A young woman whose name would soon be unimportant walked along the city streets at night. She stared down at her phone as she walked, flipping left and right on an app. Well...much less right swiping than left. Her lips purse as she squinted at the glowing light on her phone. Left, left, left...
....Man! Online dating just wasn't like it used to be, anymore.
...Okay, well. No. She actually didn't have any experience with how it 'used to be' and couldn't say. Maybe it had always been a travesty and it was just the real world that got worse?
Or maybe it didn't matter.
Real world, digital world, present, past, she just wasn't able to get any good men to date her at all. She really tried to be reasonable with her expectations, but it seemed like everyone that these apps tried to pair her up with was only dabbling in online dating to augment their true passion of being a serial killer or something. Serial perverts, at least.
Lame.
She sighed in frustration, but kept on swiping. Maybe there's a princely man waiting for her to swipe right on just a few swipes away?
A blaring car horn caught her attention finally and she looked up at it with annoyance, only to get an eye full of headlights. And a good look at a puny little pickup truck careening its way to her. Not even a really big truck, either. The little ones that made one wonder whether they're actually 4WD or if they're just cosplaying a pickup truck for people who can't afford the real thing.
"Aww, shi-" the girl had enough time to mumble before her vision is completely filled by the lights and windshield. And then nothing. Nothing after that. Nothing but black. And pain. Searing hot burning agony...that gradually ebbed into nothing as well.
She'd remark about how that sucked, and yet was totally fitting for her life so far.
She would, if she could.
But she was just...floating in nothing. So she couldn't. It was a little terrifying, because if the endless emptiness around her was the afterlife, for all eternity, it was....a word she didn't know. Something far more than mundane terms like 'horrifying' and 'hellish' could describe.
Fortunately, just as she began to panic, she jolted awake.
Not in her bed, though. And not in a hospital bed, either. In the most obnoxiously, over the top, why-is-it-this-expensive bed she's ever witnessed or even conceived of. More ornately carved than any royal tomb she'd ever heard of. Just staring at it gave her the heebie-jeebies.
This was absolutely nothing like her little one bedroom apartment, so what was going on?
An incredibly fancy room. Lavishly furnished from floor to ceiling and wall to wall in gold and gemstones and fabrics beyond her imagination.
What on Earth...?
When she looked down at herself, she couldn't help but notice...these perfectly manicured fingers? Not hers. The perky but good sized breasts? Also not hers. Even the toned tummy under the tight fit nightgown! Definitely not hers. Why. Was she looking through the eyes. Of someone definitely not her?
Well....
Never mind that. It was better than sitting in that endless empty blackness.
Besides, she wasn't just looking.
She reached out, stretching out a hand and flexing it in the air.
She definitely had control of...possession of...was...? This body. Definitely wasn't hers, but it felt like it.
It only made sense then, to climb out of bed and pad over to the vanity mirror on the ridiculously ornate desk to look at herself.
It wasn't so much a walk as it was a stumble, with this body being very unlike the one she's used to. Her weight distribution was wrong. Her arms and legs were just a smidge too short and thin and the angle of her shoulder and hips made her waddle a bit. She eventually adjusted a little after walking and took a gander at herself in the mirror.
Hmmm.
Okay, yeah, she wasn't anyone she recognized.
Some strange beautiful lady. A woman of obvious noble lineage with smooth soft skin and high cheekbones, gold hair that fell down her shoulders in a way she definitely would have said 'oh it's totally natural' but one hundred percent wasn't...and...red eyes? She'd never seen red eyes in real life before. Well, other than those cosplayers sometimes.
While she stood there just...gawking at herself, the door opened behind her.
A mousey looking maid looked up from a bundle of fabrics, only to startle so hard she nearly fell over.
"Ah..aahhh! Your majesty!" She stammered. "How long have you been awake?"
...Majesty?
Before she could say anything, the woman immediately burst into a flurry of movement. Picking up the fabrics from the ground, setting them on the bed, smoothing them out, then reaching to grab the dressing robe off the chair it was placed upon and practically bowled right into the woman still standing in front of the mirror.
For being so mousey, the maid had some strength in those arms. She wrangled the woman into the robe, only to put her hands to the small of the woman's back and push her gently but firmly toward a smaller room connected to the lavish chamber. A bath room.
The room itself was bigger than her apartment. Like, she would have actually described it as being roughly the size of her apartment. Which meant that when the maid pushed her into it, it was like being pushed into a whole different house. A house dedicated to bathing. Less a bath room and more a bath house.
The tub alone was like an Olympic pool, filled with water and already steaming. The sides were decorated with jewel encrusted statues and inlaid with marble and gold.
Why.
Why would anyone need this much?!
She wanted to ask who exactly would build this type of excessively ornate place, but before she could do anything, the maid started taking the robe off. That finally snapped her out of whatever dream this was. Her cheeks heated up, her arm darted up to block the maid, but the woman merely raised a brow, turned her around, and undressed her all the same.
"Your Majesty is quite shy this morning. Is something wrong?" The maid asked innocently enough while scooping up the robe and walking to go hang it up by the entrance. The nightgown she'd been wearing suffered a worse fate - tossed into a suspicious looking hole near the door.
"No...not really...?" She replied. But she realized the minute the words left her mouth that that answer was going to sound awkward as all hell.
Thankfully the maid didn't comment further. She simply padded around the large bath to the opposite side where an array of various soaps, creams, lotions and perfumes and shampoos and all sorts of things sat atop shelves on the wall.
The woman suddenly felt like she was that stereotypical man looking for 15-in-1 shampoo and perplexed by a shelf full of soaps.
It got worse.
The maid picked up a scrubbing brush, lathered it with something that smelled like it came from heaven itself, and without pause at all began to vigorously rub down the woman's body. And what a body.
Being scrubbed down by a stranger wasn't exactly the best way to get used to a new, unfamiliar body. If there was such a way.
She felt like those soaked kittens in cute viral videos looked. Helpless and a little mortified. As the maid worked her down the woman couldn't help but squeak a few times when she was a bit too rough with the scrubber in certain spots, earning puzzled looks from the maid each time.
Her whole face was red hot by the time the woman was done, which probably looked like anger when really it was more embarrassment. The maid quickly finished up, dunked her under the water for a moment to rinse her off, then politely guided her over to another room through the washroom doors.
Because a bathroom the size of an apartment didn't have enough room for things like toilets.
....At least that room was more reasonably sized.
'Reasonably'.
She felt entirely frazzled when she finally sat back on the bed, dressed in a gown she didn't even fully remember the maid putting on her. After sitting silently, contemplating whether she should try asking what the hell was happening or not, a knock resounded on the door.
"...Yes?"
An older man walked into the room, eyes on some mess of papers in his hands. "Your majesty." He bowed, but the gesture seemed perfunctory. "Your majesty, about what we were speaking of yesterday. It is time. You really must choose a king consort."
A what?