Edit: After some careful deliberation and with the help of a couple reviewers, I've decided to remove the prologue entirely and make a few minor edits to chapter 1 that were necessary to support it as a story opener. I've come to realize that not only is the story just fine without the prologue, but it is actually far more impactful to open with Jeran's part in chapter 1. For any current readers who liked the prologue and/or future readers who might be curious as to what it entailed, I will be reuploading it after the final chapter as a sort of bonus/deleted scene.

Hey readers! Sorry for the sudden extended absence from the site archives; as those of you who have seen my profile lately know, there have been a couple factors keeping me from doing too much in the way of fanfic writing for the past few months. As you can see, though, I've finally managed to get my latest major project up and running!

I've been working incredibly hard on this piece (seriously, you should see the Word document I've been using for preplanning alone), so hopefully you guys will enjoy it! Also, I find the song "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons to be rather fitting to the story; while I'd first come up with the idea before it came out, the song getting stuck in my head was pretty much what inspired me to start seriously working on it, heheh. But enough of my rambling – on with the story!


Chapter 1: Awake

Light. Pain. Power. Dark.

Jeran groaned and rolled onto his side, dimly aware of the unyielding stone beneath his body. His vision blurred only for a moment before giving him a clear view of Meridell Castle's inner wall, but his ears still screamed confusion.

What happened? Had there been an attack? Someone come up behind him and knocked him out? No... Jeran had been knocked in the head his fair share of times, and though there was a dull throbbing in his skull, it wasn't the right kind of pain for blunt trauma.

Some sort of potion, then? He wasn't sure. With a grunt, the Lupe rolled onto his belly and pushed up from the ground. As he did, he idly caught sight of his hands.

I really need to trim my nails, he thought. And since when was the lighting in the halls so dim that his fur looked dark like that?

Something wasn't right. The chaotic noise in his ears hadn't died out as he came to his senses, and his head felt constricted and encased. When had he put a helmet on? He hated helmets; most Meridell knights did, and went without them if they could help it.

After taking his sword in hand and shifting into a battle-ready stance, Jeran edged down the hallway toward the source of the commotion. He rounded a corner and peered through a doorway into a room he recognized as the dining hall.

There were pets – all mutant pets, to be precise – everywhere, and they were ransacking the place. Food sailed through the air, some of it landing in swiped potato sacks or open mouths and the rest splattering unceremoniously against the wall. Pets scrounged in the cupboards for silverware, and knives and a few forks went into the sacks as well. One of them was even smashing plates and claiming the largest and sharpest of the shards for himself.

As one mutant came through another doorway, a precarious armful of weapons fresh from the armoury in tow, Jeran tensed and bit back a threatening growl. It was clear what these thieves, or invaders, or whatever they were wanted, but there were too many of them for him to take on by himself.

That was when he noticed just how these mutants looked. They were all dressed in outfits befitting nobles, court staff, or palace guards. Then he recognized one of them: a Scorchio knight who was supposed to be green, though his armour, voice, hair, pretty much everything besides his colour and wild behaviour matched up perfectly.

Something clicked in the back of Jeran's mind, and he took a step back and brushed his free hand over the hard material that covered his head.

It wasn't a helmet.

A pair of eyes caught his movement in the doorway, and a mutant who had been a court mage pointed the Lupe knight out to the others and cried, "A straggler! Seize him!"

Jeran's eyes widened as a roomful of glares settled on him, and he turned tail and bolted down the hallway. Shouts and pounding footsteps followed him, and a spell sailed over his head. There was no time to question what was going on, and he wouldn't be any use in the hands of these deranged beings.

A flash of light to his side signalled the arrival of another mage, and he brought up his sword to block an oncoming attack. After ducking away, however, the mutant Aisha simply ran by his side and fixed him with a pleading gaze that held none of the wild fervour of the others.

Jeran blinked in recognition. "Lisha?"

The Aisha nodded with a small smile and grabbed his wrist. "Hang on!" she cried, raising her wand to form a second portal that she dragged her brother through.

Jeran and Lisha stumbled into a large and dimly-lit storeroom, the portal behind them winking out in an instant. Jeran caught his balance and let his eyes adjust to the light, and his breath caught for a moment before he realized that the mutants now surrounding him still had their senses as he and his sister did.

"Sir Jeran!" one of them cried. "You're all right!"

Another turned toward a Blumaroo in mage robes whom Jeran dimly recognized as one of Lisha's colleagues. "Are there any others?" she asked.

The Blumaroo closed his eyes and let a spark of power play between his fingers and a crystal ball probably swiped from the Mages' Hall. After a moment he shook his head. Remorsefully he said, "Everyone else has either been turned or captured, and the captured ones are already on a ship and too far away for us to retrieve."

Jeran's heart pounded in his chest. "What do you mean 'everyone?' Everyone in the castle? In Meridell?" His eyes swept over the room – there were roughly two dozen pets present, along with Illusen and a few minor faeries. Surely this couldn't be what was left of the kingdom's population? "What's going on here?!"

Lisha fixed him with a sad one-eyed gaze. "We got the message just before it hit. There was a... power... From a ray of some sort, we think, that swept over all of Neopia. It knocked out most of the pets who weren't braced for it, and it changed us. Not only our colours, but our minds; most pets were brainwashed, like the ones you saw in the dining hall. I don't know why we weren't, but we're all that's left in Meridell."

The other mage nodded and added, "Between the colour choice and the starships taking the captured ones away, this can only be the work of Dr. Sloth. It looks like that madman has finally done it."

A strained silence fell over the room, broken only by the faint clamour and shouts coming from the rooms above. Jeran realized with a start that they couldn't hide there for long; it was only a matter of time before the brainwashed mutants flooded the storeroom in their continuing search for provisions and weapons.

One of the others – another knight, Jeran briefly noted – seemed to realize this as well and said, "We shouldn't stay here, especially if we've finished getting together everyone we can. Where should we go?"

The knight had directed her question toward Jeran, and the others immediately set their gazes on him. The Lupe's ears pinned back a little at the anticipation in their eyes. True, he had led Meridell's finest as their Captain and champion before, but never in a situation like this. He had only just learned what was going on, and in all honesty, he wasn't sure what he could say or do to help at this point.

"We... We need to leave the kingdom, for now," he began carefully. "If they're capturing everyone who wasn't brainwashed, we should start by getting away from the heavily populated areas where the other mutants are most likely to be. After that..."

A flash of light saved him from further deliberation. The focus in the room shifted to Illusen, who snatched a faerie summons from where it had just appeared in the air in front of her.

Near-silence reigned again as the earth faerie scanned the paper. After a few moments, she stood up and returned her attention to the others in the room.

"It's from Queen Fyora," she announced. "She has an idea."

0 * 0 * 0

Isca coughed and gasped for air. She tried to ignore the sound of the things that had once been her ears doing the same.

The surface of the ocean churned as thousands of land-species pets once coloured Maraquan flailed about in a panic over their missing gills. Isca herself tried to remain calm – as one of the two who had seen this transformation coming in her dreams, she'd had ample time to steel herself compared to the others – but it was a difficult thing to do with the Buzz she had recently helped to the surface scrabbling at her shoulders, his thin new wings fluttering madly.

The Aisha grit her teeth and kicked her legs in an attempt to stay afloat. The alien appendages were stiff and awkward compared to the tailfin she'd grown up with, yet she just managed to tread water, likely as much out of a sheer will to survive as anything else.

A dark form suddenly breached the surface nearby, and Isca shrieked in spite of herself and paddled back a bit. The reptilian head snapped in her direction, and after a moment of recognition she managed to slow her frantic heartbeat.

"Talek, is that you?" she called out. The Draik still wore most of his maractite armour, which seemed tight on his larger new form. The chestplate was gone, doubtless due to the replacement of his dorsal fin with a set of tattered wings, and in its place he wore a simple seaweed necklace of the same make as the one she'd given to Garin some years before.

"Isca!" Talek swam up to her with a relieved smile. The Buzz at her shoulder didn't seem to appreciate this, and sprung away before turning back to scrutinize the two of them.

Talek gave the other pet a wary look. "It's strange, the way many of the pets are acting now. Even the King doesn't seem to be in his right mind since the transformation." He returned his attention to the Aisha. "I'm just glad to see that you are."

Isca took a moment to observe her surroundings. The land pets, though perhaps slightly less panicked than before, were still a chaotic mess – frankly, she didn't know what constituted "normal" behaviour in this situation.

A barrage of questions forced themselves into her mind. She returned her gaze to the enchanted necklace around Talek's neck.

"You're with the rescue crew, aren't you? Is everyone all right? Have you seen Caylis? We got separated when we were trying to help some of the others to the surface and she went to check past the outskirts."

Talek's face darkened. He did not reply for several moments, but finally he said, "We helped everybody we could find, but I worry that it may have been impossible to track down all of them. By now it will have been too late for anyone without a waterbreathing enchantment or a pocket of air, so we can only hope for a miracle." With a heavy sigh, he continued, "And I'm afraid I haven't seen your sister... Although considering her circumstances, I'm sure she was able to –"

A sudden increase in the surrounding clamour interrupted his thought. The pets around them began shouting and pointing toward the sky – some in fear, but most in rapture – as a hulking metal craft burst through the clouds.

Isca felt a twisting in her gut, and she paddled back again as her antennae lowered themselves and hissed. A spacecraft? So Garin's stories about the mad alien are true then...

The ship came to a hover just over the ocean's surface and a little beyond the throng of pets. Massive mechanical doors opened with a hiss, revealing a smirking Cybunny with long thick hair.

"Afternoon, my fellow recruits," the Cybunny called out to the huddled masses, her voice amplified by some kind of hidden speaker. "You didn't think the Master would forget about his once-aquatic soldiers, did you?"

A few metal ladders descended from the entryway into the waves below, and most of the pets began to make their way toward the ship as two more spacecrafts appeared and came forward to join it. Isca shuddered and kept her head low, now certain of Garin's tale.

The Aisha was just contemplating whether she might find a way to swim to shore when the Buzz to her side hissed something about stragglers and lunged toward her. Eye wide, she took a quick breath and dove beneath the surface, kicking furiously away from him and trying to blink through the salty water that she had once seen through with ease.

A muffled splashing sounded above, and the blurred green form of Talek joined her. He removed his enchanted necklace and placed it around her neck.

Isca felt the waterbreathing charm begin to work on her and took a shaky breath. So this is it, then? she thought to herself. A seer and a swordmaster taking turns with a waterbreathing enchantment in their desperate attempt to slip past these crazed pets?

Even so, she let Talek take her by the wrist and use his massive wings to propel the two of them more quickly through the water. The din above began to fade into the distance, but she kept a wary eye out for any members of a truly aquatic species that might try to ambush them from below.

Talek began to slow his pace after several moments, and Isca held her breath and handed him back the necklace. As she did, she followed his gaze and tensed – someone was approaching them from up ahead.

It was... a water faerie, and a brightly-scaled one unblemished by the marks of corruption that distinguished the Drenched. Isca forced herself to relax. Surely faeries, unpaintable as they were, couldn't have been affected by this strange power. Right?

In any case, the faerie was too close and too suited for sea travel for her and Talek to flee if there was trouble. She swam up to them and, after saying a few words garbled by the water, produced a flask of liquid that Isca recognized as a waterbreathing potion and offered it to her.

Isca took a careful sip and felt the magic take hold for a second time, allowing her to breathe normally again. An added effect of these potions and enchantments allowed her to see and hear more clearly as well, so she was able to catch what the faerie said next.

"It's good to see more pets who have managed to resist Sloth's brainwashing. Follow me; it's not safe near the city, as I'm sure you're aware."

Isca and Talek shared a brief glance and complied, following the water faerie as closely as they could. After a few moments Talek said, "You seem to have a specific destination in mind. Do you mind me asking what it is?"

The faerie offered him a wan smile. "I do, although it will take us a while to get there, so you're welcome to hide out in the wilds instead if you don't want to make the trip. But I recognize the two of you if I'm not mistaken, and I believe you'll want to fight back. For that, we are going to Faerieland."

Isca blinked. "Faerieland? Why there?"

The faerie paused for just a moment and turned to her. "Because it's the last free nation in the world."


By the way, once I've finished this story I plan to submit it to the Neopian Times as a series. Because of that, I'll likely keep tweaking it as I go (I'll let you guys know in the author's notes if I make any major changes to already-published chapters) and would really appreciate any feedback on this. Thanks!