Crowns of the Kingdom

Chapter 9: Adjuncts and Ramifications

Donald, flabbergasted, immediately shifted his gears into "concerned boyfriend" mode. "Daisy! Sweetheart! Are you okay? What happened? How did you wind up in that tool shed?" He rushed forward to take her by the hands and guide her to a nearby crate, where she sat down gratefully."

"I don't know," Daisy confessed. "One minute I was doing some last-minute touch-ups on my costume, the next minute everything went dark and I was…floating! It was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber!"

Minnie looked skeptical. "When have you ever been in a sensory deprivation chamber?"

"Once every two weeks," Daisy explained blithely. "It's part of my beauty treatment. You have to shut out all distractions so that your natural beauty can express itself without interference."

"I see…" Minnie said with pursed lips.

"So what happened after that?" Donald prompted.

"After what? Oh, right! So I was floating, but I was kind of…not floating, at the same time. I know it doesn't make sense, but that's what I remember. Maybe I was standing still, and it was everything else that was floating. I think I need to lie down for a while." She lifted the back of one hand to her forehead melodramatically, while Donald patted the other hand in sympathy.

"Donald," said Mickey, "take her home so she can get cleaned up and changed into something more…practical." Daisy's Mardi Gras costume, with its purple sequins and giant ostrich feathers, was completely unsuitable. For anything. "Explain the situation to her while you're at it. The rest of us will see about picking up the trail of the second crown."

"Second crown?" Daisy echoed blankly as Donald helped her to her feet and began steering her away from the construction site. "What crown? What in the world is going on? Why is New Orleans Square being remodeled? Just how long was I stuck in that shed?"

"It's a long story, toots," Donald sighed. Then the pair was lost to sight.

"How do you suppose Daisy wound up in there?" Goofy wondered as the four of them exited the enclosure and continued on toward the raft dock.

"I have a hunch," said Mickey, "but I'm waiting to get more of her story before I jump to any conclusions."

One raft, inelegantly labeled "Becky Thatcher" in off-white paint, sat moored at the dock, its motor running idle, with two more ("Tom Sawyer" and "Injun Joe") secured nearby. The oddness of it struck Mickey: with no guests present to be entertained, and no Cast Members to entertain them, Disneyland was nonetheless perfectly operational. The raft was ready to move; he had only to unhook the mooring rope and release the throttle to take them across the Rivers of America.

Then came the tricky matter of steering. Neither track-bound like the big ships nor as maneuverable as the hand-paddled canoes, the rafts could be daunting for the inexperienced to control. Too much speed would cause water to build up in front of the leading edge of the platform, splashing the passengers—too little increased the risk of being overtaken by the Mark Twain or Columbia on their rigid circuit. And since only one side of the craft was capable of docking, each trip necessitated a 180-degree spin that could, if the operator wasn't careful, take the raft way off course. Fortunately, they were the only ones on the river, giving Mickey the leisure to take it slow and careful.

They realized almost immediately after arriving at Tom Sawyer's Island that they wouldn't be able to find any clues. It wasn't the same island that it had been in 1955; development into an elaborate playground had involved a wholesale alteration of its landscape. Trees and boulders had been relocated or removed altogether, rope bridges and artificial caves and log cabins and forts had been built. The little clearing where the Mouseketeer Crown had lain was, in a sense, not even there anymore.

Having determined that the lead was a dead end, the four of them returned to the "mainland."

"So now what?" asked Minnie.

"Back to Central Plaza," Mickey said after half a moment's consideration. "Merlin and Wart should be there with Wart's crown by now, and we can't charge ahead without Donald and Daisy anyway."

So they returned to the spot that they were increasingly beginning to think of as home base for the adventure. Merlin was indeed there to hand over the ornate crown of England's kingship with an exaggerated air of ceremony that bordered on parody. (He seemed in some ways not to be taking the state of affairs quite seriously enough…but then again, this was Merlin, behind whose puckish sense of humor nestled one of the sharpest and wisest minds in the entire Disney Family. If he seemed to be taking a crisis lightly, it was assuredly only a seeming.) The aged wizard remarked casually upon Daisy's sudden reappearance and wished them all luck in their endeavor before retreating into Fantasyland to carry out his assigned task of research.

At length, Donald and Daisy returned, she freshly turned out in a lavender blouse and matching ribbon for her perky feather-do. She looked slightly troubled, which in Daisy Duck usually translated into an adamant, aggressive determination to fix whatever was troubling her, often with extreme prejudice.

"Donald tells me it's 1965," she said petulantly. "I don't care what anyone says; I am not wearing go-go boots again."

"Did you find anything?" asked Donald.

"No," Mickey sighed. "It looks like we may have to send Minnie up the Castle again."

"I'll do it," Minnie growled, "but I won't like it."

"Maybe it won't be necessary," Daisy said reassuringly. "I only have bits and pieces of the story so far, and you guys don't have my whole story either. Maybe we can figure something out if we put the two together."

"That's a great idea!" Mickey crowed, perking up considerably. "You go first, Daisy—and don't leave anything out!"

"Right," Daisy agreed, clearing her throat. "Like I said before, I wanted to do a last-minute 'theme check' on my costume, so I went to New Orleans Square to pick up a few more beads and feathers. While I was there, suddenly it was like someone threw a switch and shut off the world. I couldn't see a thing, or hear anything except my own voice! And I was all alone…" She paused for a moment to smooth her ruffled composure. "Anyway, I don't know how long I was stuck like that. My whole sense of time was screwed up. When the world came back, I was locked in that tool shed. I spent the entire night in there!"

"Gosh, that sounds awful!" Mickey sympathized. "You're okay now, though, right? No lingering side effects of the, uh, sensory deprivation chamber?"

"No—why, should there be? Do you know what happened to me?"

"I think so. I'm pretty sure you took a trip to Inpotentia." And while Daisy listened in rapt, disturbed fascination, Mickey explained—in detail—what had happened to Disneyland and the Disney Family. He told her what they had learned from Maleficent of Inpotentia, the condition of only possibly existing. He gave her a rundown of the quest, including where they currently stood.

"Something doesn't make sense," said Daisy. "I've been around since before 1955. Why did I get sent to…what did you say it was called?"

"Inpotentia," Minnie filled in.

"Inpotentia, right, thanks. Why did I wind up there?"

"Because New Orleans Square wasn't around in 1955, is my guess," said Mickey. "It was the area that got…uncreated; you just went along for the ride."

"Hey, ya know what?" Goofy broke in. "We just learned a bunch o' stuff worth knowin'!" He began counting off on his long fingers. "One: It's not just characters that got sent to Inpotentia, but lands and attractions and everything about Disneyland that hasn't been built yet. Two: A person can end up there if the place they're standin' in does. Uh…three: A person who goes there that way won't be affected the same way as a person who goes there because time got backed up to before they existed yet. And three: the place might not have to come back all the way for the person to come back!"

"You mean four," said Donald.

"I do?" Goofy asked blankly. "What'd I say?"

"You said 'three' twice," the duck explained. "The second 'three' should have been 'four.'"

"Well, shucks, Donald, you just made me lose count." Donald rolled his eyes. "But as I was sayin'," Goofy continued, "maybe it's a good thing Daisy got stuck for a little while! Otherwise, we wouldn't have found out all that important stuff!"

"You wouldn't be saying that if it had happened to you," Daisy sniffed.

"And it wouldn't have happened to you if you'd been on time to the Happiest Homecoming," Mickey pointed out wryly. "But that's not important. Goofy, what did you mean about people being affected? Everyone who came back is okay, right?"

"More or less," said Donald soberly. "After Minnie dragged you off last night, we got to talking with the people who'd been trapped there."

"Uh-huh," Goofy agreed. "It sounds pretty awful, not really existin'! They said they had to keep remindin' themselves who they were, every second, or they'd feel like they were completely disappearin'!"

"But that didn't happen to Daisy," Donald finished, pulling his girlfriend close.

"It's easier being a visitor than an inmate, I guess," she said philosophically.

"There's no time to lose, then!" said Mickey. "Well, Daisy? Any ideas where we should start looking?"

"Hmm," she said thoughtfully. "What about Tomorrowland?"

"How do you figure?"

"You found the first crown—the one with the Mouseketeer hats on it—on Tom Sawyer's Island, right? Don't you remember Walt's original plans for Tom Sawyer's Island? What he wanted headquartered there?"

Gradually it dawned on them. "Why…the Mickey Mouse Club!" Minnie exclaimed.

"Exactly," said Daisy. "And the design of the crown representing the second decade uses the Moonliner as its basic motif. Ergo, it should be somewhere in Tomorrowland!"

"Wow, Daisy!" Mickey opined. "That's…that's brilliant!"

"I know!" she piped. "Besides being great for a girl's looks, sensory deprivation helps with mental focus too!"


There was no end to them, and the servitude of all was hers for the asking. They would do anything just to be noticed, and did not have the wit to draw any distinction between true acknowledgement and the empty promise of it.

They lacked substance entirely; even the word illusion credited them with more reality than they possessed. The only place they found a semblance of existence was in the mind of someone real, and even there they were weak, able to do no more than provide fleeting impressions of what they might have been.

But they were getting stronger. Maleficent was seeing to that, submitting briefly to the gross unpleasantness of experiencing them in all their misbegotten variety. She permitted each one a brief foray across her consciousness, that it might draw enough sustenance to have a sense of purpose. It was an exercise in masochism. They represented all the senses, every possible avenue of creativity, so that no mode of her perception was left unsoiled as she ushered them, the rejected orphans of the human imagination, onto the threshold of the existent world. She didn't much mind. Maleficent had long ago accepted that the road to power was a toll highway. And as personal sacrifices went, these were superficial—aesthetic annoyances, really.

Her lair was thronged with them: tunes never quite composed, words almost coined, recipes that just missed being attempted, graphic designs never sketched, plans never formalized…all manner of ideas, forgotten by their creators but not by themselves. A casual observer would have noticed nothing. They were invisible, intangible, inaudible, undetectable, until they touched the mind and revealed the degradation that they had become. Yet here and there were hints—a flicker in the shadow of green torchlight, the suggestion of a whispered voice riding a chilly draft—indicating that something was coalescing out of the nothingness of them.

Oh, yes, they were getting stronger. Soon they would be strong enough. Soon, Maleficent would unleash them—the Dispirations—on the Magic Kingdom to do her bidding.

The Wicked Fairy added her own malevolent laughter to the dissonance her new minions were creating in her head.


If seeing the old Fantasyland again had produced a curious mix of nostalgia and disorientation, entering the Tomorrowland of 1965 was almost entirely unsettling. Of all the lands, Tomorrowland had required the most updates and revamps over the years to keep pace with a continuously evolving vision of the future. While Fantasyland's single remodel had amounted to an enhancement of its timeless theme, its progressive neighbor had undergone several extensive transformations over the years, each time emerging with a different focus. While it had acquired a few permanent landmarks, too good to give up—Carousel Theater, the overhead trackway originally built for the PeopleMover, the ridged cone of Space Mountain with its graceful alien spires—none of those had been built by 1965.

Thus, the Tomorrowland into which the Sensational Six ventured was one that had long since stopped being familiar to them in any way. In many ways, it had hardly changed since Opening Day, especially in the vicinity of the land's entrance. Instead of giant shining mockups of silvery circuit board, the gates were adorned with the Clock of the World and a double column of flagpoles flying the colors of many nations. The space beyond looked—to eyes accustomed to the 21st Century—almost unnaturally open, like real estate going to waste.

This was the very end of the era of corporate-sponsored walkthrough attractions, of Monsanto and Kaiser Aluminum and Dutch Boy. Most of those exhibits, which had been installed as stopgaps when Tomorrowland's original construction ran over-budget on both time and money, had already closed by 1965, but nothing memorable had yet arisen to replace them.

"Oh, Donald, you weren't kidding!" Daisy exclaimed. "I'd forgotten how much this place had changed in the last forty years! What are we going to do?"

"We're going to bring it back up to the present, ten years at a time," Mickey replied. "So, Daisy, you seem to be on a roll today—where should we start looking for the Rocket Crown?"

"I was going to suggest the Moonliner, but it's obviously not there," said Daisy, pointing ahead. With no tall structures in the intervening space, the tall, proud rocket was clearly visible in its entirety, without a hint of gold interrupting its bold red and white color scheme.

"Well, it shouldn't be too hard to spot, wherever it is," said Minnie. "It's gold, and almost everything here is white and silver."

They reached the broad, mostly uncluttered area at the end of the entry promenade and spread out slightly, each one scanning their line of sight for the telltale flash of gold and gems. After several fruitless minutes of this, Mickey spoke up.

"Fellas, we need a better plan than this. There's a lot of ground to cover here, and buildings to search, and we're all just glancing around and hoping the crown pops into view!"

"It's too bad this isn't really the future," Goofy said glumly, "or we'd have nifty inventions to help us look. Like…uh…"

"Like little robot servants?" Daisy suggested, holding her hand parallel to the ground to suggest something about thirty inches tall.

"Yeah!" Goofy said, brightening. "Or an automatic radar crown detector!"

"Or X-ray specs!" Donald chimed in, encircling his eyes with his fingers. All three of them broke into laughter for a moment. Then Donald straightened up with an excited expression. "I've got a great idea! Follow me!"

He led them at a brisk walk back up the entry promenade, all the way to Tomorrowland's entrance, where he turned a sharp left and approached the entrance to the southern building complex. Within the hexagon formed by a stick-and-ball model of a carbon ring, glowing neon tubing over the doorway spelled out the words "Hall of Chemistry."

"What's here?" asked Minnie. She made a face. "Monsanto didn't actually invent X-ray specs, did they?"

"No, I think we'd remember something like that," Daisy said dryly.

As was typical of the early sponsored attractions, the interior exhibits were filled with glowing praise for the life-improving miracles of modern chemistry, amounting to little more than the Monsanto Corporation patting itself on the back. Donald swept past all this to a "Cast Members Only" door near the back. Beyond this was a break area, a small administrative office, and a short hallway terminating in another ordinary door. This one, however, was plastered with large signs reading "DO NOT ENTER" in about twelve languages (except for the Chinese, which actually translated as "Please leave the egg rolls on the small table to the right. The money is inside an envelope taped to the back of this sign. Keep the change. Thank you.") and one small sign reading "The Professor is IN."

Donald ignored all the brusque commands and marched right through the door. It opened onto a downward-trending metal stairway, at the bottom of which was yet another door. The signs on this one bore messages along the lines of "TOP-SECRET: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL STRICTLY FORBIDDEN" and "THIS PROBABLY MEANS YOU." These, too, Donald disregarded.

"Should we really be down here?" Goofy wondered nervously. "Those signs look awful serious!"

"Not to worry, Goofy, old pal," Donald replied confidently. "I'm authorized personnel."

The group continued down a long, dimly lit hallway to a final door ("THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO TURN BACK"), which Donald slowly pushed open with an air of supreme caution, as though expecting the unexpected. When nothing happened, he waved them all through while calling a cheery "Hello?" to the presumed occupant of wherever they had arrived at.

"LOOK OUT!" barked a frantic voice. Before the six of them could react, the attack came. There was a loud hiss—several loud hisses in fact, from all sides—and they found themselves engulfed in a noxious opacity. A choking chemical mist surrounded them, blotting out all light and setting them coughing violently.

"Oh, goodness!" cried the voice from before. "Let me help you out a little over there."

There was a whining, whirring sound, and the foul cloud dispersed before a draft of fresh air driven by a high-powered electric fan, allowing the Sensational Six to catch their collective breath…and revealing the smiling face of their host, Professor Ludwig von Drake. Donald had taken them to his Viennese uncle's semi-secret lab. (Mickey had always known it existed, but never exactly where it was located.)

"Well, look at you kids!" von Drake emoted gleefully. "That's very fetching! Oh, well, it needed a test run anyway."

Minnie and Daisy simultaneously caught sight of each other, pointed, and shrieked. Then they stared at their own pointing hands and shrieked again. Then they pointed at the guys and shrieked some more. Then the guys joined in. Even Pluto was aghast at the sight of himself.

All six of them had been dyed a mélange of outrageously bright colors, bordering on the psychedelic. (Well, it was the Sixties.) The hissing sound had been several aerosol canisters, the pernicious miasma a fog of lurid spray paint.

"What's the big idea, Uncle Ludwig?" Donald demanded furiously. "Are you trying to kill us?"

"Of course not!" von Drake said merrily. "That's just my experimental automated laboratory security system. It doesn't hurt the intruders or restrain them, but it sure makes them conspicuous when they tryin' to run away! I'm thinking of calling it 'Spectro-Protectro;' what do you think?"

"I think I need another shower!" Daisy wailed.

"Yeah, sorry about that. Here, this should do the trick." He pressed a button on a remote control unit the size of an unabridged dictionary, and several pressure hoses whipped down from the ceiling to douse them in water. Another button brought the fan into play again, blasting them with hurricane-force winds, so that all six of them were soon both clean and dry, if rather shell-shocked and woolly with static electricity.

"Uh…thanks," said Daisy, trying to put her feathers back in order without the aid of a beauty salon.

"Pretty slick, huh?" the Professor beamed. "It's also useful for when an experiment goes BOOM! and all of a sudden there's a great big mess all over everywhere."

Mickey's opinion was that was exactly what had just happened, but he didn't say so.

"So, Donald, favorite nephew of mine," von Drake continued. "What's the occasion for this visit with all your little friends?"

"You mean you don't know?" Mickey blurted, taken aback.

"Is it somebody's birthday?"

"He wasn't even at the Castle when it happened," said Minnie. "He's probably suffering from the same amnesia that struck everyone in Fantasyland."

"Business as usual," Mickey sighed. "Professor von Drake, this might shock you, but even as we speak, Disneyland is under attack!"

Von Drake narrowed his eyes. "What kind of attack?" he said seriously.

"The kind of attack," Mickey replied, "that rewinds time and traps the members of the Disney Family in a place where they don't even exist!"

The elderly duck looked pensive. "You know something, Mickey? That actually might explain…well, I better just show you what it actually might explain. Come on over this way."

He escorted them further into the lab, which was about the dimensions of a high school gymnasium but much more densely populated with…stuff. Bookcases and cupboards and stainless steel counters doubled as partitions, dividing the lab into a mazelike conglomeration of specialized workspaces. Most of what was going on was scientific in nature, even if the purpose of it wasn't readily discernible—bubbling test tubes, buzzing Jacob's ladders, a watermelon bristling with electrodes. One area seemed to have been converted into a makeshift lecture hall, with about twenty chairs, a slide projector, and a reversible chalkboard on which were marked the words "INSIDE-OUT EARTH HYPOTHESIS" and a sketch of a globe with the outlines of the continents drawn backwards. In another corner, a large cage contained several albino rats that appeared to be performing The Pirates of Penzance. Periodically, von Drake would stop to peer at something or other and make a few notes on a clipboard before continuing. Every spare surface was heaped with loose papers and books on every conceivable subject, supporting the Professor's self-acclaimed status as The World's Foremost Expert on Everything.

Their destination turned out to be a large wall-mounted (or in this case, back-of-shelving-unit-mounted) electronic display. It looked like a map or a building blueprint, neat white lines on a cobalt background. A massive control console, covered with flickering lights and rows of switches and bearing at least one standard computer keyboard, spread out at the screen's base. The whole thing looked like it belonged at NASA.

"This," von Drake said grandly, gesticulating with an educator's pointer, "is the latest development in top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, man-of-the-hour space-time-matter-energy scanning surveillance analysis technology: the Cosmoscope 5000!"

"Hey, look, it's a map o' Tomorrowland!" Goofy observed. Sure enough, the pale outlines in the diagram were those of the buildings and other structures in the area of Disneyland that all of them were currently occupying. It was obvious once you knew what you were looking at.

Von Drake made an avuncular chuckle. "You sure hit it on the nose! Maybe you not as dumb as they say! I been using the Cosmoscope 5000 to keep tabs on stuff that goes on the park when I'm not looking. And today I find this little piccadilly!" He stabbed with the pointer at a slowly blinking yellow dot in the Submarine Lagoon. With every flash, an expanding circle of light spread over the map.

"What is it?" asked Mickey.

"A temporal anomaly," von Drake explained, scrunching up his face the way he often did when lecturing. "Right in this spot, time is going all screwy for some reason."

The Sensational Six traded meaningful glances. "I think we might have a lead on that," Mickey said.

"But that's nothin'!" the Professor went on. "The really puzzling thing is over here." He turned to the console and began punching buttons. The map display scrolled to the right, revealing the eastern edge of the public part of Disneyland, a few small office bungalows, the outer berm, and then…nothing. The crisp details of the map, including the gridlines, faded out into a pixellated haze.

"It's not supposed to do that," said von Drake. "We should be seein' Harbor Boulevard here, not this mishmash. And now look at this!" He tapped more buttons and flicked a few switches, and the image on the monitor changed to a kaleidoscopic swirl of color, like a screensaver based on the Mandelbrot set but lacking its complex order. There was no rhyme or reason to it, just endlessly shifting hues.

"And what's this, the best of Spectro-Protectro?" Daisy asked sarcastically. She was still a little bitter about having been so unceremoniously plastered with paint.

"This," von Drake announced dramatically, "is a live video feed coming from the very edge of the park property. This is what it looks like outside the park right at this moment. Combined with the failure of the Cosmoscope 5000 map and what Mickey just told me about us bein' under attack, it can only mean one thing." He leaned forward, planting his palms on a conveniently situated table, and eyeballed them sternly. "Disneyland is disconnecting from reality!"

To Be Continued…

A/N: Thanks to all my readers for your patience while I got this chapter finished. It actually ran a little longer than I had expected because of a bit of self-indulgence on my part—Ludwig von Drake is one of my favorite lesser-known Disney characters and I couldn't live with myself if I shortchanged him. Another reason for the delay is the setting: photos and maps (for reference) of Tomorrowland prior to the 1967 remodeling are almost impossible to come by, even in this age of Google.

Minnie comes across a little catty at points; I think it's because she's miffed at Daisy for turning up all of a sudden and pulling the prima donna act. She'll be better next chapter, I promise.

—Karalora