This chapter was inspired by a fic here on ffn where the mini-fairies became hyper after drinking Red Bull or coffee (or something like that.) Enjoy!
Week Two: Plants
Flying above a large field of wildflowers a mini-fairy by the name of Baby Tooth was whizzing back to the palace of the Tooth Fairy. In her tiny hands, she held a pearly white tooth. After flying all the way from Arizona to Bali, Baby Tooth was getting tired. She glided to a stop on the petals of a fragrant white gardenia.
Quickly looking at her surroundings, the little fairy noticed a strange green plant waving at her in the breeze. Curiosity got the better of her and she flew slowly over to the plant to investigate. Still holding the tooth, she stared at one of the leaves. It was sparkling in the sun with slender rays of light reflecting from its lush green color. It looked quite beautiful. First, Baby Tooth sniffed it. After debating with herself, she quickly tore four of the leaves off the plant's stalk, folded them into her small bag and whisked away, trying to make up for lost time.
"Oh, finally, Baby Tooth! I was afraid that you were lost," exclaimed the Tooth Fairy. Baby Tooth wearily handed over the molar that she'd been carrying to one of her fairy friends and went off to find a nook in which to rest. Sadly, only a few minutes passed before Tooth saw the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis. Something, was wrong.
Calling out to Baby Tooth and a few others, Tooth and her fairies raced across the sky to North's Palace in the North Pole. "Ah good, you're here. I got a message from MiM (the Man in the Moon) and he needs us," said Santa, known as North to his friends as Bunny and Tooth, his fellow Guardians, came to a halt in front of him.
"What was the message, North?" asked Bunny as he took an Easter egg from his satchel and began to paint it.
North became more serious and said, "Apparently, MiM needs us to come to his palace on the moon and help him retrieve the last ever-bright flower seed."
"Wait!", yelled Bunny as Sandman drifted in, cautiously. "That flower is not supposed to exist anymore,".
"Well, that's why it's the LAST ever-bright seed," Tooth emphasized.
There were at least two problems about going to the moon at that time though. One was the fact that the newest Guardian had still not shown up after waiting for thirty minutes. The second, being that North could simply not find the snow globe that led to MiM's palace.
North and Sandy went to North's office to find the special snow globe while the Easter Bunny and Tooth waited impatiently for Jack Frost. Baby Tooth and her fairy friends, meanwhile, were busy in North's kitchen secretly discussing Baby Tooth's newest discovery. The little fairies could simply not determine what kind of leaf it was. Baby Tooth decided that she'd ask Tooth, the fairy leader, what it was when they had the chance.
Stray papers and bits of ice were everywhere as North continued to tear apart his office in search of the snow globe that they needed. While North's back was turned, Sandy noted that above them was a shelf of snow globes that they had not yet checked. He tried to tell this to North, but he wasn't listening.
"I can't find it! I don't know where it went. We haven't used it in so long," said North as Sandy made a last ditch attempt to get his friend's attention.
Grabbing a stray elf by the ankles, the Sandman shook it ferociously so that the bell on his hat jingled loudly.
"What?!", North questioned, turning to Sandy. The Sandman pointed above his head at the shelf, tapping his foot. Sure enough, right in the center of the snow globes on the shelf was one labeled Man in the Moon.
"We found it!", North cheered as he burst back into the room where Tooth and Bunny were still nervously eying the doors and windows in case Jack Frost decided to join the party. After it was decided that they couldn't wait any long, which was quite a stretch considering that Sandy was usually the patient one, they left for the sleigh. ("I knew that troublemaker wouldn't come!" said Bunnymund.) A note written for Jack informed him where they were going and when they planned to be back.
Jack was only late because he'd been having fun with his first two believers, Sophie and Jamie. Jack had promised the children that he wouldn't be gone too long and that when he came back, they'd have a giant snowball fight.
However, when Jack got back to the North Pole and read his fellow Guardians' note, he realized that he'd be gone longer than he said. Walking over to a bench and sitting down, Jack re-read the note and caught another level of meaning in it.
"Wait! How do they expect me to manage the Tooth Fairy's work and run the North Pole at the same time? Plus bring winter to the world, I thought I was the irresponsible one?!" In the bowels of the workshop, a crash suddenly rang out. Sighing, Jack flew off to see what had happened. He knew that things had gone wrong on a number of levels when he ran into Phil the yeti.
Phil was currently holding two mini-fairies by their wings and trying to shake off a very hyper elf from his foot. Jack, after resisting the urge to laugh, dropped out of the air, touched the manic elf with his staff, and froze him instantly. Even though Jack couldn't fully understand the yeti's language, he got the gist.
Following the direction of the agitated yeti's finger, Jack skidded to a halt in front of North's kitchen door. He heard a shout of warning from behind him but it was too late. The kitchen door swung open. BANG! Jack hit the deck just in time to avoid getting impaled by a crowd of mini-fairies as they burst out the door.
After peeling his face off the floor, Jack's eyes saw what could only be described as absolute chaos. Mini-fairies were zipping around in the kitchen so fast that you could barely see them. Cake mix and yellow icing covered the floor like a field of daisies and elves were shoving cookies in each other's faces.
Jack rolled out of the way of a remote-controlled car as he exclaimed, "How did this happen?". He made the mistake of looking behind him for a second. Before he could get a better grip on his staff, something jerked it away.
"HEY!", Jack shouted. "Give that back!" Three elves on a miniature bi-plane had swept by, grabbing Jack's staff, and flew out of the kitchen before Jack could catch them. Scrambling to his feet and dashing after the elves, who were laughing crazily, Jack jumped up, his fingers almost catching the tail of the miniature plane. Suddenly, Jack was distracted by a hummingbird zooming around his face as he crashed back to the ground.
"Baby Tooth?!", Jack exploded. Baby Tooth's hand held a small, dried up leaf that she used to wave at Jack. He almost didn't notice the leaf but while deciding whether to chase after his staff or escape the crowd of mini-fairies that had begun to crowd around him, he finally saw the leaf. Little did he know that the leaf was the source of his current troubles.
Jack tried to question the little fairy about the leaf but all Baby Tooth did was smile and zoom away in the opposite direction. She remembered the time when she and her friends had been anticipating the moment when the Tooth Fairy would tell them what kind of leaf they'd found. Their excitement had grown so big that they could not wait any longer.
The little fairies decided to taste the leaf. This was not a wise decision because they didn't know that it was a tea leaf, and this tea leaf contained caffeine. Mini-fairies only need to eat a few crumbs to sustain themselves. Just as too many cups of coffee can make a human over-active, eating a few flakes of the leaf was enough to make the fairies super-hyper.
With their tiny minds on overdrive, Baby Tooth and her friends decided that the elves might appreciate their discovery. Anyone who's been to the North Pole knows that anything given to the elves with caffeine or sugar in it most certainly spells disaster.
Jack had just about had enough of all this chaos. In the past fifteen minutes, he had run from one end of Santa's workshop to the other, dodging flying fairies, all sorts of pastries, and leapt over stacks of knocked-over toys. He'd even had to climb seven flights of stairs and run into several yetis. North was going to be furious because his workshop was a mess!
On the fifth floor of North's workshop, Jack gasped for air, sitting collapsed on the floor from exhaustion. All this time, he'd been following Baby Tooth. He closed his eyes with the mistaken impression that he could rest for one second in the midst of this mess.
In a moment of realization, Jack jerked his head up. A few months prior to this fiasco, he'd learned that there was a limited list of beings that could not use his staff: warm spirits like Summer, humans, and dark spirits like Pitch Black, the Nightmare King. Unfortunately, that meant that the elves (with what little magic they possessed) could still sort of use his staff to freeze things. Whoops.
Jack hoped that the elves were not smart enough to learn how to fly. "Flying elves would just make my day," Jack thought sarcastically. He pushed himself quickly off the floor and ran more slowly to the eighth floor of the top of the workshop. Jack looked for any signs of elf use of his staff.
Up close, each mess he'd seen on the lower floors of the workshop had its own disastrous consequence. One mess was in North's living room where Jack had encountered scores of battling mini-fairies and elves who'd been throwing cookies and raining eggnog down on each other. Under different circumstances, Jack would have loved to join the fun but with the current state of things, the sane beings in the palace – Jack and the yetis - weren't having much fun at all. And this was coming from the Guardian of Fun himself!
Had Jack not looked around the workshop two times, he'd have missed the faint trail of ice in one of the corners. The elves, after discovering that the staff's owner was on to them, set a trap. Before Jack Frost could pull his foot back, it tripped a wire that resulted in a cascade of pink paint and flour onto him. Several of the yetis also were splattered with the odd mixture, as well.
Few things could make Jack Frost as angry as he was in the following moments. Every creature within a twenty foot radius stuttered to a halt. Afraid of what the young Guardian might do to them, the elves, almost looking guilty, shoved the staff back at its irritated owner.
"Thank you very much," Jack hissed. And although the elves had returned the staff, Jack went ahead and froze them anyway. They were annoying him greatly. When Jack and the yetis acknowledged that they were covered with flour. pink paint, and bits of pastry from the elf food fight, it was to Jack's horror that he'd forgotten one, minor detail.
In between unsuccessful attempts at cleaning paint off his clothes and ensuring that unfrozen were kept away from him, Jack had forgotten the mini-fairies. Above him, a faint buzzing sound started to fill the room. Jack cautiously looked up. About twenty mini-fairies, looking like a floating field of wildflowers, squealed with delight at the sight of his pearly white teeth. They all dove straight for him as Jack broke the world record for fast-flying during his escape. There was only one place that he knew that he'd be safe from fairies, elves, and eruptive disasters: North's office, the one place where a mess hadn't bloomed.
Jack slammed the office door just in time to avoid becoming a pin board from the mini fairies, and lost track of time as he tried to wipe off the paint-flour mess. A few days later, the Guardians fell out of a portal onto the floor.
"Bunny! Get off me!," North nudged the Easter Bunny, prompting him to stand up. "Sorry, mate. You can't really control where you land when you're traveling in a portal," Bunny said. "Not to mention that coming back from the moon is a little disorienting," emphasized Tooth.
All the Guardians enthusiastically agreed with Tooth until they got their first full look at what was around them. North nearly screamed. Patting his friend on the shoulder, Bunny stared wide-eyed at the floor.
"I don't know what in Grim Reaper's name happened but does anyone remember pink footprints on the floor?", asked Bunny. Sandy responded by wildly gesturing to the messy heaps around them, as if to say, "Of all the messes, you choose the pink footprints!" While some of the Guardians tried to comfort North in his distress, Bunny tracked the pink footprints all around the workshop. He tried to avoid unconscious mini-fairies and elves as well as slippery piles of goo on the floor.
Eventually, he arrived in front of North's office. The door looked like it'd been pecked in many places and mini-fairies were strewn all over the floor, fast asleep. One look at the door, and he knew that his fellow Guardians had to see it. Tooth was becoming slightly distressed at the sight of so many fairies in a deep sleep and was relieved to learn from Sandy that they'd be awake soon enough.
Tooth sighed as she wearily reached for the big door handle. Quite suddenly, the door opened from the inside. Bunny burst out laughing. Jack Frost stood with one hand on his staff, closely resembling a pink-and-white Easter ornament. "There is nothing funny about this, OK?", Jack snarled. This only made Bunny laugh even harder.
With the Guardians staring at his peculiar clothing color and hair styling, Jack promptly stormed off to find a place where he could peacefully clean up. "So, Jack. Are you going to tell us what happened?" Tooth asked when Jack finally returned. "Just give me a moment, OK?" Jack said, too tired to give a long explanation. And even then, Sandy had the guts to add the fact that the second week of advent was about plants (though not all of them caffeinated tea leaves.)
This is also based off of a day where my friend had WAY TOO MUCH SUGAR FOR BREAKFAST. (It was pretty bad.)