice Emma sketching the cording under her skin before it faded.

While Emma rests before her trip, the Seamstress performs the grisly maintenance that the zombie maids and the ullathoid pumps require. There's no joy in this work, just quiet appreciation of returned competence. The Seamstress notices that there is practically no decay to take care of; an aftereffect of the overflow of life of a few days before, likely. So, she takes the time to shore up her work, rather than just patching it.

(Ullathoid: simple machine with undead parts attached. For example, a self-pumping bellows with a skeleton arm.)

Emma surmises that the Kingdom of Rice is called so due to rice paddies, and she's right. After crossing the border -- and it is a border, the path becoming a gravel road, the grass becoming greener, the trees more Mediterranean, the fragrances in the air different -- she figures that the place must be the Madlands' breadbasket. On the way there, she crosses path with a centaur pulling a cart, a Conestoga wagon moved by aurochs, a few travelers on foot, and a plodding contraption steered by rods and powered by a small eggbeater windmill, which she recognizes from Waterworld. On the rice paddies, dragonflies hunt, tiny people -- gnome? check for unwanted animals by rowing balsa rafts around, the occasional crane or flamingo grazes. Figuring that it might be the best investment for the leaflets, she gives a few to the travelers going roughly in the Seamstress' direction; maybe they'll make a detour.

The town looks like a Renaissance village, minus the drab medieval filter that filmmakers sometime apply. Five hundred souls if Emma is any judge. She can read the script on the signs, if she squints. An armored footman and a guard on horseback, an ironmonger sharpening a scythe on a pendulum-powered grinding wheel, with his burly assistant resetting the weights every few minutes.

"No wonder I can't place the time period, duh. I'm not in the past, I'm just sort of... over here."

She instinctively recoils from the guards -- her last encounter with... No, she doesn't want to think about that. Instead, she realizes that nobody's ever going to be transphobic at her again; she had always been worried about passing as a natal woman, but the Seamstress' art made it a non-problem.

Emma noticed the fish being raised in the rice paddies. Everything seems to be made of rice, if it can be; rice bread, rice paper... She sees a lot of rice and some fish leaving, and things like olive oil and spice coming in. She positions herself at a street corner where she can give away the leaflets and people-watch, the basis of sociology.

The Seamstress told her to not cry out advertisements as it may cause a diplomatic incident; can't risk a slogan being mistaken for an attempt to claim sovereignty over the hamlet. That works pretty well for Emma; she gets to people-watch without being obnoxious. This place looks prosperous. Is that good or bad for the Seamstress' business?

Then a stray thought hits her. Fish and rice. If there's something like nori, surely they have sushi? Should be cheap around here. And if not, even more awesome. She can be remembered for bringing sushi to this benighted land!

And then she sees a hen strut down the path with a tiny bucket on her head. She asks a passerby what that's for. "Well, it's for being a helmet."

It is only a matter of time until one of the guards, the one on horseback, confronts Emma. She flinches, but tries to not show it. For a pedestrian, being next to a big animal and looked down on is viscerally intimidating; this is why riot police still uses mounted units. The man seems friendly, though.

"I'm Squire Jusip. You're from the west, yes?"

"Well, I'm from the Midwest, but... yes, that's the Seamstress' uh, castle. How did you guess?"

"Part of my job is to send back traders from realms at war with the Kingdom of Rice." He holds up a compass. divided in four sections. "Well, we're not at war with anyone, but the political compass is being weird with you.

Because of course there's an actual politcal compass. It looks a little like a PKE meter, if it was smaller and made of wood and brass.

"Let me go ask Jush, maybe he knows."

The armroed footman is older; he comes over. Emma looks around, but this doesn't feel like being stop-and-frisked, it's more a conversation. It helps that they don't look like modern cops to her.

"Oh, yes" says the older guard "there's a sanding order about it. Should a minion of the Seamstress come, we are to give you a papyrus to take back to your ruler."

"I'm not a minion, I'm a maid!" Emma blurts out, then finds that right now, she means it.

"Well, maid of the Seamstress, now I've got to get the envelope from the guardhouse, wherever we put the damn thing. Wait a little."

"I'm not under arrest or anything, right?"

"Eh? No, why would you be?"