Storytime.

Once upon a time there was a scruff. The scruff was stupid by most accounts. There were a few accounts that were positive, but they were a bit dodge, due to bad book-keeping and the like.

Scruff was having a pretty miserable life. Scruff was indeed shown to be stupid, and not very good at keeping friends, and had no real Reason to exist.

One day, Scruff met a tall[er], dark[er], handsome[r] (although it was hard not to be) Strange[r]. The Strange was not strange in any of the normal contexts. Strange was strange because of the conceptual confusion surrounding her. She was very pretty, but did not exploit this to her advantage. She had eyes that could steal the work of swords, x-rays, and small puppies, but she let them keep their jobs. Strange also wore a hat extremely well. As Scruff illustrates, it is hard to wear a hat. Not everyone has a head that can handle them. Indeed, most of the heads that think they can handle them are not, in fact, wearing the hat, but being worn.

Strange's hat knew its place. It rested there with the appropriate easy slouch and worked in conjunction with Strange's eyebrows to convey confusion and disbelief amongst other things that made the cause of the emotion feel rather as if they had forgot to dress themselves that morning.

Strange had the ability to make people go off on rather large diatribes about hats.

Scruff had been previously been considered to be good at counting. Scruff had passed exams in Complicated Counting. But even those qualifications were not enough to enable Scruff to count the leagues between her and Strange. Scruff's neck felt sore even thinking about how far above her Strange resided. And yet, when Strange talked to Scruff she made Scruff feel as if she had been dragged up to the upper realms where the decent folk hung out. Scruff was fairly wary of this at first. She didn't really know how to be A Good Person. And that was what Strange made her feel like. All of a sudden Scruff felt of some worth. Roughly equivalent to that of iron and steel. Scruff began to like feeling that she had a value, that there was a little speck of Reason beginning to grow and explain her internal organs working so consistently.

To be continued. And then moved to voat...