Prologue: Your Narrator Explains The Situation
Do you know what my one regret about the day I died is?
I should've chosen to read Harry Potter. Or maybe His Dark Materials. I mean—magic, steampunk, hot British accents. Wouldn't that have been a great world to get transported into?
If it had to have been a ~~handwavy medieval fantasy book, I could've at least gone for Lord of the Rings, or even Game of Thrones. GOT's world is pretty murderous, but at least the world-building made sense.
Sadly, my tastes have always encompassed the entire spectrum of science fiction and fantasy. The classy... and the trashy. And I'd been feeling trashy that day.
But in my defense, my parents had warned me 5114 times [1] by that point that if I kept crossing the street while burying my head in a book, someone was going to run me over one day.
How was I supposed to know that morning was the day that some idiot actually ran me over?
Or that I'd transmigrate into the third-rate fantasy novel I'd been reading at the time, Chess Games of Blood? [#2]
Or that out of all of people in Chess Games of Blood's derivative and paper-thin (ha) world, my soul would decide to land inside the body of the Dumb Hero's childhood sweetheart?
See? I, Gemma Tran, am totally blameless for my predicament.
Honestly, in most other circumstances, I probably would've been ecstatic to have taken over the body of Aurelia Morrell. According to Dumb Hero, she was gorgeous, talented, feisty... basically everything I'm not. It was honestly an excellent choice of body to take over, my soul was probably feeling aspirational the day I died.
Unfortunately, in this particular circumstance, I was rather more worried about how Aurelia was going to be as dead as Real Me in T minus 3 days.
According to The Fantasy Rules That Be: if the Dumb Hero is happy at the beginning, he must soon become very very unhappy, because he needs a reason to go on his Epic Journey. And how what better event to kickstart his grand adventure than baptism in the blood of Aurelia and his family? Under The Fantasy Rules, Aurelia has to die.
Except the Chosen One Alex Silverwood could find some other reason to start his Epic Journey, because I wasn't going to be Fridged [3]. Nope, not me. That first time dying had hurt like hell—I was pretty sure death by poison arrows [4] wouldn't be any better.
I was an empowered, twenty-first century young woman.
I was not going to die (again), in a poorly-plotted, poorly-characterized GOT knock-off.
Especially not when I'd read every page of the knock-off [5], and knew every point of the Plot. Sure, I wasn't a genius, but I was at least medium-smart. With that knowledge as my weapon, surely I could make my escape before my blood starts pouring into the pseudo-Medieval dirt.
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1. I was 17, so [17 years x 365 days] – [365 days x 3 years where I couldn't read] + 4 leap years = 5114 days. Since my parents told me off about reading and walking daily, that's 5114 times [6].
2. Fridged = past participle adjective, from "(To) Fridge Women": when a book, TV series, movie, or other piece of entertainment have female characters get injured or killed in order to move a male character's story arc forward. Hi, Alex Silverwood! waves
3. Let's pause for a minute to talk about how stupid that name is. Obviously it's a knock-off, but why didn't they just go with Games of Blood instead of Chess Games of Blood? Maybe plausible deniability for copyright claims from GOT, but then it's so weirdly specific! At the very least, the characters could've played chess in the series, make it some sort of motif. But no one ever did, not a single game! Across all four books! I'm not even sure chess exists in the series.
4. Well, technically Aurelia died by rape, poison arrows, and beheading. Just you know, in case just having his girlfriend die wasn't quite enough to launch Alex's political revenge, she had to die very slowly and gruesomely. Personally, I'd just throw myself onto the Poisoned Arrows to get it over with. Except I wasn't going to die. Absolutely not.
5. And reading every page of the knock-off series was a real feat, let me tell you. The first book was 400 pages. By the last book, we'd gotten to Nine. Hundred. Freaking. Pages. Honestly, who does Andor K. O. Natter think he is, J.K. Rowling?
6. Yes, I like math. I'm Asian, shut up.