“Wait, what?” Asked Mibbet, this was certainly news to her. “You’ve been traumatised, damn near assassinated, dealt with the undead, and the un-dead pretending to be the undead.Hellcats, and owl-bears, not to mention bandits, not that they were really worth the mention, but now you’re saying you don’t want to undo it?”

“Do you know what my day consisted of before that?” Rosalind asked. “I sat in a castle, doing nothing, wondering how long it would be before dad married me off. See here’s the thing, dad is, when it comes down to it a king. He can have more kids, and one of em will be a son. Sons inherit, daughters only think they’re going to till things get all diplomatic, then? We’re trade goods unless we pull off something amazing. Now I don’t know about you but I don’t want somebody else picking my partner for me.”

“Wouldn’t know, I’m a frog, we don’t do that whole gross thing, we just lay some spawn and nick off, what happens after is none of our business. Howe you humans managed to make mating so confusing is beyond me.”

“Well now they aren’t just faced with marrying off a princess, but a Saintess, and between us we’re a pretty good team. Even if you are only looking out for the frogs mostly a side effect is helping a lot of people. That’s better than sitting round the castle collecting the biggest shiniest rocks I can find so I can sneak out and sell em when it’s time to escape.”

“So that’s your plan? Good one, you humans always were obsessed with shiny stuff so I guess selling off shinies you don’t need to get shinies to spend makes sense.”

“Yeah every copper spent in the castle is watched, if I’d started skimming off there they’d figure it out in a second.”

“Then once you’ve escaped we find the scum-suckers who did this and make them fix it, right?”

“uhhhhhh......”

“I said once you’ve escaped we fin........ wait a minute, why do I get the feeling you don’t wanna?”

“That....might be because I don’t wanna.”

“OK what kind of hopless, puddlejumping, rotten spawn is this? I am literally controlling your life and you’re trying to tell me you wanna keep it up?” At this point Mibbet was pretty much giving up on making sense of humans, she had reached the conclusion that as a species they were pretty much completely doolally, you can’t make sense of the senseless, and Mibbet was now convinced that she would never, ever, ever, even if she lived to be a ka-jillion years old and became a god, understand human beings at all.

“Still not controlling me as much as the damned castle, I wake up same time every morning, eat the same time, go to the same classes, I mean who cares how I’m supposed to hold a godsdammed fan? Every time they tell me I wanna shove the thing somewhere that would require surgical intervention to remove, and no I’m not talking about their nostrils.”

“After having sat through your etiquette classes I kinda get that, itchy nose is not what you would call fun, but still, I miss my pond, like a lot.”

“And without you around I’d miss my best friend, even if you are kinda a control freak sometimes.”

“I can’t live like this forever.” Mibbet sighed, for the first time since Rosalind had met her she sounded genuinely depressed.

“No you cannot” Addy said, jumping into the conversation with all the delicacy and tact of a sledgehammer to the funny-bone. “You are starting to meld thaumatoligically.”

“Waddya mean by that?” Rosalind asked.

“To put it bluntly two souls in one body gets complicated. Eventually either one starts to take over or they bond. If that happens separation becomes impossible.”

Mibbet pondered this carefully for a moment. “Can’t we try?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you are a big fan of being at the epicentre of a massive thaumatological feedback loop.”

“Translation for those of us who aren’t made of a mana hive-mind?” Mibbet asked. (Frogs not usually having very many mana 101 classes in their day to day lives.)

“If I am not mistaken this meld happened due to a mild feedback phenomenon, or a sqwoomph correct?”

“Yeah it did.” Rosalind replied, she already didn’t like the sound of this. Where Sqwoomphs were involved reality tended to take a long vacation without proper notice, or requesting anybody take their shifts. The universe compensated for this in the worst way possible, meaning it didn’t, and just left the mess for some other poor slob to clean up.

“Well sticking things together via a a sqwoomph is easy compared to what it would take to undo it. Your magic bonded you on a spiritual, thaumatalogical, and atomic level, a bad attempt to tear that bond could result in a multidimensional subatomic tear.”

“That doesn’t sound good, even the bits I didn’t understand did not sound good.” Mibbet chimed in, (though in all fairness the bits she understood could be written in large print on the back of a micro miniature replica postage stamp using the largest press in the entire kingdom, without doubling up, or using both sides of the paper, probably with some negative space remaining afterwards. So maybe it would be easier to just say she understood magic, messy, and tear.)

“OK I will try to make this simpler, you, her, stuck together, all realities. That is many sqwoomphs. Atoms split with a big boom, across many realities? Even bigger boom. You not want, big boom bad.”

“How bad are we talking here?” Rosalind asked, there really wasn’t much call for a crown princess to gain an understanding of multiverse theory until now, and the middle of a dirt road in the arse end of nowhere was definitely not the place to learn. So for all she knew there could be two realities, this one and one populated entirely by moustache wearing evil doppelgangers. (In all fairness there are a disproportionate number of excess facial hair realities, and evil twin realities, so it stands to reason there would be a fair number where those two requirements both overlap, but even with those requirements filled it is a fair few more than two.)

“Sqwoomphs, well you have witnessed in person how bad they can get. Now imagine that across an infinite number of realities.”

“That is one big baddasqwoomph.”