Chapter Text
“Arthur… I’m sorry…”
“Guinevere… How could you betray me like this?”
“For gods’ sake.” Grace Quinn dropped her Switch, and rolled over in her bed.
High Noon Over Camelot was a fairly basic cowboy retelling of Arthurian myths stuffed into an otome game. Like so many games in its genre it featured five pretty-boy love interests, a surprising amount of horror and violence, and had a lovely smattering of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Because of course.
However, none of that was what drew Grace into the game. The game kept promising to be interesting with its worldbuilding. Every other line implied a world full of magic. A seat that drives people insane, Merlin as a sentient statue, the mystery of the world continually heating.
But as soon as they started talking about anything cool it was suddenly interrupted by inane romance bullshit. Sorry! Can’t talk about the Saxons! We’re too busy organising a picnic! We interrupt this plot because Guinevere has not had a heart-to-heart with Her Man in over 15k words! No, we don’t care that it is a weird jarring shift in tone, you're here for a kissing game so a kissing game you will get!
High Noon Over Camelot was trash, but it was Grace’s type of trash. She was a connoisseur of over-the-top otome. She could hold her own In any debate about mechanics, best romance options, and of course, “Most Weirdly Placed Act Of Violence” (the correct answer to that obviously being a tie between Bustafellow’s blood nanobots and Café Enchanté’s entire plot).
Grace was most of the way through Arthur’s route, and she had hit the inevitable scene where Arthur accuses Guinevere of cheating on him with Lancelot. Extremely typical third act break-up so they can reunite after defeating this route’s big bad blah blah blah. This was her second-to-last route to play. She was saving her favourite romance option, Gawain, to be her last route. She really really hoped that his route would be something special. A diamond in the ruff, with some real worldbuilding, some cute scenes, and a cool character arc.
But alas, she must first get through this nonsense. She had seen it a thousand times before, and she found Arthur to be too boring to be bothered with.
She kicked her legs and groaned, hoping that if she threw a big enough tantrum then the route would play itself. She writhed until her body barely resembled the human form. Her foot hit something solid, and then it crashed against the floor with an extremely concerning clatter.
Instinctively, Grace stopped her dramatics to push herself up on her elbows to look down on the ground. Her Switch lay a full foot from her bed, face down.
“Oh no!”
She grabbed her precious gaming console and flipped it screen-up. The screen was cracked and she cringed. She pressed the on-button.
The screen turned headache-inducing multicolour. Her mind swirled and she tried to turn it off again.
However, she was too late.
She blinked and her stomach dropped. And her body dropped. She was falling through the sky and before she could scream, she hit the ground.
She looked around at the rust-coloured sky, and the rust-coloured ground, and the clouds of rust-coloured dust. Her Switch lay on the ground just beyond her reach. She raised herself onto her knees and crawled forward a few paces towards it. Her ribs ached but she had to keep moving.
The screen was blank white, but as she looked at it, it transformed into the logo for High Noon Over Camelot. She pressed the A button. Music blared from the tinny speakers as the opening cinematic started playing. It was hypnotising her with the familiar world of Galfridian. There was that incredibly ugly CG of Tristan, there was Percival’s blushing sprite fading into Gawain’s aloof sprite. Finally Lancelot and Arthur swept across the screen to land on either side of Guinevere. Grace had watched this video nearly twenty times, the music was burned into her brain. Slowly, the animation faded to black. Grace stared at the screen, until she noticed her reflection.
That was not her reflection.
A man stared back at her with shoulder-length curly hair, and a cowboy hat sat jauntily on her head. She did not recognise that face but it had a resemblance to the sprite for the villain of the game. If she imagined this face as a flat anime drawing, smoothed those skin imperfections, drained some of the life from those eyes, made one of five facial expressions… The face that came to mind was definitely Galahad.
She was Galahad.
Goddamnit, not again.
Grace was not particularly mad about transmigrating (haha trans), but she was a little pissed that it meant starting her transition from the beginning again. She was not a stranger to villainess stories, and had been dreaming of going into one herself. And she actually wanted to delve deeper into the world of High Noon Over Camelot, but couldn’t she just start in the body of Morgan le Fey or something???
Whatever. If Grace Quinn could transition in England, then Galahad (oh gods she needed to pick a new name) could transition in Camelot. She was not the most traditional of dames, and it would not do for her to have a traditional villainess story.
Okay, she needed a plan. She had to get to Camelot. She had to find a way to transition. And of course, she had to avoid the terrible endings that were waiting for her at the end of each route. If Guinevere falls in love with Tristan but she does not have high enough stats to romance him fully, then through a horrible domino effect Galahad gets beheaded. If Guinevere goes through with the Lancelot route, and succeeds, then Galahad gets the great honour of being burned alive at the stake. If Guinevere does not romance anyone then Galahad gets exiled and is implied to starve to death. No matter what she does, she dies.
Grace could not let any of that happen.
So that means she had to encourage Guinevere to go down a route that was not in the game. And she knew the perfect answer: polyamory. Lancelot and Arthur had huge amounts of chemistry through that whole “sworn to protect each other” stuff, and honestly the jealousy arcs in both their routes had really gotten on Grace’s nerves. And in all honesty she thought they’d just be cute together. Who doesn’t love a battle-throuple who overthrew a tyrant together, even if one of the components had a terrible habit of being an otome protagonist?
First issue: she had no idea where she was. She was in the middle of a vast expanse of nothing. Well, nothing and a fuzzy blob to her right. She picked herself to her feet, ignoring her joints, and limped over to the blob.
She really had hoped it would be Camelot in the distance, but alas it was not. Instead it was a motorcycle about five metres from where she had landed that had been obscured by the dust. Well it was kinda like a motorbike, if a motorbike’s grandfather was a horse. With some cow and hoverboard ancestors thrown in for flavour. In the luggage compartment there was a change of clothes, a couple parcels of food, and a book. Galahad - because this had to be Galahad's bike - travelled light. Not that there was much room for anything else.
Grace still had no idea which way was to Camelot. Her only hope was that the bike was pointed towards it. She looked down at her Switch that she still held, because maybe the transmigration gods had been nice and given her cheat codes. Indeed, the screen lit up with a dusty brown tone, marked over with black lines.
A map!
Grace spent far too long getting herself centred, and locating where Camelot was. So if she… and then… go around that massive crater…
She decided that the ride would take her about two days, which she had more than enough food to cover herself for. Galahad had probably not been heading towards Camelot himself, which was good news in her opinion. That meant she could enter the narrative before the story truly started. Maybe she could calm down the fight between the Pendragons that had occurred in the common route. But how much earlier than expected would she arrive? She had no way of knowing how old she currently was, or how old Galahad of the story was. She could only hope it wasn't before the Pendragons settled the city.
She mounted the motorcycle-thing, and her hands easily found the controls. She tucked the Switch into a convenient hollow in the handlebars where it displayed her planned route. Her leg automatically kicked off the ground, and Grace Quinn sped towards Camelot.