Chapter Text
Nene leaned back in her desk chair and yawned, stretching her arms upwards. She was sitting in her small, dusty office that had nothing but a bookshelf, some tacky red wallpaper, and a wooden desk with papers scattered messily upon it. The big window above the desk was open, letting in a cool night breeze.
She checked the clock. It was 1:00 in the morning, and she still had only finished two chapters of her story’s final draft. She had no idea where she wanted to go with it, and there wasn’t much time left; her publisher expected her to get it done in the next couple of months. It was just that she was utterly uninspired.
Nene let out a sigh, and brought herself to hover her fingers over the typewriter again. She looked down at all the letters, trying to think of something, but alas, there wasn’t a single idea that came to mind. Perhaps she should just call it a night.
She stood up out of her chair, brushed her pale green dress down, and blew out the candle on her desk. Once she got back to her bedroom and changed into her night wear, she tucked herself into bed and simply stared at the ceiling.
Nene began to think about what the future could be like. Perhaps one day, she might be able to write songs instead of books, just like she’d always wanted. Perhaps even perform her songs in front of a crowd. Maybe she’d have other people in her life too, ones that supported her dreams. What if that was what could’ve been, if she hadn’t been so…?
She didn’t want to finish the thought. The reality of life was that it wasn’t one big fairytale, and someone like Nene would never really become anyone special. Dreams were reserved for the privileged and the blissfully ignorant. A girl like Nene would never be anything more than a boring old commoner, stuck with a career she didn’t want.
Somehow feeling at peace with that, she at last shut her eyes and slept the night away.
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The next day, Nene decided she would head to the marketplace. She was starting to run low on food, and she figured she couldn’t live on just stale bread and soup for much longer. She put on a brown coat, picked up her bag, and headed out the front door.
Nene lived in a small house with no other houses around it, in the woods but not so deep in the woods that it was impossible to get anywhere. There were lots of overgrown plants and vines on the front part of the house. Living in such a small town, it only took about a couple of minutes to get to the marketplace while walking down the rocky path that extended from her house to the other part of the town.
The market was quite busy on a Sunday morning, not to an overwhelming extent (that was always Nene’s favorite part about living in this town; there were never any large crowds) but there were still quite a few people around, all wearing coats due to the chilly fall weather.
When Nene reached the fresh fruit section, it looked like there was already someone else there. She shifted uncomfortably: for some reason she felt a bit weird whenever someone else was shopping for the same thing right next to her. Well, she really wanted to get some new grapefruit, so she would just have to deal with it.
The stranger was wearing a black hood that obscured their face, but they appeared to be a younger person who was about the same height as Nene. What was strange was that they appeared to keep looking around, as if they were trying to hide something. Nene fully expected that they were about to steal a piece of fruit.
She tried to direct her focus towards the fruit in front of her, looking at all the different ones to try and find the best quality ones. That was when she suddenly heard a “psst!” sound from beside her.
She paused. Was that directed towards me? Then, she felt someone nudging her arm with their shoulder. She jumped and whipped her head around to the stranger beside her.
“Miss!” they whisper-shouted. Nene looked around, confused. “H-Huh?” she whispered back.
“Can I trust you with something?” the voice asked.
Nene just stood there in shock, not sure what to say to this random probably-thief who started talking to her out of the blue. She simply replied with, “U-Uh..?”
The stranger looked around once more, before pulling their hood down ever so slightly. At first Nene had to squint to see their face, but soon enough she saw the familiar short, pink hair and large pink eyes.
“P-Princess Otori!?” she exclaimed, perhaps a bit too loud. She knew she had made a mistake when the princess let out a “shh!”, and she instantly covered her mouth with her hands.
“Um, w-what are you doing here?” she asked, her voice back to a whisper.
The princess didn’t respond, and instead took Nene’s hand and began to run someplace, making the green-haired girl let out a sharp gasp.
She had no idea what was going on, or why the princess was running off holding her hand. Eventually, Otori pulled Nene behind a few trees where there weren’t any people, and pulled off her hood.
The pink-haired girl waved both of her hands around. “Hi there!! You can just call me Emu, if you’d like!”
“W-What!?? What are you—“ Nene stammered, staring continuously at the princess’s brightly smiling face, as if trying to decipher if she’s real or not. Nene then hid her face in her hands. “I have so many questions…” she mumbled in a muffled voice beneath her hands.
She suddenly gasped once she realized how she was behaving towards the Princess herself, and the amount of trouble that could potentially get her in. “O-Oh, I’m sorry! I’m Nene Kusanagi. It’s uh, a pleasure to meet you, your highness.”
To Nene’s surprise, Emu frowned a little at her response at first. But, she quickly regained her smile. “Hi, Nene-chan! Um, but you don’t need to be so formal with me, you know! Ahaha…”
“Uh, o-okay, Emu…san?” Nene said awkwardly, not exactly knowing what to call her. She didn’t want to seem too rude by not adding an honorific. “What are you doing here?” she asked, repeating her question from before.
“Well, one of my servants went out to go get some new food, so I decided to secretly follow him! I wanted to see all the yummy types of food they have!”
“If that’s the case, then why would you need to disguise yourself like that..? You’re allowed to go anywhere if you’re the princess, right?”
“Well…” Emu started to twirl a strand of her hair around her finger. “That wasn’t the only thing I wanted to do today.”
Nene raised an eyebrow as a signal to “go on”.
“I’ve heard rumors about this super duper powerful sorcerer that lives in the woods! My big sister told me he lives in a creepy old house and spends all day practicing black magic, so I wanna go visit him!!”
“A sorcerer? Um… do you mean you want to go find him so you can banish him from the kingdom?”
Emu began to bounce on her heels, a mischievous look in her eyes. “Nuh-uh! I wanna find him so that I can see him go all SPARKY WAM BOOM!!!” She got closer to Nene. “And maybe you could come with me too!!”
Nene at this point had come to the conclusion that this was not a normal princess. “Sparky wam boom?” Nene mumbled, before shaking her head. “W-Why do you want me of all people to do that with you? I mean, we only just met, and I’m just a regular commoner that bumped into you at the market.”
“You just… seem like you’re really Wonderhoy, Nene-chan! More than you might think, okay?”
Nene decided to just give up on trying to decipher Emu’s strange vocabulary. Still, she felt a strange warmth in her chest upon hearing her words. What type of person was the princess?
“I…” she began, looking at the other girl’s big, pleading eyes. “…A sorcerer, you say?”
Emu’s eyes somehow got even bigger than before, and she nodded. “Yeah, yeah! I wanna go find him!”
Nene let out a small laugh. “If he’s a sorcerer, isn’t he like, evil?”
Emu put a hand to her chin. “Hmm… Maybe!! But if we defeat him, then that would make us heroes, right?”
“Something tells me you care less about being heroic and more about just having fun…”
But when Nene really thought about the whole situation, no matter how ridiculous it was, she realized her short time spent with Emu was somehow the most fun she had in months. She felt a sudden determination to chase this feeling.
“Let me at least prepare a little bit first, okay? Also, um, I never really got the chance to buy anything at the market.”
“OH!! I’m sorry! We can go back there first!” Emu replied, putting her hood back over her head. “Let’s go!” She began to walk back in the direction of the market, with Nene following suit.
“So, no one knows the sorcerer’s real name,” Emu chatted on as they walked, “but they say he’s the most active at night and also he has a superrrr cool wand and—“
Nene stopped being able to process anything she said because of how fast she was talking. She really had no clue what she had just agreed to, or why. Maybe this was Nene’s breaking point and she had finally gone insane. Who knows. But she had already grown a strange liking to this eccentric princess, and a part of her was willing to see where this all led.