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He grins, and I can see that he is quite pleased to have rattled me. He likes a reaction, I gather.
“I suppose we will discover if I am right or wrong in due course. Time reveals all. Soon you will see the true nature of the one you have made your lover, and I will enjoy that a great deal.”
“You know who I have made my lover?”
“You’re wearing a man’s clothes. By their stitching I can deduce he is a man of means and wealth, a king, likely. There is only one king who I can imagine taking such a strange princess as yourself. Therefore, yes, I believe I know who you have made your lover.”
He is making me uncomfortable. Not in a creeped out way, but in a far-too-well-seen way. I do not want those dark eyes judging me so deeply. I want them away from me. I want to decide who I am for myself, and not through the unsettlingly eloquent machinations of a mysterious stranger.
“Alright, well, nice to meet you. I’m going to head down here.”
“I wouldn’t advise it. That’s the road to Spinoff. But that’s not where you belong right now. Right now you’re approaching Climax, do you not see it? Do you not feel it?”
“Where’s Climax?”
He smirks at me in a way that makes me blush. There’s a suggestiveness to the quirk of his brow, something that tells me this secluded area could soon become quite the den of iniquity.
“Oh. OH! No, I don’t think so. I belong to King Charming.”
“Do you? Where is he?”
“I don’t know, but that doesn’t change the truth of it.”
The mysterious stranger is undeterred. “What if he never comes for you? What if you wander the Far Far Away forever, not even so much as a loose end, nothing more than a red herring?”
“I’ll worry about that if and when the time comes, for now I am on my way home.”
“Are you?”
I draw the sword, because this guy has quickly become an irritant, and I have enough of those. “Why does everyone I meet act like a complete asshole?”
“Dramatic tension?” He makes the suggestion with an unbothered smile and I lower the sword. I get the feeling I couldn’t do much damage to him with it anyway, given as he turns to shadow vapor when he pleases.
“I could share you with the King,” he suggests.
“I don’t think he’s the sharing type. And I don’t think I’m the being-shared type either.”
“Pity,” he says. “I can be a lot of fun. You don’t look like you’ve had much fun lately, princess. You look like you have been suffering in a world you do not understand.”
“That’s pretty standard for where I come from.”
“Not here in the Far Far Away. Everybody knows what their role is here, everybody knows what they have to do.”
“You must be bored,” I say. “If everybody knows what they have to do, what does someone like you have to do?”
“I try my best, here and there,” he shrugs. “It’s true, most of the inhabitants of these lands have no time and little energy for being waylaid from their labors. But I felt you immediately, the moment you arrived. You’re something quite different. Where are you from, precisely?”
“I’m from planet Earth by way of Ever After.” I see no reason to lie to him. He might already know. He might be testing my honesty, and that might matter for reasons I cannot yet comprehend. I have the distinct feeling that I am speaking to a creature of power, and that to cross him would be to risk more than I am willing to risk.
“Figures. Another planet and another continent. Ever After follows different rules, but it still follows rules. I wish you luck, naughty little human.”
“Why are you talking to me this way? I am not naughty or little.” I hate the way saying that makes me feel extra naughty and super small.
My interrogator smirks knowingly.
“Ah, but you are both, and you should be glad for it. Small enough to slip in and out of spaces when you get yourself into trouble, and naughty enough to do what must be done even when you know you strictly shouldn’t. I will enjoy watching you.”
“Maybe you could help me?”
“Help you?” He considers that. “I suppose I could, perhaps for a price.”
“What price?”
“What help?” He tosses the question right back to me.
“Could you find King Charming and tell him where I am? I could wait right here…”
“I think if you stay still, you will find your story advancing very quickly around you,” he says. “I think your king is very eager to find you. Your only task is not somehow getting yourself ever more lost.”
“You mean like in those movies, where the hero goes to find the heroine in another country, only to discover that the heroine has already gone to find him, and they’re still oceans apart.”
