So, the other day, I got to thinking: You know what would be awesome? A Labyrinth cartoon. Like a half-hour affair with one, maybe two new episodes twice a week.
And I couldn't get the idea out of my head.
And as I was thinking about it, I couldn't get the idea of the Beetlejuice cartoon out of my head, either. Does anybody remember that? That show was the best.
So this entire thing is supposed to be just little "episodes"; some of them will connect to the others, and some of the will be completely separate. It's just goofy, Labyrinth, Sarah, Jareth, Hoggle, Ludo, Didymus… and more! fun, and the first story takes place about two months after Sarah's trip through the Underground, and she's 16. This doesn't exactly have any set ending. Just read and enjoy, I guess.
It was the perfect, early fall morning; the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, children rode their bikes on their way to school, and a sharp scream ripped through 4217 Pine Tree Drive.
"Sarah!" Robert and Irene exclaimed in unison as they raced up the stairs to Sarah's room. They burst in only to find the teen pressed against the foot of her bed in a complete panic.
"Sarah!" Robert exclaimed as his eyes swept over where his daughter was looking; her dressing table. "What is it?" The Goblin King's face was in the mirror instead of a reflection of Sarah's room, but neither Sarah's father nor her step-mother seemed to be able to see him. Sarah's panic-stricken eyes darted from her parents to the mirror and back again. Jareth made a silent shushing gesture, and then motioned to the wooden surface of the table.
"It's a really big s-s-s-spider!" Sarah stammered out. She tried to get her erratic heartbeat under control again after the surprise of having the Goblin King pop up in her mirror as she was getting ready for school.
"Really Sarah?" Irene asked with an annoyed sigh. "I thought that you were mature enough to deal with things like this on your own. You're going to be a junior this year."
"Yikes, look at this fellow," Robert said as he moved the things around on Sarah's dressing table and uncovered a giant spider; it hadn't been there a moment ago.
"Eek! Get that thing away from me, Robert!"
"Now you know why I screamed, Irene!" Sarah called out as Irene ran from Sarah's bedroom with Robert chasing after his wife with the spider. Sarah stood and smoothed out her green plaid skirt before she slowly turned her attention back to the mirror. "What do you want?"
"Oh, come on, precious," Jareth said with a sly smile. "Is that any way to greet an old friend?"
"We met two months ago and we are not friends," Sarah said with a scowl as she crossed her arms over her chest with annoyance.
"Precious, you wound me with your words," Jareth said with a scowl that matched Sarah's. "You have time to spend with Hogfarts, but not for me?"
"Hoggle is my friend," Sarah pointed out sharply. She spun away from the mirror and started to pack her backpack for school. "You are not."
"Weeeeell…" Jareth started. He stretched the word out until Sarah turned back around to face him with a dry look. "You wouldn't happen to want to be my friend, would you, precious?"
"Are you nuts?" Sarah hissed to him. She dropped the notebook she was holding onto her bed and stalked closer to the mirror. "You kidnapped my baby brother and tried to kill me on multiple occasions!"
"Oh, please, Sarah," Jareth said and gave the teen a dry look. "I was only having a bit of fun. Both you and Toby were never in any real danger. Especially not Toby. I would have given him back. …Eventually."
"It's that 'eventually' that has me worried," Sarah said as she turned back to her bag. She roughly shoved the notebook in, zipped the bag up, and stalked back over to the mirror. "You and I… We're never going to be friends. Ever. Because you are a horrible person."
"Your words wound me, precious," Jareth said. But Sarah was already leaving the room. "Don't think that this conversation is over, Sarah Williams! …Because it's not! Over I mean! SARAH! Come back!" A look of complete panic came across the Goblin King's face. "Please?"
Sarah vowed to put the Goblin King and his absurd request out of her mind. After all, it was the first day of school, and she was going into her next to last year of high school. Sure, she would occasionally talk with Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus, but not as frequently as Jareth had implied earlier.
"Hey, Sarah! Long time no see!" It was Frankie, Sarah's closest friend at school.
"Frankie!" Sarah exclaimed, and hugged her friend. Then, she pulled away and picked up one of the cornrows that her friends thick, dark hair had been braided into. "I'm really digging this look."
"Thank you! My mom said that it was great of me to want to embrace my roots." Frankie looked over Sarah's shoulder and let out an annoyed groan. "Don't look now, but here comes Gabrielle." Despite Frankie's warning, Sarah looked over her shoulder anyway, and let out an annoyed groan, just like Frankie had done seconds earlier.
A baby blue limo pulled up to the curb of the school, and the driver got out, came around, and opened up the door. Not only did Gabrielle climb out, but so did Daphne and Una, Gabrielle's two best friends. It was a rare occasion when one was seen without the other.
"I can't believe that the school lets them get away with wearing their uniforms like that," Frankie said as the girls walked up the steps to the school.
"What I have an even harder time wrapping my mind around is why they would sex up their uniforms when we go to an all-girl's Catholic school," said another of Sarah's friends, Iskra.
"Yeah, that always sort of struck me as being a little unusual," Frankie said to the brunette. By this time, Gabrielle, flanked by Daphne on her right and Una on her left, had walked up the steps to the front of the school. The only thing that stood in the way of the three girls were Sarah, Frankie, and Iskra.
"Uh, move," Gabrielle said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
"As you wish, princess," Sarah said with a sneer as she and her friends moved away from the door and over to the low, brick rail of the little stoop. A little black and white chihuahua poked its head out from Gabrielle's Burberry bag. Gabrielle stopped in her tracks, which made Daphne and Una almost run into her.
"Excuse me?" Gabrielle said slowly as she turned around to face Sarah.
"Far be it from me to prevent the acting royal brat from entering her kingdom," Sarah said with a giant, fake smile plastered on her face.
"Sarah! What are you mad, girl?!" Frankie hissed to her friend. Gabrielle matched Sarah's fake smile with one of her own.
"I don't know who you think that you are, Williams, but I'm going to make your life a living hell," Gabrielle said; although the tone of her voice was sweet, her attitude made it have the sickly-sweet smell of garbage. She snapped her fingers, turned, and strode into the school, with her friends trailing after her.
"What have you done?" Iskra hissed as she rounded on Sarah. "You don't mess with the Queen Bee unless you want to get stung!"
"I don't even know why anybody likes her! Who around here hasn't heard some cruel rumor about themselves that Gabrielle started? Her friends must know that she's the one who started them!"
"There's a lot more to Gabrielle's position as the Queen Bee here than spreading nasty rumors," Frankie pointed out. "After all, if the only thing that she did was to spread rumors all day long, she really wouldn't have any friends." The bell for the start of school chimed, and the three of them headed inside.
"But either way, you're a marked woman now, Sarah," Iskra said. "I'd watch your back today." They all went their separate ways.
Sarah's first class this year was history. She walked in and saw that Sister Patrica had a seating chart drawn up on the old chalk board. Sarah was grateful to see that her seat was by the window— she'd be able to look outside and daydream her way through what was likely going to be a super boring class. Sarah walked through the rows of desks to her assigned seat, put her bag down on the floor next to her chair, and then sat down with a rather unpleasant squish.
"Whoops," said a cruel, overly sweet voice from the other side of the room. "Did we forget to mention that there was fresh paint on some of the chairs? Oh well. At least red is your color, Williams."
Sarah saw red and clenched her fists together in order to stop herself from jumping out of her seat. If she left now, before Sister Patrica took roll call, she'd be marked as absent from her first day of class. Not a good way to start the year at all.
The time seemed to crawl by as the elderly nun came in and started to drone on and on about the standards that the girls at St. Agnes Preparatory School for Girls had to live up to, as well as in her class.
Finally, the bell rang to dismiss from first period. Sarah jumped out of her seat and ran from the room like a bat out of hell. She ran to the nearest bathroom, only to find a rather disheartening "Closed for Cleaning" sign on the door. The overly cruel laugher of Gabrielle, Una, and Daphne as they sashayed past where Sarah stood fuming at the sign made Sarah grind her teeth together.
She turned and hurried upstairs to where her second period math class was, but instead of going into the class, Sarah instead ducked into the bathroom. There, she saw that there was bright red paint all over the back of her skirt. Gabrielle had clearly tried to make it look like Sarah had gotten period blood all over herself, but failed in regards to the tiny fact that blood was not fire-hydrant red.
"That doesn't look like it's going to come out anytime soon, precious," Jareth said from the bathroom mirror. "You should probably change. And I happen to have a beautiful dress that is just…" He held up a beautiful, emerald green dress, but Sarah spun away from the mirror and stalked out from the bathroom.
Thankfully, Sarah's math class was an advanced course class, and Gabrielle, Una, nor Daphne were in it. Nor were they in her drama class, or her advanced English class.
"Oh, good grief, girl!" Frankie exclaimed as soon as she got a glimpse of the giant paint stain on the seat of Sarah's skirt at lunch. "I told you not to go messing around with Gabrielle and her cronies! She's going to make your life a living hell for the rest of the year now!"
"I don't believe that," Sarah said as she got out her lunch from her bag. "After all, the school year is a long thing and she's likely to get bored with me after a while."
"No, no, I don't believe that at all," Iskra said from the other side of the table. "Gabrielle holds a grudge like nobody else. You know Olivia Lombard?"
"Yeah," Sarah said slowly.
"Olivia once took Gabrielle's Barbie doll in kindergarten because she wanted to play with it. Gabrielle had made Olivia a social outcast since then," Iskra explained.
"Is that why?" Frankie asked quickly. "I just thought that she really did like to eat the gum off the bottom of the desks. I didn't want to hang out with somebody like that. But now that you're telling me this, this sort of changes how I view her."
"Olivia's perfectly nice," Sarah said quickly. "And just because she did something that five-year-olds do frequently, that gives Gabrielle reason to turn her into a pariah? Even when we're in high school?"
"Hey, Gabrielle hasn't any new rumors about Olivia in years," Iskra was quick to point out. "But stuff like that… that's the sort of stuff that sticks with you for a while."
"Poor Olivia, though," Frankie said with a frown.
"Oh, come on. I think that we all know that there's a limit to what people will do for gum, and licking it off the bottom of the desks is that limit," Iskra snapped at the other girl. "Oh no, here comes trouble."
"Well well well, what do we have here girls?" Gabrielle said from directly behind Sarah. Gabrielle reached over Sarah and upturned the bottle of coke that she was carrying all over Sarah's lunch.
"What the hell?!" Sarah gasped as she jumped up, but her white uniform shirt had already been splashed with the brown soda.
"Whoops. I slipped," Gabrielle said before she turned and walked away; she and her three friends were giggling loudly. Sarah turned and ran the opposite way that Gabrielle had gone in, and she didn't stop until she was on the other side of the school. She ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.
"You know, if you were my friend, I wouldn't sit by and let those girls pour soda on you," Jareth said from the mirror. "You deserve much better treatment, precious." Sarah burst into tears.
"I can't take this anymore! If she stars a rumor that I eat gum off the bottom of the desks, I won't be able to face coming in to school for the next two years! I'll have to transfer to a public school, and then I'll never get into a good university!" She slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor.
"Sarah, I will make sure that Gabrielle has much bigger things on her mind than to be hurtful towards you," Jareth said.
"And all you're asking for is my friendship?" Sarah asked with a sniffle as she looked up at him. "What's the catch?"
"No catch, precious. I just want to be your friend. Pinky promises, slumber parties where we braid each other's hair and talk about the boys that we like, and we'll even exchange friendship bracelets if you like."
"I'm serious!" Sarah snapped at him.
"So am I!" Jareth snapped back.
"Why?" Sarah asked as she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. "Why do you want to be my friend? Don't you have an entire kingdom of goblins who will be your friend?"
"I do, but do you know how stupid that goblins are?" Jareth asked with a roll of his eyes. "You're the only person that I've meet in a long time who I feel is my equal. I'd like to get to know you. And maybe try to make amends for the cruel things that I did to you two months ago."
"Well," Sarah said slowly as she got to her feet. "Maybe I could forget about how you sent the cleaners after me if Gabrielle got a little payback for what she did to me."
"It's a start. So, are we friends?" Jareth reached a hand out from the mirror and held out his pinky.
"Consider it a trial-run friendship," Sarah said as she approached his hand. "It's going to take a lot more for me to forget about how you kidnapped Toby, about how you almost sent me into the Bog, how you drugged me, about those cruel tricks that your goblins-"
"Okay, okay. A trial-run. And I'll make sure that Gabrielle has a taste of her own medicine," Jareth said quickly as he cut Sarah off. Sarah twisted her pinky around Jareth's for a brief moment, and a faint glow passed over the two of them.
"What was that?" Sarah asked sharply as she quickly pulled away.
"A vow," Jareth said as he withdrew his hand back through the mirror. "We'll be friends so long as I start to make amends for the things that I did to you. And if I break that vow, then I'll die."
"What?" Sarah asked sharply. She pressed her hands to the mirror but couldn't go through. "Why would you make a vow like that? I don't like you, Jareth, but I don't want for you to die!" Jareth threw back his head and let out a loud laugh.
"Oh, I'm just messing with you, precious," Jareth said after he'd calmed down a little bit. "If I break my vow, then I'll end up locked in an oubliette for a week. And if you break our vow by not being my friend, then it'll be you who ends up at the bottom of an oubliette." Sarah swallowed hard. "Oh, don't look at me like that, Sarah. Is being my friend really that vile?"
"Let me think about it and I'll get back to you," Sarah said sourly.
"Well, here," Jareth passed a sandwich through the mirror. "My first act as your friend."
"Thanks," Sarah said reluctantly.
"Oh, don't look at me like that; it's not poisoned or drugged. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make sure that Gabrielle gets what's coming to her." He vanished.
"Wait, Jareth!" Sarah called out, and the Goblin King quickly returned. "Please, nothing too mean, okay? I mean, the only thing that she did to me was that she put paint on my chair and dumped soda all over me and my lunch."
"Of course not, Sarah. I'm simply going to give her a simple reminder that what goes around comes around."
Sarah reluctantly went to her sixth-period science class; Sarah wasn't in advanced science class, so she knew that she would likely end up having the class with one of Gabrielle's friends. She was on edge as she walked into the science room, and was waiting for something awful to happen.
"Alright girls, let's get to our labs and start cracking! This ice isn't going to melt itself, you know!" Sister Beatrice exclaimed after she'd handed out the course guidelines. Sarah and her lab partner, Odette, started to get out the Bunsen burner and the beaker of ice that they would watch melt. It was literally the most boring lab experiment in the history of lab experiments, but they were being graded on the report that they would turn in at the end of the period.
"I still find it difficult to understand why Americans still insist on using Fahrenheit," Odette said as they carefully monitored the thermometer that sat in the beaker full of ice.
"Me neither," Sarah said with a sigh. "Metric is so much easier." A loud laugh on the other side of the room caught their attention, and they looked over to where Gabrielle and Daphne were joking around and generally not paying attention to their experiment. Sarah narrowed her eyes as Gabrielle pulled a tube of lipstick out from her bag and carefully reapplied it. Whatever punishment Jareth had planned for Gabrielle could not come soon enough.
That's when Sarah saw it. A goblin, no bigger than a field mouse, scurried across the room and over to the lab desk that Gabrielle and Daphne were not doing their experiment on. As the blue-grey creature scrambled up the wooden leg of the table, Sarah realized that she was the only one who could see the thing, and gave a sly smile to herself as she returned her attention back to her own experiment. Just the sight of the goblin was enough to make Sarah want to forgive Jareth for everything, even if the thing hadn't done anything yet.
Sarah waited with eager anticipation for something to happen. She and Odette took turns writing down the temperature and state of the contents of the beaker every two minutes, as instructed by the lab. When everybody's ice had turned to water, that's when it happened.
Gabrielle and Daphne started shrieking as loudly as possible, and then something glass shattered on the ground. "For the love of baby Jesus, girls!" Sister Beatrice snapped at them. "It's only water! And if you'd been paying more attention to your experiment rather than how you looked, then maybe this wouldn't have happened! Now, go get a broom and sweep that mess up!"
"But… But…" Gabrielle stammered. Sarah bit down on her lip and looked over to the two of them. Somehow, the goblin had managed to throw the water up into their faces, and their mascara was running badly.
"Unless you'd like to serve an hour of detention on your first day, I would suggest that you don't say another word, Ms. Ferriera!" Sister Beatrice snapped at Gabrielle. "Broom! NOW!" Gabrielle and Daphne marched reluctantly over to where the brooms were kept, and went back to clean up the broken beaker.
A couple of minutes later, the room was filled with an intense burning smell. "Ah, crap!" Sister Beatrice swore quickly a second before both the fire alarms and the fire sprinklers went off. This time, it wasn't only just Gabrielle and Daphne who where screaming from the water.
As Sarah hurried out from the science room, she found that she didn't mind getting wet. After all, some of Gabrielle's and Daphne's papers had… uh… mysteriously ended up on top of the super hot Bunsen burner and had caught on fire. And after causing the entire school to be shut down for the rest of the afternoon, there was no way that Gabrielle and Daphne would be getting away with just a strict warning.
As Sarah unlocked her bike to go home, something tugged on her sock, and she looked down to find that it was the tiny goblin from earlier. "Azar did good, Lady Sarah?"
"Azar did real good," Sarah said. "Tell Jareth that I'll be home in fifteen minutes okay?"
"Okay, Lady Sarah! Lady Sarah say Azar did real good!" the goblin yelled as he skipped away and then vanished on the spot. Sarah chuckled slightly to herself before she got on her bike and rode home. She walked through the back gate and came inside through the kitchen door.
"Sarah, what are you-" Irene started, but gasped loudly when she saw the state that her step-daughter was in. "Sarah! What happened?"
"Somebody left some papers on a Bunsen burner and it caught fire," Sarah said. "Also, I sat in some paint earlier," she said as she spun around. "Do you think that you could get it out?"
"I'll see what I can do about the paint. Strip off in the laundry room— I don't want you to drip all over the rest of the house!"
Sarah did as she was told, and left her school uniform for Irene to take care of later. Dressed in an old sweatshirt of her dads and some running shorts, Sarah dashed upstairs and quickly locked her bedroom door. "Jareth?"
"Ah, precious! Azar told me that you seemed to enjoy what he did."
"I did, even if I got a little wet in the process," Sarah said with a laugh.
"Well, I do have one more trick up my sleeve for Gabrielle," Jareth said.
"Jareth, what Azar did was plenty!" Sarah insisted. "Two things from her, two things done to her."
"Ah-ah-ah, nobody messes with my Sarah and gets away with it," Jareth said with a slight smirk.
Meanwhile, the driver of Gabrielle's limo stood outside the vehicle and scratched his head in bewilderment. He had no idea how all four tires on the limo, plus the two in the trunk, had managed to become completely flat all at the same time.
"What's taking so long?!" Gabrielle yelled from inside.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Ferriera, but the tires are all flat," the driver explained calmly. "We're going to just have to wait for a tow."
"Oh for goodness sakes! Can't you even-" Gabrielle opened the door to get out just at the same time as a large semi-truck drove by. The truck drove through a puddle, which threw the muddy water up onto Gabrielle. The blonde was already twice-drenched from school, and let out a scream of frustration as the dirty water hit her.
Sarah and Jareth let out loud peals of laughter as they watched Gabrielle scream in frustration from Jareth's crystal. "Jareth, I think that this is the start of a beautiful friendship."