Sakura Sweet chapter 5 part 1: Ulysses S. Grant

He was alone. Alone in his world with nothing but a bunch of imaginary elves to accompany him. How did he know they were imaginary? He didn’t. Not at the time. He had no way to prove that they were real or unreal. I mean, he saw them. They really existed in his sight.

Not that any of it mattered. They came through a forest pass and came out into a meadow where the flowers were blooming and the bees were buzzing and everything had the smell of sweet clover and honey, the stuff of the bible—bread and honey, clover and honey, quail and honey, honey everywhere. What was it that made the stuff so appealing? The sugar? The taste? The viscosity? No one really knew. Or at least, no one had told Johnathan one way or another. I mean, that’s just the way things were.

So Johnathan and his elf captors walked out of the meadow and into a small little hut hat Jonathan did not notice but when it was right before him. It blended into the trees and hid itself so well that even when Johnathan stepped inside he wasn’t sure whether or not it was constructed. It might not have been. A magical attachment to a tree, perhaps. Not that Johnathan cared about what it looked like on the outside. What he was concerned with was who or what was on the inside.

He did see. It took his eyes a while to adjust. When they did he saw that the hut was sparse. Just a chair, a table, and someone sitting on that chair holding his hands above the table, eating a fried fish with impeccable mannerism, up to and including covering his mouth as he chewed. If he really was a man at all—with elves it was hard to tell gender since they all looked like asexual pointy-eared beings with strange sideways eyes that blinked horizontally. That was creepy. Johnathan still couldn’t get used to it. What were they seeing? Were they seeing the same things he was seeing? Or were they seeing a completely different world from his? He didn’t know. Not that he didn’t care; he just didn’t know anything, or at least not enough to figure out what was what.

The elf man-woman at the table raised his or her head. He or she looked directly into Johnathan’s eyes.

“Welcome to middle earth,” she said, completely straight faced.

And now Johnathan was convinced that she was a girl. She looked exactly like that one elf queen from the movies—she looked just like Galadriel. She was Galadriel.