The Vigilantes of Corona

I do not own the rights to Tangled

Chapter One

She was there again. In that warehouse, amongst the abandoned crates and beneath a leaking roof. For a warm summer night it was unnaturally cold, causing her to shiver through the thin clothing she had put on the night before. Sweat and tears blurred her vision, her nose was blocked, and she was breathing heavily through her mouth as if the air was going to run out any second. Any single snapshot of consciousness could be her last, even though she knew her captors were in the upstairs office. They hadn't said what they wanted, nor how long they were going to keep her here. All she knew was that the ropes around her wrists, binding her to the creaky chair, irritated her skin to the point she suspected she was bleeding.

It was dark, and there was no hope.

She couldn't remember how she got there. All that could be recalled from the dazed pictures that occasionally buzzed through her mind was she had been somewhere very noisy before this. There had been someone, someone nice she spoke to. Foolishly, she had rejected his kind offer and then she had been snatched away. The only other thing that re-emerged from time to time was that two voices, male and female, were calling after her.

But now it was dark, and there was no hope.

She thought about her family in the long intervals of silence, as night turned to day and then back again. Her mother and father, who would only find out she was here when her body was discovered. When was the last time they had spoken? A day or a week? Could it be a fortnight? She really couldn't remember. What was the last thing she had said to either of them?

There were her cousins, one of whom was the most powerful woman in Arendelle. Surely they would be searching for her? Hopefully they were searching for her. Whether they would find her before it was too late was a different question. Her kidnappers may not have issued a ransom.

Of course, her nanny had been right the entire time. In the city there were always ruffians and thugs, people who were prepared to take advantage of a naïve young girl for their own gain. One of the few things she could picture was the triumphant, smug grin of her nanny; which would inevitably, if fleetingly, manifest itself when she heard the news. Her feelings towards her primary caretaker were ambivalent, but this reaction was as certain as the presence of blood down her wrists. If she got out of this, she doubted she would ever leave home again.

Otherwise; who else was there to care? She had no friends, excluding a pet chameleon that lacked conversational skill. She'd never had any part-time job. Hell, it was unlikely her tutors would bat an eyelid if she was murdered. They had been superfluous to her learning since her mid-teens. There was simply no one else.

Except, perhaps, the strange man she had met on the train. The one who had tried to get her out of the club before the kidnapping. He had been the first new person she had met in years and surprised her by the bizarre kindness he gave her. On their first meeting he'd acted as if he was the only person who mattered, but managed to recall several details about her on reunion. Maybe, just maybe, he would know where she was. Maybe he would come to her rescue.

But it was dark now, and there was no hope.

Time shifted before her eyes like autumn leaves being brushed by the wind. She was standing, the stinging in her wrists diminished, and her legs were surprisingly stable. From behind her hiding spot of crates, she could see two blue figures fighting against her giant kidnappers. Snow and ice crystals whirled through the air, unnaturally for the time of year. The seasonal antithesis of weather surrounded one of the blue people, the woman, leaving the man to take down an opponent who was easily a foot taller than him.

Despite her reservations, she felt herself rising from her spot to help when she saw her saviour being lifted by the neck. But before she could do anything, the man caught her eye and stared her down, making it clear she was not to endanger herself unnecessarily. When she hesitated for a second, trying to decide whether to follow his instructions or help anyway, she watched him swing his legs back and forth like a pendulum. Then, in demonstration of an intimate gymnastic ability, he clamped one boot on the giant's shoulder before swiping up with the other directly into the chin. The kidnapper fell like an avalanche among the lingering pieces of blizzard and she ducked down behind the wood again.

Another shift, like tumbling through a curtain, and this time she found herself lying on the floor. How she got here was initially unclear. Above her, dimly, she could see two faces peering down at her as perfect reflections of terror. The kidnappers were nowhere to be seen, yet somehow the looming sense of danger had not faded. Instead, the world had started to fade from her.

Second by second, she watched the kind, scared faces become a little foggier. Their soft, panicked words were slightly more muffled. The feeling of the rough wood on her back became forgotten. Gradually, all that remained was the queerest sensation of deflating; as if heat and volume were escaping her from an unknown point. She couldn't feel any pain; only the slight, increasing numbness of floating on nothing.

With fumbling, empty-sensed fingers, she reached down to where she thought the feeling emanated from. Her skin, clothing and vision were suddenly flooded by a stabbing, burning redness which engulfed her for the briefest of seconds. The sight of her two heroes were completely blotted out, although she wasn't sure they were even there anymore.

Then, as quickly as the deep reddish-brown had dominated her senses, it abruptly turned darker than the night sky and all sound stopped. She could not see a thing, hear the slightest noise or grab at anything around her. All at once, she had been ripped from the painted canvas of the world and thrust into the deepest of voids from which there seemed no escape.

She could not see the light.

Gasping as if rising from the inky depths of the sea, Rapunzel Engel rose from her bed in a panic and toppled onto thick carpet below. Sleep blurred her eyes even as she frantically tried to blink it away, while her muscles twitched from the sudden exertion. Her heart pounded in her ears, the blood sounding like it was prepared to burst the veins. For a long interval from her perspective, which was actually only a minute from a neutral stance, she breathed erratically and deeply; forcing herself to remember where she was.

I'm at home, she told herself. The one eye which wasn't buried in the furry wool of the rug strained upwards to see her ceiling mural of the Coronan sun surrounded by happy, dancing figures. Yes, I'm at home. I just had a nightmare. I'm definitely not… not back there again.

It was almost a second later that the by-now familiar glow of her gift filled her veins and repaired what little damage she had dealt herself on her journey to the floor. In less than thirty-seconds her heart rate had returned to its steady rate and the lag of lactic acid in her muscles lifted. Just over a minute later she was fully awake and had rolled over, considering the daily ritual which had emerged since returning home.

It had all started about four months ago, and she remembered the very moment that she had decided running off to Arendelle was a good idea. If only she had known the results of that fateful, spur of the moment rush to force her into action. Back then, she had internally repeated that such a rash action was good for her. It would show her family she was capable of taking care of herself, and she would be able to catch up with her cousins; one of whom she had not seen for four years.

Of course, had she known that the quiet, reclusive Elsa Noble was in fact the Arendelle Vigilante now known as the Snow Queen; Rapunzel figured she might have been intimidated into staying home after all. But, alas, barely anyone knew the truth. Not even Anna was aware her sister was jumping off rooftops and beating up the perpetrators of illegal activity every night. Hell, Elsa had even managed to keep her greatest secret from Anna as well. The revelation that Elsa was capable of cryokinesis, and had been all her life, was frankly astonishing. It amazed Rapunzel to think that absolutely no one, excluding a few allies of Elsa's, had put two and two together.

Indeed, Rapunzel could have gone her entire time in Arendelle without spotting the obvious similarity between the vigilante and the CEO of the Noble Corporation if it hadn't been for… Rapunzel swallowed hard as she remembered that fateful night; if it hadn't been for the Stabbington Brothers.

The Stabbingtons were notorious in Corona, in equal measures due to their shared number of death sentences and murders committed. They were enormous brutes, with a combined height of thirteen-feet at least and three eyes between them. And the only reason they had been driven out of the city was because of Corona's own costumed crusader; Flynn Rider.

In apparent desperation after a final legal blow was dealt, the Stabbingtons had fled to Arendelle in order to find a way out of the country. Unfortunately for them, Flynn Rider had not been far behind; and it was under the cosmic coincidence of picking the same train seats that he had also crossed paths with Rapunzel. As one might expect, she did not know that Flynn Rider was actually sat across from her at that time. She had just thought he was another random man taking a trip north.

But then, as inevitable as it apparently was, Rapunzel had become an interest of a much higher power in Arendelle: given that she now had ties to both media sensations. Within three days of her arrival in Arendelle she was kidnapped by the Stabbingtons. As planned, the Snow Queen and Flynn Rider came to rescue her while another crime was taking place across the city, and they were successful in stopping the Stabbingtons until, by a fluke of probability, one of the foes had been conscious enough to reach a gun and fire at them.

For reasons Rapunzel still did not understand, she had thrown herself in front of the Snow Queen and taken the bullet in an unnecessary act of sacrifice.

As it had later turned out, the bullet could not have penetrated the Snow Queen's costume, so Rapunzel had unintentionally left the pair of vigilantes with the new responsibility of saving her without revealing their identities to the public in the process. This had led them to the point where Dr Ernest Pabbie, an advisor of the Snow Queen, was preparing to operate on her in a makeshift hospital ward located on an abandoned subway station. Despite the odds, such a procedure could have worked. However, Elsa's nerves had been shot by the trauma and Flynn Rider had recognised that the blood loss would make a recovery risky.

And during the resulting squabble; Rapunzel died.

She had actually, medically died. No pulse, no breath, not even any lingering brain activity if they had looked at her in an MRI scanner. For five minutes, Rapunzel Engel had passed on to the land of the dead.

Fortunately, Elsa was not without access to experimental remedies and, concluding her argument with Pabbie, injected the corpse of Rapunzel with a previously untested serum which had the potential to heal the damage.

To this day, Rapunzel was not exactly clear how the serum worked. The one explanation she had been granted described how the genes of a rainforest planet which was known for producing oils capable of accelerating the healing process had been inserted into a virus. As a result, when Rapunzel was injected, every cell in her body had been affected by this new gene in a matter of hours. And its potency was apparent.

It had taken five minutes for the serum to bring Rapunzel back to life, with more long-term consequences becoming visible in the following months.

Since that life-changing incident, Rapunzel had measured that her body fat had increased by five percent while her muscle mass was one-point-five times what it had been. Yet she had not grown in any notable direction. Her height remained the same, at an average of five foot three, and if anything; her clothes were slightly baggier. This, however, was due to the second symptom of the serum: her metabolism had now increased to ridiculous proportions.

At first, the fact that Rapunzel's body now processed all food much faster than the regular human had manifested in dizzy spells of hypoglycaemia, negative effects which should have been controlled by the serum in her bloodstream but was initially complicated by a separate problem. Thankfully, the hypoglycaemia was rectified by simply eating to match the demands of her stomach.

Otherwise, the most important change in her biology following what could really be classed as an artificial genetic mutation was a heightened healing factor. While she was still in Arendelle, her cousin Anna had compared this ability to that of 'Wolverine', although Rapunzel did not fully understand how this related to her condition. Regardless, the healing factor had proven itself an asset during what remained of her holiday in the north. In fact, it had repaired all the damage dealt to her from accidentally cutting her palm to being stabbed to being thrown through a window by a twelve-foot-tall monster.

All in all, she had had a surreal year.

And now she was home again; in the renovated tower of a colonial fort outside of Corona. After all of the excitement, the days now plodded with the enthusiasm of a turtle trying to complete its tax returns. She had been back one month, and in all that time she had only left the tower twice. Once was to try her hand at driving with her nanny (a failure her guardian never refrained from reminding her about) and the other occasion was to see her mother in hospital after an appendectomy. As she realised at that moment, mundanely picking through her wardrobe for clothes she hadn't worn recently, Rapunzel had seen either of her parents about three times since her return.

One of those times was on the night of her return, when James and Elizabeth Engel had taken her to a fancy new restaurant near the boardwalk to hear all about her trip (including the kidnapping, but with the omission of the experimental recovery technique). A fortnight later, Rapunzel had gone to the hospital on the aforementioned visit. And finally, her father had dropped by the tower to make sure her new exercise equipment was delivered and installed properly. That was it.

Rapunzel didn't resent the absence of her parents that much, mind. She knew that their jobs were demanding and important, so she naturally had to take a backseat to their priorities. Besides, Rapunzel was more or less accustomed to the loneliness by now.

James Engel was, in all respects, a self-made man. Whenever she had seen her grandfather, Rapunzel was always treated to the story of how James had taken a paper route as soon as he was old enough; then had started buying shares in a few companies when he had the money available. Although the list was ever changing, the ones which stood out in Grandpa Engel's memory were the Noble Corporation, Westerguard Industries, and the Arcadian Building Association. In time, and with 'shrewd trading', James Engel collected enough money to found Sunbeam Media; a company which itself started with printing daily newspapers and then jumped across onto the internet when the time was right. His endeavours had been a success, and he was now wealthy enough to own a number of comfortable properties across the country. None of them, however, were used often seeing as his passion was the survival of his company.

Elizabeth Engel, on the other hand, come from relatively old money and was locally famous for organising numerous charitable causes which could whisk her off to anywhere on the planet with short notice. She had first met James while he was reporting on her work in Burundi, and for a time afterwards her stories would be published in the Sunbeam Standard before any other journal or paper. Courtship between the two had been difficult, given the demands of their occupations, but they were eventually married with Rapunzel being born nearly a decade afterwards.

With this background in mind, the care of an infant had been a serious task until it was decided that a nanny would be hired to care for Rapunzel most of the time. It was an unconventional set-up, but it worked for the most part. The only criticism Rapunzel could make, which she never said aloud, was that she felt as if she hardly knew her parents on a personal level. Indeed, the brief meetings since she had come home only drove this point home harder.

But instead of dwelling into bitterness on this matter, Rapunzel indulged herself in the limited freedom this gave her to pursue her interests. Namely: art and gymnastics.

The observer of Rapunzel's skills may have remarked on the fact that she qualified as a renaissance woman; she had achieved high grades in all her tutored subjects, she spoke German fluently, and was well versed in the modern political situation due to her father's work. But, if asked, Rapunzel would say her greatest interest was in all manners of art. Be it painting, singing, acting or dancing; she had set her sights on mastering the techniques her isolation gave the time to research. And master them she did.

A visitor needed only glance around her home to realise just how single-minded Rapunzel could be in her pursuits. For instance; there was not a single wall in the tower which was not covered in acrylic paint. The project had taken Rapunzel years, and her progress could be seen not only in production, but also in skill. As a rule, Rapunzel never painted over one of her works (unless she was adding necessary details) and so it was possible to trace her offers to the world of art from the childish handprints in a corner by the stairs to the bizarre cubist portrait of her nanny in the bathroom to the chronically evolving impression of the night sky on the ceiling. Her home was her museum.

As her nanny often commented, it was fortunate that the tower only had three rooms to live in. Otherwise Rapunzel may have spent her entire life painting. Not that she could see an issue in this life. So that was the decoration of her living room, her bathroom and her bedroom.

To fill in the rest of the time, Rapunzel had entertained herself by practicing the guitar and stitching together a large percentage of her own clothes. Cooking had also been an interest of hers, which her nanny had indulged from the moment Rapunzel could reach the work surfaces. And reading, well, she read quite a lot. True, there were probably only three books in the building, but Rapunzel had access to all the short stories her father had ever published in his newspaper from her computer. By her own admittance, she did not know classic literature beyond what her tutors prescribed. Shakespeare, of course, she had read (and put on many one-hander productions of the comedies), but her other books were a cookbook and Grey's Anatomy.

Now, completely awake and alert, she looked at her digital clock on the cabinet next to her bed and saw it was seven in the morning. She went to bed at two in the morning after hours on the treadmill.

She went off to start her usual morning routine. The young woman hurried into the towers lounge. It was the main room of the tower which was equipped with a kitchen, a living room area with a couch and an armchair, a TV, radio and an easel with a blank canvas on it. Along one wall was an array of exercise equipment including a treadmill and an exercise bike. Both were relatively new, only bought just after her return from Arendelle after the encounter with...no, no, no. Don't go to there again. Rapunzel walked towards the kitchens fridge and opened it, pulling out a protein shake for breakfast. When she sat down at her kitchen table she tipped back her head and drank the entire bottle quickly. With breakfast done she started on the rest of her morning routine. She began by turning on the TV which was showing the news.

"And in a surprise the body of Raniero Fosco was found this morning in a back alley. The wanted mafia boss, who vanished last week, was apparently killed with several knife wounds in the back."

"What are the odds?" asked Big Nose.

There were a few people in the Snuggly Duckling. It was a fairly low end bar with a scratched up wooden floor and walls covered with an odd collection of trinkets including horns, pictures of old hunters and, for some reason, a large tree trunk in the corner. Eugene was lazily serving a drink to Big Nose, one of the out of work thugs who frequented the bar.

"What do you mean?" Eugene asked him, doing his best to keep up his cover.

"Fosco was a Made Man," Big Nose explained. "Where the Hell has you been living?"

"Downstairs," Eugene deadpanned.

"As I was saying, he was a Made Man. You're not allowed to kill a Made Man or you die."

"Haven't a million bosses been killed lately?" asked Eugene, still keeping up his guise of Eugene the young bartender.

"Yeah," said Hooke, at the other end of the bar. "I heard a rumour that this new boss 'Mother' is doing it."

"What kinda man calls himself Mother?" asked Big Nose, and another of the thugs at the bar, a Mime of all people, shook his head dramatically.

"Word is Mother's a woman," Hooke told him.

"Ah a woman," Big Nose said and, at once, everyone in the bar groaned at the hopeless romantic.

...

"I don't see why you couldn't just put on one of your own one hand shows again."

"I know but I just wanted to see it on stage."

"After that silly stunt you pulled in Arendelle I can't imagine why you want to go outside again."

Rapunzel made sure to look away from her nanny as she rolled her eyes. Gothel was a woman a little taller than Rapunzel with curly black hair and an age which was hard to guess. The two of them were walking down a street in Corona. While there was still a chill in the air it was a bit warmer than it had been for a while so Rapunzel and her nanny, Gothel, had taken the opportunity to go the theatre to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was starting at one in the afternoon and they had about half an hour until it started.

"Well I just want to get out more. You know, show the world I'm not afraid and nothing can stop me."

"Still so naive my little flour," Gothel said gently as they continued walking.

"Rapunzel?"

That voice. I know that voice.

She froze at the sound but she slowly managed to turn around and saw, to her surprise, Eugene Fritzherbert.

'"Eugene," she said happily and hurried towards him ending with a small hug. "It's been ages."

"Yeah it has," he said sheepishly.

"Rapunzel what have I told you about talking to strangers?"

Rapunzel physically flinched and turned around to see a disapproving Gothel striding towards her.

"He's not a stranger," she quickly told her.

"Yeah I'm not a stranger."

"He'safriendImetinArendelle," Rapunzel explained at a million miles a second.

"And look how that turned out," Gothel told Rapunzel before quickly grabbing the girl by the wrist and dragging her along behind her.

"Don't forget to call me Eugene!" Rapunzel shouted.

"I won't forget!" he shouted back at her.

A moment later Eugene realised what had happened and then he jumped in the whooping. Then he walked away quickly, avoiding the curious stares from other pedestrians.

Right, he thought to himself, back to lunch break.

AN: Well that was the end of the first chapter. For the record I didn't write most of this chapter. My work started at the scene in the Snuggly Duckling.

I'll try to update as quickly as I can but it may take a while due to exams.