I.
This planet was weird, Hat Kid mused. She looked down from her spaceship, admiring the glorious colours and bright skylines of the landscapes below. No one back home would believe her tales of this place!
She'd only been here a couple of days, and already she'd come to realize that Earth was full of many strange wonders. A dream vacation island overtaken by goofy mafia, laws of space and gravity being skewed, and flightless birds running a movie studio? Honestly, all she needed was some sort of fairytale kingdom, with a princess and a dragon, to make this as ridiculous an adventure as one of her games! She hadn't seen anything like that yet, of course, but perhaps it was just a matter of time. After all, she was going to explore someplace new soon! There were still a couple of regions to look into yet, such as a pretty bunch of mountains over there, and, her destination for today, a large purple forest! She landed in the new section of the planet, explored for roughly five minutes before getting caught in a trap, and then… Uh oh.
"Be careful what you wish for" echoed in her head as a massive, scaly maw grinned down at her.
"AHHHAHAHAHAHA! FOOOOOOOOOOL!" Hat Kid quailed as a colossal form ambushed her, shadows and fire whirling around, enclosing her in a nightmare. Dark clouds loomed overhead as thunder rumbled. It was as if she'd been taken to an entirely new dimension, a prison, locking her in with the terrifying apparition now smiling hungrily at her. Molten yellow light dripped from its fangs, pure black scales glowing an eerie purple as it crowed in victory, "You blew it! You've totally screwed yourself! Nobody enters my home and leaves in one piece!" She trembled at its terrifying majesty. Dragons in fairy tales were supposed to be scary, but nothing could have prepared her to see one up close! She was dead, so dead! Getting eaten by a dragon, what a way to die!
Its malicious voice boomed once more, "Tell you what though! Hang on a minute! You get to live! That's right! Aren't you lucky?!" At this, Hat Kid perked up. Wait. She was going to live!? "Normally I'd gobble you up whole, soul and all, but you're a lucky one! You won the lottery, because I just so happen to be missing a braindead servant!" The great beast continued, seemingly taking pleasure in describing the fate of their previous towel boy, but Hat Kid couldn't entirely pay attention. She shook in fear, but now, some relief wormed its way in there. Oh, thank the stars, she was going to survive this encounter!
Hat Kid was NEVER making fun of people in fairy tales again. "Why didn't they just go kill the dragon themselves," she had mocked way back when she'd heard some stories in school, laughing at the useless characters. Her classmates Bow Kid and Timmy had giggled along with her. Now Hat Kid knew better. Oh, how she knew better. The stories would NEVER be able to describe this thing's sheer, intimidating presence as it continued to speak, "So tell you what, I've got a piece of paper here! Don't worry about the details! I just need you to sign right here at the bottom!" This was when it offered her a contract, and Hat Kid made a very stupid decision. Fear and relief did a lot of crazy things to a person, especially when mixed together.
Hat Kid refused the contract. Twice.
The dragon paused. "I don't think I made this clear enough," he began, and that's when Hat kid knew she'd blown it. Fire blasted from the monster's jaws, an insurmountable number of sharp teeth bared less than an arm's length from her face as The Snatcher roared, "Your opinion DOESN'T MATTER TO ME. Put your name on the contract or I'll make your DEAD, HOLLOW BODY sign it for you!"
Suffice to say, when faced with an angry mythical monster that could very easily flatten her with a flick of its tail or swallow her down in less than a bite, she signed the contract.
II.
Hat Kid was a little surprised with how quickly she got used to The Snatcher's presence.
Sure, he was massive. His head alone could squash a car, much less the rest of his long form. Sinuous and shadowed, The Snatcher's coils wrapped around his lair several times while his wings were tucked politely at his side, thorny tail twisted through the brambles and dipping into the pond surrounding the tree he called home. They were terrifying, true, but Hat Kid wondered if maybe she'd overreacted when she first met them.
The Snatcher was, dare she say it, borderline friendly. Helpful, even! His minions seemed to love serving him, for one. Two, every time Hat Kid got lost on a contract and was forced to ask directions, either the minions or The Snatcher themself were more than willing to point her in the right direction. The dragon was even spectacularly unbothered the few times she'd fallen on them while trying to climb his tree! The lazy creature simply snorted at her, rolled his glowing eyes, and returned to enjoying his hoard of books. The Snatcher, it seemed, was maybe not as bad as she'd thought he'd be? After she came across a genuine fairy tale 'evil queen', she'd even begun to appreciate the dragon's lenient ways.
She knew a dragon. She's been so close she'd actually touched them, multiple times! How cool was that?!
Learning his history from a time rift had endeared her to the beast even more. It helped her understand why the former Prince Charming had become such a twisted creature, and explained The Snatcher's protective, possessive nature when it came to his territory. His forest, his minions, and anything else under his tyranny was well protected from any intruders. Sure, they all had their quirks, but Hat Kid started to love Subcon and its inhabitants. The land was steeped in cruelty, stained dark and glowing by the grudges of the hateful dead. She could see countless wretched spirits squirming in the depths of the swamp, clustered so thickly that one could even walk on the water's surface. The plants glowed a subtle purple too, and in general, Subcon was a place that was horrifying and evil at first, but came to be oddly calm and homely if one learned its ways. And, you know, overlooked just how many people the Snatcher must have eaten alive or murdered for the forest to become like this.
Dark as it was, Hat Kid was well endeared to the place. Subcon Forest felt downright welcoming to her once she got used to it. The young, energetic child lost herself in many adventures there. She knew a dragon! She got to explore a forest straight from a fairy tale! Hat Kid played and pranced with the locals, danced around fires with spirits, hunted for treasure in the foliage, and even explored treehouses and ancient stone towers. It was the most fun she'd ever had! Ever! Hat Kid loved Subcon.
It was this love that would lead to her complacency.
III.
She should have seen the betrayal coming.
It wasn't just books that The Snatcher kept. He also hoarded souls. If fairy tales had taught her anything, it was that you never wanted to try and take from a dragon's hoard.
She'd tried to get her soul back once her contracts were all complete, and now she was paying the price. Hat Kid lost track of how many times she'd screamed, barely dodged the hungry jaws of the dragon, jumped out of the way of his rainbow magicks, or avoided the reach of his minions as they swarmed the battlefield. Dueling a dragon was petrifying. She remembered now, all too clearly, why she'd been so frightened in her first encounter with him. He buffeted her with his wings, struck out with his claws, breathed fire and magic and rained death upon her at every chance. Yet somehow, she won. Somehow she pulled through, having turned his own potions and attacks against him. She struck him a final, decisive blow on his snout, and the monstrous dragon flinched back with a horrendous screech as shadows clouded her vision.
The battle was over.
Whether or not he'd been close to death, or just fed up with her shenanigans, Hat Kid would never know. Regardless, The Snatcher attempted to trick her after the fight, tried to make her leave his woods once and for all. She wasn't having any of it. Firstly, of course, because he had been very resistant in returning Hat Kid's soul to her. She kind of wanted that back. Badly. Secondly, she just loved the forest too much to never come back! Haggling and harassing him, she managed to get her final time piece from the dragon's collection too, and he made little effort to hide when he clenched his talons into the darkened ground in frustration. But The Snatcher, though powerful, was also something of a lazy and timid beast at times, and Hat Kid got what she needed in the end thanks to a not-insignificant amount of pure stubbornness. A bargain was struck, and that was that.
She also got a little extra something from the deal. Hat Kid smiled to herself as she surveyed her latest success. A slightly crinkled, scribbled on contract sat proudly on her bedside table as she settled in for the night, grinning.
After all, what little girl didn't want to be best friends with a dragon?
IV.
"Good mooooorniiiiing!"
Hat Kid barely held in a yelp. By the great nebulas, let that not be what she thought it was. She slowly turned around in her bed as her robot companion, Rumbi, screeched in offended vacuumese at the tail so rudely blocking its path. Said tail curled and twisted like a thorny vine in her room, spines and scales snagging at her carpet, until it entwined itself quite comfortably around the legs of her bed. She focused very hard on that tail, not really wanting to deal with the creature on the other end of it.
No such luck would befall her.
"Up and at 'er, kiddo! These contracts aren't going to fulfill themselves, you know!"
Hat Kid finally gave up, turning around in her bed to glare at the grinning reptile half-buried in her pillow pile, "I finished all your contracts. Let me sleeeeeeeeep."
"Well that's too bad, princess," he said sarcastically, smug smile plastered on his face, "there's no way I'm letting you miss out on all the fun!" The great beast eyed her as he moved, their dark form a comical contrast to the gaily coloured mass of bedding he'd usurped from her.
Realizing that this was likely The Snatcher's version of revenge for yesterday (and boy, was it petty), Hat Kid nonetheless had no choice but to get out of bed and start the day. The dragon grinned, shifted his sinuous neck, and sneered down at her rumpled choice of garb. "What is that that you're wearing? I haven't seen anything that threadbare since I tried to find where the metro cats keep all the pants they don't wear! Spoiler alert; they don't own any. So! Pretty threadbare."
"They're my favourite jammies! Peck off!" Hat Kid grumbled. Sure, they were wrinkled and worn, but they were comfy! And, quite frankly, her only pair. So yes, they were her favourite pajamas, and The Snatcher could shut his trap about them.
"Heh, sure thing kid. It's probably the only nightgown you've got-" dangit he knew, the snoop-! "And honestly, you could do better than that. I could do better than that! Speaking of, why don't you just sidle on over and take a look at this little contract here…" He waved a piece of paper in the air enticingly, well, as enticingly as you could wave a document that you signed your life away on, and Hat Kid sighed and obliged. The sooner she took a look at it, the sooner she could tell him no.
Only she didn't.
Dang it. Dang that dragon and dang his clever ways! If this was his revenge, she had to admit, he'd gotten her good. The contracts were difficult, hard, downright tortuous from what she could see, but… they had rewards. Rewards she really wanted. Dang it! Dang it good and rotten! How could she refuse?
Over time, as she went and got the rest of her time pieces, she also played his new game. She wanted that raincoat, and that pretty, pretty bow for her hair, and all those other hats and outfits and little trinkets he teased her with. The Snatcher knew her way too well, and there was no way she could resist his trials no matter how many close calls she had. Thank heavens she could reverse time if things got too spicy. There were benefits to being a time-travelling alien for sure.
Part way through these events, something occurred to her. "Hey, uh, Snatcher," she asked, "how did you get in here?" Because, even if he could shrink and grow his size to a certain degree, she had no idea how such a gigantic dragon had managed to wyrm (lol get it?) his way into her ship.
"Oh, I just snuck a portal in under this marvelous pillow pile of yours. Not the most clever place to hide your diary, by the way-"
"YOU FOUND MY DIARY!?"
"Ahhahahahahahahaaa!" The Snatcher laughed at her expense, Hat Kid tried to get her revenge only to be tossed onto her bed, and life was good.
Well, as good as life could be with a giant dragon taking over her room…
V.
Dragons were surprisingly cuddly. At least, that's what Hat Kid figured must be the case when, for the third day in a row, she woke up with some part of The Snatcher draped languidly on top of her and her bed.
Today it was his neck. Her legs were tingly and asleep by the time she managed to wriggle her way out from under him and her blankets. The Snatcher watched her in amusement, loafing off as usual and being absolutely no help. Instead he just yawned widely, his head nestled securely in the loveseat nearby. To be fair, he was a very large dragon in a very small room (despite how much he'd tried to downsize himself to fit), so it made sense that he was spread out all over the place. Wait. Hold on. He had a whole dang forest to nap in! Never mind, The Snatcher was just being a brat by taking up as much space in her home as possible. Hat Kid glared. He simply grinned in return, and Hat Kid knew a lost cause when she saw one. "Some of us have places to be, you know," she grumbled.
He simply snorted in reply, a sarcastic drawl emanating from his serpentine form, "Oh dear. Does the spoiled little princess not want to sleep in today for once? My my, whatever is wrong with you? Is the itty bitty kiddy sick? Oh no, I'm so concerned! Ha! Not!"
Hat Kid gave him another nasty look, but to no avail. He seemed rather content to ignore her. Instead she just gave up and got dressed, only once tripping over his wing, which was quickly retracted and hidden under the bed. She'd gotten, overall, rather good at dodging his scaly coils and sharp spines. They hurt rather a bit when she didn't avoid them…
After a bit of breakfast and puttering around, she eventually settled on going back into Subcon. There may not have been any more time pieces down there, but there was a fair bit of magic yarn still hidden in the forest that she wanted access to. That, and The Snatcher's latest contract had her sniffing around the area for his special coins. It was a long, tiring, and fun day. Sniffing out the tokens had been no easy task, it never was, but when she finally showed him the fruits of her labours, she noticed that he actually seemed a bit proud of her. Not that he'd admit it, of course. Big scary dragons had a reputation to keep after all!
Then he handed her The Dress, the same one she'd seen a certain evil queen wear in the Subcon time rift's storybook, and her brain ground to a halt. "Uh. What."
"Well, you're such a spoiled princess all the time, so I thought, why not? Besides, the last princess I had certainly isn't using it anymore. Might as well not let it go to waste!"
There was a lot there to unpack, Hat Kid decided, and she didn't have the energy nor the patience to do so right now. She would deal with it in the morning.
Of course, the next morning was when Mustache Girl decided to steal her time pieces, and all thoughts of figuring out why The Snatcher had given her the Queen's dress went forgotten.
VI.
Dealing with Mustache Girl was tough. Leaving the planet was tougher.
It wasn't a physical effort that made it hard, as all she had to do were push a few buttons. It was the emotional toil that did it. First, there was seeing her friend crumpled on the ground in Mafia Town, crying at her failure and the unfairness of it all. (She dropped Mustache Girl a gift, of course; no one back home would miss just a single time piece, would they?) Then, having a mafia man, Cooking Cat, the Conductor, and DJ Grooves all cling to her spaceship and wail for her to stay? That was heartbreaking. Watching The Snatcher fly determinedly towards her had been utterly wrenching too, and literally breathtaking, although that was mostly because it had been so hilarious watching everyone else freak out when they saw him coming. (Hat Kid was still laughing herself silly over it, fervently ignoring the tears that trailed down her cheeks.) She, slightly involuntarily, pushed forwards on the throttle when the shock of seeing a giant dragon winging its way towards them dislodged the group from earlier, and soon enough she was making her way through space unhindered.
She was going to miss them, that was for sure. But she had to go home, it was imperative! And so she did. Hat Kid thought up a cover story for her adventures along the way. In what felt like a too-short amount of time, she was stepping back onto her old homeworld. Bow Kid had come to watch her land and disembark, along with a few authorities wondering where she'd been all this time, but they didn't matter. Hat Kid had come home for one reason, and one reason only... to apologize to Bow Kid.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry I got mad and left without you!"
"I'm sorry I got upset and we had an argument and, and, waaaaaah!"
Bow Kid and Hat Kid cried, embraced, and all was good. Truth be told, Bow Kid was supposed to have come with her on the trip that led her to getting stuck on Earth, but an argument beforehand had caused Hat Kid to leave early in a rash (and admittedly childish) bout of temper. That's why it had been so important for Hat Kid to get home; to apologize.
Then the adults stepped in. What followed was a rather boring series of debriefings, explanations, and accounts that were mostly lies mixed with a couple of glossed over truths. Hat Kid felt oddly possessive and protective of Earth. Maybe being friends with a dragon had rubbed off on her a bit, or maybe she was worried about how the rest of her species would react to The Snatcher's apparent ability to make more powerful time pieces. (It had been rather a shock the first time she realized that no, the purple time pieces weren't just a fancy, miscoloured mock-up of her favourite collectables. They had some scary amount of power behind them!) In the end, her story was that some sort of space-time rift had knocked her ship around a bit, and the excuse worked as intended. They admonished her and praised her at the same time. After a bit of quick thinking and sly wording, she managed to convince them to let her return. She hadn't quite gotten all her time pieces back, of course, and it would be safer if she were to retrieve them, plus any that might have formed in the space-time rift she'd stumbled into. They bought it hook, line, and sinker. It probably helped that Bow Kid insisted she come along too. The mission was supposed to have been the first unsupervised flight for both of them; it was only fair that Bow got to go back out. It's not like she had a ship of her own after all. And really, apart from getting tossed around a bit, how dangerous could it possibly be? Space-time rifts were nothing new to their species.
After a quick rest, they ventured back out into the cosmos. Hat kid programmed their destination into the computer, played video games with Bow Kid until they both dropped, and the two ate enough cookies to make themselves sick. Bow Kid giggled wildly. "I missed this," she admitted.
Hat Kid grinned, "Me too." Then she looked over at Bow Kid, mischief overtaking her features, "So. You wanna know what really happened?"
Bow Kid perked up. "What really happened? What do you mean?"
Hat Kid smirked and rubbed her hands together evilly, "Heh heh, you'll never guess. Story time! Catch me if you can!" She ran to her room (the best place for telling stories if you asked her) with Bow Kid hot on her heels.
She'd forgotten one very important thing.
"Thought you could get away from me so easily, did you?" The Snatcher yelled greedily, looming down at her from where his head and horns scraped against the ceiling. Hat Kid came to a dead halt, Bow Kid ran into her from behind and was knocked flat to the ground, and The Snatcher smiled victoriously as he reached for her. Despite being half-in, half-out of the gateway nestled under her pillows, he was more than quick and agile enough to grab her in his massive talons. "It's back to Subcon with you!"
"Whoops. Forgot about the dragon portal," Hat Kid stated bluntly.
Bow Kid shrieked, "What do you mean, you forgot about the dragon portal-!?"
But it was too late to answer as The Snatcher wrenched himself backwards into his realm. Hat Kid was dragged along with him, Bow Kid screamed, and really, the day just went downhill from there.
VII.
In Hat Kid's humble (and rather grumpy) opinion, it took Bow Kid way too long to find her.
To be fair, getting to Earth from their homeworld was a long way to travel, even when she'd already input the coordinates into her ship. Also to be fair, Earth was a big and confusing planet, and Subcon Forest was even more so. Getting to Hat Kid wasn't a simple task by any stretch of the imagination, especially when Bow Kid didn't know where exactly she'd been taken. "Subcon" wasn't a single place to search; it covered a third of the whole blasted planet! But still! In the time it took for Bow Kid to attempt to come to her rescue, Hat Kid had just about had it with The Snatcher.
First of all, The Snatcher hadn't been idle in the time since she'd last seen him. According to him, the reason he hadn't immediately used his portal to find her was because he'd been angry that she left. Initially he'd pouted and moped in his lair, then schemed when he realized that he wanted Hat Kid to return, and finally put together a rather diabolical yet simple plan to snatch her back (whether she wanted to come home to Subcon Forest or not). Also, clothes. He'd put together more outfits for her because apparently, he'd decided that she was going to be his princess now, and that was that. Dang dragons and their dang princesses! Hat kid fumed, threw a few dozen temper tantrums, and tried on a couple of dresses sulkily because okay, she'd admit it, The Snatcher had an oddly good fashion sense.
She also attempted a few more of his contracts to pass the time, and the look on her face when he'd given her a knight's helmet, of all things, made him howl with laughter and fall to the ground with an earth-shaking thud so heavy it knocked a rickety old tower over. The irony, the cheek, the absolute nerve! Dang that Snatcher to heck!
...it was also quite comfortable. How insulting.
Needless to say, by the time Bow Kid finally found her, Hat Kid was pretty irritated. She glowered at The Snatcher and his latest ploy, the great black dragon grinning like a gremlin at her. Hat Kid was wearing the most ridiculously frilly dress yet. Her arms were crossed, her face was scrunched up, and her legs were delicately folded one over the other as she sat comfortably in his curls. She faced away from him out of spite.
Bow kid looked at her.
"Never," warned Hat Kid grumpily, "Sign a BFF contract with a dragon."
Having both Bow Kid and The Snatcher laugh at her did not help her mood one bit.