Spin-off: Four Demonly Kings
Mission canon(s): Disney: Twisted-Wonderland
Part 3 of: Colour Swap arc
The Four Demonly Kings' search for ingredients begins, but not without badfic antics.
The fic, titled "Morning sunrise" belongs to AkiraShards and they're welcome to keep or do anything they want with it. The Little Mermaid (1989) belongs to Disney and is based on the short story of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen.
Chapter one:
"I swear, I input our original colourings into the disguise generator. Why doesn't it work?" Inasuke cried, hands tugging his still dark hair. All four agents entered the fic in impeccable Night Raven College school uniforms, but their hair and eye colours didn't change from their swapped state. "What are we gonna do?"
"All the more reason to find the ingredients quickly," Momoka said before being interrupted by a loud garbled scream from Kaguya. "And yes, we can't forget to put out this badfic quickly too; the fact the uncanonical granddaughter of Ariel is given the very Japanese name Akira is paining Kaguya-sama more than terrible hair colour."
I felt the salty water air flowing through my hair. It was breath taking to me. Even though I do live in a castle right next to the sea I still feel drawn to it somehow. Want to know the reason? I’ll tell you. I’m the granddaughter of the little mermaid. Aka Princess or should I say Queen Ariel. My mother and father are the rulers of the people on land. But, under the sea there’s a different ruler. King Trident.
In lieu of sufficient scene-setting and description, the chapter was illustrated by [a still of the seaside castle from The Little Mermaid]. Thus, the white castle, the sky, the sea, the grassy cliffs were rendered in beautiful detail, but lacking in motion: no wind blew, no cloud drifted, no wave crashed, no leaf swayed. The only sound the environment made was an annoying, squeaky first-person narration; the only moving creature was King Trident the trident-wielding, chewing-gum-wielding baby moray eel. "Are we sure we're in the right canon? Or has the fic missed the memo that all those original Disney movie characters are supposed to be historical figures in this world?" Inasuke commented at the onslaught of canon-fails, the state of his colouring temporarily forgotten. "What on earth is an 'Aka Princess', and why is Ariel one? The king's original name is Triton, not 'Trident', and why is he the only one with a changed name?"
"Whadda heck is wrong with ya? Didja forget our top priority here?" Urato said. "We still gotta find pill ingredients first n' foremost! We can't kill da fic widdout findin' em! I can't stand havin' dis stupid hair n' Guyatchi's stupid eyes any longer than necessary!"
Kaguya then added his own unintelligibly roared input to the discussion. The three seemed on the brink of launching into noisy bickering, but Momoka stepped in. "Look, why not find ingredients and finish the mission as quickly as possible? What we need is a strategy, not sitting around arguing!"
"Sempai is right," Inasuke said. "You know, I have an idea."
"I hate my life," Inasuke muttered between his teeth. "Not only do I have his hair colour, now I must pair up with him too! Again!"
Such was the fate he brought on himself: he had suggested that the group be split up, two collecting charges and two searching for ingredients. This led him to be paired with Kaguya to observe the fic. The Word World seemed eager to put them to work: they were quickly teleported into the castle, where they found the Sue-possessed first-person dummy in a bedroom, yapping on and on about a clichéd princess life.
Of course being the granddaughter of Ariel herself means that I too am a princess. Even though some days I dream about being at sea, I also have responsibilities here in my own kingdom. Like, going to dinner parties, check on the people of the kingdom, also have meetings with the other rulers of different kingdoms. It sounds like a lot I know but hey, it’s just my life. And that’s not all of it, everything I just told you that I need to do as a princess is just the beginning.
Right now, I have to get all packed up and go to this school my parents recommended to me. It’s supposed to be the school for all of the granddaughters and sons of the princesses and princes. You know, like Cinderella, Belle, Snow White. You know, those kinds of stories.
I hate to say it but I didn’t really want to go. Yes my place was on land but down in the sea. I had a place there too. I met up my lady in waiting Ruby. She had just the most beautiful pin straight hair a girl could see. And her eyes, like her name was shingling bright like a fire.
The woman named Ruby was rendered with chains of clothespins for hair, an image of burning wood shingles in her pupils and a nametag decorated with the same burning shingles motif on her shirt, but this was the least of the agents' concern.
"Either there is an implausible number of royal children and grandchildren, or this school is ridiculously small," Kaguya expectedly offered sagely input. "This Sue is constantly resurrecting historical figures, isn't she? Goodness me, somebody stop her whining! Has nobody told you Leona and Malleus are both princes?"
Inasuke knew nothing to do but to groan.
"Oshimo-san did say the ingredients can be obtained from any Word World, so this should be easy," Momoka said. The two were still left outside on a cliff overlooking the immobile sea. The perfect silence and stillness, as though the entire environment was preserved in gelatine, was starting to become unnerving.
Until an unholy burst of assorted noises that sounded like someone trying to play music with food blasted forth from the castle and ended just as quickly. "AAAH! What on earth wazzat?" Urato cried, almost losing balance.
"Probably because dining hall is written as 'dinning hall'," Momoka replied. "But that's not important right now. Urato-kun, let's go over the ingredient list."
Urato fished out the scroll from his Bag of Holding and spread it out on the ground. "Ya got 'ny idea whadda heck any o' dese means?" he asked, pointing at the bulleted list written in powerful semi-cursive calligraphy. "Fer gods' sake, my brain hurts tryinna decipher dis thing! Is zis an ingredient list, or is it friggin' abstract poetry?"
The list read:
- A fragment of the night
- Perfume of daylight
- A seed of time
- Cloth of fleetingness
The list is charmed to automatically update when an ingredient is found.
"Maybe it's best to just pick anything we can get our hands on and see if it's correct," Momoka said.
Page 2
"I - hate - this - fic," Inasuke forced words out from between clenched teeth, all while running up and down a packed grandstand trying to find his angry sempai among the seated crowd. The Sue had decided to take a pit stop to check out that ocean side view of the kingdom on her way to the dining room, and this meant part of the castle corridor was turned into a full beige-tinted car race track, complete with a generic audience. This was giving Inasuke a headache: he had lost sight of both Kaguya and the Sue, the generic spectators were yelling at him to stop running in the grandstand, and the first-person narration was still blathering in his head.
I remembered that looks and etiquette is everything to a princess. Everything must be perfect about her, from her hair to her toes everything must be perfect. That means, no non matching clothes, no non matching earrings, and this is the most important thing. Never do anything to your hair. My teachers at that princess school taught me that.
They engraved it into our brands since we were kids. That was the one the that I hated about being royalty. They never let you do anything you want to do. Ever since I was little, I dreamed about doing anything else, besides our family tradition. What’s my family tradition you ask? It’s me going into the sea, letting the octopus steal my voice in exchange for a pair of human legs and to find my true love.
Inasuke soon spotted a commotion far down in the pits: a zoned-out girl in a dark blue dress, with a black bow tided up in her pony tail, was standing right at the door of a garage while generic mechanics tried in vain to shove her out of the way. "Well, found the Sue at least," Inasuke said, his voice barely audible to himself due to the noise. "Does she ever do anything outside of bumming around whining about how oh-so-tough her royal life is? 'Everything must be perfect'? So all that thing about Leona flunking his classes and Malleus eating ice cream and playing video games is just a lie then? And now you go and invent an uncanonical tradition just so you have one more thing to mope about! Gosh, how I hate upper-class brats pretending to be victims of circumstance!"
Just then, Inasuke spotted a certain someone seated a fair distance from where he was. This person stood out from the rest of the beige generic crowd with his head of long, stark red hair and his face nearly as red from rage. "Finally," he said, sprinting toward Kaguya as fast as his short legs allowed.
And then disaster hit: the race track began quaking violently, knocking Inasuke to the ground.
"No, not the sunflower. Not the dark purple seashell either," Momoka said as yet another ingredient was rejected by the scroll. She and Urato had gathered and laid out an array of random objects from the immediate environment, which included washed-up seashells, tree branches and a handful of dirt, but each one they held the scroll up to lead to a shock of magic through their bodies. After a while, not only was the two's hair in the wrong colours, it had also frizzed into sheep fleece consistency. "Urato-kun, what is that you have there? Why are you bringing in an entire fish?"
"C'mon, dis ain't just any fish. Dis is a friggin' red bream, 'n it's huge. Ya think I'mma pass dis treasure up?" Urato said, holding up the pink-scaled fish just slightly bigger than his head. "We gunna have killer sashimi fer dinner t'night! Wait, we can sell dis baby n' instantly get 'nuff money fer vacation, no need fer part-time at maid café 'nymore!"
"The time you wasted grabbing irrelevant stuff, you could've used it to find ingredients instead! Besides, there's no way we can keep it fresh before we're home!" Momoka protested. "For heaven's sake, don't put it into the Bag! It's going to stink up in there!"
The two had gathered up enough assorted bric-a-brac to cover an area as large as HQ Courtyard, but none satisfied the scroll. "I give up!" Urato shouted, throwing the scroll to the ground. This lead to yet another bolt of magic through him. "Dis is her fault in da first place, n' she goes n' makes us suffer! Shouldn't she be da one lookin' fer ingredients?"
"She let us know there is a cure, and told us how to create it. There's nothing more we could ask for," Momoka replied. "Maybe this means there are no ingredients in this scene, and we can find some when the fic switches to another scene. Wait, is that… Urato-kun, brace yourself, there's a scene change incoming!"
Momoka reached into the Bag, cringing briefly from the slime from the bream Urato had caught, and took out the DORKS.
Coral Sea
Inasuke panted heavily – and his breath came out as flurries of bubbles. While the Sue was having a wangst-filled internal monologue in the pit stop, the fic cut to a flashback to when she was in her mermaid form under the sea. Thus, the race track dissolved as the environment changed into an underwater location. In the ensuing quake, Inasuke quickly got ahold of the DORKS and changed his own and Kaguya's disguises into that of merpeople before they became completely submerged.
Inasuke couldn't help feeling a spark of resentment once he caught up with Kaguya – he indeed looked like a male version of Ariel. Pretty face, blue eyes, long red hair trailing in elegant waves in the water; first the disguise generator sorted him into Pomefiore, next he looked like a Disney Princess. The man Inasuke wasn't the most affable with resembled the things he loved, and this was rather unfortunate.
She (Melody) had to make a deal with someone to get a mermaid tail but this time that’s not what is going to happen. Anytime I touch water or at least salt water i immediately turn into a mermaid. I was around five at the time and we were in Atlantica, the kingdom of the seven seas.
My grandfather was delighted to see me. I can still remember the smile on his face. It was clear. Full of joy. Like nothing could ruin it. As I was playing in the my room in the castle, I heard voices. I looked below my window and there were two eel boys. They are like mermaids or well mermen. But they were eels. I heard about them before but I never got to see them with my own eyes.
[Jade Leech (youth) (CV: Koshino Kanade). Floyd Leech (youth) (CV: Takeda Aina). Canon, male merpeople, magic users. OOC level: YEAH NO I'M OUTTA HERE SUCKERS]
This scene was challenging for the agents for many reasons. First, they had not yet mastered control over the fish tails they now had in place of legs, and they both awkwardly wobbled, flailed and spun in the water, struggling to move forward. Second, while their equipment was waterproof by design, the CAD immediately disintegrated upon detecting a high concentration of OOC behaviour ahead. Third, Kaguya was getting supremely annoying.
Specifically, his ugly, unintelligible "angry mode" voice, while bad enough on its own, when underwater came out as, "Glug glug charge for bubble bubble uncanonical abilities foam foam intruding in on and disrupting canon characters' background coral coral oh dear goodness has this Sue even played the game lobster lobster?"
“Our masters and Azul’s master is having a meeting. We aren’t supposed to make any noise if possible.” I nodded and kept on following them through what seemed to be a shriveled up kelp garden. It looked unsettling to the eyes. Actually, they had eyes. All of the kelp had eyes and mouths.
"Charge for interfering with canon relationships on multiple levels; Azul and the Leeches don't need an extra childhood friend, and they don't have 'masters' either," Inasuke muttered disgustedly. "Here I am, having to watch a Mary Sue fool around and hear ugly noise from the mouth of a near-perfect approximation of a Disney Princess, all without Shigisawa-sempai here to translate any of it and make it more bearable. This is the worst; I should've been put on gathering ingredients instead."
"Oh hey, we're still breathin'! Ey wait, what happened tah my hands? What's goin' on?" Urato cried. Right after the fic cut to the flashback under the sea, he discovered that his limbs had turned into the flippers of a turtle. In fact, he had entirely become a leatherback turtle, complete with a sleek shell and smooth, slimy skin.
"Sorry Urato-kun, I went with the first sea creature disguises that came up. I should've disguised us as merpeople," Momoka said. Unlike Urato, she'd turned into a surgeonfish.
"Seriously, whadda heck is dis fic?" Ura-turtle said, looking around at the vivid corals, seaweed and schools of swimming fish. "Welp, at least when we're like dis, we ain't needa lookit each other's wrong hair colours."
"Oh right, we still need to hunt for ingredients," said Momo-surgeon. "Now that the scene's changed, maybe we'll find something."
"Yeah, if only we understand 'nythin' on da list! She didn't give us a sham list just tah get ridda us, did she?"
"Oshimo-san is a scientist, she knows what she's doing. Besides, the list makes a lot of sense when you think about it," Momoka said, her fin pointing at the still-open scroll that managed to not fall apart in the water. "Do you remember the cotton rose? It changes colour throughout the day: white in the day, red at night. Day, night, time, fragility, these are the components of a cotton rose flower."
"Yeah, guess yer right," Urato replied, "Well den, shall we getta work?"
Azul started to speak in a quiet tone.
“That’s my master and theirs. They didn’t know that they brought you here. You need to stay silent. At least until they leave.” We kept in the shadows and that’s when I heard them speak. It was non other than the sea witch and her little henchman themselves. Ursula, Flotsam and Jetsam.
Somewhere under the sea, a red-haired merman grunted and muttered something lengthy and unintelligible, while a smaller black-haired merman wrote in his notebook they don't have "masters", and the Sea Witch and her minions are dead by now! Seriously, play the game before ficcing about it!
At someplace else under the sea, a surgeonfish had just gotten yet another magical shock and said to a turtle, "Not even the black pebble? No, Urato-kun, you're not catching another red bream!"
So far, so good; the mission was progressing without a hitch on both fronts. Kaguya and Inasuke suffered as the fic stacked on more and more Sue nonsense, and Momoka and Urato hopelessly got themselves shocked over and over. However, the badfic had lots of surprises up its metaphorical sleeves, and so before the agents could get too comfortable, a chapter change hit them.
Page 4
"Holy macaroni what the heck is that smell, I can't breathe, somebody help me, I'm gonna suffocate, wait no sempai please wake up," Inasuke wailed as taller and heavier Kaguya passed out and collapsed onto his shoulders. Drenched and cold, the two switched back into their human bodies just in time to see Akira the Sue have breakfast with her parents in their on-land palace. Unfortunately, her mother Melody greeted her as "Good morning sweaty", and the Word World gladly obliged, covering the Sue from head to toe in perspiration that filled the hall with a strong odour.
Inasuke's eyes teared as though he was cutting onions, his head ached sharply, his stomach threatened to force his breakfast back out – but he fared better than his dear sempai. He much preferred a noisy and incomprehensible Kaguya to a quiet but limp and heavy one draped over him. Pampered botchan and their weak constitutions, he thought.
Then he heard a familiar voice from behind, "Ugh, what izzat nasty smell? Hey, ain't it Inatchi and Guyatchi?"
"Thank gods you're just in time, I'm getting crushed over here," Inasuke said as Urato and Momoka, as soaked and shivering as he, approached. "How did the ingredient hunt go?"
"More importantly, what happened to Kaguya-sama!?" Momoka said, and immediately peeled her master off Inasuke's back as if unloading a cargo. "And where did this horrible smell come from? Are you two okay?"
“Alright.” I looked over to my mom, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was Andrew meant to be…my prince? “Sweaty, you need to listen to this. It’s almost time to follow the family tradition. You will be turning twenty one soon, and on your twenty first birthday, you will follow it.”
"Blame the Sue's grasp of English spelling," Inasuke said between coughs. "We need to go outside, or I'm afraid we'll run out of air."
While rummaging through his Bag for the RA, Urato felt as though there was some invisible force pulling the Bag in the Sue's direction.
Page 5
Royal Sword Academy
“Akira, we can’t see you anymore.” “Eh-what do you mean?” “Since we are your….villains, and we’ve been sneaking out to see you, recently our masters found out about it.” Floyd said not wanting to make eye contact with me. Jade finished by looking up at me, for a moment I thought that I saw a tears welling up inside his eyes but quickly went away.
"Kaguya-sama, thank gods you're awake," Momoka gushed as soon as Kaguya's eyes started blinking. He coughed out some garbled noise, to which she replied, "No, we're still in the fic. Do you need Bleeprin? Should I send you home?"
The sky was sapphire blue, the air clear, the white stone castle stood high atop grassy grounds like a swan taking off. This was Royal Sword Academy, a boys' school with hardly any concrete canonical information other than that it was the rival of Night Raven College, and that its students were a flock of goody-two-shoes. In a dubiously refreshing narrative move, Akira the Sue was to enroll here rather than NRC as part of the uncanonical "tradition" that the fic never stopped waffling about.
Disguised as male students in the school's white uniform but with towels wrapped around their heads, the agents loitered in a then-undescribed hall to catch their breaths. Kaguya was coughing so profusely he couldn't stand straight, while Momoka patted his back. Urato ruffled his soggy, dripping mess of white hair with his undone towel, and said to Inasuke, "We still ain't found no stinkin' ingredients, but at least we decoded da stupid list a lil' bit. Momotchi says it all got somethin' ta do with cotton roses. If only we knew what exactly those things on da list 'r supposed ta be!"
When I looked at that statue of Ursula/the Sea Witch (at which point Inasuke wrote, what is a Great Seven statue doing in Royal Sword Academy?). It reminded me that when my birthday comes up, I’ll finally take my part in our family tradition and let Azul take my voice in exchange for a pare of human legs….come to think of it, wouldn’t that be easy? I mean I am half human half mermaid. How would my fairy tail end? ("Please calm down, Kaguya-sama, it's just a misspelling; this fic is not crossing over with an unrelated manga. Would you like a cough drop?") Or how would it even start? Who’s to know.
Instantly, Urato once again felt his Bag being pulled, followed by that unmistakable odour in the air.
Chapter 2
Newly spawned Subation and Skuttle the baby moray eels turned even greener than they originally were, Mrs.Pots the Enchanted Miniature Rose turned sickly yellow, cave of Wounders the mini-genie floated belly-up in mid-air. Urato ran to the nearest window and emptied his stomach in a rather similar manner to Linguini from Ratatouille, while Momoka pinched Kaguya's nose and frantically urged him to breathe through his mouth. Akira the Sue had arrived in all her glittery and smelly glory.
At this point, there was nothing else that could be done.
Kaguya gently shoved Momoka aside, then bent down to take off one shoe. The Sue very quickly found herself beaned by a flying shoe and fell to the ground dramatically in the middle of the crowded hall. "Alright, that's it, my lungs can't take it anymore!" Kaguya whimpered in his normal speech brought about by catharsis. "Akira the sweaty Sue, you're convicted of crimes against fanfiction and Twisted Wonderland canon. Charges against you include having an out-of-place Japanese name; rudely inserting yourself into and tampering with canon characters' backstories, namely by being Azul and the Leeches' uncanonical best friend; turning them OOC; resurrecting long-dead in-universe historical figures; creating implausible relationships, to wit: turning Azul and the Leeches into direct subordinates of the Sea Witch who, may I remind you again, is supposed to be dead before their time; inventing a royal lifestyle that canon royals don't have just to be whiny and annoying; inventing an idiotic uncanonical 'tradition' and forcing canon characters to be part of it as well; forcing a boys' school to admit female students; being very sweaty and assaulting agents' nostrils; poor grammar, spelling and punctuation; creating minis native to multiple worlds; and being a Mary Sue. For all of the above, you're sentenced to…"
But before he could finish, Urato interrupted him. "Oi, what's wrong widda Bag? It's practically flyin' adda Sue!" he cried, wrestling the Bag to the floor like his life depended on it, playing a brutal tug-of-war with an invisible force pulling it towards the Sue. Seeing this, Inasuke crouched down and reached into it, trying to pull out whatever it was that caused such a force.
His hand met something slick, slimy and scaly. "Eww! Who put a fish in here?" Inasuke cried, then yanked out the object – the red bream Urato had caught earlier. He immediately threw the fish at full force at the Sue. It came into contact with the Sue's face, and miracle happened. Since she had given herself the ability to manifest mermaid physiology upon contact with seawater, the dampness on the fresh fish caused her legs to become a fish tail and cost her the ability to breathe air, and she quickly suffocated. The Sue's corpse turned back into a first-person crash dummy cube still soaked in nauseatingly smelly sweat.
But the invisible force exacted upon the Bag did not go away. It then opened itself, and out flew none other than the ingredient list scroll. It floated closer to the dummy cube, unfurled itself, and something incredible happened.
The item "perfume of daylight" faded away and disappeared on the paper, as if it was never written there.
"Why didn't I think of this sooner? The Sue is named Akira meaning light," Momoka said, walking up to the dummy cube and grabbing the scroll. "We've found one ingredient at last."
"We're gunna hafta swallow medicine made with literal smelly sweat?" Urato asked incredulously, one hand pinching his nose, one foot poking at the cube.
"Do you want your colouring back or not?" Kaguya breathed out. "Let's take the cube and get out of here, I think I might be sick."
Minis (all up for adoption):
Mini-Overblots:
- Ambrose XLII
Baby moray eels (The Little Mermaid):
- King Trident
- Subation
- Skuttle
Enchanted Miniature Roses (Beauty and the Beast):
- Mrs.Pots
Mini-genies (One Thousand and One Nights):
- cave of Wounders
