Centaurworld Presents: Mysterious Woman and the Quest for the Fixit Shard, or, Holes part 4 /12

"Centaurworld Presents: Mysterious Woman and the Quest for the Fixit Shard, or, Holes part 4 1/2" is a theoretical fanfiction to Megan Nicole Dong's Centaurworld, conceptualized by reddituser idiotballofwonder.

Plot Summary
The story begins roughly a year or so after the finale. The centaurworld shamans have discovered the location of the Fixit Shard an artifact that has been lost for centuries that Mysterious Woman traveled to find in her youth. Mysterious Woman volunteers herself to retrieve the shard as she has nothing else to do. With Grahmm the Beartaur’s help she finds the Fixit Shard deep within the abandoned holetaur mine. However upon touching the shard she finds herself suddenly in a completely different looking cave and wearing a different outfit. Exiting the mine to find Grahmm, she instead finds her childhood friend Gwendale, alive and in her youth, as well as the still-alive elktaur waiting for her -and passes out.

In her subconscious, Mysterious Woman sees a version of herself identical to how she was just dressed. Both of them realize what has happened: the Fixit Shard has body-swapped Mysterious Woman with a version of herself from an alternate timeline. Her counterpart from this reality, who goes by her birth name, Zuut, is trapped in the canon timeline in her body.

Mysterious Woman and Zuut can only talk when they’re both asleep. Each of them has the other’s physical objects on their person, which is a problem because Minos had confiscated the Fixit Shard while "Zuut" was passed out. Without each other’s half of the shard, they are unable to get back to their own timelines and bodies, leaving Mysterious Woman stuck in her counterpart’s place and Zuut in hers. Zuut takes the opportunity to explore the canon timeline, disturbing Grahmm and the rest of centaurworld by her sudden change in demeanor as she does so.

Back in the alternate universe, none of Zuut’s friends agree to help Mysterious Woman steal the Fixit Shard from Minos as they all think "Zuut" is acting out due to headtrauma. Only Zuut and Minos’ son, Briamael, upon discovering that she is in fact not his mom, helps her steal it back. Mysterious Woman also learns of Zuut’s alternate life to her own:       Instead of splitting himself into the elk and the general, Minos asked Princess Zuut to personally help him craft the Key she helped design at his "Riftworker-of-the-Year" Party. The Princess agreed because she wanted to use magic to better her kingdom and become a centaurworld shaman, in the process grew closer to and more understanding the plight of her centaur friends. Eventually she was confident enough in her plans to tell her father, the King, about them - to which he had her arrested, locked away, abdicated her title as princess, and was going to put her through a cruel public trial to answer for the heresy of consorting with magic as a woman. While attempting to control the Key, which had also been taken from her, Zuut used up all her physical magic but was able to get a message through to centaurworld. Her allies (Minos, the centaurs, and a few loyal human guardsmen such as Gary) then smuggled her to safety with the aid of the holetaurs. What life has been like for the rest of humanworld no one knows because centaurworld has been guarded from humans since Zuut’s escape.

In their shared sleep, Mysterious Woman shows she’s reclaimed her half of the shard but Zuut insists on staying in Mysterious Woman’s time and ditches her to wake up; Mysterious Woman having to explain to Briamael that his mom didn’t come back to him, which is news he isn’t upset by. He explains how his mother is determined to reclaim the magic she lost years ago. He also explains how he’s barred from even speaking of the humanworld by his parents, his mother apparently intent on never going back after what happened. Hearing this, Mysterious Woman promises Briamael and Becka (this timeline’s version of Becky Apples) that she’ll sneak all three of them through the Rift and into humanworld.

As Mysterious Woman bonds with the son she never had, Zuut discovers that Becky Apples has been able to talk for a while now thanks to centaurworld magic and that she knows Mysterious Woman and her's situation. Becky Apples fills Zuut in on the horrible fate of the elktaur and the war that has raged the land because of him. Zuut refuses to believe this until she travels to the still humanworld and sees the devastation for herself. She finds the elktaur's skeleton in the chasm and cries over it.

That night in their sleep, Zuut begs to switch back but Mysterious Woman tells Zuut it’s her own fault for not appreciating the life she had with a family and network that loved her. When Mysterious Woman lets slip she’s going to take Briamael to the Rift, Zuut tries to force their shard pieces together but Mysterious Woman manages to wake up before she can.

The next day Becka, Briamael and Mysterious Woman stage a taurnado in order to evacuate the guardtaurs at the Rift. They leap through to the humanworld....where they are immediately captured by human riftworkers who take them to the new king of the realm - a king not at all related to Zuut’s father or her family. The Key, which had been left behind in Zuut’s escape, directly powers only the human’s side of the Rift under his watch. While in this so-called golden age the new king intends to use the magic of the Key as a weapon of war. Becka and Mysterious Woman fight off his police and escape, but Briamael is left behind when they’re both pulled back through centaurworld. Minos is horrified when he hears his son his lost on the other side. He demands to know why Zuut would do such a thing, which is when Mysterious Woman reveals to everyone that she’s not really their Zuut and explains what has happened. Minos and the rest of Zuut’s entourage unanimously abandon Mysterious Woman for stranding Zuut in an alternate reality, and embark to go find Briamael in the humanworld. Mysterious Woman breaks down, having been rejected by the reality and friends she wishes she had. The real Zuut, meanwhile, binges through Brahmm’s fridge in a fit of trauma and passes out.

In their fugue state, both women nod off an meet their alt self; Zuut wanting to kill Mysterious Woman for endangering her son. Mysterious Woman assures her that she will risk everything to save Briamael and Zuut's world while Zuut gathers her half of the Fixit Shard she’d earlier thrown into the centaursea.

Zuut swims to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve the shard when she meets there the sobbing Whaltetaur shaman. Whaletaur tells Zuut (thinking of course that she’s Mysterious Woman) her plight; how years ago she had swallowed Johnny Teatime’s parents, the original shamans of Cat Valley, because they were depressed. At a certain point the souls she swallows are unable to be regurgitated and, having recently found out about his parent’s fate, Johnny Teatime declared ‘war’ on her, ending their friendship. Zuut knows the Teatimes from her reality and understands from the story why they did what they did but also that the Whaletaur is genuinely regretful. Zuut has the Whaletaur take her to Cat Valley where Johnny tries to murder them with his powers; Zuut however placates Johnny and speaks to his inner kittentaur when she sings to him his parent’s favorite lullaby. She assures him that his parents never left because they didn’t love him, but only because they hated themselves, and that the Whaletaur wanted to help them. Whaletaur and Johnny reconcile while Zuut heads back to Grahmm’s cave with her half of the shard.

Mysterious Woman storms the Rift to help find Briamael. Seeing the totalitarianism of the humanworld shocks Zuut’s friends while Minos is horrified at the state of the Key, deducing that it’s magic is not only dangerous but unstable and that the centaurs need to intervene before the humans destroy themselves. While hiding in what’s left of the nearby forest, the group come across a commune of yuppie anarchists who want to live with nature and without magic. They explain that they were keeping Briamael safe in their camp because they think he is their deity, but he’d escaped that morning after he grew sick of their adoration. Minos and Becka save Briamael just in time from a human officer while Mysterious Woman uses the tricks she’s learned from Briamael to fool the rest of the officer's squadron. The centaurians leave with the promise to return and try to end this crisis, or at least smuggle the yuppie commune to centaurworld before the inevitable arms-race destroys humanity.

Mysterious Woman bids her alt family farewell and falls asleep that night with them watching. Zuut and Mysterious Woman meet and briefly catch the other up on what’s happened in their worlds before they connect their shard pieces and return to their timelines and bodies; Zuut in her timeline held by her son and Minos, so happy to see them alive and ready at last to face the humanworld she escaped from; Mysterious Woman wakes up in the canon world being watched over by Grahmm.

Mysterious Woman rides Becky Apples to the Shaman Training Ground and returns to the Shamans the Fixit Shard. After which her body transforms for the first time in years to match centaurworld and she find she’s able to shoot tiny versions of herself from her feet. Reinvigorated by her experience, Mysterious Woman asks to be called by her birth name, Zuut, from then on, even though her centaurworld friends think her name is "weird" upon hearing it out loud.

Canon Characters
Mysterious Woman - The main character. The inhabitants of centaurworld do in fact call her just “Woman” as she’s refused to be called by her birth name for years. Mysterious Woman is full of self-loathing that she doesn’t concede as a problem. Having ‘moved on’, she’s actually doubled down on her philosophy of keeping her emotions locked up; refusing to acknowledge that she even had a husband and keeping everyone but Becky Apples, whom she talks to like a pet, at bay. Mysterious Woman feels the atrocities in both worlds have all been caused by her inability to act, and thus, has idealized her memories of humanworld before the war, but not of her past self: MW thinks she was foolish, spoiled, and shallow in her past because she recognizes she was not the best ally she could have been to her centaur friends. She feels the rest of centaurworld, especially the shamans, resent her when they really do not, a side effect of her projecting her own self-hatred onto them. She hates her counterpart when she first meets her, saying she reminds her too much of a person she "hated being". During her journey she comes to think the alternate reality is a ‘fixed’ version of her own. Mysterious Woman realizes through Zuut’s life that not every outcome in the canon timeline is linked to her, nor should she feel personally responsible for everyone else - Zuut did make the decisions she wished she had, but those have resulted in their own consequences. Her stand-offish, pessimistic, and slobbish behavior helps her bond with Briamael, her alternate counterpart’s son. While in Zuut’s timeline she reconnects with the friends and family that are still alive there, though she’s still uncomfortable around her husband’s counterpart.

Beartaur - Mysterious Woman's roommate. His name in this story is Grahmm. He rarely ever leaves his cave. We learn from the story that he and Mysterious Woman met years after she was stranded in Centaurworld and she’s been his insight into how humanworld works (while also misinforming on information when he makes her mad). Grahmm apparently tried and failed to make Mysterious Woman part of his collection when they first met. Throughout the story, while Grahmm never learns exactly what’s happening with Mysterious Woman/Zuut, he’s disturbed by Zuut’s (in Mysterious Woman’s body) comparatively chipper, cool-mom attitude. Just as quickly though, once Zuut discovers the fate of the Nowhere King and brings home her husband’s antlers, he’s horrified to see what he this is his friend regress into her old obsessions. He and Becky Apples do not get along.

Becky Apples - She was a tiny foal when she was Gary’s horse, and Gary is the only person she ever trusted and cared for and is even where she got her love of apples from. The loss of Gary is a sore spot for Becky, who’s always wondered what happened to him. Even as a foal, however, she was deadly and had a taste for bone marrow and hair. She is tolerant and loyal enough to her riders but never accepts any of them as ‘hers’. Mysterious Woman nonetheless treats Becky as her horse and even confides in her, thinking that Becky can’t talk back - she can. Becky has been able to speak for awhile now thanks to the magic of centaurworld, but she chooses not to; a fact she reveals to Zuut when Becky confronts her on who she really is. Becky has a very harsh, authoritarian voice and mannerisms. She doesn’t think too much of the Mysterious Woman, though not for the reasons Mysterious Woman hates in herself, and she loathes the Grahmm because she thinks he’s lazy and can’t sculpt horses to save his life. When Zuut departs from her world and gives her words of love from her timeline’s Gary, however, Becky breaks character and seems genuinely touched.

Johnny Teatime - This story reveals that Johnny Teatime is in fact a kitten, or at the very least, has not physically aged past kittenhood. Johnny never speaks in his ‘normal’ voice and makes cutesy gestures to indicate what he says. When Zuut comforts him at the end of the story and tells him anecdotes about how much they did love him, it’s the first time he has an honest “ugly cry”.

The Whaletaur Shaman - Whaletaur is revealed in this story to have been swallowing up depressed centaurs for years; the crowd that’s freed from her stomach in “Ride the Whaletaur Shaman” had yet to be fully digested. This was sadly not the case for Janna and Jackson Teatime, who’s sadness she consumed and ate away years ago. Whaletaur has been trying to turn her life and her unknowingly harmful methods around for the sake of her friends, which is why she’s so saddened to be hated by Johnny once he discovers the fate of his parents.

Big Tree and Little Tree - Appear very briefly while Zuut is on her “magic joyride” in MW’s body, and at the end of the story where Mysterious Woman entrusts with them the Fixit Shard. They are revealed to be the oldest of the centaurworld shamans. They are the only canon characters (besides Becky Apples) to recognize what is happening with MW and Zuut, though they’re more annoyed by it than bothered. In both realities, Mysterious Woman/Zuut harbor a great deal of respect for the Tree Shamans; they are the only shamans Mysterious Woman talks to.

Alternate Versions of the Canon Characters
The timeline that Zuut lives in is set in an earlier time period than what is currently seen in the show; around 50 to 80 years before the events of Centaurworld, taking place roughly around the time Mysterious Woman discovered the elk in the dungeon. Mysterious Woman gets body swapped with Zuut because they are both holding their piece of the shard and are both at that point in time 39 years old (Mysterious Woman has been unable to age past 39 since she split apart the Rift, while Zuut has just turned 39 in her time).

Zuut, the human - Mysterious Woman’s alternate universe counterpart, who still goes by her birth name. With her life not being nearly as horrific as Mysterious Woman’s, Zuut is more optimistic and friendly but also manic depressive. Zuut is determined at all costs to fit into centaurworld’s artstyle and regain her magic, hoping to use it to improve the lives of her family. Her desire to achieve that has slowly eaten away at her relationships; she doesn’t really know her son like she used to and is unable to see Minos’ unhappiness. Like Mysterious Woman she has imposter syndrome and blames herself for things both in and out of control, which in turn, makes her strive even harder to be magical. It also means she has forsaken some of the support and power she does have; though she doesn’t possess physical magic like MW has, she’s mastered various illusions to compensate. Technically Zuut is a fugitive in centaurworld and at the very least believes she is wanted by humanworld as well. Though her criminal status makes her unpopular with the holetaurs and Judge Jacket, she’s otherwise respected and treated as an authority befitting any shaman in her world. Part of her desire to fit in and become magical has to do with her feeling of betrayal by her homeworld; she’s intent never to see the humanworld again. Ironically, like her canon counterpart, she has a need to lock that part of her life away at all costs rather than face it and free herself and her family from their trauma. Though emotionally neglectful of them, Zuut loves Minos and Briamael very much; she refuses to believe Becka’s story about the Nowhere King until she finds her partner’s counterpart’s remains. When she learns Mysterious Woman is endangering Briamael her one goal is to get back to her own body and save him. Zuut’s mannerisms sheds light on Mysterious Woman’s personality prior to splitting up the Rift. Whereas in the show we never see/learn much about the princess as a character, here we learn things about her: like how she lovingly describes things in nonsensical food anecdotes, writes fan fiction, and unironically calls herself a ‘girlboss’.

Minos the Elktaur - Briamael’s father and the alternate counterpart to the elktaur. Having begun a working/romantic relationship with the princess, all because he actually had the courage to ask her out in this timeline, Minos is loyal to Zuut to a fault. He never bothers Zuut with his own unhappiness, or disapproves of her judgment. He’s adopted her worldview on humanity following her escape and hates the humans he so wanted to be in the past, which when Mysterious Woman questions him about in Zuut’s body, he implies he still has body dysmorphia. He is both overly protective of his son and totally spineless in disciplining him, which makes Briamael respect him even less. Minos is clearly upset by Zuut’s obsessions coming between their relationship. They haven’t married in this timeline because Zuut’s constantly putting off their “re-reproposing”, engagement, or wedding for work. Nevertheless, he still calls her “Smookums” and is hurt to see her (really Mysterious Woman in Zuut’s body) so frightened of him. Even though he never became his worst self(s) in this timeline, Minos shows snippets of aggression, violence, and cruelty that mirror the General and the Nowhere King in the canon timeline; he acts as a sort of captain-of-the-guard to Zuut and he kills a human officer in a fit of rage for hurting Briamael.

Becka - The Becky Apples of Zuut’s timeline. She is younger and more adapted to centaurworld in this reality. Though she’s technically still a beast of burden, she acts and behaves no different than the other workers and servants to Zuut. She and Briamael get along and are each other’s closest thing to ‘friend’, the both of them acting like edgy teenagers and texting each other with birdtaur eggs. Becka is also close to Gary in this timeline, though given that she learned to talk much earlier in her life, they have more of a father-daughter relationship than a rider-steed one. Becka was a foal when she and Gary first helped Zuut escape to centaurworld and killed the guards the were pursuing them.

Goodwitch the Beartaur - Grahmm’s mother. She’s apparently still alive in the canon timeline though she isn’t in contact with her son. In Zuut’s timeline/period she is Zuut’s loving landlady who allows Zuut and her posse to live in her cave with her cubs.

Grahmm the Beartaur - Goodwitch's son. In Zuut's time he is only a cub and he is used to getting bullied/picked on by his older sister.

Gwendale -

Gary the Extraordinary - Zuut’s personal chef, doctor, and custodian from the humanworld and Becka’s “humandad” (i.e. rider). In the canon timeline, he’s the same Gary who worked for the princess’s castle staff and is currently a skeleton there. Gary is friendly, obedient and joyful in his many jobs and isn’t one to complain. Zuut considers him one of her finest allies as it was he and his identical brothers who managed to sneak Zuut out of the castle and into centaurworld.

Gerard the Guard - One of Zuut’s personal assistants from the humanworld that willingly stranded himself in centaurworld to save her. In the canon timeline he’s the guardsman whom the Nowhere King fused with a cow to make the first minotaur. Ironically in Zuut’s timeline, he has now married a cowtaur and is expecting their first hybrid child. He’s mostly concerned with his job and doing it right because he’s failed every other job before that tremendously.

New Characters
Briamael the Reverse-Elkhumantaur - Zuut and Minos’s 11-year-old son. He does not exist in the canon timeline given the fate of his father there. Briamael is a hybrid and thus a ‘reverse’ centaur, with the front half of his body being an elk with human ears and the rest of his body being a human up to the neck. His looks have resulted in him getting bullied in centaurworld and is thus homeschooled for his protection. In the humanworld, by contrast, the yuppie revolutionaries think he’s their made-up deity and treat him like a savior, which bothers Briamael. Although initially just a brat, Briamael is the first person to believe Mysterious Woman’s story that she’s not really ‘his’ mother but is in his mother’s body, which he thinks is “cool”. Briamael has a tendency to call violent or disturbing subjects neat. Like his mother he’s self-aware to a fault and knows he’s privileged and sheltered from the rest of centaurworld and his human-heritage, a fact he’s not at all happy about and is why he lashes out. Briamael is smart for his age and gifted at wall art and illusions, all of which were taught to him by his mother. At the start of the story, Briamael thinks his mother doesn’t love him anymore. He says she changed after her hair became all ‘wibbly wobbly’-like and started to seriously pursue magic again, unaware that her interest in magic started well before he was born. He calls Mysterious Woman “AltMom” and is annoyed that she won’t tell him about the more disturbing aspects of her world. Though sad to see her go, he’s overcome with emotion when his real mom awakens and hugs him so close. Briamael enjoys hard rock (as does Mysterious Woman) along with Becka and they sometimes dip their homelife to go to trashtaur concerts. Briamael appears to be pen-frenemies with Malandrew, who is actually a child and not a grainy black-and-white hellspawn in this reality; Minos caught Malandrew hitting Briamael with a croquet mallet and they haven’t physically spoken since.

Janna and Jackson Teatime - In Zuut’s timeline they are currently still alive. Johnny Teatime’s parents, the original shamans and rulers of Cat-Valley. Unlike their son they apparently were very talkative and had ineffective ‘showy’ magic. They were apparently a very close pair and also vapid people who only knew how to talk with others by belittling them. Evidently, despite how they presented themselves as glamorous and shallow, they battled depression all their lives because they asked their friend the Whaletaur to swallow them up when Johnny was very young. Janna and Jackson consider themselves friends of Zuut, even though she doesn’t like them and endures their weekly visits; Mysterious Woman calls them exactly how she sees them when they stop by her cave to give ‘condolences’. Janna and Jackson want to become parents but haven’t had any luck so far within this timeline. Mysterious Woman knows they’ll eventually give birth to Johnny while it’s this fact that helps Zuut mend the fences between Whaletaur and Johnny, as she knows they must have loved him.

Rathaas -

Rathaas and Gwendale - Zuut’s childhood friends ever since her first visits to centaurworld as a toddler. Gwendale is an gerenuktaur while Rathaas is a jackalopetaur (a rare kind of centaur as most crossbred centaur are usually one or the other of their parent’s species, not a mix) and Gwendale’s brother. Gwendale is reasonable and Zuut’s personal gal-pal. Rathaas likes to antagonize Zuut whenever he can, similar to how Ched is to Horse. It’s all but stated that they are the ancestors of Glendale and have passed away in the canon timeline. Gwendale does not have the same cleptomaniac tendencies as Glendale but both her and Rathaas have similar portals with which they keep their things in; Gwendale’s is in her mouth while Rathaas’ is in his forehead. Mysterious Woman is very happy to reconnect and bond with them while in Zuut’s world, as she’s become aware since that she wasn’t the best ally she could be to her old friends.

Yancy and Lynn -