The 250 foot tower loomed in front of them. Ro imagined that it must have been a tough challenge for the civil engineers who drew the plans for the obelisk-like structure, but even more for the person who had to get those plans approved by the city zoning committee.
As amazing as the fact that the plans to build the tower had actually been approved (considering all aspects such as natural disasters, and disasters as a result of idiotic guests who should never procreate, and whose parents should never have procreated) the landscaping around the tower was just as impressive.
The whole area looked like it was transported right out of a fairy tale book, except for the safety and zoning law-required blinking red light at the very top of the tower. That certainly didn't look very magical. Starting from the window at the very top of the tower there was a very long, golden rope braid that was hung all over the perimeter walls, draped from the lamppost tops, as well as coiled up in heaps on the ground. Yup, it certainly looked like there was a mile of hair snaking around the place.
"So, what do you think this is made of?" Ro asked, reaching out to touch one of the braid loops that were hanging along the walkway to the attraction. "They couldn't possibly have used real hair, because it would have been too hard to trim off all of those split ends…"
Zee stared at the braid for a second, then gave her the brief summary of his data bank report on what the substance was, "It appears to be made of an advanced fiber compound, with the chief fiber being nylon."
"Next question. Do you think this is one long strand of hair, or do you think they broke it up into sections?"
"It's not hair it's a synthetic fiber…"
Ro glared at him with the, "You know what I meant," look. He stopped his rambling and answered her promptly, "Most likely it's one long strand. Man-made fibers can be produced in infinite continuous lengths as long as resources are available."
As they got closer to the tower itself, Ro could see a line of people coming out of the entrance into the tower. How could there be a line for an attraction that's always moving? Simple, the attraction could have a line of people coming out of it slower than the swarm of people getting into the line. At least the line was constantly moving, however slow that motion might be. There was no one to blame for this long line but the people in line themselves. Just for this reason, there was a fashionable queue line for the guests to wait in, conveniently made from rope braids.
"Ro?" Zee cautiously asked, as they entered the queue line. He knew she was going to think his question was stupid, but he still couldn't help but ask, as he was sure she'd know the answer. Usually if either of them had a question, the other would know the answer or know how to figure it out. Despite this, neither of them knew the ultimate purpose of life, yet.
The hesitant tone of his voice let her know that he felt intimidated about something he was about to ask. She could encourage him to get over his shyness by replying with a soft voice as well. "Yes?" she asked.
"How is it possible that someone's hair could grow this long? Your hair has never shown this much potential for growth."
"So what part of the fact that Rapunzel is a 'fairy tale story,' don't you understand?" Ro laughed at him. They'd been over this before when earlier in the day he'd asked about the logistics of how such stories came into existence if fairies themselves were magical creatures, or who came up with the idea that fairies could tell stories. This had actually been a question that neither of them had known the answer to. Luckily, someone who was waiting in line behind them had overheard their discussion and knew the answer.
The girl who'd known the answer was enrolled in French at her college and explained that the term "fairy tale" was coined from the French saying, "conte de fée" which when translated into the English, came out as "fairy tale". From there they'd gotten into a long discussion about what made a story a fairy tale, verses a myth or a folk tale while they waited in line. Both agreed that the root of any fairy tale was to have an undefined setting such as "once upon a time" and "in a land far away", and that a fairy tale also had to stereotypical characters with static personalities. Then, the most important element was that it had to have some kind of other-worldliness, or the ability to give the reader a sense of the surreal.
"I'm familiar with the story of Rapunzel!" Zee said defensively. He realized now that he'd actually set himself up for Ro's retort because he hadn't properly worded his question.
Ro gave him another chance to argue his case, "So what don't you get then?"
He clarified, while proving that he did know the fairy tale, "In the story Rapunzel is trapped in a tower by an evil witch. The witch, uses Rapunzel's hair to climb up to her in the tower, as well as the prince. So, why the mile of hair? Wouldn't 250 feet have been satisfactory? And unlike the other fairy tales, this one gives no supernatural explanation for how her hair is able to grow that long! It just happens! And what did the witch do while Rapunzel's hair was growing out to be 250 feet?"
"I don't get it Zee, you didn't complain about the fact that all the mermaids have hair when all other underwater mammals don't! "
"That's not entirely true. Whales and dolphins are born with hair above their lips, but it falls out as they grow up."
"Then why didn't the mermaids hair fall out?"
"That's not the point!" Zee protested. Their voices weren't raised so it didn't sound like they were getting into an argument, but it certainly felt like one to him. The last thing he wanted was to be disagreeable with Ro, or to have her mad at him. He didn't know what he'd do if one day she'd had it with him and left because of his simple mindedness.
"Then what is?" Ro asked.
They'd gotten so far from his original question that he wasn't really sure anymore. He also wasn't sure if he wanted to pursue the topic any longer. "Never mind," he dropped the subject.
"Come on, tell me!" His stated intention to remain silent on the matter only fueled her curiosity. Just what was it about Rapunzel's long hair that upset him so?
She didn't sound angry or that she felt like they were in an argument and that she was grateful that he'd dropped the matter. In fact, the fact that he'd tried to drop the subject only increased her eagerness. In a way, it felt good to have her interested in what he had to say for once. "Well, it's clear that these people went to a lot of effort to put all of this hair here, but why so much of it? It's completely inefficient? Wouldn't even 300 feet have been enough? They could easily have picked a simpler theme for the decoration."
Ro slapped her forehead, for not having realized what he meant sooner. "Zee, you are perfectly right. This is inefficient. However, since I know you haven't heard the revised story, I don't blame you for wondering."
"Revised story?"
"Yeah. Somewhere there was a group of storyboard creators who were thinking the same exact thing as you, 'How does someone's hair grow so long?' So they fixed the glitches in the story so that it made more sense."
"So what did they change?" Zee asked.
Ro was distracted for a second, as it was now their turn to file into the tower and begin climbing up the circular staircase to the top. The ingenuity of the staircase design was either brilliant or the most preposterous thing to ever be drawn on paper. The up staircase started out as a tight coil spiraling upwards until it got close to the top, in which case it began to spread out until it was circling around the perimeter circumference of the inside of the tower. The downward staircase did the opposite. It was tightly coiled around near the top, then spread out as it got closer to the bottom. It was the only way that they could have such a tall staircase running to the top, and still accommodate and up and down pathway. No wonder the witch needed a rope ladder…
Ro began to retell the story on their way up, "Well, Rapunzel didn't always have long hair. She was actually cursed by a fairy who was unhappy that she was not invited to the princess's christening."
"Why wasn't she invited?" Zee interrupted her.
"I was just about to say why!" Ro retorted. She cleared her throat, "The fairy wasn't invited because she was known to give the best or most appropriate gifts to little children. She didn't give little girls, long lashes or a beautiful singing voice, or excellent embroidery skills. No, no, no… She gave them things like the ability to always find the properly ripe fruit at the market, or she'd give the child knobby toes and knees. Though not all of the gifts she gave to children were inappropriate, most of the time they were unfitting and unglamorous for a princess. Come on, who wants to have the gift of always being punctual, or to speak correct grammar all of the time?"
Yeah, he guessed those kinds of gifts would be rather hard to accommodate, and would limit the princess's free choice. "So, in her anger, the fairy took one look at Rapunzel's beautiful golden hair, and got an evil idea. For her gift, she then cursed the princess's hair to fall out and never grow back again.
This greatly grieved her father and mother as—you know… all princesses are supposed to have beautiful, long hair, but what could they do? Then, the fairy stormed off, never to be seen in their kingdom again…"
Ro had no idea how high up they were yet, but climbing steps while talking at the same time was becoming tiring. She stopped speaking in such a hurry to save her breath a little, "The princess was bald even until her sixteenth birthday…"
"What's so special about turning sixteen?" Zee interrupted her again.
She couldn't help but wonder herself what was so special about that age too. It seemed to be a reoccurring age for the princesses in all of the fairy tales. She'd turned sixteen last year, and it hadn't made her somehow magically mature and ready to marry a prince or rule a kingdom. She guessed that to a younger, more naive and less experienced mind, it might seem like an age where a person could be deemed as "grown up", but she knew better. Grown ups had to support themselves on their own income, deal with getting summoned in for jury duty, apply for house loans, and keep up with their car and insurance payments every month. She was so young she couldn't even buy a lottery ticket at the local drug store. The most ironic fact of the matter was how this simple number related to the park admission prices… According to them, once someone reached the age of twelve, they could be considered as an "adult" and could be charged the adult admission price. If money wasn't a trivial thing to her and Zee, she might argue that she shouldn't be charged the higher adult prince for at least another two years.
"I'm not sure. I guess it just seems like an age that someone appears to be grown up to someone who's younger than that age."
Satisfied with her explanation he let her continue. It took her a second to remember where she left off. "By that time in her life she was supposed to be married to a prince, but no prince wanted to marry a princess without any hair."
"That's superficial."
"Uh huh. To remedy this problem, her mother decided that she would finally use a fairy wish that she'd been saving for a long time. Since the kingdom was at peace and was prospering, she didn't have any qualms about the wish she was going to make."
"What did she wish for?"
"She wished that Rapunzel's hair would grow out three feet, then would continue to grow one inch every day, and then grow twice as fast each time it was cut. But, before the king could wisely advice the queen to make some kind of maximum growth length for the princess's hair, the wise grew cold and ended. You see, the king was smart, and realized how much trouble they would be in, in just a matter of months."
Zee automatically began to calculate the growth rate for the princess's hair. In five weeks, the princess's hair would be floor length. Then if it were cut, it would be that same length in half of the time… "That would be a problem," he agreed.
"Because she had so much hair, it pulled down on her head and so she had to have it cut every morning before she could even get out of bed because it kept growing and growing back, longer and longer every morning! As you can guess, it soon got out of hand! The princess's hair was soon the chief staple export of the small kingdom. The king saw the problem was getting out of hand so he searched far and wide for a way to undo the spell. In his search he found the recipe for a potion that would make the princess's hair stop growing. However, the potion required an ingredient that only the evil witch had. The king tried to bargain with the witch for the ingredient, but she was unreasonable and refused to help him. So, the king felt that he had to steal it as Rapunzel's hair was getting out of control. The witch found out that he'd stolen the ingredient, and so she stole Rapunzel!"
"One bad deed shouldn't be repaid by another."
"No it shouldn't…" Ro trailed off. Just how much more did they have to climb until they reached the top? Did the staircase secretly spiral downward so every two steps they took up, they were really only taking one?
"The witch locked Rapunzel in a tower much shorter than this one, and used Rapunzel's hair to climb up. However, Rapunzel's hair was still growing. But rather than cutting it, the witch let it grow. One day, though, a prince was riding his horse in the forest and he saw the princess's hair and followed the golden trail back to the tower. And yeah, then there's the whole deal with the prince."
Ro wasn't sure if she was being brief with the story because she was getting tired, or if she really believed that Zee could put the two stories together. "But how could Rapunzel flee from the witch if she had all of this hair to drag along with her?"
"Well, the prince was not only handsome, but cunning. He had Rapunzel wrap her hair around a hook at top part of the tower, so that she was hanging a few inches off of the ground in her room. Then he cut herself off from her hair rather than cutting her hair from her. They used the rope braid to climb down from the tower and away from the witch. The next morning, the princess's hair was still the same length from when she cut it! However, in its place, the tower had grown one inch."
"So what was done about the tower?" Zee asked next.
Always curious, never satisfied… That was Zee alright. "The tower continued to grow one inch taller every single day until it blocked a wizard's view of a star constellation in the sky, in which case the wizard used his magic to stop the tower from growing, as using magic on an inanimate object was less dangerous then trying to undo a spell on a living person. And then everyone lived happily ever after, the end."
If she hadn't clearly stated that she was done talking of the matter he might have asked whether or not her hair grew even a little bit later in the princess's life. "Interesting," he commented. "Thank you, for explaining."
Their walk up the staircase was rather boring. The walls were plain and undecorated. They hadn't even bothered to pain a mural or anything on the walls. There was nothing to do but climb and climb and waive to the people heading down on the staircase that wrapped around the outside of the tower. There were no windows so they didn't have any way of telling how much longer it would be until they reached the top and could start climbing back down. "I wonder if anyone's ever passed out from climbing these things, "Ro was complaining, when she accidentally bumped into the person in front of her.
The line had stopped moving. Great someone must have had a heart attack and passed out at the top. The medical team was going to have a fun time trying to get a stretcher up the flight of stairs with all of the people stuck on them. There was one point on the stairs where there'd been a bridge between the larger flight of stairs going up, and the one going down. It was closed off to guests, but it did look like it was operable in an emergency situation. Most likely if an evacuation were to occur, the medical team would have the bottom half of the downward staircase cleared out, then the top half of the upward staircase. No way would they ever be able to get a stretcher up on the coiled staircases. The best solution, was to hope that nothing did or had happened.
After waiting for a minute, they line moved forward a bit. Then another minute or two passed and the line moved forward again. Ro was familiar with this line set up, and figured out what was up even before she could see what was going on. They were admitting small groups into the top room of the tower so that it didn't get too crowded up there. Ro looked up over the heads of the people in line. She could see the attraction supervisor, sitting on a raised platform behind a small operating panel, underneath the ceiling door that led into the tower room. Ro couldn't help but feel sorry for this girl as she'd felt sorry for the waitress at the restaurant. There were no elevators in the tower, so this girl had to walk all the way up to the top every single day to work, and all the way down. And if she wanted to go somewhere on her break, she'd have to walk down, then up again. If Ro had this job, she wouldn't bother to leave the tower for her break. It would take her the entire duration of her break just to make it down and up again, assuming that the crowd let her through. At least she didn't look like she was bored out of her mind. But that was probably a part of the job.
For the most part, the girl's eyes remained glued to the control panel in front of her. Most likely there was a camera in the tower room and she was watching the guests to make sure they didn't trash the property and that they exited the room in a timely manner before she let more guests in.
"I think she's just fallen asleep with her eyes open, this is taking forever!" Ro commented as she eyed the girl. "Can't she tell those people to hurry up and move on so we can have a turn sometime this year?"
Zee glanced over at the girl. She did look very interested in what was on her display panel. Whatever it was, it was definitely distracting her from letting the people into the room at reasonable intervals. There was something about her dazed stare that concerned him. He squinted slightly as his eyes zoomed in on the reflection of the vid screen on the girl's prescription glasses. This was one instance where some feature of his robotic nature was better than its humanistic paradigm. From the distance they were standing at, no human eye could discern the picture on the girl's glasses, but he could. The ghostly picture on her glasses had only been there for a second before the girl looked up from her panel, so he couldn't see the image anymore. It didn't matter that he couldn't see the picture anymore. The familiar profiles were easy enough to recognize. He'd be in trouble if he couldn't recognize his and Ro's own faces.
"Ro…" he started to say, but then realized that he didn't have enough time to explain but would have to act immediately. He took her elbow gently and quickly pulled her close to him, holding her head against his chest, using his hand as a partial shield to cover the side of her face from view. He then turned her around slightly, and looked down at the top of her head, shrugging his shoulder up slightly to cover his own face.
"What is it?" Ro asked, trying to look up at him while he held her head against his chest. He didn't permit her to look up at him, but continued to hold her closely to him.
"Shhh…" he whispered to her.
The girl was doing a good job at pretending not to be looking at them out of her peripheral vision, but Zee was better at the game. He could directly stare at her out of the corner of his eye, while having his holographic eye staring off in a different direction to create the illusion that he wasn't watching her. She finally remembered that she was supposed to let more people into the room and quickly pushed the button.
Great the line was moving, and so they would have to as well. As Zee still hadn't lessened his hold on her, Ro had to take a few shuffled steps up the stairs. It felt so hypocritical that they'd made fun of the couples who had glued themselves together (so that they walked funny when the line did start moving because they didn't want to separate) and now they were doing the same thing! But they had a good excuse, those other people didn't. When the line settled, Zee had managed to find them a spot against the wall. They still had about a three minute wait until they would be allowed into the room with a small group.
"Stay right there," Zee told her. With that itchy feeling of just wanting to run for their lives, three minutes would feel like hours. The fact that Zee had verbally told her to "stay" made it seem even harder to keep still.
She was leaning right back against the stair rail on the side of the wall, facing Zee, who was hunched over inches in front of her. His back was towards the girl at the control panel. Because he was taller he completely sheltered Ro from the girl's view, while keeping the back of his head conveniently facing her.
"What's going on?" Ro asked again.
"The girl at the control panel has a copy of our profiles."
She tried to peer around Zee's shoulder, half expecting to see the girl holding their "wanted" poster in her hands, though if she'd thought the matter through for a moment, she might have realized how ridiculous it would be for the girl to have a tangible copy of the posters. It would also be stupid of the girl to be openly displaying such an item.
Zee shifted his weight slightly, to continue to block Ro's face, and her view. "How do you know?" Ro asked, as she couldn't see for herself.
"It saw the reflection of it on her glasses." She wouldn't bother to ask if he was sure that it was them on the picture. Zee was usually always right. Then again, so was she.
"What are you waiting for then? Change us!" Ro said brusquely.
"I can't. She might have seen us already. Besides, there are too many people here."
She guessed she should have known better to tell Zee to disguise them. He was on top of the matter. If that had been an option he would have done that rather than keeping her hidden in his shadow.
"So should we run for it?" But as she saw the tightly packed line of people behind them she realized that they weren't going to get out the way they came in. This tower supported one-way directional traffic only. If they were going to run they'd have to do it on the way down. Even then there would be a problem from the corkscrew staircase part. They'd only be able to go as fast as the people in front of them. There were no windows they could jump out of, no doors to run through. For the moment, it seemed like they were trapped in the tower.
"Never mind that last idea," Ro refuted her own suggestion. "Do you think we could wait it out in the crowd?" she asked.
"Not likely. By the time that we got down to the bottom of the tower there would be someone waiting for us."
"You got that right, looks like she's on the phone now," Ro announced having stolen a glance at the girl when Zee wasn't actively blocking her view.
He quickly moved closer to her to shelter her again. "What's she saying?" Ro asked, as panic swept over her face.
He tried to fine tune his hearing to pick up what she was saying, but the chatter of the crowd was too loud. "I can't hear."
"Well I'm sure it'd sound something like this, "They're stuck here in line. Come and get 'em, they're sitting ducks!"
"Shhh," Zee tried to silence her. "There might still be a chance that she didn't recognize us."
"Look, you're doing a real good job at hiding our faces, but don't you think she'll find that suspicious?"
"Possibly, but it's better than giving her a clear confirmation that it's us."
"Even if she doesn't know it's us for sure you think she'd take that chance?"
Zee thought for second, "Probably not."
"And it certainly doesn't help that she's probably got a camera in that room too." They wouldn't be able to use the tower room as a "changing room" for some new appearances.
The line moved forward again. It seemed like the girl purposely let a larger group of people into the room just so that Zee and Ro would be planted right under her nose to be the first people in the next group to be admitted into the room. Ro clutched her arms to her chest. Maybe it would help her beating heart to be a little more muffled and to stop pounding so loudly?
The quick pulses of her heart, rattling against his shell for a body let him know that she was nervous. He gently stroked her hair, then reached under her chin and pulled her head up to look at him with a loving gesture. "Play the part," he thought to himself.
She peered at him out of the corner of her eye, then stared at him directly. The man who was holding her was not Zee, but someone else. Or rather, someone with his same hair cut, and slightly altered facial features. From the extra locks of holographic hair dangling in her face, she could tell that there was something different about her face as well, though she couldn't see what it was without a mirror.
While his plan to slightly alter their faces, but keep their dress the same, was a good way to create doubt with the girl, their new facelifts wouldn't hold up long against a pair of holoviewers.
He was grinning at her with a stupid "love sick" grin on his face. Yuck. She hated watching the infatuated couples in line who couldn't keep off of each other, and that's exactly what Zee had turned them into! At least it made a good excuse for why he was always holding her head close to him, or why they seemed to be glued together. She would have returned the silly pretentious smile if she thought she could do it without laughing out hysterically or retching.
It was finally their turn to be let into the room. The doors above them opened inward, and they were permitted to climb up the stairs into the tower room. Zee saw that there was no corner of the room for them to hide in from the camera (even though there could be no such corner as the tower room was round) because the camera was decoratively hidden in the middle of the light fixture, in the middle of the ceiling in the room.
The interior designers must have had fun trying to fit in the necessary furniture items of a princess into the room, while still leaving enough room for guests to walk around the furniture to admire them, and avoiding placing anything in the middle of the room where the entrance to the downward staircase was.
Zee pulled Ro around the crowd of people who were admiring the oval bed, which conveniently fit right up against the wall because of its unique shape. "What can we do? We're trapped!" Ro frantically hissed.
Zee looked across the room to a crowd of people on the other side. "No we're not…" he trailed off.
They squeezed their way over to the crowd of people who were trying to peer out of the single window in the entire tower. The window was left open and didn't have any glass in it so that Rapunzel's long rope braid could come in through the window and the loose end could be ornamentally tied off to the hook hanging right over the window.
However, knowing that there would be someone stupid enough to let their kid climb into the window sill and fall out of it to his death, there was an intricate frame on the inside of the window sill to prevent this from happening. This fence would be of little concern to Zee.
By being a little aggressive and impolite to some of the other people around them, they managed to make their way to the window. Zee looked down at the people below them. His eyes narrowed as he saw what he was dreading, and he regretfully informed Ro of his discovery. "This must really be a popular vacation spot, Bennet's here."
"No surprise there," Ro said gloomily.
Bennet was cleverly standing in a dark shadow behind a large planted bush with his other agents, but he wasn't invisible to Zee's eyes. He was waiting off to the side of the exit for them. But how? How could he have gotten here so quickly? It'd been no more than five minutes since he'd first spotted the girl and Ro had seen her making a call. The only solutions were that Bennet was indeed taking "Fortune Telling and Predicting the Future" classes on his weekends at the local community college where he learned to know where they would before they even knew where they'd be…Or, the more likely solution—that he'd been in the area when the girl had made the call. But even then, what was the chance that he'd be right in the area when the girl called in to tell them that they were at the tower attraction?
Still, he didn't have time to figure it out. They had to think of a way to avoid Bennet at the bottom of the tower, or find a way to get out of the tower now. As Bennet had somehow known they would be at the tower, it wasn't likely that they could surprise him at the bottom of the tower. He was already waiting for them at the bottom of the tower so most likely, he was also "ready" for them.
Zee looked at the brackets that were holding the window in place. There wasn't time to unbolt and unscrew all of them, they needed at least a little of the element of surprise, but more specifically, the extra time that came with it when it caught someone off guard. The girl was probably watching them through the camera, relaying their every movement to Bennet below.
He eyed the rope braid that was tied off above the, then the anchor point at the end of the court yard below. He let go of Ro's hand and the hologram over her face disappeared. It didn't matter, as he was about to blow their cover in a second. He reached out and ripped off the fencing over the window. The bolts stripped out of the wall easily.
"Hold on tightly," Zee said, lifting her up with one arm, and holding her close to his side. She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, hanging on for her dear life.
With the sound of the grate being pulled out from the window, everyone turned to look at the beautiful princess in her glamorous dress with her short blonde hair who was being held by her, strong, handsome prince. Interested in what was going on, and where these actors had suddenly appeared from, they crowded by the window.
Zee climbed halfway out of the window with Ro. She looked at the ground below them, and all of the doll-sized people walking around on it. "You know… now might not be the best time to remind you about my fear of heights…"
"Hang on!" he yelled as he swung his free arm over the rope braid and jumped the rest of the way out of the window.
It might have been more convincing that they were really actors in a show if Ro hadn't been screaming the whole time Zee slid down the rope braid.