It's a romantic subplot in a short story.
Written by me.
You might want to stock up in case the rains of blood, frogs, and other apocalyptic whatsits show up.
(I'm using my random hippo icon, but truthfully I'd have been less surprised if a hippo subplot had arrived.)
Also I'm not sure why this short story has suddenly fallen together, but hey, I'll take it. It's always nice when this happens, and this one is even SF. Because my brain feels the need to prove, every once in awhile, that I'm not exclusively a fantasy writer. Thanks, brain! Much appreciated.
I think part of what happened here is that I was thinking -- unrelatedly, I thought -- that one of my big disappointments about stories where the unobtrusive mousey girl is transformed into the belle of the ball is that "unobtrusive" is never a word I got to keep for more than five minutes straight, even when I'm trying, so it looked like a wish fulfillment story to me: girl gets to blend in with scenery, do what she wants unobserved! Neat! And then even in the wish fulfillment story they take it away from her again. In this story, she starts out mousey and unobtrusive and ends up mousey and unobtrusive. But in the middle she learns how to be sneaky in addition. And that's good.
