𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕘𝕖𝕥 {𝕍𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕟 𝕩 ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕣}

-Chapter Three- The God of Loss

 /I'll be no outlaw/ no renegade/ just your faithful god of loss/

-the god of loss, darlingside

Several minutes had passed, and still, no results had been yielded. Y/n and Cassandra were standing next to each other, watching the scene before them- Varian had woken up, and was sitting with Rapunzel's hair piled on top of his head as she sang her "incantation." While Y/n had obviously never seen her sister use her powers before, she was pretty sure that it wasn't supposed to look like... this. No glow, no magic particles, just some random girl singing with her hair on someone's head.

"Bring back what once was mine~," sang Rapunzel, seemingly unfazed by the lack of progress. Pascal, who had been sitting on her dress, made some sort of gesture to Varian as Rapunzel finished the song. "What once was mine~."

"Better?" her sister asked hopefully. Y/n and Rapunzel glanced doubtfully at each other.

"Oh, yeah-" began Varian, pulling the hair off his head and looking at his gloved hand, "Nooo!" he shouted, squeezing his eyes shut when he noticed the blood remaining on the glove.

"Huh." Rapunzel said, staring at her hair like she was going to make it work simply by looking at it harder. "That used to work."

Varian opened his eyes and began talking, seemingly to distract himself from the blood. "Well, uh, silver lining, we've acquired some critical data about your hair." Varian picked up one of Rapunzel's loose strands of hair, looking down at it. "It... no longer possesses its legendary healing power."

Suddenly, he shot out of his chair, holding Rapunzel's hair and beaming at Y/n. "Progress!"

Y/n smiled back at him, feeling energized by his enthusiastic demeanor. Varian began to walk over to the other side of his lab with the pile of hair, grinning. "Now, let's figure out exactly what this hair is made of."

Varian smiled excitedly at the three of them, before pulling a tarp off of a large machine. It had a large wooden platform with a metal surface, and every manner of mechanical device seemed to be placed haphazardly around the edges. Varian walked backwards and hopped up on the platform as he talked, gesturing wildly. "This machine can analyze any substance for chemical makeup, bitopic composition, and urgu-structural integrity." He elbowed the metal platform in the center, and it expanded into a long metal table with a variety of tools attached to it. "I built it myself."

"Nice!" commented Y/n, who was genuinely impressed. Heck, she'd never even heard of- well, of whatever that last characteristic was. Varian grinned at her, and Y/n could swear that her neurons just stopped firing for a second before she pulled herself together.

Varian hopped off of the platform, standing behind the device's control panel with his hands on the levers. "If I'm right, Rapunzel, this should tell us all there is to know about your hair."

Rapunzel leapt up to the metal table, strapping herself in, but Cassandra didn't seem to notice, as she kept talking to the empty air where Rapunzel had been. "Raps, are you sure that- Rapunzel?" she asked, finally noticing that Rapunzel had already strapped herself to the machine.

Rapunzel smiled at Varian with a determined expression on her face. "Let's do this."

"Okay!" exclaimed Varian. "Rapunzel." he laughed nervously, putting his hand on the back of his neck. "Now, this may get a little... uh..."

"Exciting?" asked Rapunzel, as a convenient ray of light illuminated all of the tools hanging above her head.

Varian put his hand on the back of his neck again. "Uh... sure! Yeah!" His nervous grin turned to a slightly mischievous one as he pulled the machine's levers. "That's a good word for it."