CHAPTER 1: Craving for Symmetry and Enchantment

“Guten Tag.  Ist hier noch frei?” a seven-foot-tall hairy green beast asked politely in German as he approached an empty seat on the InterCity Express train heading towards Berlin.

“Guten Tag,” the girl returned without much thought about it, “ja.”

“It’s only an everyday story to fabricate creatures like me and to transform creatures by trouble.”

Prince the Green Beast

When the girl rolled her eyes to her new acquaintance, she was startled.  She was screaming inside.  She tried awfully hard to relax her eyebrows and restrained herself from staring at him from head to toe.  She had been well taught to behave and stay calm when encountering creatures with different features and appearances from her genre.  She heard a lot about magical creatures fabricated in beast-like forms from imaginary hybrids and the like, but this green beastie gentleman was slightly bigger than she used to imagine.

She found it wired, then amused, to be talking to a gigantic teddy bear.  Apart from that, there was no drama when she met the first magical creature in her life.

“Könnten Sie mir vielleicht sagen, wer… oder wo…” she tried to keep their dialogue going and threw out as many German words as she could recall from the intensive language course that she attended before going abroad.

“Are you interested to visit Sir Norman Foster’s elliptical glass dome of the Reichstag?” the green beastie gentleman interrupted, with his eyes wide open.  “That was erected on the roof of the historical parliament building as a gesture to the original cupola.  How clever!”

The gentleman was intrigued by the tourism and travel article in the in-train magazine.  He added, “Just right next to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof when we get off at the next station.”

The gentleman did not hear a response from the girl and wondered if she did not speak English at all.  He turned his head towards her, and his signature triangle eyes, with one inverted, blinked with curiosity.

“Sprechen Sie Englisch?  Nicht?” asked he.

“Oh yes!” said she.

“Then let’s go for an adventure.  I’m Prince.”

“Georgia Yilton.”

“Georgia Yilton,” Prince repeated aloud after her, so then he knew exactly how he should address her.

The girl followed Prince’s lead and arrived at the Reichstag.  She noticed that Prince was extremely cautious with his crown, always tidying up to look his best.

There were strict fashion rules for the beastie royals.  The crown should not be worn far forward on his head, but with the dragon head at a forty-five-degree angle when viewed from the side.

The crown was not jewellery, but Prince’s royal regalia and identity.  The crown was made from an alloy of titanium and gold and the mechanical dragon head adorned with a pair of topaz eyes was a late addition by his mage.  It was believed that there was a hint of Japanese robot anime influence during his moulding.  In fact, his mage’s generation was raised with televised cartoons as their daily entertainment after school.  Prince could easily trace his fascination with parallel worlds of fairy-tale enchantment and sci-fi mechanical engineering back to the good old days with his mage.

“Every magical creature has a myth.  What’s yours like?” asked the girl.

“Nothing much,” replied Prince.

Disappointment evident on the girl’s face, Prince rubbed his triangle eyes gently to avoid direct contact and went on, “It’s only an everyday story to fabricate creatures like me and to transform creatures by trouble.”

As they reached the roof of the Reichstag, Prince suggested, “Let’s fly to the next cupola.”  He pointed at the Berliner Dom and then jumped swiftly over the parapet wall.

“Let’s stroll to the Berliner Dom instead,” the girl shouted out her counterproposal.

“You can fly,” Prince clenched his fist implying a boost of confidence and instructed, “simply stretch out your arms.”

She hesitated, “Pixie dust?”

“We don’t need those superficial things to reach the clouds or the stars,” returned Prince.

“But I can’t fly,” she gulped and took a step backward, “I wasn’t born with wings or big ears.”

Prince was aggravated with more and more excuses.  He felt tired arguing and at last, surrendered.  He patiently walked with her to the Berliner Dom and climbed every step of the granite staircase. 

The walk around the dome high up at fifty metres was magnificent indeed and allowed non-winged tourists to overlook the Museum Island by the Spree River in the central district of Berlin.  The girl was eagerly searching for the Reichstag and the renowned boulevard Unter den Linden where they just came from, while Prince indulged himself in the architecture expressed in symmetry and order.

“The synagogue, the lively public square Gendarmenmarkt, the Rotes Rathaus…” the girl named the buildings as she recognised them one by one.

Prince did not speak again until they reached one of the four corner towers through a disguised doorway.

“If you’re afraid of heights, overcome your fear,” remarked Prince coldly, “if you cannot stretch your arms wide enough to fly, exercise your muscles until they’re fit for purpose.”

Prince flew up to the gable and sunbathed when the summer sun was not so hot in the late afternoon.  He spoke in a low voice as if he was talking to himself, “If you don’t let go of your worries and jump off your comfort zone, you’d never know what you’re missing.”