Tiffany Maye's a hard working Honors student at Glenberry University. Smart, quiet, and focused on her nursing career, her life was nothing unusual aside from her two friends at the local cafe. Until a strange girl named Kyu offers to move in as roommates to help pay the bills. She's never home, never explains where she goes, and has a collection of lewd toys and porn magazines. And something about working as a relationship therapist...still, she tries not to pry into her professional life too much.
Until Tiffany accidentally injures her, sending her to the hospital with a broken wrist and a swollen head.
Catching her alone at a visit to see her, Kyu informs the cheerleader she's a love fairy, sent to help those too nervous or unmotivated to have a push in the right direction. More importantly, she's a love fairy out of work until she heals, leaving Tiffany to pick up the slack.
Giving her temporary access to fairy powers, colored perfume bottles to bring out talent, romance, flirtation, and sexuality, and her trademark Huniebee, it's up to the university student to bring people together until Kyu can get back to work. And come to think of it, her friends seem like they could use a little help...
The Love Fairy's Apprentice is a HuniePop fanfic written by Cypher_DS. In contrast to the large cast of girls in the game, the fic explores the lives of Tiffany, Nikki, and Audrey as they struggle with social anxiety, relationships, and their uneven friendship. Expanding on the character profiles and backstories, the fic does a lot to flesh out the trio's mindsets, personalities, and feelings without the H-Game aspects.
You can find the fic here
A sequel, entitled ''The Bounty Hunter's Escort can be found here
Spoilers relating to the characters as they appear in the game will be unmarked.
Tropes:
- Action Girl: Celeste was strongly implied to be one of these in the game. The fic backs up her claims, and then some.
- Aliens Speaking English: Averted. When Nikki and Celeste first meet, they have a hard time communicating at first until Celeste acquires a translator device. Even then, she explains it's the closest linguistic equivalent to English it's using. Most metaphors and slang that use words in radically different contexts are untranslatable.
- All of the Other Reindeer: Nikki had to endure a lot of bullying and discomfort in high school, some of it was Audrey's doing.
- Alpha Bitch: Played up a bit more than usual compared to the game with Audrey. She's revealed to be quite wealthy, has a fashion sense that's described several times in narration, has the same bitchy temper, and a throwaway comment says she even had the standard Girl Posse in high school.
- Beat: The author seems to love this trope as a frequent source of awkward humor.
- This bit, after Tiffany leaves Nikki and Audrey's table.
They stared blankly across the table, each waiting for the other to move the conversation forward. No luck – their verbal dance had stumbled clumsily, stopped completely, and the silence descending over the booth was of the awkward variety: the silence of two people realizing they had absolutely nothing in common, nothing to talk about and nothing to do.Audrey hated silence.Audrey: So … You wanna get high?- When Tiffany wonders where the name Kyu comes from.
Kyu: Like my mamma always said, you can’t spell ‘cute’ without k-y-u!(Tiffany blinks)Kyu: My mother was dyslexic. - Birds of a Feather: Nikki and Celeste are both quiet, contemplative women who feel isolated in their societies, have a hard time warming up to people, exclusively prefer other women, don't care what people think of them, and love to learn about new places.
- Chekhov's Gun: The purple bottle of perfume that represents the broken hearts failing a date in the game is given to Tiffany with a warning only to use a few drops if absolutely necessary. She eventually uses it at the climax to get her and Audrey out of the fraternity party.
- Closet Key: Anton is this for Nikki.
- Crapsack World: Celeste's home planet was ravaged by Space Pirates generations ago, leaving her people carted off as slaves across the galaxy, resources plundered, and the complete loss of knowledge on how their advanced technology works. Civilization has been clumped into villages and small cities, leaving the poor to dig through the ruins to find technology that can be sold off-planet.
- Deadpan Snarker: Kyu, as to be expected.Tiffany: So um, what are you?
Kyu: Tired, and ready to blow the first nurse who’ll up my morphine. But biologically speaking? You’re looking at a fairy. - Deconstruction: Marco does precisely what an experienced player would do, checking profiles based of the girls he meets, knowing exactly what to say to get them to like him, gets Audrey drunk, and thinks of them in cliches instead of people. This makes him a practiced manipulator who gets away with rape and semi-consensual sex.
- Drunk on Milk: Subverted in that Celeste can get mildly intoxicated with alcoholic drinks. Played straight when she mentions caffeine is what really gets her species drunk, as she drinks a can of Doctor Pepper.
- Fallen Princess: Audrey is strongly implied to have experienced a harsh falling out with her high school Girl Posse, and now spends her time hanging out exclusively with Nikki and Tiffany, who are certainly not on the top ranks of the social strata or party scene.
- Fish out of Water: Most of the comedy in The Bounty Hunter's Escort comes from Celeste's attempts at adapting to American culture.
- Foregone Conclusion: Readers will already be familiar with the in-universe surprise to Tiffany that Audrey's a virgin, and her stories about having lots of sex is an act.
- Genre Shift: The Love Fairy's Apprentice is a character-driven story with romantic drama, self-loathing, Attempted Rape, and aside from the titular fairy and Tiffany's accessories, relatively realistic teenage struggles. The Bounty Hunter's Escort has a plot with alien rivalry, a predator species that could ravage Earth's ecosystem, and more lighthearted romance. There's still some interpersonal issues and fallout from the first story, but it's in a Space Opera backdrop.
- Hidden Depths: Who knew Audrey was a fan of musicals? Or that she loves taking care of fish?
- Horrible Judge of Character: Several times Tiffany fails to see Marco's obsessive behavior, stalkerish tendencies, and how incompatible he is for Audrey. She was nearly raped because of it, but thankfully Tiffany found out in time to save her.
- Innocently Insensitive: One of Tiffany's biggest flaws. While her attempts at helping her friends come from a good heart, she doesn't realize how much she's not listening to what they really need, projecting what she wants relationships to be, not what they are.
- Invisible to Normals: As with the source material, fairies can use magic to become invisible to everyone they don't want to see them and visible to whoever they choose. Tifany exploits this to coach her clients and avoid being caught.
- Lampshade Hanging: As with the source material, Kyu is self-aware about the tropes she's dealing with. Before she transforms to show Tiffany that she's a fairy, she mutters "let's skip to the exposition".
- A Magic Contract Comes with a Kiss: As part of accepting her love fairy abilities, Tiffany needs to kiss Kyu. She prepares to do it despite not being attracted to girls, but Kyu laughs and admits it was just a joke.
- Mythology Gag:
- Kyu repeats the line "I'm a fairy. A love fairy, to be exact" when explaining her job to Tiffany, just like the tutorial of Hunie Pop.
- At one point, Nikki gets bored and starts playing Candy Crush, the mechanics of which are heavily borrowed from in the game's date segments.
- Skewed Priorities: Stuck in the hospital with broken bones, casts, a neck brace, and temporarily out of work, Kyu's biggest complaint is that she can't masturbate with a broken hand.
- Trickster Mentor: At the end of the story, Venus implies Kyu orchestrated the story's events to make Tiffany empathize with people better, and learn to solve her problems without magic.
- You Can't Go Home Again: In Celeste's case, there's nothing stopping her from going back, but she doesn't have anything left to return to.
