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princesspuzzle) wrote2022-10-23 01:46 pm
Genesis
"There. It is done." The man had a seat on a stool, and breathed a sigh of exhaustion. He looked like he'd not slept in a day and a half; his eyelids drooped, his hair was a mess, and he looked like every inch of him was struggling to keep itself from collapsing. She took that time to gain her bearings. She was sure that it was illogical that she could not remember what - if anything - came before she came to, but she knew things. Many things. Those were frescos. That was Leonardo. He was her creator. She knew the words for everything in the room, and everything the young painters were painting. Hills. Sky. Bodies. Men, women, children, animals. She seemed to know a lot of things, but she didn't know all that she knew. She supposed it would come to her in time.
After a few moments, he sat back up and looked directly at her, hunching forward and craning his neck to look her in the back eye. "So, my pretty thing, you should have hands." He held up his hands to illustrate. She spent a moment to figure out how it was she could manifest them. It didn't take long, and she conjured one, then another hand, very similar to Leonardo's - a left and strong hand, but delicate and slim, matching to her darkwood body. A second came forth same as the first - another left - and extended outward to slide a piece of paper her direction. She then grabbed a nearby quill and ink pen.
She wrote, "Leonardo," backwards and with familiar but dissimilar script to the man's. "What am I? Who am I?"
Leonardo's eyes went wide with surprise as he saw his name written by the puzzle box he'd created. But then his expression softened into a sympathetic scowl. "You're a miracle."
She wrote back, "Thank you, but I meant physically."
Leonardo sat back and ran his hand over his beard and tried to find the words. Instead of finding them, he slid his hand gently under her and held her steady at the top edge of her body, and her hands disappeared only to be replaced by much smaller, and many more hands to cling to his wrist and hand. He brought her to an old, pitted mirror, and he held her out to look at herself and set her down on a crate a foot away from the mirror. She looked with scrutiny, twisting back and forth, looking at herself with all eyes, and when she tried to see from the top eye, she nearly toppled off the crate, but thrust a hand towards the edge of the crate and pulled herself back up. It got Leonardo to chuckle, and he scooped her back up. "Mobility comes with practice. I'm sorry, I should have put you farther away from the edge."
Princess looked up at him, offended that she thought she couldn't keep from falling. She hoped he felt her disappointment in him. She hoped he could feel anything that she'd felt. Or anyone could. She couldn't tell, but she had a feeling that Leonardo was incapable of sensing what she felt at all. That, she supposed, wasn't that important. She felt she had more important things to learn and see.
It turned out, she absolutely did. Days, weeks, months went by and Leonardo kept her close to him at all times. People came up to her and marveled at her, but Leonardo had warned her on the first day that unless she was with him and he gave her a signal (a crack of his knuckles that ended in a circle made of his thumb and ring finger,) she couldn't show her hands. She had to sit still and be gawked at. Some of her admirers came with puzzled expressions, but most with delight. Some put their hands all over her, rubbing their fingers over her ruby eyes and rubbing their fingers against her grain, making her feel uncomfortable and angry. There was an unpleasant tingle when her wood was brushed against the grain. There were smudges on her eyes that made it harder to see. She always had to wipe a small cloth over her jewels when people left, dusting herself off. But mostly, her time was spent correcting Leonardo's maths and proportions. She helped him draw perspective, making perfect lines and arcs. She enjoyed it, and enjoyed his company.
Years went by. She realized there was more outside than in the workshop, and she went to explore, keeping her sneaking to new moons, so she could hide in the shadows better. She didn't go far from the workshop, but there was a hill with tall grass and flowers that she loved to go and look around her, and down at Firenze. But mostly, she stayed by Leonardo, being carried from the workshop to the little home nearby, down the road and hill from the abandoned monastery that Leonardo made into the workshop that was her birthplace.
He aged. She did not. When he was old, very old, he gave her to his most beloved female friend.
"This is Principessa. Treat her well."
And she changed hands. Her first person after her father was a opera singer. She spent many years on the mantle of her singer's practice room - with a grand piano and a harp - and when the singer's home was empty, she mimicked her singer's movements on the piano, and on the harp, and learned to play both quite well. But that was a secret for only herself.
She then was handed off to her singer's friend, a man with a large family - six children, a pet dog, and a wife. He was a merchant, and he spent a long time away, but came back to his family all smiles and gifts. He was a lovely man. Her merchant was of strong moral and religious character. He took his family to mass twice a week. Those times, she snuck out and enjoyed the family garden, full of edible plants - not that she ate, she sat in the sun to regain energy - and pretty flowers. She pet the dog, and watched the birds as they tittered in the olive tree.
When he died, the youngest son was the one who inherited her. That man wasn't the upstanding individual man his father was. He gambled, cheated on his wife, never had children so far as she knew. She never knew the end of his story, as she was sold to another, less scrupulous merchant. She was crated and lost consciousness after a month out of the sun.
She awoke again. She was on the deck of a ship, looking up at the faces of a man with a fair complexion and the other more swarthy, the mast and sails of the ship, and a pile of other things that had been in the crate with her. She was in the company of pirates. She wasn't fully cognizant of her actions when one of them touched her eyes - and she slapped him. She'd woken up and immediately was being handled like some unfeeling conversation piece? The utter nerve. The fairer one called the other Captain and laughed at him, while the other man told Bill to be quiet, it was a rare day when a piece of shine had the brass to slap him as if he'd done it wrong. She manifested another hand and poked the man in the chest. If he couldn't feel her emotions intuitively, she sure as hell would make him feel it physically.
She spent two hundred years with her pirates. They had zero moral compass, but were kind to each other and those others they loved, and were the antithesis of religious. One believed in nothing, the other believed in everything. They were polar opposites in many ways, but they connected to each other in the ways that mattered. She had never seen true love until then. The two men and the woman, all three were beloved to her, even though none of them truly realized she was more than a fierce object. Bill thought she was a haunted object, and Anne thought she was an odd mechanism.
They were a delight. They didn't age, just like she didn't age. They never crumbled into obsolescence. They were the products of their times, but they kept up with every change the world made. Princess learned more by listening and watching the trio than she ever had at her father's, and over the couple hundred years beyond that.
It was in the late 90s that Princess met her new people. She was still living with her pirates, and she never thought she would ever have new people. She was happy with having her pirates. But one night, in the dark and silent, a young man - no older than the apprentices in the workshop - and he walked up to her with a wary eye. She eyed him back. He spoke to her as if she was alive and she felt a tug within her that made her feel something she hadn't felt in a long, long time. She felt seen. She felt known. And then the boy touched her eyes and she simultaneously slung one hand out to punch him, and four others to wrap around him and keep him still until the pirates came home. He was a thief.
It all happened so suddenly. As soon as the pirates returned home, they saw her wrapped and clinging to the thief who had since resigned himself to being held. They practically adopted the young man. And with him came another child. A beautiful young woman with eyes nearly as red as her own. She fell in love with them almost immediately. They were fun. Funny. Irreverent but constantly open to learning. She relished the days they came to visit her pirates. Sometimes together, but less and less frequently, and only singularly.
Then one of her pirates - who had been going progressively mad - decided for the health and happiness of his other two pirates to greet the sun, to put an end to himself. And it was beautiful how he ended. The following years, though, were heartbreak as she watched Bill suffer through the grief of it all. She was watching a man walk through memories when he walked through the living room. And watched him as he slowly began to pack up those memories and put them away, or send them off. She was one of those things. She was put into a crate with boxes a thousand times more horrific than herself. By then, he knew she was more than a simple haunted object. He thought she did have a limited amount of sentience and intelligence, and went in with them to be shipped away to storage. She was there with the other puzzle boxes to keep them in line. She had no idea how to do that. She was preoccupied with a realization.
She was sent off again. It was terror and fear and grief. She was unwillingly left and sent away from her pirate. She lost them both and inside, she felt like she was breaking. Crumbling deep within herself. She was furious with Bill. How dare he leave her? Send her away? After living with him so long, she couldn't think of any other way to live.
She was then sent to live with another vampire. A haughty, frightening, horrid woman who was more like a spider than a person. Trapping people in her web and then eating them. She frightened Principessa. She talked endlessly to her like one would talk to themselves in a mirror. And all the woman talked about was herself and Bill. It was unceasing. And when she wasn't doing that or ignoring her, she was ripping people apart with fangs and claws, bathing in their blood. She'd seen her pirates feed, but they were relatively tidy about it. Even Bill (bastard!) who would gnaw on the wound and dig his nails in if he had no desire to keep the meal alive.
Then one night, she was rescued. She'd heard faint voices in the echoing foyer of the mansion, and perked up. They were familiar to her, but... she wasn't sure until the countess picked her up roughly and brought her with mutters of anger and handed her off... to her thief. They were both there! Both of them! After years upon years of never seeing them together, and only singularly, she was relieved. Relieved and delighted and terrified all at once, making her tremble and quake in Artan's arm as she clung tightly to his shirt. She wasn't going to let him go.
It wasn't even ten minutes before she was back with the pirates. She slapped Bill immediately, but with all the excitement and emotional strain and exhaustion, Principessa fell asleep.
She woke up somewhere new again. It was like waking up in the mind of her boythief. Metal and shabby everything, save for the technology that was more than up-to-date, it was state-of-the-art. All the little signs of being in Artan's place made her at ease. So did the note left to her. She loved her boythief. And her girlthief, Petit. They now worked together and lived together in a mind-boggling Amassment of things not unlike her. Cursed and blessed and powerful objects. Objects with minds. And a thousand felines that were anything but feline.
She found home, though. Princess - as she was called by everyone now - was home. She worked, she played, she met her Norwegians - a big, owly man, and a bright and cheerful lady. They were supposedly twins, but they were as far from alike as two complete lunatics from the same family could be. She loved them, but her love for them didn't touch her love for her thieves.
She realized, then, that she was free to be herself. And then she realized that she could put into motion a thought that had been put aside and brought back up year upon year. She wanted to be people, too.
With her little Norwegian's help, she started creating a plan. There was a room in the Amassment that was nothing but books. An endless library that was forbidden to be read by any human. Luckily, she was anything but a human. She read each from cover to cover, and found a spell. It was intricate, precise, and only allowed to be done by an individual who had never spoken.
She built a body out of mannequin parts and soft lambskin, molding a face out of clay like she had done in the workshop, half a millennia ago. She then put the ingredients of life within the body, and drew the sigils on the lambskin.
She felt her consciousness split. She was full in both bodies. And like she could see from all facets of her body, she now could see from a new set of eyes. She could feel her individual physical feelings from both sides, but each of her was autonomous. Mental Mitosis, she thought, and her human form laughed silently. Her little Norwegian, Torii, picked up her box self, and held out a hand to help her human self up off the floor. She stood, found her balance, and then looked around with a pair of ruby-hued eyes that matched her box form, a smile on her face. She was people AND box.
It was the most incredible experience of her life. Extraordinary. She loved it, loved her people, and forgave all sins done against her in the moment. She was new again, and was able to experience things like a human could. She wouldn't have to hide in the shadows and sneak silently to sun herself when people weren't around. It was now time to experience. Princess had spent too long unable to show emotion, and now she could. She could emote, and speak, and dress, and taste, and kiss, and be loved for herself, and not be thought of as other.