05-12-2018, 06:16 PM
For almost two years, Mickey Mouse had been in hiding. Stowed away in an idyllic corner of the Vasty Deep, not a thing dared to bother him. Contrary to the beliefs of the Omniverse at large, everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic rodent had not been gone forever. He’d been asleep, and now the multiverse’s most optimistic hero, with the biggest, most impressive ears, was back in business. He was awake.
Discovered. Oh, brother.
Mickey Mouse leapt from palm tree to palm tree, moving faster than he could remember moving in years. In this moment, he regretted not agreeing to do P90X with Nani. Their sabbatical from heroism of any kind had transformed into a sort of lazy holiday, and as danger forced him back into action, he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he would be very, very sore tomorrow.
He sped down the mountain towards Lilo and Nani’s cottage which had abruptly gone up in smoke minutes before unwanted visitors had barged into their own hut. “Go — get the girls,” Minnie had ordered as a squad of Stormtroopers burst through the doors, blaster rifle trained on the lion that stood guard. Simba let out a ferocious roar, knocking the troopers back, and before his wife had finished summoning her scepter the king has leapt through the window and begun his descent.
The distance between their two homes wasn’t far, so even a little wearied Mickey burst forth from the beachy brush within minutes. He landed squarely in the sand in front of the combusting hovel, where two troopers stood, seemingly awaiting his arrival, and two more hurriedly carried a large metal container towards their ship, docked nearby.
Mickey’s ears perked up enough to hear a clanging sound and a low growl coming from inside the box that he recognized rather quickly as the sounds of Stitch, Lilo’s strange pet. He screeched and rattled, giving his captors enough trouble to frustrate them, but the cage’s defenses kept him soundly at bay. The stormtroopers loaded the alien up onto the barge just as the fires swelled at the small abode.
His eyes darted back and forth between the boat and the house. He scowled, and his hairline furrowed with frustration. Rescue Stitch from the clutches of the Empire, or save Lilo and Nani from a fiery doom. Both didn’t seem feasible.
One of the stormtroopers standing in front of the burning house whipped out a long, electrically charged staff and lowered himself into a fighting stance. The other raised his blaster rifle and trained it at the mouse’s head. Mickey took one last look at Stitch’s captors as they shuffled him onto the lower levels of the barge.
I’ll come and get you, buddy, he thought as his keyblade materialized in one of his gloved hands. He clamped his fingers down on the hilt and bent at the knees, sliding into his own combat posture. It struck him that he hadn’t fought—not really, anyway—since he’d broken free of Jafar and some New Babylonian remnants all those years ago, in Nippur. He took a deep breath. Time to shake the rust off.
The rifle-bearing trooper began firing off energy blasts, and one by one Mickey batted them away, keeping his eyes fixed on the other trooper beginning his own, foolhardy sprint toward the king.
“Hey, batter batter, hey batter batter, hey!” Mickey shouted with a grin, winding back and hitting yet another energy blast with his keyblade. The bolt deflected away from him and right into the weapon hand of the staff-bearing trooper, who yelped and released the staff into the air.
It spun through the air at an accelerated pace, flying over the beach and splashing into the ocean. “Home run!” Mickey yelled, delightedly. “That was aweso—ugh!”
Just as his fancy baton had crashed into the ocean blue, the staff-wielding trooper flung himself—singed hand and all—into the mouse, knocking him back onto the sand and attempting to pin him there. Mickey struggled against the stormtrooper’s grip as his comrade jogged up behind him and aimed his rifle. Dangit, the mouse scowled. How’d he let himself get in this position?
How’d he let these losers find him? For a very long time, he and Minnie and Simba had lived in peaceful solitude, only the young Hawaiian girls and Stitch to keep them company. Months into their tenure on this uncharted island in the Vasty Deeps, Proto Man—Mickey’s best friend since inexplicably entering the Omniverse—had washed up on the beach, and they’d lived for a while as one big happy family.
Slowly, that illusion had been shattered, bit by bit. Being in hiding wasn’t the type of state someone could be in forever, and Mickey certainly had grown antsy in their time away from the world. Not only did the ever present threat of the Heartless in his home universe tug at the back of his mind, but he had witnessed so many unspeakable atrocities since arriving here. Could he really sit by and watch as Karl Jak and his Syntech goons coerced primes, year after year, into their sadistic death match? Could he sit by while the Empire’s grip on the Omniverse tightened, their outposts in the Deep and the Endless Dunes growing stronger each day? He and Proto Man had banished Gilgamesh, but Nippur still sat as a seat of corruption. And he harbored a sinking feeling that sending the King of Heroes to the Underverse wasn’t the last they’d heard of him.
Proto Man’s disappearance only magnified these thoughts. He’d left not long ago, under the auspices of attending a nearby carnival, and never returned. A bad feeling crept up Mickey’s spine after that — that somewhere nearby, something went wrong, and Blues had been forced to fight it without him. He couldn’t bear that idea, and many times had attempted to leave their small, secluded corner of this archipelago to find out why his buddy had yet to come home. His wife wasn’t having it.
“Blues can handle himself,” she’d say. “If he wanted your help, he’d call you on the communicator. Whatever it is, he must not need you to beat it.” And if he hadn’t felt useless before, that pretty much put the nail in the proverbial coffin. He wasn’t needed. Maybe Blues didn’t even want him fighting evildoers by his side anymore. Maybe he’d thought a year plus of retirement weakened the mouse, and at the moment, Mickey was inclined to agree. Pinned on the ground by an effectively one-handed stormtrooper, and staring a blaster rifle—and an embarrassing trip to the Nexus—in the face. Had he really been out of the game so long that he couldn’t defeat two of the Empire’s weakest goons? Was he really about to die at the hands of some nameless secondaries?
Thankfully, the answer to the second question was ‘no.’
A deafening roar called the rifle trooper’s attention away. Simba leapt through the air, tackling the trooper to the ground, and Mickey took that moment of distraction to shove his yellow shoe as hard as he could muster into the other trooper’s nads. Through the mask, the trooper let out a garbled, mechanized moan, and rolled off the mouse, clutching his… uh, well, his private area. Mickey leapt up in time to catch Simba lifting a paw and extending his claws for a killing blow.
“Lieutenant!” he called out to his subordinate, “We don’t kill.”
“But your majesty—”
“We don’t kill. Keep them busy, I’m getting the girls!”
And with that, Mickey Mouse sprinted into the flaming hut, dodging burning rubble this way and that as he weaved toward the muffled cries of Nani and Lilo. Luckily, their small hut wasn’t too big, so it didn’t take long for the mouse to stumble on them, huddled low to the ground and trying their best not to breathe in any of the foul, smoky air.
Lilo cowered in Nani’s arms, her long pink dress scorched a bit at the ends and her eyes dripping with tears, probably over Stitch’s disappearance. She had always been the stronger sister, but no little girl should have to endure all this terror in the span of fifteen minutes. Nani, for her part, looked paler than normal, but had steeled her face, using her own body to shield her sister from the flames. They lapped at the older girl’s bare legs, and as Mickey ducked beneath one last burning beam to enter the room they hid in, he heard some not-nice words spill out of Nani’s mouth. Normally, he might’ve scolded her for the language—but under the circumstances, he let it slide.
“Oh, hey, buddies,” he smiled as he found them, “Let’s getcha out of here, okey-dokey?”
“Your Majesty!” Nani exclaimed, breathing a sigh of relief that she immediately regretted and coughed back up. “We—excuse me—we were worried they’d gotten to you guys.”
“Some measly troopers are no match for me and Minnie,” Mickey smiled, though he didn’t really know if he believed himself when he said it.
“Where’s Stitch?” Lilo piped in, breaking slightly free of her sister’s grasp and scramble-crawling to the mouse king’s feet. “Is he okay?”
Mickey’s expression bunched up. Outside, he heard the whirrs of the motor boat as it kicked into action. “He’ll be fine,” Mickey loosely promised, marking it on his mental to-do-list to prioritize Stitch’s rescue and safe return to the innocent Hawaiian girl. “Let’s get you guys out of here for right now.” He turned and aimed his keyblade at the roof, drawing a heart in the air and then launching a huge, golden beam of light upwards.
The energy beam smashed through the roof, sending planks of broken, burnt wood and clumps of the thatched roof flying in many different directions. Smoke billowed through the hole, and Mickey stuck two of his gloved fingers in his mouth and whistled for assistance. “Come on, grab my hands,” he ordered the girls, dissolving his keyblade and offering up two gloved palms. Nani and Lilo complied, and Mickey leapt towards the hole in the roof. Mickey would never have counted jumping amongst his skills, but they passed the hole’s threshold nonetheless, and just as they began to plummet back down, a dusty old magic carpet whizzed underneath them and came to a sudden stop. Mickey, Lilo, and Nani landed with a thud on the rug, and before they had time to catch their breath, it zipped away.
The carpet carried its three passengers away from the burning hovel and over toward the beach. Reaching that destination, though, had never been part of Mickey’s plan. They soared over the pair of stormtroopers scuffling with Simba, and the mouse king summoned his keyblade once again. He flipped off the magic carpet and sailed down toward the action, landing on the shoulders of one of the troopers. “—what the?!” the trooper shouted, glancing up and down as it tried to swat the mouse off his shoulders. Mickey quickly shut him up, placing the keyblade against the man’s neck and pulling it tight, trapping the trooper in a chokehold.
Simba turned, the enemy underneath him now sufficiently frightened into unconsciousness, and watched as his king grappled the stormtrooper’s neck with his weapon. The trooper fought back, and soon, Mickey lost his balance, his stubby legs sliding off the guy’s shoulders. He swung around wildly, holding on merely by the keyblade as the soldier tried to wrestle himself free. Simba blinked for a second at the king’s struggles, and then let out another ear-piercing roar. The trooper’s grip on the keyblade suffocating him loosened and, as much as he could with his throat under pressure, he let out a shout, stumbling away from the lion and tripping backwards.
With Mickey Mouse still attached to him, he fell onto his back, the little mouse’s body cushioning the fall. His armored form crashed into the small-figured rodent and within seconds, Mickey’s sight went black. If he’d still been awake, the mouse king might’ve sighed at how pathetic he felt. As it was, he’d been soundly smacked into unconsciousness.
Oh, brother, indeed.
* * *
A few months back...
A few months back...
Discovered. Oh, brother.
Mickey Mouse leapt from palm tree to palm tree, moving faster than he could remember moving in years. In this moment, he regretted not agreeing to do P90X with Nani. Their sabbatical from heroism of any kind had transformed into a sort of lazy holiday, and as danger forced him back into action, he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he would be very, very sore tomorrow.
He sped down the mountain towards Lilo and Nani’s cottage which had abruptly gone up in smoke minutes before unwanted visitors had barged into their own hut. “Go — get the girls,” Minnie had ordered as a squad of Stormtroopers burst through the doors, blaster rifle trained on the lion that stood guard. Simba let out a ferocious roar, knocking the troopers back, and before his wife had finished summoning her scepter the king has leapt through the window and begun his descent.
The distance between their two homes wasn’t far, so even a little wearied Mickey burst forth from the beachy brush within minutes. He landed squarely in the sand in front of the combusting hovel, where two troopers stood, seemingly awaiting his arrival, and two more hurriedly carried a large metal container towards their ship, docked nearby.
Mickey’s ears perked up enough to hear a clanging sound and a low growl coming from inside the box that he recognized rather quickly as the sounds of Stitch, Lilo’s strange pet. He screeched and rattled, giving his captors enough trouble to frustrate them, but the cage’s defenses kept him soundly at bay. The stormtroopers loaded the alien up onto the barge just as the fires swelled at the small abode.
His eyes darted back and forth between the boat and the house. He scowled, and his hairline furrowed with frustration. Rescue Stitch from the clutches of the Empire, or save Lilo and Nani from a fiery doom. Both didn’t seem feasible.
One of the stormtroopers standing in front of the burning house whipped out a long, electrically charged staff and lowered himself into a fighting stance. The other raised his blaster rifle and trained it at the mouse’s head. Mickey took one last look at Stitch’s captors as they shuffled him onto the lower levels of the barge.
I’ll come and get you, buddy, he thought as his keyblade materialized in one of his gloved hands. He clamped his fingers down on the hilt and bent at the knees, sliding into his own combat posture. It struck him that he hadn’t fought—not really, anyway—since he’d broken free of Jafar and some New Babylonian remnants all those years ago, in Nippur. He took a deep breath. Time to shake the rust off.
The rifle-bearing trooper began firing off energy blasts, and one by one Mickey batted them away, keeping his eyes fixed on the other trooper beginning his own, foolhardy sprint toward the king.
“Hey, batter batter, hey batter batter, hey!” Mickey shouted with a grin, winding back and hitting yet another energy blast with his keyblade. The bolt deflected away from him and right into the weapon hand of the staff-bearing trooper, who yelped and released the staff into the air.
It spun through the air at an accelerated pace, flying over the beach and splashing into the ocean. “Home run!” Mickey yelled, delightedly. “That was aweso—ugh!”
Just as his fancy baton had crashed into the ocean blue, the staff-wielding trooper flung himself—singed hand and all—into the mouse, knocking him back onto the sand and attempting to pin him there. Mickey struggled against the stormtrooper’s grip as his comrade jogged up behind him and aimed his rifle. Dangit, the mouse scowled. How’d he let himself get in this position?
How’d he let these losers find him? For a very long time, he and Minnie and Simba had lived in peaceful solitude, only the young Hawaiian girls and Stitch to keep them company. Months into their tenure on this uncharted island in the Vasty Deeps, Proto Man—Mickey’s best friend since inexplicably entering the Omniverse—had washed up on the beach, and they’d lived for a while as one big happy family.
Slowly, that illusion had been shattered, bit by bit. Being in hiding wasn’t the type of state someone could be in forever, and Mickey certainly had grown antsy in their time away from the world. Not only did the ever present threat of the Heartless in his home universe tug at the back of his mind, but he had witnessed so many unspeakable atrocities since arriving here. Could he really sit by and watch as Karl Jak and his Syntech goons coerced primes, year after year, into their sadistic death match? Could he sit by while the Empire’s grip on the Omniverse tightened, their outposts in the Deep and the Endless Dunes growing stronger each day? He and Proto Man had banished Gilgamesh, but Nippur still sat as a seat of corruption. And he harbored a sinking feeling that sending the King of Heroes to the Underverse wasn’t the last they’d heard of him.
Proto Man’s disappearance only magnified these thoughts. He’d left not long ago, under the auspices of attending a nearby carnival, and never returned. A bad feeling crept up Mickey’s spine after that — that somewhere nearby, something went wrong, and Blues had been forced to fight it without him. He couldn’t bear that idea, and many times had attempted to leave their small, secluded corner of this archipelago to find out why his buddy had yet to come home. His wife wasn’t having it.
“Blues can handle himself,” she’d say. “If he wanted your help, he’d call you on the communicator. Whatever it is, he must not need you to beat it.” And if he hadn’t felt useless before, that pretty much put the nail in the proverbial coffin. He wasn’t needed. Maybe Blues didn’t even want him fighting evildoers by his side anymore. Maybe he’d thought a year plus of retirement weakened the mouse, and at the moment, Mickey was inclined to agree. Pinned on the ground by an effectively one-handed stormtrooper, and staring a blaster rifle—and an embarrassing trip to the Nexus—in the face. Had he really been out of the game so long that he couldn’t defeat two of the Empire’s weakest goons? Was he really about to die at the hands of some nameless secondaries?
Thankfully, the answer to the second question was ‘no.’
A deafening roar called the rifle trooper’s attention away. Simba leapt through the air, tackling the trooper to the ground, and Mickey took that moment of distraction to shove his yellow shoe as hard as he could muster into the other trooper’s nads. Through the mask, the trooper let out a garbled, mechanized moan, and rolled off the mouse, clutching his… uh, well, his private area. Mickey leapt up in time to catch Simba lifting a paw and extending his claws for a killing blow.
“Lieutenant!” he called out to his subordinate, “We don’t kill.”
“But your majesty—”
“We don’t kill. Keep them busy, I’m getting the girls!”
And with that, Mickey Mouse sprinted into the flaming hut, dodging burning rubble this way and that as he weaved toward the muffled cries of Nani and Lilo. Luckily, their small hut wasn’t too big, so it didn’t take long for the mouse to stumble on them, huddled low to the ground and trying their best not to breathe in any of the foul, smoky air.
Lilo cowered in Nani’s arms, her long pink dress scorched a bit at the ends and her eyes dripping with tears, probably over Stitch’s disappearance. She had always been the stronger sister, but no little girl should have to endure all this terror in the span of fifteen minutes. Nani, for her part, looked paler than normal, but had steeled her face, using her own body to shield her sister from the flames. They lapped at the older girl’s bare legs, and as Mickey ducked beneath one last burning beam to enter the room they hid in, he heard some not-nice words spill out of Nani’s mouth. Normally, he might’ve scolded her for the language—but under the circumstances, he let it slide.
“Oh, hey, buddies,” he smiled as he found them, “Let’s getcha out of here, okey-dokey?”
“Your Majesty!” Nani exclaimed, breathing a sigh of relief that she immediately regretted and coughed back up. “We—excuse me—we were worried they’d gotten to you guys.”
“Some measly troopers are no match for me and Minnie,” Mickey smiled, though he didn’t really know if he believed himself when he said it.
“Where’s Stitch?” Lilo piped in, breaking slightly free of her sister’s grasp and scramble-crawling to the mouse king’s feet. “Is he okay?”
Mickey’s expression bunched up. Outside, he heard the whirrs of the motor boat as it kicked into action. “He’ll be fine,” Mickey loosely promised, marking it on his mental to-do-list to prioritize Stitch’s rescue and safe return to the innocent Hawaiian girl. “Let’s get you guys out of here for right now.” He turned and aimed his keyblade at the roof, drawing a heart in the air and then launching a huge, golden beam of light upwards.
The energy beam smashed through the roof, sending planks of broken, burnt wood and clumps of the thatched roof flying in many different directions. Smoke billowed through the hole, and Mickey stuck two of his gloved fingers in his mouth and whistled for assistance. “Come on, grab my hands,” he ordered the girls, dissolving his keyblade and offering up two gloved palms. Nani and Lilo complied, and Mickey leapt towards the hole in the roof. Mickey would never have counted jumping amongst his skills, but they passed the hole’s threshold nonetheless, and just as they began to plummet back down, a dusty old magic carpet whizzed underneath them and came to a sudden stop. Mickey, Lilo, and Nani landed with a thud on the rug, and before they had time to catch their breath, it zipped away.
The carpet carried its three passengers away from the burning hovel and over toward the beach. Reaching that destination, though, had never been part of Mickey’s plan. They soared over the pair of stormtroopers scuffling with Simba, and the mouse king summoned his keyblade once again. He flipped off the magic carpet and sailed down toward the action, landing on the shoulders of one of the troopers. “—what the?!” the trooper shouted, glancing up and down as it tried to swat the mouse off his shoulders. Mickey quickly shut him up, placing the keyblade against the man’s neck and pulling it tight, trapping the trooper in a chokehold.
Simba turned, the enemy underneath him now sufficiently frightened into unconsciousness, and watched as his king grappled the stormtrooper’s neck with his weapon. The trooper fought back, and soon, Mickey lost his balance, his stubby legs sliding off the guy’s shoulders. He swung around wildly, holding on merely by the keyblade as the soldier tried to wrestle himself free. Simba blinked for a second at the king’s struggles, and then let out another ear-piercing roar. The trooper’s grip on the keyblade suffocating him loosened and, as much as he could with his throat under pressure, he let out a shout, stumbling away from the lion and tripping backwards.
With Mickey Mouse still attached to him, he fell onto his back, the little mouse’s body cushioning the fall. His armored form crashed into the small-figured rodent and within seconds, Mickey’s sight went black. If he’d still been awake, the mouse king might’ve sighed at how pathetic he felt. As it was, he’d been soundly smacked into unconsciousness.
Oh, brother, indeed.
![[Image: 2agonyw.png]](http://i68.tinypic.com/2agonyw.png)