Off to Seek a Wizard -10- Scary, Hairy, Fairy, Curse

Printer-friendly version
Off to Seek a Wizard...
-10-
Scary, Hairy, Fairy, Curse

by Erin Halfelven

stephaniedale.png

 
"There are fairies of the wood and fairies of the river and fairies of the mountain," said Charles Wood. "Are you a mud fairy?"

"No, I'm not," I said. This conversation was making me grumpy, not to mention loony. "I just fell into this mudhole and I can't get out."

"Are you sure you're a fairy?" asked the not-bear. I supposed I could call him Chuck, even though he still sounded like George.

"No, I"m not sure." I snapped. I'd been called that often enough, all the way back to kindergarten and I hadn't much liked it at any time.

"How can you not be sure?" he asked, sounding reasonable. "Just look at you! Besides the mud, I mean. Oh," he nodded, "you're definitely a fairy. I think."

He came closer and I looked at his teeth again. Not threatening in the least, for all their size. If he weren't almost two feet taller than me --or me two inches shorter than him-- he would have looked a lot like a child's plush toy, some Muppetish cartoony creature with an adorable name.

"I'm just not. And it's not very polite to call someone a fairy unless they tell you, that yes, they are one. Now are you going to help me out of this mudhole? I only fell in because you scared me." Asking for a favor always gets a better response with a little guilt for sauce. Well, maybe not, but nearly everyone does it that way.

"I scared you?" he seemed astonished.

"Yes, you came up and I turned and there you were just as big and hairy as all daylight! I thought you were a bear."

He looked up as if examining the daylight for hirsuteness. Something 'as all daylight' was another of my grandfather's sayings, I don't know why they pop out at the oddest times.

"Just come over and pull me out, please?" I begged when Chuck hadn't moved closer in a reasonable time.

He ambled toward me. He looked nervous, but I couldn't understand why. It's not as if I had teeth the size of a tall latte sticking out of my face. "I don't see why you don't just fly out of there."

I rolled my eyes. "My wings are all muddy, I can't get any lift!" I said. "Please, please, please help me?" I hated to ask for help from J. Random Rodent but I wasn't going anywhere without a little assistance.

The marmot reached the mud puddle and with one fastidious paw --if he had had a pinkie, it would have been raised-- and hardly any effort, he simply reached in and scooped me onto the dry grass. I gasped. He shook a bit of mud off his claw.

"You're so strong," I gushed.

"What does that mean?" he asked, nervously. "Does helping you out of the mud count as a rescue?"

"Oh yes," I said. "Thank you." I tugged at some grass blades, all of which were three or four inches across, but none of them would break. So I just sat there and used some of the taller ones to wipe as much mud off me as I could. My bra and panties were encrusted with the stuff and where was I going to find a laundry for them? And what would I be wearing while they went spinny in the dryer?

Chuck continued to hover while I tried to clean myself off. "I can't stand waiting!" he exclaimed. "Boon or bane?"

"Pardon?" I said. All I could think of was the frontiersman in that song or the guy in the Batman comic.

He jittered from paw to paw then sat up and covered his face. "Everyone knows that if you rescue a fairy she will grant you either boon or bane," he said from behind his hands. "So which is it? Am I cursed? Oh, I don't want to be cursed, I'm sure my family doesn't want me to be cursed. My brothers and sisters and my poor sweet mother, it would just break her heart. Oh, please, Princess Stephanie, don't turn me into a frog! I don't want to croak!"

I stood there with my mouth hanging open and stared at him.

up
192 users have voted.
If you liked this post, you can leave a comment and/or a kudos! Click the "Thumbs Up!" button above to leave a Kudos

Comments

I have this feeling ...

... that this is all going to turn out to be a dream and Steph is snoozing safely in aerial transit. Stories that turn out to be dreams usually annoy me no end but in this case I don't think I'll mind because it has that dream-like quality written though like 'Skegness' in a stick of rock.

Robi

Opaque as a Rock

erin's picture

That was a pretty opaque reference there until I looked Skegness up in the Wiki! LOL.

To save some other people time, Skegness is a beach town in Lincolnshire, UK. It's where the Vikings used to holiday, apparently, and with its wide beaches and bracing wind off the North Sea it's favored by hardy tourists to this day. Not by the mayor, though, who has apparently made the unofficial slogan of the town, "Stuff Skegness! I'm off for some sun," presumably in Portugal or Cyprus.

I love jolly old Blighty, you can't make this stuff up. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Re: Opaque as a Rock

Hello Erin,

Skegness is a beach town in Lincolnshire, UK.

In the UK, we would call it a seaside town, to distinguish it from a town with a river or lakeside 'beach'!

Regards,

Dave.

Interesting

erin's picture

A riverside beach is seldom called a beach in the US unless it is near to the ocean, and while lakeside beaches exist, they're more frequently called just shores. I called it a beach town because its notable aspect is not that it is at the sea but that it has several miles of sandy beach. Does seaside imply a beach or resort area in the UK? It has a weak implication here but isn't common.

There's a California beach town called Seaside, near Monterey, it has a cool and gloomy climate most of the year with about ten weeks of sun and warmth split between July, August and January. The place used to be surrounded by an army base which has since closed.

There's also Oceanside near San Diego, a windy spot sometimes favored by surfers. Oceanside has typical Southern California weather, sunny and mild most of the year, cool and gloomy in spring and early summer and unpredictably in the winter. The wind off the Pacific there can be quite cold, though, even when the sun is warm. The beaches south of town are used for military exercises and the ones north of town are noted for their voracious biting fleas.

Seaside is noted in the Monterey area for good Mexican food; Oceanside is considered a haven for fast fooderies, and not much else.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Seaside

Angharad's picture

is very much associated with holidays, especially bucket and spade stuff, piers, dirty postcards, sticks of rock, overpriced ice cream and fish and chips - add 'Kiss me Quick' hats and candyfloss, possibly a bit of a funfair and you have a traditional British seaside resort.

Weymouth is one which is trying to go upmarket by converting its harbour into a marina. Lookout for it during the Olympics as the sailing is in Portland Harbour in Weymouth Bay. It's fast becoming an upmarket dump.

Angharad

Angharad

Moving up in the world then?

It's fast becoming an upmarket dump.

In my Dorset days Weymouth* was a downmarket dormitory area and Wyke Regis* was a full-blown downmarket dump.

However I like the beach in Wyke Regis, as a place to bathe in the sea. The particle size of the sand is very good and it has an infant-friendly slope. My other childhood beach was Hythe (Kent) where the pebbles are the size of hens' eggs and the slope is about 45 degrees. My memory is that it was also the temperature of the water, or it always felt like it.

Xi

*I don't know where the boundaries are today, but in my time Weymouth was to the west of the Wey (the river) and Wyke Regis was to the east. The hoi poloi referred to the seaside town (beach resort) on the eastern side as Weymouth - in fact they referred to the whole urban sprawl as Weymouth, aided and abetted by the Great Western Railway and the Royal Mail. The latter is a bad joke in itself (the RM is a bad joke it is true, but what I mean is that the title of Wyke Regis was royally bestowed - IIRC).

Xi

Wyke is one side

Angharad's picture

the other side is Melcombe Regis, both granted by royal charter and largely irrelevant today as the whole thing is the Borough of Weymouth and Portland - the latter if you remember was originally a royal manor.

Angharad

Angharad

Weymouth and Skeggy

Weymouth does have rather a nice beach, which is made from sand. From memories of a holiday at Butlins in Skeggy, many years ago, when I was a skinny, confused 'boy' who hated having 'his' photo taken because it somehow seemed to solidify the body 'he' wore, I remember that Skegness beach went out to roughly waist-deep at mid tide, where it changed from sand to truly slimy mud.

The tricky thing ...

... about the beach at Skeg is the fact that the tide can come in behind you and cut you off. I was, at times, almost a resident and the local advice was to walk towards the pier as fast as possible if you got caught out. It's a very big beach, though and in my youth there was an old landing craft that took holiday makers to the water. That didn't stop the sea flooding part of the town in the notorious East coast floods of 1953 which took many lives on both sides of the North Sea.

Butlins holiday camp was taken over by the Royal Navy during the war and christened HMS Royal Arthur. According to Lord Haw Haw (an Irishman broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin) the Royal Arthur was sunk on two occasions which amused the Skegness residents.

We visited Weymouth in 2010 for a day (we were staying near Sherborne) and quite liked it as a change from the Dorset hills.

My innocent reference seems to have stirred a few comments. It shouldn't detract from Erin's very funny (in both senses) story.

Robi

I grew up and still live in

Jemima Tychonaut's picture

I grew up and still live in a seaside town on the English south coast. In answer to your question I guess most people would associate seaside with a beach though beach and resort go pretty much hand in hand as a legacy of a time before foreign holiday travel. Often though the resort can be quite small and crushingly disappointing (i.e. seen no substantial investment since before WW1 or subject to awful 1950's rebuilding).

I can't speak for other more northerly points but the weather is pretty mild in my part of England with only a handful of snow days in a year (and some years none even) and with small palm trees quite commonly being cultivated in peoples gardens or as part of civic gardens. We even have non-native feral Rose-ringed Parakeets well established. I've heard my home town sell itself because of its beach but never calling itself a beach town, so it must be one of those common language divided things. :-) The word 'seaside' does evoke a rather cheesy song though for which the bit most people remember is -

"Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play:
"Tiddely-om-pom-pom!"

As for the story, I think the boon Stephanie needs to give Charles is a backbone. ;-)

Still lost, confused and bewildered. Feels like I fell out of the plane more than Stephanie!! Looking forward to enjoying the ride with this story.

 


"Just once I want my life to be like an 80's movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life."



"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

Loving the story, Erin!

"There's a California beach town called Seaside, near Monterey, it has a cool and gloomy climate most of the year with about ten weeks of sun and warmth..."

See, that's just like the nicer English seaside towns!

Loving the story, Erin!

Kris

{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}

Kris

{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}

Funny, because ...

... Skeggy's motto for years was that "Skegness is so bracing". Actually it means bloody cold and windy in my not inconsiderable experience. I grew up there in the 6 weeks of what passes for Summer in 1956. I worked on the permanent fairground whilst waiting for school exam results. It was both profitable and fun but a relief to get back home 90 miles inland.

Sorry about the opaque reference, Erin. Just getting my own back for all the equally opaque US references that litter BC stories like confetti at a double wedding LOL. I must check out the Wiki reference.

Robi

If you think Skeggy's bracing...

Back in Victorian times, some bright spark thought he could turn a windswept, exposed cliff top in North Yorkshire (between Whitby and Scarborough) into a resort. Unsurprisingly, Ravenscar wasn't a big success and never really got off the ground. If you look at the aerial photo you can see its location, together with both paved roads, unpaved roads (no point since there aren't any houses on them!) and even the possibility of roads that were built but have since been returned to fields.


As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

"Boon or bane?"

Oh I do hope its a boon. He's a nice whatever-he-is

Dorothycolleen, member of Bailey's Angels

DogSig.png

Mud, mud, glorious mud...

Angharad's picture

oops, wrong story again. Still loving it although I have no idea what's going on.

Angharad

Angharad

No, that's...

... Weston-super-Mud, or Clevedon, or...

Xi

Not Clevdon

Clevedon doesn't have mud. Its all pebbles and rock pools - and a rather unpleasant disused seawater swimming pool. There is a nice walk around the headland though.

Sorry going off on tangent a bit like the story.

Audrey

Wonderful story, Erin...

I love the styles of writing that you're using for this series and the way it seems to switch every few chapters to something fresh. So long as you feel the quality of the story stays up, please keep it up. :)

--SEPARATOR--

Peace be with you and Blessed be

Peace be with you and Blessed be

hahahaha

"'...don't turn me into a frog! I don't want to croak!'"
Hillarious. I am enjoying this so much Erin!

Dreamy

terrynaut's picture

This story is just oozing with dreamy goodness, but if I'm wrong and this isn't a dream sequence, then I'm in trouble. I hope it's all just a dream. Dream, Steph! Dream!

Make no bones about it. I am enjoying this.

Thanks and kudos.

1960s In Corn fields

It reminds me of strange trips in corn fields, In the 1960s/1970s. Its funny how the adults talk about a dream why can't thay just fly were the story takes them, ahh one must be in control, I am Never growing up.
Love and Hugs Hanna

Love And Hugs Hanna
((((((((♥)))))))((((((((♥)))))))((((((((♥)))))))((((((((♥)))))))((((((((♥)))))))
Blessed Be
2889.jpg

Click your heels together

Click your heels together three times and say, 'There's no place like home, there's no place like home.'

Hugs,
Karen

"I don't want to croak!" I

Daphne Xu's picture

"I don't want to croak!" I thought this was Oz, where nobody ever croaked.

"I'd been called [a fairy] often enough, all the way back to kindergarten..." Calling a man or boy a Fairy is an embarrassing insult -- as is calling him a Queen.

The varmint is two feet taller than Stephanie, and Stephanie's two inches shorter?

So he finally rescues her.

-- Daphne Xu

-- Try saying freefloating three times rapidly.