KrissyKat91: Why has nobody done this? It works so well together! Anyway, I'm not Buddhist by a long shot, so parts of the Monkey King's story are going to be wildly different from what's in the book. Just thought I'd warn you.
Ch. 1: The Voice in the Mountain
"I'll huff show huff them," Ping Po gasped as he pulled himself over another small ridge. "I can huff be brave huff too."
The ten-year-old Giant Panda cub had been dared by some of the other children in the village to climb the highest mountain in the valley to prove he was as brave as the kung fu masters in the Jade Palace.
Now, Po wasn't stupid. He'd freely admit he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he did have a brain between his ears. Climbing the highest mountain had been forbidden for so long that no one was old enough to remember why. Except maybe Grandmaster Oogway, but if the old tortoise knew anything about it, he wasn't telling. When Po had pointed this out, however, the others just laughed and called him a coward.
And so there he was, a quarter of the way up the mountain, huffing and puffing while giving himself a pep talk in order to keep going. Finally, however, he just couldn't take it anymore and had to stop and rest.
"Phew!" he sighed, plopping down in front of a large flat rock. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea."
As he sat there, letting his heart rate calm and listening to the songbirds—tiny, fragile creatures that barely had the intelligence to string simple phrases together, but which had beautiful voices—he gradually became aware of another sound coming from somewhere behind him. It sounded like… singing?
"Eighty-seven bottles of wine on the wall, eighty-seven bottles of wine. Take one down, pass it around, eighty-six bottles of wine on the wall. Urgh, I am so. Incredibly. Bored."A heavy sigh."Eighty-six bottles…"
Blinking rapidly, Po hauled himself to his feet and clambered up on the rock. There was no one there that he could see. There was, however, a round hole in the surface of the rock with about the same circumference as his dad's biggest soup pot. Peering into the hole, the cub could see that it was actually a sort of tube that went down much farther than one might think just by looking at the rock, far enough that he couldn't see the end of it.
"Hello?" he yelled down the tube.
"Eighty-fi… Is someone out there?"
"I'm Po!" he responded. "Who are you?"
"Um… Wu. Call me Wu. How did you find me, kid?"
"I'm not a kid! I'm ten! And I heard you singing. Are you some kind of mountain spirit?"
A snort echoed up the tube. "Hardly. Just a monkey who made some powerful people mad, and got locked in a mountain because of it. And if you're younger than thirty, you're still a kid."
"You're in jail?!" Po squawked, ignoring the argument for the moment. "What did you do?!"
"Erm, not jail, more like a reeeeeaaally long timeout. Let's just say that if you like pranks, you should stay far, far away from the Jade City. The Emperor is a killjoy."
The panda sat down abruptly. "You pranked the Jade Emperor?" he breathed. "You're awesome!"
The Jade Emperor was an ancient dragon, even older than Oogway, and one of the few true dragons left (some snakes claimed they had dragon blood in their veins, but most everyone took that with a grain of salt). He'd been around for at least a thousand years, and probably still had several centuries left in him. Unfortunately, his great age meant that he was more than a little set in his ways, and that his sense of humor had atrophied somewhere within the last few hundred years. It didn't surprise Po at all that he'd imprisoned someone over a practical joke.
"Yes, yes I am," Wu replied smugly, then asked, "Hey, this may be a weird question, but what year is it?"
Po raised a brow but told him the year.
Dead silence rang up the tube.
"Wu?" he called after several minutes. "Are you okay?"
"…Y-yeah. I just… I've been here longer than I thought. What time is it?"
"Um…" Po looked up at the sun, then shot up with a scream. "It's almost dinner! I gotta get back to the noodle shop or Dad'll kill me!" He scrambled to the edge of the rock, paused, then scrambled back. "You know, it's gotta be pretty boring being up here all by yourself. Maybe I could come back tomorrow?"
"…Sure, kid. I think I'd like that."
"I'm not a kid!" the panda yelled as he half ran, half tumbled back down the mountainside, Wu's raucous laughter ringing out behind him.
Deep in the mountain, at the other end of the tube in the stone, the laughter slowly faded away as a white furred figure slumped slightly in his bonds, eyes closed.
"I've been trapped here," he whispered to himself, "for five hundred years. Five. Hundred. Years."
He opened his eyes, but the burning orbs didn't seem to see anything. "Everyone I knew." A massive troop of monkeys, varying in color from dark brown to ash grey, flashed in his mind's eye. "Everyone I loved." Another image, this time of a golden furred female with gentle copper eyes. "They're all… gone."
Flaming eyes closed again. And then Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, threw back his head and screamed.
Down the mountain, just outside the village gates, Po paused in his mad dash, looking back the way he'd come and wondering at the faint, far off sound he'd just heard.