[Adelie]

I hate this.

Well, I hate a lot of things. People, mostly - if I listed off every person, every archetype, every one of those nasty, squabbling, uppity mammals, you'd wither away and die of old age before you heard the end of it. But there's no doubt that if I ranked them all, the dumb kid who sent me here would rank second on my list.

Oh, woe is me. Look at my pitiful human body being personally attacked by a sudden inability to see colors. This is so terrible, so debilitating that I can't even muster up the courage to leave my bed. How could I possibly survive a perilous trip into some godforsaken region too desolate for monsters and spirits to even bother with? You must take on this dangerous task for me - for the safety of the world!

Yeah, what an idiot.

[Adelie]

The person who's first on my list? That's the guy who got me into this mess in the first place.

You think I wanted to be at the beck and call of some child with maybe two brain cells to rub together and the magical talent of a rock? If that was really your assumption - then, I offer you my most sincere congratulations on moving a few ranks up my list. Your death, whenever I get around to it, will be sweet.

You see, I used to be - well, I suppose the term you'd use would be god. Not that that's an accurate description or anything; there's no real word that properly describes what I am. You know, puny mammal brains and their inability to comprehend things beyond their understanding - the usual stuff.

But it's close enough that you get the right idea, I guess.

[Adelie]

So there I was, a few centuries or so back, in some castle in some hamlet or whatever humans were calling their dwellings back then - curled up comfortably on the pile of treasure my supplicants had offered to me, feasting on the flesh and blood of their sacrifices.

How the times have changed since then. Those days, they knew how to treat their betters. I didn't even have to demand their firstborn children or coerce them to give up their gold and silver - as soon as I strolled in, they just surrendered them to me. Who was I to decline?

But as I was enjoying the fruits of my labor, this man walks up to me - not cowering in fear, not trembling at the prospect of even daring to exist in proximity to me, but simply walking like someone would down a street.

Now that I think about it, that should've been the first sign that something was off.

[Adelie]

"Hey," that guy said, and then stabbed me with a fork.

There are so many things wrong with that sentence - so much so that I can't even attribute them all to human wilful ignorance.

Let's ignore the sheer barbarity of walking up to someone and stabbing them without a word of introduction, for one. Oh, hey certainly doesn't cut it. You're supposed to give a worthy opponent - and I certainly am a worthy opponent - your name, perhaps a reason why you're trying to murder them; it's only basic non-human decency.

If I had someone at my mercy - not saying, of course, that I was ever at their mercy - I'd at least take the time to monologue a little. That's just the way you're supposed to do things.

[Adelie]

But as I said, let's just ignore that part. That, at the very least, I could excuse as a lack of understanding, an ignorance of the conventions that are accepted among the civilized. What else can I expect from humans, after all?

No, the real problem I have is that he stabbed me with a fork. A fork. To emphasize - a three-tined utensil, commonly used to move food from plate to mouth. Not an actual knife, like normal creatures might use; not even a table knife, which could've at least passed for an improvised weapon - but a fork.

Clearly a real weapon was too good for him.

And to add insult to ignominy, it was a godforsaken dessert fork.

[Adelie]

Look, the point is - being stabbed isn't really new to me.

It's certainly not normal, but things just happen sometimes, you know? You demand a few too many firstborn children from people, you push them a little too far just to see what they'll do, and sometimes they'll stop cowering in fear long enough to do something. It's kind of cute how they try, to be honest.

But that doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt my pride, because usually these people will find actual weapons to do the stabbing with - which makes it all the more cute when it doesn't affect me at all - and it certainly doesn't hurt my existence by binding me into a fork - a dessert fork, mind you - for the rest of eternity.

Yeah, that's what happened. I don't really know how to explain it, either; all I know is one minute, I was getting stabbed with a fork, and the next minute, I was the fork.

I really wish it had been a real weapon.

[Adelie]

I doubt you've ever spent any time as a fork. If, by sheer chance, you have, I'm sure you'd agree with me that it's a miserable and boring experience.

Consider all the things a fork can do. If you're coming up with nothing - congratulations! You're right! A fork, as one might expect of an inanimate object primarily used to transport cake from one location to another, is capable of doing literally nothing.

Now imagine doing that for hundreds of years. Years upon years of just sitting in a cutlery drawer, doing nothing; years upon years of sitting in a kitchen sink, waiting for someone to wash the gross human saliva off you. I may be effectively immortal, but I swear I nearly died of boredom during that time.

[Adelie]

So anyways, that's what I did for the next few hundred years, or few thousand, or whatever.

Originally, when they still remembered what had happened there - when they still remembered me - they locked the fork I inhabited deep inside the royal treasury. Well, to the extent that you could call those rocks and misshapen pieces of wood and metal humans like to keep around treasures, but at least they provided something to look at that wasn't upgraded primates fooling around with each other.

Years passed; the kingdom fell, as mortal empires are wont to do, and the one that replaced them summarily looted their treasury and scattered their belongings to the various whims of their generals and soldiers. And so I found myself first in possession of some family of lords, then pawned off to pay debts, then passed down from generation to generation as a family heirloom.

[Adelie]

There's more to it, of course, but I can't be bothered with the details - it's not like I spent a few hundred years of my life watching the intimate affairs and internal family drama of some human family because I was so parched of entertainment. Certainly nothing like that.

Point is, I eventually ended up with some kid where their bloodlines mysteriously aligned and gifted them an atavistic amount of magical power - meaning enough that they could probably light a candle every now and then, or bend a fork or a spoon.

Maybe the magic that kept me trapped within that piece of cutlery had grown weaker over the years, or maybe it simply found some kind of resonance that broke it, but one day, this dumb kid was showing off his amazing cutlery-bending skills to some friend when he happened to pick me up.

[Adelie]

And so, my majestic self finally returned to the world - in some sense. You see, this kid was too incompetent to fully release me from the confines of my fork, and instead only succeeded in summoning out a small fragment of my existent.

I say fragment here because it pains me to describe my current form as a representation, of course. A representation is supposed to be accurate, to a certain extent; it should at least somewhat reflect what it's supposed to be representing.

But this? I don't even know what this is supposed to be.

No wonder when the kid first looked at me, they said, "Wow, it's so kawaii!"

[Color Harvested]