Work Text:
The mornings continue to blur together.
Maybe you have time for another shower?
You turn the water on and wait for it to heat up before stepping inside.
Today, you're thinking about modality.
Modality and media and magic spells.
You're pretty sure you know what medium you're in. And it's not one that's working out great, honestly.
So here's the thing. Stories and magic spells are more similar than you'd previously considered. If there's one thing you've figured out about magic, it's that everything depends on how you look at it. Whether a story or a spell is successful is all in how you look at it. Which is to say.
Sometimes you can cast a world-changing spell just by
Changing
Your
Perspective
{Okay.}
That's better.
"In essence, stories are about characters and the most interesting stories are often told with dissonant characters; as it is the surprise, the disturbance, the accident, the sacrosanct disruptive element, that justifies the very act of telling a story."
Seraphine, Frédéric. 2016. “Ludonarrative Dissonance: Is Storytelling About Reaching Harmony?”
"The ‘alternativeness’ of fan fiction universes varies from slight shifts in a series of related events, often made due to the desire to save some character from death or rotate the view on various characters and events, to the complete ‘plowing’ of the whole picture of the world, when even the laws of its existence change."
Samutina, Natalia. 2016. Continuum. "Fan fiction as world-building: transformative reception in crossover writing."
...
.....
......
Now where were we.
Oh, right.
You think you've spent enough time in the shower.
As you walk into your chambers, Puck literarily materializes at your shoulder. "What have you done?"
"I've moved the court," you say. Huh. You actually said something. Let's see if it will work twice.
"I've cut us off from the other queen," you say. Nice.
"You've given us to Her!"
You rather think that's not the case.
First off, there's always another day, after all. All you have to do is look back. And now no one can go stale, trapped, forever repeating the final thing they said.
Second, there's rather more than one of Her now. You think better of sharing that part out loud.
Not that it seems to matter. Puck storms off anyway, but that's par for the course at this point.
The day passes without the War coming to your doorstep, for once, and you go to dinner. Those from the Stale Feast have... woken up? They sit chatting with the others in the cafeteria (pizza again). A familiar fairy even walks up to you and thanks you for granting her petition. You think you'll be smug about that for a long time.
Puck doesn't come back.
Eventually, it is time for sleep. The court settles down for the night, and you wait for things to start to move.