Thanks for all the reviews, favorites, follows and views this story has gotten so far.
Okay, so a couple things I don't think I addressed last chapter, though I probably should have. I hope nobody thought it was that unrealistic that Peri knew Neverland had caused Elsa and particularly Anna's memory loss (by the way, Anna forgot more because she's younger). After all, in Secret of the Wings, there was that book that had the reason for Tink and Peri's wings lighting up even though they were the only twin fairies, so Dewey couldn't have known about that from someone else. So I figured the fairies could have noticed memory loss in some random child Peter brought to Neverland (or maybe Wendy, John, and Michael).
And now for the issue of adults seeing or not seeing fairies... It's so confusing because there are so many contradictory things out there. I feel like most adults wouldn't be able to see them, so then if a child's like "Look a fairy!" the adult would just be like "Yeah right." or "You have a great imagination" or something, and then fairies would remain mostly undiscovered.
So why did I have Kai see Elsa? Well, I imagine some adults would still see fairies, and for some reason he just struck me as a likely candidate (by the way, Gerda can't see them). I have no idea why Dr. Griffiths would be able to see them in TB&the Great Fairy Rescue if he scorned Lizzy for believing in them; it's pretty illogical, but it was sort of necessary for the plot.
How about this some-adults-seeing-fairies-but-the-majority-not thing just is one of those unexplained but accepted things, like how Elsa got her magic or Olaf and Marshmallow somehow being alive or Elsa making a dress and ice skates with her magic. (Originally I tried to come up with an explanation but the books and movies contradict each other and it wasn't possible to stay true to both, so I cut it out).
Ok, now for Chapter 22. (Just F.Y.I. A lot of things about the wand are different from the books). The curtains open and it's showtime!
They probably stayed in Arendelle for a couple of hours, but none of them were really keeping track of time. Anna and Elsa traded memories, and sometimes just sat on the windowsill in thoughtful, companionable silence. Tink and Peri joined them on the windowsill, but they let Elsa and Anna have their very long 'moment' of nostalgia together.
Anna realized she missed her old life terribly, despite having forgotten it. If she could have, she would have turned back into a human and run around the castle until she found her mother and gave her a huge hug. Anna wasn't sure she wanted to be a fairy anymore, if it meant not seeing her parents. Actually, she'd never really decided to become a fairy, it had just happened when she'd blurted out a wish. She sighed. Why were these things so complicated? She loved being a fairy, but she hated not seeing her parents; and it was worse that, according to Elsa, her mother couldn't even see or hear her.
Anna wondered why something good in her life couldn't happen without something bad happening too. Like right now, where she was a fairy but her mother couldn't see her. Or when she'd first met Tink, she'd had to get lost in the woods and separated from Elsa first. It really wasn't fair.
Tink asked "Do you two want to turn back into Clums- humans?", although she knew the answer already. As she predicted, the answer was unanimously 'yes'. Tink nodded, and said "I'll start working on the wand as soon as possible." Inwardly, she was leaping with joy. At last, she would finally get to tinker with the wand! It had been hard to resist simply pulling it out and starting before Elsa and Anna wanted to be humans again. Maybe hiding it in that box and shoving it behind all those other boxes in her bed had done more than just prevent Anna and Elsa from finding it.
Tink and Peri thought they should start heading back to Neverland, and Anna (who apparently hadn't been listening earlier) asked "But what about Mama? She'll miss us even more.." Peri again delighted in saying that no time would pass when Elsa and Anna were in Neverland. Anna didn't even give a second's thought to why that was. The fact cheered the princesses up greatly, and Peri wondered if it had eased their guilt tremendously. It probably had, since their mother would only be worried for a day instead of weeks or even months.
Peri laughed as Elsa and Anna spiraled around each other as they flew. They didn't look as if they were overwhelmed with guilt now (they certainly had when discussing the queen's lack of reaction to Elsa). Considering that they'd literally dragged the princesses along to Neverland with them in the first place, the fairy twins would've felt rather guilty themselves if the princesses had remained guilty and miserable.
Peri kept mulling over her secret, accidental wish, the one about Elsa and Anna being accepted. It might have actually been a bad thing that they had been accepted and joined talents, since it had probably aided Anna's memory loss. Since she was accepted as a fairy, it probably wouldn't have been to hard to believe she'd always been a fairy. Or had it just been Neverland itself making them forget, like Dewey had told her? (Dewey had also told her he'd abducted Clumsies to do research on that, but she was pretty sure he was joking- she certainly hoped so, in any case).
Peri suddenly felt a rush of guilt. Wasn't that what they had done to Elsa and Anna? The princesses had been trying to get home before the twins took them to Neverland. But she knew that Elsa and Anna were glad they went to Neverland, and she assumed they were glad they'd become fairies. She was sort of surprised that Anna and Elsa had really only experienced the everyday life of fairies, with the most exciting event being a hawk sighting (not even an attack or a fight to drive it away). Considering how many things the girls had gone through since she and Tink met them, she was surprised they hadn't had a more adventurous fairy experience. The fairies had been preparing to bring winter to the mainland- the London variety, not the Arendelle variety, in case Elsa's storm hadn't extended to London.
Now that Tink and Peri had seen London, they knew the fairies would have to bring Winter there. If Elsa helped with the preparations, they could bring it to London sooner than without her, but still they were running pretty late.
Late in the night, they arrived back in Neverland.
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Although Tink and Peri had thought the princesses' troubles and worries about home were over now that they knew time wouldn't pass when they were in Neverland, they were wrong.
Elsa, in particular, went through mood swings of exuberance at being a fairy and depressed homesickness. Nobody was sure why. Maybe, in her sad periods, Elsa felt guilty for having fun when she knew how much their mother missed them. Fortunately, these bouts of sadness only took up a small fraction of the day; she was happy most of the time.
Anna, too, went through periods of homesickness, but without the guilt. She just missed her parents and some of the castle staff, and it showed up most when she first woke up and before she went to sleep at night. Other than that, as long as she was having fun, she didn't dwell on it.
During one of her lower moments, Elsa sat near the border on the warm side. Although she felt comfortable in the Winter Woods, all that white snow did get boring, and the change in scenery was nice. She'd just made a ton of snowflakes with the winter-talents, but had come over here for some alone time.
"Regretting your wish, sweetheart?" A slightly sarcastic voice said behind her. Elsa slowly turned around. She knew that voice, but she couldn't place it. Oh. There was that fairy with the huge black ponytail that they'd flown with to steal the wand from Kyto. Vidia.
Elsa shrugged, looking away, and said "It wasn't even my wish. Anna said it and then we were both fairies."
"Well, dearest, I think it's an improvement." Vidia's voice almost lost its snarky tone with that statement. "At first I thought it was the best thing ever, but now..." Elsa paused and remained quiet for a good portion of a minute. "I love this and I hate it" Elsa began again "I hate being homesick. I hate..." She moaned and flopped over, saying "It's too complicated."
Without even thinking about it, certainly before she could stop herself, Vidia said "It's not what you imagined, is it?" Vidia gasped as soon as she spoke. How had that slipped out, and worse, how would this affect her reputation? Sure, Vidia had been in a similar situation with her flying-with-infinite-speed wish, but the misery that followed that wish wasn't even something she liked to think about. Well, she was definitely thinking about it now, and she couldn't help empathizing with Elsa.
Elsa was talking again, and despite originally wondering why anyone would care about the emotional roller coaster of an eight-year-old's conflicted feelings, Vidia found herself listening. "Yeah. I didn't know I wouldn't be with Anna... or that Mother wouldn't..." She broke off again, and this time she didn't continue.
"Do you wish you'd never turned into a fairy?" Vidia asked, truly curious. "No!" Elsa sat up and spoke with a force that surprised Vidia. "It's just..." She didn't bother saying how complicated it was this time, she simply let out a dramatic sigh and flopped over again.
Vidia decided this was the end of the conversation, especially since Elsa hadn't said anything else since. Vidia sped away, the snide part of her glad to be rid of this stupid girl's whining, but deep down she knew that was really just hiding the small connection she was starting to feel with Elsa.
Less than 15 minutes later, Elsa was out of her slump and went flittering off to look for Anna.
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Tink groaned and flopped over, her head making a loud bonk when it hit the top of her desk. She was tempted to whack it a few more times, just to punish her stupid brain. She needed to find some way to get the wand to reverse Elsa and Anna's wish without it causing all sorts of trouble like it had last time. The first part would be relatively easy once she woke the wand up, since she'd reversed wishes before, but the second part was a whole different story, since an awake wand can cause lots of mischief.
She tossed her latest leaf scroll- a blueprint for a contraption that would shake the wand in the hopes that the motion would somehow distract or lull it- over her shoulder, where it joined the other leaf scrolls that were practically carpeting her floor.
She'd been at this for nearly two days and had gotten nowhere. The ideas for preventing wand mayhem had seemed great in her head, but once she'd drawn out some sketches, she was shocked. They had become more and more far fetched; some of them were so bad it was embarrassing that they'd come from her mind. She'd probably be the laughing stock of Tinker's Nook if the other tinkers saw these, especially the sketch of the restraint harness that the wand would undoubtedly just magically slip out of or destroy (most likely both).
Maybe all this planning was pointless. After all, the wand had wrecked havoc last time, and she'd thought she'd been prepared. Perhaps there was no way to subdue it, and they'd just have to try to minimize damages. After all, wands were pretty much the most powerful things in existence. But then again, she knew they could be controlled. They'd gotten the wand from a group of fairy wannabes who could get wands to obey them. Said fairy wannabes had started to hate fairies when the fairies had decided to give this wand to Kyto to save Mother Dove rather than just dumping it back in a storage room where the wannabes kept all their other wands. She couldn't exactly go ask them for help because, well, they were holding a grudge and would probably be glad to see the wand causing fairies trouble.
Someone knocked on her door. "Go away!" Tink snapped, but some of the effect was lost because her face was still up against her desk. The door opened anyways, and Tink turned to glare at her unwelcome visitor. She saw it was Terence, and he was carrying a tray with a bowl of soup and a mug of Chamomile tea. When she saw this, her irritation vanished completely; Chamomile tea was her lifelong favorite (somewhat eerily, it had always been Peri's favorite, too).
"Knickity, Knickity, Knock" Terence always said that, for some reason. "Hey," he said as he fluttered over to where his friend was. "I brought you this in case you've been forgetting to eat again." Tink began to eat, nodding her thanks. It was true; when she was really caught up in her work as a Tinker, she could easily forget necessities like eating and sleeping. She was glad Terence had checked up on her.
Peri was spending a lot of time with Elsa and Anna, both because they were friends and because someone needed to keep an eye on them. There was no way anyone in their right mind would let them go off by themselves for long stretches of time after they'd managed to turn into fairies on one of their unsupervised excursions, not to mention the time with Dewey's pet lynx or Elsa trying to fly back to Arendelle herself.
"So how's the tinkering going?" Terence asked once Tink had finished her meal. Tink, who hadn't hidden anything about her work from Terence since the whole autumn scepter/moonstone/Mirror of Incanta incident, groaned and said "Horribly. I'm completely out of ideas, and the ideas I had..." She didn't finish the sentence, but Terence got the idea. Before she could stop him, he began looking at the leaf-scrolls littering her floor. When he began laughing, she was quite tempted to literally kick him out, until she realized his laughter was fairly benign.
"Tink, I think you're looking at this the wrong way." Terence explained. "Trust me, that thing pulled me all around Pixie Hollow. I don't think it's possible to physically hold it back." Tink frowned and asked "What am I supposed to do? I can't just let it run rampant."
"Well, no, but what about controlling it magically?" Terence suggested. Tink stared at him and said "It's a magic wand. You can't just... outmagic it. If you could perform more magic than a magic wand, they wouldn't be such a big deal, would they?"
Unfazed by her reaction, Terence said "Pixie Dust is pretty powerful, you know." Tink frowned at this idea. "Wouldn't Pixie Dust just make the wand more powerful?"
"If you only use a little bit, then yeah" Terence answered "but I think a lot of Pixie Dust could overpower the wand. Maybe we could dunk it in the Pixie Dust pool..." Ordinarily, the idea of anything going in the Pixie Dust would have appalled Terence, but he doubted the wand would contaminate the Pixie Dust.
He paused for a bit, and then said thoughtfully "Wait a minute, didn't you use Pixie Dust on the wand last time?" Tink startled. That was right, wasn't it? She hadn't really thought the Pixie Dust had done anything besides waking the wand up, or maybe she'd wanted to believe she'd fixed the wand without any sort of magical help. At any rate, she'd totally forgotten about that, and was now feeling quite stupid.
Tink stood up and said "Come on, let's go run this idea over with Zarina." A part of Terence was annoyed that Tink wasn't content with going over his idea with him, but he realized Zarina knew a lot more about the different types and uses of Pixie Dust than he did.
The two of them flew over to Zarina's lab without talking. Fortunately, Zarina answered her door and let them in (though Tink might have come in uninvited if she'd had to). Zarina's lab looked rather interesting. Sunlight trickled in through one round window on the far wall, leaving the whole room moderately dark, even in the middle of the day. Underneath the window was a table crammed with all sorts of test tubes, jars of ingredients, and books.
Tink asked bluntly "Do you know how to control a magic wand with Pixie Dust?"
"There has to be some way," Zarina said to Tink and Terence; both of them agreed. Terence launched into a discussion with Zarina about how the various properties of Pixie Dust could affect the wand. Tink listened with little comprehension, not liking that she was the one who didn't understand most of what they were talking about. What in Neverland was "Sprinkle power"?!
Terence and Zarina reached the consensus that Zarina's Pixie Dust Alchemy could probably help, and seeing as that was currently out of Terence's realm, that left only the former pirate fairy to do it. Zarina's face immediately lit up at the idea of a new experiment, and she began thinking through various formulas and properties on the spot.
Although Tink would have liked to be the one to figure out how to get the wand's compliance, she didn't feel that jealous because she was still the one who would get to tinker with the wand. She raced back to her room, rummaged under the bed for the box with the wand, flew back to Zarina's lab, and handed it to her. Once Zarina closed the door, Tink was surprised to feel somewhat relieved. At least now she wouldn't have to worry about wand madness, although she'd done an outstanding job resisting it so far.
She should probably go help the other fairies prepare to bring a hurried winter to London. It's not like she had much else to do at the moment. At least in terms of reversing the wishes, right now all she could do was wait.
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Anna flew over to Fawn, who was waiting for her on a tree branch. "Ready to go, kiddo?" Fawn asked. Anna nodded and said, somewhat irrelevantly, "Me and Elsa, we're going to go home soon. But I'm still Bluebell right now." This reminded Fawn of just how young Anna really was. She almost saw the five-year-old Anna instead of the teenage body she was stuck in now.
Instead of heading into the forest like they normally did, Fawn and Anna flew to the heart of the animal-talent section of Pixie Hollow. It was full of various animal shelters that fairies had made, and functioned as a cross between a rehabilitation center for injured or sick animals, a nursery, and a large place for temporary pets. Some of the animals stuck around forever, but most eventually went in the wild.
"I thought you might like to play with some animals, without having to teach them anything." Fawn explained, and Anna's eyes almost bugged out. She hadn't gotten to just play with the animals since her acorn fight (if that even counted), since she had always been helping Fawn teach them. Anna was so excited that she didn't even notice that it was a little suspicious that Fawn wasn't treating her like an animal-talent in training anymore (Tink had talked to her about Anna and Elsa wanting to be Clumsies again, and Fawn had agreed that she should probably stop treating them like permanent additions to Pixie Hollow).
Anna happily settled down by some ladybugs and giggled when they crawled all over her. It tickled! She spent some time chasing them around before she moved on to playing with chicks, baby hedgehogs and even rats. But it didn't feel quite the same now that she remembered she wasn't really a fairy.
Even though she was having lots of fun, she couldn't help but wish that Elsa was with her. But Elsa was in the Winter Woods helping the winter-talents finish another winter to bring to London.
She thought about how nice it would be once they were back home in Arendelle and she and Elsa would be together forever again.
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Tink knocked on Zarina's door two days after she'd dropped the wand off. She'd checked up with Zarina often, but the Pixie Dust Alchemist hadn't found a solution yet. Zarina opened the door. Her hair stuck up in every angle, probably due to fumes from her experiments, and she looked a little tired. But she looked excited, too.
Tink's hopes began to rise, and this increased when Zarina eagerly pulled her into her lab. "I think I found it!" Zarina gushed. "What did you do?" Tink asked as Zarina tugged her over to her workbench. Dusk was falling, but their glows and the various glowing jars of Pixie Dust kept the room pretty well lit.
"Nothing!" Zarina exclaimed. "But I stumbled across this!" She held up a jar of Pixie Dust, presumably one of her creations. It looked mostly like normal Pixie Dust, only the color was a bit off- it was more yellow than gold.
"I'd almost forgotten about it. I made it even before the talent-switching dust. It was actually one of my first creations." She paused long enough to pique Tink's curiosity and said "I call it Happy Dust"
Tink snorted at that, and Zarina playfully challenged her to come up with a better name. Tink's immediate question was if it worked. "Trust me, I used it on pirates all the time," Zarina assured her, giving a cheesy wink. "That's why they were singing. And if this can make pirates sing goofy songs, it can make the wand more cooperative."
Zarina went back to describing the Happy Dust. "It really wasn't that hard to make. Pixie Dust already makes people happy, so I just combined it with pleasant things, like the scents of flowers and chocolate. Oh, and some sounds, like babies laughing." Tink wondered how you combined a sound with Pixie Dust, but she didn't bother asking for an explanation that would just confuse her.
"Just sprinkle it on the wand when you wake it up, and that should help. I already gave it a bit, so it should be in a pretty good mood already." Zarina told her. Tink thanked her, picked up the box with the wand in it, the jar of Happy Dust and started for the door. She stopped, turned, and asked for one more favor.
Around an hour later, Tink sat at her workbench in her room. Peri was also there, as were Elsa and Anna. The latter two were asleep, so thankfully they wouldn't cause any trouble (Zarina may have helped them fall asleep with a small amount poppies, which conveniently also assured that they wouldn't wake up for a while. But it was around their bedtime anyways so it wasn't too different from drinking sleep-inducing tea).
Cautiously, Tink reached out her hand to touch the wand. She'd woken it up with Pixie Dust, but now was the risky part. A wand can't do magic unless someone is holding it. Hoping Zarina knew her stuff and really did put the wand in a good mood, Tink gently curled her fingers around it, thinking soothing thoughts.
The wand didn't buck or drag her around, or do anything at all, really. So far so good. She took a deep breath, and let her mind connect with the wand's. Even though she could still see her hands holding the wand over her workbench, she had the sensation that she was surrounded by a void of emptiness, like outer space with no stars or planets. It was just her and the wand.
"All right," She said mentally, as soothingly as she could, "It's time to reverse a wish. We'll work through it together, while you're all nice and relaxed."
The wand didn't reply, but it wasn't resisting, so that was good. Caressing the wand gently, Tink continued her quasi-telapathic monologue "There was a wish you granted a while ago where you turned two little girls into fairies" The wand conveyed a vague assent to this statement. "Well, that was an accidental wish, and it's time to reverse it."
She waited for the sensation of magic flowing from the wand, but she didn't feel it. "Did you not understand?" Tink asked the wand, out loud. "No, I understood," The wand answered mentally in a somewhat annoying sing-song. Tink blinked, a little surprised it had responded. The wand didn't say anything else for a bit, so Tink asked, in her head again "So why didn't you reverse it?"
"Won't!" Answered the wand, now sounding like a very young child refusing to take disgusting medicine. Tink focused and delved deeper into the wand's mind. She couldn't find the source of the problem there- the wand's mind wasn't twisted up like last time. Whatever the problem was, it was out of her reach.
Hoping to lighten it's mood even more, Tink sprinkled some more of Zarina's "Happy Dust" on it. "There," She said, inwardly frowning. Sure, it wasn't fighting her like it was last time, but it seemed less cooperative for reversing the wishes now than it did then. "that's better, right? Now will you reverse it?"
It promptly did not reverse the wish, again. She tried caressing it more. It refused. She added yet more "Happy Dust" and while the wand was now giving off an almost euphoric aura, it still refused. After several repeated trials with the same result, Tink's patience was wearing thin. She shook it, glared at it, even banged it on the table but was still met with defiance. The worst part was the wand wasn't broken, so there was nothing to fix.
Her face eventually became as red as a cherry. Only when she was imagining snapping the stupid thing in half did it respond in some sort of cooperative manner. But no matter how hard she cajoled, bargained, and even pleaded with it, the wand would not offer another option. It just kept singsonging bad news.
Tink broke her connection with the wand, and could see on Peri's face that her twin knew something was wrong. Tink felt horrible for her sister when she told her. "The wand says it will reverse all the wishes, or none." She took a deep breath and said the rest quickly "And our suspicions were right. It says that Elsa will one day have control of all the magic, and you'll be left with nothing."
Uh oh. Things are looking sort of bad. Dun, Dun, Duuunnnn!
I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I enjoyed writing it, although it's sort of strange. Even though I have the whole story planned out, the Anna/Elsa as fairies part isn't turning out quite how I imagined (even though everything I imagined is happening). I feel like Elsa did when she was talking to Vidia :) *Slumps over and thinks about how complicated it is*
Oh, yeah, so with the Bluebell thing when I said there would be spoilers. In fairy tales or something, bluebell is a flower that makes people obsess with fairies and lose interest with humans (or something I like that). Sound like Anna? (well, technically she forgot but they're sort of the same thing). I really didn't know about that until after I'd planned it out.
Did anyone else notice that they dropped Zarina after The Pirate Fairy and she, like Peri, had absolutely no role in Legend of the Neverbeast? And Terence was all but forgotten after TB& the Lost Treasure. What is it with them and dropping characters?
I hope I didn't forget to mention anything, and I'll see you next chapter. Again, I hope you enjoyed this!