"Hi!" says the puppy. "Are you the Princess's kid?"

"I'm Harley Andrea," says Harley. "Who're you?"

"I'm Zeus Norton!"

"Cool," says Harley. "I wanna help with your snowfort!"

"Okay!" Zeus runs indoors and gets a spare shovel. He's building on the snowheap created by someone having shoveled the front patio of his house, digging out tunnels in it and turning excavated snow into turrets on top.

Harley gets to work. Snow architecture is one of his favourite things! He's pretty good at it, too, although sometimes he is not especially careful about making sure his creations can support their own weight.

Zeus thinks it is okay when stuff falls over, because then, you get to build it again. "Are you a human?" he wants to know.

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, you could've been a puppy or a hybrid. I'm a puppy. If you're not the Princess's kid how come you came out of her and Jacob's house?"

"I'm not not her kid," he shrugs.

"...Huh?"

[Elsie, Zeus wants to know if I'm your kid, how do I explain me?]

[You can tell him as much or as little as you like. You're my fosterling from another world, would be a succinct description.]

"I'm her fosterling from another world," he echoes. Elsie is good at explaining stuff.

"Oh. Why does she have one of those?"

"She took me away from my parents because they were bad for me. I don't remember them," he says, shrugging again.

"Oh. But you're not like a prince or anything?"

He grins. "Nope!"

"Huh. Okay," shrugs Zeus. Snowfort snowfort. "So I am prince of this snowfort. 'Cause I started it."

"I, um. I sit on top of it, and if a snow dragon shows up you can be the snowfort knight and slay it and bring me its head!"

"Cool," Harley opines. "I wonder what a snow dragon looks like."

"The size of both our houses put together! And made of ice and snow and with big sharp icicle teeth," asserts Zeus.

"I wanna kill one," Harley declares.

"I will then!" says Harley, and he studies the icicles to see which one would be the easiest to grab.

Harley climbs up and grabs the icicle.

Just in time, too! "Sir Harley! Knight of the Snowfort! There is totally a dragon right over there!" hollers Zeus, waving at someone's snow-covered car.

Harley giggles and runs over to the car, which he climbs up onto and then stabs mightily in its snow-covered windshield. His icicle breaks, and most of the snow slides off the front of the car, taking a giggling Harley with it.

"Oh no! Your sword broke!" exclaims Zeus, and he abandons the snowfort, sliding headfirst out of a tunnel, to grab another big icicle - two, one for him and one to replace Harley's.

"But I killed the dragon," snickers Harley.

"There could be more dragons!"

"Maybe the houses are dragons," Harley speculates. "They've got the teeth and everything!"

"Yeah! They're sleeping dragons! We gotta get them or they'll wake up and wreck the fort!" Zeus begins relatively gently attacking his house, trying not to break his icicle.

Harley, of course, joins in the battle with more enthusiasm and less restraint.

"Your house is a dragon and we're killing it," Harley adds, cheerfully.

"Oh no! Have I been living in a dragon? All this time?" chuckles Zeus's mother. "Well, please don't kill it too energetically."

Harley laughs. "You're funny!"

"I love Elsie, she's great," Harley says cheerfully, attacking the wall some more. His icicle snaps in half.

"And then you'll be living in a dead dragon!" says Harley. "Cool. But how do we intimidate it if we can't talk to it?"

Harley eyes the house speculatively.

"It won't answer you, most likely. Dragons are arrogant like that," smiles Demeter.

He giggles again.

Harley is laughing too hard to help intimidate the dragon.

"I'm a Snowfort Prince! Smart dragons don't even let me talk to them, they're already dead when I get there," asserts Zeus.

"It's true!" Harley agrees. "He's already killed, like, a million more dragons!"

"A billion!" corrects Zeus. "And that's not counting the smart ones! This dragon here must be really dumb," Zeus adds to Harley.

"Is it dead?" asks Zeus skeptically.

"Yeah, look at it," shrugs Harley. "You see it moving?"

"Maybe it's asleep," says Zeus. "Maybe it's in a coma!"

"Hey, if we scared it into a coma, I think that's good enough," says Harley.

"It could wake up, and then my mom would be in it," says Zeus suspiciously. "It'd have her hostage!"

"Your mom sounds like she knows how to handle dragons," says Harley.

"Yeah, maybe. Okay, let's go make a village for around the fort," says Zeus, and he wades off through the snow to start making snow houses around the base of the existing construction.

Snow houses! Harley cheerfully assists him in this noble endeavour.

Houses houses. "D'you know how long the Coven's going to be here?"

"Nah," he shrugs.

"My dad used to move around with the Coven but he stopped after he met Mom."

"Did your mom not like it?"

"Yeah. We travel plenty, just we always come back to the same place." He gestures at the slain dragon.

"Elsie goes around with the Coven," says Harley. "And sometimes she takes me places where they aren't, and then we go back again. I like it, it's fun."

"Mom and Dad met at Burning Man and now we all go every year."

"What's Burning Man?"

"It's a bunch of people and art and stuff in a kind of a dust desert! It's fun and nobody cares if you run around naked."

"Cool!" says Harley. "That sounds awesome, I wanna go to it."

"You should totally come! It's in summertime. You'd have to get Princess Elspeth to take you though."

"She would, I bet! She takes me places a lot!"

"That's really cool," says Zeus. "Does she magic you there?"

"Yeah!"

"Lucky, we have to go places in cars or buses or planes."

"What are those like?" wonders Harley. "I've never been in them!"

"They're dumb, you just sit in them and you have to be quiet and not kick the seat and sometimes they make me throw up."

"That is dumb," says Harley. "Somebody should fix it!"

"Dad says when the Masquerade is fiiiiinally over we can start having magic stuff even to go places like Burning Man where regular humans will see, but it's not quite yet."

"Yeah! I like them. Planes are even faster, so it should be funner, but you're all boxed up."

"Maybe somebody'll make better planes," Harley says optimistically.

"They're faster than they used to be, anyway, it used to be it would take like all day to get from here to Black Rock City but now it's just a couple hours once you're on the plane."

"That's a start!"

"Yeah." They're starting to run out of snow to make the village; Zeus starts patting down the spaces between them into roads.

Harley busies himself scuplting further details onto the houses. They can have little roofs! With tiny, tiny icicles!

Zeus approves! "I like playing in the snow. Once I'm twelve I can floof and then I don't even have to wear a coat anymore!"

"Awesome," says Harley. "Plus you'll be floofy!"

"Yeah! I dunno what color I'm gonna be. I hope it's a good color."

"Elsie could find out, I bet!" says Harley.

"Would she bother?"

Elspeth pokes her head out of her window, and spends a square for an illusion of Zeus's forthcoming wolf form near where they're playing. He is going to be cinnamon-brown with black feet and a black muzzle, apparently.

"...Hi Your Highness thank you!" says Zeus after a moment's stunned pause.

"Well, you have to wait five years," shrugs Zeus, "or so, and then I have to find a vampire to trigger me. But then you can!"

Harley beams. And hugs the non-floofy Zeus, preemptively.

Zeus laughs and hugs him back.

Hugs!

"You should stay here a while and we can play all the time," Zeus says.

"Yeah! That'll be fun!"

Zeus grins at him, then disengages from hug and runs off to grab some snow, form a snowball, and hurl it directly at Harley's face.

Zeus is a fierce snowball fighter!

Harley is too! Also a giggly one.

Zeus has soon invented an elaborate backstory for their two-person war; apparently they are a marooned pirate (Harley) and a shipwrecked navy captain (Zeus) who are fighting for the limited supply of food on their desert island, with coconut projectiles.

Harley adopts this fiction with enthusiasm. And snowballs.

Zeus has a colorful arsenal of suitable insults for naval captains to aim at pirates, and employs them all gleefully once Harley has adopted piraticality as a character trait.

Harley-the-pirate finds this endlessly amusing!

"You live in a dead dragon!" Harley yells after him, and goes back to merrily pelting Zeus with snowballs.

"We killed it for you you're welcome!" Zeus adds at the top of his lungs. Snowballs! An apocalypse of snowballs! Zeus eventually has the clever idea of seeking cover in his fort, where he manufactures a small stockpile and then peeps his head out of the skylight to throw from high ground.

Harley, who has climbed the snowfort in the interim, dumps an armload of snow over his head the moment it is visible.

"Pah!" Zeus is distracted by brushing snow out of his face, but then he escapes through one of the tunnels, his arsenal rolling out after him.

Harley triumphantly smashes the top of the fort so that parts of it crumble onto Zeus as he emerges.

"My KINGDOOOOM," howls Zeus theatrically, and he pelts Harley with his accumulated snowballs ever more fiercely.

Harley pelts him with bits of fort!

"Yeah!"

Harley beams and follows him inside, getting snow all over the entryway as he divests himself of his winter gear but mostly managing not to spread it through the rest of the house.

Harley drinks his too fast and giggles over it.

Bartholomew supplies seconds without having to be asked.

"Thank yooooou," Harley sings. Slurp!

"Do you want to stay for dinner, Harley?" Bartholomew asks. "If that's all right with Her Highness, that is."

That's fine, Elspeth broadcasts to Harley and also to Bartholmew and Zeus.

"Green beans, baked chicken, and baked potatoes," says Bartholomew.

"Yum," says Harley.

"You like green beans?" asks Zeus skeptically.

He shrugs. "Yeah?"

Harley giggles.

Eventually Bartholomew serves dinner, Demeter appears from elsewhere in the house with sawdust in her hair and paint on her apron, and they all eat dinner. Zeus even eats three green beans when sternly obliged to do so.

"You've got stuff on you," Harley observes to Demeter around a mouthful of green beans. "What were you doing?"

"Making a go-cart," says Demeter. "Can't go anywhere in it till summertime, but I have a jump on the competition this way."

"What's a go-cart? Is it a cart that goes?"

"Fun!" says Harley.

"Yeah! I help Mom sometimes."

"Cool," he says. "Is it fun? Sometimes I go to Aedyt's asteroid and she lets me help her make stuff and it's really fun."

"Who's Aedyt and why does she have an asteroid?" Demeter asks.

"Aedyt is the Joker's daughter and she has an asteroid because he gave her one!" he says reasonably.

"Why do you go there?" asks Zeus.

"Because it's fun!"

"The Joker's my alt," Harley explains serenely.

"I forget," says Harley.

"How do alts even work?" Zeus asks.

[Elsie, Zeus wants to know how alts work and I dunno how to explain!]

[No one understands why alts happen, at least not yet, but your alts are versions of your personality and basic traits - and, in most cases, appearance - from other worlds and circumstances.]

"Alts are people from different worlds who are like the same person!" says Harley, approximating this explanation as best he can without copying it verbatim.

"So the imperial something is from another world but he's - like you sort of?" fumbles Zeus. "But what if you grow up to be different? He's a grownup, you could be anything you wanted when you grow up, right?"

"I can be anything I wanna be when I grow up, but I'm still gonna be me," he says. "And I'll be one of the Jokers. There's lots and they're all the same but different and I'm gonna get to meet them when I grow up!"

"You haven't met them yet?" asks Zeus.

He shakes his head.

"Why not?"

"Because grown-up Jokers have sex with each other and it'd be weird when I grow up if I knew them all now!" he says, secure in the knowledge that this is an Elsie-splanation and is therefore absolutely true.

"Elsie did!"

"I'm not sure that's such a - how old are you?" Demeter says.

"Seven!" he chirps.

"And Her Highness just - told you that?" Bartholomew says.

"She's Elsie," he says. "She says true stuff!"

"Yes, but," says Bartholomew, "that?"

"Why not?" he shrugs.

"It doesn't seem age appropriate," says Demeter.

Harley shrugs.

"Then I guess it'll have been silly to wait all that time to see 'em," Harley says philosophically. "But it's not like I could meet them all now anyway; the other worlds have been cut off since I was a baby."

"I dunno," says Harley. "Probably. They all do, and I'm another one, right? So I'm probably gonna like all the stuff they like. I already know I like to cook!"

"Nah, it's not weird," says Harley. "If you wanna talk to Elsie about it, you can do that! She's right next door!"

"We don't personally know the Princess," Bartholomew tells Harley. "I know Jacob, because I'm in his pack, but I've not spoken directly to her."

"She's really friendly," Harley says earnestly.

"Why would it be weird? It's just not," Harley says with a shrug.

"Like if somebody showed me a picture and was like 'this is the person you will marry when you grow up, for sure' I would think that was weird," explains Zeus, not particularly eloquently.

"Well, that might be a little weird," says Harley. "But just knowing stuff about what kind of person I'm going to be and what kind of stuff I'll like is fine!"

"Why don't we talk about something else," suggests Demeter.

"Okay," Harley says cheerfully. "Like what?"

"After you defeated the dragon what happened next?" Demeter suggests.

"Then I was a pirate and we threw snowball coconuts at each other because we were shipwrecked on a desert island! And I smashed his fort," Harley says gleefully.

"I am a prince without a fort," says Zeus solemnly. "He is a wicked destroyer and one day I will have revenge."

Harley giggles.

"Tomorrow we should make two forts, one for both of us," says Zeus, "and - and booby trap them and play capture the flag with them! There are some other puppies around, we can get them to play too."

"Awesome!" says Harley.

Harley giggles.

[Hey, was Zeus's dad just there?] wonders Harley to Elspeth.

[Yes, he was talking to Jacob about you and me because he doesn't feel comfortable talking to me directly.]

[What'd he say?]

[He wanted to know if I knew what I was doing, telling you things about Jokers and how you're going to be when you grew up, and Jacob assured him that I did and that you were fine.]

[Well, you do and I am!] he says cheerfully.

[Yep.]

[Love you, Elsie.]

[I love you too.]