"Not too bad. But he has bad dreams while he's stabbed, so that won't help."

"I'm definitely starting to get a sense of why he talks about being cursed so much."

"I wonder if there's anything to learn from the place where he got the apples."

"I'm very hesitant to send an expedition - we can warn people not to eat the fruit, but there's always a chance someone will decide otherwise, and I don't want any repeats of Winter's problem. And there's just no way I could justify personally travelling there, even if I got him to give me directions. Definitely not this year and probably not this decade. Too much else to do."

"Yeah. Send a single trustworthy carnivorous scout, maybe."

"I'm not sure I'm willing to bet the apples aren't somehow tempting to carnivores. Winter's situation fills me with feelings of extreme caution."

Nod.

"One eternally unhappy person in my kingdom is more than enough."

"I'm not sure the immortality is directly interacting with the unhappiness, just making it hard to address."

"He did seem to remember a remarkably apt warning on the gate, didn't he?"

"I don't know how remarkable it is. He hasn't found his heart's desire. Besides, the rhyme indicates you can take fruit for other people just fine, so if we want to believe it entirely we should send people who want to be immortal in pairs."

"I don't know... the White Witch sent him to that garden. The poem warned about despair. Despair ensued. Maybe they're perfectly benign apples of immortality and Winter is just separately doomed, maybe being sent by the Witch was what caused his problem, maybe there are more factors at work that I don't understand, maybe there's an interpretation of the poem that shows how to use them safely... and maybe they're cursed apples that make you immortal at the cost of eventually ending up helplessly suicidal for the rest of eternity. I don't know, and I don't know how to find out, and I don't want to risk it without better information."

"He ate three, we don't know what happens if you don't eat three - but I agree it's not something we want to test. Maybe we should ask Father Christmas."

"Yeah, that's a good plan. Although it's hard to decide between trying to ask him and maybe not getting the chance, and wasting a present on a written question that might not be satisfyingly answered..."

"Well, I got a whole list of questions, last time, and he didn't wait for me to ask them before deciding they were my present, so we might be in a bind having thought of it anyway and might as well think of more things we want to know."

"He did seem to at least lightly imply that he only answers written correspondence that way, but yeah, fair point. Okay. Let's start keeping a list."

Out comes the infinity notebook.

"First question: What should we know about the apples of immortality...? I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with that phrasing, but it seems good enough to write down."

Write write. "Well, he's Father Christmas, not an evil genie, he might be terse but I don't think we can get more out of him by asking really exactingly phrased questions."

"The phrasing still matters some. For example, if I asked 'what is Winter's problem', which was the first phrasing that sprang to mind, the answer might not be about the apples even though the question was intended to be."

"Ha. We can still ask what Winter's problem is though."

"True."

Isabella writes that down.

"What else might we want to ask him about? Maybe if there are any other surprises like those dark tunnels..."