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  1. Once upon a time, in the quaint kingdom of Reuhrenwald, a king and queen
  2. gave birth to a prince.
  3. And this would not have been so unusual--indeed, it is the fashion of
  4. the times that kings and queens give birth to princes--but the prince
  5. in question was born fully grown, seventeen feet tall, with the least
  6. pleasant unibrow any of the subjects had ever seen. Physicians were
  7. summoned from all over the kingdom to examine him.
  8. "Why, it's like nothing I've ever seen," one said. "I've heard of babies
  9. born seventeen feet tall, and babies born fully grown, but the unibrow
  10. is really a new thing altogether."
  11. And it was really only a matter of time, what with his stature and
  12. unsightliness, that he took up gardening, and spent his free time doing
  13. the pruning at the tops of trees that nobody else had bothered to
  14. do. He became good friends with the birds who lived at the tops of
  15. the trees, calling them by their first names--usually Benvolio, because
  16. birds often name their children Benvolio, regardless of gender, for
  17. reasons that none of them quite remember, though they assure you
  18. it has something to do with eggs or some bird-related thing, which is
  19. not as obvious as it might sound at first--and generally being merry.
  20. One day, he looked beyond the forests of Reuhrenwald and noticed that
  21. the kingdom was gone. Half of it was destroyed in the Great Fire of the
  22. Shoemaker's Estate, and the other half moved away because the town
  23. wasn't like it once was without the Shoemaker's Estate. The prince
  24. shrugged and went on with his pruning.
  25. He also probably turned into a tree or some shit, because that's what
  26. usually happens in stories that start with "Once upon a time." You
  27. can honestly believe whatever you want about the prince. See if I care.