A/N: Hey! This story won Best Love Triangle (complete) in round four of the SKoW awards! It's an award winner, people! Isn't that exciting? It is to me. Thank you to all who voted for it and nominated it, you guys are truly my heroes!

There's more info about this story on my profile page if you're interested. If not, here it be...

Ordinary World
By JD Allen

The Tale of the Unfortunate Maiden

Once upon a time, in a land too close for comfort, there lived a girl by the name of Elizabeth Potter. Elizabeth was not a special girl with any sort of special qualities and she lived the most mundane life a girl could live. Her job was horrible, her apartment was horrible, her love life was horrible, and basically her life in general was horrible. She spent her days cleaning up after lecherous country clubbers, with no help from a faerie godmother, and lived in a cockroach-invested hole until she died completely alone and unhappy.

The End.

Before her unprecedented and life-altering fall, this was how Elizabeth Potter believed her faerie tale would go had she the reason or esteem to acquire one.

This is the story of a girl, a girl whose story, at first, was so dreadfully far from a faerie tale the two should not even be uttered in the same sentence. This is the story of a girl who was not a princess or even a poor miller’s daughter. She was not magical in any way and she most assuredly did not have a handsome prince waiting for her on a shining white horse.

Although, in retrospect, it may be a bit of a fib to say her life was so separated from the faerie tale life. She was, after all, an orphan who lost her mother from childbirth complications and her father from a long and mysterious illness when she was seven. She was then under the soul care of her eccentric grandmother (who had cared for her along with her father following her mother’s untimely death) until she died when Elizabeth was only eighteen.

Being she, her mother and her grandmother were only children and her father’s brother and father had died years before and she had no grandparents on her mother’s side still living, she was completely and familially void while still in her teens. From then on, Elizabeth lived a life of solitude, unable to make good friends or find decent, keepable boyfriends.

So her life was similar to faerie tales, she just got all the unfortunate traits of them without any signs of the good ones showing up. The earth-shattering blow of her father’s death sent her on a bit of a mission to accomplish the happiness all of her favorite and put-upon faerie tale heroines eventually received. Generally, they were sixteen or eighteen when their faerie godmothers or Prince Charmings showed up, right? At sixteen Elizabeth failed her driving test twice and got the chicken pox while at eighteen her grandmother followed in her family’s unfortunate habit of prematurely dying. At her grandmother’s death, suspicions began to grow in her, making her wonder if this happiness she had been working for even existed.

It was about a year later - when she was booted from her grandmother’s house, due to skyrocketing inheritance taxes, and forced to shack up in a shanty of an apartment - that she began to work at the country club. She spent the following years scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets, putting up with less-than-pleasant – and most of the time improper - customers, and coming home to an empty apartment with a light paycheck. Friends and boyfriends were still scarce and fleeting.

Within months of her sordid new employment, she came upon the realization the happily ever after she had been laboring for was only a dream of the optimistic. She had reached the point in her life where she could no longer hide behind her girlish fantasies of heart-stopping adventure, fantastic creatures and unbreakable love. Optimism was dead.

Besides, she wasn’t blessed with the gift of stunning beauty, nor the gift of song (her only ranges were flat, toneless and pitchy) and she lacked the ability to communicate with friendly forest animals. Even her old skin-and-bones cat, Prince, (the closest thing she had to a male adoring her: she named him Prince figuring he would be the only one she’d see in her lifetime) stared at her blankly when she attempted conversing with him.

She felt as if she had splatted against the ground of her abysmal existence. At only 22, her life appeared to be at its end. This was what was meant for her: an ill-paying and degrading job, a run-down apartment, no friends or family, a car that barely worked and a love life that had only declined with age.

This was what her faerie tale had come to.

She had given up all hope.

And then, one day, once upon a time, she fell down a hole…