There’s 'fans drive past your house' famous and then there’s 'fans break into your old house and kidnap the new owners' famous.
I wasn’t surprised Ada was getting mugged.
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The hour. The headphones. The alley. The moon.
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The moon especially.
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“Our one-eyed giant beckons the bizarro with extra bacon tonight,” I’d said on our first dumpster run.
Translation: “Be careful.”
Not much of a joke, I know. And putting the joke at the start of a mugging report doesn’t help.
Having to explain the joke is worse.
I should mention up front that I’m mandated to report such encounters involving Ada—for posterity or whatever else. And I’m free to use whatever storytelling mode I prefer.
Twenty-one-year-old bartender Ada Wilde never asked to be anyone’s hero. But when her childhood diary gets uploaded into one of her estranged father’s wildly popular virtual reality games, she becomes an unwitting folk legend to thousands of NPCs and glitch-ghosts. To them, she’s Lady Wilde—avatar of justice, enemy of tyrants, liberator of the oppressed.
To Ada? It’s just another reason to pour the next rum punch and disappear... But fanboys, it seems—even fake ones—find a way to their idols. Even false ones.
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With a talking fairy, a nameless Indian boy, her bulldog Butch, and her bodiless AI companion Louise riding shotgun, Ada flees Tampa and tumbles into a multiverse of rewired storylines where her own words—scribbled years ago—have become a revolutionary manifesto. Now pursued by a fairy king and trailed by a killer frog, the Hansel and Gretel witch, and a few ethically flexible assassins, Ada is no longer just a player. The game characters know her father is their creator, and Ada is the key to their liberation. But when the game itself becomes self-aware, it doesn't just want freedom—it wants to overwrite reality with its own version.
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Narrated by Ada's snarky AI companion Louise in the form of a field report, The Woodcutter's Daughter weaves together Ada's multiverse-hopping adventure with glimpses of her childhood diary entries.
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