Monster Arm, Part 1

Marco, dressed in white karate robes with a Red Belt tied around his waist, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. In front of him, balanced on two identical stacks of cinder blocks, was a wooden plank. Opening his eyes, Marco clenched his right hand into a fist and raised it above his head.

"HI-YAH!" he cried out and slammed his fist down on the middle of the plank, causing it to instantly split across the middle and fall to the floor.

At that moment, Star happened to be walking past the door to Marco's room, and she got stars in her eyes when she saw him break the plank.

"Ooh, you hate wood, too? YEAH! Crush that wood! Wood's the worst!" she exclaimed excitedly.

"He doesn't hate wood, Star," Bucky said with a roll of his eyes. The elder Butterfly sibling was sitting on Marco's bed with a steady supply of fresh wooden planks at the ready. "Marco's training for his upcoming Karate competition. You know, that Human fighting technique he told us about?"

"Exactly!" Marco confirmed with a smug smile. "You see, Star, Karate is all about honor and discipline. Which is why...I'M GONNA KICK JEREMY BIRNBAUM'S BUTT!"

Having been caught off-guard by the shout, both Butterfly siblings realized upon recovering that neither of them had ever heard of this "Jeremy Birnbaum." Unless, of course, Marco was referring to the talking bear that used to raid the royal Dumpsters of Butterfly Castle, which was highly unlikely.

"Um...who is that, exactly?" Bucky asked with a raised eyebrow, and Marco scoffed.

"Oh, he's just this jerk from my Karate class who's only any good because his rich parents buy him fancy equipment and private lessons. He's always flaunting either his Karate skills or his money like he has something to prove. But Saturday, I'm gonna put a stop to it by taking him down a notch or two! So gimme some more boards!"

"I dunno, Marco; I'm not sure doing more than one at a time is a good idea," Bucky said uncertainly, putting a stack of three boards on the cinder blocks.

"Don't worry, dude. I can handle it!" Marco proclaimed, confidently raising his fist once more.

...

"I told you to be careful!" Bucky chided Marco, who was reclining on Bucky's cot with a frown on his face and his right arm in a cast. In trying to break all three boards, Marco had miscalculated how strong they were, breaking his wrist and two fingers.

"Ugh, this is terrible!" Marco groaned. "If I can't face off against Jeremy because of an injury like this, he's gonna say I wussed out! Then he'll never let me live it down!"

Meanwhile, Star was standing in front of her and Bucky's shared wall mirror, trying to decide whether to have her hair up in pigtails or a ponytail and using her Wand to morph between them. Once he noticed what Star was doing, Marco got an idea. He looked at Bucky.

Bucky shook his head "no."

Marco nodded "yes."

Bucky shook his head faster.

Marco nodded faster.

Bucky facepalmed and resignedly gestured to Star, knowing he was somehow going to regret this.

"Hey, Star, do you think you could heal my arm? With your magic?" Marco asked. Having finally decided on pigtails, Star looked over at Marco with an uncertain look on her face.

"I dunno, Marco. Healing magic isn't really my forte. Plus, it's a little out of my comfort zone. I don't even know any healing spells!" she explained.

"But you do know where to look for one, don't you?" Bucky pointedly asked. Realization dawned for Star.

"Oh, yeah! Be right back!" she cried and bolted up the stairs to her part of the bedroom. She took much longer to come back down, though, because she was carrying something really heavy, even for an unnaturally strong Mewman. "Here! This family heirloom Spellbook oughtta help!" she grunted and dropped the object on the floor hard enough for Bucky and Marco to both feel it through their respective shoes.

True to Star's word, the object in question was a gigantic leatherbound book, two feet wide, two feet tall, and one foot thick, with a threadbare canvas cover and yellowed pages. On the front, two rhombus-shaped purple gems were set inside the loops of a tarnished brass figure-eight symbol.

"You had a magic instruction book this whole time?!" Marco demanded incredulously.

"Yup!" Star replied and pried the book open. A huge cloud of dust immediately plumed upward from the pages, making all three of the teens cough and sneeze.

"And you haven't bothered to use it why?" Bucky demanded in irritation.

"Hey, you can't blame me for wanting to experiment, can you?" Star asked rhetorically. As she spent the next few minutes flipping through the pages, Marco became increasingly impatient.

"So...how long is this gonna take?" he asked.

"Just gimme a minute," Star requested with a frown. "This thing is, like, ridiculously unorganized."

"Which is to be expected. After all, it has been in our family for hundreds of years," Bucky pointed out. Marco's gaze flitted between the Spellbook on the floor and the Wand in Star's lap, which Bucky noticed. "And before you ask, the Wand is even older than that. See, the original Spellbook was destroyed when a fire burned down the original Butterfly Castle, so our ancestor Queen Skywynne had to start a new one from scratch. Which is a shame, because almost everything we knew about the earliest queens was lost, since each Princess and Queen uses the Spellbook as a sort of diary or journal." Bucky shifted his attention back to Star. "Regardless, as disorganized as the Spellbook is, it could take hours for Star to find-"

"Found it!" Star exclaimed triumphantly. "It's in the middle of Crescenta the Eager's chapter, which explains a lot. It's in some kind of ancient language, too, so I hope I don't mistranslate it." Bucky looked over her shoulder and frowned.

"Some kind of ancient language?" he echoed. "Star, that's High Mewnian! You would have learned how to read this if you just paid attention to our tutors!"

Star scoffed and shot back, "Well, excuse me for thinking that learning a dead language would be totally useless!"

"Can we just get back to the task at hand, please?" Marco asked the bickering siblings.

"Oh, right. Sorry, Marco," Star said before clearing her throat and looking down on the page. "Okay, here we go...Releasio...Demonius...INFESTICA!" Once Star completed the incantation, a steady stream of bluish-purple light flew from the Wand and engulfed Marco's plaster-covered arm.

"Hey, I think it's working! My fingers are tingling!" the Hispanic teen exclaimed in excitement.

Just then, everything went horribly wrong. When the light faded, Marco's arm was no longer broken...because it was no longer just an arm! Seamlessly fused to the rest of Marco's arm at the elbow was a wriggling ten-foot purple tentacle with a fleshy barb on the end.

Star and Marco both screamed at the result of the spell, while Bucky just stared in shocked silence with wide eyes.

"STAR! WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Marco demanded in terror as the tentacle started flopping and flailing.

"I don't know! I must've read the wrong spell or something!" Star panicked. "Bucky, gimme a hand here! Maybe we can find a counter-spell!"

Bucky looked over Star's shoulder and was about to turn the page when the tentacle suddenly backhanded the Spellbook, sending it flying out the window and into the back yard. It then coiled up into something resembling a fist and delivered an uppercut to Bucky's jaw, sending him flying into the ceiling with a shout of pain and surprise. When he came back down, Bucky landed flat on his face hard enough to make the floor tiles crack. He groaned weakly and tried to get up, only for a bookshelf knocked over by the tentacle to fall on top of him.

"Sorry, Bucky! I dunno how to control this thing!" Marco apologized as he grappled with his new appendage, trying and thus far failing to gain some amount of control over it.

Bucky's hand, sticking out from under the fallen bookshelf, shakily made a thumb's-up before going limp. Star looked over to where her Spellbook landed in the yard and sucked air through her teeth.

"Okay, Marco, good news and bad news," she said, "The good news is that your arm is no longer broken. The bad news is that it looks like you're gonna be stuck like...well, this for a while. I promise, though, that as soon as Bucky recovers from this, we'll start looking for something to help you, okay?"

"Um...are you sure there's a counter-spell for my specific situation?" Marco asked.

"I can almost guarantee that there must be. After all, Queen Crescenta invented over a thousand new spells during her lifetime, most of which were seemingly useless at the time that she invented them," Star replied confidently.

Marco looked at his new Monster Arm and gulped.

It was gonna be a rough day at school tomorrow...