Because you guys asked :)

Two

Mickey and Leon sat together at Merlin's kitchen table, hunched over the stained notebook and cradling cups of coffee. To their dismay, this house was filled with early risers. If someone was still asleep by seven, they were presumed to have fallen into a coma or died. Belle had stared at the notebook in horror for a few minutes before Mickey and Leon covered it with their hands.

"If you can make sense of that handwriting," she said, gesturing to the table with the same hand that held her teacup. "You could help me translate some of Merlin's old manuscripts."

She said this very sweetly, hinting that maybe they should find something more productive to do with their time besides bum around the kitchen. Leon sighed, pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, and Belle took her cue to leave.

"This is the list of supplies?" Leon asked, running a finger down the page.

"Just a skeleton," Mickey admitted. "All of this will probably get us through the front door. The problem is we need to get back out, you see."

They sat back and pondered this, making the kind of faces one would expect a person to make while pondering.

"We're going to need munny," Leon said. "Lots and lots of munny."

"Right. How much do you have?"

Silence. Mickey nodded.

"Same here," he said. "That brings our grand total to…"

Mickey drew a large circle in the middle of the paper. He and Leon spent a moment contemplating the goose egg and all things gold and shiny, mostly the noticeable lack thereof on the table. Mickey hemmed and rubbed his chin.

"We," he said, holding up a finger. "Are going to have to find ourselves a benefactor."

Munny really does grow on trees. Or accumulates in honey pots. Or manifests instead of blood when sharp, heavy objects are driven into a heartless creature. You'd think things would be better this way, but it's not. You have to break a lot of pots to find about fifty cents worth of it. Accumulating enough of it to be considered rich is an extremely tedious process that involves a lot of time and the ability to run around for hours without doing things like eating or sleeping. Many have died trying to seek their fortune from ripe-looking garbage cans and couch cushions.

It is by no means any excuse for not going out and getting a job or making wise investments.

Just ask Scrooge McDuck.

"You want me to lend you munny?" Scrooge said in the tone of voice usually only reserved for those who have just been asked to amputate their own leg.

"Uh-huh," Mickey said. "How's about it? A favor for an old friend?"

"Depends on how good of a friend," Scrooge grunted. He said the word good so that it sounded more like gooot.

Leon and Mickey were currently sharing one side of a round table out on the patio of Scrooge McDuck's mansion. The feathered miser owned a respectable amount of land which he kept bordered with high, barbed wire fences and imported exotic trees with wide, palm leaves and security cameras nestled in with the fruit. The guests had been served tea and coffee, with fat cakes smeared with sugared icing and heaped with juicy, plump berries. The two men had a good view of the sun-drenched garden and the sparkling surface of the backyard pool. They could not see that the pool had been built to look like the dollar sign.

Scrooge polished off the last few crumbs of his cake before asking. "How much are we talking about?" (He said the word about more like aboot.)

Mickey flipped to a certain page in his notebook and handed it to Scrooge, who adjusted his spectacles as he looked down the length of his beak at the digits inscribed on the paper.

"WHAT?" Scrooge pushed the notebook away in horror like it was about to spring to life and gnaw his eyes out. "Why don't you just pluck all my feathers off and use them for pillow stuffing! Rip of my beak and sell it as a car ornament! Cut out my lungs and use them in…"

Leon took the time to question why he and the King had gone to someone who used to swim in his money.

"What if I told you I could pay you back?" Mickey interrupted as Scrooge got all the way down to his small intestines. "With interest?"

Scrooge sighed, gesturing helplessly with his hands.

"Boys, you're asking the wrong duck. My business is in shambles, but I've got more than enough stored away for me self. No one will ever say that Scrooge McDuck left his boys without two pieces of munny to rub together. Not after the first sea monster ate my ice cream. No, no, no, I've got their college funds all set up andmy funeral is already paid for. Picked out the coffin me-self and everything, got such a good discount on it, too. Snow goes on the ground and suddenly prices drop like a..."

(He pronounced the word ground like it was grooond when he spoke.)

"Say, what did happen to your ice cream parlor again?" Mickey interrupted. "That was some swell dessert you were selling."

Scrooge slapped his palm down on the table, growing very red under his feathers.

"Oh, of course, you weren't here to see it happen!" he said. "While you were tripsying around being king of the universe, my poor, honest little establishment was left to rot when everyone started going to Pete's Ice Cream Emporium instead. Do you know that they use chemicals in their ice cream, to bring out the flavor, and it's the exact same material that they use to make wax candles smell not like wax and like peaches and fresh laundry instead! That's one of their ice cream flavors, in fact, Freshly Laundered. People buy it just so they can tell their friends how disgusting it is, I tell you..."

Scrooge continued on, gesticulating wildly to the strapping young duck who was currently cleaning his pool. Mickey and Leon exchanged a meaningful look.

"Well, Mr. McDuck, I'm sorry we wasted so much of your time," Mickey said, standing up and reaching out to shake Scrooge's hand.

"Mm-hmn," Scrooge said, eyeing him suspiciously. "Sorry I couldn't have been more help, Your Majesty."

"We appreciate it," Leon continued. "Thank you for the tea."

"You're very welcome," Scrooge replied. "You could always start taxing us, you know, and take our hard-earned munny that way."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it," Mickey added hastily as they headed for the door. "Speaking of tea, we're going to have to slip some drugs to Pete's security team at this rate because that's the only way we're going to get out of there alive."

"Why," Scrooge said suddenly. "Would you ever want to do that?"

Mickey turned around.

"What's that?" the King asked.

"That," Scrooge said.

"What?"

"What you just said," Scrooge said.

"What did we just said?" Mickey asked.

"Yes."

"I didn't say anything," Mickey turned to Leon. "Did I say something?"

"I don't know," Leon replied.

"Oh, don't you do this to me," Scrooge picked up his cane and jabbed it in Mickey's direction. "You said something and it was something about Pete."

Mickey looked at Leon, who silently returned the stare.

"Oh, nothin'," Mickey said, waving his hand. "Don't you worry about it, we're just planning on robbing Pete's casino and embarrassing him in front of the entire League of Villains and we don't want you to dirty your feathers by getting too involved."

"We could start whacking flower pots," Leon suggested.

Scrooge threw down his napkin. "LAUNCHPA-AD!

The younger duck who had been cleaning the pool in his swim shorts immediately straightened and snapped into a salute. "Sir!"

"Get your shirt on and fetch me my bank statements!"

"It's really swell of you guys to stop buy," Launchpad, Scrooge McDuck's personal pilot and pool-chlorinator chatted conversationally as he unlocked the great, steel gates to the metal airplane hanger that was situated somewhere north of the mansion. "Mr. McD doesn't get too many visitors nowadays. To tell you the truth, it gets a little boring up here. The quiet's enough to make you go bouncing off the walls, heheh."

The door opened, letting Mickey and Leon step in with the afternoon light. The hanger was mostly empty, with one, single plane sitting up front. Behind it was an extraordinary amount of empty space, encased by the canvas pulled over the metal frame of the ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they walked inside.

"So, whaddyou think of the place?" Launchpad asked, sniffing as he raised a feathered finger to scratch his beak.

Mickey started walking across the concrete floor while Leon stood beneath the wing of the plane. He gave a nod of his head up towards it. "This yours?"

"Yep," Launchpad said, proudly. "Isn't she a beauty? I've crashed her fifty six times and she's still managed to stay together. Well, with some repairs, at least. She had six sisters, too, but we had to sell 'em, s'why there's so much empty space in here. What do you boys think of it?"

Mickey started to jump up and down on the floor, testing it with his weight.

"I think the concrete's pretty sturdy," Leon said, wryly.

"Just wait until you fall through it one day," Mickey replied, looking up. "I suppose we'll take it, if he's sure he won't mind us setting up camp here."

"Sure," Lanchpad shrugged, holding out a white envelope, which Leon took and opened, peering at the pieces of paper stuffed within. "So, if you don't mind my askin', what are you boys gonna do with your first paycheck?"

"We're going to Disneyland," Mickey announced.

The neon lights inside of the bar drenched everything in warm shades of red and yellow. It highlighted the crisp edges of people's glasses and deepened the shadows in the corners of the walls and underneath the tables. The spotlights shone upon the stage which ran through the area where the patrons were sitting. A man sat in the back, wearing a leather jacket and tight jeans, his brown hair falling into his face. He was reclined into one of the plush booths, his feet propped up on the seat of one of the empty chairs around the table. In one hand he nursed a cold bottle of beer and studied the words on the label rather than look at the women and men dancing on stage.

Somewhere out of the crowd, Mickey emerged, carrying his own drink as he approached Leon's lonely table.

"So, which one is she again?" Leon asked.

Mickey used the straw to stir the cold contents in his glass. "You see the one in the purple dress? She looks kind of Greek?"

"The one singing by the pole?"

"Yep," Mickey said. "That's her."

Leon picked up the program flyer sitting on the table and scanned the photographs there, matching them up to names. "Megara?"

The woman who was singing had a sharp face. She also had long, thick brown hair that fell all the way to her small waist. To Leon, she looked too skinny to be healthy, as if she drank too much vitamin water and could use a couple of milkshakes, but she sang as if she could murder someone with the weight of her deep, velvet voice.

"She got herself in debt chasing after some fellow who didn't have the same level of commitment. It was one of Pete's banks that she took the loan out of."

The woman put her hand on the pole and bent over backwards in a way that Leon had not considered to be physically possible.

"She's working for Pete to pay it off?" he asked.

"Both here at this joint and at the casino," Mickey said. "She knows her way around the place. She knows a lot of the people who work there, too, the caterers, the blackjack dealers, a couple of security guards…."

"What makes you think she's going to talk to us?" Leon asked.

"Because I just put fifty dollars into her garter and told her to go and give you a lapdance," Mickey said, taking a long slip from his raspberry slushie. "Bye."

Leon's reaction time was slow and by the time he looked, Mickey was gone and there was a woman making her way across the floor. If she had been a bullet fired from a gun, her path could not have been straighter. Her sandals were laced all the way up to her knees. Somehow, between the stage and his table, she had obtained a cigarette. She stood before him, hip jutted out and arm crossed over her waist, fingers resting on her elbow as she held the cigarette up to her face with two fingers. Smoke curled toward the ceiling like the soft ringlets framing her face.

"So, what'll it be?" she asked, her voice dry.

Leon did not say anything. She took the cigarette and snuffed it out on the ashtray in the middle of the table. She looked at him, her large, dark eyes looking him directly in the face, with one eyebrow cocked high and sarcastic into her brow.

Leon had stopped moving, remaining as still as a cat while this was happening. The warning bells inside of his head were banging like he had his own personal hunchback up there hammering away at them. He was debating whether or not to continue to look bored and take another drink from the bottle or possibly get up and walk away just as the woman's hand gave a final twist to the cigarette.

"You'd think you had body odor or something, the way that you're sitting out here all by yourself."

She teleported. That was the only way he could put it.

One moment, she was standing.

The next, she was straddling his lap, as casually as if she were hopping up onto a bar stool.

I'll have a slice of brain-dead male brunette on the rocks.

"Haven't I seen you somewhere?" she asked, taking her hands and raking them through his brown hair, which had grown out quite a bit since the King had found him, enough to be properly raked by sharp, bony fingers. "Weren't you out doing time in the middle of the city?"

"I got out," Leon said, as she brought her face close to his, enough so that he could feel her hot breath on the back of his neck. "Good behavior."

"You don't seem like a good boy to me," Megara said. She leaned in, bringing one finger up to touch the spot between his eyes and run it along the rough, twisted skin of his scar. "Huh. This looks like it hurt."

"It did," Leon said, beneath her hand.

They could have just as easily been talking about golf, or something else equally dull and uninteresting. She took the bottle from his hand and set it down on the table.

"Some people are just a magnet for trouble, aren't they."

She looked at him, dead on, for such a brief second that Leon thought he had imagined it. He did not have time to dwell on it because he found she had taken his hands and placed them right on her hips.

"All right, then, Lonely-Boy, buckle your seatbelt," she said, sounding almost bored and methodical. "Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle and enjoy the ride."

The King wanted him to do something, Leon thought, as she started to move her hips from side to side, painfully close to where all of his belts were buckled. Something very important.

"Your buddy back there sure seemed desperate to get someone over here to your lonesome little corner," she said as her hips continued to gyrate like she was cranking them with an egg beater. "Is he trying to jump start your engine or something?"

"Or something," Leon said.

Megara tossed her head from side to side, sending her thick, healthy hair sweeping over her shoulders so that he could catch a whiff of fruity shampoo.

"Strawberries," he said, almost proud.

"What was that?" Megara asked

"Nothing."

"Listen, I don't take any dirty talk from customers," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "Just because you think you can mutter with nobody hearing you."

She helped him place his hands all the proper places on her waist. He didn't have to think about it, just watch as she danced her way around him. The tails of the sash slung across her waist rippled like water. She had a stubborn curl of hair that seemed to be persistently draped over her face, which she would peak out from under when she glanced at his face.

"Would you mind if I spoke with you in private?" Leon asked, it being the first thing that popped into his head. He felt as if there was a clock, and it was ticking in his ear.

"Are you going to be just as boring?" she asked.

Leon tried to come up with a reply in time. Well, ma'am, I—something-something, smart, chauvinistic, witty comeback—something.

"Well, that's it, we're all out of quarters," she said, tidying up her hair and straightening her skirt. She put her foot on Leon's knee and used him to balance against as she tightened up the laces to her sandals.

When she was finished, she turned on her heal and gave him a lazy, half salute that turned into a wave. "See you around."

He watched her go, letting her disappear into the crowd. He felt as if he had just dropped a bowling ball onto his foot.

It was late enough to be early in the morning when the club closed. Leon waited outside, under the acidic yellow streetlamps in the parking lot by the back door as he watched performers leave and scuttle to get to their cars. He had to wait almost a whole half hour more for a certain woman to slink out into the dark parking lot.

"Oh, it's you," she said, dismissively, barely looking at him. "You know, you could at least try and act a little less like a creep."

Leon stepped out from the shadow of the doorway.

"That was a really sad song that you were singing," he observed.

When Megara spoke to him, it was like she was recording a piece of narration that she did not particularly care about at all.

"Do you come here and critique all the girls?" she drawled. "Is that how you keep yourself happy all night over there in your little booth?"

It was not, but Leon did not feel the need to vocally defend himself.

"I was sent here to contact you about a position," he explained, not very well.

"I don't do private gigs," she said, not even trying to hide the disgust that tainted the last half of the sentence. "You loose. Thanks for playing."

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. Megara stopped walking. She looked over her shoulder and wordlessly reached into the carton to pull out a long, thin roll.

"Cute lighter," she said, looking at the lion profile engraved into the silver that matched his necklace. "Didn't expect a tough guy like you to be able to accessorize."

"Thanks."

He let her smoke for a few minutes in silence, the smell of the smoke and nicotine making his nostrils flare.

"So, what's this about the King being in town?" Megara asked as she continued to indulge. "Isn't this too ratty of a nest for him to be mousing around in?"

Leon was getting the sneaking suspicion that he had fallen into a very poor film noir.

"He's got some business to attend to," Leon replied. "Wants to do some gambling in the casino."

"Oh, really," Megara scoffed. "He doesn't strike me as the gambling type."

"He doesn't seem like that, until you get to know him."

Megara shook her head and turned her back to him, taking her cigarette and gesticulating with it as she spoke.

"So the height-depraved wonder returns to beat all the bad guys and the good guys welcome him with open arms," she raved. "Whoa boy, here comes the conquering hero. You know, they say he can bite bullets and shine light out his butt."

Leon considered. "…nothing of the sort. Not that I've seen, anyway."

Megara sighed and crossed her arms, twirling the cigarette between her thumb and first finger.

"Sounds like a suicidal glory trip," she said with a disgusted shudder. "Count me out, I don't do the whole hero thing.."

Leon twirled his silver lighter between his own fingers, tossing it up and snatching it out of the air before tucking it deep into his pocket.

"I don't assume that your reason for helping us will be to spread goodwill and happy sunshine rainbows to the people of the Hallow Bastian," Leon said, turning around to watch her start to sulk away. "I think you'll do it because of the cut you'll be getting out of it."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, white card. Meg paused, looking over her shoulder as he walked up and held the card in the tips of his fingers. Meg looked at it for a second, making Leon stand there in mid-step with his card in hand. She looked at him and then snatched it away with a crack.

She looked at it. Looked at him. Looked back down at the card.

"That's seven zeroes," Leon emphasized.

She deliberately ripped open the zipper of her purse and tucked the card away inside. She took a deep breath and zipped it shut.

"Friends call me Meg," she said, sticking out her hand and giving Leon's a firm shake as she smiled. "You?"

"Leon. Leon Leonheart."

"Really?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Will you call me or I call you?"

"You'll know."

She left Leon alone with the scent of burning tobacco and one, flickering street lamp.

A small shadow stepped out from behind one of the parked cars, carrying bags of groceries and decked out in multi-colored flower leis.

"Well," Mickey said, sounding cheerful. "I think that went very well. You got her number?"

TO BE CONTINUED...