Chapter Text
The letter in her hands was one of shock and revelation as Dr. Gretchen Tennyson read the note. Several things about her childhood suddenly made a new form of sense as she realized why her family kept so many things secret from her. This letter linked the Butterfly Dynasty and the Tennyson Clan in a way she never considered until now. Of course, any historian both within Starfleet and outside of it had been taught the stories about Star the Titan and Benjamin the Great and the Four Moons War and the Planetary Alignment Treaty as per the typical history classes in school about the origins of the Federation. It was a required history lesson for her education and such discoveries about the past had always fascinated Gretchen.
It was natural that her passion for history would lead her to discovering the letter that was now in her hands. To learn from the past was how the future was shaped, after all, so it only seemed fair that learning about her own past would be a helpful thing for the future to learn from as she wrote down her own history. Right now, Gretchen was excited to learn from First Thinker Albedo Firefly and Sir Glossaryck of Terms as they presented her with those nine volumes that detailed the origins and legacies of the Royal House of Butterfly.
Each volume was varied in terms of chapter length and the biographies of each Queen Butterfly and their respective Governments and Periods within each Age was worthy of lively interaction as she took in each word and warning at a careful pace. She was no stranger to biographies for her work, having read and written several herself, but these felt different compared to her own documents. Perhaps it was because this was a personal project rather than anything meant for professional purposes.
Regardless of these new facts of life, Gretchen took her time to carefully read through these massive novels, soaking in the familiar information through fresh eyes. Every Queen Butterfly had their own biography, written through Glossaryck’s perspective, but these books told more than merely where most would stop through that useless concept of “great man history” when real history was better told from the ground up in her opinion. He and Albedo both knew that Gretchen was the type of historian who was eager to learn every last little detail and much to her delight, she was gathering plenty of details as she learned about the Butterfly Queendom through the eyes of someone who had fully lived through it all as she studied the Butterfly Dynasty, the aristocratic clans who ruled by their sides as members of the Butterfly Government, and all of the messy and beautiful chaos in between and during those nine Ages of Butterfly and the Periods in each.
She read about the Queens and their Consorts and their children. She read about the Heads of the Primary, Foundational, Great and Sworn Guild Houses as their country evolved and adapted. She read about the wars between Butterfly and its neighbors across the rest of Mewni in addition to the postconflict politics that linked them all together. None of it was new information to her, of course, but the letter in her hands had changed her perspective regarding this realm’s history for her for damn good reason. The letter in her birthmother’s handwriting that her parents had just given her now that she was old enough to understand the circumstances of her adoption.