Chapter 3
Down and Out in Pepperland
Goofy slowed down. Donald and Sora didn't stop; they banged into Goofy in a reversal of the red Trinity action.
Jiminy didn't bother to comment on the conservation of momentum. "So now what? We're still hungry."
"He had it coming," said Donald, referring to the manager he had hit on the crown.
"So where can we stop to eat?" Sora asked.
The party looked around the street. The smiling plastic face of Stan "The Grocery Man" Smith, founder of Smith's Market, the largest grocery store in all of Pepperland, gazed back at the party from its perch atop the building there. The solution to their hunger woes became suddenly obvious.
xxx
Inside, life was not so simple as one would think it should be in someplace as innocuous as a grocery store. The main complications were provided by throngs of kids who all seemed to want to have their pictures taken with Donald and Goofy. Oh yeah, and Sora, too, if he insisted, but who the heck was he, anyway?
"Cast members," an annoyed parent commented when he saw what he assumed was a group of three Disneyland employees. "They don't even bother changing out of their costumes."
The smiles of the kids in the front of the pack were little consolation to Donald as long as he had to put up with the twin terrors of the noisiness and smelliness of all the kids behind them. Heck, the kids in front weren't exactly wearing perfume, either. Some deadbeat parents needed to give certain nearby children "The Talk." You know, the talk every parent has to give at some point in the kid's development, informing the kid that those who don't use deodorant really, really stink.
Donald hated kids, his nephews above all. Lousy nephews. Always ruining his dates with Daisy, filling his scrumptious pies with volcanic mustard, destroying the interior of his car by transforming it into a makeshift aquarium, and stoutly refusing to give him a family discount while he was out buying items to help him save the entire universe from the Heartless. Saving the universe. Yep. That's what he was doing, and his bratty nephews couldn't even give him a free sample of Ether. And whose idiotic idea was it to let them run a store that sold weapons? These are the same kids who once nearly killed him with snow, and they got to sell firearms. He was going to chew out Dumbella for having those darn pains in the tailfeathers.
Jiminy Cricket managed to escape the maelstrom of noise and stickiness and odd smells that followed the crowd of children, but he was merely, so to speak, out of the frying pan. The fire came in the form of the health inspector, who was none to pleased to see a giant cockroach bounding about the premises unimpeded. This store was apparently messy enough that the roaches wore fancy clothes and had time to learn to speak. Something had to be done.
Jiminy made the mistake of running past a magazine rack in his efforts to get to safety. Armed with a rolled up copy of Sports Illustrated, the inspector became twice as dangerous. Twice in the first twenty seconds, Jiminy was nearly smashed by an image of an overly enthusiastic-looking Venus Williams. The irony of the situation was that Williams was far enough over the hill that Jiminy would have been about the first thing she successfully smashed in a while. Losing to some teenager at the French Open didn't help her any.
The best hiding place Jiminy could find was down the cereal aisle.
What most people don't know about cereal aisles is that they are like miniature apartment complexes for roaches. Each box contains enough room and enough food to support a roach family of four for several weeks before anyone could even notice the difference. They simply go in through the bottom of the box, make themselves at home for a while, snacking on crumbs, and then they leave just before the box gets sold. They've had a cereal real estate racket going for decades right under the noses of health inspectors around the world.
Jiminy was probably the only one in the world who could be happy to discover the roach houses, and then only because of the extenuating circumstances. From safe inside a box of Apple Jacks, he was able to watch the inspector stroll right by without suspecting a thing. A few annoyed looks and an angry scratch on his checkpad later, he gave up and went off to check the expiration dates on the frozen chickens. Jiminy stuck around long enough to see the waves of children around Donald and Goofy slow to a trickle and finally stop, thanks in part to Donald's being too grumpy to sign autographs.
XXX
Over on the other side of the store, Sora asked to whoever would answer, "What was that all about?"
"They think we're actors," said Donald. "Do I look like an actor? I'm a real duck. I look like a real duck to you, don't I, Sora?"
"Of course you do, Donald," Sora said.
"Then why the papparazzi treatment?"
"The pepperoni meat?" Goofy smacked his lips.
"Papparazi," said Donald. "Cameras."
"Gawrsh, Donald, I figured it was 'cause we're so pretty."
"Forget pretty! I'm still hungry. Let's split up and shop."
XXX
Nothing ever came easily to Goofy. Not skiing. Not baseball. Not horseback riding. Not fancy parties. Not brain surgery. (Don't ask.) It stood to reason that he would have some nontraditional difficulties while trying out the everyday task of grocery shopping. The first of those presented itself in the middle of aisle three: a cleanup mop and bucket.
Goofy's first instinct was, for some reason, to grab the mop and twirl it around like a dance partner. What could possibly go wrong? For starters, there was the bucket, which was sitting right where Goofy's left foot (one of the two) ended up at the beginning of the third bar of the imaginary waltz music. This was unfortunate because the bucket was full of water, the floor was wet, and the bucket didn't get great traction with the floor anyway. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Goofy's work could predict that he would slip and fall and break something. In this case, he managed only to hit his head on the floor, making himself more than a bit dizzy.
He then realized that he was on the wrong aisle, unless he could suddenly develop an appetite for cat food. Even in his dazed state, he realized how unlikely that was, so he went off to find something slightly more edible. He felt like pickles.
Ah, pickles, the potato chips of the health conscious. Goofy had heard much about their legendary flavor, and he figured they wouldn't taste half bad, either. Equally legendary in stature was Goofy's lack of hand-eye coordination, so the pickles were doomed from the get-go. Smash. Right on the floor, at least fifteen jars.
Clean up in aisle ten! The intercom's reaction was almost immediate.
A few seconds later, Goofy's met his old nemesis, the mop and bucket, again. It wasn't pretty.
XXX
Sora, though less clumsy than some of the others in the party, was even more clueless in some ways. The fruit aisle, in particular, had him baffled. He was used to having a wide assortment of tropical fruits. Weird, small fruits like grapes and strawberries seemed strange and exotic to him. Paopu fruits were nowhere to be seen. Nor were coconuts.
Luckily for his stomach (and those of the party members too clumsy to find their own food), Sora came across the bakery section. Jackpot. Pastries. Pies. Cakes. Bread. Uh, more bread. Sora, now rich from having slain so many Heartless, took as much as he could carry, rounded up his team, and made for the checkout lines. Donald was the most difficult to catch; he was curled up in the fetal position near the frozen food aisle, muttering something about what some bad, bad person must have done to all the poor chickens.
XXX
"Well, now, we're not hungry anymore, but we're still lost." Jiminy, to Donald's extreme annoyance, was playing the role of leader. "Anybody have any ideas on what to do next?"
Donald was pessimistic, which is to say he was acting like his usual self. "Even if we get back to the Gummi Ship, it's not going to fly. The thing's splattered all over the ground."
"Gawrsh, couldn't we find an engineer or something? Chip and Dale could get the thing shipshape in no time flat."
"In the meantime," Sora said, "we've got a keyhold to find."
"A keyhole?" Donald was still thinking about food and splattered Gummi. "Oh, yeah. Of course."
"Where would we start looking for one of those?" Jiminy was being practical now.
"Same place King Mickey would look," said Goofy. "The question is, where is that? We've got to start thinking like King Mickey."
"Hey, mister!" Goofy shouted in the general direction of a formerly disinteresed pedestrian. "We're a bit lost, you see, and we were wondering if you could tell us if you've seen King Mickey anywhere."
You idiot, though Donald.
"That way," said the man, pointing to a road sign.
Lo and behold, the sign had painted on it three things: an arrow pointing northeast, an image of King Mickey's royal seal, and the word Disneyland.
"Waaaaaak!" Donald expressed his shock as well as anyone could. "The k-king is h-here?"
"Looks that way," said Sora. "Let's follow the arrow and see where it leads."
