Chapter 9: Interlude – Hanna’s backstory

Hanna is three years older than Ikke, and found out about herself only a few weeks before meeting Ikke. A small mercenary band came through town for an extermination, and one of them was a female. Her father, owning the only tavern of the town, took them in. She got into conversation with her, and found that she really liked the sound of her life. After that, there was always something nagging at her, something off, until she said to herself ‘I can’t be like that, so why do I want it?’ That little voice in her head then asked ‘why not? What makes you unable to?’ She decided to be like that from then on, and she changed a bit, leaning into that new and exciting part of herself. It all came crashing down when her parents asked her what had changed, and she told them. They immediately told her to pack up and leave, never to return. The next day, they told the village of her inner self.

 Having been kicked out from her family, and village, she left for the trading city she knew was nearby. With the meager savings she held from her work in her parent’s tavern, she bought nonperishable food. That didn’t last long - both from stealing and poor rationing - and Hanna took to begging, a sadly common practice. Upon meeting someone who seemed nice, she broke down, opening up about her troubles. She learned a hard truth about her kind that day - most of them only want something, and upon getting the wrong thing, they lash out. 

Upon meeting Ikke, she was mostly delirious with hunger, and just answered, only realizing afterwards what she had said. Thinking it was too late to do anything, she tried to lessen the impact of the beating that would come, but instead, Ikke just asked about her chosen gender. At her hesitant affirmation, continued on about how what people did to people like me was awful. Then, they asked about coming to their house. She was still of it, and accepted without much deep thought, or she likely would have refused out of fear. 

Dinner that night, Ikke turned out to be kind of like herself. They were sometimes any gender, not just one or neither. And it changed, all the time, something she found strange. If you had a gender that you liked, why would you change it? Apparently, Ikke liked certain genders on and off, and it just changed, they had no idea why. Also in that conversation was why discrimination of gendered Av Utsiden exists. Apparently, about 2000 years ago, one of the Arvinger(Heirs) was gendered. He also happened to be insane. He ended up killing many of the older population, and ruined us for a few decades to come. Many people became quite prejudiced after that event.

Ikke was very nice, strangely smart, and at the same time, seemed to look with childish excitement at some of the things she saw as normal. There was magic for heating that is used in almost all households, and she saw Ikke examining them, time after time, always with wonder just under the surface. Most people didn’t care too much about things like that, often only caring that it isn’t broken. They studied all the little things like that, all the enchantments that were in every household, and never seemed to get bored of them.

A few days after her arrival, Ikke found what they were looking for, in the form of a freezer(not our kind of freezer). This one was made with a time magic enchantment, but it did the same thing as all the others. The only difference was that time slowed while ice froze. So, to get ice to happen instead of slowing time, you need the understanding of temperature, the understanding of movement, and to be able to slow that movement down on only the smallest scale. Or, you can apply a concept, such as ‘frozen in time’. The same thing happens in adventurers or rich people’s storage items - time was frozen - to all dead things, at least.

This was all explained to her in a rush, and rather poorly as well, before they ran off to a training room, then ran back out and to the kitchen, grabbing enough food for quite a few days, and ran right back in. They didn’t come back out for another six days, holding a sword aloft with a wild grin on their face. Telling her to touch it, she did, and yelped as her hand was nearly frozen in an instant. In a rush, Ikke started explaining how everything worked, and the only thing she caught was ‘you don’t have to make the property of space through space magic, you just have to make space and remove the unwanted properties’ and something about going about things in reverse.

She hadn’t really noticed, but she had just started to feel happy again. She was accepted, there were no hardships, there was nothing painful here. For the first time, she was finally home.

 

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