06-22-2018, 01:43 PM
Black umbrellas were an unusual sight in Ambrosia, but today was a special occasion. The normally quite cheery town had been rocked by tragedy. Or, to be more accurate, Minnie Mouse had been rocked by tragedy when her gardener had been rocked by a rock, and dragged the whole city with her on her brief gothic bout.
In her never-ending quest to spruce up the Clubhouse for Mickey’s hopeful inevitable return, she’d ventured out into the forest to find some plants to liven up the landscaping of her and her husband’s home. That, combined with some new-fangled technology she was having installed, would certainly make the place more enticing for him, and once he’d finished going off and making a fool out of himself in Dante’s Abyss, she would shoot him a little message on the Dataverse filled with cute pics of their new garden and their new recall station and he could just… teleport right on back home, teleport right back into her arms, and she would chain him to his lazy chair and never let him leave the house ever again.
Sure, some would call that extreme. But a desperate lady mouse was a desperate lady mouse.
Unfortunately, she’d found the actual activity of… planting things to be a tad tiresome for the life she’d gotten used to during their not-so-brief respite in the Vasty Deep. She hadn’t really been forced to do any taxing physical labor during that time, and so even the act of taking a miniature shovel and trying to plant some lilies in the mulch just wore her the heck out, and she’d called in a local gardening service to finish the job, and maybe even bring a couple of extra plants. Just make her garden look pretty—that’s all she’d asked.
Instead, they’d done much the opposite. Their services had ended up with the gooey brains of Jeremy, a cute little moogle, mixed in with all of the dirt and shrubbery that already took root outside of her house. Maybe it had been kinda her fault, admittedly, too, since she’d insisted that the recall station must be adorned with large, aesthetically-pleasing boulders to fit with the aesthetic of the general town, and it had been one of those that’d fallen on the worker, crushed his head, and killed him. Either way, she was absolutely wracked with guilt, and to absolve herself of that, she’d organized a lavish cemetery for him.
Quirky little creatures of all shapes and sizes gathered at a makeshift cemetery outside Pokute Palace, trying their best to conform to Minnie Mouse’s expectations of what the young creature’s wake would be like. The citizens of Ambrosia couldn’t really find a time in their collective memory when one of the many minor residents of the city had actually perished. So, when Jeremy the gardener bit the dust, they’d had to sort of make do. They’d plopped a random stone in the middle of a patch of grass near the huge, pink castle, dug a Jeremy-sized hole, and dropped him inside, then scrounged about their closets for whatever black clothes they owned.
Minnie, for her part, had gone all out. Seeing as the moogle was approximately the same size as her husband—though the mouse king was, as she noted, a tad chubbier—she’d outfitted Jeremy in some of her husband’s nicest clothes. She’d snuck into Princess Guu’s palace and stolen some curtains to make into some regal-looking upholstery for his improvised coffin. The other two primes hadn’t been seen in Ambrosia for quite a while, so the lady mouse assumed they wouldn’t be too mad about some of their finer possessions going missing.
After all, they both kind of owed her.
The funeral went off without a hitch. Minnie wept an appropriate amount, watching as poor Jeremy’s family hooted and hollered with a degree of sadness the queen felt was perfectly tragic. The rest of the citizens of Ambrosia, bewildered as they were, stood in respectful silence as the currently highest-ranking prime to occupy the actual city limits of Ambrosia gave what she judged to be a heartfelt eulogy to an itsy-bitsy secondary she’d never actually had the time to get to know.
“Friends, Ambrosians, country-creatures!”
The motley crew of weird little beings in attendance all turned their attention to the large-eared girl, sort of famous vlogger and Dataverse presence, Lady of Ambrosia and… well, they supposed she was a mouse worthy of their respect, though she’d been gone for quite a while, too.
“You know,” Minnie Mouse sniffed, “I still remember when I first met Jeffrey.”
“Jeremy,” someone whispered behind her.
“Jeremy,” Minnie corrected herself. “Sorry, I’m just—so sad, my words aren’t coming out how I mean them to. You know? Anyway. I still remember when I first met him, the poor little moogle. It was about two days ago. He was standing just off the right shoulder of the head gardener as that guy explained his plans for my house’s little mini-flower orchard. And I can recall—hold on, I’m sorry—”
She paused as she tried to actually remember the exact moment she wanted to tell everyone about. Goshdarnit, she knew she should’ve written this down. “Ahem—” she continued, “I can recall when he piped up in the cutest dang moogle voice I’ve ever heard and said, ‘we should add some violets around the door.’ Well, Jeremy, I know I rolled my eyes and said violets were for the common girl’s garden when you said that, but now, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to wreathe my whole front door in a vine of violets because I don’t care what anyone thinks except you.”
Even though you can’t even really think anymore because your brain exploded.
Do violets come on vines?
And just like that, the funeral was over. The critters of Ambrosia filed back to their daily lives, forever weirded out by the mouse’s display of mourning which simultaneously read as strangely artificial and overwhelmingly genuine. Minnie, for her part, remained by the makeshift gravestone, paying her respects… or something.
She felt like she had been there for literal years when the pitter-patter of chocobo footsteps called her attention.
Sitting atop the chocobo was a diminutive creature, with a rounded abdomen and a spiky little head. His features were alabaster white—not dissimilar to the Nexus—and he had two cute little wings that sprouted from the back of his spherical body. Big, black eyes peeked out of what looked, for all intents and purposes, like a ninja costume you’d get from a Halloween store. He waited to be addressed, and Minnie kept him waiting. Finally, when she’d fully taken in the form of the mysterious thing that had disrupted her mourning, she spoke.
“Yes?”
“Yo. Might you be Lady Minnie Mouse of Ambrosia?” the egg-shaped ninja said in a surprisingly bass voice.
“That’s my name,” the Lady responded, “Don’t wear it out.”
“The name’s Togetic,” the guy said, sliding off his chocobo. “I’m an Ambrosian sent by some of the elders to go blend in with the people of Mokugakure, y’know, keep an eye on the ninja dudes over there and make sure everything’s going cool. You know they’re shockingly violent?”
Minnie blinked. They were ninjas. Of course they were violent.
“Anyway, it’s awesome over there and everything, great stuff to report back,” he bounced around, seeming genuinely thrilled about his findings and also genuinely convinced Minnie had any idea what the heck he was talking about, “but that’s not the main bit of info I’m here to report, my dudette.”
“I’m waiting,” the lady mouse droned, standing up. She looked over Togetic with a suspicious glare. She might not have been the one who’d sent him, but she was genuinely interested to know the dirt on whatever the other factions of the Tangled were up to, given the fact that she was, as far as she knew, the only prime in the city of Ambrosia at the moment and therefore its most capable line of defense from outside threats. She needed all the information she could get to perpetuate the slightly self-important fantasy that had led her to assume a leadership position amongst these country folk.
“Spill the tea, Togetic.”
“Well, y’see, I heard some choice gossip, Lady Minnie Mouse…”
Back inside the chambers of Pokute Palace, Togetic relayed the highly unlikely, but very juicy, rumor of the alleged meeting between Princess Guu and Tsunade. Minnie Mouse wasn’t buying it.
“I find it hard to believe the Princess would just leave a powerful artefact with the leader of another forest faction.” The mouse rolled her eyes, leaning back in one of the uber comfortable purple velvet arm chairs that dotted the palace library.
Togetic, standing by the fireplace, worked harder to convince the mouse of his story. “Nah, girl, look—”
“Lady Minnie,” the noblewoman corrected.
“Lady Minnie, yeah, right,” Togetic continued, and Minnie noted that her obsession over titles had begun to make her sound unfortunately like that Captain Jack Sparrow they’d briefly encountered in the deep. She’d make a mental reminder not to correct the peons if they called her by the wrong title anymore. She would be a gentle, benevolent proxy leadership council member.
“Anyway,” the egg Pokémon explained, “so I didn’t believe it either, right? But Tsunade—nobody’s been able to get in touch with her since any of it happened. She disappeared into her office with a couple of her advisers and only comes out to eat or sleep. Something’s going on in there.”
Minnie frowned. “Well,” she conceded, “if this is true—as in in the hypothetical instance that you’re not a liar looking for glory—where, exactly, did the Princess go after her visit to Mokugakure?”
“Dunno,” Togetic shrugged, “but I can betcha it ain’t here.”
“Clearly,” Minnie sighed.
The Princess’s absence had truly gone pretty much without note until Minnie Mouse herself had arrived. Strange; the lady mouse had thought it strange that the Ambrosians hadn’t really taken stock of her own disappearance, but their relative autonomy became even clearer when she realized the vanishing of their de facto leader—if not exactly their actual governing body—hadn’t done much to shake the foundations of the city. Guu had created something quite impressive, for certain.
But the city had remained stagnant for too long. The world around them moved and changed with each passing day; the mouse herself had been a victim of the shifting tides when she’d emerged from obscuring, as had her husband. She’d watched Mickey flail in the lead up to the first round of Dante’s Abyss, surrounded by, now, thousands and thousands of would-be competitors.
Times had changed, and more and more primes were adopting attitudes of manifest destiny. No longer were they content to just be the most powerful beings in the entire Omniverse… no, now they all had to wave their proverbial bratwurst around in everyone else’s faces too. Gosh, it was all so tiring.
The former queen knew that without Guu or someone else capable at the helm to keep it steady, the city of misfits would, eventually, be forgotten in the dust of other small factions on the rise. New Babylon, in the Dunes, had already sprouted from the ashes even more powerful than before, if her Dataverse sources were to be believed. Various gangs grew in prominence in Coruscant’s lower tiers, a sleeper threat to both the Empire and the Rebels that mounted offenses against the dictatorship. Would she just sit by and watch as Ambrosia faded into obscurity?
No way, no how.
In her never-ending quest to spruce up the Clubhouse for Mickey’s hopeful inevitable return, she’d ventured out into the forest to find some plants to liven up the landscaping of her and her husband’s home. That, combined with some new-fangled technology she was having installed, would certainly make the place more enticing for him, and once he’d finished going off and making a fool out of himself in Dante’s Abyss, she would shoot him a little message on the Dataverse filled with cute pics of their new garden and their new recall station and he could just… teleport right on back home, teleport right back into her arms, and she would chain him to his lazy chair and never let him leave the house ever again.
Sure, some would call that extreme. But a desperate lady mouse was a desperate lady mouse.
Unfortunately, she’d found the actual activity of… planting things to be a tad tiresome for the life she’d gotten used to during their not-so-brief respite in the Vasty Deep. She hadn’t really been forced to do any taxing physical labor during that time, and so even the act of taking a miniature shovel and trying to plant some lilies in the mulch just wore her the heck out, and she’d called in a local gardening service to finish the job, and maybe even bring a couple of extra plants. Just make her garden look pretty—that’s all she’d asked.
Instead, they’d done much the opposite. Their services had ended up with the gooey brains of Jeremy, a cute little moogle, mixed in with all of the dirt and shrubbery that already took root outside of her house. Maybe it had been kinda her fault, admittedly, too, since she’d insisted that the recall station must be adorned with large, aesthetically-pleasing boulders to fit with the aesthetic of the general town, and it had been one of those that’d fallen on the worker, crushed his head, and killed him. Either way, she was absolutely wracked with guilt, and to absolve herself of that, she’d organized a lavish cemetery for him.
Quirky little creatures of all shapes and sizes gathered at a makeshift cemetery outside Pokute Palace, trying their best to conform to Minnie Mouse’s expectations of what the young creature’s wake would be like. The citizens of Ambrosia couldn’t really find a time in their collective memory when one of the many minor residents of the city had actually perished. So, when Jeremy the gardener bit the dust, they’d had to sort of make do. They’d plopped a random stone in the middle of a patch of grass near the huge, pink castle, dug a Jeremy-sized hole, and dropped him inside, then scrounged about their closets for whatever black clothes they owned.
Minnie, for her part, had gone all out. Seeing as the moogle was approximately the same size as her husband—though the mouse king was, as she noted, a tad chubbier—she’d outfitted Jeremy in some of her husband’s nicest clothes. She’d snuck into Princess Guu’s palace and stolen some curtains to make into some regal-looking upholstery for his improvised coffin. The other two primes hadn’t been seen in Ambrosia for quite a while, so the lady mouse assumed they wouldn’t be too mad about some of their finer possessions going missing.
After all, they both kind of owed her.
The funeral went off without a hitch. Minnie wept an appropriate amount, watching as poor Jeremy’s family hooted and hollered with a degree of sadness the queen felt was perfectly tragic. The rest of the citizens of Ambrosia, bewildered as they were, stood in respectful silence as the currently highest-ranking prime to occupy the actual city limits of Ambrosia gave what she judged to be a heartfelt eulogy to an itsy-bitsy secondary she’d never actually had the time to get to know.
“Friends, Ambrosians, country-creatures!”
The motley crew of weird little beings in attendance all turned their attention to the large-eared girl, sort of famous vlogger and Dataverse presence, Lady of Ambrosia and… well, they supposed she was a mouse worthy of their respect, though she’d been gone for quite a while, too.
“You know,” Minnie Mouse sniffed, “I still remember when I first met Jeffrey.”
“Jeremy,” someone whispered behind her.
“Jeremy,” Minnie corrected herself. “Sorry, I’m just—so sad, my words aren’t coming out how I mean them to. You know? Anyway. I still remember when I first met him, the poor little moogle. It was about two days ago. He was standing just off the right shoulder of the head gardener as that guy explained his plans for my house’s little mini-flower orchard. And I can recall—hold on, I’m sorry—”
She paused as she tried to actually remember the exact moment she wanted to tell everyone about. Goshdarnit, she knew she should’ve written this down. “Ahem—” she continued, “I can recall when he piped up in the cutest dang moogle voice I’ve ever heard and said, ‘we should add some violets around the door.’ Well, Jeremy, I know I rolled my eyes and said violets were for the common girl’s garden when you said that, but now, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to wreathe my whole front door in a vine of violets because I don’t care what anyone thinks except you.”
Even though you can’t even really think anymore because your brain exploded.
Do violets come on vines?
And just like that, the funeral was over. The critters of Ambrosia filed back to their daily lives, forever weirded out by the mouse’s display of mourning which simultaneously read as strangely artificial and overwhelmingly genuine. Minnie, for her part, remained by the makeshift gravestone, paying her respects… or something.
She felt like she had been there for literal years when the pitter-patter of chocobo footsteps called her attention.
Sitting atop the chocobo was a diminutive creature, with a rounded abdomen and a spiky little head. His features were alabaster white—not dissimilar to the Nexus—and he had two cute little wings that sprouted from the back of his spherical body. Big, black eyes peeked out of what looked, for all intents and purposes, like a ninja costume you’d get from a Halloween store. He waited to be addressed, and Minnie kept him waiting. Finally, when she’d fully taken in the form of the mysterious thing that had disrupted her mourning, she spoke.
“Yes?”
“Yo. Might you be Lady Minnie Mouse of Ambrosia?” the egg-shaped ninja said in a surprisingly bass voice.
“That’s my name,” the Lady responded, “Don’t wear it out.”
“The name’s Togetic,” the guy said, sliding off his chocobo. “I’m an Ambrosian sent by some of the elders to go blend in with the people of Mokugakure, y’know, keep an eye on the ninja dudes over there and make sure everything’s going cool. You know they’re shockingly violent?”
Minnie blinked. They were ninjas. Of course they were violent.
“Anyway, it’s awesome over there and everything, great stuff to report back,” he bounced around, seeming genuinely thrilled about his findings and also genuinely convinced Minnie had any idea what the heck he was talking about, “but that’s not the main bit of info I’m here to report, my dudette.”
“I’m waiting,” the lady mouse droned, standing up. She looked over Togetic with a suspicious glare. She might not have been the one who’d sent him, but she was genuinely interested to know the dirt on whatever the other factions of the Tangled were up to, given the fact that she was, as far as she knew, the only prime in the city of Ambrosia at the moment and therefore its most capable line of defense from outside threats. She needed all the information she could get to perpetuate the slightly self-important fantasy that had led her to assume a leadership position amongst these country folk.
“Spill the tea, Togetic.”
“Well, y’see, I heard some choice gossip, Lady Minnie Mouse…”
* * *
Back inside the chambers of Pokute Palace, Togetic relayed the highly unlikely, but very juicy, rumor of the alleged meeting between Princess Guu and Tsunade. Minnie Mouse wasn’t buying it.
“I find it hard to believe the Princess would just leave a powerful artefact with the leader of another forest faction.” The mouse rolled her eyes, leaning back in one of the uber comfortable purple velvet arm chairs that dotted the palace library.
Togetic, standing by the fireplace, worked harder to convince the mouse of his story. “Nah, girl, look—”
“Lady Minnie,” the noblewoman corrected.
“Lady Minnie, yeah, right,” Togetic continued, and Minnie noted that her obsession over titles had begun to make her sound unfortunately like that Captain Jack Sparrow they’d briefly encountered in the deep. She’d make a mental reminder not to correct the peons if they called her by the wrong title anymore. She would be a gentle, benevolent proxy leadership council member.
“Anyway,” the egg Pokémon explained, “so I didn’t believe it either, right? But Tsunade—nobody’s been able to get in touch with her since any of it happened. She disappeared into her office with a couple of her advisers and only comes out to eat or sleep. Something’s going on in there.”
Minnie frowned. “Well,” she conceded, “if this is true—as in in the hypothetical instance that you’re not a liar looking for glory—where, exactly, did the Princess go after her visit to Mokugakure?”
“Dunno,” Togetic shrugged, “but I can betcha it ain’t here.”
“Clearly,” Minnie sighed.
The Princess’s absence had truly gone pretty much without note until Minnie Mouse herself had arrived. Strange; the lady mouse had thought it strange that the Ambrosians hadn’t really taken stock of her own disappearance, but their relative autonomy became even clearer when she realized the vanishing of their de facto leader—if not exactly their actual governing body—hadn’t done much to shake the foundations of the city. Guu had created something quite impressive, for certain.
But the city had remained stagnant for too long. The world around them moved and changed with each passing day; the mouse herself had been a victim of the shifting tides when she’d emerged from obscuring, as had her husband. She’d watched Mickey flail in the lead up to the first round of Dante’s Abyss, surrounded by, now, thousands and thousands of would-be competitors.
Times had changed, and more and more primes were adopting attitudes of manifest destiny. No longer were they content to just be the most powerful beings in the entire Omniverse… no, now they all had to wave their proverbial bratwurst around in everyone else’s faces too. Gosh, it was all so tiring.
The former queen knew that without Guu or someone else capable at the helm to keep it steady, the city of misfits would, eventually, be forgotten in the dust of other small factions on the rise. New Babylon, in the Dunes, had already sprouted from the ashes even more powerful than before, if her Dataverse sources were to be believed. Various gangs grew in prominence in Coruscant’s lower tiers, a sleeper threat to both the Empire and the Rebels that mounted offenses against the dictatorship. Would she just sit by and watch as Ambrosia faded into obscurity?
No way, no how.
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![[Image: -Gildarts-fairy-tail-35651033-300-180.gif]](http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/35600000/-Gildarts-fairy-tail-35651033-300-180.gif)