Trolls: Gladiola Trollkonge
Chapter 7: Why Trolls Should Never Go To Darwin's Office
Licene got lucky when her two apartment-mates were absent due to evening classes, which meant that Gladiola was able to roam around to keep herself busy while the human tried to work on her writing assignment for that lame WHY SHOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN ART class. Art and Alice even stopped by to hang out while Mattie was off for her metal-workshop class and Willy was, well, somewhere. Personally, after the heated conversation she and Willy had, Gladiola could care less if he came or not.
"This is by far the most revolting assignment the teacher ever gave us!" Licene groaned as she tried typing her document onto her computer, only to end up with just the assignment's title. She then mocked the teacher's high-pitched voice. "'In your own words, explain why men find nude women essential in art'. He's lucky I didn't call him a pervert!"
Gladiola, who was trying to relax on the big couch while scrapbooking, giggled at the mock exhibit. "I seriously don't see what you guys are making a fuss about. I mean, I've met Trolls covered in glitter and stark naked."
"Humans and Trolls don't exactly have the same anatomy, Glady," Alice said as she worked on a rope ladder made of lanyards, not for a project but in case of a 'genetically-modified dinosaur attack'. "Let's just say that female and male humans have contrasting organs that are essential for young reproduction and arousal that leads to the arousal."
Gladiola briefly glanced up from her scrapbooking so that her eyes could scan those odd female chests. She never knew that such volume existed in the upper body. All the Troll and Bergen females she knew with the approximate age of her new human friends didn't even have that volume.
"Come to think of it, this could be inspiring for the paper." Art realized. "Gladiola, how do Trolls manage to copulate in order to, you know have kids? Because the human way is a little weird to explain."
Gladiola paused her scrapbooking and searched through her hair, throwing miniature objects out and onto the carpet, making all the humans blink when they saw the impossible amount of stuff she carried in her mass of hair: hairbrushes, two umbrellas, five bear traps, a case full of scissors, a frying pan, a cowbell, a framed picture, containers full of beads and threads, and about seventeen handmade scrapbooks. After she got the stuff out of her hair, Gladiola searched through her scrapbooks and picked up a cherry red covered one with a Troll silhouette cut out of pink paper and the title GLADIOLA'S KINDERGARTEN SCRAPBOOK. "Got it!"
"Ooh, I just found out a good line to start my assignment!" Licene snapped her fingers and typed on her computer. "'In my own words, I think that men find nude women essential in art because they have nothing on them to protect them from the unpredictable.' Thanks for the Troll inspiration, Glady."
"Anytime." Gladiola used her hair to swing her way to the table and opened her scrapbook. Due to the small size of the object, Art and Alice had to squint until Art decided to just take pictures of it with his phone (yeah, turns out that humans also take pictures with their 'cell phones'). "So, Art, I learned how Troll reproduction works when I was five and I scrapbooked it. Trolls create a seed with a baby in it using all the happiness and love they are ready to give the child, then they wait a week until it's ripe enough to be planted in what is called the Birth Crops Fields, and wait until the next day or so until a plant blooms out of the seed with the baby in it."
"So, it's like an agricultural baby harvest," Art said in fascination. "But how can you tell if it's a boy or a girl?"
"Female Trolls are born from flowers while boys spring up from any form of sprout."
"Funny, it reminds me of an old myth about babies being born from either a cabbage or a rose depending on the gender." Licene added in more to her assignment. "'I mean, it's quite obvious that when nude, the female bodies' natural floral fragrance arouses the artist with enough inspiration to add in more colors to his work.'"
Gladiola chuckled as she went back to the ground to collect her items and put them back in her hair while Art and Alice took pictures of her small scrapbook in order to examine it a bit more. "It's so well done...Not even once loose end or an overdose of glue. Glady, you made this scrapbook when you were only five?"
"Pretty much," Gladiola admitted as she quickly used her last item, a hairbrush, to straighten her loose ends before stuffing it in there. The princess put a finger on her forehead and felt the texture of plastic very slowly waning its way towards the tip of her eyebrows. Sighing, she picked up the scrapbook she had been working on to the page that gave her the most grief: a glittery image of her family and friends, Trolls and Bergens, giving her a bunch of toothy grins while standing by the Troll Tree. Her eyes looked at her scrapbook grandfather standing next to the scrapbook stripped gladiola, making the princess feel worse about the possibilities that she might never make it back home and fill up her people's expectations.
Out of instinct, Licene stopped working on her computer and gently picked up Gladiola in her palms. "Hey, don't worry. Everything's going to be alright," the human reassured her.
"You think?" Gladiola was now gaining some optimism. Before Licene could say anything, the front door of the apartment burst open and Mattie and Willy came in. Seeing the latter made Gladiola look away, for she was still upset about the conversation she had with him back on the top of the Hourglass building. Eventually, the Troll noticed the bandages wrapped on Mattie's wrist. "What happened to your wrist?"
"I accidentally cut myself when I saw Dårlig through the window!" Mattie grimaced in pain while Willy closed the door and quickly made sure that nobody else other than themselves were witnessing the conversation.
"Chef's acolyte was here?" Gladiola panicked. Licene still held her in one hand while the other hand saved her homework and put her computer in SLEEP mode. "They found me!"
"No, he didn't," Willy reassured her, but the Troll didn't listen to him.
"I was in my metal-workshop class and working on a new cord-less drill when I spotted the guy walking towards one of the small shopping areas in the neighborhood," Mattie explained as she walked towards the fridge and pulled out a weird brown can labeled 'root beer', making Licene grimace and Gladiola frown while listening to Mattie's story. "I slightly cut myself on the wrist to make it look like it was an accident..."
"Wait, you're telling me that you purposely cut yourself with one of those doomsday machines in the metal-workshop facility?" Art exclaimed.
"I used my Swiss Army knife, you dummy!" Mattie rolled her eyes as she sat down next to Licene on the couch. "So I cut myself and convinced my teacher that it's serious and I need to go to the infirmary and got a ride from one of the seniors in exchange for doing his laundry for the next three months."
"Good luck washing an old male's clothes." Gladiola stuck her tongue out, making Licene chuckle at her misunderstanding of the term.
"While I bandaged my wrist, he drove me on his Moped and tailed the not-so-ugly Bergen to the Segrator Alley..."
"The Segrator Alley?" Alice's eyes widened. "Dude, that's like the most unsafe alley in Charles' Village!"
"You went all the way to a village outside of town?" Gladiola asked.
"No, she refers to the neighborhood." Licene got up and pulled out one of the papers she had clipped on the fridge with cute animal magnets and unfolded it, showing to Maligna a rather geometrical map. "That's Charles' Village right here." She pointed at an area outlined with a brown line before trailing her finger a little bit more south to go to an area full of blue forms. "That's the Inner Harbor, where I found you. Unless you take the light rail or any kind of public transportation, you'd have to go through a series of streets just to get to AURA before finding your way to Charles' Village."
"And Segrator Alley is right between the barber shop and the old abandoned church," Mattie said ominously. "Local legends say that the soil just beneath the street is full of leftover corpses from battles between Native American tribes and people who got shot during the MLK riots. That's why there's a bunch of wacky fortune-tellers and pawnshop owners running their shops there, luring unsuspecting tourists."
"Or disoriented college students," Alice said. "You guys ever heard of Dick Jackson? He was a student at the neighboring community college. Guy got drunk at one of his off-campus buddies' house and he had the stupidity of taking a shortcut through Segrator Alley with his girlfriend. The alley's wanderers mugged him while others gang-raped his girlfriend. One ended up his last year at college with a ticket to a local psychiatric ward while the other ran off a bridge in her car."
Gladiola gulped and instantly hid in Licene's hair. This story was giving her even more chills than the time when she and her friends tried to scare one another with cheesy ghost stories on Halloween. Licene gently patted Gladiola for comfort.
"So my pal drops me off and I hid behind a trash can and waited for like ten or twenty minutes before Dårlig finally stepped out of this psychic ladies' shop with a brown book in his hand," Mattie said.
This got Gladiola's attention and made her sit down with her legs crossed on Licene's shoulder to think. "First a human warlock shelters the bad guys and now one of their lackeys goes all the way across town just to get a book from a psychic?" She pondered out loud. "Something's not right and yet I'm sure Chef wants to use magic from this world to do something horrible to the Bergen royalty...as well as my parents."
"Hang on," Willy put his hands out. "If Dårlig was going through the AURA campus just to get to Segrator Alley, then how come he hasn't, you know, picked up Gladiola's scent or something?"
The Troll princess grimaced at him. "Bergens aren't dogs, Willy," she said before pondering again. "But come to think of it, only Chef should be able to sniff me out. But...no..."
"Chef could sniff you out?" Art quickly got up and checked through the blinds covering the window.
"During her two exiles, Chef had to be replaced by another cook for the position of royal chef against tradition."
"Being a Bergen royal chef is a tradition?" Licene arched an eyebrow.
"Back home, we currently have this Bergen royal chef named Puddle who had to fill up Chef's role after her first banishment and now has her job permanently because of her permanent exile," the princess explained. "Once when I was little, he told me and my friend Calico that the Bergen royal chefs were like being a Bergen monarch. The duty and job gets passed on in each generation. Once a royal chef has a new child to carry on the tradition, he puts the child through severe training as the future chef once the first can no longer serve."
"Putting your kid in cooking boot camp?" Art shivered. "And people wonder why my grandpa doesn't want me to join the army!"
"His grandpa ended up in a gulag during World War II. Don't ask him," Willy warned Gladiola, who took the advice at hear while he went back to the main topic. "Wait, Chef could sniff you out or not."
"She...she could have," Gladiola said uneasily. "Puddle said that the duty of royal chef was never taken seriously until...until..." She didn't dare to say it.
"Until the Bergens found your people," Licene guessed. She picked up Gladiola in the palm of her hand and gently stroke her hair. Her gentle touch slightly calmed down the Troll.
"Puddle said that once the Bergens discovered the Trolls and they had no idea on how to contain them, the royal chef back then aided the monarch of that time to build Bergen town to surround the tree so that, no matter where they tried to go, the Trolls would be surrounded by the giant Bergens. The royal chef was also the one who managed to trap us in our tree with a giant cage, and because he did such wonderful community service, he was now the local hero, Minister of Happiness, and Guardian of the Trolls."
"I can't believe it," Alice said.
"So, in a way, aside from Trollstice being a Festival of Eating Trolls For Happiness, it was the anniversary of the chef's ego and the same applies to his family. Trolls continued to get eaten annually for so many centuries, the royal chef's lineage ended up growing a new instinct of sniffing out Trolls that were the most juicy in happiness."
"And then the Bergens could be fed the food of their dreams." Willy was disgusted.
"It's like the two sides, the chef and the people, are the dogs to the human and mortal worshippers to a god," Art said while making hand gestures. "Think about it. A dog and a mortal worshipper respectively want a treat and benediction from the human and the god. In this case, it's a double combo. The Bergens are the mortal dogs wanting a treat that while bring them benediction, and the only person who can give them that happy treat is the godly human played by Chef."
"That's an oddly good comparison," Gladiola said. She had never seen things that way. People willing to act like animals obeying one shepherd just to get one rare treat? This must have been how Chef and her ancestors treated the Bergens at every single Trollstice: goading the into submission just to get a taste of happiness. No wonder she wanted to usurp the Bergen crown. By being the royal chef, she had the people venerating her as a unique goddess who gave them a once in a year gift, but if she had been queen, she could have tricked the people into giving her anything she wanted just for the price of one Troll's life.
Honestly, did that Bergen ever pause to think that if the fed the Bergens Trolls every day, the colorful species would have been driven to extinction? Probably not.
"Maybe we should reconsider our plan," Willy said in a tone of uneasiness. "I mean, imagine if we go to the restaurant and Chef manages to sniff out Gladiola."
"We've got to try!" Gladiola stood up on Licene's shoulder. "There's a crazy Bergen and treacherous Troll out there who've got access to some sort of portal that leads them to and from my home world and that could probably give them a chance to lead a knife-wielding army of chefs straight to Bergen Town and harm the royal families!"
"A cooking apocalypse!" Alice exclaimed before saying in contempt. "Odd no one's thought about it before. At least these guys are creative."
"Relax, Willy. Gladiola can do this," Licene told Willy. "She has to anyway. What kind of princess is she to not protect her people?"
"You got it, sister." Gladiola smirked and high-fived Licene with the latter's finger.
"Uh, I hate to break the happiness here, but Willy does have a point." Art got up. "How are we supposed to sneak in Gladiola?"
"Easy." Gladiola climbed on top of Licene's head. Once she stood at the very tip of the human's head, she swung her hair, causing to grow bigger, larger, and colorful. The humans gasped in awe as the small Troll turned her mass of hair into a rainbow twister before deciding to let it go, giving Licene a very fluffy, curled hairstyle that reached past her shoulders and shone with the Troll's natural pink-and-blue hair.
"Girl, I give you an A for handmade wigs!" Mattie gave her a thumbs-up. She used the camera application of her phone to show Licene what she currently looked like.
"Nice work, Gladiola, but maybe if it weren't so pink..." Licene got cut off when the pink from Gladiola's hair morphed into a dark chocolate brown color. "OK, I so wished I had Troll hair instead of having to pay for the hairdresser."
Gladiola poked her head from underneath the mass of hair ten times her size. "The perfect camouflage."
"OK." Licene cracked her knuckles. "Here's how it's going to work."
The next day, at precisely 9am at the Inner Harbor
"In the morning, Willy, Mattie, Gladiola, and I will go to the restaurant right on opening hours. That way, we avoid causing too much attention."
They stood before Darwin's World Food and Deli Market, which looked exactly like the image they found on the website. On the website, it looked like the cheesy image of a traditional English pub with wooden walls painted with dark green paint. But now that they were there in person, they saw that the wood looked old enough for termites to have chewed on in fifty years, the paint was tacky and wearing off, the glass windows still had stains despite being clean, the white curtains inside barely matched the pub outside, and the carved letters were painted in screaming lemon paint.
"'DARWIN'S WORLD FOOD AND DELI, WHERE YOU'LL WISH YOU NEVER SHOPPED AND ATE MULTICULTURAL FOOD ANYWHERE ELSE'," Willy read the sign out loud and used a loud tone to imitate the ego reflected by the place's name.
"Now that I know we got a bunch of psychos in there and thanks to Willy's impression, I'm starting to ask myself why I even came here," Mattie said sadly.
"We'll go inside as the first customers. Gladiola will be acting as my wig while me and Willy act as Mattie's little clique."
They opened the door, which caused the small bell hanging above it to let out an annoying jingle. So far, the interior of the restaurant looked as off as its exterior. The only decent thing about its decoration was the fresh black wooden floor and the paintings of international monuments hanging on the walls.
"Welcome to Darwin's World Food and Deli Market," a glum human in his forties wearing a dull grey usher uniform spoke when they approached the front desk. He smiled a bit when he saw Mattie. "Nice for you to come again, Miss Mattie."
"'Sup, Andrew," Mattie greeted while putting her shoulders over Willy and Licene's shoulders as they tried to imitate her attitude. "These are my buds Johnny and Deppie. We decided to have a late breakfast here at my favorite place on opening hours in order to talk about our chakra problems."
"Yo," Willy said in his best I-don't-care-what-life-is-like impression. Gladiola, who was spying from underneath the dark brown and blue wig she was hiding on Licene's head, had to cover her mouth in order to avoid laughing. She had to admit: Willy was rather silly.
"Miss Chef will sure be glad to see you," Andrew said. He escorted them through the room full of wooden tables covered with tablecloths, each based on a certain country's flag, until he got them to a small booth near a corner. "I'll go fetch her along with your menus." They sat down and observed as Andrew left towards the left side of the room and vanished through a small hallway.
"OK, that there is the small corridor leading to both the bathrooms and the restricted area," Mattie said very quietly. Licene slightly lifted her dark shades in order to have a better view before putting them back on while Gladiola poked through the wig. "Chef has a tendency on having chats with her clients, so when she comes and starts talking to us, Licene excuses herself for a moment and goes to the bathroom."
"Then we strike." Licene said. The sound of a door opening was heard and they stood in position.
Chef came out, with quite a grin on her face. While the two humans who had never seen her before had to blink before hiding their shock, Gladiola made sure that she neither moved nor gasped when she saw the familiar Bergen with heather skin and mauve and stone blue hair. It was rather surprising that A, her cooking uniform in the human world looked a whole lot cleaner than it did in Bergen Town, and B, for some reason the villain did nothing to disguise her species' large ears, pudgy nose, crooked teeth, and the fact that even among humans, she didn't hide her large bare hands and feet full of sharp purple nails that could pierce through her skin. For the ex royal chef of Bergen Town, she easily violated many sanitary rules in public human places other than this tacky restaurant.
Chef didn't even hide her yellow eyes crowned with red irises, which stared at the humans as she put on a welcoming smile that would scare an old man out of his wheelchair. "How nice to see one of my most frequent and preferred customers come over on opening hours," Chef said as she waved a hand at Mattie while the other held three menus. "Mattie, how've you been?"
"Eh, the usual. Making jewelry out of metal, going to Edgar Allen Poe's grave to worship him, and remind myself that I still owe my mother an apology for seeing that she tried to make me the best morbid person in the universe." Mattie shrugged. "And when I woke up this morning, I told myself I'd drag my two buds Johnny and Deppie here with me to my favorite restaurant and meet my favorite chef in the entire world."
"Hi," Licene said.
"Mattie says you're like a source of inspiration for her," Willy added.
Chef chuckled, flattered that she was getting complimented while Gladiola gagged from her hiding spot. "It's so nice to see people respecting you for your work," she said with a smile. She handed them their menus until she paused right when she was about to give Licene her menu. Gladiola watched from her hiding spot as Chef's nostrils moved only a few inches. It didn't take a Troll genius to understand that Chef had just used one of her family's instincts of sniffing out Trolls.
"You have an odd perfume," she told Licene. Once she heard the Bergen's comment, the Troll princess put her own small nose on her small arm and cautiously sniffed the wig. Her skin did have the scent of blueberry tarts served with pollen nectar and her hair had the fragrance of a raspberry field in summer. Please don't tell me Chef can smell all this...
Mattie took a sniff as well and pretended to scoff in shock. "Deppie! What have I told you? This brandy berry women's perfume from Sephora clashes with your chakra!"
"I can't help it!" Licene protested. "I told my dad I wanted that cologne you told me about, but he was all 'proper girls use proper girls' perfume!"
"Just soak yourself with this and don't come back until you get this revolting scent off you!" As planned, Mattie gave 'Deppie' a bottle of men's cologne and the latter excused herself to go to the restroom. "Please excuse her, chef."
"Anytime," Chef shrugged as she seemed to have fallen for the trick. "So, while you wait for your friend to clean up, what do you think you'll be having for brunch?"
Meanwhile
It was a relief that Mattie knew that once the restaurant opened, one of the waitresses went to the bathroom to clean her hands in the place's restroom. This meant that once Licene got into the girls' bathroom, she saw the waitress washing her hands and didn't hesitate to stuff her nose with a sleeping drug-endorsed tissue, knocking out the unsuspecting creature. Gladiola got out of her hiding spot, giving Licene a chance to switch clothes with the waitress, place the unconscious body on a toilet, lock the cabinet, and sneak from underneath. "What the heck are you doing?" Licene snatched the cologne bottle after she caught the Troll Princess pouring herself with at least a quarter of it.
"Chef almost sniffed me out, so I'm covering myself," Gladiola said before jumping back on Licene's head and struggled to morph her hair into a black bob haircut that matched the one of the waitress who was now sleeping in the bathrooms. They quickly peeked out of the door before cautiously making their way to the client restricted area and found themselves in the hallway that Gladiola had recalled. Licene covered her nose in disgust and so did Gladiola.
"You never mentioned that this place stank of boiled artichokes and wine," Licene quietly complained. "Seriously, how do they manage to keep such a dump running?"
Gladiola ignored the comment and tried to pay her attention to her surroundings. On their left side, the sound of distant clanging pots, chopping, and water hitting metal was heard. On the right, she spotted the walls decorated with the most rewards and a velvet painted door. "There's the door to Mr. Darwin's office."
"Are you sure?" Licene walked towards the door. In the process, she picked up a broom that was just laying around in case she needed to pretend like she was sweeping whenever one of the employees passed by. To answer her question, the door was unusually fancy, with small carvings of lions on the velvet stained wood and a paper sign hanging on the golden doorknob.
If you are reading this, that means the local warlock is out for personal reasons. Door remains locked until the warlock returns.
Underneath those words was a cartoony drawing of Mr. Darwin giving the girls a toothy grin and wacky thumbs up, as if he were excited for a football game rather than warning them to not step in his little sanctuary.
Gladiola shrunk her hair back to normal and slid down Licene's arm in order to land on the doorknob. Once Licene pulled out a pair of large scissors from her purse, the human gave it to the Troll princess, who took about a minute to pick the lock with the scissors until they heard a creepy click and they stepped inside the office as cautiously as they could.
Now that she was here, Gladiola had a better look at the office of the warlock who hosted Chef and Creek. Like the door, the wooden walls were stained with velvet and decorated with carvings of lions, only these lions looked more like Roman amphitheater lions devouring gladiators than the regal ones outside. A thick purple carpet fashioned to represent the seven chakras covered the matching floor while dark Victorian armchairs stood upon them with the matching desk. Aside from the window covered with grey curtains, the only other decoration was the old library covering every wall with book-filled shelves.
"This would be so cool if this weren't a villains lair," Licene said as she locked the door behind them. "Where do we start?"
"We check for anything related to what they're planning and how do I get back home." Gladiola freaked a bit when she felt her forehead getting more of a plastic texture. "I'll check the books and you the office."
The two then proceeded to search through everything they could find while maintaining an ear on the door at the same time. Gladiola hopped from shelf to shelf and had to tilt her head occasionally in order to read the titles. So far, she only ran into books that were organized either by genre, title, or author. At least, that's what she thought. She still didn't get the chance to have a glimpse of human literature.
"Looks like he's really into spears made of shakes," Gladiola said when she frowned in curiosity at one column of shelves in particular. "He's got a bookcase full of them."
"I think you mean William Shakespeare," Licene corrected the small Troll while she skimmed through the papers that were neatly organized on the desk and sadly mostly consisted of tax receipts, newspaper articles, and disgusting noodle recipes. "Ugh. And I thought just having the deli market was horrible enough." She then responded to Gladiola's remark. "Shakespeare was a British playwright and poet from the 16th century. He wrote many comedies, tragedies, and historical plays that managed to last 400 years after his death. Macbeth is my personal favorite. If we ever get the chance before you have to go back, I'll have to read it to you."
"But if Mr. Shakespeare wrote so many plays, then why does Mr. Darwin only have books related to two titles?"
This got Licene's attention. Putting her search through the desk on pause, she walked over to the bookcase and gave a look through it herself. "Odd. Almost every single one of these books relates to The Taming Of The Shrew and Romeo and Juliet."
"If Darwin thinks he can tame bad-tempered women, he's out of luck with Chef," Gladiola said sarcastically. Licene giggled at her comment.
"That would be hilarious, but I think you make a point about whether or not this might related to Chef."
"What makes you say that?"
The human looked through the bookcase and pulled out two books that she placed on the carpet for Gladiola to see and flip through some of the pages. "Both of them are complete opposites, one of the being a comedy while the other is a tragedy and both discussing loyalty and marriage. I personally didn't read The Taming Of The Shrew, but I saw the play once with my parents and it mostly taught how sexist men were back in the old days, believing that wives must be tamed to obey them. Romeo and Juliet, however, was the second best play from Shakespeare that I ever read after Macbeth."
"Really?" Gladiola flipped through the mentioned book until she landed on a page with a fancy illustration of two young humans, one being a beautiful golden maiden standing on a stone balcony reaching out for the dark-haired young man holding her hand in order to support his climb towards her. A small smile came on Gladiola's lips. It made her think of all those love stories Trolls back home would tell their children, especially when they came with songs. The princess had always enjoyed hearing the love story of her parents and the Bergen royalty, which sometimes caused her to hum 'True Colors' or 'They Don't Know' to herself. "Is that the comedy?"
"Nope." Licene gave her a flat response. "Their parents hated each other, the lovers married secretly, and it's only after some severe conflicts and the lovers killing each other just because they thought the other was dead that the families finally came together. Aside from the death of history's most famous star-crossed lovers, the only tragedy I've seen in this play was that Hollywood ruined the play with each attempt to reenact it."
Gladiola lost her smile. She really hated tragic love stories. Even Branch, her father and the Troll expert on being grumpy, had disgust for romantic stories that never ended well.
She looked at the page next to the illustration. The page was full of beautifully printed words full of romantic confessions between the lovers. "'My bounty is as boundless as the sea,'" she read with full passion. "'My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.' It's so...beautiful."
A strange thud was heard.
"What was that?" Gladiola quickly closed the book and let Licene put them back on their shelves while the Troll princess went back to play the role of Licene's wig. The human straightened herself up, waiting for someone to burst the door open until she looked up and saw that one of the books in the upper shelf nearest the window was literally pushing itself out and land right on the carpet. A coughing sound was heard and followed by a rolled up ball of paper.
"That...was weird." Licene carefully walked over and picked up the book. She and Gladiola gasped together when they saw that it was a brown book with an illustrated Troll head surrounded by leaves for a cover.
"It's the book that Mattie caught Dårlig bringing back from that shop in Segrator Alley!" Licene quickly flipped through the pages while Gladiola looked through the pages as fast as she could.
"Oh my Troll!" Gladiola exclaimed. "The book's cover, those drawings with curvy ends, the typography...Licene, this is a Troll Apothecary Manual."
"A Troll Apothecary Manual?" Licene asked.
"Yeah. At least one page discusses a plant know to Trolls that can use for medicine and each plant in the book is categorized in alphabetical order, with details on the date the Trolls first discovered it and how they applied it in their regular lives. And that dialect..." Her eyes got bigger than her own hair. "It's ancient Troll dialect! No one has ever read ancient Troll dialect for generations!"
"Gladiola, calm down... What the heck?" Licene stopped at a certain page. Well, it was hard to say 'page'. Right between the article of Nightshade berries and Nomadic Lilies, a species of white lilies that are know to float away with the wind whenever spring ended, four pages were missing. Obviously, someone had ripped them and the new owners of the book had scrambled red marker notes on the other two pages.
Where are the pages?
Need pages!
Need map!
Book's seller MUST have a copy of the book!
"Whatever the bad guys wanted, it's not there," Gladiola noted. "But it must be essential if they were to vandalize an ancient book with paranoid notes."
"I'll take a picture of this and send it to Art and Alice." Licene pulled out her phone and took pictures of the notes while Gladiola got off the human's head and walked over the balled up paper. "I bet they can find the copy of the book at the shop when they go check it out this afternoon."
Gladiola unfolded the piece of paper and gasped. Each half was split to draw a different map. The top half looked like a hand-drawn map of Bergen Town while the bottom one showed Baltimore. The map of Bergen Town had numerous red X all over it, the majority being on the castle. Gladiola noticed that a red dotted line connected the Troll Tree through the underground tunnel, straight into the mouth of a hill monster, and onto some sort of tower building before zigzagging through the drawn streets and into Darwin's World Food and Deli.
"I think I know where the portal is!" Gladiola waved at Licene right when a buzzing noise came from the latter's purse and before Licene pulled out her phone.
"Mattie texted me! Chef is going to ask us what we want to eat and Darwin was just spotted at the front door! Get on my head, now!"
Gladiola quickly folded the paper and stuffed it in Licene's purse before climbing back on top of the human's head and acting as her wig once again. Licene, in a hurry, stuffed the book back in it's place, made a run for the door and quickly shut it before walking as discreetly and as fast as she could out of the client restricted area and back in the ladies' room. She cautiously knocked on the door of the cabinet where she had left the waitress. Since no one was answering, she sneaked underneath it and found the waitress still unconscious.
As fast as she could, Licene re-switched her clothes with the waitress and Gladiola changed her hair as the hair of 'Deppie'. Then came the part that sickened Licene the most: pulling out a wine bottle full of grape juice and smearing it all over the waitress and laying it on the floor to make it look like she was drunk.
They managed to get back to the restaurant as casually as they could right when Chef was asking what they wanted to eat. "There you are, Deppie!" Mattie said in glum enthusiasm. "We were just about to order! I'm going to have my usual salami and onion soup and Johnny here will have the Hawaiian pizza."
"Let me see." Licene quickly flipped through the menu. "Caesar salad for me."
"Soup and salami, Hawaiian pizza, and Caesar salad," Chef said without taking notes. "Excellent choices. And for drinks?"
"Water," they all said in unison.
Chef grinned at Mattie. "You brought good customers. I'll be back with your orders in about ten or twenty minutes." Chef got up right when Mr. Darwin came in. Both of them gave a cold stare to one another and marched back to the client restricted area, and judging by how Chef was screaming at some waitress named Lena for intoxicating herself on the job, it only meant that it was the waitress Licene knocked out.
"What did you learn?" Mattie quietly asked Licene.
"We'll talk about it at the next meeting," Licene said. Just when she said that, a shout came from the client restricted area.
"WHO BROKE INTO MY OFFICE?"
Andrew made a rush there, leaving the humans and the hidden Gladiola alone. "We'd better go!" Willy said.
"Well it wasn't like I was coming back here now that we know the bad guy lives here!" Mattie hissed. They quickly got up and made a run for it, with Gladiola clinging onto Licene's hair for support.
Meanwhile, unknown to Gladiola and her friends
By the time Gladiola and her human friends reached the light rail and took a ride back to AURA, the villains noticed too late that their first three customers had vanished once the crime was discovered.
"Betrayed by Mattie, my only favorite human customer..." Chef sounded disheartened while she and Mr. Darwin looked around his office. Aside from a few misplaced papers in his office, the place was normal except for the picked lock in the doorknob, which gave away to the warlock and Bergen that someone broke into his office.
"Whatever could she have betrayed you for?" Creek said when he stepped in. "It's not like she knew you were a Bergen..."
"I don't think Mattie's the problem."
Chef and Creek looked at Mr. Darwin, who knelt down and picked up something with his thumb and index fingers. The object in question was a loose strand of thickness colored in dark blue and magenta.
A strand of hair.
"I'd say that the Troll princess was in the area," he concluded as he showed them the strand of hair. Chef snatched it and took a sniff. The odor of berries made her snarl.
"So," she muttered, "Mattie's friend Deppie uses brandy berry women's perfume, which actually meant she had Gladiola Trollkonge right under our noses!"
"It looks like she quickly managed to make allies in less than a full day." Creek was a bit impressed.
"And now it looks like she's onto us!" chef snarled. "If it turns out, she's probably searching for her way back home and will have the two kingdoms' armies ready for us before we can even act in three days!"
"At least we do know where she's hiding now." Mr. Darwin took the hair sample back and curled his fingers over it, turning the hair into a crystal ball with glowing smoke of dark blue and magenta glitter shaped like Gladiola's face. "Your plan should be successful in three days, and the princess will be a factor, whether you capture again or lead her back home. Summon Dårlig and Feige."
"Dårlig!" Chef shouted.
"Feige!" Creek shouted as well.
A minute later, the young lackeys came in. Dårlig stood up straight, his arms folded behind his back like in the military, while Feige sat in a Lotus position on his shoulder.
"We have a job for you, you worthless scum!" Chef said.
"Great. What now?" Dårlig muttered. "Is my salary decreasing?"
"Of course not." Mr. Darwin shook his head and showed them the crystal ball. "Princess Gladiola Trollkonge was recently here. It would seem that she was trying to find her way back home. Fortunately, she was careless enough to leave hair strands that I turned into an essence tracker. Use this to track the princess, find her, and bring her back to us in a cage. If you can't, that's fine, but then you must trick her into finding the portal and going in there after we do. At the same time, go back to the shop and find the second copy of the Troll Apothecary Manual."
"And what do we get in return?" Feige asked.
Chef grinned. "Once we usurp the Bergens and the Trolls, you two will inherit the titles of royal chefs. The kitchen will be all yours."
"Just for the two of us? Nobody else?" Dårlig pointed his finger at himself and Feige.
Chef nodded.
"That's all I wanted to know." Dårlig hid back a smug grin. "We'll do it."
