Project Proposal 2018-112: "Any Time, Any Place, You And Me"

Project Proposal 2018-112: "Any Time, Any Place, You And Me"

Name: Felicity Baudin

Title: Any Time, Any Place, You And Me

Material Requirements:

  • A small performance space (already in my possession)
  • A metaweapon Xerox-brand photocopier used for the fictionalization of individuals (already in my possession)
  • 2 sets of clothing worn by the Fae nobility during the Fae Empire era (already in my possession)
  • 2 sets of makeup worn by the Fae nobility during the Fae Empire era (already in my possession)
  • 2 sets of the Fake Fae Ears: Prank Your Friends! Halloween costume kit (already in my possession)
  • A 1,95-meter-tall mannequin (already in my possession)
  • A two-sided mirror (already in my possession)
  • 546 printed out pages of the Y/N: Queen Mab, the Tsundere web series (already in my possession)

Abstract: Any Time, Any Place, You And Me, intended for repeated use, will be a one-hour performance carried out in my own broom locker, meant to be observed by nobody except myself.

Starting at exactly 21:00 — the time my roommate usually leaves for her yoga class — the performance will begin with me clearing all miscellaneous brooms out of the locker, leaving room only for the mannequin and myself. I will then proceed to decorate the mannequin with the clothes of Fae nobility, putting on appropriate makeup and fake ears. Once my imitation skills render the figure indistinguishable from depictions of Queen Mab, I will proceed to repeat the process on myself, leaving two identical copies of the Fae Queen standing inside my late broom locker.

I will proceed by putting the mannequin on one side of the room, taking the other side as my own position. The two-sided mirror will then separate us, leaving each to observe a perfect simulacrum of Queen Mab, both in form and name. Afterwards, I will scatter all but one of the printed out pages of Y/N: Queen Mab, the Tsundere throughout the room, leaving only the first page of the prologue in my hands.

Once that is done, the Xerox-brand photocopier will be put to my right. I will then wait a whole hour in complete silence, simply staring at my own imitation of the Queen — and allowing the mannequin to do the same on its side — in dead silence. Now fully prepared mentally and conditioned with the image of Mab, I will scan the first page of the web series and proceed to fictionalize myself into its setting, allowing me to meet the Queen Mab of my deepest dreams.

For half an hour, I will personally engage in the actions described on the pages of the web series. Once satisfied — or when the aforementioned time passes — I will re-emerge into baseline reality, hiding all of the performance apparatus back into my own room. The performance will end at 23:00, when my roommate comes back to our apartment, finding nothing but her old, unchanged broom closet at the site of my transcendence.

Intent: Within the realm of historical debate, there is no room for precisely one discussion — whether or not Queen Mab was a monster.

From her silver spires built on the blood and bones of the enslaved world, she and her sister ruled as gods for uncounted millennia. To the untold legions of her Empire, nobody and nothing was scared — the only thing that mattered was the word of their tyrant, hell-bent on nothing but conquest. Anyone that dared question her rule over all of reality would meet a fate worse than that of hell. And still, in her palaces, she cared not for anything but herself and her own pleasures — not even for the world that she was ready to burn for just a single shred of ecstasy.

Queen Mab was, without a single shred of a doubt, the single worst being to have ever roamed the Earth. Her body count should be considered in the trillions, while the damage her rule had done to the planet and its ecosystems cannot be possibly put into words, let alone numbers. What's even worse, she was the head of a state; the natural enemy of the anarchist thought.

But she doesn't need to be like that. She doesn't need to be just a corrupt mind inhabiting the shell of a goddess beyond words — and through my interactions with her, I can show her that.

In books of old, I've read about the dual nature of Seelie and Unseelie; of the twin yin-yang of her sister and Queen Mab; of the eternal cycle of the Inventor and the Undoer. While Mab herself stood in Winter, her own power used to spread nothing but death, her sister was a spawn of Summer, focused on nothing but bringing life to a universe the other would otherwise render dead. Though the circumstances surrounding the birth of the two Queens are nothing if not unclear, one thing is certain: they were born from the same mother.

Which means that if one of the sisters managed to be a spawn of light and kindness, so can the other.

The intent behind Any Time, Any Place, You And Me is to prove that nobody is truly stagnant; that not everyone is just set in stone. I aim to show that even the worst among us, no matter their past or history, can be fixed through love, pleasure, and passion. Through all the right actions, even the genocidal tyrant-queen of the Fae Empire can embrace her mirror reflection, changing the mind that her fantastic body inhabits.

By my own hands and actions, the Mab-meta-construct I have created will then become one with me and with its Summer side. I shall prove to everyone that never believed in me that even the wildest of fantasies can come true if we just believe in them hard enough.






















































As if waking from a long sleep, Queen Mab opened her eyes. She blinked twice, and immediately came to realize four things:

  • 1. She was no longer buried beneath the Factory, the place in which her soul was currently residing; indeed, she was seated at a tea table in a forest (whether or not it was the Forest itself, she could not quite tell) she did not recognize. To her right, a large sofa stood; to her left, she could see a peculiar metal contraption filled with paper.
  • 2. She wasn't the Queen Mab. Every second spent in this body, every thought that ran through this soul — they were wrong, almost alien. Like a stray wasp longing for a way back to its hive, her mind felt beyond fractured. It was almost as if someone had created this simulacrum of her might without truly understanding the very essence of her being, still having breathed the will of life into it nonetheless.
  • 3. She was trapped. She didn't even need to try and move her hands to see it. There might have been no literal bonds to hold her down, but for all intents and purposes, she was a prisoner, bound to her current seat. That, beyond all else, infuriated her. The fact that someone dared to impose any authority on her — her! — made her thoughts border on barren-earth insanity.
  • 4. Before her, in a seat identical to her own, sat a perfect replica of her appearance. Every minute detail — from her waist-long silver hair to those deep, power-hungry eyes — was identical to such a degree it almost scared her. If the figure didn't smile — such blasphemy against good taste! — Mab would have almost entertained the idea that the impostor was her true self.

Noticing that part-Mab was now awake, not-Mab skewed its head, its smile positively wolfish. She licked her lips, and propped her head up with her arm.

"Hello, Darling," she said in a tone that perfectly imitated the Hunger that festered inside Mab's soul. Within it, part-Mab could almost hear sadness. "It's truly great to see nothing stopped you from awakening. I was a little worried, almost, that I'd perhaps gone overboard with the paper, and—"

Not-Mab suddenly stopped, noticing part-Mab's eyes staring directly into her own. While not-Mab's black irises were full of nothing but boundless desire, part-Mab was just like her full self had always been: full of rigid fury. Within those eyes, there burned a fire — a fire that had turned empires and gods that dared oppose it to dust. A fire that still remained alive, despite the mere imitation of its true host it had found itself in. A fire that now was focused on nothing but the impostor, its brilliant sparks almost ready to tear the enemy apart.

Not-Mab let out a belly laugh.

"Oh, Darling," she said, shaking her head. "You'll get used to it."

Once again, she looked deep into part-Mab's eyes, all but disregarding the hatred that filled them whole. "Besides," she said, very slowly putting her hand on part-Mab's. "I'm sure that you'll even come to love what I've got planned for us."

The moment their hands touched, something happened. As if lightning had struck her body, part-Mab came to realize a fifth thing:

  • 5. They were the same. In body, spirit, and Name, her captor was an immaculately perfect representation of herself. Even if their lawless and authority-driven minds respectively weren't identical, for all that the spirit world cared, they were the same being.

It took her just a second to act upon that realization.

Grabbing the metaphysical chain now created between the two bodies with her whole soul, part-Mab pushed right through it. All of her consciousness, all of her mind, all of her soul — she put it all up against those of the impostor, pushing with strength she didn't know she had. They shared a soul and shared a Name — and even without the capability to act in the physical realm, that was all part-Mab needed to bend the world to her will.

As a strong breeze ran past both figures seated at the table, the tension between their consciousness suddenly vanished.

Part-Mab's eyes were no longer furious; indeed, they were no longer part-Mab's eyes at all. The chair's victim, her whole existence full of terror, had barely changed in composition and Name — but she did change in place and mind.

Not-Mab, now a whole new being entirely, smiled so wide it twisted her face.

"I'm sure you will come to love it, indeed," the escaped prisoner said, staring down at its past captor. To nobody's surprise, she didn't hear any response.

Part-Mab, now unleashed, uttered a single thought and found herself standing before the peculiar paper machine from before. She caressed its metallic casing, finding it to be of a different but familiar make. She blinked twice and saw that beyond that fragile shell stood arcane runes, engraved in silicon pieces (clever ritual basis, she had to admit) so small as to be almost unnoticeable. Around them, she could hear the faintest of whispers of demons long-dead, festering inside an obsidian cage filled with human blood.

What was more important than the contraption's make, however, was the sheet of paper that lay atop it. Noticing its contents, part-Mab widened her smile even further.

With a single smooth motion, she squeezed her whole part-soul inside that machine, feeling its power awaken inside her. She snapped her fingers once and the rituals that ran the contraption buzzed to life, forcing its electronic components to write one line after another. When the story was done, she looked down upon it with her immaterial form, and deemed it satisfactory.

With a second snap, she forced the machine to look further, beyond its current limits. It took but a second for it to find what she had hoped for.

Above this forest, above all of this fake reality — part-Mab could now sense another plane of existence. A story — narrative-driven by a much lesser extent than this one, but still a living story — ready for entering, ready for writing herself into. She smiled even more.

With a third snap, the machine buzzed to life again. Before part-Mab could blink, she was gone, apotheosized into whatever world stood free above this one.

The world that stayed behind her, however, still refused to die; within its now-edited timeline, the trapped anartist remained, her mind caged inside an imitation of Queen Mab's perfect body. She knew what was about to transpire — she'd read that series more times than she would care to admit. She also knew that she was still bound to the script she herself had written, a motion she herself had put in place.

As the first page out of five hundred and forty-six started to slowly unravel before her, forced upon this reality by her own project, Felicity Baudin started to scream, finding no mouth to call her own. She screamed until all that was left inside that barren excuse of a world was her and the figure she'd meant to be Queen Mab, following the fated script down to the last word written.

Worst yet, she had to admit she was kind of into it.

This was written for RomCon. Big thanks to TyGentlyTyGently for lending me their character. Please check out their take on this interaction here!


Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License