1. 3/16/2020: Going to work
Teri has a bad feeling about this...
Transmigrated Teri is an ongoing isekai/portal fantasy series about Teri Graves, an embittered middle-age GenX office lady who gets into a massive car accident and wakes up in the world of the fantasy series she loves to hate, The Allisar Fireborn Chronicles. She knows the characters, she knows the plot, and she knows that its all a massive coma dream…except for how nothing is as it should be. Worse? She woke up in the body of the doomed evil stepmother! She escaped a pandemic for this?
Teri pulled into the parking lot at Barkingham Palace with a white knuckled grip on the wheel. In the passenger seat, her mother’s dog Theo sat looking out the windshield expectantly. He absolutely loved doggy daycare and had pretty much forgotten that she existed, his tongue lolling out as he panted with excitement.
“Yeah, yeah. Hold on.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. There was a 100% chance that the university was going into lock-down that day or the next in response to the threat of COVID, but everyone was pretending that it was business as usual in the meantime. She did not want to drop Theo off knowing that she would probably just be back to pick him up in a couple of hours, but her options were limited.
They walked in the front door to see Angie on the phone, already looking aggravated, and it was only 7:30 a.m.
“Yes, Mr. Durwin, we’re open, but as I’ve explained several times, I can’t guarantee that we will be staying open. Yes, I know it might be inconvenient. Yes, but on the other hand, if we go into lock-down, will it matter? Yes sir, I’ll write down that complaint and give it to my manager.” She wrote absolutely nothing down and then hung up. “Okay, boomer,” she hissed at the phone before looking up with a smile.
“Teri! And Theo, yes, good boy, Theo! Good boy!” Angie cooed at the ridiculous dog from over the counter, making faces at him as if he was a toddler. Theo, predictably, bounced around with joy and headed immediately for the door leading to the play area. Teri tugged at his leash to hold him back for a moment.
“Angie, I don’t know when they are going to call the lock-down, so I’m headed in now but might be back early for pickup. I know I’ll be paying the full day’s rate,” she rattle off to forestall the lecture.
The door flew open and Louis, one of the dog handlers, spread his arms wide. “Holá, Theodorian!”
Teri just let the leash go, since it was hopeless to try to contain eighty pounds of excited doggy joy. He was half Chocolate Lab and half Great Pyrenees and 100% feather-brained exuberance personified, and far more popular than Teri herself would ever be. Theo scrambled across the concrete floor with a bark and disappeared with Louis into the back.
“Do you think you can keep him out of the pool today?”
Angie grimaced. “Probably not? But we’ll dry him off completely, I promise!”
Teri sighed. “Fine.” She turned and stomped out, fully expecting a slightly damp wet dog smell to ruin her day later.
By the time she got to work, it was exactly 8:01 a.m., but as usual she was the only person in the department who bothered to show up on time. She eyed the empty front desk critically as the phone rang and rang, but she walked straight past it instead of answering. It was probably a panicked parent calling for information about the assumed lock-down and, more importantly, information on how to get a refund on the dorm room if the school closed for longer than a month.
No one knew the answer to that, not even the university president’s office. She sure as hell wasn’t going to waste her time saying as much over and over until the student intern-du-jour came into work (if they did, which she doubted. Half the school was already fleeing homeward).
“Teri! Hey.” Devon called out as he walked through the front door. “You haven’t—”
“I have not heard anything. No news, no updates, nothing.” She kept walking. Devon was a good kid who at least showed up almost on time for work, but Teri was already done with all the questions. She was not looking forward to going home to re-explain it all to her dementia-addled mother, who would just badger her for answers, over and over and over.
As she stopped to get her keys out to open her office, she glanced over at Ellie’s office door. There were two new photos of her kids plastered there, and Teri swallowed the bitter pill she swallowed every morning, looking at Ellie’s door. She jammed the key in and swung the door open, stopping for a moment to take in the space. It was a small office, but it had a tall window overlooking the math department’s hideous, brutalist architecture, all geometry and concrete and pretentiousness.
But what caught her eye was the extravagant pothos plant draped over the top of her desk’s hutch, along with her sansevieria, her parlor palm, and her two boston ferns in pots. She realized she would need to take all of them home, since they would not survive a long lock-down.
Her boss had said the other day that he assumed it would only last a few weeks but she was betting on three months, at least, so she started packing up. Aside from the awkward plants, everything she would need to work from home fit in a banker’s box, so she spent the rest of the morning cleaning up and organizing.
Ellie came in and stood in the doorway, watching.
“You really think this is going to go on for a while, don’t you?”
“Yep.” Teri continued dusting the bookshelf. “I honestly doubt I’ll be back here anytime soon.”
Ellie sighed. “I hope not. The boys are really enjoying third grade.”
Teri braced herself for another long-winded information session about “the boys,” including their grades and which sports they loved that week and how much their grandmothers doted on them. Instead, Ellie straightened up and peered at her.
Teri did not bristle. “What?”
“How’s your mother?”
Teri slapped the wad of paper towels she was using to clean onto her desk. “The same.”
Ellie wrinkled her annoyingly adorable button nose and pushed her long blond hair out of her face. Then she put her hands on her hips with a sigh.
“Look, I know we don’t always get along, but this a pandemic, right? So if you need anything—”
“We’re fine.”
She got a slanted look of disbelief at that. “Dementia is rough for everyone, Teri. My great grand-uncle—”
“I appreciate the sympathy, Ellie, but there is nothing you can do. You’ve got your boys and your husband and that all takes priority.” She turned back to wrestling the largest fern out of its corner. It was too heavy to carry, but facilities was too busy to help her move a plant, most likely working to prepare the campus for a completely unplanned, history-making crisis. She tried to remember if there was a dolly cart in the storage room.
“Sure, fine. Okay.” Ellie grumbled and finally left Teri alone.
Teri closed the door and put both of her hands on her desk, bowing her head and taking a deep breath. Her mother was not doing “the same,” she was visibly worsening by the day, her dementia turning mean and chaotic. Her mother had always shaded toward narcissism, but in the past five years that had dialed up to where she was more like a spoiled toddler than a 72-year-old woman.
The idea of being trapped in the house with her deteriorating mother and a rambunctious dog, who was going to miss seeing his friends at doggy daycare every day, rattled her hard, but she reminded herself that there was nothing she could do about it. They were both her responsibility and there was no one else to do it…as if her brothers would even offer.
Sometimes, very rarely, Teri was glad she never had children because she could not imagine trying to deal with kids and her unstable, nasty mother all at the same time…and now, a fucking pandemic.
She took a deep breath, stood up, and got back to prepping her office for the duration, however long it might last. She stopped and stared for a long time at the small, framed poster hanging discreetly next to her desk.
It was something she had bought on a whim at a comic-con years and years ago, right after the release of the second book in the Allisar Fireborn Chronicles. She had been younger and the series had not gone off the rails the way it would in books three and four, so she had paid a lot for the fanart of Valerontarius and the three surviving Allisar children: the hero Gervyn and his twin sisters, Vycette and Aurguth. The artist had done it in a fantastical art nouveau style, all bright colors and excessive details. Valerontarius, the mysterious wizard who wore a magical full-face mask and was Gervyn’s mentor, was standing tall in front of them in an outfit that looked a bit like it came out of The Three Musketeers, holding a lantern as they traveled through the Caves of Melifinaar—not entirely canon accurate, but a stunning portrayal.
She ground her teeth thinking about the fridging of the twins in the fourth book, along with the sidelining of Valerontarius himself in order to turn “chosen one” Gervyn into even more of a larry stu. Despite everything the author, Chadwick Jarvaldson, had done to ruin the series, Teri still clung to it like a scorned lover. In an early Yahoo group for fans of the series, Teri had called him “Fuckin’ Chad” after the weird turns the plot took in the third book, and the name stuck. Over fifteen years later and it was all the fandom used to talk about him, and she was pretty sure no one remembered that she had coined it. As popular as the series was, the fandom turned over on a regular basis every time a new book was released.
She wondered if the upcoming pandemic lockdown would finally see Fuckin’ Chad finishing the fifth and final book in the series. Like most things in her life, she loved the potential of it more than how it actually panned out, and she expected that she would writing another ten thousand word meta essay on how wrong Fuckin’ Chad was about everything.
Maybe the lockdown would give her time to get jumpstarted on that, she thought as she took down the art and tucked it carefully into her packing box.
Finally, at 2:41 p.m., they were all told to go home. Indefinitely.
Everyone else was gathered around the front desk, slightly panicked and making some attempt to bolster each other’s moods. When Teri rolled the dolly cart past them with her box and her plants, Ellie gave her a polite wave and Devon called out good luck, but everyone else ignored her.
It was fine. She was fine. It was all going to be fine.
NEXT: 3/16/2020: Heading Home
Thank you for reading! 🎊 I’d love your comments and feedback! ☕
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I had to look up “Larry Stu” but this is feeling good so far. I know nothing about the story she’s about to fall into. Can I safely assume it’s fictional?