Anyway, we all know how the story goes; little elfin man takes pity on the kind daughter of a farmer whose mouth doesn't know when to stop talking. He offers to spin her some gold in return for odd trinkets, on the third time said maiden runs out of trinkets and offers her first child. She gets married, has the little bas – I mean bundle of joy, and then decides, Hey! I think I'll keep the little stinker, I don't care how angry it makes poor old Rumpy's higher ups, and I'm going to be selfish. Make my knights go on a crazy quest for a name and then watch the elf get mad and destroy him self. Honestly,its not that I really cared all that much about getting the kid, my father spread it around so it didn't seem like I wasn't decaited to job. There had already been in inquiry about five years or so after I got the job. See, I wasn't always the bad baby snatcher; it used to be my older brother Roberto's gig. That was until he ran off with some Sleeping Beauty Babe; she left him a few months later for some "Prince Charming" git. Roberto was devastated, got into some bad habits, involved with a bad crowd, started selling magic beans for a living, that's right. He's the idiot who sold Jack the beans. That got the giants after him. Last we heard, he was shaking up Rapunzel, climbed one of the bean stalks into the tower, says he won't let her go until he gets some of the riches from Jacks adventures with the giants.)
Anyway, there was this thing about a set of quintuplets that I failed to bring back and well, a lot of dirty laundry got aired, we couldn't afford to have it happen again. Like I was saying, from all the years that I've been doing this, I've collected about – One hundred children. Twenty only kids, fifteen sets of twins, six triplets and the odd larger digits or so. I've got a pair of "conjoined" twins, but for legal reasons due to the on going investigation into illegal relations by Snow White and one of the seven dwarfs, I'm not allowed to go into detail. I wasn't that upset about the kid was my point. All that foot stomping and tearing my self in two, pure nonsense, just ask anyone who was there. If I had ripped my self apart, would I be telling you this story? No, I didn't think so. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in a land far, far away… yada, yada, yada, insert random fairytale cliché here…. Sorry, got side tracked…. This kind of thing just gets a little old after a couple thousand retellings. Anyway, there lived a mean, alcoholic, dirt-poor miller who, of course, had a kindly, beautiful daughter. The Miller looked more like a troll then some of the trolls I knew. He had a drunkards face of course, swollen cheeks, a fat, thrice broken nose… he was also missing three fingers on his right hand from a few "incidents" at the mill and large scar on the left side of his check from a case of "mistaken identity" with the big bad wolf. The man was in the last stages of balding, what little hair there was on his head was a dull gray color, as opposed to his eye brows, which for some reason were still a flaming red. No one could really stand being around him, not just because of his horrible attitude and his drunken passes, but because the man smelled like a dead cat in the middle of July, during a St. Louis heat wave. The sharp bitter aroma of the homemade alcohol he was always drinking, oozed from his pores, his hair, it could be smelled on his clothes. Your eyes started to water and you started gagging as soon you were with in a mile of the man. The miller and his daughter lived on a small farm, which honestly should have been condemned right after it was built. The mill had been falling to pieces since right after the Miller took over. Bits and pieces of the gears rusted, doors hanging of hinges, windows broken all over the floors. This dump was located in a town called Millersville in the kingdom of Kingsville. (They aren't very creative with the names are they, bet you those folk don't have a "Rumpelstilzkin" running around anywhere in their village, no sir re bob.) The daughters name was Gemma, and she was your average small town beauty, long blonde hair, red lips, and those eyes! Kind heartwarming blue eyes that when she smiled, lit up the whole town, and when she was sorrowful, as she seemed to be so often when living with her father… They were the kind of eyes that reminded one of the sea just after a horrid storm, they made you want to take her pain, and make it your own, so she didn't have to suffer any longer, she had the roses in her checks, you know the drill. She was the town sweetheart, helping with the elderly and the little kids, staying with her father to help on the mill (only god knows why) instead of frolicking away at balls like her cousin Cinderella and the other young people of the village. She was the kind of girl who you wanted to protect, she just seemed so dainty, fragile, as if a strong gust of wind would blow her away with no more effort then it took to blow the maple leaves. If you ask me, she got her cosmic brownie points when she married that King. I would know, I lived just a few miles out side of town in a little gingerbread shack that the Wicked Witch Reservation Committee had decided to restore and then forgot about. It kept the kids fed and out of my hair, I thought it was the perfect place to live. I was able to grab a kid or two every couple of months so it kept the old man happy as well. I had been keeping an eye on the girl for a while now. I mean, it's the daughters of people like that who usually make it in this place. That should have been my first clue. So, five years after I moved in and the Miller had gambled himself in debt, chased away all his workers with low wages and the occasional finger ending up in the flower when the old man decided to hit the sauce early and the towns general fear of the Miller, no one was surprised when he had to go to the castle to beg the King for a small loan to get "back on his feet" again. What did surprise everyone however was when he came back two days later and bragged about how his daughter was going to make him rich. Now, we would have known months in advance if there was to be any kind of royal wedding so, we all thought that he had finally flipped his lid, we were SURE of it when we heard his scheme to go about it. Claiming that Gemma could spin straw into gold? I followed them to the castle, after bulling the gingerbread man to watch the kids for me. (Even if I don't like the kids I still have to take care of them. Trust me when I say you don't ever want to see the fairy tale division of family services get on one of us Rumbles…. (All of us but Roberto are named Rumpelstilzkin; it's an old family name.) At the castle, the "gold spinning chit" was taken straight to the king. After taking an "apprising" look at the girl he told her that he would place her in a room full of straw with a spinning wheel inside. If she had spun all the straw by morning, she would be greatly rewarded, if she failed… well, let's just be glad that I was there. I took the opportunity to follow a servant to where the girl would be held and hid my self in the hay until the time for her to start spinning arrived. Whatever other lies that – story in your fairy tale books have told you, elves don't appear and disappear when ever we want. We use doors, windows and the occasional chimneys and ventilator shafts just like everyone else. Glancing around the room, I wondered if the place had been used for a torture chamber in years past. (What do we do with evil villains caught in the act of tormenting young princesses these days? We hand them over to the nearest wicked witch of course, or those people who have taken to making fairy tales more "Child Friendly." I'd like to point out, that thanks to them, Red Riding Hoods Wolf (they started dating after the whole Granny eating thing, they found out they both had a lot in common, like they hated her Grandmother…) hasn't had a meal in about three weeks. The Monsters…) Where you could see the floor, there were dark brown stains, a faint odor of copper rising from them. The remnants of Mother Goose knows how many years of frightened prisoners sweating bullets, panic showing in wide eye glances toward the rack, or the axe or the Iron maiden, wafted about the room. Windows at least twenty feet up the walls and no bigger then a giant's baby shoe (about 3x2, give or take,) cast a dark glow about the place, causing more shadows then they eliminated. Finally, after three leg cramps, four hours of waiting and a mouse up the shorts, the door was opened and the kings' threat was repeated, the door closed and the distinct sound of sobs echoed of the stonewalls. I chanced a glance at her out of the hay, and was nearly moved to tears myself at what I saw. The beautiful girl from the town sitting in a pile of hay looking anything but beautiful. Her face was swollen and red from the crying. With her cheeks puffed out and her nose the bright red color it had taken, she looked a great deal like her father. She just sat there sobbing, not even making a move to investigate her surroundings. Gemma wouldn't move for anything, would not look around, just sat there, her blonde hair hanging limp in her face, normally radiant, shining eyes, dull and listless, staring at the hay with a look of a woman facing the gallows the next day. For ten minutes she remained that way, until a rat scampered over the hem of her dress. That woke her up long enough to let out an ear piercing shriek, and resume her sobbing, shoulders shaking, chest heaving from the force of her sorrows. That was when I chose to make my presence known. That – did not go over well at first. Gemma looked at me like I was crazy, which I could understand, considering everything else that had been going on with her. But after I had spun one thing of gold, she quickly believed that I was here to help. She offered a simple golden ring, a small diamond at the center, hardly bigger then a fairies heart, with an engraving that read " To my Happily Ever After" as payment. Under normal circumstances I would have been in trouble with management if I had taken something so plain, but this girl was a special case. I took the ring and started spinning, and spinning and spinning, long after the girl dozed off I was finished. With a self-satisfied smirk I tunneled under the gold to wait for the morning. When the King came in I'm pleased to say he was pleasantly surprised by "Gemmas" handy work. However, as these stories go, he was over come by greed and the process was repeated twice more. The second time, she offered a necklace that had belonged to her mother, The third time, she had nothing left to give, and me being who I am and considering the business I'm in, (well and also because this IS a children's story so prostitution is out of the question) I asked for her first-born child. As was expected, she agreed wholeheartedly, her mind most likely rejoicing in the thought that she would see the day after nexts dawn. So, I spun the gold, she married the king and I disappeared for a few years until the first royal brat was born. It was a sunny afternoon in June when I rope climbed my way up to the balcony where Gemma was playing with the little princeling. So I tell her that's its time to hand the kid over. She doesn't react to that well either. Not that you could expect her too really, but the tears in those eyes, and that pout… you'd have to be a more heartless elf then me to just take that baby away from her.Therewas also the fact that I've got more kids then one elf should EVERhave to deal with. So, I made her the infamous deal, Guess my name and you can keep the child, you've got three days. I hung around for a while; listening to the names she was guess… Moe, Larry, Curly... this girl may have been kindhearted, but she was NOT the shiniest glass slipper on the rack… Then there was Juliet? Do even think that if my parents were any type of self-respecting elves they would name me JULIET? I blame the tenth kingdom for that, that movie put all kinds of bad ideas about us Fairy Tales into the minds of the easily misled. That's why when I heard that she was sending a soldier to a near by village for some clean up over the boy who cried wolf, I took the opportunity to drop a hint or shove it down the solider boys throat with a magic wand if necessary. I wasn't really picky as to how I got my point across. I quickly made camp a few miles from the town and danced around the fire shouting my name and things that rhymed with it, as you can probably guess, not many things rhyme with Rumpelstilzkin, so I ended up making up a lot of random words that day. I got louder when I was sure the solider was near, I was doing this for HIS benefit after all. (And to stop myself from gaining an extra kid, yes, yes of course. Can you really blame an elf for that though? When you've raised as many as I have, and none of them call, they never write…. Inhale Rumpy, Inhale; let's not start crying again… Anyway, where was I? Oh right, the solider boy.) The soldier was smarter then the Queen he served and rushed back to tell her what he had learned. The next day I showed up as scheduled to take away the little brat. There was Queeny, looking all smug and pleased with her self. What is it you humans say, like the cat that ate the canary? I told her it was my time to take the baby, and she burst out with, "Not so fast – Rumpelstilzkin!" Well, I was extremely pleased that the soldier had done his job, not that I could let her, or my higher ups know that. So I staged a little Fairy fit, and left with out saying another word. And that as they say, is that. That's MY story. I call it RUMPY REMASTERED. You can't handle the truth? You don't like it? Go back to your fairy tales. Well thats all she wrote folks. REVIEWS! REVIEWs for the masses please!!!