Crowns of the Kingdom

Chapter 4: Fickle Memories

"Mickey Mouse, you are surely the slyest individual ever to garner a reputation as America's Nice Guy."

"What do you mean, Minnie?" Mickey asked as the Fab Five strode up Main Street toward Central Plaza.

"You know what I mean," she said in a tone that was half chiding, half admiring, half amused, half perplexed, and mostly sweet. "You weren't entirely honest with Maleficent in there."

Mickey slightly smiled. "Well, I didn't exactly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…but are you gonna tell me she deserves it?"

"Nope!" Minnie tittered. "She was hiding things from you, too—I could tell."

"Bingo," Mickey agreed. "If I were a gambling mouse, I'd give pretty long odds against her knowing as little about this 'Inpotentia' as she claimed. For starters, she already had a name for it!"

"And a corny one at that," Donald offered. "Who does she think she's kidding? There has to be more to her plan than just trying to spite everyone."

"That's my hunch," said Mickey. "Before we jump into looking for the crowns, I intend to ask a certain party a few questions."

When they arrived back at Central Plaza, however, they found it nearly deserted. For a horrifying instant, they thought that the rest of their friends had somehow been banished to semi-existence, but no—Pinocchio and Brer Rabbit were sitting quite calmly on a bench, playing cards for a stake of ride coupons. Pinocchio was losing very badly, because a) he was young and inexperienced, and b) Brer Rabbit kept cheating quite flagrantly, and every time the wooden boy was tempted to act in kind, Jiminy Cricket would gently lecture him into pursuing a more honest strategy.

"Hey, fellas," Mickey called to them.

"Welcome back, Mickey," Jiminy responded with a token tip of his thimble-sized top hat. "Did you find out what you needed to know?"

"Uh…more or less," Mickey replied distractedly. "Jiminy, where did everyone go?"

"Oh, there's nothing to worry about. We didn't know what to do, so it was decided by general consensus that everyone should take up a post at their own attraction until we had a plan. Just to have a familiar routine to fall back on, you see."

"Makes sense," Mickey agreed. "And that's where they all are now?"

"Sho' nuff they are," Brer Rabbit confirmed. "But Brer Puppet and Brer Cricket and me, our rides wasn't built up fer roundabouts thirty years since 1955, so's we ain't got no place to go 'cept right here. So here we is!"

"Uh…glad to hear it?" Mickey half-guessed as an appropriate response to the rabbit's heavily accented statement.

Donald leaned close. "And you thought I was hard to understand," he whispered. Mickey nudged him back rather indelicately.

"Do you need them all back here?" Jiminy asked.

"No, that's all right," said Mickey. "If they're all staying calm and keeping busy, it'll do for now." He beckoned to the rest of the Five. "C'mon, gang. We'll split up to spread the word about what's going on."

"What is going on, Mickey?" asked Pinocchio. "What did Maleficent do to everyone?"

"She trapped them in a place we can't reach directly," Mickey explained with a meaningful glance at Minnie, who, to his satisfaction, drew the others close and began whispering to them. "But they're all together, and they know we're working on freeing them."

"We are?" the marionette blinked.

"We will be soon," Mickey assured him. "And then I'll let you know what you can do to help." Knowing Pinocchio's childish propensity for dragging out a conversation, he hurried over the Castle drawbridge into Fantasyland, the others close behind him.

It was a splash of cold water all over again. Knowing intellectually that the park's signature land had reverted to its original state did not dispel the gut expectation developed over twenty-odd years of seeing the remodeled courtyard, day after day. What had been normal decades ago was now the anomaly.

All the same, there was something blissfully nostalgic about being in the old Fantasyland, with the characters cavorting freely in front of their rides, more enticing than any bellowing carnival hawk. If there had been any guests in that time-displaced scene, they would have been instantly enchanted. Snow White and her Prince danced blissfully to cheerful music provided by the Dwarves, while Peter Pan demonstrated aerial acrobatics to the clumsily hovering Darling children. The Fab Five split up as they went along, to bring the news of their new quest to the characters—as much of the news, at any rate, as they could probably handle. Mickey's goal, however, was a bit further in, where eighteen riotously colored giant teacups spun to the strains of a teapot orchestra.

In the absence of guests, Alice and her entourage had the Mad Tea Party all to themselves, and they were making the most of it. Most of the characters occupied cups in groups of two or three…but the one Mickey had come to see was sprawled on a velvet plush high-backed throne, watching over the tableau with great interest.

"I need a word with you, Your Majesty," he said without preamble.

Frantically, her eyes locked on the whirling cups, the Queen of Hearts shushed him.

Mickey frowned. He wasn't sure he had ever been shushed before. Not seriously, anyway.

"A-hem!" he said rather sharply.

"Not now, Mouse!" the Queen barked. "Can't you see I'm trying to judge a race here?"

Mickey let his gaze slide over to the teacup platform. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary about the ride. (The passengers were a different story.) "Race?" he repeated with a puzzled head scratch.

"The Mad Tea Party race, of course!" the Queen bellowed, waving her arms exorbitantly. "Now pipe down! You'll make me lose my concentration!"

There wasn't much Mickey could say in response to that, so he waited until the ride cycle ended and the spinning platforms coasted to a halt. The Queen sat up straighter and clapped broadly.

"Wonderful, wonderful!" she cooed. "Everyone take your places for the third heat!" Immediately, the riders leaped to their feet and scrambled around the platform, eventually settling in different teacups, like some kind of exponentially more complicated Chinese fire drill.

Mickey sidled alongside the beaming monarch. "So," he said conversationally, "how can you tell who won?"

"A bit slow today, aren't we, Mickey?" she smirked. "It's a race, isn't it? The winner is the one who finishes first!"

Mickey tried to apply this concept to the Mad Tea Party, and failed. Well, that was Wonderland logic for you. "Now, why didn't I think of that?" he muttered. "Anyway, Your Majesty, if you can hold off on the, uh, third heat for a moment, I've got a few questions for you."

"Well, all right," she said after hardly any hesitation at all. "Because it's you asking, Mickey."

He breathed hugely. "Be honest—did you have any knowledge of Maleficent's scheme?"

The Queen didn't respond right away, perhaps because she was cleaning her ear out with a pudgy finger. "Could you repeat that?" she said carelessly. "I don't think I heard you properly."

Mickey raised his voice slightly. "I said, did you know Maleficent was going to pull something today?"

Suddenly, he was seeing stars as the Queen of Hearts brought her heart-shaped scepter down on his head. "Make sense, man!" she rather ironically admonished him. "You're using an adjective as a proper noun! That's permitted only on the third Thursday of odd-numbered months!"

"What in the world are you talking about?" Mickey grimaced, rubbing his head and speculating idly how to tell the difference between the kind of nonsense that a Wonderlander would actually say, and the kind that a person might erroneously hear after being concussed by a heart-shaped scepter.

"We could ask you the very same question," the Queen said haughtily. She was referring to herself in the plural, her last resort of hauteur.

"Come on, Your Majesty!" Mickey persisted. "Quit playing dumb! You know perfectly well who I'm talking about! Maleficent! Tall, dark, horns, creepy theme music?" He finished up with a flailing outburst worthy of Donald. "The Wicked Fairy who just sent this whole park and everyone in it back in time FIFTY YEARS!"

The Queen of Hearts stroked her chin, searching the air, completely unruffled by Mickey's explosion. "Doesn't ring any bellbirds, I'm afraid. Besides, if this really were 1905, we wouldn't have the electricity to run our attraction here, now, would we?" She gestured primly to the Mad Tea Party platform with her scepter. "It seems to us, my dear mouse, that you must have dreamed it all. Would you like some tarts to steady your nerves? We baked them ourselves." She offered him a plate of heart-shaped miniature pies, each with the legend "Eat Me" picked out in red icing.

"Don't mind if I do," said Mickey, reached for one of the pastries. But he caught himself. "No, wait! What do you mean, 1905? 1955 is where we were sent back to, not from! Don't you remember this morning? We were just getting ready to kick off the 50th Anniversary Celebration! And it was no dream!"

"50th Anniversary!" the Queen blew. "'Tis said indeed that time flies, but surely not as fast as all that!" She leaned close and whispered, "Actually, to be perfectly frank, I'll be surprised if this enterprise lasts one year, let alone fifty."

"You really don't remember," Mickey said, staring at her in shock. Maleficent's mocking words, spoken with Esmeralda's mouth, came back to him: …memory would have regressed to fit and none of you would have noticed that anything was wrong. It would be business as usual… Somehow, the Queen of Hearts' mind had backtracked to match the state of the park. As far as she knew, it really was 1955. Disneyland was less than a year old, and it was…business as usual. "You've forgotten that anything's wrong!"

The Queen scowled and clicked her tongue. "You're not playing with a full deck, are you, dear?" she muttered.

"Oh, now, that's too much!" Mickey retorted. "Your Majesty, you're coming with me!" And with that, he seized her by her fleshy arm and hauled her bodily off her throne. Without so much as a backwards glance, he headed straight for Sleeping Beauty's Castle at such a pace that his surprised passenger had to trot to keep up.

"Oh, my," said Alice as she watched the receding figures. "What do you supposed has gotten into him?"

"Bad tea, I should think," the Mad Hatter conjectured blithely.

Fortunately for Mickey, the Queen was more startled than indignant at being so unceremoniously dragged away from the Mad Tea Party, and the most aggressive thing she said during the trek was "Well, I never!"

"I'm going to show you something," said Mickey, "that will prove I know what I'm talking about."

His intent was to show her the tantalizing fragment of the Mouseketeer Crown that still adorned its Castle turret. But as they passed beneath the Castle itself, the Queen's attitude abruptly changed. No longer passively allowing herself to be pulled along, she stopped short, forcing Mickey to stop as well, and clutched both hands to her face.

"Ace of Spades!" she exclaimed. "I remember!"

She hurried out onto the drawbridge and stared up at the turret. "Of course! The crowns! Maleficent! How could I have forgotten? Mickey!"

Mickey approached her, relieved that his plan to make her recover her memory had worked (if not quite in the way he was expecting) and slightly amused at such fluster coming from a person who was normally either regally calm or imperially furious. "Are those 'bellbirds' ringing yet, Your Majesty?" he grinned.

"I can't imagine what happened back there!" was the reply. "It's like my mind was back in 1955!"

"As it happens, that's what Maleficent was hoping for," Mickey informed her. "That all of us would forget we had ever seen the 21st century, accept this situation as normal, and go on forever, never even realizing what we had lost. It didn't work because she got caught in her own trap and couldn't complete the spell. That's why there's still a piece of crown up there. It's actually a piece of the year 2005.

"So to repeat my question from earlier—how much of what I just told you did you know already?"

"What are you implying?" asked the Queen, still too shaken to be properly suspicious.

"You villains occasionally team up to make our lives difficult. Was this—" he jerked his thumb up at the Castle, "—a joint project?"

"Good heavens!" the Queen of Hearts said loftily, but with an impishness of tone that belied the threatening words that followed. "You are fortunate in your identity, Mr. Mouse. Anyone else's head would roll for making such a disgraceful accusation!" She sobered. "I may come down on the side of the devils officially, but ultimately my loyalty is with Walt. I would never be part of any plot to damage his legacy! And before you even need ask, if I heard so much as a rumor of any scheming to that effect, I would come straight to you!"

She seemed sincere enough. Mickey found himself trusting her—just this once. Before he could reply to her impassioned speech, however, there was shouting from inside Fantasyland. Someone was calling his name.

It was Minnie and Donald. "Mickey, we've got big problems!" his girlfriend squealed.

"Huge problems!" Donald clarified, spreading his arms in demonstration.

"Am I allowed to guess?" Mickey deadpanned. At their quizzical nods, he went on. "You tried to tell everyone what we found out, and no one knew what you were talking about?"

"Exactly!" Donald confirmed. Just then, the quick-tempered bird noticed the Queen of Hearts. "Hey, what's she doing here?" Her fuse no longer than his, the two of them began squaring off for a row.

"It's okay, Donald; she's on our side…this time," Mickey said hurriedly. The Queen nodded proudly. "I don't know what's making everyone forget about 2005, but coming back here, in front of the Castle, made the Queen remember. I bet it'll work the same for everyone else."

"Should we go get them?" Minnie asked.

"Actually, let them be for now," Mickey said after a moment's thought. "They're all keeping busy, and they're happier not remembering. If we need anyone's help, we can worry about it then. But it would take too long to gather everyone at once, and time's a-wasting!"

He stuck two fingers in his mouth and made a short, sharp, brain-rattling whistle. Within seconds, Pluto came bounding up from wherever in Fantasyland he had been. Goofy wasn't far behind—after all, he was also a dog.

"Fellas," Mickey said when all the Fab Five were gathered, "we're going crown hunting!"

"Splendid!" said the Queen of Hearts. "Perhaps we can be of assistance! Is it any crowns in particular you're hunting?"

"Uh, yeah," said Mickey. "The crowns that go up there." He thumbed at the Castle turrets. "It's a long story—but the short version of it is that if we can find all five crowns, everything will go back to normal."

"You certainly have your work cut out for you," the blustering monarch said. "Therefore, it is our royal decree that we shall bestow upon you a—a good luck charm! Take this, with our royal blessing."

And with that, she doffed her own crown and offered it to Mickey with both hands.

"A good luck charm?" he repeated dubiously, eyeing the simple spiked gold circlet.

"A memory token, then," the Queen said. "To guard against the ever-present risk of you forgetting your sacred task. Should the Wicked Fairy's wicked spell begin to take hold of your minds, the sight of this, our royal crown, shall remind you of the crowns you seek."

"Gosh," Mickey gulped. "Thank you, Your Majesty." Gingerly, he accepted the crown. His hands dwarfed it—the Queen's head, which it was made to fit, was rather pointed. "But will you be all right without it?"

"Never you mind," she said airily. "We have instructed the King to give us a new one for our unbirthday. It's coming up, you know.

"And now, we return to our post to await the success of the brave heroes. Ta-ta!" Prancing like a girl half her size, she sauntered back underneath the Castle and was soon lost to sight.

"Well!" said Minnie, arms akimbo. "I certainly never would have expected a gesture like that from her!"

"More than a gesture, I think," Mickey responded, turning the Queen's crown this way and that, feeling its weight in his hands. "She has a point—our memories might regress, too. Having this could help."

"Gawrsh, Mickey!" Goofy wailed. "I hope you're right! I don't wanna forget!"

Donald grimaced. "Better have a backup plan, just in case," he said.

"Right," Mickey agreed, stashing the crown in his pocket. He called out to Central Plaza, where Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, and Brer Rabbit were still involved in their lopsided card games, too engrossed to have noticed the goings-on with the Queen of Hearts. "Jiminy! Jiminy Cricket!"

Jiminy moved quickly, springing grasshopper-style. In very short order, he stood before the Fab Five, raising his hat. "At your service, Mickey!" he said, the soul of sprightly politeness.

"I have a special mission for you, Jiminy. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it might make all the difference in restoring Disneyland to the 21st century."

"Whatever it is, I won't fail you," Jiminy promised. It was not bravado on his part, but trust in Mickey's judgment.

"Great to hear it, pal. We need you to…remember. Everyone who went into Fantasyland lost their memories of all the time since 1955. Maybe it was pretending that nothing was wrong that did it; we don't know. Just in case it happens to the five of us too, please be our backup memory. No matter what happens, remember 2005. Remember everything that this family has accomplished in fifty years."

"You can count on me, Mickey Mouse," Jiminy said with a smart salute. "Is there any—"

He was interrupted by a spate of shouting from Central Plaza. "Cheater!" Brer Rabbit was hollering, standing up on the bench and stretching as tall as he could. "Cheater! Cheater! There's a cheater right here!" he announced to all directions in turn, pointing at the cringing Pinocchio with one hand and amplifying his voice with the other. "Cheater! Cheater! Cheeeeaaaaateeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!"

Jiminy sighed. "I have to take care of this, Mickey."

"No problem, Jiminy," said Mickey. "We need to get started on our quest."

Hitching up his trousers, Jiminy catapulted back over to the bench and began chastising his young ward. "Now, Pinoke, what have I told you about cheating when you play cards?"

"But he started it!" Pinocchio complained over the rabbit's howls. ("Cheater! Cheater! Pinocchio's a cheater!")

"If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: two wrongs don't make a right."

"Well, gang," said Mickey. "What are we standing around here for? We've got crowns to find!"

To Be Continued…