And he probably continues to think nothing of it until a person who looks like a twentysomething human-- except for his large, pointed ears-- appears with a pop inside his bedroom.

"What the fuck on a pogo stick!?" Bruce inquires. At least he sleeps in sweatpants and a Star Trek: The Next Generation shirt, so he's not particularly less dressed than he usually is.

"--uh, I've never actually been the one who has to do this before-- um, you're the new Santa Claus?"

"This some kinda campus event? I didn't sign up for anything. It's not even Christmas yet. And why are you my room instead of my email about it?" His phonological loop has decided this is a good time for the Bed Intruder song, but it is mistaken and should shut up. He isn't even opposed in principle to LARPing Santa at a bunch of visiting elementary schoolers or whatever, but this is not how you get volunteers for things.

"No," Lev says, "you're literally Santa Claus. The guy with a sleigh and reindeer who brings joy to the children of the world? You're him."

"No, I'm Bruce Banner. And Santa doesn't exist. And you're still breaking and entering." This is only making less and less sense as it goes on, isn't it.

Lev thinks about this for a minute, snaps his fingers, and teleports them to the moon. 

He's on the moon.

He's on the moon.

It's instantly recognizable from the pictures, and if he can't believe the evidence of his eyes it would be hard to disbelieve the reduced gravity. He turns, bouncing a bit on unsteady feet, and--that's the Earth. Just like the photographs but a thousand times more overwhelming. There it is, the blue marble where every human who ever existed was born and grew up. 

He's distantly confused about how he can breathe, about how he isn't freezing or choking or anything else, but mostly he's staring at the rising Earth with eyes like saucers, experiencing.

...oh no he's cute.

Bruce kneels on one knee and runs his fingers through the moon dust. He'll eventually recover enough to ask a million questions. But it'll be a couple more minutes.

NEW SANTA CLAUS IS VERY CUTE AND THIS IS EXTREMELY PROBLEMATIC.

Bruce stands up, puts a hand on his head like he's trying to hold his mind on, and manages to get his eyes at least mostly focused on the stranger.

"How did you do that? How can I breathe here? What does it mean that I'm Santa? Can I learn to teleport too? What other things that everyone believes are actually wrong?"

"Magic. I'm not going to teleport you without air because then you'd die. Mostly that the Christmas spirit is set by your own sense of what Christmas ought to be, but you also have thousands of powerful magical slaves and some flying reindeer. No. The Cry Babies Kristal Interactive Baby Doll breaks really easily, you're better off with one of the ripoffs from Amazon."

Bruce needs a minute to play his memories back a few times and match up questions with answers and determine that if the thing about the doll is important he's not going to figure it out right now and--"Wait, magical slaves?"

"...yeah, we elves are your slaves."

"Can I--not? Is that an option? Are you okay, should I be doing something about that?"

"...why would we not be okay?"

"Because being enslaved sounds like it sucks? I just--look, what are you hoping I'm going to do, I want to do a good job here but I don't know what doing a good job looks like."

"Spread the Christmas spirit into everyone's hearts and bring joy and cheer to the children of the world?"

"Joy and cheer sound good, I'm in favor of those. Wait, does this mean Christianity is true, that seems like an important thing to know going in."

"We became the spirits of Christmas when St. Nicholas became Santa Claus. Previously, we were the spirits of Yule."

"Okay, I guess that's probably fine then. Uh, I'm not religious at all, does that make you spirits of the winter solstice or of American secular Christmas or what? Also, why me, do you do a random draw every four years or something? Also also if I got your name I forgot it, sorry."

"I'm Lev and, uh, you killed the last Santa Claus."

"I never killed anybody! Unless this is like a Peter Singer type of situation where I was supposed to save him and didn't?" Shit, he got someone killed, shit.

"You told him that the view from the top of the Green Building is awesome if you can fly. He could fly well enough to get up there, but then he fell off."

"Oh no! Fuck, I am so sorry, I did not realize he was going to actually . . . Fuck. Me and my big mouth."

"I'd say it's not your fault but, uh, the universe does seem to have decided it was your fault."

"Why is that even the criterion. And, uh, what exactly does being Santa entail, do I just keep living my normal life three hundred and sixy-four days a year and then deliver presents in a TARDIS on Christmas Eve, or is there stuff the rest of the time too?"

"How else would we choose the next Santa? --What the job of Santa entails is basically up to you."

"I still have no sense of what the limits are, and what I can do that isn't 'give people orders'. What did the previous Santa do? It can't have been much or someone would have noticed. And that's another question, what happens if people find out about magic, why's it a secret?"

"Magic is secret because the previous Santa believed that believing in things without evidence is a touching and meaningful example of true faith."

"Well, that's obnoxious! Um. Sorry, I shouldn't speak ill of the dead."

"...I like you much better than previous Santa, so far."

"Thank you. Um. Circling back around to the magical slavery thing, since that did not get resolved. Can I just. Free all of you? Is there any reason not to do that? It seems like the obvious thing but I know I don't know a lot of relevant stuff." At least, thank all that is good in the world, Lev is not behaving in any way similarly to Dobby. 

"I'm not sure that we... can... be freed?"

Well, balls. "Then, uh, what do I need to know to behave in a decent and civilized manner about that. I can't actually afford to pay a thousand people unless Christmas has a budget or something." He is unsure how the previous Santa could have been doing a worse job at this than he's been doing so far but he expects the answer is unpleasant.

"...why would we need to be paid?"

"So you can eat? As fair compensation for your labor, I'm assuming even secret Christmas things required some amount of work? Or is this some sort of post-scarcity Communist situation where you can make anything you want by magic and ignore the rest of the economy, because that would be awesome."

"Elves produce food for elves. We don't-- they're gifts, we don't want to be paid for making gifts."

"That's--really sweet, actually." From a certain angle, this is all very Star Trek. He's in space, there are post-scarcity Communists, a friendly humanoid alien is delivering exposition, it could be a lot worse really.

"So is there, in fact, anything other than secrecy stopping you from ending scarcity on Earth? What magic can you do besides teleporting, how does it scale?"

"Well, most of our magic can only be used to spread joy and happiness to children around the time of the December Solstice, so that puts some limits on how well we can be used to end scarcity. And we can only do things in accordance with the Christmas spirit, which is set by the current Santa. Subconsciously, you don't get to declare that the spirit of Christmas is to end malaria unless you truly feel that in your heart."

Well, possibly having thousands of lives depend on whether his heart is pure enough isn't terrifying at all. But he can't not try it, in a sense he's already trying it, and--he's on the Moon. He's already done one impossible thing today, with Lev's help. Maybe he can do this thing too.

"Possibly my subconscious isn't up to scratch, but--it really feels like it ought to work? Christmas is about abundance, it's about having a feast in the middle of winter because you know you have enough supplies stored to last until the Sun comes back, it's about sharing what you have with your neighbor and giving each other presents and coating your whole house in art because you've gotten the upper hand on winter. I want to believe that I can make Christmas mean that, for the whole world."

"Well, when we get to the North Pole, we can see what changes you've started to make."

"I am excited and also nervous! Do you have some kind of Christmas Spirit monitoring system that can tell how pure my heart is?"

"No, but the Christmas spirit has changed, and we'll be able to reassign some of the Naughty/Nice cams to look for the first signs that it's changed and see what it's changing into. Movie producers, advertisers, that sort of thing."

"Naughty/nice cams? Are you telling me you actually spy on children? I  continue to have no right to tell you to do things but I would really appreciate it if you did less of that."

"We have a database on the actions of every child so that we can tell who's naughty and who's nice, and then we don't give presents to naughty children."

"How attached are you--like, you in particular and also elves in general, how attached are you to doing that? Because I totally get wanting to only give presents to people you like, but the spying is creepy and also the whole concept is kind of sad." He really hopes that was another thing that was mainly the previous Santa's idea and none of the elves care, because otherwise he's simultaneously obligated not to give them orders and obligated to get them to stop spying.

"We want to make human children happy. We don't really care if the human children misbehave."

"Okay, awesome, great. I'm pretty sure human children have to misbehave some to, like, function at all anyway. And now I'm curious about elf culture and also about whether you're as closely related to humans as you look. Sorry, bio student, my brain goes off on weird tangents sometimes."

"The spirit of Yule created us four thousand years ago."

"That sounds weirdly plausible given the rest of tonight. Where did the spirit of Yule come from? Is there a corresponding spirit for the other solstice or just the one? Should I stop asking you a million questions and let you get back to doing whatever you were doing?"

"I'm Santa's personal assistant, it's my job to educate the new Santa. The current legendary figures are the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, Death, leprechauns, the Bogeyman, Jack Frost, Mother Nature, Father Time, Krampus, and Jack O'Lantern. I don't know where holiday spirits come from, they just sort of happen."

"Woah that's a lot of things. I guess the only real numbers are zero one and lots, but that's still. And all of them are hiding from humans? And Death is a person?" 

What if someone gets Death to fall off the Green Building, what then? Or, coming at it from the other end, does that mean that if Aubrey de Grey invents immortality a guy with a scythe will come after him? This definitely has massive implications and he can't at all tell whether they're good or bad.

"Most of them don't really do much that adults would notice. The Bogeyman isn't trying to hide from anyone, it's just that not a lot of parents believe their children that the children are being menaced by a being with claws and fangs and talons."

"That and Death both sound extremely concerning, but presumably the situation there is at least stable and I should figure out Christmas stuff first. Shall we go to the North Pole and see what's happening or are there more things you want to explain first?"

"I'm mostly here to answer any questions you have!"

"How does the whole delivering presents on Christmas actually work? You mentioned reindeer, I'm imagining some sort of time shenanigans? What are the limits on how many presents we can do?" He might get to hand out presents to thousands or millions of people and if he can solve the inevitable logistical mess that sounds really fun.

"We stop time until all the presents are delivered."

"That's really cool. I guess it might get boring after a few thousand, but I wouldn't hold anything up by taking breaks--or if any elves think that sounds fun we could do shifts, unless I'm the only one who can pilot the sleigh or something.

We are gonna bring so much joy to so many children."

"We are!!!!"

"How do we find out who wants what, once we've gone public we can set up a web form or something but I'm thinking maybe the best way to go public is just by going all out this next Christmas and then making an announcement, unless you have a better idea, so do we have some minimal-spying way to get present requests already working?"

"We get the kids' letters, but obviously that won't help if they don't write to Santa at all..."

"That's really cool, that you get the letters. So my first thought is to use the spy cameras, but instead of having a person looking at them just transcribe all the audio and then search it for anything that looks like a request for an object, but I'm not actually a good enough programmer to do that last step optimally and I may or may not be able to get that good in time to make all the stuff before Christmas. And of course next year more kids will know we exist and send us mail. The really important thing to get right is kids in developing countries, maybe I can find research on what parents tend to spend their money on and make a model of what's most useful . . . if I had known this was going to happen I would have picked a different major, CS or Econ or something."

"...I don't know why you're assuming we don't have programmers."

"I'm sorry, of course you have programmers. I'm trying not to assume any given programmer is going to be interested in implementing a thing I thought up in thirty seconds, but maybe I should just be assuming someone is going to be excited about any given Christmas-related project. 

I'm actually really curious about elves in general. Your biology, your culture, what your government is like, what your economy is like, if you have your own language I'd like to learn it, that sort of thing. If it's not rude to ask."

"Uh, we're not immortal but our life expectancy is about five hundred years. Most of us look like human children-- I'm actually half-human, that's why I look so old. We care a lot about Christmas? Santa is in charge of all the elves but usually we handle most of the implementation details ourselves. We have an economy to allocate scarce goods but I think we're really different from humans because what every elf wants most is to spread the Christmas spirit and make human children happy. We usually speak the current Santa's language, but we can speak all human languages."

"Ooh, omniglossia and a five-hundred-year lifespan, nice. And all having common goals sounds really good too. Also at some point I'd like to look at a list of all the previous Santa's policies and what the general elven public opinion on them is, if such a thing is kicking around." Just because running his mouth irresponsibly is how he got this job doesn't mean he should go changing things that consensus holds to have worked for years. Especially not if all the elves have opinions as sensible as Lev's.

"...Previous Santa kind of has a lot of policies. Like, do you want to see the policies on the education of elf children, or the kind of food offered in Cocoa Cottage, or whether we offer better presents to rich kids or poor kids--"

Bruce runs his hand through his hair; now his hair has moon dust on it. "That sounds kind of exhausting just thinking about it. Is there some reason elf parents and teachers and children don't make education policy and whoever does the cooking at Cocoa Cottage doesn't decide the menu?" There's a reason Bruce has never so much as run for student council rep, and that reason is: aaaaa. "Who gets what presents at least sounds vaguely in my wheelhouse. I'd like to shoot for giving everyone the most useful present we can, but if that's not possible we should definitely spend most of our resources on the poorest kids."

"Well, I mean, most of the time elves set policies about things because Santa doesn't care, but in principle you could set policies about whatever you want. --Oh, we're going to have to reorient everything."

"I'd really rather not set policies about things that don't affect me, I'm making an exception for the presents thing because I think it's really important. I don't know quite what you mean by reorient everything, but sorry for all the extra work."

"Right now we give better presents to rich children."

"I guess you'd have to, if you were keeping it secret--how did you keep it secret, anyway? I guess most of the time every relative would assume someone else bought the thing, and if they compared notes they'd conclude whoever bought it forgot."

"Mind control. The parents believe they bought it."

"The previous Santa. Managed to turn giving children presents into a supervillain plot."

"...don't supervillains mostly plot to, like, pollute the earth for unclear reasons or something?"

"Mind-controlling the populace for unclear reasons is also a popular one! --Also to be clear if supervillains actually exist I don't know about it."

"It was for a very clear reason. The reason is that he thought that the Christmas spirit was best served by children having blind faith in spite of all the evidence."

"Okay, fair, that's less 'supervillain plot' and more 'terrible internet fiction circa 2010 villain plot' but still."

"...there's Internet fiction about how Santa sucks?"

"There's stories about how wanting people to have blind faith in things sucks. I don't know of any featuring Santa in particular but it wouldn't surprise me, the internet is vast and strange. Does the North Pole have internet?"

"We haven't bothered to get it yet, we didn't know if the humans would get bored of it."

"I'm pretty sure it's sticking around. Maybe not on the time scale you care about, I guess. . . . I should probably figure out if I should move to the North Pole or not, if I can be more useful there then I should but if I'm only useful on actual Christmas I should stay in school."

"...it sounds like you want to change a lot of things."

"I probably do, yeah, if there's more stuff like the mind control. Sorry." Philosophical conundrums about the ethics of interfering in alien cultures: also very Star Trek.

"I don't know anything about what humans learn in school, it might be important. But I think your best chance of changing things and having them stay changed is by coming to the North Pole and dealing with it."

"Then I should go. Also I really want to see the North Pole. Also, if any of the changes I've suggested sound like bad changes, please tell me? You know more than I do about this, I am super not qualified."

"I think you want to spread joy to all the children of the world and I will definitely tell you if it looks like you're not doing that."

"Thank you." He kind of wants to go to the North Pole and see the secret magical city and find out what his brain has been doing to the abstract concept of Christmas but it turns out he can't actually suggest leaving the Moon.

Well, then, Lev is going to bounce on the moon.

Oooh, excellent idea! Moon bouncing! Bruce is going to find out how high he can jump.

He can jump very high, because the moon doesn't have very much gravity.

"...I really like being on the moon."

"It's really great. You picked the best possible way to show me magic exists."

"...I think you just have good taste in magic! Some people would rather, I don't know, be transformed into a taller man with giant muscles."

"I can understand how some people would find that convenient but having my body modified on me would been quite the shock." He looks down at himself, notices his footprints in the regolith and smiles.

"Do you want to go to your house?"

"At the North Pole? Yeah." He really wants to come back here sometime, but he's asked for enough things from someone who might not feel free to refuse already today. 

Snap. 

They're in Bruce's house at the North Pole.

Teleportation: not much less disorienting the second time! Also still extremely cool.

The house is smallish and cozy and well-lit and every wall that can reasonably have bookshelves on it does. The carpet is deep blue and very soft.

"What a nice house."

"It's designed to be your ideal house."

"What a nice piece of magic!"

He pokes his head through a door into what turns out to be the kitchen. It has nice broad countertops and a stove and a microwave and None Whatsoever of his floormates' possessions. Lovely.

"It's important that you be comfortable."

Bruce doesn't really know what to do with that statement so he's just going to leave it alone and look at his new books. Some of them look like econ books!

The lack of internet is the only drawback this place seems to have, and he has so much research to do on subjects that haven't been discussed online that he can probably cross that bridge when he gets to it. 

"I wonder how the magic picks the books. It clearly knows my tastes, but it's also heard of books I haven't. And now I'm wondering if my preference for accuracy in my nonfiction means my library can be used for objective truth, or if it's going off what I'm likely to enjoy reading."

"...probably enjoyment but it would be worth testing it to find out if we could figure out how?"

"At some point when I'm more caught up on my Christmas-related responsibilities I can work my way through the nonfiction and look for books that contradict each other's main theses, or make claims that have been solidly disconfirmed. I doubt any book is going to be one hundred percent accurate, but I can see if they're likely to be more accurate than a random nonmagical collection."

"That sounds really fun."

"You're welcome to join in if you like, there are plenty of books! But first I should probably look at what the Christmas Spirit is doing."

"Well," Lev says, "let's walk to Christmas Headquarters."

What an excellent name. "Okay!" And off they go.

He's going to see a secret polar city! Will it be cold? Hopefully it won't be full-on arctically cold, he's not remotely dressed for it. He's sort of expecting it to be decorated for Christmas year-round.

Of course it's decorated for Christmas year-round, what do you take them for, amateurs?

He can tell it's cold-- snowflakes are falling and the wind is whipping-- but he feels like he's walking on a nice sunny day.

Most of the elves are younger than Lev: an eight-year-old carries packages, a ten-year-old and a five-year-old are arguing enthusiastically, a twelve-year-old is going for a jog. 

Heck yeah Christmas decorations! 

"The weather magic here is really awesome, snowy and warm is a great combination when it doesn't mean slush."

"That's all you, Santa."

"Neat! I hope I didn't change it too much from whatever you were used to." Also being addressed as Santa is extremely weird but he's just going to roll with it.

"No, I mean, impervious to cold is all you. If a normal human were here they'd freeze."

"Ohhhh that makes so much more sense, I feel like an idiot now. But at least I'm an idiot who can't get frostbite!" He scoops up a handful of snow and tosses it in the air where it won't land on anybody, just to watch it sparkle.

This Santa is excited by many things and he is very cute. 

Soon he shall be excited by Christmas Headquarters, which has a certain air of being a lavishly decorated minor government building. 

Elves presumably have four thousand years of architectural tradition; he's mostly surprised that he can categorize it at all. But that doesn't make it not exciting; what's inside?

A lot of extremely busy six-year-olds looking through inboxes that are as tall as they are.

"So, how old is grown up, for an elf?" He knows elves are kids at some point, Lev mentioned elf kids going to school, but for all he knows they come of age at a hundred.

"Thirty-five."

"Huh. So everyone here is probably older than me, then, unless elf kids can handle office jobs better than human teenagers."

"Fully-grown elves look like humans somewhat between the age of five and fifteen."

"Huh! That seems really random. Is it heritable?"

"Yep. Elves that are half-human look like human young adults."

("Like me," he doesn't add.)

"Are you telling me humans and elves are interfertile?" How did they even find that out--nope, not asking that, super not asking that, Bruce was not in fact raised in a barn.

"Yes. And they produce fertile offspring. --We are magic."

"That is--still extremely weird but I guess with you being a designed species it's only on the same tier of weird as everything else going on. Wait, if half-elves are magic and live longer than humans then--never mind. So what are all these folks working on, anyway?"

"Planning the elven economy, assigning presents to children, figuring out who's naughty and nice, learning about what the new Christmas spirit is so we can change ourselves appropriately..."

"I really hope 'change ourselves' isn't as ominous for you as it sounds to me?"

"Well, for one thing we'll have to redecorate all our houses..."

"Huh. Change them how? I don't know my subconscious opinions on Christmas decorations beyond 'lots of lights is awesomesauce'."

"We don't know, that's why we need to learn what Christmas is." He flags down an elf who looks to be about seven. "Can you take us to the Christmas spirit room?"

"Yes, sir," the elf chirps.

Bruce is so! Excited! And nervous! And excited! He's going to see what he did to the Christmas Spirit! If it's good it's going to be awesome and if it's not good that means his brain has a big ole contradiction in it and it could be screwing things up for people even without him acting on it at all! It's like the feeling of being about to get his grades back on a really important test except he has no memory of taking the test and no sense of whether he did well or badly and no idea how high a score is passing or whether there was any extra credit! His legs follow Lev and the other elf without any supervision on his part.

Bruce enters a brightly colored room full of flashing lights and big red buttons and, in general, a child's idea of what a command center would be like, if the child also thought that everything should be decorated with candy canes.

Time to try to read all the labels on all the buttons and switches and lights! If it's anything like being in an airplane cockpit he's likely to end up less with useful knowledge than with a map of his ignorance, but knowing that doesn't make compulsory label-reading less appealing.

The buttons are labeled things like HO HO HO and HALLMARK MOVIE INDEX and HOLIDAY COOKIE MONITOR and TERRIBLE CHRISTMAS PARTY ADJUSTMENTS.

"This is incredibly cool. So, what sort of changes are you seeing so far?"

"We seem to have developed... taste-equivalent vegan eggnog? Do you have any idea what is up with that."

Embarrassed snort of laughter! "Uh. I have kind of been wanting vegan eggnog every Christmas for several years now. And I guess it. Picked up on that." On the one hand, what a frivolous use of magic. On the other hand, maybe people will consume fewer eggs. Also maybe he will be able to get some of the eggnog later.

"An executive got a brilliant new idea for a story about three children investigating whether Santa Claus is real... uh, cultivated-meat turkey?"

"Wow, apparently my subconscious believes that the true meaning of Christmas is having as many different kinds of food as possible. Also that movie sounds adorable."

"As many different kinds of... food without animals?"

Oh, boy. "So, uh, I don't know what the Elven food production situation is or how much you know about how humans do it, but, uh, I don't like--the way humans farm animals is kind of awful for the animals so I only eat plants."

It occurs to him to wonder if the flying reindeer can talk like they do in the movies, though probably it doesn't have any implications for nonmagical animal cognition either way.

"All our food spontaneously comes into existence through magic. We thought that the animals were happy and lived on farms with cheerful farmers in overalls, as depicted in children's media?"

"Spontaneous magic food is awesome and I'm sorry human media is full of lies."

"Oh. I'm-- glad you're doing something about that?"

"Thanks. It--makes sense, the more I think about it." Also it is belatedly occurring to him that while he's here he can eat anything (that isn't someone else's) without having to investigate it, and that in itself is extremely Christmas. 

"So what's next on the agenda?"

"Explaining things to your family? Listening to me talk about my fifty years of work on what we should do with presents?"

"I should definitely explain things to my family and also my lab but I want to have a better sense of the implications for them, me, and the world in general first. Also now that I know you have fifty years of work on how to do this I really really want to see it."

Economics!

Lev has unknowingly reinvented quite a lot of economics while trying to work out how best to give children Christmas presents that make them happier.

"This is really cool! And way better methodology than a lot of social sciences stuff. Are there, like, entire elf think tanks for post-scarcity economics and Christmas policy?" Oh man, a society of long-lived individuals could (controlling for interspecies psychological differences) reveal so many things about how societies work, starting with whether science really progresses one funeral at a time.

"Uh, no, just me."

"That's really impressive!" And kind of intimidating. Bruce has met people with fifty-year-long research careers but never had this long of a conversation with one. He reads some of the analyses on optimal presents. "Are all your studies purely observational or with interventions consisting of presents or can you do, I dunno, telephone polling? I'm wondering how much you have to rely on revealed preferences assumptions."

"Can't do telephone polling yet, although as Santa you could authorize it."

"Go ahead! Uh, if you can do it without breaking the masquerade, I would rather do it in a cleaner way than confusing telephone calls. But that doesn't sound like it would be hard."

Bounce bounce.

"Thank you!"

Lev bouncing is adorable. Is that a weird thing to think? Probably. Is it weirder than most of the other things he's thought in the past hour? Probably not.

"Any other experiments you want to run? Also, is there a fully fleshed-out optimal Christmas present plan in here and can we get it implemented by this Christmas?"

"Not the whole thing, but-- at least we can switch a lot of the toy factories to making vaccines and medicines, and give the rich Christian kids a smaller Christmas this year."

"Sounds good. It would have been nice to get it all done the first year, but the rich kids won't miss it and it's definitely better than waiting. Hmm, and we should have a plan for communicating with everyone afterwards, both the case where someone immediately sends a reporter to the North Pole and the case where they just run around being confused."

"...if we're going to come forward we should probably explain ourselves to the Council of Fairytale Beings."

"That sounds like something I should be thoroughly briefed on." Especially since one of them is Death.

"Yes. Yes, you should."

Lev gives an explanation of their personalities, known likes and dislikes, and holiday preferences. Apparently all Fairytale Beings get their jobs through murder. Interesting fact. 

"...And there's one you're really not going to like."

"Is it Death? Because, I gotta say, not a fan."

"No, actually, she's pretty cool. Deaths tend to be cool because they're all people who respond to dying by attempting to murder Death. It's Krampus."

That makes a lot of sense, actually, though it might also suck for the Deaths. "What's Krampus' deal? Also something Christmas-related or at least wintery, right?"

"So, Krampus is-- the spirit of punishment and vengeance. He worked a lot with the last Santa because... he wanted to specialize in punishing children."

"Yikes." He understands the evolutionary biology behind the vengeance instinct and the ways in which it's sometimes game-theoretically optimal, but, yikes. "Why children in particular?"

"Well, if you punish naughty kids, they'll grow up to be good people."

"Well that's just not true! Kind of the opposite actually, I've seen studies on it--I guess it's a better motive than 'because I like hurting people who can't fight back' because there's a chance he'll listen to reason."

"The humans do studies on that?"

"Observational studies only! But yes."

"Humans are so cool!"

"Thanks! So is this Council more like a social club or a legislative body or what?"

"They vote on things that affect all fairytale beings, like what happens if someone quits or commits suicide, or revealing that magic is real to the general public, or Christmas getting earlier each year and invading Halloween."

"Oh boy, politics, my favourite thing." Politics is not his favourite thing. "Do you know who's most likely to oppose going public? Are there parties that tend to agree with each other?"

"Mother Nature is going to be the most powerful opposition, she is unhappy about how many humans there are to begin with."

"I can sort of see where she's coming from, if she's directly harmed by climate change or species going extinct or something. I wonder if I can sell her on post-scarcity being easier on the environment in the long run." He also has vague ideas about large human populations emigrating to space, but they're too unformed to talk about.

"Ah, no, she aesthetically prefers pure and untouched nature. She's still really pissed about Scotland."

Bruce prefers pure and bug-free climate-controlled buildings, but to each their own. "I wonder if she likes plants specifically or if she'd enjoy a trip to the moon."

"Well, she can go to the Moon any time she wants to."

"Nice. Is that something specific to her or could I learn it too?"

"I mean, she asks the nymphs."

"Oh, so there's a species as well as a one-off person for each holiday?" He tries to imagine what sort of species would match up with Death or Father Time and comes up blank.

"Sometimes, not always. Death is just Death."

"That makes sense. So, where and when does the Council meet?"

"When a meeting is called by any of its members, but probably you should try to do politics first? --I'm trying to think who you should meet first. Jack O'Lantern is great but he's a lot."

"He did sound that way. Maybe the Easter Bunny? She sounded pretty cool too."

"Might be a plan. I will schedule a meeting. --Or Death. You would like Death, I think."

He hesitates a moment, then says, "Yeah, sounds good. By the way, how much, er, scheming and backstabbing and similar do fairytale beings tend to do? On a spectrum from 'everyone is generally decent and collegial even when they disagree' to 'one of those TV shows where everyone is constantly plotting against everyone else'."

"Not very much? We mostly don't affect each other very much. For the last thirty years the most important disagreement has been about Christmas expanding and threatening Halloween." 

"I'm honestly not a big fan of that myself; Halloween deserves its time and arguably so does Thanksgiving. Is that something that will stop on its own if my desire for it to stop is genuine enough or is it someone's deliberate decision?"

"It should stop on its own if you genuinely want it to."

"Well, here's hoping I'm not a hypocrite. Anyway, scheduling a meeting with Death. Does Death have an email address? Are we inviting them here?"

"We can invite her here. The elves can talk to her."

He's nervous but it would be insane of him not to be, so, "Sounds good."

And then he spends the next few days learning his way around the North Pole (successfully) and trying to memorize the names of as many elves as possible (unsuccessfully) and reading up on development economics (effectively but slower than he'd like) until his appointment with Death.

"Hello! Funny seeing you here. I thought we had an appointment in Samara."

Bruce lets out a short, tension-releasing cackle. "I have been telling myself every fifteen minutes this morning that I would not make basically that joke! Welcome to the North Pole."

"Welcome to being a fairytale being! Love what you've done with the place, by the way."

"Thanks. It's funny; I have no idea what it used to look like."

"I mean Christmas more generally. Excellent holiday. Get Christ out of Christmas, that's what I've always said."

"Ah, yeah; I've been questioning a lot of how I thought the world works but as far as I can tell there's still no God. Anyway. I want to take at least my own existence public so I can do things on a global scale--distribute vaccines and farming equipment and everything else people need in quantities too big to hide."

"And you want my support for this on the Council?"

"Yeah. And also, like, to take your opinions on how and whether to do it into account, if you have them." And if they turn out to be compatible with human flourishing and/or necessary to get enough votes.

"I am Death. Vaccines are rather the opposite of my area of expertise."

"But you might have opinions on whether everyone should go public or just me, or reasons why you think I shouldn't do it at all, or whatever."

"--Do you know how many instances of my consciousness there are running right now?"

". . . You're actually present whenever anyone dies."

"Yes. And I talk with them until they are prepared to move on to what is next. --There are 528,769 of me conscious this very moment." 

That's horrible on so many levels. He has questions, but the only one important enough to ask is, "So are you going to vote that I can go public."

"...I am not sure. It is difficult, these days, for me to care about such things. I am very very old."

"Is there anything you know you want?"

"Not terribly? --I am quite lonely."

Constantly talking to hundreds of thousands of people, and she's lonely. Bruce is the magical spirit of a holiday about giving people what they want, and he has no idea how to help.

"I'm sorry. . . . You deserve better."

"I suppose. Eventually someone will try to kill me."

He can't bring himself to ask if she's looking forward to it.

"If nobody ever died again, and you could just be one person, and live a normal human life, or do whatever else you wanted--would that be good?"

"...I am not sure that is in fact possible or desirable."

"Why?"

"What happens if someone gets bored or depressed and wants to die? What happens if someone is very badly injured? Do people continue to have children, and if so where do the resources come from to take care of all of them?"

"There are a lot of resources out there once we can get them. And--" does she get people who get cryopreserved? "ways to make it harder to die of illness or injury. You'd probably still get the occasional accident or depressed person, but most of the time there wouldn't be anyone who had just died."

"There are not infinite resources, and if people are born and do not die the population can become infinite rather quickly."

"If the average person has fewer than two children the population converges to a finite number. Also the carrying capacity of this one solar system is in the trillions. Also it's apparently possible to appear matter out of nowhere so I'm less sure there aren't infinite resources than I used to be."

"I am not a physicist. --Is the average person really going to want fewer than two children over an infinite lifetime? This seems very implausible."

"I expect people would prefer to be able to have more children but if we do run out of resources they won't be able to afford more. I'm not in charge of humanity, thank goodness, so I can't say for sure what people will choose."

It's very strange, having this debate without being sure what he would have to convince Death to believe to win her vote, but it's a good kind of strange because it means all he can do is say what he really believes.

"Hm. I suppose that is a solution. --Although you realize you are going to get people paying other people to die, and I still will have a job."

"Yeah. But--you'll get to take breaks. I--it's honestly impressive how well you're handling it." He's looking forward to being in a lot of places at once for Christmas, just to see what it's like, but that's just one night, and he'll be handing out presents instead of comforting dying people, and he still sort of wishes he could keep all the memories even though he knows they'd crowd out his memories of the rest of his life.

"Hm. --I do not so much mind not taking breaks. The real problem with being Death is that no one visits you more than once."

"I could visit you more than once." His mouth says this before his brain evaluates whether it's a good idea, but once he's said it it doesn't feel like a bad enough idea to want to try to take it back.

"Perhaps. --I suppose if people knew they existed I would not be limited to doing my job. I could go bowling. Go to a knitting club. Take up golf."

"Although perhaps I'd have to have a less upsetting form."

"Yeah, if you got recognized you'd probably get the same questions over and over."

"Well, I do have to look like death, but fortunately there are options."

"You mean you can look like any human depiction of Death, or something else?"

"I can look like any human depiction of Death, and a human depiction of death looks like me."

"Yeah, I bet you can avoid getting recognized if you swap around between cultural contexts."

"It is alienating not to be recognized because I cannot talk about the vast majority of my experiences."

Wanting to talk about your experiences with people sounds fake but okay. "Fair."

"But I guess if we go public I can at least hang out with goths."

"I bet they'll think you're cool."

"I hope so! --I am not sure your utopia plans are very well thought out."

"They're not. That's--part of the reason I want to go public, actually. I don't want to, to impose utopia on people from outside. I want to make people aware of the resources I have and help them use them as well as possible. I'm not good enough to solve all the world's problems on my own, but I can get more people working on the problem."

"Makes sense. You can have my vote."

"Thank you. I appreciate it." He's kind of out of things to say but suggesting she leave the minute she's said she'll vote to go public would be rude and also bad politics.

Fortunately she can just disappear on her own.

Being able to instantly reallocate your consciousness is great for avoiding awkward small talk. And now he gets to go do something that isn't having an awkward, high-stakes interaction with a stranger!

Orrrrr he could talk to the old man with a comical amount of beard who just appeared between him and the door.

"Good [unspecified time of day]! Cheer up; you're much better at Christmas than you are at sex."

"What???" Oh, this must be Father Time. Lev did warn him, mostly that being warned wouldn't make him less confusing. "Um, hello."

 "I'm extremely high context. I'm practically wearing a warning label about it. You, on the other hand, sometimes have no context whatsoever. It takes all sorts."

". . . Noted. So, uh, what brings you to the North Pole?"

"Because this is where the action is and also I have an excuse. The excuse being that Father Time exists and I'm him."

"How did the conversation with Death-- oh hello!"

"Hi, Lev!" Chirps Father Time. "Always good to see you. I bet you're enjoying getting to do things instead of just watch."

"I have... literally no idea what that means."

"And not knowing things is your favorite way to be, so you're welcome! That and 'falling in love extremely quickly'. It's adorable."

"Do you just go around being incomprehensible all the time, is that your thing?"

"Not all the time. Only when anyone is looking. Or will later decide they were looking. Or when no-one is looking but I want to anyway. Congratulations on believing your senses are connected to external reality, by the way, I know it's really hard for you."

"Uh," says Bruce, suddenly noticeably less confident that his senses are connected to external reality and going entirely too many meta levels up the "but that's what he wants you to think" tree about it.

"I do not fall in love extremely quickly! I am two hundred years old and have not been in love with anyone. --Also I like knowing things!"

"Well, nobody wants to get what they want all the time; then you'd never get to be miserable."

"No, actually, I think the truth is the opposite of that thing you just said."

"...I have to say I appreciated the last two hundred years of not talking to Father Time about whether or not I am miserable. --Are you going to vote for Bruce to be able to go public?"

"Oh, yes, of course. I'm obnoxious but not the kind of obnoxious that slows things down. No, the things that slow you down are mostly self-doubt, weird power dynamics, guilty conscience, nervous virginity . . . oh, but we were talking about the magic reveal."

"Okay seriously what is it with you and my sex life." (Lack of a sex life. Whatever.)

"Good question!"

"Is it a good question you're going to... answer?"

"I don't know and I wouldn't tell you if I did. That's the answer to 'Is it a good question you're going to answer?', not to the prior question. Got to keep the stack in order or you'll find yourself trying to dereference what you thought was a pointer and finding out it was actually a badger." Upon completion of this sentence, Father Time dissolves into a cloud of purple glitter, which fades out of existence over the next several seconds.

"Does . . . that . . . happen a lot?"

"...I can with complete honesty say that that has never happened to me before. What the holly."

Oh my god he says what the holly that's adorable.

"Well, that's two votes down I guess."

"You should probably talk to Jack O'Lantern next, he's also going to be an easy 'yes.'"

"Sounds good." His instinct with assignments is usually to do the hardest one first so it can only get better from there, but in this case it probably is better to do the easy parts first and hope he levels up in politics by the time he gets to the hard parts.

"...do you have any idea what any of that. Meant."

The honest thing to say here would be "it sounds like he was saying I need to get laid" but are those words coming out of his mouth, no they are not. "I should try to write down as much of it as I can remember in case he can see the future and it's important later." He grabs the nearest writing materials (a pen and some post-it notes) and starts taking notes.

"Probably the part about the badger doesn't mean anything important? The part about being slowed down by self-doubt might. Also the part about having a guilty conscience is concerning because I can't tell what he thinks I'm guilty of and that might mean I haven't done it yet."

"I really can't imagine what bad thing you would do."

"And if I knew something I was going to do was bad I would stop being going to do it. Also it might be some sort of stable timeloop thing where even a detailed warning couldn't help."

"What did he mean about 'fall in love with'--"

Oh crap.

Oh no Lev looks scared. "Is something wrong?"

"No, everything's fine!"

That kind of sounds like he was thinking about something Father Time said, put two and two together and came up with Infohazard, and he wants to know because he always wants to know even when he knows he'll regret it, but if Lev doesn't want to tell him then he doesn't want to tell him. He probably can't help with whatever it is no matter how much he wants to.

"Maybe more of the stuff he said will make sense later. Hopefully before it becomes dramatic irony."

too late

"Yeah. Hopefully."

Bruce doesn't have any brilliant insights about what Father Time meant before it's time for his meeting with Jack O'Lantern.

A twentysomething with an array of piercings almost as impressive as his hair color appears. 

"Hello, new blood. --You're cute."

"Hello. Uh, how's it going?" Bruce had been about to say "nice makeup" but as a response to "you're cute" it might sound like reciprocal flirting and he doesn't want to imply anything he doesn't mean. Which is too bad because even Bruce can tell that's an expert makeup job.

"Well, are you planning to keep having Christmas bump up against Halloween?"

"I would really prefer that Christmas not start until after Thanksgiving but I'm not confident I can beat American consumerism in a metaphorical fight."

"You are the anthropomorphic personification of Christmas, it does whatever you want. --We're the two youngest, did you know that? I guess Death is younger than me but"-- he waves a hand vaguely-- "in terms of experienced time."

Nod. "Do you have any time weirdness, or are you always at one second per second?"

"I can warp time on my own holiday, same as you. The old guy used it to scare people but I use it to give candy to little kids and hook up with hot people."

"Neat. Apparently I'm going to do the splitting into lots of people thing and it will either be the coolest or the least cool experience ever."

"How so?"

"Brains doing things that aren't generally possible is awesome, but losing most of the memories and having memories that don't have a defined chronological order sounds really disorienting." He'd make an analogy to recreational drug use, but he hasn't actually done much of that and for all he knows Jack has and then he'd be talking out of his ass to someone who knows more than him. "Like when you oversleep and have a subjective week worth of dreams and wake up with a whole mental to-do list of fake tasks, but worse."

"That has literally never happened to me. I exclusively dream about vampires."

"Huh. Lucky you, provided you like vampires as much as I'd guess."