Chapter F-1: The Dragon, The Wizard and the Wardrobe
Set: Shortly after Grace moves in with Pierce
"What's that?" Grace blinked, watching as Pierce tried to hoist a large, wooden wardrobe through the window and into their apartment. Slimy black tentacles outside the window revealed that Inky was helping him from outside.
"It's a wardrobe," Pierce replied, setting it down on the floor, before producing his flute and calling Inky back.
"But you have a wardrobe," Grace pointed out, gesturing to the black wooden construction in the corner of Pierce'e bedroom.
"I know. This one's for you," the Tamer explained. "I'm getting a bit sick of you leaving your clothes everywhere," he pointed out, before trying to drag the wardrobe into the sitting room, which Grace had co-opted as a pseudo-bedroom.
"Isn't it a bit big?" Grace pointed out. "It looks expensive, too,"
"You'd think so, but nope," Pierce shrugged. "I got it at a sale of the belongings of this guy who disappeared, just eight thousand jewels," Finally, he set it in a corner, and pressed it flush with the wall. "There. Now, I want you to use this," he told his adoptive sibling in his best 'parenting voice'.
"Okay," Grace nodded.
And she did. She immediately gathered and hung her coats and skirts up inside it, even the dirty ones.
"No, Grace. You need to wash clothes after you've used them a few times, or if they get dirty," Pierce explained.
"Oh, okay," Grace nodded, taking the dirty ones back down. The floor rippled, and she dropped them into a hole in reality, swished then around a bit, before pulling them back up. They were now dripping wet, but not much cleaner.
"What did you just do?" Pierce raised an eyebrow.
"I put them in the canal. Water makes things clean, right?" Grace asked.
"Close. Water plus soap," the blond chuckled.
~P's E~
The cupboard saw plenty of use; as a Dragon Slayer, Grace went through a lot of clothes, especially once she started training with Natsu as well as Gajeel.
Eventually the day came when, after getting her dress badly singed during a training session, she completely ran out of things to wear. Pierce was out, and Grace didn't want to go out shopping by herself, so she resorted to frantically digging around in the back of her wardrobe.
"Come on, there's gotta be something here," she muttered, tossing out ruined shirt after ruined knickers. At one point her short arms couldn't reach the back of the pile, so Grace resorted to climbing into the wardrobe to get at them.
"Aww, please? Gimme something," she begged as she dug through the pile, pulling destroyed clothing out like ribbons from a magician's hat, and expecting at any moment to reach the end of the wardrobe. But she didn't, indeed, the interior of the article of furniture seemed to extend far beyond what it could reasonably have.
"What is going on here?" Grace asked, reaching above her, and standing up when she couldn't feel the roof above her. The shadows inside the wardrobe seemed to stretch, fade and warp around her. She walked onwards, looking around as a source of light appeared in the distance.
It wasn't long before the realised that the grey stuff around her was actually rock, and as soon as Grace came to this realisation, she emerged from what seemed to be the mouth of a cave as snow crunched underfoot. Looking around, she seemed to be on top of a mountain; snow covered the rocky surfaces, as the side of the mountain continued upwards until it reached a peak a ways above her to her right, and dropping away into an equally sheer gulf beneath her; one so deep that clouds beneath blocked her from seeing the ground below.
And, at the other end of the snowy plateau, was a large, dome-shaped building with a telescope protruding from the roof. "Is that an observatory?" Grace wondered, and her socks left imprints in the snow as she advanced on it.
Soon, she was standing at a door that seemed to be made of lapis lazuli, and looking up at it. Grace shivered in the col, hoping fervently that it was warmer inside, and knocked.
As soon as her fist left the door's surface, it swung open, seemingly of its own volition, revealing a dark room inside. Grace stepped in, glad to be out of the cold, and looked around.
The room was gloomy, poorly lit, and had three doors other than the one she came in from, all made of the same substance. There were no other furnishings. "Hello?" she called, looking around.
There was a rustling from behind the door to her left, and it suddenly swung open, as a hunchbacked creature emerged, with spiky, raven-coloured hair, ragged clothing and deformed teeth. Compared to an average person, he would be short, but Grace was young and petite and more-or-less matched his height.
"Oooooooh!" he gasped, a drawn-out, high-pitched noise. "And who might you be?"
"I'm Grace. Who are you and why are you in my wardrobe?"
"Your wardrobe?" the man asked, tilting his head inquisitively.
"Yeah. My brother bought it for me, and I want to know why there's a mountain inside it,"
"Ooh, no no no. The mountain isn't inside the wardrobe. The wardrobe takes you to the mountain," he 'explained'.
"Oh, so it's Spatial magic?" Grace realised. Now that she thought about it, there had been a familiar tingle as she crawled through the wardrobe. But she jumped through rifts in reality so frequently, she'd become highly desensitised to the sensations attributed to it.
"Ooh, yes. Very good, little girl. You know, I think the master would be very interested to meet a clever little girl like you,"
"Master?" the Dragon Slayer raised her eyebrows. She only knew one master . . . Feng Chronia, Guild Master of Phoenix's Eye. Her guild. And she was really nice. So surely this master would be nice too? "Sure. What's she like?"
The hunchback paused. "My master is male, and he's very kind. He loves to have little girls like you," he reassured her, before adding, under his breath s that Grace couldn't hear, "Dissected,"
However, what he didn't realise was that Grace was a Dragon Slayer. And Dragon Slayers had much more acute senses than other humans.
"Dis-sec-ted," Grace sounded out the word, before giving the minion her most pleading gaze, oblivious to the deer-in-headlights look he suddenly sported. "What does that mean?" the greenette asked.
"Uh . . to have some delicious biscuits," he hastily fibbed.
"Ooh, yummy!" she grinned in response.
So she followed the strange man through one of the doors, down a corridor and up a flight of stairs, and eventually came to another door. Before entering, the strange man called, "Master! There's a little girl here to see you!"
"What?" a new voice shouted back. "What are you talking about, Crumb? We're on top of a mountain! Why would there be a little girl here?"
"She said she came through your wardrobe, sir!" Crumb, as the minion was apparently named, explained.
"Oh. Bring her in, then," The door was swung open, and the hunchback led Grace inside.
They emerged into a single, massive, domed room, dominated by what seemed to be a gigantic telescope no doubt linked to the massive les she had seen from outside, and unfurnished and undecorated otherwise, with plain grey walls and yellow floor. At the base of the telescope, surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of papers strewn about the floor, was an elderly-looking man with pale skin and white robes covering his body. Sharp, orange eyebrows drew todether under a mane of matching hair, and with harsh, angular features he glared at Grace. "So, someone stole my wardrobe?"
Grace may not have known what a 'dissection' was, but she definitely knew what a 'stole' was. "Hey! Pierce didn't steal anything! He bought that wardrobe at a yard sale!"
"Yard sale?" the man parroted with a frown. "Oh. Oh dear me, Crumb. We might have to conquer a new residence again,"
"Uh . ." Grace didn't really understand what that meant.
"So, this Pierce? Is he your big brother?" the man asked.
"Um, I guess so," the Dragon Slayer nodded.
"Good. Is he good at fighting?" he continued his questions.
"Yes! He's a really strong guild wizard in Phoenix's Eye! And I am too!" she promptly beamed, pulling up her yellow/grey dress to show the guild mark on her thigh.
The man seemed concerned by this turn of events. "A guild wizard? Oh dear, oh dearie me," he gulped. "I'm sorry, dearie, but this puts me in a little spot of bother,"
"Uh, why? We're good guys. We aren't dark wizards or anything," Grace pointed out.
"Yes, I know. That's rather the problem, as, you see, I am a dark wizard. And I can't have some snoopy little guilder messing things up in here, not when I'm finally almost ready to activate my atmospheric ioniser, cunningly disguised as a telescope as it is, and turn sunlight into a distant memory for all of Fiore!" the man, whose name Grace still didn't know, cackled. "So you see, I'm afraid I'll have to kill you. And anyone else who comes snooping around. I hope there's no hard feelings," Suddenly Crumb clutched at her arms and pressed them behind her back, before stepping on her foot in an attempt to restrain her.
Grace blinked. This was an unexpected twist. "Hey, wait," she blinked, thinking through what she had jet been told and coming to a horrifying conclusion. "Does this mean you're not going to give me biscuits?"
The dark wizard blinked. "Pardon?"
"Ah, master Gerald, sir? I may have told her that dissecting her meant you'd eat delicious biscuits with her," Crumb explained.
"Oh. Well, no, you foolish girl. There will be no biscuits! Indeed, once my atmospheric ioniser turns the skies black, there will never be another biscuit again! Muhuwahaha!" Gerald cackled.
Grace blinked. She blinked again. Did . . he just say . . . there would be no more biscuits?
"You see, one of the key ingredients in your precious biscuits is wheat! And without sunlight, wheat will be unable to grow! But this won't matter to you, because very soon, you'll be dead! Muhuwaha!" Gerald laughed maniacally.
And then a blast of grey Reality magic threw him against the opposite wall, shredding the papers around him and blasting the eyepiece of his telescope apart.
Using her enhanced, draconian strength, Grace pulled herself free of Crumb and, spinning on her heel, declared, "Reality Dragon's Spiral Slash!" The resulting attack threw Crumb back into the stairwell, knocking him out cold.
Gerald tried to recover, but Grace, already blurring forwards, shouted, "FOR BISCUITS!" A second Reality Dragon's Roar smashed Gerald straight through the wall, sending him flying out onto the mountain.
She looked at the massive telescope. Gerald had said something about his atlas thermos iron thingy being disguised as a telescope . . maybe it was that telescope, maybe it was a different telescope. The only thing she could do was destroy all the telescopes she could find. "Reality Dragon's Roar!" she declared once more, hitting the broadside of the machine with a blast of spatial magic that ripped it into pieces sending debris smashing onto the floor. With that done, she leapt into a bend in reality that instantaneously brought her to the hole he had just blasted in the observatory.
Grace realised a little too late that that side of the observatory was the one that looked down the side of the mountain, and that Gerald was most likely out of her reach. He'd probably escape by the time she got to the bottom of the mountain. "Aww. I could have gotten a reward. Maybe," she sighed, before giving the subject a little thought. There was really only one thing to do now.
~P's E~
"Grace!" Pierce shouted, dropping his groceries and rushing across the living room to the pile of firewood that had once been a wardrobe. "What happened?" he demanded, looking visibly upset at the young Dragon Slayer, who paled under his glare.
"There was a mountain in the wardrobe, and a giant telescope, and an evil man who wanted to make there no more biscuits, and I had to destroy it for biscuits everywhere!" Grace protested.
The Tamer blinked, confusion replacing his anger. "What?"
"I went into the wardrobe, and there was a mountain with lots of snow, and an observatory with a man who wanted to use his evil telescope to get rid of the sun and destroy biscuits!" his adoptive sister repeated.
Pierce's shoulders sagged. "Grace. Have you been reading Narnia?"
A/N
A/N
Unlike Grace, I have been reading Narnia, and it served as the inspiration for this.
But enough about wardrobes. This is The Guild Next Door: Filler Episodes! Because the main TGND story is so jam-packed with the major story arcs, yet canon Fairy Tail has a bunch of filler episodes that are, mostly, only tangentially related to the main plot. So I decided the smart thing to do would be to create a second story to put any drabbles, one- or two-shots, alternative endings to situations, anything that's part of the TGND universe but can't fit into the main story. I hope you all enjoy it! Peace!The Dragon, The Wi
