Rosemary's Beginning

Winter 4348

The pixie wasn’t sure what happened. She was just born, that was all. Or that’s what she thought afterwards anyway. She had just become aware, or else she simply never remembered anything else, or forgot it all before, which wouldn’t be that odd. Except that she remembered the baby. She was so sure it was her baby. Her birth baby, the baby whose giggle had broken. The baby would have been the first on this island, the Island of the Blessed, this refuge from the war, just far enough off the coast to be out of the line of fire.
The light was warm, the baby was lying on a blanket in the floor with one of its long-haired parents leaning over it and making faces, wagging their head and swinging the brown curls over it.
Then the world exploded.
It felt like it, even now, even to Rosemary’s developed mind and senses, that the entire planet had erupted around and beneath and above her from all ways, all sides. She was sure it was centuries ago, and still it struck her in the same way to remember, still it haunted her.
Rosemary couldn’t help the thoughts as she busied herself with commanding her zombies to clean up the wreckage. It took nearly a year to get back to this lab in this world, the temporary death had sent her back to the feywild, and the time had not been kind to her den.
The catastrophe had been a magically summoned meteor that actually missed, but still sent so much boiling water over the island that it was wiped clean in moments. Rosemary was still not sure how she survived, but she washed up on the mainland with nothing in her mind but her birth and near death. It had scared her badly, and she could never consciously talk herself out of the fear of mortality.
“Which brings me back to this mess,” she cursed to herself. The mess was a lab and library in the natural world. It had been underground, but Rosemary wasn’t sure if it still counted since part of the ceiling caved in and exposed the lab to the elements. Overall, it wasn’t that bad. The adventurers had taken their friend and nothing else. The stone slab was still stained brown with the blood of her last subject, the books were intact and safe, as far as she knew, the crumbled stone littered the floor. The zombies were assembling the scattered body parts from the subject on the slab.
“Why am I doing this to myself?” she mumbled, and she tried to get up and flit around, but her gossamer blue butterfly wing was damaged and she was tired.
“Because you are bored and you liked him,” she responded irritably. “The storytelling is because you are bored and you are sorry you didn’t tell him the story, so now you are going to make Stein and you are going to tell him the story instead.”
“That’s stupid. This is stupid,” she snipped. “I am being sentimental over… Oh, fine, that was a… Oooh!”
Rosemary stomped in a circle. “Damn them!” she cried. Her tiny squeaking voice echoed through the musty library, and she checked to make sure the ceiling was still holding. Portia needed to come through and fix it for her, that was soon. Today?
She was so close! She finally found a real, true immortal! She had him! And he was rescued by those furballs!
She still had several of his pieces, but the loss of the specimen was infuriating!
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she breathed, and she paced in a small circle.
The pieces of the specimen were not as numerous as she hoped, and she needed Shmi to create some mechanical bits for him… the hands, as many times as she took them apart and off, could not be reassembled in any meaningful fashion. They were simply too big to stay in one piece and attached at the same time. If the hands were whole, the arm would fall apart, and if the arm was whole, it would fall off the shoulder.
“You’re doing that thing where you’re stewing about the lost chance?” chuckled Portia, who had appeared on the west wall through a ripple in the air. “You’ll get it figured out before you stay dead,” they promised, and they approached gracefully. Portia was a tall, thin elfish person with yellow hair, yellow skin, and green eyes, and Rosemary was not sure they had a physical sex at all. They spoke in a smooth alto, and they were beautiful, but Rosemary had little use for beauty. They were also a master Planeshaper and could swap dimensions as easily as clothes.
“I was so close, he was perfect!” she moaned.
“Maybe you’ll find him again. Wait ‘til the werekin girls are dead, pursue him again? Make this new one in the meantime?” He picked the immortal’s head off the slab and turned it in their hands. “I cannot believe the size of this man. And beheading didn’t permanently kill him?”
“He grew another one!” squealed Rosemary. “It was incredible! One time in moments!”
“Goodness, I am sorry I missed the early experiments, but we have always warned and been warned about messing with the heroes,” Portia giggled. “Well, I’m here to restructure this lab and library for you. Show me the damage and we’ll get started.”