3. Waking Up is Hard to Do
Teri wakes up, kinda sorta...
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's first day of pandemic lockdown gets worse...
“Gervyn! Gervyn!”
Teri felt herself waking up, which was a very weird sensation. It was if her brain was in the backseat, watching her drive her own body. Not that she was doing much other than laying there and fighting a migraine. Everything was sluggish and light hurt her eyes, so she kept them closed.
“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!”
“You both need to shut up. I have a headache,” Teri grumbled. She wanted to rub her temple, but her body was strangely reluctant to comply, and she was determined not to panic about it. Instead, she concentrated on moving her arm to shoo at the kids who were fussing next to her…bed? Was she in bed? Was she in a hotel room? She thought that was weird for a moment before her memories unspooled altogether, all at once.
She jack knifed up in bed and her body spasmed in agony.
She fell back down, clinching her jaw to keep from screaming. In her mind’s eye, she saw the delivery truck headed straight on at her, Theo scratching at the car window, and heard the horns blaring. Did Theo sit on the car horn?
“Theo!” She gasped again, and again her body spasmed in agony.
“What are you two reprobates doing here, bothering milady? She is grievously injured! Out!” An older voice sternly commanded, followed by feet shuffling across the room and a door slamming shut.
“Milady, you should not have moved so much. You are still healing.” The man made a tutting noise. She still kept her eyes closed, but she could tell he was standing next to the bed. “I am relieved that you have finally awoken.”
“Mmph.” She grumbled, trying to gather her thoughts. She had obviously been in a catastrophic accident, and she was mostly surprised she was alive at all. She had to assume Theo was dead, which made her stomach flip a little. He had been dumb and annoying but he had been her puppy, once upon a time, no matter that her mother had basically stolen him when she moved in with Teri five years ago.
“Can you tell me how you feel, currently?”
“Headache,” she rasped.
He hummed, and she assumed he was probably writing a prescription. She wondered if she had any IV lines, which seemed likely but she could not feel them. That brought up a new worry.
“Paralyzed?”
“What? Oh no, milady, you are not paralyzed. Battered, with some internal organ bruising, and I’m…displeased with the healing of your right leg. But it is early days yet.” He sounded too cheerful about all of that, but then, every doctor she ever known was a ghoul at heart.
She was already dreading all the physical therapy in her future. And she was a little creeped out by all the fedora-nice-guy “miladies” going on. It was extremely unprofessional. She already knew his name, thanks to the kids who had clearly come into the wrong room, but she needed more info. “Hospital?”
“Hm?”
“Which…hospital? My mother, she’s home alone.”
There was a long pause. “Your…mother?”
She took a deep breath and forced herself to open her eyes. Light hurt, and she knew she was opening the door wide for the migraine to come in and have a seat instead of hovering around the edges of her consciousness, but she needed to figure things out.
Squinting and blinking, she looked around. “Am I…am I actually in a hotel room? What the actual fuck? I can’t afford this!”
It was gorgeous. She was under a heavy and heavily embroidered, brightly colored quilt on a gigantic four poster bed, brocaded curtains tied back with fancy, twisted cords. The room itself had several tall, narrow windows that were edged with stained glass, bright and sparkling in the nearly-pink sunlight. Everything in the room screamed expensive and tacky in the way of a tourist-trap-style European castle trying for a “medieval but make it luxurious” vibe. Not that she had ever been in one, but she enjoyed travel websites as much as the next middle class working stiff.
“Cannot…afford? Milady, if you please—” the doctor said, leaning over her with a hand held out cautiously, as if he was wary of touching her.
“What are you wearing?” She tried to pull back from him. He was dressed in a burgundy red and pink outfit that looked like three layers of fancy bathrobes with a belt so wide it could have been a girdle. Maybe it was. She blinked her eyes.
“My robes of station?” He frowned at her.
She tried to flap her hand at him, but her body screamed in pain. Collapsing back down all the way with a gasp, she stared at the lovely and ridiculous draperies covering the bed before closing her eyes again, taking a deep breath to focus. The migraine was marching up on her consciousness at full speed.
“Look, Mom is home alone, and—” she started to say, but then felt a hard tap in the middle of her forehead and everything went dark again. She thought she heard barking as she drifted away.
NEXT: Familiar
Authoria:
I should probably have mentioned this earlier, but the incredibly popular, world-wide best-selling series The Allisar Fireborn Chronicles by Chadwick Jarvaldson is entirely made up by me, KimBoo York!
The series is based on all those wildly popular, overwrought, epic fantasy “Chosen One” Tolkien ripoffs from the 1980s and 1990s with cover art by Larry Gilmore or the Hildebrant brothers. Yes, that one, and also that other one. You know the ones I mean.
Did I actually have to outline the whole series and develop all the canon story elements and character profiles for it? Yes I did. Fuckin’ Chad owes me a drink.
Thank you for reading! 🎊 I’d love your comments and feedback! ☕
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