05-31-2015, 01:03 PM
Craig couldn’t believe his eyes… there was another one.
He blinked a few times, his eyes focusing on the creature that looked pretty much identical the anthropomorphic mouse he and Conan had just encountered. Same big ears, same black fur covering most of the thing’s body; that he could see, anyway. Just one major difference to be noted: this one was a girl.
She lightly brushed her long, flowing red dress off, trying to smooth out the wrinkles that her trip to the Nexus had no doubt caused. In between her huge, perfectly-round ears, a tiara rested gently on her head. She looked like royalty if Craig had ever seen it.
The scout began to feel his nerves creeping back up his spine, though. Non-humans put him on edge more than almost anything else he had seen in his days serving the army of the Kingdom, and seeing two so alike in the same day just made the anxiety tickle even more ferociously at his brain. He looked back over his head; the other one was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it would be in his best interest not to inform this lady mouse of her twin’s arrival; safer, anyway, so that they would have a harder time coming together and enacting whatever weird scheme they planned to enact on the humans in Camelot.
Yeah, not telling her was definitely the noble thing to do. For country, of course.
“Ahem,” the lady mouse said, high-pitched voice and all matching her predecessor, “Are you just gonna stand there or are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”
“Uh,” Craig sputtered, “yeah, yeah, sorry, missus—”
“Your Majesty,” she corrected, holding out a hand for him to daintily shake, “Queen Minnie Mouse.”
Minnie Mouse was overwhelmed. The huge expanse of white stretched out before her and her guide, seemingly never ending. At the very edge of her vision, she spotted what looked like an archway; perhaps, she thought, that would lead them out of this wasteland.
A man that looked altogether too similar to Craig sprinted toward them. Minnie made note of their patchwork, but still nearly identical, uniforms, and gave herself a mental pat on the back for allowing her soldiers to dress to their own particular style as long as it still protected them. If nothing else, her army definitely qualified as the best looking one in all the universes ever. The man looked down at Minnie, and then back up at Craig, who shook his head. Had she cared just a little bit more, she might have been suspicious, but at this point, she had a single focus.
“Excuse me, sir,” she started, prepared to repeat the question she had asked Craig a moment ago, “but have you seen a boy mouse who looks a little like me?”
The second scout opened his mouth to speak, but Craig spoke first. “I told ye, we’ve never seen anythin’ like ye, missus—I mean, your Majesty.” He glanced at his friend, who made eye contact with him. Again, suspicious.
“Yeah, never,” the man went along with his friend’s story, though Minnie had a hard time believing it. “I’m Conan, by the way,” he introduced himself, and the Queen went through the same song-and-dance she had before, with Craig. These humans really did not know who they were dealing with, did they?
In a little bit less than a day, Minnie’s journey took her to the thriving city of Minas Tirith. She had left Craig and Conan behind at the gate and hitched a ride with some nice-looking merchants heading to the capital. Along the way, they had passed by a desolate-looking little village that she had considered staying the night at. In the end, she had decided against it—the poor excuse for a wall they had up convinced her otherwise.
Minas Tirith, however, towered before her, threatening Disney Castle with its magnificence. Of course, Minnie knew that her castle clearly took the superior spot, but if nothing else, the city at least proved a worthy challenger. If anything, she would say that it needed a splash of color; too much white.
The people, too, needed a bit of a makeover. All dressed in ratty medieval clothes, at least down on the lower levels where she had first entered. And the nerve of these people, too—even the ones so clearly much lower class than the lady mouse eyed her with disdain. She could not place her finger on why, though she suspected it had something to do with the overpopulation of humans in this court. This was why Minnie had always valued diversity—Daisy, one of her favorites of the noble ladies back home, was a duck, and she and her husband Donald got a great say in royal affairs. Heck, even Pluto the dog got a little bit of input.
Granted, Mickey was the only one who could understand him, so he hadn’t had much to say recently. That, amongst other reasons, made it imperative that she find Mickey and bring him home. When she had found his letter sitting on her throne, she had been absolutely furious—how dare he go off on another silly adventure, once again without getting her permission first! She loved her husband, truly, but sometimes she found him to be the most reckless mouse she had ever laid eyes upon.
However, she has been getting nowhere in her search. She had assumed Mickey would make his way to a place where he could use his position as royalty to his advantage, become something of an emissary, but throughout her scans of Minas Tirith, he was nowhere to be found. Of course, she didn’t know where she would find anyone of quality in this awful, awful section of town. Where in the world was everyone of worth in this city?
It was then, as she started to give up finding a suitable place for her to make her stay, that she spotted a gaggle of women in fine-dresses coming down from an upper level of the city. Once again smoothing the wrinkles out of her dress, Minnie straightened up her back and prepared to act like the lady she was.
Minnie’s transformation into an upper class citizen of the Kingdom did not take long. Despite their misgivings about inviting a lady mouse to tea and crumpets, the women she had encountered were quickly subdued by her charm and elegance. Though Minnie knew they probably did not think her any more than a simple pet, she would play the game for the moment, as long as it kept her out of the darker alleys of the White City.
Her position quickly became something of a novelty, at least amongst those who paid attention to the lower levels of Camelot’s court. Though she couldn’t consider herself a major piece of nobility, she had managed to rub elbows with almost all of the city’s minor nobles in the recent days since she had arrived in this Omniverse. As such, her trek outside the city garnered the eye of many a poorer citizen, glaring at her with either disdain or envy. She preferred to think that it was the latter.
As she escaped the walls of the city for the first time since she’d been there, she stumbled upon a strange sight. Tents lined the walls of Minas Tirith—or, at least, a few did. Some, it seemed, were being packed up already. She approached one of the workers, whose uniform bore a ‘DA’ on the front pocket, and asked him what in the world all of this was for.
“Oh, these were for Dante’s Abyss, madam,” he bowed politely to her, “A reality TV show being broadcast throughout the Omniverse.”
“Oooh,” Minnie cooed, “a reality TV show? Could someone like me play, do you think?”
The man looked her over with a bit of anxiety—she did not seem the type to play this game. “Well, registration’s already closed, unfortunately,” the man said, which was the truth, thank goodness. He did not want to see this lady mouse fighting to the death in Karl Jak’s arena, that was for sure. “But if you go through a portal in that tent over there, you can get to our Dante’s Abyss pre-show facility, which has the best view of all the events in all the Omniverse.”
Minnie contemplated this for a second—she did like to have the best, always. And perhaps a distraction from her search for Mickey would do her some good…
“AW, SHIT! LOOK AT THAT! GANON FUCKED THAT GUY UP!”
Minnie turned away from the screen as the giant, rampaging pig monster batted Retane away. How come that guy had not told her this was a fighting game? She had sat here for maybe thirty minutes, and all she had seen were people being beaten to a pulp or having their eyes gouged out by a giant, green man—and all over a hammer, apparently. Altogether, not her cup of tea.
She resolved to leave. She headed for the lobby of the Pre-Show facility, preparing to leave behind the long row of television screens that showed pretty much everything on the island. Perhaps she should have taken the time to look at another, but her gaze had been transfixed on the violence occurring at what the announcers called an “Easter Egg” fight. She had not been able to look away, until now. It had been too horrifying. The lady mouse shook her head, reaching the doorway and preparing to cross through it—
“We just want the hammer. No one has to get hurt, kapish?”
No.
She spun around, and sure enough, on the television screen stood her husband, arm wrapped in some strange metallic gauntlet, staring down a cloaked man with a red-headed woman standing by her side. The man in the red cloak tossed the “magic hammer” at Mickey, and Minnie gasped in horror as it sped toward them. Luckily, it clocked the girl and not her boy, but she still couldn’t help but cry out painfully.
“That’s my husband!”
Why? Why, why, why, why, why? Why in the world had Mickey joined this gosh-awful tournament? He was not a violent boy—and from everything she had seen on the television screens, this tournament was not suited at all for pacifists like her husband.
She had stayed, after finding out Mickey was in this tournament. She had rented a room at the hotel adjacent to the Pre-Show facility and decided that she would stay here, watching her husband until he either got eliminated—oh, the horror—or won the whole thing. So many powerful Primes populated the island that she doubted he would escape them all to the end, but to hear the analysts describe it, his chances were good, especially after he and his red-haired companion (who Minnie was not jealous of at all, thank you very much) had managed to join up with the armored lady and her scruffy-looking friend.
In the screening room she was in, each television focused on a different contestant. She had found the television screen that followed Mickey and camped out there, watching her husband intently as he and his newfound allies weaved through the forest, thankfully encountering nobody. She prayed a little bit every hour that he would remain safe and relatively unharmed.
Heck, she didn’t know if she could handle him getting into another fight—watching that man throw fire bombs at the King and Erza had almost made Minnie have a panic attack right there, in front of everyone.
To her left, she had made a neighbor. A silver-haired boy in a long, black cloak had also taken up residence in front of Mickey’s monitor, and though the female mouse had grown nervous about him being there, she had not yet perked up the courage to actually talk to him about it. She was, after all, a jealous creature at heart, and it plagued her to think that someone was just as interested in her husband’s progress as she was.
Finally, after a while, she decided to press the matter. “So… do you know Mickey?” she asked, trying to sound as non-confrontational as possible. It was difficult.
“Not in so many words,” the boy responded almost instantly, “I’ve met him once, but otherwise… well, you could say I’m just a fan.”
Minnie’s brow scrunched up at the boy’s puzzling answer.
This place is too flippin’ weird.
Her companion had disappeared shortly after Mickey and his crew found the man in the blue spandex. Minnie did not know why her husband had all of a sudden become less interesting to the boy, but she did not mind the privacy. She much preferred the rotating cast of occasional watchers than this boy and his consistent interest. Thankfully, though, no one sat even close to her monitor at this time. She supposed the lack of violence had dissuaded them; also, she got the feeling the Pepsiman was not all that popular with the viewership.
And then, all of a sudden, everything went black.
Behind her, the boy in the black cloak lifted up the sack and gestured to his two friends that flanked him. One of them used some omnilium to summon a portal, and just like that, they escaped with their prize.
He blinked a few times, his eyes focusing on the creature that looked pretty much identical the anthropomorphic mouse he and Conan had just encountered. Same big ears, same black fur covering most of the thing’s body; that he could see, anyway. Just one major difference to be noted: this one was a girl.
She lightly brushed her long, flowing red dress off, trying to smooth out the wrinkles that her trip to the Nexus had no doubt caused. In between her huge, perfectly-round ears, a tiara rested gently on her head. She looked like royalty if Craig had ever seen it.
The scout began to feel his nerves creeping back up his spine, though. Non-humans put him on edge more than almost anything else he had seen in his days serving the army of the Kingdom, and seeing two so alike in the same day just made the anxiety tickle even more ferociously at his brain. He looked back over his head; the other one was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it would be in his best interest not to inform this lady mouse of her twin’s arrival; safer, anyway, so that they would have a harder time coming together and enacting whatever weird scheme they planned to enact on the humans in Camelot.
Yeah, not telling her was definitely the noble thing to do. For country, of course.
“Ahem,” the lady mouse said, high-pitched voice and all matching her predecessor, “Are you just gonna stand there or are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”
“Uh,” Craig sputtered, “yeah, yeah, sorry, missus—”
“Your Majesty,” she corrected, holding out a hand for him to daintily shake, “Queen Minnie Mouse.”
* * *
Minnie Mouse was overwhelmed. The huge expanse of white stretched out before her and her guide, seemingly never ending. At the very edge of her vision, she spotted what looked like an archway; perhaps, she thought, that would lead them out of this wasteland.
A man that looked altogether too similar to Craig sprinted toward them. Minnie made note of their patchwork, but still nearly identical, uniforms, and gave herself a mental pat on the back for allowing her soldiers to dress to their own particular style as long as it still protected them. If nothing else, her army definitely qualified as the best looking one in all the universes ever. The man looked down at Minnie, and then back up at Craig, who shook his head. Had she cared just a little bit more, she might have been suspicious, but at this point, she had a single focus.
“Excuse me, sir,” she started, prepared to repeat the question she had asked Craig a moment ago, “but have you seen a boy mouse who looks a little like me?”
The second scout opened his mouth to speak, but Craig spoke first. “I told ye, we’ve never seen anythin’ like ye, missus—I mean, your Majesty.” He glanced at his friend, who made eye contact with him. Again, suspicious.
“Yeah, never,” the man went along with his friend’s story, though Minnie had a hard time believing it. “I’m Conan, by the way,” he introduced himself, and the Queen went through the same song-and-dance she had before, with Craig. These humans really did not know who they were dealing with, did they?
* * *
In a little bit less than a day, Minnie’s journey took her to the thriving city of Minas Tirith. She had left Craig and Conan behind at the gate and hitched a ride with some nice-looking merchants heading to the capital. Along the way, they had passed by a desolate-looking little village that she had considered staying the night at. In the end, she had decided against it—the poor excuse for a wall they had up convinced her otherwise.
Minas Tirith, however, towered before her, threatening Disney Castle with its magnificence. Of course, Minnie knew that her castle clearly took the superior spot, but if nothing else, the city at least proved a worthy challenger. If anything, she would say that it needed a splash of color; too much white.
The people, too, needed a bit of a makeover. All dressed in ratty medieval clothes, at least down on the lower levels where she had first entered. And the nerve of these people, too—even the ones so clearly much lower class than the lady mouse eyed her with disdain. She could not place her finger on why, though she suspected it had something to do with the overpopulation of humans in this court. This was why Minnie had always valued diversity—Daisy, one of her favorites of the noble ladies back home, was a duck, and she and her husband Donald got a great say in royal affairs. Heck, even Pluto the dog got a little bit of input.
Granted, Mickey was the only one who could understand him, so he hadn’t had much to say recently. That, amongst other reasons, made it imperative that she find Mickey and bring him home. When she had found his letter sitting on her throne, she had been absolutely furious—how dare he go off on another silly adventure, once again without getting her permission first! She loved her husband, truly, but sometimes she found him to be the most reckless mouse she had ever laid eyes upon.
However, she has been getting nowhere in her search. She had assumed Mickey would make his way to a place where he could use his position as royalty to his advantage, become something of an emissary, but throughout her scans of Minas Tirith, he was nowhere to be found. Of course, she didn’t know where she would find anyone of quality in this awful, awful section of town. Where in the world was everyone of worth in this city?
It was then, as she started to give up finding a suitable place for her to make her stay, that she spotted a gaggle of women in fine-dresses coming down from an upper level of the city. Once again smoothing the wrinkles out of her dress, Minnie straightened up her back and prepared to act like the lady she was.
* * *
Minnie’s transformation into an upper class citizen of the Kingdom did not take long. Despite their misgivings about inviting a lady mouse to tea and crumpets, the women she had encountered were quickly subdued by her charm and elegance. Though Minnie knew they probably did not think her any more than a simple pet, she would play the game for the moment, as long as it kept her out of the darker alleys of the White City.
Her position quickly became something of a novelty, at least amongst those who paid attention to the lower levels of Camelot’s court. Though she couldn’t consider herself a major piece of nobility, she had managed to rub elbows with almost all of the city’s minor nobles in the recent days since she had arrived in this Omniverse. As such, her trek outside the city garnered the eye of many a poorer citizen, glaring at her with either disdain or envy. She preferred to think that it was the latter.
As she escaped the walls of the city for the first time since she’d been there, she stumbled upon a strange sight. Tents lined the walls of Minas Tirith—or, at least, a few did. Some, it seemed, were being packed up already. She approached one of the workers, whose uniform bore a ‘DA’ on the front pocket, and asked him what in the world all of this was for.
“Oh, these were for Dante’s Abyss, madam,” he bowed politely to her, “A reality TV show being broadcast throughout the Omniverse.”
“Oooh,” Minnie cooed, “a reality TV show? Could someone like me play, do you think?”
The man looked her over with a bit of anxiety—she did not seem the type to play this game. “Well, registration’s already closed, unfortunately,” the man said, which was the truth, thank goodness. He did not want to see this lady mouse fighting to the death in Karl Jak’s arena, that was for sure. “But if you go through a portal in that tent over there, you can get to our Dante’s Abyss pre-show facility, which has the best view of all the events in all the Omniverse.”
Minnie contemplated this for a second—she did like to have the best, always. And perhaps a distraction from her search for Mickey would do her some good…
* * *
“AW, SHIT! LOOK AT THAT! GANON FUCKED THAT GUY UP!”
Minnie turned away from the screen as the giant, rampaging pig monster batted Retane away. How come that guy had not told her this was a fighting game? She had sat here for maybe thirty minutes, and all she had seen were people being beaten to a pulp or having their eyes gouged out by a giant, green man—and all over a hammer, apparently. Altogether, not her cup of tea.
She resolved to leave. She headed for the lobby of the Pre-Show facility, preparing to leave behind the long row of television screens that showed pretty much everything on the island. Perhaps she should have taken the time to look at another, but her gaze had been transfixed on the violence occurring at what the announcers called an “Easter Egg” fight. She had not been able to look away, until now. It had been too horrifying. The lady mouse shook her head, reaching the doorway and preparing to cross through it—
“We just want the hammer. No one has to get hurt, kapish?”
No.
She spun around, and sure enough, on the television screen stood her husband, arm wrapped in some strange metallic gauntlet, staring down a cloaked man with a red-headed woman standing by her side. The man in the red cloak tossed the “magic hammer” at Mickey, and Minnie gasped in horror as it sped toward them. Luckily, it clocked the girl and not her boy, but she still couldn’t help but cry out painfully.
“That’s my husband!”
* * *
Why? Why, why, why, why, why? Why in the world had Mickey joined this gosh-awful tournament? He was not a violent boy—and from everything she had seen on the television screens, this tournament was not suited at all for pacifists like her husband.
She had stayed, after finding out Mickey was in this tournament. She had rented a room at the hotel adjacent to the Pre-Show facility and decided that she would stay here, watching her husband until he either got eliminated—oh, the horror—or won the whole thing. So many powerful Primes populated the island that she doubted he would escape them all to the end, but to hear the analysts describe it, his chances were good, especially after he and his red-haired companion (who Minnie was not jealous of at all, thank you very much) had managed to join up with the armored lady and her scruffy-looking friend.
In the screening room she was in, each television focused on a different contestant. She had found the television screen that followed Mickey and camped out there, watching her husband intently as he and his newfound allies weaved through the forest, thankfully encountering nobody. She prayed a little bit every hour that he would remain safe and relatively unharmed.
Heck, she didn’t know if she could handle him getting into another fight—watching that man throw fire bombs at the King and Erza had almost made Minnie have a panic attack right there, in front of everyone.
To her left, she had made a neighbor. A silver-haired boy in a long, black cloak had also taken up residence in front of Mickey’s monitor, and though the female mouse had grown nervous about him being there, she had not yet perked up the courage to actually talk to him about it. She was, after all, a jealous creature at heart, and it plagued her to think that someone was just as interested in her husband’s progress as she was.
Finally, after a while, she decided to press the matter. “So… do you know Mickey?” she asked, trying to sound as non-confrontational as possible. It was difficult.
“Not in so many words,” the boy responded almost instantly, “I’ve met him once, but otherwise… well, you could say I’m just a fan.”
Minnie’s brow scrunched up at the boy’s puzzling answer.
This place is too flippin’ weird.
* * *
Her companion had disappeared shortly after Mickey and his crew found the man in the blue spandex. Minnie did not know why her husband had all of a sudden become less interesting to the boy, but she did not mind the privacy. She much preferred the rotating cast of occasional watchers than this boy and his consistent interest. Thankfully, though, no one sat even close to her monitor at this time. She supposed the lack of violence had dissuaded them; also, she got the feeling the Pepsiman was not all that popular with the viewership.
And then, all of a sudden, everything went black.
Behind her, the boy in the black cloak lifted up the sack and gestured to his two friends that flanked him. One of them used some omnilium to summon a portal, and just like that, they escaped with their prize.
![[Image: 2agonyw.png]](http://i68.tinypic.com/2agonyw.png)