Chapter 28
Battle Rustling
Cruella spat in disgust as she tracked dirt and dust on her boots. She pinched the bridge of her nose to block out the smell of farm animals and their fertilizer. She marched past the gate leading onto the dairy farm, passing under the sign labeled "Little Patch of Heaven", but felt herself being yanked backward. She turned around and scowled when she saw that her coat had gotten itself caught on the fence. She angrily pulled at it to no avail. Doug removed the coat from the protruding wooden board, and she stumbled backward as it suddenly came free.
"I hate farms! All the mulch, bugs, and smelly animal pests!" Cruella complained. She then remembered that Doug, a sheep and therefore one such smelly animal, was standing next to her. "Ahem. No offense," she muttered.
"No, go ahead. Let's just get the job done," Doug said bluntly. They walked over to the barn, and Doug pulled the door open. "You know, you could have changed into something less room-filling and less likely to get caught on something or chomped on," he added.
"Never!" Cruella gasped, indignant. She scanned the inside of the barn, looking past the curious cows to try to locate the object she and Doug sought. "Can we be certain that it's in here?" she asked.
"Based on Zeromast's observations, quite likely," the sheep answered. "Once the coast is clear, it should be simple to locate it with careful study in differentiating it from the other material. You just go distract the old lady."
"Hmph." Cruella went over to the farmhouse. She roughly threw the door open and stepped inside.
An elderly, overweight woman wearing a straw sun hat entered the room, glaring at the unexpected visitor.
"Can I help you, ma'am?" the farmer asked, her stern tone voicing her displeasure at the intrusion.
"Oh, hello. Are you the proprietor of this ranch?" Cruella asked, making little effort to act polite.
"That's right. Pearl Gesner's my name," the farmer replied. "What do you want?"
"Oh, I was merely… admiring the livestock and produce you have put together here. You must be very proud of your work."
"Why, thank you," Pearl said, suspicious of the woman's intentions. The fancy clothes, perfume and odor of tobacco gave her away as city folk, and someone with those kinds of furs and lacking the sense to wear more appropriate garb in this country would not have the best interests of the farm at heart. Pearl inched closer to the telephone, just in case.
Cruella thought back to the profile that Zeromast had given her on the farmer, as well as on the condition of the surrounding area, and decided how she would best keep the woman distracted. "You see, there are plenty of farms struggling around these parts, due to rampant cattle rustling," she said in an entreating tone. "You don't think you would mind selling some of your fine stock to help them back on their feet?"
Pearl was taken aback by this. She felt somewhat bad, though she was still a bit suspicious of the visitor. "Well, I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am. These animals are my family. I wouldn't dream of selling a single one," she answered apologetically.
Cruella smirked. "Now, I'm sure we can come to an agreement. How much would you like for them?" she asked, pulling a large wad of cash from her purse.
"What?!" Pearl all but screamed at Cruella.
While this was going on, Doug stepped into the barn and donned a gas mask with a transparent visor. Watched by the curious cattle, he took a metal canister out of his pocket. He punched a few buttons on the canister's activation console and threw it into the middle of the barn. As a beeping noise emitted and a red light blinked repeatedly on the device, Doug exited the barn and hid to the side of the building.
The beeping stopped and the red light remained on continuously. The two ends of the canister expanded, leaving slight openings and allowing a red gas to billow out and fill the room. The cows breathed in the gas, and their eyes turned bloodshot. They convulsed and started roaring, thrashing about violently.
"Why, I oughta—" Pearl shouted angrily, but her threat was interrupted when she and Cruella heard a destructive crash, accompanied by the thundering sound of dozens of hooves. Her attention taken away from the rude intruder, Pearl ran outside and gaped in shock. "What in tarnation?!"
All of the cows were stampeding wildly, plowing through the farmland. Somehow, they had gone completely berserk! Pearl coughed from the dust cloud that the bovines were kicking up.
"I gotta warn the sheriff!" Pearl declared before running back into the house to dial on the phone.
Smiling proudly, Cruella entered the barn and started chuckling when she saw that all of the cows' stalls had been torn down in the escape. The red gas had either dissipated completely or been mixed with the dust, which had started to settle after the escape.
An obese man with long red hair, a moustache and a short goatee, who wore a large brown coat, boots, gloves, and a gray Stetson hat, sat in his caravan. Alameda Slim was waiting until nightfall, when he would use his yodeling to hypnotize the cows and steal them away from the nearby farm. He heard one of his triplet nephews climb into the caravan with him.
"Wow, Uncle Slim. I thought we was going to wait until nightfall to bring them cows to us," he said.
"Whatcha talking about, fool?" Slim asked. His nephew pointed backward with his thumb. Slim climbed out to investigate, followed by his mercenary Rico. When he looked toward the Little Patch of Heaven farm, Slim gasped in horror. The cows were all running straight for him!
Slim started to yodel in an attempt to pacify the cows, but realized that he had no time, and instead elected to run, followed by Rico and his nephews. However, the cows came too fast, and the crooks ended up caught in the stampede, and they had to wrap their arms around the cows' necks for dear life.
In town, the sheriff had received Pearl's call and already cleared the streets, then had tar poured out to catch the cattle before they could charge through town. As the cows came through, their hooves began to become stuck in the tar, forcing them to slow down to a halt. Fortunately, the gas that had sent them on a berserk run was wearing out of their system, so it was easy for the sheriff to calm them down.
Alameda Slim sighed in relief when he realized that the stampede had stopped, not even realizing that the sheriff was standing in front of him. He let go of the brown cow he held onto and dropped to the ground, making a splash in the mud.
This got the sheriff's attention. "Well, if it ain't Alameda Slim," he said proudly. "Looks to me like you've got a date with the judge for all your rustlin'!"
Cruella and Doug searched the barn for the item they sought. Doug located a post, next to a fallen purple hat, that did not suffer a single bit of damage from the escape and picked it up.
"Mission accomplished," the sheep announced.
"Hmph. What could possibly be so special about that piece of wood?" Cruella grumbled.
"If you paid attention, you would notice that, unlike the other boards and posts, this has suffered no weathering from age, not to mention the fact that in its current form, it is identifiably a different type of wood from the others, indicating that it is not from the same kind of tree as the others. And if you look at the holes or the edges, you would notice that it did not experience stress along the grain, meaning that it was not cut like this. Also, the markings on the side do not match the patterns of regular wood grain. All this evidence indicates that this post does not belong, and the stall was built in a way that would incorporate this and allow it to hide in plain sight," Doug explained.
"I'll admit, that was impressive," Cruella said with a raised eyebrow, amazed at the sheep's keen eye for detail and deductive reasoning.
"Well, let's get back to base. Wouldn't want anyone to figure out what we're doing here," Doug said. He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and, like Zeromast instructed, drew a line against the wall, long enough for him to step through the door it conjured. When the line was drawn, he and Cruella stepped through and returned to Villain's Vale.
There we go, another villain-centric chapter. It's about time that I say that one of the main issues I have with the story of the first game is that the team-up of Disney villains was barely a point, and they barely interacted, particularly with Ursula and Oogie Boogie, who only had a couple obscured scenes with the other bad guys (and only one line for Ursula), so I wanted to give the bad guys more focus as a group throughout the story.
Stay tuned for my next update, which will take the heroes to Olympus Coliseum to practice with their new skills. Be prepared to meet up with a new Final Fantasy character who has never appeared in a Kingdom Hearts game before. Can you guess who it will be?
Okay, I'll admit that I didn't put that much research into the setting to make it line up well enough with the movie. But frankly, does anyone really care about this one?