“Charming,” she said.

She laughed, light and twinkling and pure, the way, mayhaps, a princess might laugh, “What kind of a name is ‘Charming’?”

The thing about Princes is that it is a zero-sum game – in order for someone to win, someone else has got to lose.

The game is also stacked in favour of its earliest entrants, a sort of first-come-first-served, an inconvenient fact if you happen to be the sixth to join.

The roll of the dice called birth also features as a rather large factor in your abilities as a player. In order to qualify for Princes, you have to be born of the Queen and, presumably, the King. While this sounds perfectly fine – everyone needs have two parents, after all – in the breeding program that is royalty, it is as entirely possible to be born with an extra head as it is to maintain the fair features and the rapier wit.

It is a breeding program; royalty, very much like horses are bred. The whole problem with it is that there isn’t enough culling, which gives you a fair amount of mad kings. Horses, of course, have breeders to safeguard their bloodline. As royalty, we only have God, which is all you ought to need, excepting that theory and practice are quite two worlds apart altogether.

No matter, when I first played the game, it was heresy to question God, high treason to consider, even for a split-second, the killing of one of royal blood, breeding programs were solely for horses, and weren’t programs at all, and germs, much less genetics, were impossible, simply didn’t exist. No one would even consider these concepts, wouldn’t have the framework to get a mental picture, so suffice it to say that I was lucky to gain the fair features and the rapier wit, just as I was unlucky to be the youngest. That’s how Princes is played.

The other rules of the game are similarly strange. Officially, the players were taught what gentlemen do – fencing, riding and hunting, protocol, hawking, dancing, theology, reading and writing. Unofficially, we were supposed to learn diplomacy, statescraft, warcraft and, in addition to what gentlemen do, what gentlemen are – chivalry, noblesse oblige. The official lessons are usually learned and followed, while the unofficial ones are not, but such are the rules of the game.

The world, as we knew it, consisted of God, King, Aristocracy, Man and the Animals, females a sub-set of each group, below the males. That division is harsh and sharp, anyone below you on the order of the-way-things-are is so far beneath you as to be beneath even your contempt. The aristocracy ate well even in times of famine, the life of a peasant is worth less than that of a healthy bull.

The world of Prince number six, had, in theory, only God and King above. In practice, there were two brothers I was close enough to in age to share lessons with – Satan and his General. I never saw much of the eldest two, until about two years before I conceded the game, when I was grown enough – man enough – to keep their illustrious company. My father is the second son of his father, and from the moment that I joined the rank of my elders, I suspected that my father’s second son had ambition similar to his own.

I found out much later that this proved true, both my father and my eldest brother were poisoned, and my second brother took the throne. Satan’s General took to the cloth, rose through the ranks as was befitting his thick blue blood – royalty, and nobility, had very few options for its men; the crown for the eldest, the cloth or the sword for everyone else. Satan himself was assassinated as, ironically, general in one of the many wars we indulge in as a national pastime. My last brother, being, literally, a harmless idiot, lived to a ripe old age, over fifty, I believe.

Oh, yes, I did have sisters, three of them. They were thrown to the winds in marriages political – royalty’s singular option for its women – but they were strangers to me to begin with.

Which brings us back to the thing about Princes; it is a zero-sum game.

I don’t favour patricide, regicide or anything else that involved my benefit at the expense of another. Maybe I had learned something from the unofficial lessons – it’s possible that, even then, I interpreted noblesse oblige not as the obligation of the noble to his lessors, but as the obligation of any man to his siblings. Possibly, through the years of brutal victimisation from my brothers, I had learned what it was like to be one rung too low on the-way-things-are.

Okay fine! Most likely, I didn’t have the stomach for it. In a zero-sum game, I could be the loser.

No matter, I had had enough of Princes. As I mentioned, I conceded the game. I left the Kingdom.

Rock-Paper-Scissors is a zero-sum game. The stock market is a zero-sum game. The sum of the winnings and the losses even out – that’s what defines a zero-sum game.

In Princes, there is one winner – the King – and all the other players “lose”. Losing the game equals dying, usually, and certainly not being King, which could be a fate worse than death for some. By proper definition, Princes is or is not zero-sum based upon how you assign values to being King and not being King. Most players assign being King as infinite gain, and not being King as infinite loss.

A simpler method of definition is to see if a win-win payout exists – if it does, the game isn’t zero-sum. If there is a lose-lose payout, I would consider it best to avoid playing.

Suffice it to say that it never occurred to me that a prince is only prince with a posse of guards to enforce his rule.

The bandits – farmers driven to banditry, rather, my father’s fault – took everything I had and left me for dead. I wasn’t dead; I had fainted, possibly at the sight of my own blood, possibly at the shock of being attacked; me, attacked! I suppose they were so happy to make off with their haul that they didn’t bother to check if I was still breathing, fortunately no one had the idea of taking me for ransom.

No matter, I came to to find myself practically naked – they had taken my fine clothes – bleeding, without a horse, cold, broke, and getting hungry – no more than two of which I had ever encountered in tandem before. It was the nadir of my existence to date.

I got out of that mess, through fortune more than merit, and many worse messes besides. Luck, it would seem, was on my side.

Yes, a charmed life indeed.

Worse? Let’s see, a few dragons, a unicorn hunt – unsuccessful; our bait didn’t realise that it does, indeed, count if you did it standing up – several prison breaks, imps or leprechauns or whatever, a few wars. Sorcerers, husbands, thieves and other knaves.

I was a knave myself, full card-carrying member of the Guild of Thieves – probably still am, I suppose they call themselves lawyers or bankers now, I’ve been both – a Knight Templar, a doctor, a blacksmith, a bishop, everything short of prophet, I suppose.

Game Theory is one of those remarkable convergences of the sciences of Math and Man that result in such things as Economics.

Game Theory applies to any system where your opponent plays with the possibility of predictability.

Another aspect of the game of Princes is that we only have children with our wives. To take any other woman to bed is as unremarkable as sleeping with your hunting dogs; something we had to do in certain places come the chill of the winter frost. I’ve had many women to keep me warm, even before I left the Kingdom; too many, all in all, to remember, much less to count.

The princesses – Aurora, Cin, Snow, yada yada – I’ll tell you about them later. You realise, before the fairy tales became fairy tales, the fae were things to be feared; they were called the fair ones because you wouldn’t want to offend them by calling them exactly what they were. And the tales themselves had a lot more sex and a lot more violence, which actually shows you the marvellous power of censorship, and the still more marvellous tenacity of a good story.

Before the princesses, allow me tell you about the incident with the deep blue dress.

Consider this; the first round of Rock-Paper-Scissors is, I happily grant, totally random. Subsequent rounds, however, may not be. It becomes a mind game.

Randomness – the luck factor – is a serious consideration in any game – “climate is what we expect, weather is what we get”. In any game not predominantly dependant on luck, a strategy can be formulated, based on Math or Man. Like the metaphor of climate and weather, in a case of non-even-distribution of probability, it is still possible to formulate a strategy – even in the case of heads-or-tails, heads or tails will come up more often than the other, depending on how the coin of the realm is weighted – but that is pure math and hardly interesting at all.

Assume you have two computers programmed to play a million rounds of RPS against each other.

One of them has a strategy and the other one doesn’t, instead playing with a random choice from an even distribution between the three choices. The end result would be totally random – it can go either way.

Assume that both have strategies. The better paradigm will dominate.

Now assume that we have a million computers, in the tournament style of your choice – single elimination, round robin, yada yada. Over the course of a million games, those without strategies will be eliminated, simply because your luck cannot hold. That is the nature of probability.

Which illustrates the simple point; one cannot win on luck alone.

It also illustrates the ideal strategy for playing against a superior opponent; you force him to play on luck alone. I saw this best illustrated in a Hong Kong movie during the few years of the 80s or 90s when gambling movies were the rage. It was the final showdown between the princes, over a game of open poker. The good prince, knowing his skillz aren’t as leet as his opponent’s, without looking at his closed card, pushed in his entire stake when it was his turn to raise. The bad prince was forced to match the bet, and skill would no longer apply – they both had to depend on the luck of that sudden-death draw.

My last stint in a city had proved unsuccessful. Per usual, I had hooked up with the Guild, since they always had work for a man of my varied talents – that time, as I knew how to work a forge, I was well compensated for taking the second shift, minting coins. A second shift in a forge, if there is demand for the goods, is sound economics. Working a forge is hot and sweaty work, and the smiths had a guild of their own, keeping their secrets secret. The biggest secret of all was that there was nothing arcane about it, at least in so far as minting was concerned, but the smith they had on wouldn’t let anyone but a brother smith near his forge, good for me. The guild had a whole operation going, chipping off metal from “real” coins and making new ones. Anyhow, we got busted – someone got greedy, true then as it is now; however well run an operation is, the greed of one man will bring the ruin of all – and I barely made it out of town with a horse to ride on, a stout sword and the skin on my back still intact.

I rode through the forest, avoiding the roads on the off-chance that there might be some pursuit. An aspect of rulership is how to deal with crime – and a public execution has a lot of merit to speak of. It makes the criminals think twice before crossing the line, it gives the peasants some entertainment, and it gives the guards someone to pick on – if left alone, they’ll pick on your peasants, and an unhappy peasantry is a revolution waiting to happen. At the very least, it creates a degree of fear, and it is far better to be feared than loved.

I’m not sure how long I ran, but it was at least a day and a night, until I came across the hut.

In the hut was the witch.

Well, a witch, really – there seems to be a lot of them, though it’s entirely possible that it’s the same one. Anyway, this was a real witch, none of those village midwives or charlatans or whatever. The real deal, with Malleus Maleficarum stamped on her forehead. She had me convinced because the door swung open as soon as I had raised my hand to push it – we don’t knock on the doors of peasants – and when I got inside she had a second bowl of the slop she was eating set across from her upon the low table, obviously expecting a visitor. The only chair in the decrepit hovel was in front of that second bowl, she herself was seated upon the air, or perhaps an invisible chair – though I fail to see the point of having an invisible chair, it’ll probably trip you up more often than not.

She didn’t even look up as I entered and took the seat. The slop tasted amazingly good; some glamour, I suppose. And then, when we were done, she brought up the subject of the deep blue dress.

There is a tendency among optimists to believe that they can beat the house – you cannot, not with a consistency that counts, anyway. I grant you that there are methods, in certain games, to beat the house, but it takes so long and you make so little that it becomes the equivalent of “real work”, which defeats the purpose entirely.

An optimist with a method is a fool and his money. The optimist has a tendency to see pictures in the clouds. He figures… let’s take Roulette as an example. The optimist will figure that, should the ball land on 29, it is unlikely that it will land on 29 again, so he marks it down on a list, marks the next number that comes up, yada yada. Once it does land on 29 again, he starts up his second list, since it is extremely unlikely that the ball will land on 29 a third time.

While it could be true – I’m not a scholar – that the ball has a higher chance of landing on another number before it lands on 29 again, the optimist does not realise that he is not betting on those odds. Or, rather, he is, excepting that the house doesn’t recognise that fact and the payoff hasn’t been adjusted accordingly.

The game of Roulette has no feedback-loop, any iteration is as random as the first iteration. Weather without climate.

The thing about magic is that it’s real. It’s harder to believe that we get sick because of little animals we cannot see – if it’s so small that we cannot even see it, how can it possibly hurt us? – than it is to believe that we fall sick because we were dastardly cursed, or our humours were wrong, or the inopportune stars were against us. The church was small, then – sure, they talked against magic, work of demons and all that, against God, yada yada – but even the aristocrats knew better. Magic was real. Saying that it’s Satan’s work instead of the fairies’, well, what difference does that make?

Like all Kingdoms, we had our fair share of dragons and the knights bold who slew them, yada yada, but no more than twice a lifetime, if you’re really unlucky – usually a single dragon was good for a few generations worth of tavern conversation. Magic was real, but it wasn’t common. Charms and the like were peddled in any place where two huts stood together, miracle potions, yada yada, but my time with the Guild quickly opened my eyes to that particular scam, something I suspected even before I saw the factory where they churned out the fingerbones of saints.

We even used to have our own Sorcerer, but when the Kingdom because Christian, he was burned at the stake for heresy – before my time. No matter, I had seen enough in my travels to know that magic was real and that certain people were best not offended.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma… Two burglars, Bob and Al, have been captured near the scene of their crime. They are separated by the police and singly interrogated –

Good Cop: “Bob, you know I want to help you, but you have to help yourself.”
Bad Cop: “Good Cop, don’t bother with this motherfucking piece of lowlife scum, his buddy has already sold him out –”
Good Cop nods sadly in affirmation of the unfortunate fact.
Bad Cop continues: “– so let’s just send his sorry ass to jail. I’m sure the homo can’t wait to make some new friends, can you, loverboy?”
Good Cop: “Bob, you know I want to help you, but you have to help yourself…”

So Bob thinks:

If I confess and Al doesn’t, I go free.
If Al confesses and I don’t, I go to jail on the maximum charge, twenty years.
If both of us confess, we both go to jail, on the same charge with leniency for cooperation, ten years.
If neither of us confess, they’ll nail us with some lesser charge – say, carrying a concealed weapon – one year.
Once I get out of this, I’ll sue Bad Cop for police brutality.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma isn’t a zero-sum game.

The witch offered me immortality in exchange for the deep blue dress.

I didn’t ask her why she didn’t keep immortality for herself since she was old and obviously needed it, or why she needed the deep blue dress since she was ugly and it couldn’t possibly help. What I said was, “Okay”.

I would have done it for more of that amazing slop, anyway. I was full and warm, glad to be alive, and still young enough to believe that I already had immortality.

So she loaned me a vest of dragonhide, an enchanted blade to replace my stout, though mundane, sword, and set me off to kill the troll who had the deep blue dress.

A week later I was back, none the worse for wear.

Much, much later, I would look back and realise that the whole deal had “Set-up” written all over it in bright gaudy colours, but, as I mentioned, I was young and didn’t know any better.

Why? I was there and back in a week, the troll wasn’t even trying that hard not to get killed – she could easily had gotten the dress for herself.

I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe she thought it would be funny to give me immortality, maybe she wanted to punish me for something I had done. Maybe she was the Angel of Love, maybe she was the Devil himself – I wouldn’t find that last hard to believe.

No matter, the deep blue dress was obviously magical. It was sapphire, if sapphire could be cloth that could expand or contract to give a perfect fit to any woman who wore it. It revealed or concealed depending on the light, and, I suspect, upon the intentions of its owner. It was stunning on its own; when worn, it accentuated whatever beauty its wearer had, however well hidden that beauty may be. The end result is breathtaking. Standing ovation, if you know what I mean.

Yes, I had had opportunity to see it – or one like it – worn, though not by the old witch. It would probably go very well with Cin’s crystal slippers, but the Ash Child never got a chance to try it.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma isn’t a zero-sum game.

Considered on pure math – without regard for the fatal penalty of being a snitch – Bob attempts to navigate his way out of the maze. If Al confesses; I get twenty years if I shut up, ten years if I squeal – best to sing like a canary. If Al shuts his clam; I get a year if I do the same, I go free if I spill – best to sing like a canary.

Bob sings like a canary. So does Al. They both get ten years.

The Ash Child? That’s Cin’s archetype. She’s a phoenix. Orphaned, ill-treated by her step-mother and step-sisters – because, to some at least, blood is thicker than water – fairy god-mother, yada yada, happily ever after with her prince.

I probably shouldn’t tell you that “happily ever after”, as a unit of measurement, isn’t really all that long – I left a while after that. I wasn’t even really the prince – I was adopted by the king after I saved his life, made his heir before his first-born was little more than a tot. Next thing I knew, there was this big party for me to find a bride to keep the family line going; the old coot – remember what I said about culling? – didn’t give too much thought to the necessity of the royal family having royal blood. He didn’t know I was a prince, of course, and Cin was as blue-blooded as your next peasant. But she was soft and warm and sweet and, well, grateful, I guess. About the time that she grew out of it, first-born was perhaps old enough to realise that his birthright had been usurped and ready to do something about it. Having already quit Princes before, I did so again, even though this time I was in the lead.

No matter, my story isn’t the same as the Ash Child’s. She has about ten thousand variants, one for each culture – I sometimes think that maybe the ash that became cinders started off as the Ash Tree that is the Tree of Life – but who knows? Maybe it was my story that started all those stories, maybe that was why the witch gave me forever, so I could start a bunch of stories. Or maybe I had just played an unwitting part in re-enacting a tale as old as time – God knows that happens every day.

I don’t know. Maybe she married the first-born, maybe she ran away with a travelling salesman, most likely she was executed – that’s how Princes is played.

Rock-Paper-Scissors has ten thousand variants too, one for each culture. The game is played between two players, using only their hands, with three signals – A wins over B wins over C wins over A, with similar signals cancelling each other out, resulting in a tie.

One variant has a tiger, the village chief and his mother. Another has a bird, a stone and a pool of water.

I found a non-zero-sum variant of RPS many years later – Ready-Aim-Fire.

Each player makes a gun with his hand. After the ritual chant, she can choose to shoot herself, someone else or up into the air. If she shoots herself, she dies – unless someone else shot her, because it’s terribly bad form to shoot a suicide, they die instead. If she chose to shoot someone else or shoot the air, and anyone shot her, she dies.

In multiplay there are usually multiple casualties, which makes it a great drinking game.

So I came back, a week later, none the worse for wear.

The troll had killed my horse, probably meant to eat it.

Yes, I have. Very much like beef. Uncanny, really.

I remember the next bit very clearly –

I gave the witch the dress; it was shining, like a sapphire would. She took it, placed it on her bed, then she turned to me, held out a hand, with her palm open, a small bottle in it.

I remember very clearly because when I saw her hand – a chain of some black metal around her wrist – I thought to myself, “her hand isn’t worn, no wrinkles, nothing.” It was like a young girl’s hand, excepting one detail, she had nails like glass. Then I looked up into her face, and I realised that I had never seen her face before. It had been rather dark before, of course, and she had kept her head down, with her hair like a hood, and I just thought she was old because her hair was white and, well, that’s what witches are, old. But I saw her face, then, and she was smiling, and her eyes were empty – literally, no pupils, nothing, just white, all-through.

Next thing I knew I was in the forest again, no idea where the hut was. I must have drank the potion, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now, but I didn’t know it then, and I surely don’t remember drinking it.

Well, what else could I do? I ran.

I ran until my legs fell out beneath me. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed it all, fell on my head or something. I felt like I had stumbled into Fae and out again, couldn’t be sure if a hundred years had passed.

I wasn’t sure if I had gone insane, or if the world had gone insane and left me behind, until I got to a town and then a city – you couldn’t tell what year it was in a town, there wasn’t a calendar of any sort, no need for one – and had gotten back into my life as the artisan formerly known as a prince.

Now consider iterations – take the Turing-level AIs, Bob and Al, and put them through a million burglaries failed.

After a few iterations, Bob detects that Al could possibly have a pattern:

Al is random – Good Cop, Bad Cop sometimes works! – Bob will always confess, and fluctuate between ten years and freedom, random-distribution.
Al sings more than he shuts – Bob will always confess, again, fluctuating between ten years and freedom, on the side of ten.
Al shuts more than he sings – Bob will never confess, fluctuating between one year and twenty, on the side of one.

Similarly, Al will detect that Bob possibly has a pattern too. Each behaviour will reinforce the other, and the end result would be both confessing for ten years each – the self-choice – or both not confessing for one year each – the team-choice.

Obviously the team-choice is favourable. This is where Math ends and Man begins – this is why we have the Thieves’ Guild, to encourage the team-choice by making the penalty for the self-choice significantly higher than ten years – in effect, stacking the odds.

One day I returned to a minor city I had left a decade earlier, though I hadn’t known that so much time had passed. I found one of my old cohorts and he had greying hair, five children with his name – nice kids, too, very polite.

He told me I hadn’t aged a bit.

I laughed it off then, of course, but I offered his eldest son a gold crown to find me the largest mirror he could – they were made of steel then, beaten flat and polished and polished and polished – with the promise of another coin if his find was big enough to warrant it.

I gave him the promised coin, and his father ten crowns besides, on the grounds that it was a debt a decade old. It wasn’t, of course, but a man needs his pride.

When I got back to my room at the inn, I lit all the candles they had, noticing as I did so that my hands, though rough, were free of creases. My face had not a wrinkle, the same face you see now. I undressed, trying to remember every winter since I had left the Kingdom, and realising I couldn’t, but that enough had passed, far too many for my skin to be so smooth, my muscles so taunt.

That was when I realised.

There is a class of people who believe that man is an animal, and that animals follow the law of the jungle – that might is right. Such people will always make the self-choice. These people can be the leaders of “teams” and assume they are making the team-choice, when what they are doing is making the self-choice for their entire team.

This is why we have an Arms Race. If both rivals decide to mutually stop escalation, the threat would remain constant, and the money could be spent on, say, education or health care. This is why we have War, Famine, Plague and Death – the four riders of the zero-sum world game.

The princesses… Even after I realised that I wouldn’t age, I still took care not to get executed, just in case. And anyway, if one couldn’t die one could certainly wish one would, with people who are trying to burn you at the stake, as an off-hand example.

As far as I know I don’t have any children, by princess or otherwise. I stayed no longer than five, ten years in any one place, which seems long enough to confirm that if I could father, I would have. I am left to presume that I can’t.

The thing about the princesses is that it’s a game, like Princes, excepting that there aren’t any losers. Perhaps more similar to, say, a play, or algebra. You can change the value of x and y, but the equation, and the result, will always be the same. I would stumble in, somehow, if they were princesses already, and I would end up marrying them. Or, less often, but Cin wasn’t the only example, I ended up as prince to a Kingdom and she would end up marrying me.

While I hadn’t been in bed with every princess of every Kingdom I’ve been to – nor even one princess of every Kingdom – I’ve never bedded one I would not wed, nor have I wed anyone without a Kingdom in the bargain, either on the giving or receiving end. That’s one of the strange rules about the princess equation.

There are other rules. There’s always a witch; either they’re bad witches, or they’re good, in which case they’re called fairy godmothers, but they wick just as well as the witches. She’s always trapped in a tower – either a tower on its own or the tallest one of the castle – I wasn’t sure about this until I realised Cin’s midnight call came from the clock tower, twelve big bongs. And, I suppose by extension to the wicked-rule, there’s always enchantment. And there’s always the white horse.

I’ve become quite suspicious of white horses.

Buckminster Fuller’s objective for the World Game is a simple one: “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological damage or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Bucky proposes that electricity is the common denominator of all human-need systems; food, shelter, health care, communication, education, yada yada. This is illustrated by the fact that standard of living is higher across-the-board in places with electricity than in places without, and that electricity can solve a lot of the human-needs problems – pumping and processing of water, irrigation and processing of crops, packaging, preservation and transport of food, yada yada.

Happily ever after, ever after? No, not once. I always left. I didn’t want to be King, have never been. I didn’t like Princes but I knew how to play it.

When you’re King, you’re no longer playing Princes, you’re the target for those who are, and that’s a death-wish.

Granting that electricity is the Holy Grail –

Bucky than proposed the Global Energy Grid. Within the Grid, which is a hook-up of already existing electrical networks, the peaks-and-valleys of usage will average out to maximum cost-efficiency for each member nation. The Grid will increase standard of living, reduce fossil fuel use and pollution, reduce deforestation and the spreading of deserts, relieve the population explosion, reduce world hunger, enhance world trade and promote international cooperation and peace.

Bucky first proposed the Grid in 1969, as the highest priority objective of the World Game. His proposal was, in fact, a practical one as opposed to an ideological one – Bucky was a scientist, something his distracters are quick to forget when they dismiss his “Utopian” ideas, he had had the ideological plan for the Grid as early as the 1920’s.

The Grid is an example of a non-zero-sum model of economics, as opposed to the traditional zero-sum models, “which were created in an age of scarcity and surviving in an age of abundance only due to inertia, ignorance and greed”.

Doctor, I think I understand.

The tower is the only building I can see from the window in my room; the princesses are the nurses that work here; the white horse is my bed. Are you the witch? Or is that my mother?

Princes is a game of poker; is it my turn to deal?

No? Then kindly save your observations until I’m done with my story.

The ideal strategy in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is called Tit-for-Tat. When dealing with a new opponent, you assume that she is a team-player and act accordingly. Thereafter, you repeat your last interaction with her. If your opponent is inherently a team-player, or, at least, also following the Tit-for-Tat strategy, you will both benefit throughout the game. Otherwise, you get burned once, and become twice shy.

The deep blue dress… Snow had one, she was wearing it when she ate the poisoned apple and fell asleep, so I guess the dwarves had found it, or the witch sold it to her and gave her an apple to sweeten the deal. They always fall asleep, you know, they never die, maybe they can’t, like me. The Indian variant of Cin’s story has her falling asleep too, until her prince woke her up by returning her stolen necklace.

No, not all of them fall asleep somewhere in the courtship.

However, they do always get “reborn” – awakened – in one way or another, at the end. That’s a rule, if your definitions are vague enough. If nothing else, by the end of each story they are no longer virgo intacta, which qualifies as rebirth, I suppose.

No matter, Snow was asleep wearing the dress. So I, uh, “kissed” her and she woke up, and the dress kinda showed me everything; which is why I think it can tell the intentions of its wearer – no girl is as ready to go as one who has just gone, or came, as it were. It was very effective, but, even though she was eager for the encore, already having had my immediate need taken care of, I didn’t like the idea of the dwarves interrupting. No, I didn’t know about the dwarves then, but it was rather obvious that she didn’t build the hut all by herself, and, besides, it was full of masculine objects – pickaxes, that kind of thing.

She kept the dress, and she wore it often. In public is was totally decent, in private it was totally not. A most amazing thing, I must say.

The dwarves were executed, the hut burned down. Honour of the Crown and all that. They had lived with the princess, and there would be talk if word got out. You can’t trust dwarves anyway, they’re like trolls, only a lot smaller. She didn’t know, of course, no reason to worry her pretty little head. It’s a man’s business, and a man took care of it.

Yes, indeed, that is how the game is played.

Tit-for-Tat does not propose something as illusory as “goodness” or “morality”. Appeal to man’s better nature? Consider the optimist and his method.

Tit-for-Tat proposes cooperation and compromise in mutual self-interest. The law of the jungle – as well as the law of the house – still applies, but team-play, as opposed to the zero-sum self-play, creates better benefits for all.

Yes, it actually creates something out of nothing; that’s what synergy means.

Maybe I drank that potion and I went to Fae and I’m still in there; maybe I drank that potion and I’m imagining you, and this entire world of yours.

Maybe I didn’t drink that potion and I’m an adolescent repressed-homosexual weaned on too much Disney and dreaming everything that passed.

Maybe I’m just lying; you said yourself I’m inconsistent.

I’ll tell you something, though. You may think I’m mad because everything is a game to me; but I think that that is a hell of a lot saner than you being so sure that everything isn’t.

So that’s it.

My story, Charming’s story. Several times prince but never king, slayer of dragons, rescuer of maidens fair, yada yada.

Yes, of course, and a player of games.

Feetnotes ::

Game Theory was founded by John von Neumann, a mathematician, as a splinter of Economics. The Prisoners’ Dilemma was invented by Albert W. Tucker, also a mathematician, while addressing an audience of psychologists at Stanford University, where he was a visiting professor. I found out about Ready-Aim-Fire from a Richard Garfield article in Duelist a few years back. Garfield is another mathematician and developer of the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. R. Buckminster Fuller, developer of the World Game and the Global Energy Grid, is yet another mathematician, though he has something like forty honorary degrees, so he qualifies for any scientific title you care to bestow.

Prince Charming, the Princesses Cinderella, Snow White and Aurora are not mathematicians. Amusingly, they are more popular than those who are.

On that grounds, I refuse to have anything to do with math.

The original story was written over a night or two in Scorpio. The parts-in-different-font was written and grafted on in a painful surgery over a few hours after I read a few paragraphs of a URL the Muse had sent me. Like Princesses, all a Muse need do is to exist – like a chemical catalyst, they just sit pretty and all the work gets done around them. Unlike Princesses, kittens can be disruptive, being naturally sadistic and unable to tell the difference between pain and play – then again, not that different from some princesses.

Let me give you the track of the train of thought that led to the original story, artistic process and all that;

• Once upon a time I had decided to write Prince Charming’s story, an expose revealing him as the misogynistic philanderer that he is.
• I already had the milieu for the third part of the five-part Heaven arc I am currently writing – since, being part 3/5, the milieu was already decided – but had only vague ideas for the plot – between a human poet, part of which I had already written; and Dracula, which I am loath to write until I’ve actually read the damned book.
• I saw the first episode of the second season of Popular and Spam called Nicole “Satan”.
• I thought that sounded really cool – somehow, being called Satan seems more like a compliment than a curse.
• Lucifer could replace Dracula and still fulfil the necessary plot points, and I knew Lucifer well enough to write her, though I wanted a male protagonist because there is simply too much lesbianism going on in the three parts already written.
• “The Devil and the Deep Blue Dress” came to me somewhen along the way, and I could never resist a witty tagline.
• Also somewhen, the Charming idea came back to me.

So one morning, resisting the slide from dream to wake, entire sections of this current story came to me, and I got up to write. I forgot all of the dream-inspired parts by the time I finished with the introduction, which proves that notebooks are rather a good idea, but the story got written anyways, in spite of one feline’s idea of a zero-sum game.

What does this say about my artistic process? Probably only that I have too much time on my hands.