Conflicts of a Fairytale's Friendship

Prologue

Bleached Displacement

Her first memory was of a rhythmic beeping. It was a distant, technological sound just beyond the darkness of her unconsciousness. She was roused by how the singular tone eerily mirrored a distinct thump in her chest. It beckoned her into awareness and encouraged her to open her eyes, but prying open her lids was a foreign sensation. They were heavy and weary from being closed for far too long. The hues they protected were unprepared to receive the bright haze of the fluorescent light that lingered over her head. They squinted, painfully, against the manufactured glow. An unfamiliar appendage came to the aid of her eyes, placing itself between them and the offending light source, casting a comforting shadow upon them. Slowly, she blinked at the appendage that, despite how strange it felt, must have belonged to her. She brought it closer to her face to better access it, flexing the five digits that extended from its awkward, biologically square base.

This...feels wrong, her thoughts echoed, disoriented and far away. Slowly, uncertain of every muscle and nerve throughout her unrecognizable body, she sat up. She brought up a second appendage of the same likeness as the other and held them side-by-side, turning them over as she tested the mobility in the ten extensions, waiting for the flexing motion to feel natural. It didn't. They didn't. Not at all. This doesn't feel right, her thoughts insisted as she gained startling awareness about the rest of her body. She threw the thin, stark white blanket that had bunched up on her lap the rest of the way off her lower body. Attached to her legs—Which felt and appeared to be far, way too long—she curled stubby versions of the digits connected to her arms. They felt even more wrong. The appendages connected to her wrists trembling, she began touching, rubbing, and groping at every inch of her body, seeking even the slightest something she recognized about herself, but all her mind repeated with increasing intensity was wrong, wrong, wrong, more wrong. It was all foreign and she even felt like parts of herself were missing, though she couldn't exactly explain what these missing parts were, only where they were meant to be. The two most prominent were an extension to her tail bone and...something on her forehead, but she couldn't even imagine what. She rubbed her forehead with a rough but slow panic, feeling naked and entirely incomplete without whatever had been there once.

Still fidgeting with the center of her forehead as though her lost something would return at any moment to comfort her, her eyes danced like a frightened rabbit around the room, jumping from one object to the next. Most things, she did recognize what they were, though the room was sparsely furnished. There was the strange bed that she was sitting on, a small table on one side of the bed, a single chair on the other side the room, and the source of the beeping. She wasn't at all sure what the machine was. It was overly complex and had many parts that called her attention, most of which she wasn't sure were in operation, and it was connected to her by a series of thin, flexible...tubes. What held her attention the most was the little black screen. Numbers that meant nothing to her were depicted in the corners and, she assumed, it was the source of the beeping because, with every bleeping that matched the terrible, fear induced pace of her heart, she watched a line peek and then fall in the same rhythm. She tore her eyes from the machine, looking back at the body connected to her frenzied mind.

Find something familiar, she begged herself, the appendages that had been fidgeting with her forehead slipping into her hair and gripping the strands tightly. Even the smooth texture of the locks felt wrong. Tears pricked her eyes as her free appendage starting exploring her form once again for something, anything, while she dug and wracked her mind for something more, something about her and not about things that she could claim to know until she felt physical pain in her cranium. Anything, anything. Anything I recognize. Anything I know. Please. Anything.

Her desperation and searching came to a sudden halt when she  traveled her free hand from her calf all the way up to her hip. On the outer part of her hip, the skin felt...different. Smoother, tighter, softer somehow, maybe. She could almost trace out a shape. Curious as well as disturbed, she pulled up the awkward, disproportionate gown that barely hung onto her strange form. There, she saw a...picture, for lack of a better term, printed on her skin. Before even indulging what the design was, she pulled up the other side of her gown. It was there too. It was a depiction of feather over what appeared to be aged parchment, with something she couldn't guess wavering out from the plume. It was familiar. That very notion struck her with a comfort that pulled stiffness from her shoulders and from the darkness of her mind, it pulled a single light consisting of two words;

Fairytale Lyric.

It was a name. Her name. She had a name, but there was nothing else forth coming from her aching head; No hint as to who Fairytale Lyric was or what the designs on her hips could possibly mean. It was a victory hardly worth celebrating, but the name and those picture printed on her skin felt right when nothing else did. Whatever body she had inhabited before, whatever her correct body was, it had owned these two things. This was enough for her to coax her heart to a slower pace, one that did not cause her rib cage to protest with a dull ache. It was enough to last her for a few moments, enough to find a peace that, deep down, she knew something.

But two things simply weren't enough.

In the future, they brought more questions than answers, especially the oddly placed designs. Who was she? What did those marks mean? Did they mean anything? Why did everything feel so wrong? Why were her memories so dark?