A Savage Garden of Unwholesme Delights

you gotta digest it.

“oh man im so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now i have to keep coming back to do it again– its a long story”

Like, this analysis treats it as a substance problem, i.e. “edible matter from fairyland has properties that, if ingested, physically prevent you from being able to return to the real world.”

But OTOH, a recurring theme throughout fairy stories is that they’re all about…rules and exchanges and agreements with really steep interest rates:

“I’ll do you this favor, but if you don’t guess my name you’ll have to give me your first-born child.”

“You’re gonna be real good at everything but when you’re 16 you’re gonna prick your finger and die.”

“You loaned me $2 for the bus when I looked like a beggar, so now here’s a literal pile of gold and shit.”

Not to mention that in Childe Rowland, one of the central “if you eat food from fairyland you’re stuck there” stories, Rowland manages to retrieve his siblings despite them all presumably having chowed down on fairy food – all it took was beating the Fairy King in a swordfight and threatening to chop his head off.

The takeaway, I think, is that the food thing a matter of implicit exchange: if you get your grub on in fairyland, you’re accepting their hospitality and eating food that they own. This means you owe them, which the fairies can magically leverage to prevent you from leaving.

(You can probably get around this by explicitly agreeing to pay for your meal before you sit down to eat. From what I remember, fairies don’t seem capable of pulling a “Haha, we had an agreement but you’re fucked anyways!” maneuver, so if they agree to let you leave they might even be forced to help you leave.)

Which brings us to the matter at hand: if you blow a fairy you’re doing them a favor! They owe you.

And…they’re a fairy, so if you didn’t agree to terms beforehand they might not repay you in a way that’s ultimately helpful or safe, but it certainly doesn’t seem like they’d be able to, like, pat you on the head and be like “Thanks, you’re really good at this buuuuuuut also you’re stuck here forever now.”

“you wanna come over for the weekend?”

“oh man I’m so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now he always comes by over memorial day weekend and helps me out with minor home repairs.”

It had taken all day, but Rose had finally managed to get the headphones off. From the moment she put them on, she knew that she’d made a mistake. Somebody had done something. Changed something. Something wasn’t right.

It had been nearly a year since she escaped from the brainwashing facility, and she knew they still had operatives out, tracking her. They’d invested in her already - physical upgrades, mental conditioning - and they wanted their investment back. Nobody believed her - hell, nobody believed any of her story - but she couldn’t really blame them. It was crazy. It was the stuff of science fiction, of dystopian nightmares. It also happened to be true, unfortunately.

Rose kept mostly to herself these days. She was the first to admit she was paranoid. She left the house to work and to buy groceries - that was about it. She talked to as few people possible. She didn’t trust them. But even still, despite all her precautions, they got to her somehow.

She sat down on her bed after work, a bowl of microwaved pasta in her lap. She grabbed a book and put on her headphones. As soon as she pressed play, she heard it. A whispery, scratching noise in the background. She recognized it. It was everywhere at the facility. Broadcast over the loudspeakers, in the messages piped into the dorms, on the TVs. Rose felt her heart sink when she heard it.

The worst part was she reacted the same way she did when she heard it in the facility - she froze, and listened more closely. Everyone did. She suspected it was designed to make you do that. To stop, and to listen, to try and make out exactly what the noise was. Sometimes it sounded like words. Sometimes it didn’t. But no matter what it sounded like, you always tried to hear it better.

Rose remained cogent, though, and started to take off the headphones. Moving her arm made noise, though, and that made it harder to hear. So she stopped. Even the small sounds of fabric rustling made it harder to hear. So she could only move very, very slowly. Getting her hand up to the headphones took over an hour. Her fingers were numb by the time she got them there.

Then she had to grab onto them. That was even more difficult - it was nearly impossible to do without interrupting the sound. Then there was the issue of actually removing them. Her brain simply wouldn’t accept willingly taking that noise away. She had to listen to it. So she did all she could think of - she pulled the headphones as far from her ears as she could, sat up, and waited. She knew that before long she’d nod off. The sound always did that. Hopefully the motion of her head falling back and her grip on the headphones would yank them right off of her head involuntarily.

It took a long time. She was wide awake, and the stress and fear of the situation flooded her body with adrenaline. Eventually, though, after sitting and listening for nearly six hours, Rose felt her eyes fluttering closed. As she fell backwards, the headphones slid neatly off her head, dropping to the bed beside her, still in her grasp. As she drifted off to sleep, she gave silent thanks - maybe that was fast enough. Maybe it didn’t get into her mind enough to scramble it again. Maybe she wouldn’t remember how good it felt to be docile and simple and obedient. Maybe she wouldn’t fantasize about being programmed and enslaved and sold. Maybe she wouldn’t wake up and willingly turn herself in to her pursuers, begging them to finish her training. Maybe she wouldn’t wake up desperate to be brainwashed.

Maybe.