tuesday afternoon

[deepest_magic]

Elizabeth's house is within walking distance. Bella goes over to it the following day, after lunch, carrying two extra clumsily-frosted but perfectly baked cupcakes in her hands and notebooks in her backpack.

Comments

[neverbeatme]

"Well, now I know what a round is."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. Most of them are nursery rhyme type things like Row Row Row Your Boat."

[neverbeatme]

"Aha."

[deepest_magic]

"You can stack them up a few people deep depending on the song, but if there are more people than lines then they start to group, obviously."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah, I can see that."

[deepest_magic]

"If you had a country to run," says Bella, circling back, "what would you do with it?"

[neverbeatme]

"Depends on the country, of course. And what the rest of the world's doing. I mean, I'd run it well, obviously, but there are a lot of different ways 'well' can go. And a lot of different ways to be able to run a country. The President of the United States has a very different job from the Queen of Fairyland."

[deepest_magic]

"I would rather be the Queen of Fairyland, I think," says Bella. "The Queen of Fairyland probably gets to learn fairy magic."

[neverbeatme]

"Not necessarily a plus. Some of those fairies are pretty nasty, I mean, in the pre-Disney versions."

[deepest_magic]

"I read old books sometimes but not usually old fairytales," muses Bella, "what d'you mean?"

[neverbeatme]

"I don't know, I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head except Hansel and Gretel and there weren't actually any fairies in that one, just lots of cannibalism."

[deepest_magic]

"There's still that in the kids' versions I've seen," muses Bella. "Or at least threats of cannibalism."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. But I mean... 'fairy' used to mean 'terrifying otherworldly creature who will steal your baby and replace it with an enchanted log'."

[deepest_magic]

"What is the log enchanted to do?"

[neverbeatme]

"Act like a baby for a week until the magic wears off."

[deepest_magic]

"Why bother?"

[neverbeatme]

"To throw off suspicion? I don't know. Fairies also don't traditionally make a lot of sense."

[deepest_magic]

"Huh. I wonder if that's just lazy writing or if there's a way to interpret them that does make sense."

[neverbeatme]

"Want to look up some fairy tales and sensify them?"

[deepest_magic]

"Do you have a good collection of the kind of fairy tales with actual fairies in them?"

[neverbeatme]

"We can check!"

[deepest_magic]

Bella hops up and starts hunting for books.

[neverbeatme]

There are some books of fairy tales available, although it is not always easy to tell which ones contain fairies.

[deepest_magic]

Bella divides up the books and starts hunting.

"Fairy tales," she pronounces after a while, "are really, really weird. I wonder if stories that get written now will seem weird in three hundred years."

[neverbeatme]

"Not all old stories are this weird. Like, the Iliad is comprehensible and that's thousands of years old. And contains absolutely no log babies or people giving birth to goats, as far as I remember."