Spring needed a story. This follows Tangled and Day Job

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“Anyone?”

“That one. The one in the blue shirt.”

“With the Pomeranian?”

“That one.”

They made a good pair, when they chose to work together. Lance could point out the places where someone’s map had stopped touching other people’s, where it had gone into being a one-star-constellation, and Spring could nudge them, a little or a lot, to shake their world up.

People needed tangling. They tended, if they were left to their own devices, to just truck on straight ahead, staying in the same rut, stagnating, calcifying. Sometimes, life provided enough chaos to keep them changing, adapting. But when it didn’t, they tended to grow stiff and rigid, unable to bend with the wind, more likely to snap.

So Spring tangled them, tugged their strings, added a little randomness to their life. She reached out with her mind, grabbed the strands of their life, and, carefully – don’t hit that one, it’s a bit raw, that one is holding her life up, leave that alone – braided and knotted.

“It’s like macramé,” Lance murmured. “You’re an artist, Spring.”

“If you’re not an artist,” she murmured, finding the best strand, the one with the highest chaos for the least damage, and tying it off to another strand, over… there. There looked right, “you can do a lot of damage. I was trained very well.”

“I thought tanglers defied training.”

Across the park, the Pomeranian’s leash broke, and it went running top-speed towards a jogger with a Doberman Pinscher. The woman in blue went after her dog, the man with the Pinscher went down in a tangle of leash, and the woman went after him. Spring smiled, satisfied with her work.

“Someday, you might meet my brother. Then you’ll understand.” There were forces that could organize even a tangler.

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