This Time Imperfect
Story: This Time Imperfect: The Revenge of a Mary Sue
Dedicated to Kya, who prompted this little bit of writing.
Note: The entirety of this fic will be posted here, since I don't think it appropriate to post on FF.Net. The question of the day is this: Does a Mary Sue know who she is? And if she does, how does she feel about her destiny of ridicule? Please, leave reviews. I want to know how you all feel about this.
Mar was the youngest daughter of the Ysue family. Coincidentally, she was also the only survivor. Truth be told, she wasn’t more upset than is usual for such a loss-parent’s idiotic choice of names had left her to face a rather irritating amount of ridicule in her younger years.
Not that she was bitter. In fact, the recent, graphic extinction of her family had left her conveniently7 independent and solitary, and despite the legal and sociological practices of the day, nobody said a word about the fact that she owned property and held a regular job. But, though her bizarre and unexcused circumstances were profitable, they were also unnerving.
“Wait,” she said to a guard of a local official as he passed by her house. “I own a house. I’m unmarried, fifteen years old, and haven’t received any education besides the bare basics expected of women. And I don’t even live in an apartment, either. But an entire house. Doesn’t’ that strike you as a little bit odd?” The guard thought so, too, but was somehow frightfully unmotivated to do anything about it. This left Mar with a slight moral dilemma: should she complain to the local authorities about the incompetence of their soldiers, or should she shut up? One option risked being robbed, but the other would likely leave her displaced and impoverished (unless got married, and she was too unnerved by the local matchmaker to try that option just yet) like all the other women of her time.
After a short debate, she decided that it was bad luck to second-guess one’s fortune, so she bought a second lock for her door and left it at that. It was a decision that she would learn to sincerely regret.
After work one night, she carefully worked through both locks and stepped into her house, expecting to get a long night’s sleep before returning to work again the next morning. What she didn’t expect was to see another girl, about her age, scrawling something into a tablet of unnaturally white paper with what she could only assume was some kind of bizarre pen.
I knew I should have gotten that third lock, Mar thought numbly.
“I’m calling the guards,” she announced, fumbling for the doorknob behind her. The stranger’s brow furrowed.
“That won’t work,” she muttered. “You can’t just be some damsel in distress. That’s just too big a cliché. You need to be active. Aggressive…” Still talking to herself, the girl knelt down beside a massive trunk (one that had not been there a few seconds before, Mar was positive…) and began rummaging through it, tossing random weapons onto the floor. “…No…not that one…not pretty enough…that’s too clumsy…” at this the stranger tossed an ax over her shoulder. Mar had seen enough, and was currently fumbling with the locks, hoping to escape the clutches of this madwoman. The madwoman glanced over her shoulder in irritation.
“Quit that,” she snapped, and picked up her tablet of paper, scribbling something into it. As Mar struggled with the door, planks of wood melted into existence, nailing themselves into the doorframe, sealing it against her struggles. “I still need to get you a weapon…Here’s one!” She pulled a slender, ornate sword from the trunk, much to Mar’s confusion. The blade was ridiculously long, and there was no way it could ever have fit inside the trunk. But apparently, this didn’t bother the stranger. “Okay. You’re going to use this.” She forced the weapon into Mar’s hand, who desperately started hacking at the wooden planks on her door. Meanwhile, the girl returned to he tablet. “Okay…now, you’re an expert Swordfighter… and you were trained by…um…let’s make it Zhao…” Mar had no idea who this Zhao person was, and she honestly didn’t care. “…Your parents already died in a fire…and you just found out…from a lover in the Fire Nation’s army…that Zhao has become jealous of your skills and wants you dead…”
“What?” Mar demanded, finally turning around to face the mad woman. “Why does he want to kill me? What’s going on? Who are you?”
“…So you take your bag of endless storage, packed full of supplies, and you prepare to run away.” Mar suddenly found herself tipping backwards under the weight of an oddly shaped bag, it’s straps fastened around her shoulders as though it intended to pop off her arms. She fell to the ground with an almighty “Oof!” and stared pathetically up at the source of all this trauma, who looked rather pleased, despite some annoyance that Mar was on the ground. “Now you’ve got to flee from your home and job and find the Avatar so he can save you from Zhao’s clutches…no…Zhao’s wrath. That sounds even better…”
“But I don’t want to leave home,” Mar said, though she noticed with some relief and astonishment that the planks of wood that had barred her escape had disappeared, as well as both her locks.
“But you have to, Mary Sue,” the other girl said. “Your life depends on it.” Mar’s eyes brightened with some semblance of hope.
“That’s not my name,” she cried. “You’ve got the wrong person! My name’s Mar! Ysue Mar!”
”Really?” the madwoman said, rifling through the tablet again. “Huh. Looks like a typo…”
“See? It’s not me! You’re after someone else, so please leave me alone-“
“No, I’ve got the right girl. Emerald eyes, sometimes red, black, purple, or white, depending on your mood. Cropped raven hair, perfect complexion with a birthmark on your neck that’s shaped like a pair of wings. Yep. That’s you.”
“No, it’s not!” Mar shouted.
“See for yourself.” The girl pulled out a mirror from the trunk, and Mar’s cry turned to a scream. Her previously long brown hair had turned jet black, and hung obscenely short around her ears. Her eyes, once normally colored, now flashed alarmingly between red and white. Meanwhile, ignorant of her despair, the stranger kept talking. “…I have to say, I like Mar Ysue a lot better. It sounds more Asian.”
“What have you done to me?” she wailed, forcing herself to look away from the travesty that was her face.
“I made you better,” the girl said, sounding rather irritated. “Now you’re an original.”
“I’m a freak!” The girl nodded sagely.
“That’s what the local kids said, too. So you were motivated to defend yourself by learning airbending, firebending, and waterbending.”
“I can’t do that! I’m not the Avatar!” Mar cried.
“But the darkness and loneliness in your heart festered, so you became a shadowbender, too, and a loving relationship with a handsome prince redeemed your soul, so you learned lightbending. But he died trying to save you from some horrible…I’ll work on that part…so you retreated to yourself, and learned to talk to animals, and now you can summon them to help you whenever you need them.”
“No! None of that ever happened! It’s not true, just leave me alone!”
“Don’t worry,” the other girl said with a confident grin. “I’ve saved your ultimate power for later.”
“But-“
“Now you are going to run into the forest and look for the Avatar before Zhoa kills you.”
“I thought you said his name was Zhao…”
“Typo. Now go!” she scribbled something else into the tablet, and Mar found herself picking up the sword against her will and running out of the city. She shouted for someone, anyone to help her, but nobody heard. It was as though they had been waiting for this for a long time.