A lot of tales were made when people weren’t sure what faeries were. Everyone could see they were more magical and littler than normal people but they didn’t know the science that did it, because the faeries were still in the air and hadn’t signed the docking treaty yet.

There was a king and a queen, they were not faeries, but friends with some. When the king and queen learned they were having a baby, they had a party and invited their faerie friends. The faeries went up one by one to give magic presents, and they promised the baby would be beautiful and healthy and well behaved, which was believable because as we know, faerie scientists are really good at gene modding. Some other faeries said she would be lucky and loved, but nobody knew how faeries worked back then, so they believed that too.

The king and queen only had twelve seats at their table, so they left out one of their thirteen faerie friends. And that faerie was mad, of course. Was she supposed to be happy? She crashed in through a window and took the microphone and instead of a present she said the baby would prick herself on a spindle and die.

There was one faerie left who promised that no, the baby wouldn’t actually die but just go to sleep for a hundred years, which was actually even worse, because people in a coma can’t legally just be buried or burned up and forgotten about.

The baby grew up into a princess and her parents never let her near a spindle and wouldn’t even tell her what one was, but wouldn’t say why. So of course when she finally saw one, she touched it and went into a magic coma.

It wasn’t poison, but big magic, because even though they couldn’t all be touching spindles at the same time everyone else in the kingdom went into a magic coma too. They slept for a hundred years too.

But they didn’t get old and they didn’t get sick. They didn’t piss or shit themselves like people with regular comas. The floor didn’t rot and break under them and vines grew around the castle so nobody could move them or rob them. It must have been peaceful. When they woke up, it probably felt like they traveled through time. You miss a lot when you sleep. But it’s not bad if you’re rich and the only person who doesn’t like you is a faerie. Stocks do better if you don’t think about them for a while.

Everyone did wake up when time was up. By coincidence a prince drove in when the hundred years was over and by then everyone had probably forgotten why the coma happened and gave him credit for saving the kingdom.

Everyone was so well rested that they were in a really good mood. Nobody got mad, nobody blamed the princess or even the faeries.

There was another party when everyone woke up and the prince married the princess because that’s always what happens. The king and queen, or the princess if she was making decisions by then, didn’t try to invite the faeries again after all the trouble they’d caused. And none of the faeries showed up uninvited. Maybe they died while all the people were sleeping.

The princess was called Rose.