Ellie walked through the palace grounds looking for her uncle, Emperor Jillius. Having been staying with him for some time, she had received word that Klonoa and his friends had arrived at the palace with important news for him, so she decided to go and fetch him personally rather than just sending one of the palace staff to do it. After all, if the cabbit and his friends had turned up, whatever they were here for had to be important.
The problem was, she couldn't seem to find him. She'd knocked on his bedroom door, checked his throne room, even done a couple of laps around the palace gardens, but with no luck. She had asked all around but none of the servants or guards had a clue where he was. They were sure he hadn't left the palace, or they would have seen him, but no one could recall having seen him for at least two or three hours.
As she became more desperate, she began looking in increasingly odd places that she knew he would almost certainly not be, like the palace kitchens or staff quarters or even in the rather dingy depths of the royal dungeons. No dice.
It was like he had simply disappeared into thin air.
Growing increasingly worried about the prospect that her uncle had been kidnapped, she began looking any possible place that she had not yet checked, and it was while doing this that she went up to a small cupboard under a flight of stairs, flung the door open on a wild hunch… and stopped dead in her tracks.
There was the Emperor, in his royal robes, sat on the floor in the tiny cupboard in a way that meant he had to bend his legs to fit. A mirror was balanced on his knees, a hair comb held in his hand and a tiny lightbulb on the roof was all that illuminated his frame. That wasn't the unusual part, though.
What was unusual was that he had taken off his crown and had been doing something with his hair. He'd tied most of it up into a ponytail which fell behind his head, and he'd brushed his front fringe into a set of distinctive hair tufts that pointed to his right.
It didn't just look like a new hairstyle. It looked exactly like her hair…
He stared at her, a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, both of them completely lost for words.
Finally, Ellie managed to gather her senses enough to speak.
"Um… Uncle Jillius, what are you doing?"
He just stared at her for a moment, as if he'd forgotten how to speak, before seeming to realise how odd this looked, cleared his throat, and finally began to stammer a response.
"Er, well, Ellie, I thought your hairstyle was a good look, so I wanted to see how it looked on, um, me…."
So completely dumbfounded by the whole thing was Ellie that she ultimately decided it wasn't worth questioning further and got back to why she had been looking for him for a clawing return to normalcy.
"Klonoa and his friends have arrived at the palace and wanted to see you. They say they have news for you."
"Ah, right." Jillius chuckled nervously. "Tell them I will be down to meet them shortly."
Ellie nodded, and quickly shut the door again before booking it down the hall, completely flabbergasted by the whole situation. Something told her this was that cabbit's fault somehow, but she couldn't place why she thought that.
There was only one thing for it; she'd have to change her hairstyle. This one had suddenly lost its appeal…
(Note: Ellie is an OC made by Jeyrolami for their Klonoa fan comic Dream Crusaders, where she stars both as Jillius' niece and one of Klonoa's newfound allies. I originally wrote this short piece last year for their birthday, and reckon it is thematically fitting enough to post as an interlude to this story.)