Pixie Dust and Hydrogen Part 6


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Cupid sighed and laid back against the tiling, feeling her feathered wings fold beneath her. She wished she could say that it was only the special circumstances that led her to break curfew, but in truth, it was far from a rare occasion. It was part of why she enjoyed rooming with Darling, in fact-- they could each sneak out at odd hours of the night, neither of them having much respect for the dorm-by-midnight rule, and it was unspoken that they would not question each other. It was part of why her roommate was so easy to talk to when she truly did, in fact, have something on her mind.

It had gotten very, very hard to avoid spilling the whole situation to Darling that night. Especially  given how heavily it weighed upon her thoughts.

And so, on this night, Cupid clambered up upon the flattest, most comfortable roof she could find atop the school and lay still, gazing at the stars. Sleep would not come to her tonight, this she knew. But a few moments of solitude, the thousands of stars that glimmered in the sky above... yes, Cupid thought, this would be rest enough for tonight.

Then, the faint sound of someone sitting beside her: "Feathers and friends-- together, alone."

Cupid glanced up. "Maddie? What are you doing  here ?"

"Before asking a question, shouldn't you answer it first?" Maddie giggled, sitting cross-legged next to her. She sipped at her ever-present cup of tea.

"But... if I knew the answer," Cupid looked at her oddly. "Then I wouldn't have to ask."

"No, silly billy. I meant you," she bopped Cupid on the nose with a chuckle. "I'll answer what I'm doing on this lovely-- and, might I add, comfortable-- roof if you'll do the same!"

"Oh, of course," Cupid turned her gaze back towards the stars. "I come up here sometimes, when I need to think, or be alone... or prevent my roommates from finding out something I'm not supposed to tell them. It was especially handy when I roomed with Blondie... she's a  very  persistent questioner."

"What a coincidence," Maddie chuckled. "Why, I'm up here for exactly the  opposite  reason! All the people in the world are right here with us, if you only look for them."

Surprise flitted across Cupid's face, "Where?"

"Why,  there, of course," Maddie waved her hand out towards the sky. "The stars have their own way of talking, you know... and if they're not in the mood for conversation, they can be very,  very  good at listening."

"You make them sound like people," Cupid replied, nestling into her wings once more. She would not mind listening to Maddie either, she thought, not in this moment. She was a welcome distraction from all the thoughts whirling in her own head.

"But they are," Maddie insisted, pointing to the stars above. "Do you see those three stars, clustered together over there? Those are three friends, gathered around a MirrorPad to watch their favorite show. And that one-- that blue one over here-- why, I do believe he's lost."

"Maddie, that's a fairy-satellite," Cupid tried to stifle a smile, but it came across her face unbidden.

"Even fairy-satellites can get lost sometimes," Maddie didn't seem phased by this at all. "Look at that silver star, see how it flickers? That star is a narrator-- for though our world has few narrators indeed, narrators live aplenty across all the realms of the universe. Perhaps they even come from places where you and I seem to them as wondrous myths, such as the Library of Alexandria is to us."

The words didn't make much sense, thought Cupid, but there was a sort of poetry to them that pleased her ear. Wishing to hear but a little more, she asked, "And what about that pink star? The one that's just a little bit ahead of the satellite?"

"It's the sun to a world where people are treasured for their differences, and what the people of Ever After might revile is reveled in," Maddie painted a picture within her mind. "A paradise for all that is fabulous and freaky, rolled into one-- and though they seem like what we might call 'monsters,' why, they're the same as we at heart! They even go to high school, just like us."

Cupid froze, recalling the world where she had once lived. "Maddie... is that true?"

Maddie burst out in laughter, "Oh, of course not! Who ever heard of such a thing as a Monster High? Maybe there is one, somewhere, but it's definitely not near that pink star... maybe it's right by this one? Or this one?"

Cupid let the tenseness seep out of her once more. It was all in Maddie's mind, of course... and she did not know yet of the world which only Cupid should ever know of within this realm.

"What kind of star, then, is that pink star?" Cupid asked. "If not the sun to a world of monsters?"

"I'm surprised you don't already know," Maddie grinned and shook her head. "See, if you cover up your left eye, and squint juuuuust right, you can tell that they're actually  two  stars-- just super-duper close to each other."

Cupid did as she was bade, "I can... sort of see it?"

"Now, what does that look like to you, hmmm?" Maddie gently prodded her shoulder. "I  know  you know this one."

Finding her heart struck by a fit of irrationality, Cupid let her imagination take hold: "They're stars who have watched each other a long, long time... stars that fell in love when they were hundreds-- no,  thousands  of years away from ever meeting. But stars... they don't move quickly, if they ever move at all. And so, for all this time, they've been slowly moving across the night sky, desperate to meet, and here they are, and here we are... able to witness their first sweet kiss."

"Oh, you're  definitely  good at this," Maddie beamed. "I couldn't have gotten them to tell me  half  of what they told you."

"No... I'm sorry, Maddie," Cupid sighed, not wishing to falsely ascribe feelings to these celestial features. "I wasn't listening to the stars. I was listening to my own silly heart."

Maddie giggled, "Why, Cupid, don't you know? It matters not what you call a  star  or a  heart  or a  circle . Those are only shapes given to describe the same thing, which truthfully has no shape at all, or perhaps is shaped differently for each person who happens upon it by circumstance. But you must realize-- the shape of the shape doesn't matter, only how  you're  shaped by such a shape."

"I'm not sure whether that's the wisest thing I've ever heard, or the least comprehensible," Cupid turned her face towards her, seeking with her eyes.

"Well, as dear ol' dad always says," Maddie smiled back, "Wisdom isn't meant to be understood, and therefore, what is incomprehensible  must  be wise."

"Then, Maddie, you've got to be the wisest person I know," Cupid laughed, feeling much lighter already in spite of the weight of her knowledge. Maddie knew the same as she, after all, and she seemed fairly optimistic even in spite of the whole ordeal.

"Why, thank you both," Maddie beamed, and though Cupid looked at her a bit curiously, she laughed it off-- after all, not everyone was privy to the narration.

"Completely incomprehensible," Cupid agreed.

"You're pretty wise yourself, you know," Maddie waggled her finger in Cupid's directions. "Why, you make sense of incomprehensible things each and every day! That's very nearly as wise as being incomprehensible yourself, if I might say so."

"Me?" Cupid seemed surprised by that. "What do you mean?"

"Your hand is the one that leads Ever After High in the realm of love, you know," Maddie flopped over the roof upside-down. "And there's nothing with less rhyme or reason than people and their feelings! Why, they're always impossibly unpredictably wonder-iffic, and here you are, and here they are, and kablammo! Suddenly, sense!"

"You mean... like my advice show? Maddie, that's not making sense of feelings... I just offer people advice on what to do once they're there," Cupid chuckled, flattered. "Love isn't  supposed  to make sense... the heart wants what the heart wants. Thinking about why people feel a certain way... that isn't  meant  to be understood."

"Knowing that something  shouldn't  make sense," Maddie's grin widened. "Why, that's the wisest of all!"

Cupid broke out into giggles. "You know, Maddie, you're pretty great yourself. Why haven't we hung out more?"

Maddie flopped back up onto her elbows, "Why, we hang out all the time! There's you and I and Raven and Apple and all  three  of the Charmings, not to mention Briar and Hunter and Blondie and..."

"No, silly, I mean just us... not like, in a group of all our friends," Cupid rolled over, mirroring Maddie's posture.

"Hmmm..." Maddie tapped her chin. "I have no idea! In fact, I was  thiiiiiiiis  close to asking Raven if she wanted to come up here with me! I guess it's just been coincidence, though once is merely happenstance."

"Why  didn't  you ask Raven to come up with you?" Cupid turned her head curiously.

"Something told me I shouldn't," Maddie kicked her heels. "Besides! Dexter showed up super-duper  hextremely  late, extra, extra worried with a side of nervous-sauce. Which, in case you were wondering, is the  complete  opposite of awesome-sauce. They were talking about a ton of important-sounding hexonomomomicon-type things about rune translations. I thought I'd leave them to it."

"... so they're alone now? In Raven's dorm?" Cupid sat up straighter. Her heart pounded in her chest. "And they're  alone ?"

"Heehee... you said 'alone' twice, silly billy," Maddie booped her cheek with a finger. "And they're not alone... why, they're there with each other and a  huuuuuuge  pile of textbooks Dexter brought from the library!"

"They're studying together, alone," Cupid sighed, and nibbled her lower lip. "Maddie, can I ask you a question?"

"You can ask me as many questions as you want, Cupid," Maddie rolled over. "Including the one you just asked me!"

Cupid did her best to smile back, but the corners of her lips were weighted with heartbreak. "What do you think they're saying to each other right now?"

"These things that be unknown to thee remain unknown until we see..." Maddie mused. "Save for in the minds of three."

"Three?" Cupid creased her brow. "Who's the  third  person?"

"Why, the Narrator, of course," Maddie extended her arm towards the sky. "But something in the stars says that things are going a-okay over there."

"Something in the stars," Cupid paused. "Or something in your heart?"

"You  do  understand what I've been saying!" Even Maddie seemed surprised.

"Well, I remember this line in a book I read," Cupid stretched out her cramped wings. "It said love is just another form of madness... and whether it's stars or hearts or circles, it's something that nobody really understands... and in that way, I guess, everyone can understand it."

Maddie scrutinized her, perplexed for a moment. Then, a smile, "Are you  sure  you don't speak Riddlish?"

"I'm a natural communicator... I pick up new languages quick," Cupid winked, and decided that, for her, maybe tonight would be okay.

Everything that would crash down upon her in the morning-- Raven and Dexter, keeping secrets from her roommate, the end of the world, and even the Spellcasting Ethics quiz she'd neglected to cram for-- those things could all wait for tomorrow. Those things could wait, and Cupid had no wish to ruin this lovely night in lovely company beneath the breathtaking cast of stars that hung over Ever After High.

Maddie seemed to agree, "You  are  good at talking to the stars... what about that blue one over there? You can be the one to tell  me  about it this time!"

And so Cupid nestled in and began spinning her a tale: "That's the eye of a prince among stars, trying to find the star he'll know is meant for him as he gazes across the skies..."

-

But beneath the roof of Ever After High, hallways away into the girls' dorms, two figures sat, as far as they could be from gazing at the stars. Raven Queen and Dexter Charming studied furiously, hunched over a truly enormous pile of paper and a formidable array of books-- seeking, while they still could, to find a way to re-do the bindings which had been lost.

"All right, so the translation marks out this passage as the lines used to create the Storybook of Legends... but there's still no information on how the stories were chosen, or how the... sacrifices... were used," Raven hesitated. "It looks like the wording of the exact stories inside might have been important..."

"But nobody touches the Storybook of Legends just to... to  read  it," Dexter cringed at the very thought. "It's an important historical artifact, and most people only ever get to open it  once  in their entire lives, on Legacy Day. That's... not exactly enough time to get down a story word-for-word. What we know about our destinies, it's all just the illustrations."

"Headmaster Grimm, Giles Grimm, and Baba Yaga seemed to know enough about the stories to make a working copy," Raven scrambled. "Maybe they kept a record of their work in doing that?"

"It's better than nothing... but the copy wasn't a perfect one," Dexter fidgeted a little. "The stories weren't all correct. Destinies got mixed up even if they were never really meant to come true. I mean... royal families keep diaries and records of the stories they live in the past. Even if the school faculty went to every royal household and collected the original tales as they've been told by mouth ever afterwards, I'm still pretty sure that the Storybook of Legends wasn't just a runic translation of traditional fairytale."

Raven glanced up, briefly, from the tome of spells she'd been perusing. "You sound really sure of that. Like... super-sure. If you don't mind my asking..."

"Well... Legacy Day two years ago. I was one of the students who signed in our freshman year-- though, um, the fake book, of course," Dexter supplied. "Before anyone had the thought of Royals or Rebels or anything. Headmaster Grimm just sort of... rounded up a bunch of us at random. I recognized the story I signed."

"So you've known whose Prince Charming you're supposed to be..." Raven bit her lip, unsure if she really wanted to know herself. She met his eyes for just a moment, so bright that they could shine straight through his glasses.

"Not... really...? I never saw the real storybook, so I wouldn't know what it had planned for me," Dexter listlessly turned a page over. "Do you remember the other people who signed that year?"

"I didn't really pay much attention... I mean, I know Faybelle signed, and maybe Crystal Winter? Since she graduated that year?" Raven twiddled an end of her hair. "There was Ashlynn, of course, and both of her stepsisters, and... wait. You're not trying to say..."

"Yeah.  That  Prince Charming," Dexter chuckled. "I don't think Ashlynn saw me in hers-- I mean, in her story, the prince has maybe one line of dialogue and a dance that gets cut off at midnight. I didn't... really have the guts to  not  sign, but I've pretty much known I couldn't follow that story... ever. I guess I thought that I could do all the, uh, necessary prince-y things and skip the wedding at the end. Maybe convince Hunter to switch places with me for the ball?"

Raven felt a strange tension seep from her, as if unsure if she should truly relax. She tried a joke, "That sounds pretty pre-Rebel."

"I mean... if you can call it that," Dexter rubbed the back of his neck. "Even back then, Hunter seemed to like her a lot, even though I don't think they'd started the whole... secret relationship thing... until after I signed. He and I have been friends for a long time, and I felt pretty bad... like I was somehow stealing his destiny? If that makes sense?"

"You didn't steal anything," Raven asserted. "Headmaster Grimm made you sign the book, and the book wasn't even the  real  Storybook of Legends."

"I'm just glad he and Ashlynn worked out and I  didn't  wind up sealing my destiny back then," Dexter agreed. "And... if I had to be honest, I'm kind of relieved I'm not part of that story anymore. I'm a lousy dancer, anyways."

Raven couldn't suppress a laugh, "Really? You were worried about the  dancing ?"

"My siblings got all the coordination in the family," Dexter shrugged and chuckled. "I guess it's all right, though... I'll take being a little clumsy over constantly losing MirrorPhones, any day. Daring keeps breaking the camera buttons on his... I think Darling's outright misplaced fifteen or sixteen of hers."

"Hear, hear," Raven grinned, highlighting a line of runes that seemed particularly interesting. "It's too bad you can't use any of that tech magic to make this go any faster... I think we're stuck doing it the old-fashioned way."

"Maybe I can..." Dexter furrowed his brows. He realized, "I mean. We know most of the fairy-physics behind the dissolution of the bond. If we make a digital model of it, with all the equations plugged into the right places, maybe we can predict the forces necessary? I guess what I'm trying to ask is how well you can visualize the spell... and if you could point out what it'd look like if I managed to get a working hologram?"

"Well, it kind of looked like a cone-ish shaped thing in my head when I read it the first time through... but I guess it would really depend on what the timeline looks like? Honestly, I'm not even sure what some of these runes mean," Raven hesitated. "I learned this curse visualization spell in Hexology. I can give it a try."

Dexter rapidly typed several lines of code onto his opened MirrorTop. Certainly enough, his program provided him the output of a theoretically infinite tree, from which he was capable of using the parameters to generate a theoretical branch, much like the world of Ever After. It was a quick couple button presses to project that image midair, faintly glowing with the lines of hidden dimensions.

"That should be it," he said, pushing up his glasses.

"And this should be the spell," Raven pointed, and indeed, the lines that appeared seemed almost like a cone. "But you see, the power dissipates a few hundred years down the line... and Ever After's been around way longer than that. Even if you loop it over and over, between the generations... it just kind of fades out."

"There's got to be something we're missing," Dexter frowned. "Spells and programs aren't so different... there's got to be something that made it work when it was first cast."

"Okay. Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way," Raven sighed. "Let's say I'm doing my homework, or something, but my program keeps crashing before I can make any headway. What's the first thing you tell me?"

Automatically, as if he'd said the words a million times-- "Have you tried restarting your computer?"

Raven glanced at him strangely, "That usually works?"

"People sort of get that problem all the time," Dexter rubbed his neck sheepishly. "I wouldn't say it works for all of them... maybe a little over two thirds? It's just, usually, a program crashing means there was an error in starting it, or there's a program running in the background that's slowing things down, or maybe the computer's just been running in the same session for too long."

"We can't restart the entire world, unfortunately," Raven sighed and studied the model. "What other things work?"

"I guess outright virus removal isn't an option either," Dexter began to pace. "Um. There's defragmenting the drive? Deleting other data? I guess the big one would be checking if the program's compatible with your operating system, and upgrading it if it isn't. That's been a popular fix since MirrorPhone OS 7."

"Okay... updating stories doesn't sound so weird, I guess?" Raven hesitated. "There's no way to write that into a spell, is there...? So that it updates automatically?"

Dexter froze. Something like epiphany crossed his face. "There is. I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner... we use these runes  all the time  in Tech Club! I only know the modern symbology, but if we can find their archaic equivalents..."

"Try this book," Raven pulled one off a pile. "I have no clue what any of it means, but there's an appendix in the back with columns labeled 'modern' and 'magic'-- which is the same thing, since we still use archaic forms for spellcasting."

Dexter quickly thumbed that book open, "It's so simple I completely forgot about it... for every  n  times that the operating system updates, the program updates an equal number of times."

He passed her a scrap of paper with a mere four runes written upon it.

"Are you sure?" Raven glanced at them cautiously. "I've never  really  cast anything with that second rune in the spell. Even though I've seen it in all my mom's spellbooks, that's a rune for  curses . Really, really  permanent  curses."

"I think that's the right equivalent to the programmer's rune," Dexter hesitated. "But... since we're only casting in  theory ..."

Raven flicked her fingers, and at once, the display of the cone became something much, much more familiar-looking. She'd never been one for embroidery, but even Raven could tell what a backstitch looked like.

She took a sharp inhale. "What did those runes even mean?"

"It's the oldest spell in the book," Dexter smiled. "'Once upon a time.'"

"Once upon a time... as in the beginning to every fairytale," Raven breathed, astounded by their breakthrough. "I mean... I know you know that already, it's just..."

"I can't believe it worked, either," Dexter let himself just slightly laugh. "We... have something in common!"

A grin erupted on Raven's face, "You're wicked smart, Dex, did you know that? We make a pretty good team."

"You know," Dexter said, feeling tremendously less awkward than usual. "Though I'm glad we're lab partners, and all... I didn't think  this  would be our first project."

Raven tried to muffle her laughter in her sleeve. "I don't think I expected it either... but all things considered, I'm  hextremely  glad we got to figure this our together."

A long shot, Dexter thought, but he might never again be brave (or giddy, or sleep-deprived) enough to ever bring it up in the days to come. And so, channeling as much of his brother's confidence as he could, Dexter suggested: "Then, maybe... I mean, if the rest of Ever After still exists... we could get a Hocus Latte sometime? Um. Together?"

Raven grinned at him, and decided right then and there-- they wouldn't have any time left to deliberate, soon, whether the world would end in the next twenty-four hours or they'd be roped into creating some completely crazy plan to prevent that from happening. It was time to stop being held back by fear, and Raven wondered if this was what Briar had  meant  by living every day to its fullest.

And so, taking the leap, Raven answered: "I think we'd better hurry to Hocus Latte  right now, before classes start. We never know what's going to happen tomorrow... and besides. After the night we just had, we could both  really  use the caffeine."

The quip sent both of them into peals of mirth again, Raven only  just  managing to calm down enough to lean her head out the window and whistle for Nevermore, their ride into Book End. She clambered atop her dragon, offering a hand up to Dexter who took it with only a moment's trepidation-- it was an unsolicited off-curfew excursion, and reckless besides, but though both of them knew it, neither could muster even the slightest care for so petty a rule. His arms wrapped around her waist, the morning breeze ruffling their hair... if the world ended now, and it would fade into non-being forever afterwards, Raven thought she would die happy.

"Hey, um, look," he smiled shakily and boldly nudged her ankle with his own. "The sun's coming up."

"The sun's coming up," Raven agreed, and relished its warmth. "Today, we're alive."


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