[Voice]

[espigeonage]

[It's 11 PM on a Sunday night and Julien is bored.]

Galu, network. Random request: tell me a story.

Any story! Tell me about something that happened to you, or the other you. Or a fairytale, a joke that requires setup, something you read about in the paper, something you want to happen or really, really don't. Let me guess which one it is. I can tell you one, or a poem, or play you something from a dystopian future.

Yeah, I got the password to the other me's smartphone. It's got a lot of weird nonhuman future-music on it, and a couple of movies that haven't come out here yet. Seems like the library's got corrupted somehow, but there's still stuff there.

Comments

[espigeonage]

Nathlo, Winter. I've heard this story, though it's been a long time. Actually I think the first time it was being compared to the Rainbow Fish book!

[He gentles his voice.]

What happens in her version?

[peacefulwinter]

Oh, good, I don't have to talk about that version any more. Which is for the better... I don't know why a fourteen-year-old is reading Oscar Wilde, anyway.

She's telling it to someone else, a good friend of hers. And when she steps back from it... she compares her friend to the Happy Prince. Giving everything of herself, to the point of being self-destructive. And her friend just kind of... laughs, and tells her that that would make her the swallow.

And then her friend turns into a magical girl in front of her when it's supposed to be a big secret, and almost gets herself killed, and past-me shouts at the top of her lungs, "Let me be your swallow!" And she has to know what fate she's s-signing herself up for, and she does it anyway, and she doesn't even care.

That's where my powers come from. A girl that... is so devoted to someone that she is willing to put herself in harm's way for that person. To die for that person, if it came to that. And it scares me, a little.

[espigeonage]

I see.

[He hums tunelessly to himself, considering.]

It's certainly understandable! These other people are bleeding into us. We're becoming more like them in a lot of ways. The other me, the Apostle, is more violent and selfless than me, though I don't know if it goes as far as that. [It does. He doesn't know.] It's definitely scary.

But, it's happening piece by piece, and it's not making us forget who we are. We have to believe that we can hang on to something. Self-preservation, at the least.