A/N: So. This is sort of my first shot at a Kingdom Keepers story, and I've been debating on writing it for a while.
This will be a mainly Willa-centric fic, but may have some mentions of Willa/Philby later on. It's going to be rather short, in all honesty, maybe five chapters? This particular chapter is short, but I'm planning to make future ones longer. Rated T, but it might change. Feedback is welcome. Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: The Kingdom Keepers world belongs to the brilliant Ridley Pearson and all things mentioned Disney belongs to Walt Disney and his company.
Prologue: Part 1
To die was always a strange thing for me to think of. I'd always considered life a one-time thing, that's sort of obvious, but I'd never actually stop to consider the end. It would come when it was my time.
It was quite Disney of me to think of it like that in all honesty. Disney always took life in its stride, as if saying, "Well, if I'm going to die, I'll have an adventure first!" I guess being a Disney Host affected me like that. It made me take life one day at a time, one adventure at a time.
But with those adventures came villains. These characters, things, whatever you wanted to call them, well, they didn't like the whole "Disney" motto. They wanted their own things, things Disney couldn't give them. If they did, that's another story.
I'd never considered the possibility of those villains actually being real, though. I'd never stop and think "Hey, maybe these characters come to life at the parks at night, and so do the good ones!" The idea was absurd to me. Characters like Mickey Mouse or Cruella De Vil only existed on paper or movie screens, right?
Wrong.
These things, people, characters, whatever you wanted to call them not only existed in real life, but they interacted with others, roamed parks; anything you can do, they can too. They had thoughts, dreams, desires, all varying in degree depending on which one you see.
When I officially became a DHI, I never even imagined the sort of things I'd be getting into. All I knew it as was a job as a Disnified tour guide. Me and four other kids doing the same thing - showing people around the Disney parks. What I didn't expect with this job was being able to cross over into a hologram at night. I'd originally thought it was a malfunction, unintended, but no, Disney's Imagineers knew what was happening and this malfunction, this error, was fully intended. Characters were acting up and they wanted us to fix it. They called them Overtakers, these villains, and they fully expected a bunch of teenagers to solve what they messed up.
After our first fight with the Overtakers, I knew that there would be a lot more to come. Wayne had warned us the first day that it was dangerous, but he also said that they needed us. We were their last hope in protecting the parks, and inadvertently, every innocent child with dreams of becoming the next Buzz Lightyear, the next Mulan. I figured that it was a good thing that the adventure loving side of me never really left.
The other hosts and I were assigned to protect Disney from them. Prevent them from winning. I did, with all that I had, but one day, all I had just wasn't enough.