Ever After Happy (audio story)

Ever After Happy was the first story in the Bernice Summerfield box set The Story So Far: Volume One.

Publisher's summary
Bernice Summerfield is a young rebel, living in the grounds of a military Academy. The enemy fleet's looking for them, there are strange lights in the sky, and a terrible new gardener called Wintergreen.

Plot
Living illegally on the grounds of the Academy, Benny gives a lesson to a group of students and meets a new gardener, Wintergreen. She keeps an eye on her, believing her to be a spy, and shares her suspicions with her friend, Simon. Simon is sceptical, but Wintergreen approaches him and tells him not to betray Benny to the Academy as it would break Benny's heart; this makes Simon think that Benny does not trust him despite his efforts to keep her safe and he storms out.

The Principal stops tolerating Benny's presence on the ground and sends out a search party which burns her camp. She hides and bumps into Wintergreen, who says that in attempting to rebel against the Academy she is actually helping them by serving as a safety net to keep the other students from leaving. She tells her that she has to not only help herself instead of others and to find out what the Principal is up to before taking her to her hut, on the way to which Benny notices disturbed ground. Benny starts to examine it.

Simon denies having anything to do with the search party and asks Benny to return to the Academy, which has become a strict and toxic place to be after two students were caught signalling the enemy. When she visits Wintergreen, who is living with a werewolf, an enemy scout attacks the asteroid and kills several students, including a friend of Benny's who is left with a two-person gun that she cannot use. Benny joins her and, after her friend's death, Wintergreen helps her destroy the scout.

Benny is captured and accused by the Principal of being a spy. She denies it and accuses Wintergreen, whom the Principal has no knowledge of and has brought to him, before she is banished from the asteroid. She goes to the disturbed earth, where she meets the werewolf once more, and uncovers a damaged spacecraft as the enemy launches an attack, the asteroid's defensive shields having been sabotaged. She uses one of the craft's components to repair the shields and returns to the Academy to rescue Wintergreen, who has deduced that the Principal is the real spy. Benny hits him.

Wintergreen tells Benny that she is a researcher from the Braxiatel Collection, but she has already worked out that she is her future self. Wintergreen admits that that is the case and that she came back in time using a borrowed time machine, which Benny has unearthed, to keep her company during this lonely part of her life. She also explains that the werewolf is her son, Peter, who was aged by an energy release after the time machine's crash. It reforms and Wintergreen and Peter leave, lowering the shields and unfreezing an enemy ship. Benny tells Simon that they are going to win.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * Young Bernice - Emily Laing
 * Simon - Ché Francis
 * The Principal - Robbie Stevens

Worldbuilding

 * Squidgy is Simon's pet turtle.
 * Benny makes nettle stew.
 * Simon is a prefect.
 * Wintergreen makes Benny a bacon roll.
 * Wintergreen mentions Blinovitch energy.

Continuity

 * Younger Benny mentions how the enemy killed her mother and father. (PROSE: Love and War)
 * Peter says that he was a policeman once. (AUDIO: Paradise Frost, etc.)
 * Older Benny mentions working for the Braxiatel Collection. (PROSE: Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Doomsday Manuscript)
 * Older Benny impersonates the Seventh Doctor when talking about the Web of Time. (PROSE: Love and War et. al.)