Author Notes: Read this chapter to John Cage's 4'33". Seriously, do it! lol

Elsa stood there, stunned, for several moments. Rapunzel fidgeted nervously. Then Elsa removed her shoes, placing the dismal, fraying sneakers by Rapunzel's polished black leather boots. They were reflected in the shine of the leather and could not but subordinate themselves to their tall masters.

A brown-haired woman, her age betrayed only by a few graying hairs, ran up to Rapunzel and began planting several sloppy kisses over her face. Rapunzel smiled. They babbled their strange Slavspeak at each other, a thing overfull with consonants, while Elsa stared up towards the ceiling. There was a chandelier above, set with pearly white crystal.

Elsa was an alien here.

This palace was not far from town, perhaps a thirty-minute drive, and yet seemed a world away. It was so strange, for this was her town, her homeland, and yet she was apart from it, had been separated from the place that had nursed and nurtured her - perhaps not well, but it was familiar. It seemed ludicrous to suppose someone a stranger in a strange land when there was no strange land, and yet there she was. It was far, far too much to take in.

So she didn't. Staring at the floor was easier. At least her reflection was familiar.

She barely even noticed Rapunzel's proffered hand enter her field of view, or the question that came with it. "Would you like to meet my dad?"

Elsa swallowed the lump in her throat and tentatively took Rapunzel's hand, which, perhaps, was a mistake, because Rapunzel immediately pulled her along, practically skipping forward, their feet racing upwards, Elsa stumbling over the smooth, polished stone floors, the two scrambling up the gleaming grand staircase.

By the time Elsa reached the top, she was short of breath. Rapunzel tried to pull her forward, failed, and turned back to look at her. Elsa glared at her. Rapunzel frowned.

"What's wrong? Am I too fast for you?" asked Rapunzel.

"Yeah. Can we slow down?" asked Elsa.

"Oh, alright. If you say so. Dad's room isn't that far, though! It's just at the end of this hallway!" said Rapunzel.

The hallway seemed to stretch on forever, and the end was nowhere in sight. It was lined with portraits, all sorts of portraits.

"I think I'll walk," said Elsa.

"Walking it is, Mrs. Sourpuss," said Rapunzel.

The portraits were unlike anything Elsa had ever seen before – mostly because she could never afford to go to a real museum. The few first sets were kept in strange machines, evidently for climate control. The proportions were strange. Evidently, long long ago, Rapunzel's ancestors - all giants, apparently - had settled in miniature castles on generic hilly countrysides. These pictures gave way to men – all men – in armor, gleaming bright. All of them held their swords at the ready. They were all coiled as if about to strike, latent energy still evident even after centuries of rest. Past them were fine men in fine coats and fine wigs, all giving the haughty gaze of born aristocrats. Past them, the color was lost, fading to black-and-white photographs. Rapunzel stopped in front of one of them.

"Hey Opa," she said.

Elsa took a look at the photo. It was a man, not quite young, but not quite old either. He was grinning widely, a cigar clenched in his mouth, his face smeared with blood and dirt. If not for that, he would've fit in today – he had that 'Hitler Youth' haircut that was so popular nowadays. Then Elsa noticed the German medals gripped in his right fist, still glistening with a dark liquid. More blood. On his arm, a two-color armband with the letters 'W.P.' and a white eagle. He was bedecked in weaponry. His rifle was sloped on his shoulder, he had a bandolier filled with grenades, and several more ammunition belts were wrapped around his chest. A few knives were sticking out of the pockets of his open vest.

"Just want you to know I'm keeping up the good fight. Fight the Power!" said Rapunzel, holding up a fist. Elsa resisted the urge to laugh.

They were at the end of the hallway now. "There's Dad, have fun!" said Rapunzel.

Elsa couldn't even respond before Rapunzel shoved her inside and closed the door. Elsa looked every which way, but that got her nowhere, so she slowed down and took a much better look. The room was not quite large and not quite small. Though several lights looked down from above, the light was not quite even, with the center dim and the walls focused. Every wall was covered in bookshelves. Most were in a foreign tongue - presumably Rapunzel's horrible little language - though many were in German, and there were even a few in English, though the titles she noticed were mostly related to learning English or self-improvement.

The centerpiece of the room was an enormous, both in height and width, man, one who dwarfed the desk he sat at. He was brown-haired, and as Elsa watched, he turned. Then stood.

Standing, he was even larger, and Elsa was shocked at the speed with which that massive bulk could move. Elsa stammered out some nonsense as he drew closer and closer; eventually he was looming over her, and Elsa was very, very small. His nostrils were flaring, as if he was a raging bull.

"So... Rapunzel brings me another one? I am sure she tells you many tall tales. Tells you that I gobble up bad little girls. She is very silly, is she not?" asked the man.

"Uhhh... what?" asked Elsa.

"And I am sure she has prepared you! Told you how fiercely I question her would-be-princesses! But no matter what she has done, I assure you, you are not ready. You are not, how you say, constitution. Your constitution is not strong enough. You are not strong enough," said the man who must be Rapunzel's father.

"I don't under-" Elsa tried to say.

"Already you falter!" he roared, pointing a single accusatory finger at her. Elsa stepped back instinctively. That only made him sneer.

"What makes you worthy of the Prittwicz name, as she calls it? What gives you the audacity to seize it?" asked Rapunzel's father, stepping back and turning to look at the bookshelves. He idly glanced at a temperature-controlled case on his desk. The title was the only hint to the content, and to Elsa, Wojna chocimska looked like utter gibberish.

"You like this book, yes? Good! It is old. But my family is older. My family is almost as old as Poland itself! We saw the glory days of the Piasts. We were at Tannenberg – both battles – and at the first, both sides! We rode as great cavalry masters, teaching soldiers how to fight like men. When Frederick the Great came, praise be upon him, he saw the valor of our hearts. While others were purged as Austrian scum, we survived, we kept our lands, and we prospered. It was a Prittwitz captain that saved Frederick's life at Kunersdorf! Prittwitzes held back the savage Asiatic hordes of Russia, from the times of Piast, to the Commonwealth, to Prussia, to World War I. And we have fought for liberty, we have defended the free countries of the world. My own father fought back against the greatest tyrant this world has known, and how was he repaid? With sheer ingratitude, and it was then that he knew freedom was dead in Europe and lay only in the far West. My family is old and gloried beyond measure. What do you bring to it?"

His voice was low and guttural, yet it spat words out as rapidly as any machine gun. His consonants were quick and harsh, and there was a dark, melodious tinge to everything he said. His bushy eyebrows twitched as he spoke, and he could not keep his hands from shaking, especially as his eyes saw past her and into days long gone, grand and unforgotten.. And yet Elsa did not know what to make of it, how to res-

"Speak, girl! Or have you gone deaf?" shouted the man.

"I-I-I-I don't know! What do you want me to say?" asked Elsa.

"Bah! Asking me what to say. Indicative of servile attitude, the product of inferior intelligence. No slouching!"

"What?" asked Elsa. Her voice was shaky.

"I said no slouching! Slouching is bad posture. Slouching makes you small. You stand, you stare me in the eye, you fight. You must be a warrior. All von Prittwitzes have been warriors, ever since our name was marked down in the records, all the way back in the early 1200s."

"Well..." began Elsa.

"Well? Well, what! Come on, sell me! Speak! Assert!"

Elsa was cornered. In front of her a bear of a man, behind her the closed door. There was to be no flight from here. She looked around madly for an alternate exit, but there was none. Her heart was pounding, and wildly did she lash out, like a bison calf making its last stand.

"Assert? How's this for asserting, you overblown pompous buffoon? I didn't come here to be yelled at. In fact, I'm not sure why I came here at all! Your daughter is a bitch and you're an asshole with a superiority complex and more money than sense. Go fuck yourself! You want me to sell myself? Fine. I bust my ass every day, not on some feelgood liberal arts pretty-on-paper, useless-in-life bullshit degree, but in a real industry. Chemical engineering - ever heard of it? And unlike those idiots she's dragged in here before, my hard work is already paying off. A free ride, all expenses paid, college education, and it's mine because I earned it with my own two fucking hands. And you may put a bunch of stock in your fancy titles and pedigree, but my name is Elsa Smith, and it's a damn fine name because it doesn't need to put on airs. Because here in America, we earn what we have through grit and skill, we don't inherit bullshit. What you see is what you get, and if you're not impressed by what you see, you're as foolish as your daughter, because you'll never see anyone better. So, sir, kindly go suck a horse's cock and get out of my face. Sir."

Elsa slowly closed her eyes. She put her hand to her mouth. Fuck. She was going to die. Her emotional outbursts were absurd – she ought to wall herself off or something. Hell, if she had a gun, she'd go on a killing spree every week, and if she had magic powers or something, she'd level a whole country by accident. She just insulted some sort of supreme oligarch and she was going to die. Because she was stupid and she deserved it.

He just stared. Then he laughed. He laughed harder and harder until he was practically rolling on the floor. Then he stood, retrieved a well-worn measuring tape, and walked up to Elsa. He shushed her and patted her hair affectionately. Elsa tried to react, but felt, just beyond the layer of fat, pure muscle, hard and thick as steel cables. The man was a mountain of muscle. He measured her skull. He measured the distance between her eyes, their width. He looked thoughtful for a few moments, then he measured her nose. There was an almost maddening intensity to his eyes, which burned with unnatural fire and light, which sized her up as if she was a piece of meat. He pulled back her eyelids to examine the whites of her eyeball. Maybe he did eat people after all.

"Hmm. Blue. A good color. Very intelligent eyes," he murmured.

He examined her hair, tracing it back to its roots. He sniffed the air around her.

"What is the maximum efficiency of a heat engine?" asked Rapunzel's father.

Her mind jostled, panic and confusion settling in, quickly dislodged in turn by the blitzkrieg of intellect, which declared democracy over, installing a dictatorship of skill, the chaos and the fury all over in a split second. Gone was the meek girl, replaced by a creature of pure instinct.

"One minus T C over T H. It does a Carnot cycle."

"Euler equations?"

"Partial u partial t plus u dot grad u plus grad w equals g. And div u equals zero. They're used for flui-"

Rapunzel's father hit her with another question before she could even finish. And after that one, another and another. He drilled her on every equation, then asked for applications, then changed gears and switched subjects. Art history was next, with his rattleshot voice flying through the eras, forcing her to recall any and all scraps of art knowledge, wringing her dry. Before she could catch her breath, he loaded up a barrage of economics questions, going well beyond any of the basic introductory courses she had taken, forcing her to derive strange new equations and explanations on the spot. Her voice grew hoarse and whispered. And still it was not enough for him. He continued to circle her like a shark, always checking his watch after every question, always ready to strike. Literature next! First titles she'd first encountered in English, but, as always, he quickly pushed past her limit. He delved deep into the most obscure titles, then assaulted her with all sorts of foreign titles. Whenever he touched upon a title she knew, he would probe deep, asking her about every nuance and shade of meaning present in the book. And just as it seemed like the musty old texts of dead men would never end, he relented, switching to history. She had thought herself prepared, but she wasn't. Again, he soon was beyond any school curriculum, asking her to interpret events from Babylon to Kyoto to Cahokia. And each time she advanced an explanation, he destroyed it, burying it in a flurry of primary sources and scholarly research. She would switch tacks, only to be torn down again. Sometimes she would even switch to the explanation he favored, only for him to immediately attack that one, tearing apart the explanation he had just supported. They plowed through field after field, his questions merciless and grueling. The lights seemed to swim, but it could've been the delusions of an increasingly stressed mind. Finally, they returned to chemical engineering, where he pressed harder and harder, ending with a question of how to construct some sort of machine she had barely heard, in passing, in an graduate-level lecture she had sat in on.

"I would have to consult my notes," gasped out Elsa.

"Good answer. Perhaps consult me too. I am schooled in mechanical engineering. I know machines," said Rapunzel's father.

He sat back into his chair, melting into it with a contented sigh. He smiled. "Gut, gut."

Elsa wanted to say something, anything, but she was completely out of breath and brainpower alike.

He paused, took a deep breath, and continued.

"You know, normally Rapunzel brings me very... what are they called? Untermensch? No. They are all very stupid. They cannot answer the simplest questions. I ask them about the field they study - what do I get? Nonsense! Political nonsense that I am far too old for now, and the answers, they give me answers, all about equality with gibberish piled on top. And while equality is a fine idea, very fine, it does not make everyone equal! If that were so, why would I succeed and not so many others? They do not have good answers. They say I work hard."

Rapunzel's father scoffed.

"Ha! I know flattery when I see it. I think... I think she feels I do not respect her lifestyle. She thinks I am just very mean. That I reject people because I disapprove of her life. But no, she just has a most horrible taste! Only the simpering buffoonish contemptible, gah! Her women are like stupid pigdogs, only banialuka from their mouths. My own life was not as easy as this mansion makes it seem. For the first thirty years, I could not use any of the family wealth. My grandfather, bless his wisdom, had liquidated all of our assets save the manor itself, and secreted them away. But the curtain falls and I could not use any of the money, even though I knew it was good. So it was like I had nothing but my home. And then the Soviets came and took even that away. Expelled us for being German! The absurdity of it! My family dwells there for a thousand years, and now we are expelled for being foreign? In my heart, I hope I am still Silesian, but every year makes it more doubtful. And I suppose, what I want is for her to have an easier life. No, not an easier life, a much better life. I wish only the best for her. To tie yourself to someone... is a very weighty choice. If someone cannot survive even the most basic screening, how are they to stand by you when Gestapo search your home, or when the homeland calls for strong hands? Rapunzel calls herself a warrior, and I am glad for that, but I worry that her lovers will be unfaithful while she serves the Fatherland. Only the best for her, do you understand?"

He sighed.

"You may call me Czcibor. Or even Ctibor! Now, where is Rapunzel? She is usually lurking nearby, probably to cheer up her damnable strumpets." He opened the door.

"Rapunzel?" he called out.

He went back into his study. "Bah. She is like lizard which is very good at hiding. The frog! She blends into everything. When she was little, she had one as a pet. It died, as all things do, but I suppose she learned."

Rapunzel popped into the hallway.

"Ha! How does it feel to be ridiculed and mocked and insulted and treated unfairly for things you can't control? How does it feel to be talked down to? It hurts, doesn't it? Maybe now you'll understand the plight of-"

Czcibor tilted his head and shrugged. "Rapunzel, I like her."

Her eyes widened.

"Yeah, your dad's cool," said Elsa. Rapunzel's jaw dropped.

She began to stammer. Elsa chuckled as Czcibor lumbered back into his study and closed the door.

"Rapunzel von Prittwitz, eh?" asked Elsa.

"Don't you say that! That is a hateful way of saying a name because it's full of oppressive associations, implicit assumptions of class superiority, and outdated notions of inherited nobility which disproportionately benefit white people. My name is Rapunzel Prittwicz."

"Right, right, yeah, full of oppression bad things. I'm learning so much about social justice. Maybe we need a new name for you? Hrm. Hmmm. Ooh, I know! Prisswits. I like the sound of that! Don't you, Prisswits?"

Rapunzel turned red and stamped her foot. Elsa chuckled. Things were finally looking up.

Author Notes: While the Prittwitzes are a very real, very old Silesian family, the Prittwitzes depicted above do not represent a real branch. It is the case that Prittwitzes have been around since at least 1283. A Prittwitz did save Frederick the Great at Kunersdorf, and Prittwitzes have distinguished themselves in a number of ways throughout the years. However, these deeds cannot coherently be associated with one branch. The family epic presented is of my own invention. Furthermore, while both sides hired mercenaries from many regions, including Silesia, prior to the first Battle of Tannenberg, the records are incomplete and do not indicate Prittwitzes on both sides (unless I missed something). I normally wouldn't comment on this sort of thing, since it would result in very, very long author notes for my other main fic, but this seems standard for more normal fics.

I've always thought it needlessly self-congratulatory, though. Look at how smart I am I am a very smarty smart smart pants my pants are smart

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CLOWNS BEING BASHED OVER THE HEAD WITH GIANT FLOPPY DILDOS.

OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM LITERALY DROWNING IN COCKS SEND HELP