05-15-2018, 11:03 PM
Knock, knock, knock.
“No,” Minnie called from the other side of the creaky wooden door. “I’m locking you out and giving you the silent treatment.”
Mickey scowled. Now was not the time for her to get peeved at him. If they were going to remain safe, they needed to remain on the same side, and for that, Mickey Mouse needed some answers and he needed them now. He stepped back from the door and held up his hand. A rainbow substance appeared out of thin air and began to coalesce into the shape of his favorite weapon; seconds later, his fingers closed around the keyblade’s handle, and with a righteous battle cry, he ran at the door to his wife’s cabin and took a big downward swing.
Made out of the oldest, most pathetic wood Mickey had maybe ever seen, the door flew off its hinges and across Minnie’s cabin, crashing into the far wall. His wife looked up from her desk at the commotion, and instead of getting truly angry—as Mickey had sort of suspected she would—she simply let out a deep, annoyed sigh.
“We’re gonna have to pay to fix that,” she droned, reminding her husband once again that their mysterious benefactors weren’t aware of their prime status. No summoning new doors with omnilium, he supposed. “Now are you gonna come in here and whine at me some more, honey, or are you gonna let mama do her work?”
“Work?” Mickey asked, sliding up next to her at the desk. Splayed out across the escritoire were so many documents that Mickey couldn’t have possibly kept track. Maps of the Deep—and of the other verses they’d visited, including the Endless Dunes and the Tangled Green—blanketed the surface of it like tablecloths, and lots of different papers about lots of different people and things were stacked in seemingly random places. At the moment, Minnie had donned her spectacles and examined a piece of paper that looked to be a wanted poster for a blue turtle with a sour-looking disposition. What was she up to?
“Min, honey, aren’t you going to tell me—”
“While someone slept the last twenty-four hours away, dear,” she sneered, “I’ve been working to try and find some allies for us here in the Deep. We hid for a long time but that doesn’t seem to be possible, anymore. I’ve got some feelers out to some smaller factions around our little archipelago, and I’ve got to follow up with them on the Dataverse before they start to get impatient and we lose the link—”
“You’ve been communicating with people?” Mickey asked, slightly dumbstruck, “Without telling me?” Minnie spun around in her chair and looked her husband in the face. She placed a hand on his shoulder, which Mickey supposed was meant to be comforting. It didn’t really accomplish that goal.
“Honey,” she started, as if to tell him the worst news in the world, “I’ve been communicating with people the entire time we were on that little island.” She looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response, but he couldn’t muster up one. She’d been… reaching out to people? Without letting him in on it? Had she been keeping a bunch of secrets from him, or just this one? Why hadn’t she let him reach out to some of his allies? He certainly had just as many as she did, if not more! “I know, I know,” she continued, “I made you stay put and not contact any of your little friends, but I promise, Mickey, it was for the best. Now, if we’re all done here—”
“Little friends?!” Mickey shouted. Minnie shot him a glare, and he lowered his voice, still well aware that this boat’s walls might be very thin and the Poké-creatures could probably still hear them if they got too loud. “Minnie,” he whispered intensely, “I don’t think you get it. If you’d just have let me call Erza… or Samus… or Belle… or, or, I don’t know, Harry Dresden, even Pepsiman or something, I probably could’ve managed to get us passage through Costa del Sol and through Coruscant or the Nexus and back to Ambrosia, back to the Clubhouse, back to our home—”
“I don’t get it?” she repeated, flabbergasted. “Mickey, let’s be real. We both now, back home in the Disney Realms, I was the one in charge of diplomacy for a reason. Sure, you’re super friendly and—I do have to admit—super charming, but you aren’t good at politics. You’re a buddy, and you’re a fighter. You’re really good at fighting, so good at that, and I’m so good at figuring out stuff like this. I mean, for gosh’s sakes, Mickey, you just suggested Pepsiman as a legitimate option to help us smuggle ourselves through Empire territory. I know that every option isn’t necessarily a good option, and I know the proper channels to contact a good option when I find one. If I’d have let you reach out to one of those ‘MESH’ guys—or whatever it was you called yourselves—you probably would’ve accidentally alerted the Empire to our location…”
“They got our location anyway,” Mickey reminded her.
“Because of your buddy Blues,” Minnie snapped back.
This took Mickey off-guard. What did she mean? Had Blues… betrayed them? Mickey had never known the preteen machine to be in any particular trouble with the Empire, but he didn’t seem to be very friendly with them, either. And after all their time together, he found it hard to believe that his pal would’ve done anything to put the mouse and his wife in harm’s way. “No way,” he shook his head, “Blues would’ve never sold us out, Minnie, and you know that. We’re pals.”
“No, no, he didn’t,” Minnie clarified, waving her hand in the king’s face. She still hadn’t even really looked at him for very long since he stepped into her makeshift office, remaining intensely focused on the maps and documents she was going through. Mickey tried to catch glimpses of them, but he’d never been much for gleaning information like that—he’d never really been a studious mouse. “But the Empire tracked his path retroactively from the big fight going on in the other part of the verse, and that’s how they found us—”
Mickey’s ears perked up. “Big fight?” he asked, and Minnie bit her lip. “What big fight?”
Now, she turned to face him. “So—I don’t exactly know,” she looked at him, cautiously, “It’s some big, dark threat threatening to destroy everything. It’s happening in basically, like, all the verses or something.” Mickey’s eyes grew wide and his brow furrowed with frustration.
What?! What did she mean? Some big, dark threat threatening to destroy everything? She’d known about this and she hadn’t told him? That sounded like the kind of thing Mickey Mouse, the most heroic hero the Omniverse had ever known, probably, needed to goshdarn know about! That sounded like the thing Mickey Mouse needed to do something about. Why had she kept this a secret from him? Did she think… maybe… did she also think that he wouldn’t be capable of defeating it? Had she lost all her faith in him, too?
Had she been keeping this a secret from him for a long time?
“Oh, geez, I’ve been keeping that a secret from you for a long time.”
“Why?!” Mickey pleaded, forcing his wife to look him in the eyes. He needed to know what had possessed her to keep him in the dark when so many people—primes and secondaries alike, including, it appeared, his best friend, Blues—were in clear and present danger. “Why would you do that, Min? I could be helping people!”
“Whatever, there’s, like, millions of primes fighting it,” she shrugged, averting her gaze from him and returning to her documents, “I’m sure it’ll be over soon.” For a moment, the mice sat in Minnie’s makeshift office in silence. With her husband’s protests mysteriously ceasing, the mouse queen looked back at Mickey and saw the sadness drooping his expression. She sighed, but not out of annoyance; out of some sort of pity. She sat down the papers and placed a hand on his shoulder, gently pressing her forehead to his. “I’m trying to keep us safe, Mick,” she explained, “I just… I’d just convinced myself that if you’d gone, it would have ruined everything we had on that island, all that peace. And I know, I know it got ruined anyway, but…”
She trailed off, tearing up a bit. “Minnie,” Mickey said, reaching out.
She jerked away. “Someone had to try and protect us,” she stated, defiantly, “You would’ve just run off and alerted the Empire to where we were and, I don’t know, maybe gotten yourself killed or banished and then where the hell would we be?”
“Honey, language!”
“No—stop that!” she wagged a finger in his face. “I was trying to protect us. You’d rather go off and play hero than think about the big picture.”
Of course I would like to help people, Mickey thought. But he trusted himself to think of Minnie’s safety too, to keep her welfare in the front of his mind. How much had she been keeping a secret from him? He knew she’d go away for hours at a time to other parts of the island, under the auspices of needing her ‘alone time,’ which had always been a thing with her. They’d always been incredibly close, ever since he’d first stumbled upon his lady love with the other musketeers, but she’d always needed her space at moments. She’d never been codependent.
To be honest, that had been much more Mickey’s thing. Being alone had never really been a state he’d enjoyed. He’d much rather surround himself with buddies, find a way to keep himself occupied with the company of others.
Had he relied so much on other people that, in the relative solitude of the past few months, he’d become an incompetent warrior?
It couldn’t be the Omniverse. There had been moments when he’d felt more powerful in this place than he ever had in his home universe. He thought back to his time spent in Dante’s Abyss, which, while an absolutely terrible experience all around, proved him a capable fighter to primes across the verses. Nevertheless, in the past year or so since leaving Nippur and barely making his way to the relative safety of their old home in the Vasty Deeps, he’d lost some of his magic.
“Someone’s got to protect us, yeah,” Mickey acknowledge, “but Min… someone’s gotta protect everyone else, too. They don’t have many good guys here, honey.”
“But why you?” she shot back. “Why do I always have to give you up so you can save someone else?”
“I don’t know why me,” Mickey shook his head. “Heck, I don’t even know if it should be me. I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes. But I wanna do it, and that’s at least a big part of it, don’t ya think?” Minnie seemed unconvinced, so he sucked up just a bit more. “And you’re never giving me up,” he promised, “You know that no matter how many people I leave home to go rescue, I’ll always need someone to rescue me. And that someone’s you, Minnie. It’s always you.”
She placed a gloved hand on his cheek affectionately. Even in the midst of their biggest arguments—and this one, he knew, would remain a big one—she knew how to show him the love. He sighed, and placed his head on her shoulder. She roped him in for a hug, and squeezed tightly.
Gosh, he loved her so much.
“Please, please, please, Mickey,” Minnie sighed, separating herself and placing her hands on her husband’s cheeks, “Let’s go to the island and talk to the Pokémon there. I’ve been in contact with them for a while just in case things went sour with our former living arrangements, and… well, I really think they seem nice.” Mickey pouted, looking his wife in the face. She really seemed to be set on this island of pokers or whatever they were called.
“Okey-dokey,” he acquiesced.
“Good,” she smiled. “I love you!”
“I love you, too,” he grinned. “So what’s this island we’re going to called again?”
She pointed to a non-descript archipelago on the map below.
“Cinnabar,” she said, “Cinnabar Island.”
“No,” Minnie called from the other side of the creaky wooden door. “I’m locking you out and giving you the silent treatment.”
Mickey scowled. Now was not the time for her to get peeved at him. If they were going to remain safe, they needed to remain on the same side, and for that, Mickey Mouse needed some answers and he needed them now. He stepped back from the door and held up his hand. A rainbow substance appeared out of thin air and began to coalesce into the shape of his favorite weapon; seconds later, his fingers closed around the keyblade’s handle, and with a righteous battle cry, he ran at the door to his wife’s cabin and took a big downward swing.
Made out of the oldest, most pathetic wood Mickey had maybe ever seen, the door flew off its hinges and across Minnie’s cabin, crashing into the far wall. His wife looked up from her desk at the commotion, and instead of getting truly angry—as Mickey had sort of suspected she would—she simply let out a deep, annoyed sigh.
“We’re gonna have to pay to fix that,” she droned, reminding her husband once again that their mysterious benefactors weren’t aware of their prime status. No summoning new doors with omnilium, he supposed. “Now are you gonna come in here and whine at me some more, honey, or are you gonna let mama do her work?”
“Work?” Mickey asked, sliding up next to her at the desk. Splayed out across the escritoire were so many documents that Mickey couldn’t have possibly kept track. Maps of the Deep—and of the other verses they’d visited, including the Endless Dunes and the Tangled Green—blanketed the surface of it like tablecloths, and lots of different papers about lots of different people and things were stacked in seemingly random places. At the moment, Minnie had donned her spectacles and examined a piece of paper that looked to be a wanted poster for a blue turtle with a sour-looking disposition. What was she up to?
“Min, honey, aren’t you going to tell me—”
“While someone slept the last twenty-four hours away, dear,” she sneered, “I’ve been working to try and find some allies for us here in the Deep. We hid for a long time but that doesn’t seem to be possible, anymore. I’ve got some feelers out to some smaller factions around our little archipelago, and I’ve got to follow up with them on the Dataverse before they start to get impatient and we lose the link—”
“You’ve been communicating with people?” Mickey asked, slightly dumbstruck, “Without telling me?” Minnie spun around in her chair and looked her husband in the face. She placed a hand on his shoulder, which Mickey supposed was meant to be comforting. It didn’t really accomplish that goal.
“Honey,” she started, as if to tell him the worst news in the world, “I’ve been communicating with people the entire time we were on that little island.” She looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response, but he couldn’t muster up one. She’d been… reaching out to people? Without letting him in on it? Had she been keeping a bunch of secrets from him, or just this one? Why hadn’t she let him reach out to some of his allies? He certainly had just as many as she did, if not more! “I know, I know,” she continued, “I made you stay put and not contact any of your little friends, but I promise, Mickey, it was for the best. Now, if we’re all done here—”
“Little friends?!” Mickey shouted. Minnie shot him a glare, and he lowered his voice, still well aware that this boat’s walls might be very thin and the Poké-creatures could probably still hear them if they got too loud. “Minnie,” he whispered intensely, “I don’t think you get it. If you’d just have let me call Erza… or Samus… or Belle… or, or, I don’t know, Harry Dresden, even Pepsiman or something, I probably could’ve managed to get us passage through Costa del Sol and through Coruscant or the Nexus and back to Ambrosia, back to the Clubhouse, back to our home—”
“I don’t get it?” she repeated, flabbergasted. “Mickey, let’s be real. We both now, back home in the Disney Realms, I was the one in charge of diplomacy for a reason. Sure, you’re super friendly and—I do have to admit—super charming, but you aren’t good at politics. You’re a buddy, and you’re a fighter. You’re really good at fighting, so good at that, and I’m so good at figuring out stuff like this. I mean, for gosh’s sakes, Mickey, you just suggested Pepsiman as a legitimate option to help us smuggle ourselves through Empire territory. I know that every option isn’t necessarily a good option, and I know the proper channels to contact a good option when I find one. If I’d have let you reach out to one of those ‘MESH’ guys—or whatever it was you called yourselves—you probably would’ve accidentally alerted the Empire to our location…”
“They got our location anyway,” Mickey reminded her.
“Because of your buddy Blues,” Minnie snapped back.
This took Mickey off-guard. What did she mean? Had Blues… betrayed them? Mickey had never known the preteen machine to be in any particular trouble with the Empire, but he didn’t seem to be very friendly with them, either. And after all their time together, he found it hard to believe that his pal would’ve done anything to put the mouse and his wife in harm’s way. “No way,” he shook his head, “Blues would’ve never sold us out, Minnie, and you know that. We’re pals.”
“No, no, he didn’t,” Minnie clarified, waving her hand in the king’s face. She still hadn’t even really looked at him for very long since he stepped into her makeshift office, remaining intensely focused on the maps and documents she was going through. Mickey tried to catch glimpses of them, but he’d never been much for gleaning information like that—he’d never really been a studious mouse. “But the Empire tracked his path retroactively from the big fight going on in the other part of the verse, and that’s how they found us—”
Mickey’s ears perked up. “Big fight?” he asked, and Minnie bit her lip. “What big fight?”
Now, she turned to face him. “So—I don’t exactly know,” she looked at him, cautiously, “It’s some big, dark threat threatening to destroy everything. It’s happening in basically, like, all the verses or something.” Mickey’s eyes grew wide and his brow furrowed with frustration.
What?! What did she mean? Some big, dark threat threatening to destroy everything? She’d known about this and she hadn’t told him? That sounded like the kind of thing Mickey Mouse, the most heroic hero the Omniverse had ever known, probably, needed to goshdarn know about! That sounded like the thing Mickey Mouse needed to do something about. Why had she kept this a secret from him? Did she think… maybe… did she also think that he wouldn’t be capable of defeating it? Had she lost all her faith in him, too?
Had she been keeping this a secret from him for a long time?
“Oh, geez, I’ve been keeping that a secret from you for a long time.”
“Why?!” Mickey pleaded, forcing his wife to look him in the eyes. He needed to know what had possessed her to keep him in the dark when so many people—primes and secondaries alike, including, it appeared, his best friend, Blues—were in clear and present danger. “Why would you do that, Min? I could be helping people!”
“Whatever, there’s, like, millions of primes fighting it,” she shrugged, averting her gaze from him and returning to her documents, “I’m sure it’ll be over soon.” For a moment, the mice sat in Minnie’s makeshift office in silence. With her husband’s protests mysteriously ceasing, the mouse queen looked back at Mickey and saw the sadness drooping his expression. She sighed, but not out of annoyance; out of some sort of pity. She sat down the papers and placed a hand on his shoulder, gently pressing her forehead to his. “I’m trying to keep us safe, Mick,” she explained, “I just… I’d just convinced myself that if you’d gone, it would have ruined everything we had on that island, all that peace. And I know, I know it got ruined anyway, but…”
She trailed off, tearing up a bit. “Minnie,” Mickey said, reaching out.
She jerked away. “Someone had to try and protect us,” she stated, defiantly, “You would’ve just run off and alerted the Empire to where we were and, I don’t know, maybe gotten yourself killed or banished and then where the hell would we be?”
“Honey, language!”
“No—stop that!” she wagged a finger in his face. “I was trying to protect us. You’d rather go off and play hero than think about the big picture.”
Of course I would like to help people, Mickey thought. But he trusted himself to think of Minnie’s safety too, to keep her welfare in the front of his mind. How much had she been keeping a secret from him? He knew she’d go away for hours at a time to other parts of the island, under the auspices of needing her ‘alone time,’ which had always been a thing with her. They’d always been incredibly close, ever since he’d first stumbled upon his lady love with the other musketeers, but she’d always needed her space at moments. She’d never been codependent.
To be honest, that had been much more Mickey’s thing. Being alone had never really been a state he’d enjoyed. He’d much rather surround himself with buddies, find a way to keep himself occupied with the company of others.
Had he relied so much on other people that, in the relative solitude of the past few months, he’d become an incompetent warrior?
It couldn’t be the Omniverse. There had been moments when he’d felt more powerful in this place than he ever had in his home universe. He thought back to his time spent in Dante’s Abyss, which, while an absolutely terrible experience all around, proved him a capable fighter to primes across the verses. Nevertheless, in the past year or so since leaving Nippur and barely making his way to the relative safety of their old home in the Vasty Deeps, he’d lost some of his magic.
“Someone’s got to protect us, yeah,” Mickey acknowledge, “but Min… someone’s gotta protect everyone else, too. They don’t have many good guys here, honey.”
“But why you?” she shot back. “Why do I always have to give you up so you can save someone else?”
“I don’t know why me,” Mickey shook his head. “Heck, I don’t even know if it should be me. I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes. But I wanna do it, and that’s at least a big part of it, don’t ya think?” Minnie seemed unconvinced, so he sucked up just a bit more. “And you’re never giving me up,” he promised, “You know that no matter how many people I leave home to go rescue, I’ll always need someone to rescue me. And that someone’s you, Minnie. It’s always you.”
She placed a gloved hand on his cheek affectionately. Even in the midst of their biggest arguments—and this one, he knew, would remain a big one—she knew how to show him the love. He sighed, and placed his head on her shoulder. She roped him in for a hug, and squeezed tightly.
Gosh, he loved her so much.
“Please, please, please, Mickey,” Minnie sighed, separating herself and placing her hands on her husband’s cheeks, “Let’s go to the island and talk to the Pokémon there. I’ve been in contact with them for a while just in case things went sour with our former living arrangements, and… well, I really think they seem nice.” Mickey pouted, looking his wife in the face. She really seemed to be set on this island of pokers or whatever they were called.
“Okey-dokey,” he acquiesced.
“Good,” she smiled. “I love you!”
“I love you, too,” he grinned. “So what’s this island we’re going to called again?”
She pointed to a non-descript archipelago on the map below.
“Cinnabar,” she said, “Cinnabar Island.”
![[Image: 2agonyw.png]](http://i68.tinypic.com/2agonyw.png)