A princess! Today just gets more and more exciting. Ari sketches a quick half-bow to her, in case she's a stickler about that once she's introduced herself. "Sounds like a nice gig," he says cheerily. "I thought that was the kind of thing you knew in advance, though. There a story to that?"

"I was kidnapped as a baby and kept in a doorless tower until someone stumbled across me, talked me out of the window, and brought me to my parents."

"Bricked up once my hair was long enough to climb."

"There was a hook, or I'd have been pulled right out the window, and the hair doesn't break. And it was only one person. She was - well, she had me calling me Mother, but she wasn't, actually. I didn't think she was evil at the time. But yes. I think she is."

"I'm sorry about your parents. I'm not exactly - I'm angry, more than anything, about what she did. You don't need to worry about stirring up memories. What she did isn't going to be any worse if I think about it than if I don't."

Ari lets out a startled chuckle. "Oh, not my parents. They were... I don't remember much about them, but Belinda always said they must have been idiots to go out in a blizzard like that. She didn't really know them. It's her, I never expected to... outlive her, I guess. She was a faerie, they don't die. Unless someone kills them. Which someone did." He grits his teeth a bit. "That, I'm angry about. One day I'll find whatever killed her and make it pay. But not right now. Right now I'm just... trying to get by, I guess. Helping people, punching demons, doing what I can."

"A faerie, like you thought I was? One of them adopted you?"

"Yeah. She was called Belinda the Kind, because ordinarily they don't really... do that? I mean, they can be nice, but usually it's because they want something out of you. Usually more than you can give. But she wasn't like that, she was just... nice, because I needed it. I mean, she wasn't doing it for free, she got my baby teeth and a good amount of my blood out of it and that's some serious magic, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. Especially not eighteen years' worth of it. And she taught me magic and how to avoid getting trapped in bargains and... she was just a really good mom."

"I'm glad you had a good mom. Mine was - well - I thought she was good but it turned out she only wanted me for my hair and was lying to me about everything to keep me from running off."

"Like... lying about being your mom?"

"About being my mom and about what would happen to me if I ever tried to leave and what the world was like and about my birthday - because the princess's birthday was always celebrated with a release of thousands of floating lanterns that I could see from my window, she told me I was born on a different day - and about what people would do if they got ahold of my hair - Of course the only reason she was so good at telling me what she needed to tell me to keep me was because she read my diary."

"She'd tell me I'd be eaten, or that I'd be captured by this or that kind of villain, or that - look, my hair is magical, I don't want to tell you exactly what it does because she wasn't making these warnings completely up out of nothing, but it's magic and I don't have to cooperate for people to use it. She told me people would do that, that even if I wanted to use it to help people it would wind up being twisted around to do bad things, that it was better to just stay holed up and keep it to just the two of us. She kept me as occupied as you can keep somebody in a tower who never leaves. I'm musical and reasonably well-read and crafty and so on."

This girl's hair has an unreasonable number of special properties. Ari approves. "Yeah, "everyone is evil and they will all want to steal your glorious magical hair for evil" is less accurate in my experience. Not that I have glorious magical hair, but I know at least three people including myself who would not particularly care to kidnap and menace you for it." He pauses. "...Four people. Belinda probably wouldn't kidnap you. She might want to perform vaguely sinister experiments, but that was just her way."

Rapunzel hugs her meta-braid nervously. "Well, when I did leave the tower with my friend who talked me out the window it turned out nobody wanted to do me any harm and everyone was very glad to have the missing princess back and I'm working out safe ways to do good things with my hair."

"...Sorry, maybe shouldn't have mentioned the vaguely sinister experiments. I'm not so much about that, that was all Mom. It's good that nobody wanted to do you harm! And you apparently have friends now, that's an important part of not living with... well, the circumstances are different, but it's good to have friends if you're going to be in society. Instead of living with your hermit mom in the middle of nowhere." He looks pensively into his mead.

"She wasn't my mom. She was lying. She stole me and she was using me."

"Shit, sorry, I- slip of the tongue. Hermit captor in the middle of nowhere. Who seemed nice at the time but was actually just using you for her own goals." "Pensive" has now escalated to full-on "brooding".

"Her name is Gothel. Or was. I'm not sure. I haven't seen her recently."

"Nice - I don't know, not exactly, not like my friend or my real parents are nice. I wasn't afraid of her, I liked being around her fine, but it wasn't like she was a kind lovely person except for one thing, she was - competent, more. I loved her but nice isn't the word."