AFT Post #13.1 Princess Tepes !UdvEXCbuyo 09/05/17 (Sun) 14:53 No. 28675 So much for two updates yesterday. Here’s an extra-long update to make up for it~



“…Summer.”



Flandre cocked her head in my direction, a piece of delicious egg already in her mouth. “Whugt?”



“You asked me my favorite season. I just remembered. It’s summer.”



“Hgow chome shummergh?”



“Well, it’s…I know that spring is when nature grows and all, but summer is when Nature really lives . Everything’s green and full, just like it should be. Plus it just feels…well, strong, if that makes any sense. I’ve always wanted to be stronger, I guess.”



She nodded and swallowed her mouthful, then shoveled the rest of it into her mouth and stood up, taking the dishes to the sink. “Most of you others say spring without thinking about it, you know. Once they get over being afraid of me. Which I guess I can understand. One of these days I should probably go upstairs more and stop all those rumors. Giving me a bad reputation. Of course, with my luck, I’ll just have another accident and make it worse. Remi says she hates it more than me, how all you fairies seem to be afraid of me. Says she feels like she’s let me down or something. No, no; hardly. I let her, more like. I just don’t know how to tell her that. One day…one day maybe…The days, the days, they slips aways, forever and ever, and ever and always…”



As Flandre slipped into a quiet mumbling to herself, reciting some odd poem or song, I finished up my breakfast and brought the dishes over to the sink. Rumors of fear…I knew even better than her how those rumors circulated. Most were obviously false, and it’s a wonder how they even got started. But even in rumors you can find some sort of truth, and if most of the rumors were negative, did that mean that most of the real truth was negative as well? Or were rumors just rumors? I wished…I wished that some of; no, that most of those rumors didn’t even exist. They were misleading. Not even an hour with the young lady, and I could see that the things about Flandre I shied away from weren’t the things I’d heard about. But still…the fear couldn’t have just been from her mountains of words. There had to be something, something truly dangerous about her. I just feared what it was, and if (or when) it was going to come up.



“You can, you can do the dishes here, since you’re the maid and I don’t want to right now, ‘cause I don’t want to right now. I’m gonna go get dressed for a day. Just put everything back like it was; I’ve got a system. I don’t like it when peoples come and mess up my system. Spent a lot of time on that system…” She trailed off again as she walked out of the room, muttering about systems and words related to systems, leaving me to fend for myself on the clean up. Remembering the countless times before I had scrubbed dishes at Sakuya’s bequest, I set my mind back into the role of the insignificant maid I was and got to work.



Only a few seconds after I had put the last dish back into the cupboards, I heard Flandre calling for me.



“Hey little fairy-type person girl, can you come over here, please? My wings are stuck again. Or…well, I guess it’s just again for me. You wouldn’t know about again yet. So, my wings are just stuck then.”



Hastening out of the kitchen and across Flandre’s room, I found her in a small dressing room with her hands on the base of her wings, fiddling with something. I quickly turned away out of modesty when I realized all she had on was her underpants; not even a shirt. “Umm, would you mind putting a shirt or something on, miss? I don’t want to embarrass you.”



I heard her sigh and walk towards me, then felt her hand on my shoulder as she forcibly turned me back around. That hand…she had barely touched me, and yet just a finger or two was enough to spin me around like I was made of nothing. Even now I shudder at the thought of what kind of accidental damage she could have done if she had pulled me a little harder.



Tilting my chin up, she made me look into her eyes, those ruby red eyes of hers. Look as I might, I didn’t find any sort of “insanity” in those eyes. Then again, what did insane eyes look like? I’d never seem them before; I didn’t know. No, just normal, calm, centuries-old vampire eyes.



“That’s awful nice, do you know that?” she said. “I’m pretty sure that I think I know that you fairy-types don’t like clothes much—don’t understand them much either—but you still care about other people’s clothes just all the same. But look now: you’re a girl-type person, and I’m a girl-type person. There’s no boy-type people down here, never have been, not ever even once. Well, unless maybe some boy-type people built my room for me, but they’d be dead now anyhow. And your skin stuff is just like my skin stuff; you’ve probably seen it lotsa times before when you take a bath. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know, maybe you haven’t, I haven’t seen you take a bath, so I could be wrong. But I’m probably not wrong, right?”



I nodded meekly. She did have a point, I supposed. Not a point I understood completely, but well enough to know what she way trying to say.



“So don’t worry ‘bout me embarrassing you or you embarrassing me, k? It’s already hard enough worrying about everything else without worrying about the little stuff that’s not everything else. Now get back behind me and stop worrying. I need you to help me take my wings off.”



My eyes grew a little wider as I stepped back a half-pace. What had she just said?! “You wings…come, off? ”



She nodded. “Mhm, they have to, ‘cause what if they break or something? These are my old pair of wings, though; I just use ‘em for bedtime nowadays. They’re not really that good, it was just my first try after all. Anyways, go around back; there’s a little…umm, screw nut type deal thing, at the base. I can’t get any torque on it; stupid mechanical advantage leverage principals, thinking they own the world, making my wings all annoying like this. Newton-meters foot-pounds, mumble grumble…”



Looking at where the wings met her back again (ugh, that seam where they met just looked so ghastly…), I found the “screw nut type deal thing” she was talking about. She was right, it was definitely stuck, but I felt like with a little work they’d come off. As I twisted on her wings, I couldn’t help but ask her:



“So, umm…you don’t have to answer this but—“



“Why do my wings have to come off?” she interrupted, turning her head over her shoulder. “Yeah, you all ask me that on your first day. Makes sense, since it’s really weird. It’s because I’m…well, I guess I’m afraid? Afraid of being too strong. I’m too strong already but…don’t want to be too too strong. My wings, they’re like…hmm, what’s a word? Bird’s not the word, not this time. Birderies? Batteries. Reverse batteries, that’s a good word to use. They don’t give me energy, they take it away instead. I switch ‘em so the charge doesn’t build up too much. You ever seen a battery just kinda explode? No, prolly not. But we don’t want that. That would be bad. And bad things are bad, not very good at all, no. Don’t forget that connector pin, that’s gotta come out too.”



I slipped off the screw and tugged on the wing, my hands shaking twice as much as before. Her wings stored her excess power? And they could…explode?! Was I holding some kind of energy bomb in my hands right then? And…what happened for the few minutes when she had no wings on, then? Would she—no, no, I had to stay focused. I wasn’t there to be afraid, had to be braver. The wing slid off her back gently, and I set it down on the ground like it was made of the most fragile glass ever, more afraid of the wing now than Flandre herself.

