Veritas Virumque/P2E5

"I also couldn't explain the bizarre impression I had of being superfluous, a little as if I were an intruder." There is a story about a girl who agrees to marry the Devil. So devious and mischievous and downright insufferable was she, that Hell ordered her to be returned.

~*~

“Hello Your Highness, I’m Orleans le Nouveau, the next King of the Gold Mines, and the roommate of your brother, Turnus Wyllt. I’ve been having a few issues with him, most notably, he’s been replaced by a changeling. Would you please advise on what to do in this situation?"

With a quick press of a button, Orleans sent the above message through the InkedIn app. Soon, he saw three dots indicating typing.

“oh no” was Brutus’ first message. His next message was “Oh wait, I can easily get a person on this.”

Orleans typed up a response. “Faetastic! Thank you so much. I was so worried. He was not talking to me at all, and I felt so horrible.”

“Cool, you’re being forwarded to my wife now.” followed by a “Wow! I can’t believe I get to say ‘my wife’, this is incredible.”

~*~

A day later, at the steps of Ever After High, arrived a particular Sofia Wares. She had already set her suitcases down at a friend’s place in BookEnd, and carried with her one tote-style handbag.

For a brief moment, she looked like one of those doctors you would summon to your house, with their bag of medical supplies, ready to scrutinise. Blink again, and she was just a well-dressed computer engineer.

Given that the other two were busy, Orleans went down to greet her by himself.

She hexplained her living situation, and said not to worry about Brutus, who was here with her in BookEnd. He was working on settling into their place of temporary stay. Yes, Sofia said, the message had cut into the honeymoon, but Turnus’ life was urgent and important, and a holiday was not. Besides, from experience, she should be one of the better people to deal with such a situation.

“Have you isolated the changeling?” she said.

“He lives in my dorm room,” Orleans pointed out. “That’s not a difficult task. He’s so cocky about it, though, and insists that they’ve seen ‘all the tricks’.”

“All the tricks? Boiling water in eggshells, or beer in walnuts, or throwing him into the lake… I feel like I would always feel bad if I ever had to beat out a changeling with a switch, I’m sure there’s laws against that now.” Sofia responded to Orleans in such a way that it seemed like she was talking only to herself.

First, Sofia had to go to the administrative offices, show some ID, to get the necessary access into the dormitory buildings. Every step into the building made her feel old. How long has it been since her own school days? Being sixteen was over eleven years ago.

The room Orleans and Turnus shared had two symbols on their door. A gold bar with a palm tree stamped on top of it, and a generic set of sparkles. She pushed open the door, where she came face-to-face with the face of her brother-in-law.

"There he is," said Orleans from behind her.

"You," said the changeling Turnus.

"Of course it's you," said Sofia. "Feiynman. How many years has it been?"

"Four, if you're calculating it from when we left. Six, if you're measuring from the start. I don't miss being you, Sofia, if that's a concern."

She shook her head. "And I don't miss that either. I do miss Turnus, though. What are you doing to this poor sap?"

"My best. Higher-up request."

"Seems very boring, the life of that higher-up then. Infecting teenagers? Literal children!"

"You speak as if being replaced is a negative thing! Think, Sofia! If I weren't there, if I were never around, where would you be right now? Where word your darling brother-in-law be?" Feiynman's eyes glowed a deep yellow. "How would you know so many people? Would Turnus have ever set foot at Ever After High?"

"Forgive me, then. For thinking I should still take advantage of something horrible." Her voice was sarcastic. She did not even take a single step closer, but stood firm where she was.

The changeling that took the appearance of Turnus remained in his seat. It was a spinning office chair. Behind him, was Turnus' bookshelf of figurines and books. One leg over the other, both arms on the armrest - it was a pose almost comically diabolical.

"We'll meet again, Feiynman."

"Good luck, Sofia."

And so, the wizard spun around until she was cleanly out of the room, and closed the door behind her. Placing a hand delicately on her chest, she exhaled a short sigh in distress.

“How are you going to get the changeling out, Ms Wares?” Orleans asked.

“Not by boiling water in eggshells, for sure,” Sofia said.

"I don't know what that means."

The two made their walk back out of the dorms, and back to the central hall of Ever After High.

"So, the traditional manner of getting rid of a changeling is via surprise. I don’t know how old Feiynman is, but show them something so spelltacular that they’ve never seen such a thing in the centuries that they lived… then they’d be so shocked that they flee.”

“What could that be?”

She frowned. “Given the advent of the MirrorNet, I’ve heard changelings have been much harder to beat. Fewer things surprise you now.”

Orleans looked crestfallen.

“I mean, let’s brainstorm. I’ll share a Sword Document with you over the Cloud."

“Whatever we come up with, is it definitely going to bring Turnus back, Ms Wares?”

Sofia exhaled, and she took off her glasses. “Get a changeling out of your house, that’s the easy step.” She wiped them on her shirt, then placed them back on her face. “Get the boy back, not so much.”

“What do you mean?”

She was silent. “Have you ever read stories about changelings, Orleans?”

“Not really.”

“There’s two steps of getting a child back. First, you have to get rid of the changeling. Then, you have to wait for the fae to return your child. In the stories, the first leads to the second. In real life… not always.”

She spoke with such weight, that her very words seemed to take up physical space in the room. Orleans felt a shiver go down his spine.

“I almost didn’t.”

Orleans didn’t respond.

“I almost didn’t come back.”

When the words left her mouth, it seemed like she would regret them. What a terrible, vulnerable moment, thought Sofia, and she let herself continue.

"One hand, shame. The other, you just had your life turned upside down by someone masquerading as you - how do you even return to your old life?”

For Turnus, she thought. He was going through, right now, one of the worst times in her life. She had wished people would understand her. Right now, all she could do was make sure people could understand Turnus.

“It’s often at transitionary periods, too. Marriages are common. Births. I had just graduated university. I was about to land my first job.”

She wasn’t talking to him anymore. She was just talking.

“I mean, I aced the interview, got the job, didn’t end up actually doing the job, because a changeling took over my life and was doing the job for me and--” she sighed. “It’s a lot. They left me in their Fairyland to do IT. IT! In Fairyland! That place is one giant Faeraday’s Page…”

With a sigh--

"I'm digressing. But remember, transitionary periods. So you just entered your new life, you can't back out and run to your old one, and most of the time, you can't even deal with the new world you're in, because you lost those years of your life."

"That's… I can't imagine…" Orleans' face was one of concern.

“If Turnus doesn’t make the autonomous choice himself, then no one can forcibly drag him back.”

“He’s… he’s a very autonomous person."

There was a stubbornness in Turnus Wyllt, one that Orleans felt was a wall he could never scale. Princes like Turnus don’t bend, they break.

Sofia sighed. “Don’t rest. We still have a changeling to exorcise.”

~*~

Feiynman was well-read: one room of their house was dedicated to a private library. Pink sticky notes noted each genre, and a spell has been cast on the library so that the books would always properly sort themselves. The first time Turnus had entered the room, copies of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights had hit him squarely in the chest as they tried to make their way from "romance" to "horror".

One evening, Utility Fei found him asleep in the room, over a copy of Joseph Campspell's "Hero of a Thousand Pages".

Like an older sister, they threw a blanket over him and put out a mug of hot chocolate on the table he was at. When he awoke, they talked more about stories.

Soon, the conversation drifted to his school filled with stories.

"Ever After High, huh," Utility said. "You've read your own story, haven't you? What did you get out of it?"

"You can't subsist of love alone."

Mayblossom loved Fanfarinet. Loved him enough to take magical items from her parents and run off with him. On the island that they sailed too, she saved food for him to share together. In return, he ate it all for himself.

It was not love that saved Mayblossom. It was self and self-preservation.

It was not love that Mayblossom found. It was the knowledge of who not to love.

"Rapunzel wove a silken ladder. The Canary Princess lowered herself by tying bedsheets," Utility nodded in agreement. "What did their princes ever do?"

"Incentive, maybe. A reason to see the outside world." In other words, bait. Whenever Turnus thought about fairytale princes, the interpretation never failed to be objectifying.

Though, apply his take to his own story, and you'd soon realise that 'bait' position was easily filled by the Ambassador Fanfarinet.

Bastion Fanfarinet... that name never left Turnus' mind. Dreams might be illogical, but the once-existence of Bastion was not.

"So, don't subsist off your love for others. Very sensible. What about yourself, though? Do you love yourself?"

Turnus Wyllt never gave Utility Fri an answer to that question. To their face, he pretended it was rhetorical. But mentally, he carried that question with him.

Do you love yourself?

The apprentice at the woodwork shop was always friendly, and when Turnus needed conversation and social interaction, he found himself frequenting the place. The tarp-covered sculpture near the back always fascinated him.

“Another delivery’s coming in right now,” Polyfaemus said one day. “I’m going out to fetch it.”

Turnus took this as an opportunity. As soon as the sounds of footsteps ceased, Turnus lifted the tarp in one swift sweep.

The last time Turnus saw a mirror of himself, aside from all the silver-backed 2D ones that everyone owns, was back in the archives of Ever After. Feiynman had turned their face and body into his own, had assumed his hexistence, and had sent him here.

The eyes of the sculpture was fixed with amber, but everything else was Westerwood. Turnus did not have to be on his tiptoes to directly face this thing - it was a replica perfectly. Those golden amber eyes were a little murky, and contained a fossil: a small trapped fly in motion but no longer.

In disgust, his eyes travelled down to observe what outfit he had been put in. Painting had already begun. The jacket the sculpture wore was a prince's coat, and the buttons were painted gold. Of all the coinage metals, gold was the most malleable. At Ever After High, Turnus had worn silver.

He felt a sinking pit of horror in his stomach, then placed the tarp back over it.

"I'm back, Young Wyllt," the woodworker strolled back, his young voice ringing. "Look at this."

It was a fresh order of gloss, to make sanded surfaces smooth and even more presentable.

No more did Turnus regard the other youth with any amicably, but a disturbing horror.

Polyfaemus had a habit of looking Turnus in the eye, of always being scrutinising and critical. This was the reason, Turnus realised, to preserve him in wechselbalg form.

Do you love yourself?

Not that version of himself.

On the walk back to the Nursery, the image of the sculpture burned in Turnus' mind.

~*~

At tabletop that night, Turnus’ thoughts were occupied. He told Utility that he needed to end the session early, and ended the episode of the story on a cold note: the computer engineer shooting the ship’s doctor.

Returning the dice to Feiynman’s game room, he sat down at the poker table in the corner of it, and idly picked up a pack of cards, and shuffled.

Simple probability tells you that there are fifty-two factorial permutations in a non-joker deck of cards. The magnitude of that number is sixty-seven. Turnus thought about this -- a very, very certain thing --, then thought about something less certain, which was the view that each person would bestow about him.

Just as mathematics is constant and unchangeable, perhaps the uncontrollable nature of human perspective was as well. Turnus did not have a choice on the inevitability of statistics, Turnus did not have a choice as to whether someone objectified him or not.

What he did have a choice in was that he could look at the cards in his hands, and rearrange them. He had a choice in his response, he could choose to respond or to ignore or to address someone, and to reiterate, I will not accept this.

The memory of the sculpture still burned.

Turnus Wyllt was going to make sure that memory burned.

~*~

“Things that are surprising… things that are surprising…” Sofia hummed to herself as she walked into a game store at Ever After. She found the aisle with the product she wanted quickly, made a sharp decision, purchased it, and walked out.

Who in ever after has heard of a wizard who wastes their time with sleight of hand?