« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2021, 05:14:04 PM »
The number 'seven' was a lucky number for most people, but not for me.
It was on my seventh birthday that my mother passed away. She was a dreamer, and she encouraged me to be a dreamer.
"Dream big, Stella. Reach for the stars, Stella."
My father had his dreams crushed by his father, back when he was just a boy. That meant, since he wasn't the sort to remarry and I was his only child, my own dreams were trampled underfoot.
I dreamt of leaving Ludendorf behind, of escaping this miserable country. No more snow, no more rain, no more mud. No more greys, blacks, and brown. I wanted to escape to a world of color and imagination, a place where my child-like sense of fascination and curiosity could be cultivated and thrive. It was foolishness.
My father had a low tolerance for foolishness. He was a serious man, a man of austere rigidity. He made clocks; more specifically, pocket-watches. It showed. He was obsessed with time, obsessed with punctuality - others' punctuality and his own. If he could work out my own heartbeat to be as though a metronome, with each pulse to be as though a marching soldier taking one foot in front of the other in perfect synchronicity? Well, he would.
Overtime, I gave up the idea of escaping this snowy, open air prison that I found myself in. I did, however, make certain to rattle the invisible bars on occasion. Maybe I would cop an apple from that domineering shrew Ursula, perhaps I would slip my hand into the Ol' Man Ludwig's coat - not to take anything valuable, but just to see if he noticed me doing it. I did get caught every now and again, but that was part of the point: I wanted my father's attention, to have him know I was rebelling against him, in however small a fashion.
I did get it, in the end. He wanted to get elected to the Ludendorf's town council, the Schultebott, but my reputation as a troublemaker ultimately stained his own. He was, naturally, furious with me. Usually, the abuse he heaped upon me was merely verbal, but this being a special occasion... well, suffice it to say, he needed to buy himself a new cane the following day.
He came up with a rather ingenious plan for how to deal with me, though. He intended to turn me into someone's housewife. Of course, I put on a rather dazzling show for each of my would-be husbands, causing them to believe that I wasn't worth the trouble. Soon, I had developed a reputation for being not only a troublemaker, but as a lunatic or an ill-tempered virago, take your pick.
Eventually, of course, I gave ground in some ways. Over the years of having it hammered into my head time and again that I was the daughter of a watchmaker, I took up the trade myself. Much to my surprise, I got good at it. I became quite adept when it came to tinkering and machinery in general, and some small part of me came to enjoy figuring out how things worked. I'd take them apart, look over the parts that made up the whole, and put them back together. Desperate for a change of scenery from the dull routine I had come to know and loathe in Ludendorf, I elected to accompany some trappers in a trip up the Sleeping Beast.
What fascinated me were the traps and how they worked. Beaver traps, bear traps, large traps, small traps; they were all unique puzzles, waiting to be solved. I reached for the bait they left inside a bear trap... and with lightning-quick reflexes, I grabbed the bait before its jaws closed shut around my hand. The trappers I was with saw what I had did and were utterly baffled. "Why, by the Great Clockwork, would I do something so stupid and place myself in such great risk?!", they exclaimed.
They didn't let me accompany them on any future trips. They told my father and, naturally, he gave me a harsh reprimand. Neither my father nor the trappers could ever understand why I did it... but I hope that you can.
It was in that moment that Stella Seifert was born again.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 11:26:47 PM by Smoke and Mirrors »
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