Fairytale of Doom

By CrimsonStarbird

Chapter Six – Obligatory Princess Kidnap

Having already deduced that the guildhall in which he had awoken wasn't real, Laxus wasn't honestly expecting to find Magnolia outside, although he couldn't stop his heart from sinking further at the confirmation that he really was somewhere far from home.

Unlike triumphant Magnolia, which seemed to rebuild taller and prouder every time Fairy Tail's antics knocked it down, few houses in this village had multiple floors. Little more than huts, they clustered around the false guildhall as if for shelter, thick with its shadows. Dirt tracks too thin for any vehicle, pressed into the ground by generations of human and animal feet, ran between them. Laxus might have thought it was the Magnolia of a hundred years ago, saved from the tyranny of Blue Skull by his own great-grandfather and companions, and rebuilt in conjunction with the fledgling guild at its heart – but this guildhall was as grand as the real one had been before Alvarez had invaded, and only the town had regressed.

Or, rather, this world's town was as it always had been, and the guildhall had been ripped from memories of his own world, mixed with some ancient castle, and slammed down in the middle of it.

If it was supposed to fool him into thinking he was still in reality, Laxus thought, then it wasn't doing a particularly good job.

Then again, given how he'd already almost fallen into an enchanted sleep and nearly been eaten by a dragon, trickery seemed to be lower on this world's agenda than good old murder.

Laxus risked a glance over his shoulder. Apart from the odd tendril of smoke meandering heavenward, the fake guildhall lay dormant, with no sign of the dragon that had tried to turn him into lunch.

From the outside, the great, thorny vines that had crawled over the guildhall were visible in all their black and twisted cruelty. They sank into the stone and merged with the wood as if they had always been there. To make matters worse, what he had taken to be shadows in the town streets were yet more vines. They moved like serpents, gradually and inexorably squeezing the life out of the settlement. Soon there would be nothing but a tangle of despair around the false guildhall and its town.

Grimacing, he hurried on. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck here, armed with nothing but a sword he could not draw as the horrid curse closed in.

Soon enough, the small huts fell away to reveal farmland, rolling fields of crops that did not twitch beneath his feet. With one last glance at the false guildhall and its town, now enclosed entirely in thorns, Laxus walked on.

He wondered if he'd come back and try to free the village from its curse, once he got to the bottom of what the hell was going on here. Maybe he would. It wasn't as though he had anything else to fight for. Anything else to do.

He… didn't much like being alone.

He'd never admit it out loud, of course – and indeed if he did, it would earn him some strange looks from those who knew him. After all, long solo S-Class missions were his specialty. He'd take one whenever Freed, Evergreen and Bickslow were being a bit too overbearing, and sometimes even when they weren't.

But this wasn't a job. It had none of those familiar features: a defined goal, a grateful client, and an excitable team waiting to hear all about his triumphant adventures.

This reminded him of his exile from the guild. He'd had nothing to aim for, nowhere he could call home. The days had been long and the nights even longer as he'd wandered, alone, through a world that no longer wanted him, unable to fit in any more than he could go back.

He'd thought that time was over. He'd found his way back to the guild, and… well, even with war upon them, they'd stood together, fighting for something that mattered. Oh, he was probably still fighting, in a sense – Alvarez had to be behind this bizarre turn of events – just not in a way that was achieving much at all. He would love to have an enemy to fight right now. A nice, simple way to demonstrate that he was doing his part.

Not that he had done particularly well against the first enemy he had encountered here, having fought, struggled, and subsequently fled against an evil fairy who could turn into a dragon despite his own lack of magic.

So his thoughts ran in bitter circles as he wandered through this strange land, just as they had throughout his exile.

He wished his team were here. Bickslow would cheer them all up, Evergreen's complaining would make him feel better by comparison, Freed would probably have figured out where they were and how to get home by now, and he himself would have people to look after, people to lead, a clear task to complete.

But the silence stretched on, barely broken by the trudging of his boots through empty farmland.

So when he crested a hill and an approaching figure came into view further down the road, his first feeling was one of relief. Even though he knew there was every chance this stranger was an enemy, at least a battle would break the monotony.

Gradually, the silhouette resolved into an armoured young man on a pony. Freed would probably have called him a squire, but then Freed had probably had a squire before he'd decided to join a guild instead. The banner he carried was not that of Alvarez, although the guildhall hadn't been Fairy Tail's either, so that hardly came as a surprise.

More surprising was the way that the youth broke out into a broad grin when he saw Laxus. He leapt down from his horse and exclaimed, "Prince Phillip!"

Laxus blinked. "Huh?"

"Prince Phillip!" repeated the squire enthusiastically. "Genius general of the Guardian Kingdom!"

"…I think you've got me confused with someone else."

"No, no, I'm a huge fan! Strategist, warrior, honorary prince; the only one with the right to carry the mythical Sword of Truth!"

"What, this thing?" Laxus gave his sword a baleful look. Not that he was about to reveal to this total stranger that he was carrying around a sword that was stuck in its sheath.

"Yes, yes!" the squire exclaimed, distracted, patting himself down in search of something. "Will you sign my… my horse's saddle?"

It was far from the weirdest thing Laxus had ever been asked to sign, but at least that hen party had wanted his own name across their breasts, rather than this Phillip bloke's. "No," Laxus said bluntly.

"But-"

"I'm very busy." That was a complete lie; this squire was the only interesting thing that had happened to him in several hours, but he was not prepared to deal with someone else's fanboy.

"Oh! Right, yes, of course- to business!"

To Laxus's dismay, rather than stepping out of the road, the squire drew a scroll of parchment from one of the saddlebags. Emulating a gruff voice for which his vocal cords weren't yet equipped, he read: "To Prince Phillip, esteemed commander of the Guardian Kingdom. For a decade our kingdoms have enjoyed a prosperous alliance, reaping the benefits of bountiful trade and fertile peace. You will, by now, have heard the rumours that the Huns are approaching the Imperial Kingdom from the south, and I am saddened to confirm that those rumours are true. If the Huns are not stopped, they will tear through all five kingdoms, leaving nothing but devastation in their wake. We are amassing an army to stop them here, in the Imperial Kingdom, before they can go any further."

"What's the-" Laxus tried, but the squire wasn't finished.

"We have great confidence in our military might. We do not request troops or supplies from our allies, as other kingdoms might. However, for the sake of our old battles fought side by side, I beseech you, Prince Phillip, to lend us your assistance as a personal favour in this struggle. Your reputation as a warrior and commander is unmatched, and our friends in the Alliance will be able to sleep easy, knowing that our army and your military genius stand together to guard the gates. From your old friend, General Li of the Imperial Kingdom."

The moment the scroll was rolled back up again, the squire's voice returned to its normal chirp. "So please, please come to the Imperial Kingdom to help! Getting to fight alongside the Prince Phillip would be a dream come true!"

Sorry, kid, but I'm not him, Laxus thought. What did he know about Huns and ridiculously named kingdoms? He couldn't even lead a guild, let alone an army. Without magic, without even a usable sword, what could he honestly offer this boy, too bright-eyed to have ever known true conflict?

This wasn't his fight. Odds were, it wasn't even his world.

But…

He knew the shining optimism in the boy's eyes was aimed at this Phillip fellow he had mistaken Laxus for, not at him, but it would be nice to pretend it was.

Besides, it was the right thing to do, wasn't it? This squire's kingdom needed help. Sure, it wasn't the war that Laxus was supposed to be fighting, but that didn't make walking away from it morally correct. The boy was adamant that he could help – that one man's input could change the course of battle.

He'd tried telling the squire that he wasn't Prince Phillip. It wasn't his fault that his words had gone unheeded. Besides, a simple case of mistaken identity wouldn't hurt anyone. By the time he met this General Li and they realized he wasn't Phillip, he'd already be there, able to help the army while they continued the search for the real Phillip. It wasn't really identity theft if he was doing it for a good reason.

"Sure," he said, to the squire.

The boy actually jumped into the air in delight. "Oh, this is the best day ever! I'm going to work for Prince Phillip!"

There was a slight twinge of guilt in Laxus's chest, but it was quickly flattened.

"Though," the squire added as an afterthought, now looking at Laxus with some concern, "are you sure it's alright for you to just come back with me like this? Don't you need to, uh… check with the king or something?"

Laxus's mind flicked briefly back to the two kings in the fake guildhall, dragged by those thorns into an enchanted slumber beneath their oversized crowns. If the real Phillip had also fallen under Maleficent's spell, there was even less chance of Laxus being found out… and it was a good thing indeed that he was here to step into that role, wasn't it?

"This king is indisposed," he said. "Best not to bother him. The kingdom needs us, no?"

"Us," the squire mouthed, awestruck. Then he shook himself, and moved to re-mount his pony, before suddenly freezing and giving Laxus an apologetic glance. "Do you have- I mean, of course you have a noble steed, the legend of Samson the valiant stallion is often told in conjunction with your own, but is he, uh, around…?"

"No," Laxus said shortly.

Uneasily, the squire offered the reins he held to Laxus. Laxus eyed the attached pony, which barely came up to his shoulder. The pony took a step back.

"You ride," he said, not rolling his eyes only through great effort. "I'll be able to keep up."

"Generous too!" the squire marvelled. "The legends truly did not do you justice-"

"That's enough," Laxus said, and the boy's mouth shut abruptly. Impersonating the man was one thing, but listening to this youth fanboy about him all the way to the front lines was beyond the scope of his patience. "Let's just go."

"Right away, sir!"

How did one go about finding a shipwrecked prince?

Lucy's determination carried her all the way to the marketplace in the centre of the port city before the nagging voice of logic brought her begrudgingly to a halt. When she glanced around, she could see a host of familiar locations from the film she had loved as a child: the elegant bridge that Ariel and Eric had driven over in their carriage; the square where they had stopped to dance; the artificial waterways merging the lively town with the seas that sustained it, which had enabled Flounder to follow the budding couple, on the lookout for that magical first kiss.

Today, though, there was no kind prince giving an eager mermaid a tour of his kingdom. Maybe there never would be. Lucy had thrown that story off from the start, and now they were in uncharted territory.

And despite the fact that she was something of an expert in being swept away by giant waves, thanks to several years of being Aquarius's owner, Lucy hadn't the faintest idea where the storm may have dragged Prince Eric in a world where Ariel hadn't rescued him. For all she knew, he could have washed up in another kingdom entirely.

In the absence of any better ideas, she decided to head towards the castle. Maybe someone else had already done the hard part of finding the prince. Then all she would have to do was explain to Gray that he needed to go down to the beach and meet his mermaid princess as soon as possible.

She was decidedly not thinking about the kiss.

Prince Eric's castle had always been one of Lucy's favourites. It was built on the seafront, the ocean swirling around its towers, breaking down the divide between the sea and the land in a perfect representation of his and Ariel's love story. Where other palaces would have garages and stables, Eric's castle had its own private dock embedded into the foundations, perfect for an adventurous, seafaring prince. Pearl-white and seashell-pink, the castle sat between the bright sky and brighter sea like a gleaming bastion of harmony.

However, though it may have looked like a work of art in stone and grandeur, it was, in actuality, the seat of power of this fantasy kingdom. That meant it was crawling with guards. Walking up to the front doors and demanding to know if Prince Eric had safely returned from his voyage was unlikely to go down well. The only people who might have recognized her – the nervous, elderly attendant who had needed Lucy's help to get Gray onto the boat, along with his crew – would be just as lost as Gray himself, and no one else would give her the time of day. Not only was this not Lucy's story, but useless Cinderella wasn't even a princess until she had married Prince Charming. She had no chance of blagging her way into the castle as a visiting princess from another kingdom.

So, if marching up to the front doors and announcing her presence was out, she'd have to sneak inside another way and try to find out what was going on. There was bound to be a servant's entrance in a castle of this size. And if there was one thing pre-ball Cinderella was good for, it was looking like a servant.

Lucy was about to put this plan into action when the sound of someone hammering loudly on too-large doors stopped her in her tracks.

"Oi!" came an irate shout. "I'm a princess, you know! Let me in!"

Oh, no.

Lucy wasn't the only person who headed towards the gates in the hope of catching a glimpse of the commotion taking place in the courtyard, but she was the only one who facepalmed.

Outside the gates stood a young woman wearing a beautiful pink gown. It was a classic princess dress: long-sleeved, and with a modest, almost wing-like neckline, it swept all the way to the floor without the excessive layers of Belle's or Cinderella's ballgowns. The proud colour had worked well with Sleeping Beauty's original golden hair, but the long, raven locks of its current wearer accentuated it even further.

In fact, it was only because of the wearer's hair that Lucy was able to identify her. She didn't think she'd ever seen Cana Alberona with so much of her skin covered before. That particularly chaste princess dress probably consisted of more material than was in the rest of Cana's wardrobe combined.

"Open up!" she was shouting to the castle doors, heedless to the dozen or so guards who were hastening towards her. "I'm the missing princess, Aurora! I'm here to reclaim the throne- hey!"

Lucy had slipped through the closing snare of guards and wrapped her arm around Cana. "Sorry, sorry!" she called over the jangling of chainmail. "Please excuse my friend! She's just a bit, y'know…"

She mimed chugging a drink with her free hand. The irony of the fact that she had probably never seen Cana as sober as she was right now was not lost on her.

"Hey-" Cana began, but Lucy elbowed her in the ribs.

The guards were still glaring, but at least they weren't dragging them off to any prison cells. Lucy plastered a bright smile onto her face. "She got a bit carried away at the hen party last night. I'm so sorry for the disturbance, gentlemen, but I'm sure you understand that the bride needs her bridesmaid, so we will have to bid you farewell…"

She dragged a startled Cana out of the circle of guards and back across the courtyard. Once they were out of the palace grounds, and thankfully not being pursued, Lucy slumped against the outer wall in relief.

"What are you playing at, Cana?" she asked. "Are you trying to get arrested?"

At least she'd managed to extract Cana from that situation before they had both been dragged down. As far as Lucy was concerned, she hadn't escaped from being Cinderella just to be thrown into a dungeon for someone else to rescue.

"I'm Sleeping Beauty, you know," Cana replied, affronted. "The missing princess returns safely to her kingdom after avoiding Maleficent's curse – I'm just playing out my story!"

"You're in the wrong story!" Lucy huffed. "This is The Little Mermaid!"

"…Oh." In the poignant silence, not-so-distant waves crashed against the shore. Cana continued, "You know, I didn't think the castle looked right. Not quite pointy enough. I figured it probably looked different without all the thorns around it… but now that you mention it, yeah, I can totally see Prince Eric living here. I must've wandered further than I thought."

"So… hang on, do you know what's going on here?"

"No clue," Cana said cheerfully.

"But you know you're Sleeping Beauty?"

"Well, yeah, that was pretty obvious from waking up in a cottage with Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather making a fuss over me. There used to be an old-fashioned lacrima-projector in the guild's basement, you know. The Master would rent the films for us, and we'd have movie nights down there when we were kids. That all stopped a while ago, obviously, but I still love the films, especially the princess ones. Never imagined myself as Sleeping Beauty, mind," she added, picking subconsciously at the clingy sleeves of her dress, "but at least I have the most awesome villain."

"The most evil," Lucy corrected, with a shudder. "So, what, as soon as you realized where you were, you decided to run away to a different fairytale before Maleficent's curse could affect you? That's actually quite smart."

"What? No! The first thing I did was have a big party with the Good Fairies!"

"…You what?"

"Hey, how many people are lucky enough to turn sixteen twice? It was Princess Aurora's sweet sixteenth; I was going to make the most of it! And let me tell you," Cana added, dropping her voice a conspiratorial whisper, "that fairy elixir is gooooood stuff. I wonder if I can convince Mira to stock it in the guildhall once we're back home."

If Lucy recalled correctly, Aurora's sixteenth birthday in the original story had been a quaint and pleasant affair, in which two of the fairies had made her a dress and the third had baked her a cake, whilst the princess herself was in the forest falling in love with her prince. Cana was a terrible influence.

"So how did you avoid Maleficent's curse?" she wondered.

"No idea," Cana said promptly. "Don't remember much after my ninth bottle of the stuff. Woke up the day after my second sixteenth birthday with a splitting headache and no spindles in sight. The fairies weren't much in the mood for conversation, so rather than waiting for them to recover, I figured I might as well move the story on by myself. Guess I got a bit lost, though, if this isn't my castle."

She fixed Lucy with a gaze far too appraising for someone who had apparently drunk herself into a stupor the night before. "So, since you seem to be on top of things, would you care to share exactly what's going on here?"

"Apparently, this was the First Master's doing. She mis-cast a spell she was attempting to use on Zeref, and as a result, we've been dragged into a world of fairytales and cast as the respective princesses and princes."

"Huh. Who're you, then?"

Lucy pulled a face. "Stupid Cinderella."

"Hey, Cinderella's one of my favourite princesses!"

"Seriously?" Lucy scowled. "The servant-girl who cries a lot, does some sewing, is most famous for her shoes, and whose entire happy ending is about marrying a prince she hardly knows?"

"Cinderella never asked for a prince," Cana shrugged. "She wanted a night off and a new dress. That's the kind of thinking I can get behind."

Lucy just shook her head ominously. "You've not heard the worst part about this fairytale world yet."

"Oh?"

She began walking with melancholy steps down to the seafront. If they had to have this conversation, she was at least going to keep an eye out for Gray while they were doing it, just in case he had washed up close by and not yet been discovered.

Cana kept up enviably well, sweeping down the cobbles far too gracefully for someone in a ballgown – let alone someone who had never worn a skirt of more than a tenth the dress's length before. Despite being the least likely person in the whole guild to be cast as a princess based on her behaviour, Cana slipped into the role so easily, and looked gorgeous doing it. Not for the first time, Lucy wished she had been cast as anyone other than Cinderella.

"According to Master Mavis," she explained, "the only way for us to escape this made-up world is by playing our fairytales through to the end. Which means finding our True Loves and getting our Happily Ever Afters."

"Huh, sounds like fun."

"Fun?" Lucy squawked. "Being told by some stupid fairytale who you've got to spend the entire rest of your life with? You realize that the people cast as the princes are likely to be five members of our guild, right? Not perfect fictional characters?"

"Fairytales always end happily," Cana countered brightly. "It's like going on a blind date, except with the benefit of narrative protection!"

"If I wanted to go on a blind date, I would have gone on a blind date!" Lucy fumed. "I'm actually quite happy being single right now. I've got a lot on my plate, what with being in the middle of a literal war and all. Not to mention, your narrative protection only extends to the end credits! There's a reason all these fairytales end with the wedding carriage rolling off into the sunset – before any of these people have to actually live together, or struggle to fit their careers in around each other, or suddenly realize that one of them wants kids and the other doesn't! What if I don't want to get married at all? Has the fairytale taken that into consideration?"

Cana, who had listened to her rant in amused silence, chose the least important part of it to pick up on. "Don't you want to get married?"

"That's- that's not the point!" Lucy retorted. "It wasn't that long ago that my entire future was going to be arranged marriage, pop out a male heir, and fade into obscurity. I figured I'd have plenty of time after running away to actually make up my own mind about the future… and now I find out that every moment I spend opposing this stupid idea of True Love is another moment of leaving my guild to fight Alvarez alone!"

"At least there is a way home," Cana pointed out. "I really think you're reading too much into this, Lucy."

"And I don't think you're taking it seriously enough," Lucy huffed.

They walked on for a while in silence – or, as close as one could get to it where the sea met the shore. Seagulls tumbled and swooped like kites on the wind, waves brushed the sand a few metres shy of her feet, the energy of the city had faded to a quiet hum of life in the distance. The ocean's glossy surface barely ripped with waves, let alone the hull of a ship or the splashing of a prince rescuing himself from drowning.

When Lucy glanced towards the horizon, she could see no sign of the storm that had dashed their ship to pieces.

"So, who else is trapped here, do you think?" Cana wondered.

"I've met Juvia and Gray; they're Ariel and Eric, naturally."

"Naturally," Cana echoed, although there was an odd inflection to her tone.

Lucy brushed it off. She really didn't want to talk about Gray and his unexpected, unsolicited, and entirely out-of-character thing that didn't happen. "Mavis hinted that Natsu was here, as Prince Charming. I don't know about anyone else, though she thought there was around ten of us in total."

"I wonder who my Prince Phillip is…"

"Maybe you'd know, if you'd gone out into the forest to meet him rather than getting drunk with the Good Fairies," Lucy snarked, and Cana laughed. "Bacchus, maybe? You spent a lot of time with him whilst the guild was disbanded, didn't you?"

"Yeah, maybe… I didn't feel too bad about leaving him to come back to Fairy Tail, though. And nor did he. I think we both figured we made better drinking buddies than life partners." There was an incomprehensible lightness to Cana's voice, as if she genuinely thought that this was all a great adventure. "Could be Laxus."

"Do you even like him?" Lucy frowned.

"Eh. We had a bit of a thing before you joined the guild."

"Hang on, wasn't he a total jerk back then?"

"He was, yeah," Cana agreed, though her light tone still couldn't have been further from Lucy's sceptical one. "Well, it was fun while it lasted, but he's a completely different person now, and I just can't see it, can you?"

"Guess not," Lucy mumbled, though she privately thought she much preferred Laxus now to when he had literally been trying to destroy them all.

"Maybe it's Gildarts!" Cana said suddenly.

Lucy gave her a weird look.

"Well, love doesn't have to be romantic love, does it?" Cana reasoned. "Haven't you seen Frozen?"

"No, I never got the chance. I used to watch them with my mother, and that one didn't come out until after she'd passed away. My dad didn't have time for such childish things."

"You're missing out; it's one of the best," Cana told her sagely. "And it's all about how familial love is just as important and powerful as romantic love. And my dad definitely loves me, so maybe that's my ticket out of here."

"Well, that's fine for you, isn't it?"

It came out more bitter than Lucy had intended, and guilt rose in her at once at Cana's horrified expression. "Oh, hell, Lucy, I didn't mean- I'm sorry-"

"It's fine, I know." Lucy waved it away, with a smile that was forced at first, but became a little easier as Cana seemed to relax again. She continued, "Sorry for snapping. I'm just so frustrated at this whole situation, and it doesn't help that I keep ruining everything. First I walked out of my own story, only to find out that I've somehow got to get back to the ball if I want any chance of returning home, and then I accidentally broke The Little Mermaid too, and as for your story…"

"Oh, I've ruined that one already," Cana laughed. "Turns out it's a bit difficult to use a spinning wheel when you're in an alcohol-induced coma."

"Well, I'm sure I'll find a way of making it worse," Lucy finished gloomily.

The universe chose that moment to back her up by unleashing a roar upon the serenity of the beach. Twisted and horrible and deafeningly loud, it ripped right through Lucy's brain and out the other side. Every grain of sand in the vicinity leapt a foot into the air and slumped back down again. The ocean trembled, straining to resume its regular rhythm against the pressure of something huge, descending.

"That sounded like-" Lucy began, alarmed.

"-a dragon, yeah," Cana finished.

They moved closer together instinctively. Cana's fingers flitted across tarot cards whose power was merely symbolic in this world, and Lucy's hand rested on a keyring which could open nothing without magic. There was a great black arrow in the sky, shot straight from the watchtowers of hell, closing the distance with frightening speed. It had scales of violet mixed with shadow, woven through with a wicked green light as if hiding emerald flames within its belly.

"Maleficent, it has to be," Cana remarked. "Guess it's not so easy to run away from my fairytale, after all."

Lucy was glancing anxiously around, but the flat beach yielded no place to hide, and she wouldn't have been surprised if the hellfire blazing in the dragon's maw could boil the ocean if she tried to swim to safety. "What do we do?"

"Fight," Cana answered grimly.

"With what? My keys don't work here!"

Cana raised her right arm. "With-"

But Maleficent got there first. Wings tucked in, eyes glinting like impious gemstones, she dived towards them – and as easily as if she were merely selecting that night's dinner from the supermarket shelves, she snatched up her princess in one huge, scaly claw. The most awesome villain, Cana had described her, and compared to scheming stepmothers or sinister sea-witches, Maleficent made it look effortless: magic, power, and raw, heartless villainy rolled into one clean strike against the forces of good…

"Hang on a minute!" Lucy shrieked, from within Maleficent's claw. "Why have you kidnapped me?"

The dragon roared in wicked triumph.

"I'm Cinderella!" Lucy yelled, beating her fist uselessly against unflinching scales as every wingbeat carried her higher. "You're supposed to be Sleeping Beauty's villain! She was literally right there, in her classic dress and everything! How the hell did you get that wrong?"

By now, the beach was a golden wink beneath her. The incredibly distinctive pink dress of Princess Aurora had faded into the scenery.

Groaning, Lucy let her forehead fall onto Maleficent's claw with a thump. "Why is it always me?"

A/N: Lucy, I am so sorry.

(That's a lie, I'm not sorry at all.)

(Still, she'd probably prefer being kidnapped over actually going to Cinderella's Ball, so...)

Slightly earlier chapter this week as I'm travelling for work this afternoon/evening - I also probably won't be able to reply to any messages etc until I'm back next weekend. ~CS