The Apple Doesn t Fall Far from the Tree Ch 02
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Neurasthenia free porn video
NEURASTHENIA
by Crazy Baron
DISCLAIMERS
This work may be distributed to forums where it can be read free of
charge, provided that the author gives his explicit permission and that
the text is not altered. Please note that this story is intended for
mature readers only. The people and incidents depicted herein are
completely fictional.
THE STORY
Synopsis:
Every once in a while, it may happen that the forces governing human
destiny choose an ineffectual, harmless, pathetic daydreamer as their
instrument. They may even grant his or her dearest wish in the process,
although not always in the manner the dreamer would prefer. An idler
named Cody, who fits the above description, is about to find out this
fact for himself.
*****
For Cody, this was the absolute best part of the day. He closed the door
to another dull shift in the warehouse of the supermarket, his
unimaginative, bored, tired colleagues and the general dreary rut in
which he had ended up. He had the rest of the evening and the night for
himself. His life could begin now.
Without further ado, he shed his jacket and kicked his shoes off, and
then he made a beeline for his desktop computer. He turned it on and
waited anxiously for it to boot up, while going over his plans for
tonight in his mind. There was still some of yesterday's Chinese takeaway
left in the fridge, and he could warm that up in the microwave, so there
was no need to go to the grocery store. That could wait until tomorrow.
He felt his chin with his fingertips and decided to postpone shaving as
well. Perfect, he thought. More time for the important things.
At the top of his daily to-do list was logging onto the discussion forum
of Reflections of the Gilded Era, a website that he frequented. The web
browser had Cody's username and password saved, naturally, so this cost
him the minimum possible delay after the machine had finally woken up.
Cody had been promoted to moderator on one of the sub-forums after years
as one of the most prolific posters, and he took pride in his position
and performed this job with far more diligence and passion than any of
his menial tasks at the supermarket.
Reflections of the Gilded Era was a resource for anyone interested in the
history of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century European
monarchies, one of the best in existence. It had been around since the
1990s, the labor of love of a respected historian who was still the site
owner and main administrator but who rarely participated in the routine
running of the site anymore. The discussion board had attracted people
from professional researchers and nonfiction writers to casual visitors
and children searching for information for their school projects, and
there had been scholarly and oftentimes heated debates over sundry
topics.
Lately, though, the board had been seeing less and less traffic, and the
discussions had tended to be increasingly of the light-hearted variety.
As one of the jaded old guard types had put it shortly before he left the
forum for good, it had become a "playpen for starry-eyed teen girls and
hopeless romantics", with no credibility left. As far as Cody was
concerned, this was a mixed blessing. Although the place had been much
more active with the professional crowd, many of them had abrasive
personalities and little patience for those (like Cody) who sometimes
wondered about the favorite color of a Bavarian duchess or what rock
bands she would listen to if she lived in the present. Maybe, all in all,
the board was better this way.
The later part of last night and the day had been generally pretty quiet.
Only a dozen or so new messages had appeared, and no new topics had been
started. Not surprisingly, one third of the new posts were by a person
going by the screen name "Big Boyar". He was amazingly knowledgeable,
especially when it came to languages and obscure tidbits of information
about various noble houses of Poland and Scandinavia, but he was
habitually condescending and rude towards others and had an uncanny
ability to bring up his sexual preferences in any discussion. In truth,
he was testing the limits nearly constantly, but Cody normally tolerated
him because of his contributions. This time, however, there had
fortunately been no drama or blatant violations of the rules, so Cody
didn't have to censure anyone.
Cody's cell phone chimed to notify him of a text message, and he picked
the device up and read the message with disinterest. Exactly as he had
guessed, it was from his mother. She wanted to know if he was coming home
for his sister's birthday. Cody groaned. He would have to tell her he
would definitely pass but express this in words that wouldn't come across
as overtly disrespectful. Another damn distraction, just what he didn't
need.
He reasoned that Mom had probably sent the invitation out of politeness
more than anything else. Every visit home was the same: his parents would
lambaste him for being a lazy loser and remind him that he was a pre-med
student who had dropped out, who could barely hold down a minimum wage
job, who lived in a run-down apartment and who had zero prospects for the
future. Cody had no good defense against these accusations, since they
were all essentially true.
Whenever his older brother and sister were there, things were that much
worse. He was married and had a family, she was about to get married, and
both had advanced to nicely paid executive positions well before turning
30. "Son, what the hell is it that you actually do, anyway?" Dad would
ask him, and his siblings would eagerly offer a nasty barb or two. Cody,
for his part, would demur and nibble at his food. No honest answer he
could give was going to satisfy them. The runt was a bitter
disappointment to his family, now, always and forever.
At the end of the day, their disapproval and scorn meant nothing to Cody.
He had made plenty of friends on the discussion board. They were only a
couple of mouse clicks away, and the love of his life was closer still.
He opened the photo folder on his desktop, fired up the viewer--and was
instantly mesmerized yet again. There she was, looking solemnly at him
across the chasm of time. He never tired of seeing her in these faded
pictures. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes with her sister or other
family members; sometimes she posed, sometimes the camera had caught her
unawares. Regardless, the Princess was equally enchanting and fascinating
in every photograph.
She was the oldest daughter, tall, poised, with a lovely light brown
hair, soulful blue eyes, porcelain skin and fine features. Everyone in
her family was handsome or beautiful, but she stood out even in that
company. She was the epitome of regality and finesse, and she had
captured Cody's heart like no one else.
While she was remarkable from head to toe, Cody was particularly enamored
with her eyes. There was something magical about them: happiness and
sadness, wisdom, seriousness and perkiness, royal bearing and the
unrestrained joy of someone who was still a child at heart. Behind all
this, he believed he could catch a glimpse of indelible melancholy,
perhaps because she vaguely foresaw her own destiny, but her inner
strength and faith would carry her through the coming ordeals.
Her life had been a true fairytale, but one with a very tragic ending.
The home country of the Princess was one of the monarchies that had been
toppled by World War One and its aftermath. The endless hardships had
driven the people to revolt, and the royal family had been imprisoned by
the rebels. Stripped of their status, power and fantastic wealth, the
monarch, his wife and children had eventually been slaughtered in cold
blood in a remote corner of the land. It was an inexcusable crime;
whatever the ruler himself might have done wrong, the others were
definitely innocent.
Cody had spent countless nights thinking about the murder, and he would
sometimes cry himself to sleep as he imagined the terror and agony the
Princess must have felt. Her beautiful eyes had been extinguished, her
delicate features were crushed by bullets and rifle butts, and her blood,
and that of her family, had stained the ground. Cody sincerely hoped that
Hell existed, if only for the killers to burn in there for all eternity.
If there had been a way to go back in time and change history, Cody would
have done that in a heartbeat. He loved to fantasize about discovering a
portal to the past, or being taken there by friendly aliens, equipped
with period clothing and a submachine gun to mete out justice to the
heinous rebels. The little inconvenient facts that he had no experience
whatsoever with firearms and knew scarcely more than five or six words in
the native language of the Princess didn't deter him one bit.
Alternatively, he would picture himself as a dashing young Guards officer
who had won the special favor of the monarch and a permission to court
the Princess. He had gotten a scanned image of a supposedly authentic
uniform pattern from one of the experts on the forum, and he planned to
have a replica uniform made as soon as he had saved the money--which
would probably never happen.
The nature of the relationship, one-sided as it was, between the Princess
and Cody was not quite clear to him. To be sure, he felt he had a deep
spiritual connection to her and her family, as if he belonged with them
more than he did with his own mother, father and siblings. He loved the
Princess, and being somehow able to marry her and then care for her was a
cherished wish that he nurtured in secret. He would dream of her at night
and imagine running through flowering fields with her, or attending a
formal ball in one of the opulent palaces of her country and taking her
to a romantic dance, or sharing a tender but coy little kiss with her.
Cody was attracted to women, and the Princess was the most attractive
woman he had ever seen. No one could compare to her. Nevertheless, the
very idea of her naked, entirely exposed, sexually excited, let alone
writhing and moaning in the throes of orgasm, was disgusting to him. She
was a goddess, not to be tarnished by such base desires. He invariably
pushed those thoughts away and was ashamed whenever they occurred to him.
The picture displayed in the window on the screen was one of Cody's
favorites. It was a formal photograph taken in 1912, which showed the
Princess and her siblings seated at a small table. They were at their
best, with their hair and clothes meticulously done for the photoshoot.
She was sixteen here and had really blossomed into early womanhood, while
her younger sister, sitting to her left, had recently turned fifteen. On
the same day, Cody remembered, the latter had had a nervous breakdown of
some kind, called "a bout of neurasthenia" by her parents in their
diaries. She had been discreetly spirited away to a sanatorium in Crimea,
to avoid a scandal, but she had thankfully recovered in a week or so.
The Younger Princess was very nearly as beautiful as the Princess
herself, a little thinner and with darker hair and complexion. While
already a stunning vision in her own right, she was clearly destined to
follow in the footsteps of her elder sister. She, too, would share the
gruesome fate of the rest of her family. Both girls would be senselessly
cut down in their prime before they had a chance to taste life and live
it to the fullest.
Once more, Cody cursed silently the long years that separated him from
the Princesses. He would have been willing and ready to die for them, or
by their side. It would have been such a wonderful way to go if there was
to be no Happily Ever After.
Cody felt he had to lighten up his darkening mood. He searched for and
selected a sound file containing an old waltz, double-clicked on the icon
and stood up just as the music began to play. "May I have the honor of
this dance, Your Highness?" he asked in his best fake British accent and
bowed to empty air as decorously as he could. Cody's modest apartment
underwent a transformation into a palace ballroom, the intervening
decades vanished, and the Princess was there with him in her flowing
dress; she smiled, and he swirled her, forgetting about tomorrow and the
supermarket and the rent being due next week.
*****
It was far from uncommon for Cody to go to bed some time after three
a.m., regardless of when he was supposed to get up in the morning, and
that final night turned out much like any other. He read and posted
messages on the discussion board, browsed his photograph collection and
wrote a few hundred words for his novella, whose plot entailed an
enterprising young man from the present day finding himself mysteriously
transported 100 years in the past. He intended to post the story as a
serial on the board and also upload it to the online fiction archives
where he had registered as a user. He ate, washed up and undressed
quickly on the side, so as not to squander precious time on anything
other than the necessities, and shut down the computer and collapsed on
his bed when he was completely exhausted.
His dreams were no more unusual, at least in the beginning. He was
sitting in class at his desk, in either college or high school. The
classroom window was open, letting warm summertime air in, and the
distant voices of girls--the Princesses--were carrying from outside. They
were shouting and giggling playfully and calling to him, so he stood up
and went to the window.
They were urging him to follow them, he realized. They would lead him to
a better place; they wanted him to come home. He knew that he would have
to leave everything behind to be with them, but he was only too glad to
do so.
Suddenly the room disappeared, and Cody was in a lush garden, at the
entrance of a hedge maze. The voices were coming from somewhere in the
maze, and he went in, running forward heedlessly and telling the
Princesses to wait for him.
Sure enough, he was soon totally disoriented and lost. "Where are you?"
he called out, but the girlish laughter receded and faded, leaving him
alone. He sat down in despair, and at the same time, the walls of the
maze and the whole garden around him melted into gray, clammy mist.
Everything was dark and cold, and the sun was gone. He felt a flash of
fear, and then he opened his eyes.
The images from his dream and those of the waking world mixed in his
consciousness, and for a while, he thought he was floating on a cloud in
his apartment. But even as his brain was busily trying to sort out the
visual information and making little progress at first, he could already
tell that something was wrong.
His body felt odd. Wrapped in a soft cloth, it was more sensitive to
touch and warmer than usual, and its extremities were slightly off in
some perplexing way. Something pulled almost painfully hard at his hair,
and his chest was heavy and nearly sore for no reason.
Even more unsettling things had occurred in his crotch, however. The mass
of his penis and testicles was not packed into his boxers and pressing
against his skin, but he could still sense something from where those
parts should have been. It almost seemed as though they had retreated and
sunk deep into his abdomen.
The last vestiges of the dream evaporated, and Cody stared at the
ceiling. Whatever this place was, it was definitely not his apartment.
The room was inordinately high and larger than the one where he had gone
to sleep, as was the bed. A tall window to his right let in some pale,
silvery light, and as Cody craned his neck, he could catch a glimpse of
full moon about to disappear behind the roof of a building outside.
His breath nearly seized at all this. What on earth had happened to him?
He scrambled to his feet, struggling to free himself from beneath the
heavy blanket, and stood up on the cold stone floor. There was a wall
mirror, he noted, and a light switch near the doorframe. Maybe the
confusion would clear and the dream would end when he had the lights on.
Cody staggered towards the door, shivering at the icy touch of the stone
beneath the bare soles of his feet, fumbled for the strange-looking light
switch and managed to turn on the lights at length. Then he looked in the
mirror, and came face to face with the Younger Princess.
She was a stunningly perfect recreation. Her chestnut brown hair
(slightly mussed after sleeping), her cheeks that had a touch of
hollowness, her delicate neck, her mouth, her brown eyes, her translucent
skin, her body clad in an airy, white nightgown; down to all these
details, she was a precise duplicate of the person in the photographs
Cody had seen by the hundred, at times colored by aspiring 21st Century
amateur artists. She was just as he had always imagined her, with one
tiny exception.
Impossibly, inexplicably, his mind was in her body.
The world threatened to go black in Cody's eyes, and his knees buckled.
Listless and very close to fainting outright, he fell to the floor on his
girlish bottom. A high-pitched, involuntary, wordless cry for help
escaped from his lips at the same time, adding to his confusion and
fright.
The palace was renowned for its security, and the response of the staff
was not long in coming. Less than half a minute later, the massive door
creaked open and a guard peeked in. He said something, evidently asking
if everything was alright, but in a matter of seconds two women rushed
past him and burst into the room. Cody recognized one of them as the
aging lady-in-waiting for the Queen Consort. They both ran to him and
began to help him on his feet.
"My goodness! Are you alright, Your Highness?" the old woman gushed and
offered an arm to support Cody's weight. She spoke in English, he noted
in passing. "We heard a scream and decided to see for ourselves if
something was the matter."
"No, I'm..." Cody stuttered. His new voice, melodious though it was,
sounded jarring and strange to him, and he would much rather not have
spoken at all. "I..."
"Oh dear!" the other woman exclaimed. "There is but misfortune and then
more misfortune for us! First the Crown Prince, and now you, Your
Highness! Are you in pain? Do you have a fever?"
"No. Nothing like that. I just---"
He was standing up once more, however shakily, as another woman and a
cavalry captain in full dress uniform joined the lady-in-waiting and the
other lady who were holding him up. "Your Highness," the captain
addressed him, clicked the heels of his riding boots and gave him a
stiff, brief bow with his upper body. "Do you need assistance?" The
woman, statuesque, blond and probably in her early thirties, stared with
wide eyes at the person whom she believed to be the Younger Princess, but
stood back reverently.
"No, I'm fine."
"Shall I fetch the doctor?" the captain asked.
"That won't be necessary," the Younger Princess said. Her confident and
matter-of-fact personality was beginning to assert itself and assume
control. "I feel quite well. I just... I... I had a nightmare, nothing
more. Please, do not be alarmed on my account. A nightmare, that's all it
was."
"Are you sure, Your Highness?" the lady-in-waiting asked, wearing an
expression of intense worry. "We were rather scared---"
"No, honestly. There is nothing wrong with me."
"If Your Highness says so," she complied, "but I do hope and pray that
you get your good night's sleep. Tomorrow is an important day, with the
photographer coming to visit, as I am sure Your Highness remembers."
"I do. As I said, I'm fine, really."
She was obliged to repeat herself a few more times, but finally the
others understood. After that, it was not long before the Younger
Princess was tucked in again and the commotion in her room had mercifully
died down. She was anything but at ease and ready to fall asleep, but at
least the guards and retainers and the other folk had left her alone and
the palace was once more pleasantly quiet.
As she lay there awake, she remembered Cody and his parents, his
childhood, his friends, going to school as him, his stint at college and
the days he had spent at his information-handling device, staring at
pictures of her family. She merely had to concentrate on some aspect of
him, and a vivid recollection would appear. Even so, everything that had
to do with him now seemed out of place and illusory. Had any of it been
actually real? Had she truly lived some 100 years in the future as a
lackadaisical, unmotivated common man, who wasted his money, time and
education on the pursuit of ridiculous fantasies? How could her
personality have reversed itself in such a radical manner? A life of
sloth was just as unimaginable for her as being a man was.
The notion was absurd, and possibly blasphemous as well. She and her
entire family were devoutly religious, and she was aghast at the thought
that a human soul could migrate from one body and time to another. Then
again, God did work in mysterious ways. If He desired that she experience
the future and bring back a message to her family, why could He not
accomplish such a thing? Perchance that was His plan for her.
After a few minutes, she was almost prepared to dismiss Cody and any
connection to him from her thoughts. Discounting a divinely inspired
vision, it had to have been only a queer dream. She was likely suffering
from a bit of nervous exhaustion, which would have been no wonder after
the various nuisances that had occurred over the past few months. The
parlormaid had not exaggerated when she had said that the Royal House and
the state had suffered their share of adversities as of late.
But Cody's detailed knowledge of history remained, and its veracity she
did not doubt for a second. It made shockingly perfect sense to her,
unlike the idea that her consciousness had resided in a male form in the
next century. She and her family had six years to live; then the end
would come in a hail of bullets. Their whole idyllic world already
teetered on the brink of destruction, and the forces that would bring
about its downfall were waiting to strike. As soon as a young man by the
name of Princip pulled the trigger of his gun in Sarajevo, the plunge
into the abyss would begin, and it would not be over until all of Europe
had been swallowed by the chaos. Her country would enter the war along
with the other powers and be horribly devastated.
She had to prevent that somehow. Not only did her life and the lives of
her family members hang in the balance, but also the existence of
millions of her countrymen. They would be killed by the invader in the
trenches and in futile charges, and then by each other. She had to do
something to stop that, to make sure that Papa would not let the country
go to that insane war.
He would listen to her. He was the gentlest, kindest and wisest ruler on
Earth, and he always had time for his children, unlike most heads of
upper class families. All that she had to do was to explain the situation
to Papa, what the outcome of the bad choices would be, and he would take
the steps needed to avoid disaster. Papa had the power and the foresight
to do what was right, and he would.
The Younger Princess resolved to talk to Papa at dinner tomorrow and tell
him absolutely everything.
Lizbeth
- 01.09.2021
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