Veritas Virumque/P1E4

"He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square."

There was a particular view of the Deep MirrorNet that Turnus held. It was the place of Rose Red Rooms and Cannibal Witch Circles and ways of acquiring illegal magical substances. People tended to their vices, solicited illicit activities, and in general, were unsavoury.

So when he saw the envelope slipped under his door, with his name, and the note, he couldn’t hear his thoughts over the pounding of his heart.

Did this have anything to do with Bastion Fanfarinet?

Whatever it was, Turnus would take the risk. Truth was risky, truth was struggle, as the weird fae in the archives had said. But how was he going to get onto the Deep MirrorNet? Only villains would know, he assumed.

Besides, if this envelope held knowledge, he needed it. That day in the Archives, he could find no trace of Gabriel Fanfarinet.

It was Sunday morning, and he decided to eat breakfast alone that day. The castleteria was crowded enough that you’d have had to share a table with someone you didn’t know. Chances were, the prince that Turnus saw exiting Professor Knight’s office was holding down a table with a spare seat.

“Hey. You’re the emperor girl,” Turnus said, making his way over. “Uh, let me guess, villain?”

“Villain,” Ablative confirmed. “Seat’s free, go ahead.”

“Great. I had a question. So, do villains… get IT services or something? Other princes won’t be helpful.”

“You’d be surprised. Villains are very empress-ive,” Ablative said. “Did you know that there’s villain grants and villain trust funds and villain scholarships and villain—everything, really.”

“So that’s how cartoon villains get their funding. Makes sense.”

“Let me get to the point. We even get our own IT people, since heroes worry villains are installing malware, and villains worry that heroes install like… I don’t know, tracking devices, so it’s better for us all to have villain-destined nerds, right?”

“I see.”

“Raider Espouse is a genius, and so helpful, I can’t believe he’s a villain legacy.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but, it’s different. I’m a villain role for wanting taxation without representation. He’s a villain role for kidnapping and cannibalism.”

“This really took a turn,” Turnus said. “Listen, I don’t have the time to end up murdered. I still haven’t bought my brother a wedding gift.” Nevertheless, Turnus found himself making his way to the villain underground later that day. By villain underground, we were talking literally. When the school day was over, villains would often gather and hang out in the empty classrooms in the dungeons. For some, it suited “their aesthetic”, and for others, they were just too lazy to find a spot to sit and hang in the more crowded parts of school. Here was a microcosm dedicated to their group alone.

Granted, the villains had a system going. Some would bring video games, and host tournaments that lasted hours. There was an area dedicated to studying and homework, and having other villains nearby meant being able to practise some villainous skills, such as cheating off each other’s homework.

Dressed in sky blues and cream colours, Raider Espouse ran his IT help room. With his thick rimmed glasses and soft voice, he seemed glaringly out-of-place.

With unease, Turnus Wyllt approached the station. “Hi. Not a villain, I just need help.”

The other boy pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose, and eyed Turnus with scrutiny. “Alright, that works with me. Raider Espouse. Next Robber Bridegroom in the Robber Bridegroom.”

Turnus’ face showed no emotion when the story was mentioned.

“Oh, okay, so I guess you haven’t heard of it. You’re lucky, I wish I didn’t either,” he said, in a voice with a concentrated pang of sadness.

“Ablative said there was cannibalism and kidnapping in it. But like, same with Ginger Breadhouse’s role, and she’s one of the nicest people in this school.”

“Ablative Charming… is she here? She’s new to all this, and she said some royally nice words to me. Said that heroes are self-defined! Maybe I could also be a hero one day? Maybe more than just an IT guy. Sorry, I’m rambling! What did you need help with?”

“Uh, the Deep MirrorNet? I have a key for some place on it, not sure what to do with it.”

“Oh, fun! What for? Is that private? Sorry, I won’t pry. Nice place, the Deep MirrorNet, as long as you avoid the weird places. Be careful on there, will you?”

Turnus placed his MirrorBook on Raider’s desk. “Yeah, I guess. Thank you.”

“Alright,” the hacker took a harddrive from a box filled with them, and got working. “For starters, you’ll need sTORy.”

“My story is the Princess Mayblossom.”

“No, like S-T-O-R-Y. It’s also known as The Turnip Princess Router. It’s not a perfect acronym, we don’t really know why.” With the ease of a few keystrokes, he was prepping the laptop ready for accessing the Deep MirrorNet. “You said you were already given a key?”

Turnus pulled the envelope out from his pocket.

“No, no, don’t give me that. It’s probably private. I just want you to know what you need to do with it. There’s a baby-blue binder on one of the shelves, can you bring it over?”

Once the binder was fetched and laid in front of him, Raider cut to a point halfway through it to lists and lists of handwritten Deep MirrorNet keys. “Let’s try getting onto some of the fun sites on the Deep MirrorNet.”

“Fun?”

“The Deep MirrorNet is just everything that can’t be indexed by a search engine, right? So if Woogle can’t find it, it’s the Deep MirrorNet.”

With a few more keystrokes, Raider was in. “Look, this is such a neat place,” he gestured to the screen.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a support community forum. A lot of people can’t really air their issues on the normal MirrorNet. They might get brigaded, they might be organising protests and don’t want to be tracked, so they find community here. It’s kind of neat, really,” he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sweater. “Reminds me this place, actually. Among the villains.”

Turnus looked around. The hacker was right. In these dungeons, what he saw was cohesion and collaboration.

“I’m not a bad guy. I really, really try not to be a bad guy. Anger management courses, talking with counsellors, everything. I didn’t want the role of villain, but hey, these people call me their brother and actually treat me like a normal person… and they’re normal people too. Just luck of the draw, I guess.”

“I guess. I’m sorry,” Turnus said. He didn’t know whether to comfort Raider or not, the guy just seemed to be venting to himself. “I don’t really feel that way around my fellow princes, so this is kind of new to me.”

“The best thing to do is help people, I think. That’s why I’m their IT guy. Everyone has something going on, the reason why we lash out is because we see no other option,” Raider unplugged the harddrive from the computer. “Here, everything should work. No charge for this, but if you want, I’d really like for you to pass the favour forward.”

Turnus left the dungeons with his laptop back in his bag, the envelope in his pocket and tension in his chest.

~*~

Orleans was out at a meeting, Ramsey had a midterm on Monday that they hadn’t studied properly for, so Turnus knew neither of his friends would bother him. He checked his phone, sent Gladiolus a heart emoji, and prompted decided that the best thing to do for the rest of the day was to bury himself in his room.

sTORy was working fine on his browser, but he daren’t open up and access the key just yet.

He had to make like Utility and think like a scientist.

A notebook was easily lost and his handwriting was atrocious. Microsoft Sword documents were impossible for him to organise.

Blogs… proper blogs, with lengthy paragraphs of text and an author's bio in the sidebar, in Turnus' mind, was a lost art. If he was willing to curate an RSS feed of people whose thoughts he would gladly read in paragraph form, then those paragraphs must be well-written and meaningful.

He guessed he was going to join the bloggers he loved in restoring this art.

Opening up some blogging software, he got started.

Three hours later, while Turnus was in the middle of working how whether he liked the look of 11px or 12px text more, and which specific shade of pastel purple he wanted to use for the text, Orleans burst into the room. “It’s Sunday! The weekend’s over! Where have you been? In here? All day?”

“Busy.”

“Did you hext Gladiolus? Have you eaten dinner?”

“Still busy.”

“He’s your boyfriend. And you’re only human!”

“That’s fine,” Turnus lowered the lid of his laptop. “Can we order in? Get Ramsey, get Gladiolus, invite a few other people.”

Orleans pursed his lips. “It’s a school day tomorrow… I mean… I guess we can. We’re not going to be seeing you next week, anyway.”

~*~

That evening, Gabriel Fanfarinet was waiting for a knock on his door. He had prepared tea and put pasties out already, and was arranging the books on his small bookshelf in an order that made him look clever and learned.

He had put away the last volume - a copy of The Prince -, when the knock came.

Lanius Nightshade was on his doorstep, in his human form. Behind him, was the Princess Consort of Queen Adalinda.

“Gabriel? Gabriel, we need to talk.”

“Come through,” Gabriel said, opening the door to his place and beckoning towards the living room. “There’s tea.”

“Tea is perfect! I got your message. And you got mine, or else we wouldn’t be here, ready to talk about things,” Lanius said, stepping in.

Gabriel had prepared two chairs for them to sit on, and he was going to sit on a magic-beans-bag, but Lanius immediately dived for the magic-beans-bag.

It was still surreal to him, that Gabriel was able to host a Grim Reaper and a Princess Consort in his house, one of them being a fairytale legacy, and the other married to one. It was still surreal that he himself was a fairytale legacy. He poured the two tea, and sat down on the remaining chair.

Lanius was the first to speak. “You still remember Bastion, and for good measure. You and… you and Airmid both. And you understood that what happened with the Merlin kid almost could have violated that.”

Weeks prior, Gabriel had signed a binding magical contract that forbade him from speaking of Bastion Fanfarinet again. What had happened in his office… had he even admitted to Bastion’s existence, would have disrupted the conditions of said contract. Gabriel assumed that Airmid had a similar contract going. The upstart of a physician liked truth so much, that they would have probably told the entire world about their care for Bastion Fanfarinet if they weren’t bound otherwise.

“I’d be lying if I said you weren’t the only one who informed me of this discrepancy!” Lanius took a sip of tea. Human form was the right choice, the reaper thought, for this was good tea.

“Pythia too. My daughter knows,” said Princess Consort Adalinda.

“Of course!” Lanius made a mental note to ask Gabriel what tea he used. “No one knew Bastion Fanfarinet as well as the Adalindas. The boy told me that himself. Without the Adalindas, I couldn’t have possibly carried out the process.”

The concept is simple. If Lanius Nightshade hadn’t been doing this for centuries, you’d think he had lifted it right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell called the process “vapourisation”, and that is the term that will be used.

Vapourisation is cutting someone from existence. It is removing them from newspaper records, taking down social media posts, eradicating every possible image one could have of the person in question. One can’t exactly erase all memories, sure, but memories are tainted by nostalgia and cannot be trusted in general. Take away proof, and you will take that person out of the world.

It was what Lanius Nightshade had done to every single godchild of his.

And under Bastion Fanfarinet’s own request, it was what he had done to Bastion.

“There is no way Pythia has compromised the situation,” spoke Princess Consort Adalinda.

“We would never think of accusing Pythia,” Gabriel said.

“That’s not the point!” Lanius cut in. “I’m upset, I wish I knew that I needed to account for this. As far as we know, we don’t have any knowledge of Turnus interacting with Bastion before. Even significant relationships are affected by vapourisation, and this wasn’t one.”

He tried to take another sip of tea, but realised he had finished. Gabriel refilled the cup, and let Lanius talk on.

“So, someone got into contact with me, said that they had a hypothesis why this is all, as the kids say, wack. We’re dealing with an anomaly on our hands.”

“What is it?”

“Turnus Wyllt isn’t magical.”

“I know,” Gabriel said. “I read his file. That’s why he’s at Ever After High. His parents had very little hope that he could get a job as a wizard if he couldn’t do magic, so… princehood it was.”

Lanius frowned. “See, that’s the thing. You don’t need to come from a line of mages to practise magic. That’s not what I mean, though! Okay, think about it this way. If I gave you a pair of seven league boots, in twenty-one steps you could walk five hundred miles, and in another twenty-one, you could walk five hundred miles more.”

“So I can use a pair of seven league boots appropriately.”

“Theoretically, if I gave Turnus Wyllt a pair of seven league boots and had him walk twenty-one steps, how far do you think he could travel?”

“Five hundred miles?”

“The average stride length is thirty inches! With twenty one steps, he’d travel… uh, roughly… twenty times thirty,” Lanius paused for a moment. “That’s about six hundred inches, so fifty feet.”

“Why are we using imperial? Herr Nightshade, I can’t visualise this.”

“Fifty feet to your five hundred miles. The boots are defunct for him. That’s what I mean when I say magicless - it’s not that he can’t become a wizard, he’s just functionally incapable of using fairytale magic at all.”

Gabriel took a moment to process all of this. “Alright,” he said, still not having processed much of it at all. “What are the higher-ups hexpecting us to do about this?”

“I don’t know what the Authorities want, and frankly, I don’t really care what they want. But Gabriel, do you know what I see? I see a boy who needs our support,” Lanius said. “I think you should reach out. Keep up this consulting thing.”

“I can try. I’ll email him tonight?”

~*~

In the middle of an intense Monopoly game, an email notification lit up on Turnus’ phone. The title was simple: merely the word ‘Consultation’.

He decided that he’d reply tomorrow. Right now, he had a bank to manage and money to win.