What the fuck?

She's on a rock! It is small. It is round. She is much smaller, but not as round. The air is breathable. There's some fairly lush grass, and a little apple tree, with some apples on it in various stages of ripeness.

She attempts to osanwë Mandos and this doesn't work at all.

She's out of guesses.

She... walks over to the apple tree.

It is an apple tree.

She never did figure out if she can starve. She supposes she will discover one way or the other if all she has to eat is apples.

She picks a ripe one and bites it.

It's one of the kinds of apple that actually tastes good, which is nice. Not mealy, not too sour. Very juicy.

Her sensory radius encompasses her entire rock and also a good amount of surrounding space, which is why it might come as something of a surprise when someone walks into it. He's a bit taller than her, but not enough to be an adult. Might be a big kid, or a very small teenager.

"- hello?"

"Hello," he says. "Is this your home?"

"It wasn't yesterday but I don't see a way to get anywhere else."

"Ah," he says. "That does not make it home, I do not think - but it is something."

He walks down in spirals through the empty air and finally sets foot on her rock. "Do you know what you are, yet?"

"I appear to be a small child for some reason."

"Ah!" He sketches a bow. "Hello, Small Child. Welcome to our world. I am the Little Prince."

"That's not my name, my name is Annie."

"Your name?"

He says this in very much the same tone one might say "your flange?" Gentle confusion, not at all discounting the possibility one has completely misheard.

"Do you only have your title and not a name?"

"Yes, I am just the Little Prince... is a Name in case you meet another Small Child? I suppose there could be several."

"Small Child isn't actually my title either. I was just referring to the fact that before I appeared here I was roughly twice this height and more physically mature."

"Oh! Were you a Woman? I have met Women - a Queen, and a Doctor, and once an Amazon, though she did not like me. I do not think I was anything before I appeared, but I could have forgotten..."

"I was a woman, yeah. For hundreds of years."

"How strange. I do not know how long I have lived. I have slept some few thousand times, I suppose. ...do you know if your Tree would give me an apple? She has given one to you, but I do not know how close you two must be for such intimacy."

"We've only just met. As far as I'm concerned a ripe apple is for eating, and I've already got one." She indicates her half-eaten apple.

He lays a hand on the tree's trunk and closes his eyes. After a few seconds, he gently plucks an apple of his own and takes a bite.

"She is very kind," he reports. "She shares your view, that an apple should be eaten. Some Trees, you know, they are so haughty... I suppose when there is only one thing you can give, you might guard it close. But she is happy to help."

"Does the tree... talk?"

"-yes! You do not hear her?"

"Not so far..." She puts her hand on the tree trunk.

This is a tree. Trees do not talk.

"She says hello..."

"I can't hear her. I can't hear anything except words, and I guess maybe tree words don't come through."

"...oh. She does not say words - it is the rustling of her branches, and the light through her leaves, that makes her feelings known."

Pause.

"She says she is sorry, that you cannot hear her. I am sorry, too."

"Sorry, tree." Pat pat. Could be nonsense but it would not be the weirdest thing that has happened to her today.

"When you were a Woman, did you travel very far?" he asks, apropos of nothing.

"Yes. Not always intentionally."

"Oh, that sounds very fun. I have only ever gone where I meant to go, even when I meant to go somewhere I did not know yet. Maybe I should go more places by accident? Only I don't know how I would."

"It wasn't fun."

"Oh. I am sorry, then. Maybe we will both be happier going where we mean to."

"Yeah. I could actually send you to a random place but I doubt you'd ever be able to come back so I'm not planning to."

"Oh, please do not. I would miss my Rose, and she would do so badly without me... and I am sure my asteroid would be destroyed by baobabs anyway, they are such a constant trouble."

"...baobabs."

"They are very large trees. But they start very small and difficult to notice, and they grow very quickly, and my poor asteroid took a very bad seeding of them some time ago, and so I must be careful to root them out when they try to grow, or else they would crush it entirely."

"Oh. I guess I'll keep a metaphorical eye out."

"Metaphorical?"

"I can't see, except, again, for words. I have a blindsense sort of thing instead."

"Oh... well, so many of the important things cannot be seen, anyway. Would you like to take a walk?" The pivot is as smooth as it is nonsensical. "There is an asteroid nearby which is cared for by a Mother, and she has given me chocolate, sometimes."

"I don't know how to get to another asteroid. None of them are near enough for me to sense."

"Oh! If you hold my hand, I can lead you. Or if you don't, I suppose - but it is nice to hold hands, is it not?"

"Sometimes, I suppose." She holds out her hand.

He, in turn, takes it. And then he walks forward, but rather than following the steep curvature of the asteroid, he... doesn't. Just keeps walking in a straight line.

...can Annie do that?

Yep! There's a moment when he's started going upwards and she hasn't, where their hands stretch apart a bit, but once she gets the hang of it they sync back up.

Kind of cool. There's nothing to trip on in midair.

Indeed there isn't! It doesn't really feel like walking on anything, let alone a cluttered surface; when she puts her foot down, it just stops where her next step should be.

The Prince looks up, though up is starting to seem like a less coherent concept. "The stars are beautiful. Would you like to hear about them?"

"I've seen stars, before, but maybe these are different."

"Of course they are different! They are these stars, and you saw those stars..."

He begins describing individual stars. This one is Gelidus, and that one Pyrhos; the former is blue, the latter red, and they are in love. There is one named Columbidae, and she is very bright, and very white, and a bit of a wallflower. One is named Harry. He is in a bad place, at the moment, but the Prince is optimistic that things will improve for him.

"How did you learn their names?"

"I do not know how they talk amongst themselves, or what name Harry may give to his friends, but Harry is what I call him."

"So, if you can't talk to them the way you can talk to the apple tree, how do you know if they're in love?"

"Because - you cannot see it, but Gelidus grows so bright when they are both together, and he fades when they are apart. And Pyrhos stays strong, even when they are apart; but his light becomes a bit bluer, thinking of his love."

"And you can tell when he's thinking it?"

"Well, he turns bluer. I would be awfully surprised if there were no reason for it."

"Ah-huh."

"And Columbidae is never nearer to another star than they are to each other - and Harry, he had a companion, but she went away a long time ago to join the great star at the center, and has not stayed with him. And he has been very dim, ever since. And a few stars have stopped by, but he has not been pleasing company, and they have all gone as well. But this new one, I do not know any name for him yet, has stayed by his side very steadfastly, and he has grown brighter again. They like each other very well, I think."

"Great star at the center?"

"Oh, yes. There is one very great star, in the very pinnacle of the sky, and when a star is done with their time, they make their journey into its embrace. One day every star will have gone into it, except one, the star at the bottom of the sky - and then they will embrace, and they will be everything and nothing."

"That's not how stars work where I've been before."

"How dull it would be, if all stars were the same!"

They come within Annie-sight of another asteroid. It's got thick grass over rich black soil, unlike the moon-dust of her own.

"Is this where you live?"

"No, the Mother I told you about. I think she is baking - I smell cinnamon..."

A woman emerges from the cottage coming into view and squints into the sky.

"It's you. You have a friend. Hello."

"Hello. My name's Annie."

"Do you like butterscotch? I've been baking a pie. It's one of the things I know how to do well, so I do it a lot even though it's not very practical all things considered."

"I like butterscotch. Why isn't it practical?"

"I do not have many friends, and so I cannot distribute baked goods at the rate with which I make them without alienating my existing friends by burying them in pastry. Given this, the most efficient thing to bake would be cookies, since they keep better than pie and can be distributed piecemeal. But I like pie."

She says this while entering her cottage, retrieving a cooling pie, and setting it out on a folding table. She begins cutting into it.

"It does seem like it would be more difficult to maintain friendships when you have to go between planetoids to see anyone. Where do you get your groceries?"

"...my kitchen."

The Mother offers Annie a slice of pie, hot enough to be careful with but not hot enough to scald her too badly if she isn't.

Is there a fork? Annie will fork her way through a slice of pie. "Your kitchen... magically spawns ingredients?"

"I have little to no idea what 'magically' means to you. My kitchen has what I need. Some people have apple trees, or roses. I have a kitchen."

"I have an apple tree but I assumed it would grow apples the way trees are generally known to do. Kitchens of the kind I'm used to do not grow anything on their own."

"Kitchens of the kind I'm used to have ingredients in them."

She takes a bite of pie.

As does the Prince.

"The pie is very nice."

"Yes, it's very tasty, thank you. Are you... hm... if I finish my slice of pie, and then we leave the plate, right here, with nothing on it, would you expect it to keep having nothing on it?"

"Yes. I can predict with some fidelity the remainder of this conversation; you will ask 'then why is it different, for your kitchen?' and I will say 'because it is a kitchen, and not a plate,' and you will say 'what makes a kitchen so different, then,' and I will say 'it is a kitchen,' and however many more sentences remain, you will end up entirely unsatisfied and I will end up needlessly irritated. Let us elide the whole affair."

"I was going to say that I am accustomed to kitchens that behave like plates. Clearly yours isn't one of those."