Veritas Virumque/P2E6

"At that very moment, I thought that I could either fire or not fire." There were four mugs present on Potential Charming’s desk, and two coffee machines. All four mugs were gifts, and three of them were from his six-year-old son (paid for by his spouse, obviously).

“Feiynman’s switched again.” Sofia Wares gave no introduction as she walked in. Potential’s door was ajar. He believed that he had nothing to hide, academic privacy be damned.

The fourth mug was from Sofia. It was a Secret Santa gift, from a small holiday gathering of a very small and specific group of people. On the mug, there was an artwork similar to those diagrams on human evolution - hominid species walking towards the right, following each other, except that the species in the diagrams were various types of fae. Underneath it, in nice typography, were lyrics from Bowie: “ch-ch-ch-changes”.

In other words, everyone in that group had the hexact same type of humour.

“Oh?” said Potential, perking up from his desk. It faced the door, and the only window in the room was not behind him, but on his right. “I guess we’ll be seeing Utility at the holiday parties?”

“That’s your first reaction? And not, ‘oh no, who is this poor new sod’?”

“Oh Grimm, you’re right, Sofia. That’s so rude of me,” the words that exited Potential’s mouth may have sounded sarcastic, but everything the prince said was genuine. “Who is this poor new sod?”

“My brother-in-law.”

“Oh no, poor sod.”

~*~

When Sofia Wares first stepped into the Nursery, piano music was playing from the upstairs. It wasn't piano music played well. You could tell that whoever was at the piano was still learning the piece, with how many wrong notes hit, and how many times that they had to stop and repeat a section.

With a mechanical pencil, over a piano, Potential Charming was going over Morning Song from Grieg's Peer Gynt. He was circling a note that had been consistently erroneous when a bell downstairs rang, indicating that someone had entered through the door, so he exited out to greet them.

A woman was there - lost and confused, with large framed glasses that obscured the rest of her face. “I’m Sofia…” she said. “I’m new here?”

The interjection that Potential Charming likes to use was ‘by von Schonwerth’, but this was four years back, and von Schonwerth hadn’t been rediscovered yet. So, his response was a simple question: “human?”

“Uh, wizard.”

“So human.”

“Yeah.”

“Great! I’m human too!” and he extended a hand. She awkwardly shook it.

“Were you… uh--”

“Replaced? Of course.” Potential answered in a tone that made it sound like it was obvious. “If you’re here, it’s probably the same fae, so I’m leaving now. I want out.”

She frowned. “But I just got here! Who are you, even?”

But Potential Charming had already run past her, and was out the door. “Potential Charming!” he called. “I’m Potential Charming, once again!”

~*~

“Anyway,” he said, and opened up a drawer to reveal a coffee pod, which he proceeded to put into one of the coffee machines. “Congratulations on the marriage. Spouse and I end our regards. Did you get my gift in the mail?”

“The decorative key, wasn’t it? The craftsmanship of it is incredible.” Sofia remembered it. Immediately after she had opened the box, she told Brutus to wear it around his neck with a ribbon. He did. If he didn’t, she would have bugged him until he did.

“You kids and your fancy smart-locks. I think I’m getting old.”

“That’s not why you sent the key.” She knew too well. You don’t come out of hosting a changeling without intense paranoia from the incident.

“Everybody thinks about keys as things that open other things. That’s true, but they do more than that! They close off things, too.” The espresso machine had finally finished its brew. Potential then added an imbalanced ratio of milk and whipped cream to the espresso, and topped it with rainbow sprinkles. “Transition stages, Sofia. That’s when they prefer to strike. You know when I was replaced? I was just recently married. And we were hexpecting.”

“Anyway, we have to talk about Turnus Wyllt.”

“What a good kid,” Potential said. “I remember Turnus well. He was so smart! So energetic! Told me a lot of cool facts about outer space. What a good kid.”

"And you made him a trophy prince."

"Well, yes. The social standing is nice. Maximised rewards for minimal effort. I enjoyed being one, it's near universal."

"Such a smart kid, you said, with so much potential…"

“I genuinely don’t think you can be ‘too smart’ to be a fairytale prince,” he said. “That’s just… I don’t know, that’s just underestimating the abilities of fairytale princes. We can do things other than waiting to be rescued by princesses.”

Sofia sighed, and shook her head. "We keep digressing! Also, you keep missing the point. This is about Turnus. He's been kidnapped by the faeries."

"That's not very fun. The being kidnapped by faeries part. But the people you get to meet are!"

“Brutus is the greatest person in my life,” she said. “Not everyone handles being kidnapped by the fae well. The fact that he's able to get me through this...”

“Very few of us do,” Potential nodded in agreement.

“I spent my last two years recovering from the two years before that. You know how it is.”

“Legally, I’ve been married for six years. In reality, I’ve only been married for four.”

The way that the two spoke was always disjointed to a third listener. It was as if their statements never truly responded to one another, and were just thoughts, vaguely related, thrown out into the air. Perhaps it was due to an innate sense of understanding, perhaps both were stubborn and cared too much about their own voice too much to listen.

Potential Charming stopped talking, and proceeded to drink more of his coffee. “I will see my son grow, no one can take that away from me. Whatever the sort of person Turnus truly is, a switch can’t take that away from him.”

(But Princes like Turnus don’t bend, they break.)

Sofia, who was distressed, suddenly seemed even more sad. “Maybe it’s my fault,” she said. “Brutus’ parents never dreamt of destiny. They didn’t even think Ever After High was a possibility. But Turnus is so smart. He’s one of my favourite people. If I had to see him suffer, just because he couldn’t do magic-- if I had to see him lose opportunities, just because of his environment… and what I did was get him into Ever After High and make him no more than just a prince and with no expectation, and he got bored and tired and repressed, and if it weren’t for all of that, he probably wouldn’t have gotten into this mess, or attracted the attention of people who want him out of the way because of who he is and--”

And with that ramble of hers, which was difficult to follow for Potential (who was in the room) and acceptably frustrating and long enough for the casual reader to skip over, she finally took a seat in Potential’s office.

“Didn’t you say that I was the one who made him a trophy prince?”

“Yes, but it was my idea in the first place to even send him here! You’re right! There’s very few accessible story openings otherwise! What was I thinking?”

Instead of making another coffee, Potential took a mug, wheeled his office chair over to the water filter, and poured Sofia a mug of water. She took a sip and several long deep breaths.

“Being an Ever After High student is a gift in some ways. I like to think of it like that,” Potential said, after a bit of time. “You get to meet cool people. You get to talk to cool people. You get your name written down and artwork commissioned of you, and the bards of today write some spiffy ballads. It’s a pretty neat life.”

With a final sip, he finished off his coffee.

“You could fight and die and live a short glorious life in Troy. You could sail back to Phthia and live a long life in obscurity.” He took a sip from the coffee he just poured.

“I’m not following.”

“I like to think that I’m granting glory.”

Conversations with Potential always seem to digress like so. The prince was so concerned with ‘the wider world’, with ‘human nature’, and what it meant to be a person. Sometimes, he could forget about individual people. When Sofia spoke to him, it could be confusing. She liked to think in specifics, in non-redundant clear lines of thought.

Potential liked the system, to some extent. The system worked for him. He had the personality for it, he obsessed over it. Meanwhile, Sofia was never part of it.

“Potential,” she said to get his attention again. “How do you want your son to be?”

“How do I want him to be? He’s his own person!”

“Answer my question.”

“Fine, fine. No matter how he turns out, I hope that he’s a greater person than I am.”

“And how do you hope the legacies you assign to be?”

“Same thing. A greater person than their predecessors.”

“Okay,” and Sofia wondered if the way she was approaching this problem could be equivalent to the Socratic Method. Either way, she decided that it was some horrid human mimicry of an if-else loop. “If you think about it, I’m technically your successor, right? The witch after me, Utility Feng, was our successor. Now, Turnus is there, in the Nursery, and he’s succeeding all of us, as the host of Feiynman! You have words, you have ideas, all this ‘succeeding your father’ talk!”

She didn’t have to finish her thoughts for Potential to see her thoughts. “You want him to have a better life… be a better person… than either of us.”

“Yes!”

“And if I speak this prettily about all of this, then I am duty-bound to ensure Turnus Wyllt’s comfort and happiness?”

“Of course.”

He sighed. “Fine. What’s your plan, Sofia?”

From her bag, she took out an engineer’s notebook, with clearly sketched out designs. “A second opinion, mostly. From someone who actually knows how to pun.”

Without fail, Potential Charming made another coffee. He was out of coasters, so from his bookshelf, he pulled out a recent edition of the Odyssey, set it down on the table, and set the coffee down upon it.

~*~

Utility Feng returned with the Nightmare Fog in a mason jar. The lid was sealed shut with Page-afilm. Inside, the contents themselves seemed to fight with another - shapes dark, like magnetic iron sand. They kept it on the kitchen table, only for Turnus to store it inside a tote bag he had found.

“Is faerie fire under human arcane?” he asked them. “Can witches cast it?”

But Utility merely told him that Dungeons and Damsels was not a reliable source for magical reference.

He thought of fire a lot, mostly in dreams. The thoughts have replaced those of Bastion Fanfarinet -- for a more pertinent issue, an issue more direct to him.

Some people won’t ever be able to cast fire spells, but boxes of matches stowed in kitchen drawers do exist.

~*~

The first time Turnus talked to Polyfaemus, he had asked a simple question: a favour for his name. What Turnus needed now from Polyfaemus was not merely the knowledge of the man’s name, but access to his work.

In the neatest handwriting he could, he produced a list of questions. At the very bottom of that paper, he gave space to sign. Name, requested the blanks he gave. Occupation. Property.

While browsing the woodshop, he politely prodded Polyfaemus into an interview, and for “authenticity purposes”, told him:

"I need your name. And property."