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?
Previously: Teri tested her limits…
“Gervyn! Gervyn!”
Teri felt herself waking up, which was a very weird sensation. Everything hurt, which she supposed meant she was, somehow, impossibly, alive. Not that she was doing much other than lying there and fighting a migraine. Everything was sluggish and light hurt her eyes, so she kept them closed, taking careful inventory.
Head—throbbing, but functional. Ribs—aching in that deep, structural way that meant bruising rather than breaks. Leg—the right one, the bad one, radiating the grinding misery she had come to think of as its default state. She had learned, over the past two weeks, to read her own pain like a weather report.
Two weeks.
She frowned without opening her eyes.
Something about that thought snagged on something else. She had been in Luttiron for two weeks. She had been trying to walk. Ota’s surprisingly strong grip, the brief exhilarating moment of being upright, and then…
Theo’s head appearing over the edge of the bed.
:You’re not going anywhere, though.:
She had hit her head on the bed frame. She remembered the surprising, catastrophic quality of that impact, the way pain had simply erased everything that came after it. She had thought, in the last coherent second before the lights went out, that she was finally dying for real.
Apparently not.
She wasn’t sure she was glad about that or not.
She took a careful breath and once again reached for the familiar sounds of a hospital, such as the low hum of monitors, the distant squeak of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum, the antiseptic silence of a place that smelled like bleach and bad news. She had spent plenty of time there, off and on over the years, with her mother. They were the sounds she had been waiting for since she first woke up in a coma-dream and decided that eventually, eventually, they would come.
“Gervyn! Stop! She’s resting! You can’t—”
“I just need to see if she’s okay!”
“Doctor Dourwin told you that she is recovering! Come on!”
Teri stopped breathing.
The voices were familiar, but not like the hospital sounds she expected to hear. Familiar like a bad dream that kept waking you up over and over at night (she’d had a few of those too, over the years; anxiety, said her therapist, but Teri knew it was mostly her job and her mother). But no, this was familiar in a way far worse than that.
The linens under her hands were heavy, embroidered, expensive. She knew their weight, and the unreal softness of the mattress beneath her, and the way the pillow sat slightly too high on the left side. Underneath everything was the now-familiar, faint smell of dried herbs that someone had tucked into the bedding to mask the medicinal smell underneath.
She knew this bed.
She also knew what came next. She knew it the way she knew the layout of her own house in the dark, after having done it so many times that the knowledge lived in her body rather than her brain. She knew the next line was supposed to be hers:
“You both need to shut up. I have a headache.”
It was the first thing she had said when she woke up before (again?), the first words out of her mouth in this body in this world and she remembered saying them, she remembered. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.
Teri sat up.
The pain was extraordinary. She had forgotten, in two weeks of careful management and medicated tea, and Doctor Dourwin’s grim physical therapy, what it had felt like at the very beginning. Her whole right side shrieked in protest and she fell back against the pillows, jaw clenched, breathing through her nose in short furious bursts until the worst of it subsided.
“What are you two reprobates doing here, bothering milady? She is grievously injured! Out!” Doctor Dourwin’s voice came from just outside the door.
Teri stared at the bed canopy. The gathered burgundy silk stared back at her.
She knew what he was going to say next and the exact phrasing of it, the grim professionalism he deployed when delivering bad news, the way he would tut at her for being a disagreeable patient. She knew because she had already had that exact conversation.
She had already spent two weeks here, fallen, cracked her head...died?
And then woken up here again.
The thought arrived with the quiet, terrible inevitability of a diagnosis she had already known was coming. She had never been a panicker, she was the person who stayed calm in emergencies and fell apart afterward in car behind a fast food restaurant, where no one could see. So she lay very still and let the information arrange itself in her mind with the methodical precision of someone who had spent most of her life being the only adult in the room.
She was pretty sure she had died...maybe on the table, during a surgery? And then been revived? The alternative was that this actually was her afterlife, and she was not going to humor that nonsense.
She had woken up at the beginning of her previous coma-dream, but that was not how coma dreams worked. Or any dream, really. This was not how anything was supposed to go.
The morning she had first arrived in Luttiron, Doctor Dourwin was outside the door, and the children were arguing in the hallway, and her leg was at its worst and her ribs were screaming and everything was new and bewildering and she had not known any of these people or this world except from the inside of a book series she had spent twenty years obsessing over.
Except now she knew all of it in a very different way, outside of ‘canon’ because she, personally, was living Lady Greyrage’s backstory (or AU? Undecided, she decided). She knew every conversation that was about to happen, every face that was about to walk through that door, every trap, alliance, and quietly dangerous moment that lay between this bed and the next two weeks. She knew it like a script. Like an audiobook she had listened to forty-five times and could recite word for word.
Like a fan who knew the source material better than the author.
A sound escaped her that was not quite a laugh.
:Oh good, you’re awake.: Theo’s voice arrived in her head from somewhere nearby, utterly matter-of-fact. :I was starting to get bored.:
She turned her head. He was on the bed, sitting next to her hip as he usually was…or had been? She had no idea anymore. He was watching her with his amber eyes and his a frankly unreasonable expression of calm, as if nothing unusual had happened. It infuriated her, just a little bit. Or a lot.
“Theo,” she said carefully through gritted teeth. “How long have I been here?”
:Since this morning.: He tilted his head. :You woke up and then went back to sleep. The doctor keeps checking on you, though!:
“This morning,” she repeated. “Which morning?”
He blinked at her. :The same morning!:
“Theo. What day is it?”
:The day you got here?: He offered, ever hopeful that he was getting the answer right.
Teri closed her eyes.
Two weeks of coma-dream-time nonsense, and now she was starting over from scratch?
“This is bullshit,” she said, to the ceiling.
:It’s not so bad,: Theo offered.
“I fell and hit my head on the bed frame and died,” she said conversationally.
:Yes.: He paused. :That was unfortunate.:
“It was extremely unfortunate.” She breathed out slowly. “I would like to not do that again.”
:Agreed. The bed frame is very solid wood. I checked.:
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He gazed back with that infuriating, familiar smooth-brained equanimity, the same expression he had always worn in the car when she was running late and furious and he simply could not see why any of that was relevant to the business of being a dog in a car.
Something about it settled her.
“Fuck this,” she said. “Why? Why starting over?”
If dream-Theo knew the answer, he wasn’t telling.
:NOT A DREAM DOG!:
“Fine! Oh my god, shut up about it!”
The door finally opened.
“Milady, you should not have moved so much. You are still healing. I am relieved that you have finally awoken.” Doctor Dourwin tutted familiarly at her as he strode over to her bed.
“I never liked you,” Teri growled.
“Ah, I’m, uhm, sure that is the pain talking! Can you tell me how you feel currently?”
“Annoyed.”
“Yes, I can believe that.” He cleared his throat. “I meant, are you in pain?”
“What do you think, you obnoxious quack?”
“Hm.” He smiled tightly as he took her hand as if checking her pulse. Had he done that last time? She wasn’t sure. They went through the whole rigamarole that Teri knew they had gone through before, but with less confusion on Teri’s part. She already knew the role she was supposed to play, and was frustrated enough to play “mean-spirited noble witch lady” well enough to pass. This time, at least, she had not stressed herself into a full migraine.
Eventually, Lady Elisander showed up weeping again over “milady’s miraculous recovery!” while side-eyeing Theo.
When Teri could not take their fawning anymore, she ordered them out; and, unlike her entire family back home, they actually did what she told them to do. Lying in bed, the pain filtering away after a nice cup of medicated tea (were they using opium? Should she be worried? Would it matter since it was still a coma-dream?), she tried to think through her next steps. The weeks ahead would be incredibly boring, but maybe she could better use the time to figure out what the hell was going on with her brain.
:Sleeeeeeeeep!: Theo yawned at her.
“Alright, alright—” She stopped when the door slowly creaked open.
A bright red mop of hair appeared around the edge of it, followed by a pair of very large, very green eyes scanning the room with elaborate casualness.
Teri looked at Gervyn Allisar—eight years old, future chosen one, eternal chaotic menace—and felt something that was almost fond. Almost.
“You know,” she said conversationally, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
He froze in the doorway, caught entirely off guard, obviously expecting her to have been asleep already.
Good, she thought. That was new. That was better.
She was going to need every advantage she could get.
NEXT: SpyXFamily
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