"Yes. She wasn't really paying attention and I may have explained it badly." She strokes swanfeathers.

They really are very cute.

"What's her name? ...does she still answer to it?"

"Catarina. I - can't tell, she sometimes pays attention when I talk no matter what I'm saying."

"Catarina," she tries. "I want to ask you something. Do you remember—who you were, and what you looked like, before you were like this?"

Catarina tilts her head and attempts to detangle some wool that has a bit of plant debris in it on the Lamb's cheek.

"I turned into a Pretty Person like you once, too. She was taller than me and—sharper, with stronger colours, darker black and brighter white and more vivid red. I didn't mean to turn into a Pretty Person, I wanted to be prettier but I didn't want to change the whole way my mind worked. And I had someone who cared about me, who asked her to bring me back, because she wasn't really me anymore and the person who cared about me wanted the me who thinks the way I do. So she... changed herself almost all the way back into the shape of me, and then at the last moment when she was going to be me again, she sprouted herself off my back and flew away, so we could both exist at the same time. Can you do that, for the person you were before you were like this?"

Woolgrooming woolgrooming. Singing.

...yeah. Okay. Yeah.

She says quietly to Maria, "I don't know if it's that she doesn't want to or that she can't understand me, but... I can find out. I can make it so my crown and I can talk to her in our heads, the way my crown talks to me, the way it talked to the Pretty Lamb to convince her to do the thing. The problem is, there's... side effects? When my crown connects to somebody like that, the connection... makes them like me, and want to be around me, and want to do what I say. I don't like that. But... the crown asked the Pretty Lamb what she thought of that sort of thing, and she didn't really mind it, she didn't care about it, it didn't seem important to her because it wasn't about being pretty. So maybe Pretty Catarina won't mind it either. Do you want me to try?"

"It - just makes her like you? That seems... fine?"

She feels that perhaps she has not explained the situation correctly, but she doesn't know how to explain the situation correctly, and she does think she knows how to solve this problem, and—she can let people go, once they're hers, if they seem like they don't like it or wouldn't have liked it—if they dislike it enough they can apparently run off all by themselves, though she's not sure how much she really believes in that—

"Okay. This'll look a little weird."

Iris and Pretty Catarina both glow and levitate. (The crown is leaning very hard on the process to stop it from changing anything about Catarina's outfit, because from what it understands of the Beautiful People, Pretty Catarina would probably dislike that part more than the mind control.)

To Pretty Catarina, it feels like... an intense rush of happiness, just about the happiest it's possible to be; and then, as they settle back onto the ground, it just feels very important to listen to Iris and give Iris what she wants. 'Iris is very good and important' has been added to the list of basic facts about the world, like 'the sun is bright' and 'things fall when you drop them'; she knows it on a similar kind of deep unthinking level, and her feelings and reactions are arranged accordingly.

Iris, meanwhile, is reading Pretty Catarina's mind as hard as she can, trying to see her side of what this whole conversation has looked like, trying to figure out whether in fact she feels okay with this development or not, trying to figure out if she even heard what Iris was saying about splitting off a copy of your past self so they can keep existing.

That was so nice, can they do it again? Gosh, Iris is so good and important and beautiful! Maybe even prettier than Maria!

This looks like a job for the crown, then.

Talking to a Follower is definitely harder than talking to its own bearer, but by no means impossible. It reaches into Pretty Catarina's mind and explains to her that right now what Iris wants her to do is bring back the pre-Pretty Catarina, in this way which the crown can explain by directly showing her the memories of Beautiful Sharp Lamb doing the same thing. It's very important to Iris and Maria. Can Pretty Catarina do that?

Oh! Okay! This might be hard without lambish amounts of fluff. She will try to figure it out.

("She's trying it," Iris reports.)

Would it help (the crown asks Catarina) to have a concealing veil of white mist? It can try giving her a concealing veil of white mist! (This is harder than the ghostly flame decorations it did for the Lamb, but with one Follower it thinks it can probably just about manage. It's very exciting having a Follower again.)

Ooh, yeah, white mist would help a lot as long as it's super opaque. Can it sparkle?

The crown will do its very best! The ensuing sparkle is subtle but extant.

And after a few minutes a swan-being bursts forth from the glittering mist and kisses Maria on the head and dives under the water,

and when the mist clears, there is a young woman with feathers for hair and white swan wings and all-black eyes, sitting there looking shellshocked.

The... splitting of one Follower into two... is very weird for the Crown, and it loses both of them in the process. It thinks it could have held on if it had been more prepared, but it also thinks its bearer would have disapproved of it trying.

Maria pounces on the restored Catarina, sobbing.

(Iris appreciates her crown very much. Though if all the Pretty People are as totally fine with being Followers as this one was, they can maybe see about keeping some, someday...)

She shuffles awkwardly.

Maria is babbling very fast and not terribly coherently at Catarina and petting her feathers and crying.

That seems like a pretty reasonable thing for her to be doing, under the circumstances!

...Iris should not offer them vegetables. She hasn't even gotten to the point of actually cooking her vegetables yet. This is not a situation that would be improved by yanking a raw carrot out of the ground and handing it to the traumatized people. It's just, she wants to do something to help, and vegetables are what she has.

They will take a while to calm down.

For sheer lack of anything better to do, Iris does in fact end up constructing a cookfire and putting on a pot of soup.