[oo4] gossip girl : storybook endings
Blair Waldorf never believed in fairy-tales. However, weeks after her best friend left for boarding school,
Blair finds herself in the midst of a strange new world, at the center of a war, and in between a prince and a knight.
A/N: This story is heavily influenced by Fushigi Yūgi: Mysterious Play, and also bears references to locations and characteristics from a wide range of other fandoms including The Vision of Escaflowne, Final Fantasy IX & XII, and even Heroes. I don't claim to be original - I'm just telling a story.
Blair Waldorf was bored.
Not just at the very moment, but with life in general. With perfected popularity, wit, and income at her disposal, how Blair Waldorf managed to find a void in her highly privileged lifestyle would cause some (namely Kati and Is) to scratch their heads. However, there was a simple explanation.
Boarding school.
No, it wasn't her that was at boarding school. As far as Blair was concerned, she had worked hard enough to climb to the top of the social ladder at Constance Billiard. Hell would freeze over before Blair put herself in a situation to start over and lose the empire that she had built. Apparently Serena Van Der Woodsen didn't feel the same (though to be truthful, Serena never had to work for social significance). It was just three weeks ago that her (once) best friend had just up and left, without even giving Blair the decency of saying goodbye.
Her timing couldn't have been better. After Serena pulled her disappearing act, Blair's father had decided to pull one of his own. He left her mother. For another man. If Blair had ever needed a friend, it would have been then. It would have been now. With her family life a wreck, her loyalties not in check, Blair's grasp over the girls of Constance Billiard felt as though it were slowly slipping through her very own fingers. A queen needs a king, she thought, and if I had a boyfriend, maybe...
Blair, although ever the romantic, had never had much time for boys. What with plotting social destruction, acing the SATs, and looking after Serena's drunk ass, she found herself often preoccupied. In the light of her recent abandonment, she had thought a viable solution would have been to find a decent distraction. Blair was a pretty girl. Boys thought so, of this, she was sure. Rich brown hair, ivory skin, ruby red lips - although Blair agreed she could shed a few pounds here and there, she was typically satisfied with her appearance. Until she tried dating. It was the one game Blair wasn't apt to play.
Most of her suitors she found uninteresting, and the few that she forced herself to feign interest in had left, intimidated by Blair's intensity and intellect. Blair never managed to see it that way though, and had instantly assumed that it was her. There was something wrong with her that men, even her own father, must not like. That was when this whole mess started. Blair managed to uphold a facade of self-confidence in public, but behind closed bathroom doors she had replaced her best friend Serena with a porcelain goddess. It was like therapy. Binge and then purge. It was the only productive thing that Blair knew to do with her life right now. Without a best-friend, without a boyfriend, Blair had nothing else except for this meddlesome habit and a few vapid followers - she feared that if she didn't strive for perfection, she would lose them too.
At least her World Literature class managed to provide much needed stimulation. Blair aimed for perfection in all aspects of her life, particularly in her education, and Miss Carr made ascertaining that coveted "A" much more difficult than Blair had anticipated... but for some reason, she didn't mind. When they were assigned a tedious and thorough book report, Blair instinctively selected Machiavelli's The Prince. It was one of her favorite and most beloved doctrines, and she had already read the book several times. The report was going to be a piece of cake, but leave it to Miss Carr to deem even Machiavelli as unsatisfactory.
"Blair, this is very expected of you. I know you've read the book before, and I want you to try something new. Try something different. You might surprise yourself when you realize that there's more to politics than The Prince." She insisted.
Blair forced a smile. "I'm sorry, I thought it was much original than another Jane Austen novel." Blair's eyes shifted sideways at Kati and Is, who instantly shrank in their seats.
"I think I have just the book for you, Miss Waldorf." Miss Carr smiled sweetly, reaching behind her desk and shifting through her belongings. A few moments later she emerged, holding in her hands a thick and busted looking text. The pages were practically falling out. The leather bound cover was peeling to reveal sickeningly yellowed pages below. Blair could have sworn the book had jaundice. Even worse was the cloud of dust that rose up when Miss Carr practically slammed the book onto Blair's desk. Blair swatted at the air, looking down at the fading title that was embellished into the leather.
The Tales of Astoria.
"Well, I do love the hyphen." Blair tried meekly, referring of course to the Waldorf-Astoria, her great grandfather's pride and joy. "This one time I met Chanel Iman at the hotel bar for drinks, we met through my mother..." at this point Blair had stopped paying attention to Miss Carr and was now addressing Kati and Is along with the rest of her classmates.
"Actually, it's about a fictional place." Miss Carr interrupted. Blair guffawed.
"You gave me a storybook? Miss Carr, I'm not five." Blair insisted, eliciting a few chuckles from her fellow classmates. "I'm much too old for fairy-tales." Really, how did she find this superior to Machiavelli? Blair was convinced - Miss Carr was smoking the crack pipe.
"I think you'll find it very enlightening, Blair." Miss Carr insisted, and in a Waldorf move, she pre-emptively ended all further arguments, "You have until the end of the semester."
Wonderful. Blair inwardly groaned, eyeing the book with disdain.
Which is what she found herself doing later that afternoon; laying on top of her queen-sized bed and eyeing the book precariously. Eventually, her curiosity got the better of her and she leaned forward, peeling back the front cover. The musty smell infiltrated her nose, and Blair blanched. I am so going to wash my hands after this. I'll have to make Dorota wash the sheets as well. Peering back at the aged text, she flipped to the prologue.
This story beings many, many eons ago...
"No, really?" Blair mumbled, rolling her eyes and proceeding.
...once upon a time in a fertile and plentiful land known as Astoria. Upon its conception, Astoria was divided amongst the four first born children of Heaven, known today as "the first four". They were the first princes and princesses of Astoria, and it was they who established four separate but equal kingdoms which were to co-exist in harmony - separate but equal. Each kingdom laid claim its own region of the land and bore unique characteristics which through time would distinguish their cultures from one another. As time went on, the kingdoms would become less separate but equal and more simply separate.
There was Dalmasca, land of fire. The Zaibach Empire, land of air. Ivalice, land of rain, and finally, Alexandria - land of the earth. The four kingdoms co-existed in peace for several generations until the reign of Lord Baizen VI of the Zaibach Empire. Lord Baizen believed that Zaibach was the most powerful of the four kingdoms - they boasted the largest army, latest military technology, and was often times prone to pick-up after its failing neighbor kingdom, Alexandria. Due to their military and economic advancement, Lord Baizen asserted that the Zaibach empire should rule over all of Astoria and its kingdoms, and thus began the Zaibach campaign for total domination...
"That's what I'm talking about." Blair mumbled, playing with a strand of her hair. It was what she did every day - other girls fell behind, and by extending a hand of friendship and promising to acknowledge them in public she earned their unwavering loyalty and a reservoir of those willing to do her bidding. Total domination. Maybe this book wasn't so bad after all.
The only thing standing in the way of Zaibach obtaining complete control was the valiance of the Dalmascan Empire and the prophecy left behind by the first four - that a royal woman from another world would unite the remaining three kingdoms and restore balance to the land of Astoria.
Something wasn't right. Blair instantly sat up on her bed, picking up the book with both hands. Perhaps she needed to get her vision checked, but she swore that the text had started glowing. The thought was a little discomforting, and her stomach was beginning to feel uneasy - the way it often did after one of her many binges. Even more frightening was the way that her bedroom also appeared to be expanding. Was that even possible?
"What?" Blair frowned, frantically looking around and at the door which seemed to drift farther and farther away from her as the lights began to flickr and a gust of wind blew through the room, throwing her hair in her face and angrily fluttering the pages of the book in her hands. The floor just may have been falling apart beneath her. Panicking, Blair grabbed onto her silk sheets and let out a shrill scream "DOOOORRRRRROOTTTAAAAAA!"
...and then she fell through the floor.
CHAPTER ONE
It's my first time writing fanfiction in about four-five years. That's a little scary. FYI, my old LJ account back in the day when I first got into fandom was infairverona, out of habit I still credit my work that way. It is also my FanForum account name and FanFiction.Net (which I cannot log-in to because it's been years and I can't remember which e-mail account is associated with it, but I hope to resolve that and get this posted there as well).