Crowns of the Kingdom

Chapter 31: Dreams Left Upon a Shelf

In the blank vastness of Inpotentia, Mickey Mouse drifted.

Contrary to what he had expected, it was not utterly dark nor totally silent—Mickey found that he could hear his own agitated breathing, and could see his own body as clearly as if it were floodlit…although he could not identify any source of light. It was as though he were an isolated figure being projected onto an otherwise empty movie screen. Then his eyes adjusted to the peculiar conditions and he began to notice inconsistencies in the darkness—eddies of shadowy cloudiness, specks of color that seemed to belong to distant objects, too distant for him to make out what they were.

Something soft struck him gently in the back of the head. He reached back and felt knitted yarn. It turned out to be a hat—a winter hat, banded red, green and blue and topped with a fluffy bobble. An appliqué patch near the bottom edge depicted Huey, Dewey, and Louie in winter clothing.

Mickey scratched his head in puzzlement. It seemed like the general sort of hat that might be sold at Disneyland during the winter months, but to the best of his knowledge this particular design had never been offered.

Something else drifted by. Mickey snatched at it and found it to be a wristwatch, almost entirely normal except that the number at the top of the face was 13 rather than 12. It was a copy of the hall clock in the Haunted Mansion. Again, it was something that might logically have been sold at the park, but never actually had been.

Mickey was beginning to detect a pattern.

The third object engulfed him completely, for it was a full-sized beach towel. Mickey was just able to recognize the garish design, based on the attraction poster for the Enchanted Tiki Room, before he was cocooned in terrycloth. As he struggled out of it, he realized that he had landed on a solid surface.

Clumsy with anticipation, he clawed the towel off his head and opened his eyes—only to squeeze them shut again when they came under assault from tremendously bright light. When he dared to open them again, he did it little by little, letting them acclimate so that he could see where he was.

He saw sky, electric blue sky splashed with dazzlingly white fair-weather clouds, like the most wonderful spring day in history. Yet at the same time it was something greater than sky—deeper and vaster somehow, more like the reaches of outer space than like anything that belonged to a mere planetary atmosphere. If he shifted his focus, he could see what looked like layers of deeper blue beyond the electric blue, shading to indigo and then black. But it hurt his eyes to look that hard.

Bizarrely, despite the glaring hue of the sky, there was no sun. The light seemed to be coming directly from the blueness itself.

He was sitting on an island in the sky, a little chunk of land perhaps fifteen feet across, planted with beds of maroon pansies. At the center stood a large topiary figure, but Mickey paid it little heed at first, instead venturing to the edge of the islet and peeking down in order to see just how high up he was. It proved to be a meaningless question, for there was no actual ground to be seen, only more of the same field of sky, in fact an endless ocean of sky, going on forever in every direction, broken only by patches of those gorgeous white clouds, as well as, Mickey now saw, varicolored bits that must be more floating islands.

He turned his attention to the topiary statue. It was an image of himself, considerably larger than life and striking an exuberant pose with arms spread. It was oddly familiar, and not just because it was his own likeness.

Around that point, he realized that the floating platforms were not stationary, but were moving respective to each other. One about the same size as the one he was standing on cruised alongside it, enabling him to clearly see its cross-section with layers of dirt and concrete and odd bits of pipes and electrical wires sticking out. The upper surface was paved over with asphalt, and there was a souvenir cart on it. The two islands were close enough for Mickey to recognize some of the merchandise—camera film and batteries and postcards and refrigerator magnets and various odds and ends, most bearing the Disneyland logo and some prominently featuring imagery from the 1967 remodel of Tomorrowland. The islets soared side-by-side for a moment, almost near enough for Mickey to jump from one to the other if that were not an utterly insane proposition, and then skewed off from each other again.

Another soon drifted into view, this one quite small and bearing only a pair of doorways, one labeled Dames and the other Monsieurs, with corresponding silhouettes of a woman and a man wearing flounced clothing and carnival crowns. Through the doorways, tiled walls and floors were visible, but without any actual restroom building to be part of the setup.

Mickey slumped back down into a sitting position. Inpotentia was getting weirder, and weird in more ways, by the minute, and so far he hadn't the foggiest idea how he was going to find Minnie and/or Maleficent.

As he stared out at the skyscape, racking his brain for a solution, or even a hint, something new passed into view: a huge, fluffy cloud bank, white as marble and roiling like a handful of pearl barley in a pot of soup. Plumes of vapor curled out from the main mass, in a manner uncannily similar to solar prominences, and thick shafts of warm light occasionally pierced the cloud's surface and beamed outward. There was something immensely inviting about it.

Mickey's islet veered slightly in its flight, and a moment's examination revealed that all of them were following curving paths, because they were orbiting the big cloud. The regularity of the courses was somewhere between the sedate, orderly march of planets circling a star and the madcap quantum uncertainty of electrons whirling about an atomic nucleus. Mickey watched them swing along their paths, occasionally coming within a handspan of colliding but never actually doing so, and decided to revisit the idea of jumping from one to another.

As it happened, one was just approaching, a nice broad, flat one that seemed like it would be relatively safe to leap to. Mickey crouched, calculating, and launched himself across the gap. The lingering effects of the pixie dust helped some, and he landed squarely on the other island…and immediately felt like he had seen it before. It was flat because it featured not a structure, but a patterned pavement made of tessellated brick tiles. It was the pattern that was familiar; Mickey knew he had seen it before, he just couldn't quite remember—the concept art! For the remodel of Fantasyland in the Eighties! The artist had sketched in a patterned ground to keep the new courtyard layout from having a big blank space in the middle, but it hadn't actually been installed.

In a flash, Mickey remembered where he knew the topiary from—another concept sketch, this one for the entry tunnel into Toontown. The walkway in the picture had been lined with topiaries of the Fab Five, but they had been left out of the real thing when the project ran over budget. Suddenly he realized that all the soaring islets represented much the same thing. Like the watch and the towel, they were all things that might have been part of Disneyland, but never actually made it. Unrealized ideas, the very essence of Inpotentia. They hadn't turned into Dispirations because they had all been documented in some way, even if it was just some Imagineer's personal doodle pad. Little brainstorms that never got any further than the Blue Sky phase…

He chuckled to himself. Of course. Then he shook his head and turned his attention back to the task of jumping from platform to platform. Minnie was waiting for him. The thought energized him, and he sprinted to the edge of the brick tiles and practically flung himself at the next islet, with an early design for the Splash Mountain log vehicles that had been rejected on the grounds of not being cute enough. From there he made his way across a little archipelago of ideas for the lampposts lining Magic Way, and then up to a storefront with no store behind it, bearing a sign with a different proposed name for what had eventually been dubbed Disneyana. At that point, he paused to catch his breath, checked his progress, and found that there were only a few orbits left between him and the cloud. The next one was several feet farther away than he was normally comfortable jumping, but that hardly mattered under the circumstances—he jumped anyway, and if his successful landing next to a large barrel labeled SARSAPARILLA was more due to pixie dust or updrafts than his own athleticism, he didn't care.

As he was sizing up the next leap, a ribbon of cloud whipped out, twenty or twenty-five feet, swept across his platform, and snagged him as neatly as a jellyfish catching lunch. With a short cry of shock, Mickey was yanked into the heart of the white fluff.


He landed amid thick fog. The fog didn't surprise him, but the landing did.

The phrase "pea soup" sprang to mind as he looked around him, and up and down. He could barely see his own feet, the mist was so dense, and the ground felt fragile and uneven beneath them. He felt his hair rise—although he had intended to enter the cloud, the fact that he had been grabbed and pulled in unnerved him. And not being able to see past his own nose…he didn't trust the situation one bit.

"Show yourself!" he demanded. He left off the standard "who's there?" because he already had a pretty good idea.

There was no reply. Mickey took a step and felt the surface he was standing on crack and crumble out from under him. He reflexively backpedaled, groping for something to steady himself, and one hand found something like a smooth pole, neither wood nor metal. Clinging to it, hoping it was as solid as it felt, he scrambled, found his footing. As he stood there, panting with delayed alarm, he realized that the air he was gulping down carried a whiff of sugar and peppermint. The pole he was grasping was slightly sticky.

After a moment, Mickey came down from his fright. He smacked his forehead with his free hand. "Am I the Sorcerer's Apprentice or aren't I?" he asked himself. Making certain of his balance, he adjusted his hat—true to the Fairy Godmother's prediction, it felt more real, here—rubbed his hands together to summon up some power, raised his arms over his head, and finally flung them forward and outward. It worked—a brisk breeze kicked up, blowing the mist away in a widening patch around him and enabling him to see his surroundings.

He was standing on a ridge of a peculiar mountain made of some sort of glassy, garishly colorful stone. The sugar smell grew stronger as the fog cleared, and it soon became evident that the mountain wasn't made of stone at all, but candy—rock candy in bold shades of pink, orange, and green. The pole was actually a giant candy cane, one of several in a cluster. There were gumdrop outcroppings, lollipop forests, and veins of licorice running through the cliff faces.

A place-name popped into Mickey's head: Big Rock Candy Mountain… The originally planned setting for the Casey Junior Circus Train that had been deemed a little too colorful to build for real, although the model had been delicious. Here in Inpotentia, naturally enough, the whole thing really was made of candy. And now the mist was rolling down off the slopes of the mountain and the clear space was spreading, and more of what Mickey could only think of as Disneyland-That-Never-Was was becoming visible.

Under other circumstances, he would have found it magnificent. As in the skyscape he had traversed in order to get there, each attraction sat on its own island, but these were of course much larger, and instead of flying through the air, they were stably rooted in a sea of fog, like the peaks of hills rising through low clouds. There were maybe fifteen in all, of various sizes, connected to each other by bridges ranging in type from a simple affair of knotted rope to an elaborate glass or crystal construction lined with prismatic sculptures. The one closest to his position, linking Big Rock Candy Mountain to an L-shaped section of an Eighteenth Century New England street (Liberty Street…), looked like a natural stone arch. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the arrangement of the islands or the nature of the bridges joining them. The whole scene was twilit, as though under an overcast sky around sunset, and indeed the sky overhead was blank and gray. There was not another living soul to be seen.

Or was there? Scanning the panorama of unused attractions for possible clues to Minnie's location (though he had no idea what to look for), Mickey spotted a flicker of movement among the colonial-style buildings of Liberty Street. Almost without thinking, he began scrambling down the side of the candy mountain. It was steep, but there were plenty of hand- and footholds, and when a fragile spur broke off in his grip, he simply popped it into his mouth and enjoyed the sugar. Soon he was on the ground and jogging across the stone arch.

"Hello?" he called as he loped onto the cobblestones. "Is someone there?" There came no answer, and no sign. Mickey slowed to a walk. Had he only imagined it?

No!—he heard a sound, as of hurrying footsteps. It seemed to be coming from around the corner of the street. He followed, and again found nothing—nothing except another bridge, at the end of the street where the harbor would have gone if the area had been built at Disneyland. On the other side was another block of street, like a slightly more urban version of Main Street ending in a broad cul-de-sac—Edison Square. There, again, was the flash of something moving, too far away for Mickey to make out what it was, but at least he could be sure now that he wasn't seeing things.

"Hey!" he called to the other, breaking into a run again. "Hey, wait!"

The chase continued for several minutes, the not-quite-seen stranger leading Mickey on a chaotic zigzagging path from island to island, down the winding paths of International Street and around the circular pond of the Duck Bumps and past a full-sized mockup of the airship Hyperion, through the sacred groves of Mythia and among the hot sets of Hollywoodland. And all the while, the other person never made a sound, nor let Mickey see any of themself but the most fleeting of glimpses, at such a distance that he had no hope of seeing what they actually looked like.

He finally lost the trail in a small, square-ish plaza fronted by building facades in the style of Chinese architecture. Much of the space was occupied by a sort of patio dining area, with tables and chairs arranged so as to have a good view of a raised stage rather like a curtained gazebo with a pagoda roof., Mickey collapsed, breathless, onto a chair and had a look around. The area also featured hibiscus shrubs in planters and a fountain decorated with a laughing Buddha statue. Chinatown…

Gradually catching his breath, Mickey let his glance fall upon the table. There was a folded piece of paper sitting under the salt shaker, and his name was written on it. Intrigued, he picked it up. A coin tucked inside fell out into Mickey's hand as he unfolded it. He held the coin aside for a moment while he read the note:

"I figured you'd wind up here sooner or later. Sorry I can't help you more, but we both know you're more effective when you figure things out as you go along. Still, this should get you a clue. Drop it in the donation box."

It was signed not with a name but with a sort of smudge, which actually proved to be a silhouette of a round head with long ears. Despite his growing frustration with the circumstances, Mickey smiled a little. Then he turned his attention to the coin.

It was made of brass, about the size of a quarter but a little thinner, with a square hole stamped out of the center. A Chinese coin, then, logically enough. Mickey read the phrase "donation box" again from the note, and began looking around for such an object. He found it bolted to the side of the stage: a carved rosewood box with a slot in the lid. He shrugged, walked over to it, and dropped in the coin.

Almost instantly, the sound of a gong rang out over the plaza, as from a loudspeaker. Mickey jumped three feet, landed slightly off-balance, and staggered backward until he regained his equilibrium. A young woman's voice with a light Mandarin accent was speaking.

"One thousand gratitudes for your donation, honorable one. Hark now to the wisdom of the Teacher of Teachers."

Mickey smacked his forehead. One thousand gratitudes? Maybe it was just as well Chinatown had never been built. All the same, if Oswald thought this would help him, he wasn't inclined to argue. He sat back and watched the stage curtains slide open.

The figure on the stage—audio-animatronic, naturally—was an old man with a long gray-white beard, garbed in ornate silk robes and seated on a chair so fancy that it almost qualified as a throne. He held a scroll in one hand and an inkbrush in the other. His eyes were closed at first, but he opened them as the curtains stopped moving, and began to speak in a solemn voice.

"Confucius say, do nothing to another that you would not want done to yourself. Confucius say, to know what you know, and to admit what you do not know, is to have true knowledge. Confucius say, he who seeks virtue shall surely find it."

Mickey fidgeted in his seat. If this was just going to be a laundry list of proverbs delivered in that outrageously stilted dialect, he might have to question Oswald's judgment after all.

"Confucius say, pay attention when I'm talking to you."

Mickey started and stared at the figure of the sage, who looked as serene and dispassionate as ever. "Who, me?" he asked.

"Confucius say, if in seeking you find no one else, you must look to yourself. Confucius also say, he who hires a teacher but ignores the lecture wastes both his money and his time and is twice over a fool."

Mickey took that to mean, "You don't see anyone else here, do you? Besides, you paid for this." He swallowed, embarrassed, and addressed the great thinker. "Confucius, sir…Wise One…whatever…I'm in a heap of trouble here. My best girl has been kidnapped and I have no idea where to go to find her or the kidnapper. But…uh…my pal Oswald seems to think you can help."

"Confucius say, the cautious seldom err."

"That's all well and good, but it doesn't help me find Minnie."

"Confucius say, it does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."

"But it does matter! Who knows what Maleficent's doin' to Minnie while I'm here chatting with you?"

Confucius pulled a face. "You know, you're not making this very easy for me," he said, setting aside his stationery. "I spent my life pondering the ways by which men might be made virtuous, not figuring out how a cartoon mouse could rescue his sweetheart from a wicked fairy. It's going to take me a little time to find some maxims that are applicable to your situation."

Mickey was taken aback, and no longer certain that Confucius was just an audio-animatronic. After all, Big Rock Candy Mountain was really made of candy here…

"Sorry," he said in a small voice. "Take your time."

Confucius rubbed his chin for a moment. "Ah," he said. "These should do. Confucius say, he who would direct the future must study the past. Confucius also say, wherever you go, go with all your heart."

Mickey tried to parse that in relation to his predicament. Study the past…I've certainly been doing plenty of that lately…go with all your heart…that's exactly what I'm trying to do, Minnie is my heart. "I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid I'm not getting what you mean."

Confucius sighed, picked up his inkbrush again, and gestured at the ground. "Confucius say, study the past. The recent past, if that's any help. And follow your heart. I shouldn't think you would need to be told that."

Mickey followed the pointing brush. There on the ground, something sparkled faintly. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be the thin outline of his own footprint. There was still a little pixie dust on his shoes, and he had left a barely perceptible trail. Study the past… It suddenly occurred to Mickey that Oswald had led him by an awfully circuitous route in order to get here.

He approached the stage once again. "Sir…do you mind if I, uh…?" He made a little gesture to indicate that he wanted to climb up to the top of its tiered roof.

"Confucius say, without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established. Nonetheless…render yourself unconscious."

"Render…? Oh, 'knock yourself out.' Heh. Thank you, Confucius. For everything." He prepared to climb.

"One more thing for you to keep in mind, Mickey Mouse: Confucius say, repay kindness with kindness, but repay injury with justice."

"No kidding. Thanks again. Maybe I'll see you around sometime, huh?"

"Confucius say, the small man comes and goes as he pleases without regard for virtue, but the superior man brings a muffin basket on return visits."

"I'll make a note of it," Mickey said with a chuckle. Confucius settled back into his initial pose, and the curtains began sliding closed. Mickey gripped one of the square columns supporting the stage roof and began to haul himself up.

Within a few minutes, he had reached the uppermost pagoda-like tier, from where he could see most of the tracks he had left. Despite the gaps in several places and the oblique angle, he was able to piece together the shape of his course.

It was lopsided and the outline was far from smooth and there were a few extraneous lines, but it was very clearly a Valentine-style heart. Go with all your heart

On the other hand, looked at another way, it was a stylized arrowhead. In that case, it was pointing to a bridge right at the edge of the cleared area, leading off into the surrounding fog.

Mickey took a few more moments to work out the shortest path to his new destination before descending from the pagoda roof. Chinatown was still once more, the curtains fully drawn across Confucius's stage.

"Mickey Mouse say, update your script for the 21st Century," he muttered wryly before taking his leave of the area.

On his approach to the bridge, Mickey wondered why Oswald had taken him on such a wild trip and then dropped him off in Chinatown and had him ask the sage for help, which turned out to be an interpretation of the wild trip. Why not just lead him straight where he needed to go? The only possibility that came to mind was that Oswald himself didn't want to cross that bridge, which was not a comforting thought.

When he reached it, he began to get an inkling as to why. Made of hewn stone, the bridge looked like it had once been as solid as anything, only now many of the great slabs were cracked and eroding, and it was patched and shored up in many places by weathered wood planking, and mottled over much of its surface with moss and lichens. He wasn't at all certain it would take his weight, especially without knowing how long it went on.

"Okay," he told himself. "No problem. Oswald wouldn't send me to certain doom. It's probably more stable than it looks." He prodded the stones experimentally with his foot. They failed to suddenly collapse, so he put a little weight on them. Still, no ominous shifting.

And it wasn't like he had any other options.

Mickey squared his shoulders, hiked up his robe so as to avoid tripping on it, and set out.

The bridge rose gently for about twenty yards, forming a simple arch that began to level off just where it disappeared into the mist. As Mickey made his way up the slope, the stones and boards occasionally swayed a little under his feet, but no worse than that. Soon he had arrived at the fog bank, which rose up almost like a solid wall.

Well, not for long. Mickey summoned up another breeze to clear things up ahead of him, revealing more of the same antiquated stonework, and resumed walking. This time, however, the wind was channeled by the short safety walls on either side of the bridge, creating a minor vortex effect, and the fog curled back around behind Mickey after he had gone several more feet. He found himself in the center of a moving pocket of clear air, surrounded on every side by impenetrable grayness. It was profoundly unsettling, but he didn't want to risk putting any more strain on the deteriorating masonry by calling up a stronger wind.

And it went on like this, pace after pace after pace, long after he would have expected to reach the other end of the bridge given the shape of the arch. To make matters worse, the light seemed to be fading. Or maybe the fog around his little sphere was getting thicker—either way, at this rate he had only a few minutes of visibility left.

His foot snagged on a leafy vine growing over the stones, and he yanked it free with a grunt of annoyance. That sound, however, was eclipsed by a series of snaps as the plant tore free from the surface of the bridge, followed by a drawn-out crunch as the slabs, suddenly deprived of one source of support, sagged and began to break apart.

Mickey cried out in alarm as the bridge started to tilt out from under him. All concerns about visibility forgotten, he broke into a run, charging right into the fog, thinking only to put as much distance as possible, as fast as possible, between himself and the zone of collapse. After several frenetic seconds, he tripped on a rough spot and went sprawling. He cringed, expecting at any second to drop into the unknown void, but the shuddering and crashing died away behind him.

Mickey got shakily to his feet and took stock of his new situation. He had apparently run right through the fog bank and out the other side, because he could see the last leg of the bridge stretching away in front of him. He glanced up at a night sky—moonless, but spattered with stars in numbers such as he rarely got to see anymore unless he was on a camping trip or there was a city-wide power failure.

Then he looked ahead to where the bridge was leading him. It was a castle.

But it was not very much like Sleeping Beauty Castle at all. It was a looming, forbidding fortress, stark gray, perched on a rocky bluff. A functional castle, like the ones that had appeared in early concept drawings of Disneyland before Walt and the Imagineers realized that the park's centerpiece needed to look cozy and friendly. The bridge ran right up to the main gate, over what Mickey could only assume was the castle's moat, though when he looked down all he could see was another river of mist.

The windows of the castle glowed with torchlight. As Mickey approached, the air acquired an unpleasant electric feeling, a gust of bitter wind swept across the bridge, and the lights flared green. Things like fat black snakes crawled up out of the vapor-covered moat and slithered up the walls and coiled around the turrets in criss-crossing paths, and then bristled with spikes, for they were not snakes but thorny briars. And over it all, he heard Maleficent's throaty chuckle, challenging him to step inside the gate and face her.

So he did.

To Be Continued…


A/N: As you might have guessed, some of the shelved ideas Mickey encounters in this chapter did eventually wind up being used in a greatly altered form. Disney never just throws anything away, not even ideas. Liberty Street became Liberty Square at the Magic Kingdom, Edison Square was downgraded into a single attraction, the Carousel of Progress, and International Street was upgraded into the World Showcase at Epcot. Some aspects of Hollywoodland made it into Mickey's Toontown, while others were incorporated into Hollywood Pictures Backlot at Disney's California Adventure.

Most of Confucius's lines are actual sayings of his, although I reworded some of them slightly to sound better in context. And added the stupid "Confucius say" bit, because you just know that if they had actually built this thing back in the Fifties, that would have been part of the script. That sort of thing was part of the charm of the decade, and by "charm" I mean "forehead-smackingly embarrassing ethnocentrism and American cultural imperialism." Hey, kids! Ignorant racism is funny!

Sorry. Soapbox time over.

On a completely different note, more information has become available about "Epic Mickey" since I mentioned it in the Author's Note a couple of chapters ago. In particular, I urge you to look up the video of the artist sketching Mickey facing off with one of the "Beetleworx" enemies. It's overlaid with one of the music tracks from the game, and if it is at all indicative of the soundtrack as a whole, it's just one more thing to wait upon tenterhooks in anticipation of. (When you get to be my age, you can end a sentence with a preposition if you want to.)

—Karalora