Chapter 2 already because I love you.

There is magicness here, yes, lots of cool fantasy creatures, and could that be the beginnings of a plot? Yes it is.

Bainbridge's empire is named after Matt Berry's second album Opium because I honestly couldn't think of anything better.

And I wrote a Moon monologue, but it's really really short. I haven't done him before. Oo, I feel like one of the gang now.

Enjoy please :-)

The former Queen read her letter again, a grin spreading over her stunning features

The former Queen read her letter again, a grin spreading over her stunning features. In a rare moment of glory, she threw back her head and laughed in pure joy. She put the letter down and ran through the corridors of the manor to her son's bedroom.

"Vince!" she called, bursting in without knocking. "Good news! There's another suitor coming to see you, a good one. A very rich, very powerful man who's inherited his entire kingdom very recently and has no lover to rule with him."

The only response she got from her son, who was still in bed at half past noon and probably would be for a good while yet was a muffled "mmmff".

She strode forward and pulled the covers off him, the only thing that could spur her lazy son to movement at this time of day, and, as expected, caused a rush of desperate movement and an almost desperate cry of "Mama!" as Vince leapt forward and tried to wrestle his covers back off her.

"Look at me!" his mother shrieked. "Vince! Listen to me and you can have them back!"

Vince calmed, albeit moodily, and the Queen pushed the covers back over to him, and he pulled them back around himself and leaned up against his massive pile of pillows, pouting.

"Now then, darling, the King Dixon Bainbridge of the Opius Empire has taken quite an interest in you," she began.

She noticed that her son was leaning blankly against his pillows with his head turned to the side and a glazed look on his face. She reached out her hand and slapped his cheek.

"Vince, are you listening to me?" she snapped.

"Ow, Mama, you know I'm no good at geography; I don't know where anything is," her son protested.

The Queen sighed. "South-west of here, about three hundred miles away."

She watched Vince's eyes roll back into his head in concentration.

"It doesn't matter where it is," moaned the Queen. Her voice hardened, becoming stern and authoritative. "It just matters that you're marrying the King and you're going to live there. He's coming in three days, and you had better make a good impression."

She marched back to the door, then turned back to her son. "And get up before lunchtime," she snapped.

The deep night brought sleeplessness to Princess Vince Noir. He'd been lying awake thinking for hours now. Thinking kept him up a lot. He couldn't rest until he'd made sense of things, and his days were so full of proposals and prettiness and Things that he never had time to do it in the day. So he lay awake until the early hours every night trying to figure out his life, and then eventually fell asleep, his escape from everything, and then he got shouted at by his mother for sleeping into the afternoon.

Tonight even thinking seemed too big for him. He would never be able to get to sleep tonight. He got up and crossed to the window. It was a beautiful night outside. Mostly clear, but just a light covering of cloud. If he were to go out tonight, it would be just enough to obscure the moon so he couldn't be seen, but it would give him just enough light to see where he was going.

Opening the window and sitting on the windowsill, he groped blindly for the ivy growing up the walls. He found it, and clasped his hands around a thick vine, and began his slow descent. Careful to be quiet, he reached the ground. He slipped along the long carriageway and pushed between the gates and out onto the street, guided by moonlight.

"I'm the Moon, what is… guiding the princess, what isn't a girl… I think. But he wants to be secret, so I better shut up. I'm the Moon."

The princess eased himself silently through the streets, coming eventually to the city walls. The gates were closed at night, and guarded, and he knew he'd be punished if they caught him sneaking out, but it didn't really matter anyway. His mother would be the one punishing him, so the family would be spared the public humiliation of a lawbreaking heir, and she could never really be arsed with it.

The gates were easy enough to sneak out of, if you knew how. And Vince did know how; he'd done it many times before. There was a spot between two guard posts, shrouded in darkness, where some bricks had been loosened, and could be removed to create a tunnel just wide enough to accommodate a skinny person like Vince. Vince crept over, removed the stones carefully, and squeezed through.

Once out beyond the city limits, he held out his arms and basked in the feeling of the open wind. He took a deep breath in, the let it out, beginning as a scream, before it settled into a single long, melodious note. He grinned and ran down the hill, diving over shrubs and bracken as he ran further away from the city. He loved it here. Not many people knew about it, because they never thought of what might be outside the gates. It was an open moorland, full of thick bushes and ferns and low-lying plants, most of which were full of thorns. And there were animals too; beautiful little sprites with long horns, fairies with bright wings, miniature dragons with scales that shone in the moonlight, serpents that danced, and countless other unnameable creatures. And even, if you waited long enough, very patiently, you might see a stunning majestic unicorn. Vince had seen one once, but only once. He often wanted to wait and see if he could see her again, but it had been very late when he saw her before, and he had almost been caught sneaking back into his home.

He sprinted along the flat ground, leaping yet more undergrowth, until he came to a particularly deadly-looking patch of thorns. He stopped and knelt down before it, searching through the spiked branches without touching. After a moment, he caught a movement within the thorns. And then, she emerged.

She was a sprite, and an unusually friendly one. She would always come to meet him when he came, when most sprites shrank away, mistrustful. The fairies were far more trusting than they were, but she always trusted him. She grinned at him from the top of the thorn bush, golden hair shining a dull yellow in the muted moonlight, the horn in the centre of her forehead reflecting the light like a needle. He didn't know her name, because she couldn't speak, at least not in words he could understand.

He held out his hand and she hopped onto it and ran up his arm to his shoulder, the tiny impacts of her feet the only indicators that her six-inch body was there at all.

"Shall we go and meet some friends?" he asked her.

He heard her excited little high-pitched giggle by his ear, and set off again at a run, confident that she would hold her position on his shoulder. As he ran, the fairies began to emerge and flew along with them, circling them, ducking and diving and playing with each other. A sapphire-blue dragon ran along the ground at Vince's feet, occasionally leaping up to snap at the fairies. About ten metres or so to his side, a pure white puma, with its fur shining magnificently, ran alongside, graceful and breathtaking.

He felt the sprite's hands and horn pressing on his cheek, and he slowed to a stop next to a twisting bush covered in large leaves and small white flowers. The sprite stepped elegantly from his shoulder and onto a thin branch, and Vince fell back onto the ground, revelling in magic and his own exhaustion. He gazed up at the sky, where the moon was watching through the clouds, silly smile on his face, and where, lower down, a few fairies had broken away from the rest, and were leading the little dragon, who had now taken to his wings, in a playful aerial dance over the moor. They fell and tumbled, and he twisted and followed them in loops and spirals. Vince laughed.

He heard a sound from above his head, trying to get his attention, and he looked up to see his sprite leaning over on her branch, looking down to him. He sat up and looked at the mischievous grin on her face, returning it momentarily before she turned away to the fairy who had landed on the same branch. The sprite leaned forward and whispered in the fairy's ear, one hand resting on her rounded face, the other on her waist. The fairy laughed, and her smiling face seemed to be a light source of its own. They both turned back to look at him, sporting the same wicked grins, looking at him a moment longer than necessary to make sure they had his full attention. Then they leaned in and kissed each other, the fairy's arms wrapped around the sprite's slender shoulders, and the sprite immersing one hand in the fairy's auburn hair. Vince watched transfixed as they pressed themselves closer in to each other, pale skin meeting pale skin, their tiny eyes closed in passion. They broke apart, their arms remaining softly around each other for a moment, before the fairy flew back into the air, and the sprite jumped down into the bush.

Grinning from their show, Vince turned his gaze back to the deep velvet sky. The dragon was hovering still now, and several fairies had gone. He felt one touch down on his shoulder, and he turned to smile at her. She took a strand of his hair, and, stretching up, began to braid it intricately, a look of deep concentration on her face. Vince watched her face and her arms, until another fairy, a male, flitted down close by them, and said something to her in their own language. She let go of his hair, and he felt her gentle tiny kiss on his cheek before she joined her friend in the sky.

He fell back, tired now, and he knew he could have slept if he didn't have to get back home. He lay there for a while, how long he couldn't say, and then eventually, when all the creatures had retired to wherever it was they went during daylight hours, he pulled himself from the floor and set off, alone, at a slow walk back to the city walls.

"Evening," came a monotone voice, very close to him.

Unable to help himself, Vince involuntarily squealed and jumped back, almost falling, when he realised that someone, without him even noticing, had managed to sneak up on him until he was actually standing right next to him.

Then he was glad it was still dark, because he was going embarrassingly red to see that this unseen assailant was barely five feet tall, standing relaxed, and more than likely stoned.

"Hello," he said.

"Didn't mean to scare you," said the other person, still entirely in monotone, with a sort of detached look on his face. He was definitely quite stoned, Vince decided.

"S'okay," replied Vince, smiling, and doing his best to make it look like it wasn't forced. "Who are you?"

"I'm Naboo, that's who," answered the other, with the air of someone repeating a catchphrase.

"Naboo? Are you that witch that lives by the city walls?" Vince asked.

"I'm not a witch, I'm a shaman," said Naboo, a hint of annoyance creeping into his neutral voice. "It's a completely different religion."

"Sorry," said Vince.

Hearing the apology, Naboo smiled, the first movement Vince had seen on his face since he had arrived. "S'alright," replied Naboo, his voice becoming less neutral and more happy-sounding as he spoke. "You're the former Boy Princess Vince, aren't you?" he asked.

"Yeah," answered Vince, praying in his mind that Naboo wasn't planning to kidnap him, or worse, tell his mother he'd been outside city walls.

He was in luck. Instead, Naboo just smiled again and pressed on Vince's arm, urging him to keep walking towards the city. Vince noticed the moonlight and the approaching dawn playing on the gold embroidery of his robe. It was a long robe, almost like a dress. Yes, Vince cheered internally, he wasn't the only one!

"There's things written in the stars about you," Naboo said to him.

"What d'you mean?" Vince asked.

"A prophecy," Naboo explained. "About the true love of the boy princess. That his true love will be the one person who knows what others never see."

"How do you know it's true?"
"The signs are always true," Naboo told him, betraying no hint of ever having questioned this.

"How can you be sure?" Vince asked.

"It was a sign told me you'd be here tonight."

They walked a while in silence.

"Do you know what it is my true love'll know?" Vince asked eventually.

"Yep," said Naboo.

"Does that mean you could be my true love?"

Naboo laughed, mirthfully but not mockingly. "No, I'm an asexual."

"Doesn't that mean you can have your own babies?" Vince asked, slightly confused.

"No," replied Naboo.

"Oh…" Vince looked a little lost.

"Well, sometimes it does," Naboo explicated, "like with micro-organisms and that. But not in my case."

"Oh, okay," said Vince, satisfied with this information. Naboo grinned.

Vince sighed. "I'm supposed to marry this King Dixon Bainbridge. D'you reckon it'll be him?"

"I very much doubt it," Naboo said, urgency suddenly evident in his voice and worry on his face. "He's not one you wanna mess with. Do your best to get out of that one. You've got a talent for that." Naboo paused a while. "Oh, and do me a favour and don't mention my name with him," he added. "I owe his family a life debt, and being a bit immortal, that's quite hard to get out of."

Vince giggled, and looked ahead to see that they had reached the city walls.

"Go on," said Naboo. "Before it gets too light to go in without being seen."

"Thanks," Vince smiled, as Naboo turned to walk away. "See you later."

"Yeah, you will," Naboo called back.

Vince crawled back through his hole and replaced the stones. He snuck through the streets in the dim light of the oncoming dawn, squeezed back through the gates of the manor and climbed back up the ivy to his bedroom. He buried himself back under his covers and fell straight into sweet, untroubled sleep.