The bar was so loud that Ramona had to cover one ear and practically shout her order at the bartender. The legal ages to drink by species were posted on a plaque on the wall; twenty-one for Claude and sixteen for Ramona as a duster. She found that ironic considering their respective situations. She hadn't drunk anything stronger than root beer until probably a couple of years ago. It wasn't a particularly entertaining pastime for her, lingering at bars.

She wore a loose bandana to cover her hair today, figuring that among the commotion, it was probably enough. With her short ponytail tucked behind it, the only evidence that Ramona Swan existed was the shock of white that fell from the front on one side. Still, her nerves were pricked up, all on edge. Claude was beside her, gloves and all, flipping a gold coin and half-watching the rugby game playing on the flatscreen TVs. The bar was dark and musty, no signs of wanted posters. Good.

They'd been listening to an ogre trying and failing to hit on a female lycan—judging by all the hair and the tail—for the last several minutes. Ramona was so tired of the bad pickup lines that she was seriously considering stepping in, but just as she was about to open her mouth to tell the guy to cut his losses, the she-wolf turned and hissed at him, baring her fangs and glowing yellow eyes. The ogre yelped, and his drink slipped out of his hand, crashing to the floor.

"You'd better pay for that cup," the nearest bartender told him, sliding glasses in front of Ramona and Claude.

"I get the feeling we won't run into anyone useful here," Ramona said under her breath.

Claude was already knocking down expensive cognac. "Who said we would? You got the map, though, right? Should probably get that fact-checked by somebody."

It was a fair point. Last time their map had proved to be outdated. "We'll have to get closer to the palace, find someone who knows their way around it," she muttered, tracing the rim of her glass. "I'm sure the gardener or the servants would be willing to talk."

Claude sat back. "Look. We're here for a rest because I'm sick of being in the car. We're not gonna find any intel in this city. Relax for like, five seconds, will you?"

Her shoulders slumped. "I hate wasting time."

"Yeah, yeah."

Ramona glanced sidelong at him, thinking of their conversation the other day. It felt like they'd made progress. Progress towards what, she wasn't sure, but they'd gotten somewhere, telling each other their most uncomfortable secrets. Of course, there would always be more each of them didn't know about the other. She didn't really want to relive her days in prison or even her days working for Black Apple. For her, there was only the present and what she could be doing with it now.

Was being here going back on that progress?

They hadn't brought up the conversation again since they'd left the Bear family home. It felt like something unfinished remained hanging in the air, waiting for either of them to swat at it.

Ugh. This was all too overwhelming to decipher. Ramona took a swig of her drink. Claude was right about alcohol making things easier.

She caught a flash of movement scurrying across the floor and frowned, leaning back curiously to inspect whether she was seeing things. Claude seemed to see it too, adjusting his position on his stool to follow whatever was moving underneath the bar counter. He noticed his shoes, instead, kicking out one leg towards Ramona.

They'd been shined to perfection.

"Shoemaker's elves," Claude murmured, and an idea flared in Ramona's head. She snapped her fingers, trying to get the elf's attention before it scampered away.

"Hey!" she whispered. The moving shadow froze. Sure enough, it was an elf. It had been a while since she'd seen one of those. They were very good at making themselves invisible. "Hey, you! C'mere!"

Hesitating, the elf hovered against the bar front, considering whether it should stay. Apparently it decided that breaking usual protocol was worth it, and it hopped up onto the unoccupied stool on Ramona's other side, eyeing her suspiciously. Luckily, that ogre had finally vacated the empty space between Ramona and Claude and the werewolf, so there were a few seats shielding their conversation from prying ears.

"Whaddaya want?" it asked, somewhat nervously.

Ramona gestured towards Claude, and reluctantly, he piled a handful of shiny gold coins in front of the elf, whose eyes went very wide indeed. After an apprehensive glance towards Ramona, as if questioning whether this were some sort of joke or trick, she nodded her approval. Expression lighting up, it proceeded to greedily shovel the money into its small satchel.

"Information, if you have it," she said, and the elf giggled gleefully, delighted either at the request itself or the bribe or both. Her money was on both, given that shoemaker's elves were known for their blabber. She wasn't sure just how much this one would know about the inner workings of the palace, though.

"Hmm... so the bird and the moron want information. About what?" it prompted.

Ramona's feathers rustled, too amused to be offended. She beckoned him closer, keeping quiet. "Would you happen to know of any commotion at the Fairy Palace?"

The elf nodded vehemently. "Oh, yes. Always commotion at the Fairy Palace."

This wasn't exactly her strong suit. She turned to Claude for help. He smoothed his collar, locking the elf in gentle but unrelenting eye contact. "Say we'd like to pay the queen a visit. When do you think we'd be wisest to try?"

"Oh, the queen sees visitors so very rarely," it told him, with a sort of dismissive air. "I think you'd have to be somebody very, very important. You might be able to see her advisors or speak with her staff instead. But there is a visitor scheduled to arrive soon, so perhaps you only need make a reservation ahead of time."

Claude lingered on this flicker of information. "A visitor, you say?"

"Yep," the elf confirmed, with a little wiggle of the ears. "Baron Eoin of the North. Haughty fellow. He's already the laughingstock of the castle and he hasn't even arrived yet!" This revelation was punctuated by guffawing laughter. Ramona nodded slowly and Claude agreed with him without hesitation, despite knowing very little as to what he was going on about.

"Just dreadful. Nobles never know their place, do they?"

"Precisely, young moron, precisely. Give a man money and he suddenly thinks everyone's after him trying to behead him."

"If only," Claude said mournfully. The elf seemed to find this, too, very funny. "At least you'll be paid for your troubles if his pockets are as wide as you claim," he added.

The elf paused, shaking its head. "Oh, no, we don't get paid for our work. We do our favors for free. We elves are so humble, you see." Claude was amused to notice that through its innocent, round-eyed expression, the elf was clearly pulling some calculated manipulation tactics of its own. He could work with that.

"Doesn't seem very fair."

"Just the way the world goes 'round, sir."

"So we wouldn't be able to speak with the queen on that day, would we?"

"No sir, April the thirteenth. The palace'll be right busy with our noble guest. But I can put in good word with the queen's advisor for you, if you'd like." The elf was eagerly eyeing the pouch from which he'd produced the money before.

Claude gave an easy smirk, and though it pained him to part with his hard-earned gold, he pushed the whole thing over to it. "That won't be necessary. In fact," he said lightly, "the less you speak of this, the better."

Clearly, the elf got the memo. It wasted no time taking the pouch, flashing him a wink of understanding, and vanishing into the shadows, off to do whatever it was that elves did day in and day out. Shoe-shining and whatnot.

Claude sighed, sitting back, and picked up his glass, the sound of sloshing liquor a comforting familiarity. Ramona squinted to see where the elf had gone, but quickly gave up, turning to him instead and pondering the intel Claude had gleaned from the conversation.

"That was nice of you," she said eventually.

"What, the gold?" he mused, absentmindedly. "It's nothing, really. They hate their jobs. It's what makes 'em so easy to bribe."

"How do you know?"

A glove ran along one side of his hair. His semiformal style of speech to mirror the elf's had vanished. "Kinda an unspoken thing we all know. We're just used to it. Some things we walk by every day but we just forget, after a while. It's easy to forget. When it doesn't affect you."

They lapsed into silence, drinking.

Ramona set down her glass. "So," she began. "The thirteenth."

"That has to be it."

"'Cause they think like us. Like criminals."

"The thirteenth," Claude repeated, a slow smile spreading that promised a hell of a bad time for the so-called Darkness Alliance.

🙤 ˖ ࣪⭑ ┈┈┈┈ · ✦ · ┈┈┈┈ ˖ ࣪⭑ 🙦

"We can't repeat our mistakes from the last time," Penny was saying as she and Baby wandered a hardware store. "These Royal Alliance palaces aren't the same as the other places we've broken into. We underestimated them. Their security is much more advanced."

"Snow Palace's security didn't seem great," he muttered, crouching down to rifle through padlocks.

Penny opened her mouth to reply, then frowned. "Maybe Snow Palace isn't a good example. But still—" She chose a lock and dumped it in her shopping basket— "we probably only got in because we got lucky. What with the Evildoers Squad getting there at the same time and whatnot."

Bear seemed to tense, straightening, but nodded. "Either way we can't jack this up again."

"Right." It came out as a sort of sigh. She didn't know how to address the devil whale in the room. Penny was, in general, horrible when it came to sympathy or empathy or anything else that involved complicated emotions. That was Baby's thing. He was always there if you needed a shoulder to cry on. She didn't know what she was supposed to do when he was the one doing the crying. Oh, godmothers. Hopefully he wouldn't cry again. They'd slept in the van last night to save time and money and she'd heard soft sobs in the dark.

She'd just pretended she couldn't hear. Ignored it. Like an ass. It was what she did best.

They sat at a table outside a cafe in an area graciously shaded by trees with an arrangement of locks. Bear unpackaged one, pocketed the accompanying key, and set to work with a pair of lockpicks. They practiced in this way, over and over and over, until they'd both cracked the pattern to picking several of them, or at least sort of. Claude could do this, but he was painfully mediocre at it, and Penny hated the helpless feeling of not knowing such a crucial skill, even though it was a delicate one and delicacy was not something she was generally inclined to. She'd gone a long time depending on others to do it for her, and she was sick of it. If she was going to be a thief, as she'd grudgingly accepted by now, she was going to do it right.

The only problem, of course, was lockpicking in a world where most locks were enforced with magic—the reason Claude had such questionable luck when it came to this sort of thing. Ramona kept her ways of getting into places undetected very mysterious, so Penny couldn't be sure if she ever used magic, but it was certainly possible. Getting into the throne room would happen one of two ways: either they would go in disguised as palace staff and swipe a key off someone who had access, or, if that didn't go according to plan, they could break in by force.

Perhaps, ideally, they would wait, and let the Darkness Alliance do the work for them. But Penny liked the security of a planned ambush. For all she knew, Corpse Flower could have teleported into the Snow Palace throne room via the shadows. They couldn't take the risk of making snap assumptions.

Bear set the lock in his hand down. "I don't think this'll be my strong suit. Duckie have a plan yet?"

"I don't know."

"You're stressing about it," he observed.

"We're not the well-oiled machine these guys seem to be."

"To me," he said, pushing their practice materials away, "they look like a ragtag team of crooks. It's like lookin' in a mirror."

"Except they succeeded and we failed."

"Not this time."

He sounded like he meant it, like he knew that this time the villains wouldn't be so lucky. Penny didn't see how he could be so sure. She knew they couldn't have a plan already, not with so little in the way of information and resources, but every moment waiting until they got closer to their destination made her shiver with anticipation.

Last time this had not gone well. She couldn't imagine a scenario where they didn't fail again.

"Well, we might as well use our rest stop for its intended purpose," Baby said, easing them off the subject, and so they gathered their things and got up to explore the town. His giant, hairy arm came to rest on top of her head as they walked, making her swat his dangling hand out of her eyes.

"Augh! I can't see!" she protested.

And that was when he laughed—laughed, for the first time since his family had been killed. His laugh was deep and throaty and genuine and she'd forgotten the way it made his face light up like a thousand stars. Penny relaxed, grumbling about excessively tall people, but he'd laughed—he'd sounded like his normal self again—so there was really nothing to complain about.

She pushed away anxious thoughts of the Fairy Palace heist to follow Bear down the sidewalk, ogling store windows and trying to avoid getting hit by speeding cars ignoring crosswalk laws. They were in probably the one place that wouldn't gawk at Bear for being seven feet tall, and he seemed to be enjoying it, looking at ease as they peeked inside shops and took a walk through a community garden in which he didn't have to duck underneath the arch. Penny was just grateful to stretch her legs.

He paused to loiter before a store advertising candles on sale for 25% off. "Little loved making candles with my ma," he said, inclining his head toward Penny to murmur down to her. "I know nobody does it by hand like that anymore, but we were old-fashioned." He already spoke about his family in the past tense, like they were long gone, faded memories. "Pickin' out the oils, mixing the wax, she loved it. She and Mama would do it while Pa an' I chopped wood out back, but Mama wouldn't have it, me bein' left out—she always let me help when I came in from my chores."

Penny started towards the door. "Well, let's go check it out."

"I... I don't think I can."

She pulled back. "Oh. 'Kay."

Bear cleared his throat, turning around, facing her and beginning to walk backwards. "You got anything you liked to do when you were a kid, like that?"

Penny blew out a heavy breath, plastic shopping bag swinging loosely at her side. "I dunno. It was just me and my dad when I was a kid. We weren't... we weren't close like that. He worked the mill and I tried to be a normal kid, you know, playing street ball and hill races. But I was always running off into the woods, and you don't make many friends that way. So really, I guess it was just me." She smiled, tilted. "I liked to climb trees."

"Mm." Bear scratched his beard. "And then the prince."

"And then the prince. Always goes that way, don't it?"

"Well, what do you get without the prince? You bite into the apple and nobody wakes you up. Or you sit in the tower forever. Or you get eaten by the dragon. What have you."

"First of all, I never would've taken an apple from a creepy unlicensed seller," Penny pointed out as they walked. "You've gotta get creative about the tower escape, work on that upper body strength. And I could definitely one-V-one a dragon."

Bear sighed. "It's about principle," he insisted. "It's about, y'know, drama and romance. There's nothin' wrong with being rescued. That might be how you meet your true love. Maybe Rapunzel couldn't escape the tower without help, but I'm sure she's good at other things. That's what you've got other people for."

Penny wrinkled her nose. "I don't think the romance bit is all that appealing."

"Well, I do," he said, grinning.

"I just don't see why I can't be the one to go on the adventures and rescues—"

"No one said you couldn't, silly."

Penny opened her mouth to defend her argument but then closed it.

"You were the one who saved Prince Skip, weren't you? Broke his curse and everything. So there you go. Maybe it wasn't a grand adventure, but he'd still be a frog if it weren't for the woman in the story."

"Yeah, well, he deserved to remain a frog for the rest of his miserable days." Penny kicked a rock.

"Suppose he's actually an animagus and it was all a ploy to get you to marry him," Bear said lightly, and Penny looked at him in horrified alarm. He nearly laughed again, seemingly greatly amused by the idea. Penny was not.

After a moment of silence, Penny hesitated. "You—you said I can tell you whatever, right? Can I tell you a secret?"

Bear shrugged, his soft brown eyes still laced with sadness but ready to listen. Always ready to listen, always giving and giving and giving and letting everyone else take. "Shoot."

"I..." The words got caught in her throat. She jump-skipped to sidestep a littered soda can. "I didn't want to kiss that nasty, slimy son of a witch. But my father, he thought that witches are turning noble sons into frogs left and right, you know? He told me I should do it, for the good of our family. That if he really was a prince or a duke or something, we could finally live a good life." They reached the end of the street, and she looked out onto the crosswalk, staring blankly at cars going by. "I mean, I guess it was good for my dad. He was rewarded with land when I became princess. I don't even know if he's okay. When I had to escape in the riots, I only thought about myself. That's how you survive."

"I don't think it is," he told her softly. "I think you survive by the people you surround yourself with."

They crossed the street, the sounds of the city surrounding them and cars breezing past. And maybe, somewhere buried where she'd never admit it, Penny knew he was right.

🙤 ˖ ࣪⭑ ┈┈┈┈ · ✦ · ┈┈┈┈ ˖ ࣪⭑ 🙦

"Minerva," Lindsay whispered.

Minerva did not respond, nor did she move. She had been balled up in this frozen state of invalidity for some time now, her arm tucked into her clothes.

"Minerva, you have to stop the bleeding," she insisted.

Slowly, she began to blink, began to shift, began to recognize her surroundings. The two of them were huddled in an alley, and it was hot and sticky and uncomfortable, and they weren't going anywhere, not like this. Gradually, painfully, at the rate at which paint dries, Minerva started to tear at the fabric of her skirt, slicing a large strip of it with the pocketknife hidden in her corset. She did it one-handed and shakily. Lindsay reached over to yank it off, tying it tightly around the red knob at the end of Minerva's dominant arm, the empty space where her hand had been.

"Okay. Okay. Now we have to tell the others."

Minerva stared at the wall in front of them, blankly.

"Minerva," she said, more impatiently this time, "I don't have an earpiece." Her voice rose, becoming more panicked. "If you won't contact them yourself, you have to give me yours."

Minerva shrunk into herself, honey-blond hair falling in front of her eyes. Shook her head. Mouthed something. I don't want to. She looked so young and vulnerable like this. She looked her age. Not much younger than Lindsay herself, and yet, maybe they were both too young for this, too soft or too weak. Just girls in the bodies of women.

"I..." Minerva's voice came out much more helpless and afraid than Lindsay had ever heard it before. She continued to clutch her arm, her knees pulled up to her chest. "I hurt him." It came out as a half-sob, her eyes welling up with tears, and Lindsay didn't know what to do, didn't know what to do, didn't know what to do. They needed to get help. But Minerva didn't want to move.

She wasn't made for this. She was supposed to be cruel and wicked and selfish. The ugly-hearted stepsister. Lindsay was never told what she was expected to be when someone she'd started to call a friend was crying, was broken, was hurt.

What she was expected to be was all she knew.

"He trusted me," said Minerva softly, "and I abused it. Abused his admiration and his trust. Do you know what that feels like?"

Did she know—did she?

"Of course you do. We do it over and over again. Every day. This is not justice. Just greed."

Lindsay stared at her. "Minerva. That guy cut off your hand. That wasn't justice either."

"I know. There's no justice in this world where there isn't cruelty."

Lindsay fell silent, realizing there was no point in begging her to call the rest of the gang—she wouldn't do it. Minerva sat and cradled her arm, quietly whimpering. All there was to do was wait.

"We should get outta here before somebody finds us," Lindsay tried again, after a while. "Better to be in a crowd than in an alleyway alone."

Minerva looked at her nervously. Lindsay wasn't sure what to interpret from her expression. Minerva opened her mouth, before immediately closing it. It hit her, then.

She was ashamed.

Ashamed that she'd gotten caught or ashamed that she'd done it in the first place, she didn't know. But Minerva couldn't bring herself to face what had happened, and she'd rather stay here, bleeding and lost, than tell the crew what she'd done.

Hesitantly, Lindsay reached out for her, awkwardly placing a hand on her shoulder.

"It's..." She couldn't lie, say that it wasn't Minerva's fault. By all accounts, it was. Instead she settled for, "You're gonna be okay."

That sounded about as empty and meaningless as it felt. Minerva lifted her head.

"You ever betrayed somebody?"

"I mean. Yeah. Probably." Lindsay shifted, uneasy. She could feel the sun searing her shoulders. "My sister and I tried to escape this place together. Only one of us made it out. That always felt a little bit like a betrayal. Leaving her behind. She was killed by Queen Ella supporters. Radicals. But—I had to survive. Otherwise, everything we went through together... there would've been no point.

"And Ella's a whole 'nother matter. If your mom died, and your dad remarried some lady with two kids, and you were hoping for sisters, a family to depend on, but it turned out they hated you, I guess I'd feel pretty betrayed too. But Ella was everything our mother wished we were. She ruined our family. What was left of it, anyway. Just by being there... maybe in another time we could've been friends, could've been sisters. But I can't feel anything but hate her. Especially now that Stasia's gone. It was petty, to exile me the way she did."

"It was petty what you did."

"Obviously." Lindsay tore through her hair. Attempting to sabotage the future princess by destroying her precious glass shoes wasn't her best move. But how was she supposed to know they were magic, or that Ella was being protected by a fairy godmother? "But if she hadn't issued that decree..."

"Alexis might still be alive," Minerva finished quietly.

"Exactly." Lindsay dared look over at her again, meeting her eyes despite the shame that she, too, was feeling now. "It's your fault," she whispered. "It's your fault and it's over and there's no turning back and there's nothing you can do about it. Feel guilty. But you have to get up."

She had to get up.

Trembling, Minerva reached for her crystal, and after a moment more of internal conflict, dared to activate it. She took a deep breath. Her voice crackled over the speaker system.

It was excruciating to admit it. It was also undeniable. "I need help."

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

*AUGUST 27TH DIT: I REDID THE PENNY AND BEAR SCENE BC THE FIRST TIME AROUND IT WAS MEANINGLESS GARBAGE*

Act 2 is coming along nicely so far, yayyyy! We love character development even if it moves really slowly because the characters are stubborn little pains in the neck!! Someday this story is going to be super hard to market because "you see, it's a silly goofy story but it's also really SAD and HEARTBREAKING and EVERYONE GETS BRUTALIZED" and yeah that's how I feel about it every day trying to balance both (read: trying to keep my torturous/murderous tendencies in check).

I am currently stressing over the editing process of another story, but I managed to get this out in a timely manner, anyway. (Everything is time-consuming and costs money, by the way, which is very stressful indeed.) Enjoy more crappy proofreading from yours truly. At least I am on a temporary summer break. Today's poll is uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

You know what, recommend a really good Wattpad book for today's poll! I've been trying to get back into reading lately, and this platform is delightful because while not every book is a gem, there's plenty to sift through and all for free. I'm reading Gallows Humour and Grimm Games currently. Heh, a lot of Gs.

Anyway, toodles. I've finally put the banner on my desktop so I don't lose it again.