Story #16: In Another Life (A Twist in Time)
Ninjago/Disney crossover
writing prompt: In another life; Disney villain; "Is that magic?"
Summary: Morro, after watching Cinderella III: A Twist in Time before bedtime, has a horrible nightmare in which he, after trying to help the Fairy Godmother find her wand, winds up hiding under a bush, witnessing Lady Tremain turn back the clock to exact her revenge on Cinderella and Prince Charming. He wakes up screaming to find Lloyd standing at the end of his bed, having been alerted by Morro's cries of alarm, and when Lloyd asks what happened, all Morro can do is groan, "I knew I shouldn't have watched that movie—twice."
When Morro woke, he had no idea where he was. All he knew was that it was dark, and it was cold, and he was more scared than he had ever been in his entire life. As he slowly sat up, his shoulder blades tensed with anxiety, his nerves buzzing with restrained adrenaline, his hackles rising, every hair on the back of his neck standing straight up. And it was then that he knew he was not alone.
"Who's out there?" he cried out, scrambling nervously to his feet. "Show yourself!" he yelled a moment later, squinting his eyes as he peered out into the moonlit darkness of the gloomy midnight. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, he began to realize that he seemed to be in a clearing in the middle of a forest—a very dark, very dreary forest. Not an owl hooted— not a fox or a squirrel or a deer peeked out at the unnatural visitor to their territory—not a cricket chirped—not a katydid twilled—not a nightingale twittered. It was as if the whole world had been cast into a charming spell of deep, dreamless sleep—a paralyzing slumber so gripping and powerful that those who fell into its embrace never woke up.
The mere thought of it made goosebumps crawl eerily up and down Morro's arms and shivers ripple up his very spine. He shuddered and shook with barely contained howling wails of fright and panic as he just stood there, gaze darting all around, searching for any sign of hidden danger, just waiting, waiting, waiting for some secret foe or nightmarish beast to jump out at him and swallow him whole. Suddenly, his ears perked up at a sharp crack of a stick. Morro gulped and whirled around to see what was behind him. As he peered even more attentively into the darkness, the bushes in front of him began to rustle and quake and quiver with the bobbing-weaving-zigzagging motion of an oncoming intruder.
Morro's heart began to quail. What could possibly be coming towards him? A wild beast? A mortal foe? Death itself? As his hands began to twinge with frosty prickles of fright and his fingers to twitch with trepidation, he could feel a scream begin to build up in him, threatening to burst out of him like a foghorn or the whistle of a steam engine. Sure enough, just moments later, as an elderly figure stepped out into the open, Morro opened his mouth and felt a loud, long, wolfish shrieking cry of alarm tear itself out of his throat—right before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fainted dead away, crashing backwards into a pitiful heap on the forest floor.
"Oh, dear." a gentle voice with the tones of a cooing wood-dove was saying when Morro finally found the courage and strength to open his eyes again. "Oh, my goodness. The poor thing—I didn't mean to frighten him so."
"Huh?" Morro, his voice slurring a bit, murmured as he slowly pried open his stubbornly Deepstone-weighted eyelids and gazed upward at his unexpected companion. To his surprise, the one who was leaning over him now was an elderly lady—old enough to be his grandmother—with selkie-silver hair and soothingly tranquil sea-blue eyes that held within them a starry keenness and kind, motherly tenderness unlike any he'd ever known. She was wearing a sky-blue cloak and hood and a peachy pink dress, and she was sweetly smiling at him as his full alertness slowly drifted back into his subconscious. When she gently stroked his cheek, he felt a softness to her skin that he never would have expected in a lady of her…ahem…maturity.
"Who are you?" he whispered, his voice wispy and faint with lingering wooziness and fatigue.
"Oh, do not be afraid, little one. I am Princess Cinderella's Fairy Godmother." the lady explained, soothingly patting Morro on the head and running a smooth, silky hand through his shaggy raven-black locks, her touch momentarily hovering over his unique emerald-green hair streak that shot like a brushstroke of color through his dusky, shadowed mop. And as Morro slowly sat up and gazed in confusion at the kindly lady, his face suddenly lit up with a kindling flicker of recognition. The Ninja could judge him as much as they wanted—but he loved the story of Cinderella so much that he never wanted it to be erased or altered in any way.
"Cinderella's here?" he exclaimed in wonderous delight. "Can—can I see her?"
"Oh, of course, young one." Fairy Godmother whispered sweetly as she offered Morro a hand and helped him clamber back onto his feet. "But first, I really have to find my wand." she explained, searching through her pockets as she did so before scanning the ground for any sign of it. "Oh, I'm just so forgetful sometimes—I seem to have lost it entirely. Oh, where could it be? Where could it be?"
"I'll help you find it, Fairy Godmother." Morro volunteered.
"You would, my child?" Fairy Godmother seemed very much stunned and delighted in Morro's shy kindness and compassionate consideration.
"Of course, I'm happy to help." the wind-child stammered sheepishly, feeling his cheeks blanch three shades of ghostly pale in nervousness before beginning to dig through the bushes and peek around small trees, searching for any sign of a magic wand. A vague memory prodding at the back of his mind told him that he was looking for something long, thin, and sparkly—but he couldn't find anything that looked like that.
"Do you see my wand, little one?" Fairy Godmother called out from where she was scouring another area of the forest clearing, struggling to make herself heard over the rapidly blowing, wildly howling breeze whipping through the trees with such ferocity and vicious, bitter chills that it made Morro's skin tingle with fear and panic intertwining. Something about this didn't feel right…
But then the wind-child's ears pricked up again as he heard the rustling of bushes and a shrilly teenage girlish voice cry out, "Mother! Mother!"
"Anastasia, where have you been?" another voice cried out, this one much lower and deeper in its tones, but with only the slightest hint of motherly interest, all but smothered under a veneer of restrained bitterness and constrained woeful hatred.
"Slacking off again." another voice exclaimed—this one also girlish but decisively different in its tones and timbre. Morro, without a moment to lose, crouched down and creeped forward, slithering and slinking through the bushes like a fox or a snake, completely forgetting about Fairy Godmother still searching for the wand. Something told him that there was something fishy going on—and it had nothing to do with fish.
Sure enough, when he slunk under one particularly dense shrub and peered out through the web of microscopic wiry branches in front of his face, he could just barely see from his vantage point that something was definitely up. Through the maze of twigs and leaves, if he squinted his eyes against the midnight darkness, taking what little light there was from the few lampposts and lanterns scattered about the garden he was peering into, his misty, slightly blurry vision could just barely detect a stack of half-chopped wood, a blunt iron hatchet, a rather nasty-looking black cat with a sky-blue collar and gold license skulking about the grounds, and three feminine figures standing in various positions about the clearing. The one who had cried out first seemed to be the one standing in the very center of the garden, and the other two, one middle-aged and one adolescent, were standing close to each other, looking with wolfishly hungry eyes at the first.
"Mother, our troubles are over!" the girl—who Morro realized must be Anastasia—cried out excitedly, holding out—hold up a second—that was Fairy Godmother's wand?! But how did she get it?! Morro wasn't even able to have that question answered before he sensed his skin tingling again. Someone was coming towards him and the three figures! Fairy Godmother! he realized. I have to let her know about Anastasia and the wand! He shifted backwards to slink out of the bushes, but just as he was standing up to find his new friend, the middle-aged woman—who was clearly Anastasia's mother—murmured sarcastically, "A stick."
"Ooh. Maybe we can beat her with it!" the other daughter exclaimed maliciously. Morro was starting to get the feeling that this one—Drizella, wasn't it?—wasn't exactly the brightest lightbulb in the workshop.
"No, not a stick." Anastasia corrected, her voice tinted with a syrupy hint of frustration with her sister's selective blindness. "A magic wand!" she declared, holding the wand out even farther— but it was clear that her mother and sister still didn't believe her.
"Oh. She's finally cracked." Drizella commented dryly, and the cat—Morro thought that it might be named Lucifer—gave a sneaky snicker in reply.
"No, really." Anastasia protested as Morro crouched down again, not wishing to be seen out here in the open. "I saw this nutty old woman and—zap!" Anastasia's gaze darted over in Morro's direction for a second, and he let out a breathy squawk of horror as he ducked back into the shrubs, just as the younger of Cinderella's stepsisters exclaimed, "She gave Cinderella the beautiful gown! And, oh, the Prince."
Morro couldn't help but roll his eyes at Anastasia's precociously flirty, dreamy attitude just then. Girls were crazy in his opinion—well, except maybe Nya, but still!
"I blame the housework." Drizella continued, still snarking at her flighty sister.
"Oh, I'll prove it to you." Anastasia snarked right back, more than impatient with her sister's disbelief and blatant disregard of what she was trying to say. "Oh, what were those words again?" she asked herself, her face contorting in confusion as she quite visibly struggled to fish for the right magic words to make the wand work. "Wappity, pappity, poo?" she tried, and Morro helplessly rolled his eyes again. Someone needed to teach this girl a few things about short-term memory and not always getting what you want whenever you want it.
"Skip, skip, skidoo?" Anastasia tried again, as Lady Tremaine—yes, that was the name of Cinderella's stepmother!—gave a little toss of her head and began flouncing away, while Drizella blew a raspberry in her silly little sister's direction and proceeded to follow her mother.
"No, I know it. I know it. I think." Anastasia murmured hesitantly, holding the wand between her fingers as she tapped her chin thoughtfully. Morro was about to scream in his mind what the words really were when all of a sudden, the pink-clad girl exclaimed with a gasp of delight, "Oh, no, wait—I've got it! I've got it! Bibbity, bobbity..."
"Oh, there it is." Fairy Godmother interrupted, stepping out of the trees as a breath Morro didn't know he'd been holding whooshed out of him, unheard and unnoticed by the others in the clearing. "Child, put that down, please." the kindly elderly lady admonished Anastasia as Lady Tremaine and Drizella turned around, curious and intrigued to see how this was going to play out. Lucifer crept between the two standing stock-still in the center of the courtyard as Fairy Godmother continued pleadingly, "In the wrong hands, that wand could be extremely dangerous."
When Anastasia didn't move, Fairy Godmother moved forward and tried to gently pry the wand out of the girl's hands, saying compassionately yet firmly, "Now, now, just give it back to me, you silly little goose."
"No, no way!" Anastasia protested, pulling back and struggling to wrench the wand out of the lady's hands just as the lady was trying to pry it out of hers. "I won't give it back, Grandma!" she exclaimed in a screechy, whiny voice, "Bibbity, bobbity, boo!"
The moment the magic words spilled from Anastasia's lips, something inexplicably fantastical happened. Shimmering, glittering sparkles of silver stardust shot out of the wand, flying into the air and bouncing off of the forgotten hatchet before ricocheting off of a nearby garden statue.
Is that…magic?! Morro thought in shock and fright. But before his question could be answered, the magic zoomed so close to him that he let out another squawk of fear. Forced to hit the dirt to avoid being struck by the incoming power, the wind-child managed to duck just in time before the sparkles of power zinged over his head, bounced off of another statue and then zoomed straight towards Lucifer! Frightened, the conniving cat tried desperately to hide behind his mistress's legs—too late! There was a loud jingle-ching and a poof of smoke, and then…nothing seemed to happen. As Morro watched nervously, peeking trepidatiously over the top of the shrub he was hiding behind, he saw that Lucifer, seeming to not notice any ill effects, tipped his nose up and pranced—er, waddled—out into the open—right before he realized that he only had two legs now…and wings…and a feathery tail. Morro just barely stifled a scream. Lucifer had been turned into a half-cat-half-goose!
Had Morro's jaw not been attached, it would have fallen off his face and into the leaves. As Lucifer stared blankly at his new white wings and let out a sound caught between a meow and a honk, the wind-child couldn't help but feel really scared and uneasy about this whole thing. He was starting to regret coming here…
If I had been hit, I would have been turned into a goose myself! Morro thought timidly to himself, the mere thought of it making his skin crawl with goosebumps and frigid shivers curl mercilessly up his spine as he scurried and scrambled back under the bush, biting back wheezing winces of pain and discomfort as he did. The branches all around him were beginning to poke and prod at his ribs, shoulder blades, and neck mirthlessly, and he bit back a hiss of annoyance at the itchy, scratchy sensation of the dead grass and wilted flowers chafing and grating at his wrists.
Some people think that it's easy to hide in the bushes—it's not. Or at least that was what Morro was figuring out in the moments he frightfully peeked out, unnoticed, from his hiding place in the hedge of shrubs as he witnessed Anastasia fighting against Cinderella's fairy godmother firsthand. Just watching the movie had been one thing—the reality, he was quickly finding, was quite another. As Lucifer continued to meow-honk and race around the garden as fast as his waddling allowed, Fairy Godmother and Anastasia tussled with the wand, tugging it back and forth, each set on yanking it away from the other, but neither being able to, being too evenly matched in strength and speed. Morro did have to admit, though, Fairy Godmother seemed to be spryer than she appeared at first glance and was holding her own quite well against the youthful Anastasia.
"Put that down! Enough of that! Give me back my wand!" Fairy Godmother cried out, her voice trembling and quivering with more and more fear by the moment, still struggling to grab the wand away from Anastasia, who was gripping the short silver stick with more mighty power than Morro could have ever known like her life depended on it.
"No, I need it—you silly little garden gnome!" the spoiled teenage girl screeched, finally managing to tear the wand out of the elderly lady's grasp. "Bibbity, bobbity, boo!" she screamed without thinking—and in that moment, Morro couldn't hold back a cry of alarm as the magic once again bounced off the hatchet, struck the same two garden statues as the first time around, and then hit Fairy Godmother head-on, turning her into a stone statue instantly.
Only then did Morro notice the sneaky smirk spreading across Lady Tremaine's face as the wheels of malicious intent began to turn in her head. Anastasia, on the other hand, was dumbstruck and distressed over what she had just done and began running her hands ruefully over the statue that had once been Fairy Godmother. She was so distraught and guiltily grieved over what had just happened that she didn't even notice Morro staring up at her sorrowfully, hot tears stinging his eyes and trickling unbidden down his cheeks without him realizing it. He never would have imagined it before, but he was actually starting to feel really sorry for Anastasia. He knew exactly what it was like to be in her boots—to think that no one appreciated you, that no one cared who you were or what you did, that no one would even be sorry if you disappeared and never came back.
"Oh…uh-oh…um, hello?" Anastasia was babbling and blubbering, "Hello? Grandma? Oh, oooohhhhh…" she started to sobbingly whimper, "I'm-I'm sorry. I—I didn't mean to hurt you. I—"
But before she could apologize further, her mother approached her and swiftly plucked the wand out of Anastasia's hands, crooning fiendishly to herself, "So…this is how Cinderella did it. What delicious irony! Do you realize what this means, girls?!" she added, looking back expectantly at her daughters. Morro shrank back within his hiding place, trying to remain as still and silent as a ghost (no pun intended).
"Yes! No more laundry!" Drizella exclaimed instantly. Lady Tremaine just groaned to herself, rolling her eyes, her whole expression saying silently, What in the world happened to my perfect daughter to make her so…dense?!
"No!" she reprimanded, stroking the wood of the wand and purring slightly under her breath as she explained, "It means power…riches…revenge!" With every word, her voice grew silkier and darker in its tones, finally descending to a tone of sheer bloodthirst and vicious villainy. Morro sucked in a sharp breath. He had a hunch what was coming…and it couldn't be anything good.
"Oh." Drizella and Anastasia exclaimed at the same time, before rushing forward to grab the wand out of their mother's hands, wolfishly hungry looks appearing on their faces as they did so, as if they were so power-craving that the sheer sight of the wand was driving them insane.
"I won't have to be a stinking, filthy wretch!" Drizella growled, lunging at the wand, trying to shove Anastasia out of the way.
"I want a prince of my own!" Anastasia herself added, lunging in like ferocity and viciousness, as she tried to snatch the wand herself. The two girls then began to argue with each other, so much so that Morro covered his ears and let out a muffled wheeze of discomfort and dread. He'd never enjoyed loud sounds, and right now, he was sure that he could file the two stepsisters' bickering and squabbling under "absolute WORST."
"Girls, girls!" Lady Tremaine broke up the scuffle, having managed to hang onto the wand even through the fighting. "First things first!"
The two girls sulkily complied and let their mother pass through and approach the fountain in the center of the garden. "Now, Cinderella," she hissed malevolently, "to undo your trickery and take what's rightfully ours, I call upon all the forces of the universe!"
Morro sucked in a breath, already feeling his Wind Powers beginning to whimper and wail softly inside his core as Lady Tremaine finished dramatically, "Bibbity…bobbity…boo."
At first, the wand did not react, and Morro let out a shaky sigh of relief, feeling his distressed Wind Powers being soothed and relaxed within him. But then—the unthinkable happened. A stream of misty, sickly-green sparks shot upward from the wand's staff, flying up and up and up until it exploded in the sky—and then things went completely, catastrophically, cataclysmically catawampus as the very universe reacted violently, recoiling in horror at Lady Tremaine's bold claim to its very elemental powers and existence.
What…what's happening?! Morro thought in a panic as the ground began to shake and buckle underneath him. The air-the very atmosphere-began to whistle and howl like lost specters and wailing banshees. The flames in the lampposts screamed like phoenix, shrieking like menacing ghouls as the moonlight went eerily pale, flickering in and out of focus. Rolls of thunder heard the lightning's sky-splitting cry and answered with their own deafening peals and claps of noise and heat. The water in the fountain began to churn and ripple violently, bubbling like a boiling geyser as a stench like that of copper pennies and smoky charcoal and acrid sulfur and flaky lichen and peeling bark and molting dragon scales and black mold and rotting, mossy, grub-infested, termite-eaten wood and syrupy incense and smoldering candle wax and suffocating wood smoke and a hint of cloves-and-vanilla seeped into the very air, making Morro gag and choke on its fumes as his chest began to ache, his lungs to burn, and his heart to pound like a shattering gong or a stampede of skittish colts.
His head ached. His eyes stung with hot, steamy tears. His vision swam. His hearing dimmed and blurred, becoming muted and bleak as numbness and sweltering heat and frigid chills combining swept over him. And yet the corrupted magic of the wand kept flowing, kept ebbing into the air, grotesquely warping and morphing and twisting to fulfill Lady Tremaine's will and whims in any way she chose. And that's when the wind itself began to howl, to wail, to scream, to shriek, to caterwaul, to blubber, to sob like a lost child as time folded and unfolded and folded again—with Morro caught hopelessly in its folds, helpless to change what was happening.
Change anything…gulp…change everything…
"Reverse the moon and sun—turn back tide and time," Lady Tremaine's voice rang out, beautiful and terrible, as time and space itself began to warp, to change…
"Unravel Cinderella's happily-ever-after to the moment my troubles began!"
By now, the whole world seemed to be howling, wailing, shrieking, sobbing, cowering in horror and terror at the unspeakable, unnatural forces rocking it, quaking it, warping its elements, twisting the very fabric of space itself. Temporal chords and waves and beams and ripples and currents of pure, unmeasured kairos morphed and shifted, drifting in and out of existence, transforming, metamorphosizing, folding and unfolding and folding over and over and over, trapped in a cataclysmic hurricane of reality-tearing throes of power, locked deep within the heart of a catastrophic, cacophonic chaos of smoke and night and storm and noise. At every moment that passed, Morro became more and more afraid that the ground would soon collapse out from under him, sending him tumbling down, down, down into an abysmal void of nothingness and emptiness and hollowness and instant, life-ending doom.
He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He could barely even breathe. And as a sickly-green misty cloud of time-shaping, reality-altering power surrounded the clearing in a frigid chill and lonely sorrow, sending grieving chords of pain and anguish rippling into the very air, he suddenly found that all he could do was lift up his voice and scream.
"NO! NO! NO!" Morro screamed, thrashing and writhing and tossing and turning wildly in his bed as the monstrous nightmare continued to plague his mind and haunt his subconscious. He thought for sure that this was it—that he would never make it out of this horrible night-terror alive! But then his frantic phantasmic vision was pierced by a strong shaking sensation and a frightened voice crying out, "Morro, Morro, wake up! Wake up!"
With a piercing screech of alarm, the wind-child bolted upright, panting and shaking like a leaf as his heart pounded wildly in his chest, his whole body drenched in a cold sweat and his hands shaking convulsively in his lap as he struggled to gather his wits. Looking over to the end of the bed with heartsick, languid eyes, he sucked in a sharp breath as he realized just who had woken him.
"Lloyd?" he rasped wheezily, letting out an airy, ragged cough and clutching his sore chest with a soft groan. Oh, that was right—he was still sick from being caught out in that rainstorm just a few days ago. But that didn't take away from the fact that Lloyd had just saved him from death by nightmare—if there was such a thing.
"Are you okay?" the bleary-eyed, totally bushed sixteen-year-old kid clothed in green PJs murmured worriedly. "I heard you screaming through the wall."
Of all the things that Morro could have said in that moment, the only one his darkness-ravaged mind could convince him to say was one singular, solitary, somber sentence, as he buried his head in his hands and groaned, "I knew I shouldn't have watched that movie—twice."