Before long they reached the barn, and Evie spotted the shovels leaning against the side of the barn just outside of the door, just as George had said they'd be. Evie grabbed the shovels, handing one to Audrey as Evie handed Audrey the pitchfork as well.
"Let's see what's inside," Evie spoke as she pulled open the barn door with her free hand. The both of them went in, and Audrey immediately recognized the scent of horses. And the scent of their poop, she thought to herself as she wrinkled her nose.
Evie leaned over the doors of the stalls on the left side, checking to see how much the two would need to clean up. Audrey was still having a mental meltdown at the fact that she was going to have to clean up the poop, and she swiftly leaned the pitchfork and the shovel against the wood of the stalls.
Evie then looped over to the right side, realizing that as she went from stall to stall that the amount of poop seemed to get increasingly greater.
When she was through looking, she stood there beside Audrey. From an outsider's point of view, the two rhinestone cowgirls were a rather strange sight in the rustic look of the barn.
"We might as well get to work. But we need something to put the poop in," Evie trailed off, looking around as she tried to find something that would work. It then occurred to her that there was a wheelbarrow nearby, and she hurried over, pushing it over nearby where they were working.
Evie opened the door and started into her shoveling.
"I am a princess!" Audrey declared, watching Evie with a steady whine building in her voice. Evie shook her head, trying to bend properly in the outfit she was wearing. As much as she loathed to admit it, Mal was right about the clothes. They were very constricting and uncomfortable when doing farm work.
"I was, too, but then I moved here," Evie offhandedly commented as she heaved another almost overflowing shovelful of horse droppings. Audrey was immediately returned to the first day that all of the VKs had arrived when she had informed Evie that she had no royal status in Auradon. She felt a rebuilding sense of guilt after Evie had said it so nonchalantly.
"You know, I really am sorry for saying that to you when you first came here," Audrey sincerely spoke, fully expecting Evie to respond with at least a hint of bitterness. However, Evie instead offered her a sweet, accepting smile as she shoveled.
"I know, and it's okay," Evie reassuringly spoke, and Audrey stared at the bluenette for a moment, feeling more intrigued by her than ever before.
Evie had this motherly quality that was just absolutely shocking to see from a girl that was not too far from Audrey's age. It was comforting, and it somehow made Audrey immediately more comfortable with her, despite the fact that she hadn't had very many one-on-one conversations with Evie.
"I still feel bad," Audrey continued, and Evie shook her head, that caring smile still illuminating her face.
"Well, why don't you help me with this, and we'll say we're even?" Evie offered, and Audrey eyed the shovel leaning against the wood with dread.
"Couldn't I feel less bad some other way?"
"This is the only way I can think of right now, and there's no use in keeping negativity in you for any longer than you have to," Evie informed her, not a trace of insincerity in her voice or the slightest hint of the possibility that she was just trying to get Audrey to hurry up and help. Audrey eyed the bluenette curiously and picked up the shovel with great distaste before helping the other girl scoop the waste into the wheelbarrow.
"Eww… This is so gross," Audrey complained after a few minutes, and Evie chuckled slightly breathlessly.
"You know what they do on pirate ships to work more efficiently?" Evie questioned, and Audrey shook her head, looking over at Evie just barely as she tried to decipher where this was going. She winced as she tried to comfortably work in the outfit that Evie had made. It was admittedly very tight, and she couldn't effectively move in it.
"They sing shanties," Evie answered her own inquiry, and Audrey rolled her eyes in exasperation, unable to imagine singing while she was suffering the pain of Evie's outfit as well as shoveling waste.
"I'm pretty sure we don't need-"
"Shooooovveeeelll, boom. Boom. Shooooovveeeelll, boom. Boom," Evie started into her instrumental, her voice deepening as she tried to achieve the sound of tons of deep-voiced male pirates.
"And you're singing." Evie didn't pay the pink princess any attention as she carried her tune into a simple yet happy solo.
"Shovel, shovel, shovel shoo-shoo today! Shovel, shovel, shovel the shoo-shoo away!" Evie sang, attempting to be upbeat about the entire situation.
"Why would you sing?! There is nothing to sing about!" Audrey cried out in desperation, and Evie just kept going. Audrey groaned, silently tolerating it for a few more minutes before she finally couldn't stand the unnecessary cheerfulness anymore.
"Stop, would you?! It's not helping!" Audrey demanded, and Evie just offered her a cheerful smile.
"It's not helping because you aren't singing. Come on, it's a simple tune," Evie assured her, and Audrey just rolled her eyes as Evie cheerfully picked up where she left off.
However, after a moment, she started to hum with her, not enjoying it, but through plain desperation, she thought that it couldn't hurt anything.
Surprisingly, Evie's method actually seemed to work, and they were quickly growing finished with the stall.
"See, I told you it'd work!"
"I never actually sang with you," Audrey replied simply as she shoveled a big helping of poop into the wheelbarrow.
"I know, but you hummed, and that was obviously good enough," Evie persisted, and Audrey said nothing, allowing Evie to keep her delusional way of thinking. Evie took one large last scoop of poop, and dumped it into the wheelbarrow.
"Okay! I think we just finished our first stall," Evie declared proudly, throwing an arm around Audrey's shoulder fondly. Audrey just shook her head, glancing at all of the other stalls they had left.
Evie followed her gaze and frowned slightly at the sight of the work they had yet to do.
"Well. We aren't going to get anywhere just standing around," Evie cheerfully noted, and from her overly cheerful voice, Audrey knew the bluenette was dreading it.
However, when Evie stepped forward, it became clear that she had missed a pile of poop. Audrey jumped back as Evie very unceremoniously slid down onto the ground on her back.
Evie gasped, the breath knocked out of her as she set her wide-eyed gaze on the ceiling. Her hat was lying behind her on the floor, and Audrey was just standing there gaping at her.
Evie slowly rose up, regaining her breath and she looked at what had made her fall. It was then that she spotted the most horrifying thing that she could have ever faced.
There on her beautiful, custom-made chaps covering her leather pants was a huge green-brown streak from where fresh horse poop smeared on her clothing. She just sat there blubbering as she gazed at her leg, and Audrey didn't say a word.
After only a moment, though, Audrey started to laugh wholeheartedly and fully, bending over in the midst of her mirth.
"My hard work! All of my hard work! This is suede! SUEDE, PEOPLE!" Evie wailed loudly, and Audrey just cackled. It was something about the positively baffled look on Evie's face that brought about her mirth, and plus the fact that she had fallen in poop after being so cheerful about picking it up.
"I now know what we're sending to the boys!" Audrey proclaimed amongst laughter, and Evie was too upset about her chaps to care about the fact that there was about to be a photo made of her.
Before long, there was a selfie being sent to the boys with Evie in the background about to have a meltdown.
Meanwhile, with Uma and Mal, things were about to get much worse for them.
"Can you two get the roll of barbed wire out by that shed out yonder?" George questioned, pointing in a direction.
"Sure thing," Mal assured him, and Jane looked at them both in horror, afraid of being left by herself in this strange new place.
"Hey, Jane, you'll be fine," Mal took pity on the poor girl, reaching over and squeezing Jane's hand fondly. Jane nodded, uncertainty still in her gaze but considerably less so now that Mal had reassured her.
"Okay."
"Oh, do you two want some gloves?" George offered, and before Mal could answer an affirmative, Uma interjected.
"Nah, we're big girls. We've got this," Uma informed him confidently, and he shrugged.
"Alright. Well, the gloves are with me if you need them. Just give me a holler if you need them," George told them before heading off with Jane toward the fence.
"Big girls, huh?" Mal questioned, an eyebrow raised, and Uma grinned at her wickedly.
"We are. At least I am," Uma expressed, and Mal huffed as they started toward the roll of fencing.
They soon reached the barbed wire and stared at it for a moment, noting just how covered in barbs that it was. Mal and Uma shared a glance, but neither voiced their feelings about how they wished they had accepted the gloves. Now that Uma had so confidently declared how she felt, they couldn't go crying to George about getting poked.
"Well, I'll get the front end," Uma volunteered, and they picked up the barbed wire carefully.
They started toward the fence, having to stop several times as they tried to reposition the wire so that it wasn't stabbing their hands.
"Ow!" Uma cried, dropping her side of the roll of fencing to look at her hand after the barbed wire had stabbed her once again. The roll shifted in Mal's grip suddenly and it stabbed her swiftly.
Mal immediately dropped it with a slight yelp as she alternated between glaring at Uma and worriedly examining her digits. There was the slightest hints of red starting to stain her hand from where it had poked a hole in her.
"Great, now I'm stabbed," Mal complained, and Uma just shook her hand, trying to get the pain out of it.
"Yeah, well, your soft queenly hands must not be used to all this work," Uma sarcastically remarked as soon as she had managed to get her hand to stop hurting. Mal and Uma lifted the giant roll of wire quickly, hauling it over to the fence as well as they could considering its weight.
"Says the girl who just dropped the whole roll when she got pricked," Mal informed Uma, wincing as another barb was starting to stick into her a bit.
"You did the same thing!" Uma wheezed, speaking quickly as she helped Mal carry it.
"No, sir, we're big girls. We can handle it!" Mal nasally copied Uma's earlier statement as she shifted her grip just to get stabbed in a different place. Judging by Uma's slight grunt, she must have been stabbed once again as well.
"You don't got no room to talk. I didn't see you jumping to go begging for the gloves," Uma snarked as they continued to get stabbed by barbed wire.
Mal suddenly heard distant wailing, and she paused in her carrying, trying to listen.
"What's the problem?" Uma asked, and Mal hesitantly returned to walking.
"Nothing. Just thought I heard something."
"It's probably Audrey having a fit because her princess eyes had to look upon horse kaka-poo," Uma sniggered to herself.
"It sounded like Evie, actually," Mal clarified, but after looking in the direction of the horse barn curiously, she returned to her work.
When they eventually reached the fence, the two dropped it quickly. They had stopped several times due to the painful jabs of the wire, and they hadn't managed to get it very far. However, they had finally arrived, and they could stop to lick their wounds.
"There you two are. I've got Jane over there with the sheep already. I gave her the clippers and she should be shaving now," George informed them as he pointed behind him at the tight corral where countless white bodies were standing.
"We got the wire," Uma informed him, trying not to sound too out of breath as she subtly wiped her hands on her pants. Mal quickly recognized it as a technique to remove the bit of blood oozing from the many small cuts on her hands.
"So you did! Good work," George praised, and Mal put her hands behind her back, wiping them on her pants as she tried out Uma's method. It burned uncomfortably as the fabric touched it, but it was better than showing George that the wire kicked their butts.
"What do you say we get started on this fence, huh?" George started, getting his tools ready.
"But we do need to go get the posts, though," George informed them, and Mal resisted the urge to groan aloud as she knew what was coming.
"We'll go get them," Uma offered, and Mal shot an unappreciative look toward the pirate captain.
"Are you girls sure?"
"Yeah. We can handle it," Uma assured him.
"It's over that way."
The two headed over to the area where the posts were resting on the ground. Mal eyed Uma somewhat resentfully.
"We came here to work, but we don't need to volunteer for extra," Mal grumbled, and Uma snorted shortly as she started to lift a sizable post.
"Unlike you, your Queenliness, I like a little work. Plus, gotta build up these guns by the end of this week so I can show them off to prove to them dumb boys that I got my trouble's worth out of this whole thing," Uma told her, flexing an arm with a slight purse of her lips. Mal just laughed in response to the other girl.
"You are crazy," Mal chuckled at her, lifting her pole as they headed back over to the fence.
"Girl, don't sass-mouth me. You are looking at the future Miss Universe right here," Uma informed Mal with a hint of joking in her tone as she lifted the pole a little higher to accentuate her point. Mal just rolled her eyes in response.
Before long, they had gotten all of the posts and were about to start building the fence.
However, there was a certain interruption that occurred before they could even begin.
There was a loud scream and Uma looked up, trying to pinpoint the location that it came from. She raised an eyebrow as she couldn't figure out its origin. It did sound suspiciously like Jane, though.
"Huh. I thought I heard Jane," Uma looked at Mal curiously, and Mal shrugged, not knowing where it had come from.
Then there was another scream that was getting perpetually closer. Uma raised her gaze once again, straightening as she spotted a sheep hurrying through the pen not too far from them. The screams seemed to be coming from the sheep. Uma furrowed her brow in bewildered confusion as Mal looked up in bafflement as well.
"What the-"
The sheep veered off to the left and it was then that Uma saw where the screams were really coming from. There was Jane hanging onto the sheep's wool and body for dear life as it dragged her around the pasture in a full run.
"I did hear a Jane, I did, I did!" Uma cried with a short laugh as she watched Jane get dragged by the sheep.
George had gone inside to look for some more tools, so he wasn't currently privy to this situation. So Mal and Uma had the pure enjoyment of seeing Jane clinging to the sheep as it carried her everywhere.
"Help! I need help catching it!" Jane cried, and Mal almost laughed after that statement.
"Pull up on it and swing your leg over!" Uma instructed loudly, trying to help the poor girl.
"I can't!"
"Come on, it's just like riding a ship across the churning waters! It's just… You're kind of straddling the ship in this situation!" Uma yelled, and Mal was cracking up at Uma's crazy instructions. After a few more moments of this, Uma groaned.
"I gotta go help her," Uma spoke her thoughts aloud as she took off toward the sheep, chasing the animal and Jane attached.
Mal allowed herself to laugh wholeheartedly at the ridiculous sight of Uma sprinting after a sheep and a skidding Jane, and she withdrew her phone quickly.
Mal turned her back to them and took a selfie with the unfolding scene behind her in the background.
If the boys wanted to see their failure and giving up, they'd have to think again. Because they were hanging on like Jane to a sheep on the run.