Warning for implied/referenced racism and swearing.
Evil Like Me
Una met her roommate when they got back to the school. Doug collided with a pretty girl in a shiny pink and blue dress that looked similar to the dresses that Shan Yan sometimes wore whose black hair was braided into a crown on the top of her head. The girl caught Doug's arm with one hand and the door frame with the other before either of them could fall over.
"Oh, hey Doug," the girl said. "Oh! Are these the Isle kids? Hi! I'm Lonnie, Mulan's daughter."
Lonnie (again, was that really her name?) smiled broadly and let go of Doug so she could shake hands with each of them. She moved so quickly that Una barely registered what was going on before it happened.
"Uh, hi," Carlos said.
Jay winked at the almost-princess. "Nice to meet you, beautiful. Call me Jay."
Una returned Lonnie's handshake. The other girl had a firm grip and calluses that spoke of hours of practice with a sword. Una made a note to watch her back around her.
"Una's your roommate," Jay said.
Lonnie's eyes widened. "Really? I thought Genevieve was."
"We changed it for accommodation reasons," Doug said. "And she prefers to be called Evie."
"Okay, cool." Lonnie grinned at Una. "Nice to meet you, roomie."
Una nodded. When Lonnie's smile faltered, Una turned to Jay, pointed at Lonnie, pointed at her own throat and made a circling motion with one hand.
"Are you sure?" Jay asked.
Una narrowed her eyes at him. "Explain," she signed again.
Jay explained. Una didn't talk, end of story. That was a lie, but like every good lie it had a grain of truth.
"Sign language is talking, isn't it?" Lonnie asked. "I mean, technically if you're communicating isn't it still talking, sort of?"
Una shrugged. She used signs, gestures and facial expressions to get her point across. She didn't really care about the semantics.
Lonnie's eyes lit up. "Can you teach me Isle Sign Language? I know some military signs but that's not the same."
Lonnie linked arms with Una and dragged her into the school, chattering the entire time. Jay smirked when she looked over her shoulder for help. Jerk.
"My brother's helping coach the swords and shields team," Lonnie said.
That sounded interesting. Una tugged on Lonnie's arm to get her attention and then had to figure out how to tell the Auradon girl that she wanted to know more about swords and shields. Eventually she settled for simply raising her eyebrows.
"He's my older brother," Lonnie said. "His name is Shangzhou."
That wasn't what Una was asking, but it did bring up another point.
"Why is his name Shangzhou but yours is Lonnie?" Carlos asked.
The smile on Lonnie's face turned brittle. Her eyes darted around the hallway like she was cornered and looking for an escape route. "It's a nickname," she said. "Oh, look, it's our stop. Bye, guys!"
Lonnie pulled Una into their room and locked the door behind them. She swore quietly. Una went to their desk and searched for paper and a pencil.
What was that about? Una wrote.
It took Lonnie a few moments to answer. Then she stuttered, her words tripping over each other. "It's not allowed. My name isn't allowed."
Una frowned. Is it too powerful? Some names were like that (not Names, they were always too powerful). Naming a child Aurora, for instance, guaranteed a sleeping curse in their future and had ever since the first time Maleficent cursed a princess and woke her with True Love's Kiss. Focusing on the current Queen Aurora, like her great-great-great-great grandmother hadn't done the Sleeping Beauty gig first and better, was a disservice. And also stupid. There was going to be a wave of girls named Aurora falling victim to sleeping curses in a few years.
The history book that Una liked so much wasn't only pictures.
Lonnie shook her head. "It's too difficult. I'm not allowed to use it. They call Shangzhou 'Shang Junior' too, because his full name is too difficult. We get in trouble if we use our real names."
...Auradon was all stupid, wasn't it?
Fuck them. It's your name. Fuck them.
A wet laugh escaped from Lonnie's mouth. She covered her face with both hands and sank to the floor, hiccupping through tears.
Will you tell me your name? Una asked once the other girl was done crying.
A smile spread across the daughter of Mulan's face. "I'm Lanlei."
Una taught Lanlei a few of her signs before they went downstairs for dinner. If they were going to be roommates for an unknown length of time, it was only logical that they have a faster way to communicate than writing. "Run" was one of the signs. So were "help", "wait", "don't be stupid" and "I'm going to work with you for now".
"I guess saying 'please' and 'thank you' isn't really your thing," Lanlei said.
Una shook her head. Never say thank you. You can get caught in a contract. Faeries like doing that.
Lanlei's eyes widened as she finished reading. "I feel like that's something our parents should have taught us."
Una shrugged.
Dinner at Auradon Prep wasn't nearly as wild as mealtimes on the Lost Revenge. There were hundreds more people but the dining hall was as large as every inch of the ship put together and students were talking quietly to others at their table instead of shouting across the room. It also didn't look like anyone had been stabbed over a piece of food, but that hadn't happened on the Lost Revenge in years.
And then there was the food.
Lanlei laughed when Una gawked at the platters of (not burnt, not mouldy, not rotten) food and then dragged her away to introduce her to Chef Bouche's chicken pot pie. Una also got a bread roll (not mouldy!) and something called a salad that was a lot of vegetables (not rotten!) mixed together.
"Hey, your friends are over there," Lanlei said. She headed towards the table where Mal, Evie, Jay and Carlos were sitting surrounded by at least two empty seats in every direction. Una followed her. Lanlei and the Rotten Four were the closest things she had to allies. "Hi! Can we sit here?"
Mal barely looked up from her plate. "Am I stopping you?"
Lanlei took that as permission and sat down next to Evie. Una sat down across from her, next to Jay and far enough from Mal that it would be too much of a hassle for either of them to try to strangle the other. A large majority of the meal was spent listening to Evie and Lanlei talk about fashion, which was...a thing. It was a thing.
Jay passed Una a slip of paper under the table while Lanlei was distracted by a debate about metallic fabric. She unfolded it without looking and scanned what he'd written while taking bites of food. It took a moment to match up their old code with the layout of Auradon Prep. The tree outside her room's window, huh? Hopefully it was as climbable as she thought it was.
When they were all finished eating, Una ended up getting dragged away by Lanlei again and introduced to her friends. Fairy Godmother's daughter Jane, Queen Kidagakash and Milo Thatch's daughter Mika, and Queen Tiana and King Naveen's daughter Tamara crowded into Una and Lanlei's room. They didn't leave until close to curfew. Despite burning off the extra magic that had built up inside her on the Isle, electricity arced between Una's fingers. Being in an enclosed space with a bunch of strangers (enemies) was stressful. None of the other girls seemed to notice the light show.
Lanlei fell asleep quickly after her friends left. Una waited. Curfew was at nine. At nine thirty Una opened the window.
The distance from the window to the ground was more of a drop than a climb. After a few branches that were very easy to climb down with there was nothing standing between Una and the ground below. She judged how far it was and jumped. The earth gave slightly under her feet, unlike the brinks and concrete she would have landed on back on the Isle. People had broken bones jumping from the roofs there when they landed right. Landing wrong was a fast way to get killed.
There were more soft thuds as Jay, Carlos, Evie and Mal reached the ground. They'd climbed right down the side of the building. Mal shot Una a look that promised a painful death if she screwed this up. It would have been nice if Una knew what she was supposed to not screw up, but writing a note in a code they hadn't used for four years didn't exactly make lengthy explanations easy.
"The wand's in a museum," Jay said quietly. "We're getting it now."
Una nodded.
Carlos led the way through the forest to a road that apparently went right up to the back door of the museum. He held out an arm to stop them from emerging from the trees. "There'll be security cameras."
"Hang on." Mal took a book with a dragon on the cover out of her bag and flipped through it. "'For five of us with enemies near, let all who see us forget we were here.'"
The air around them burned with magic. A spellbook, Mal had a spellbook. Of course she did. Maleficent was the most powerful magic user on the Isle.
The magic twisted around them, almost suffocating. Una forced herself to keep breathing evenly until it settled.
"It'll work on cameras and it lasts three hours," Mal said. "Let's go."
It took another two spells to get into the museum. One to put the guard to sleep using Maleficent's spinning wheel that was sitting there begging to be used and one to open the door faster than any of them would have been able to pick the lock. Then the five of them made their way through the museum to the grand staircase where Carlos said the wand was located. They lost Mal for a song in the Hall of Villains but that magic didn't sink its claws into the rest of them so Una didn't mind. She did make sure to keep at least two people between her and Mal when Mal rejoined them though.
Even though it was nighttime, the inside of the museum was bright. The walls and floors were made of cream-coloured stone that should have shown every bit of dirt that had ever touched it but was somehow pristine. Their footsteps echoed in the empty halls. It was eerie.
"It should be right up ahead," Carlos said.
The hallway somehow grew brighter and then they were standing in a round room between two sweeping staircases with Fairy Godmother's wand floating in front of them. All five of them stopped and stared.
"Whoa," Jay said.
"Agreed," Evie said. Una nodded.
There was so much magic in the white and gold stick that Una thought the museum should have exploded trying to contain it.
Mal got out her spellbook again. "There's some sort of force field around it." She tried a few spells that didn't do anything. "A seriously strong force field."
Una tapped Jay's shoulder and held up a hand crackling with electricity. She gestured towards the wand.
"That might work," Jay said. "Hey, Mal, what if we electrocute it?"
Mal glared at the wand like that would make it jump into her hand. "Sure. Fine. Have at it."
Jay grinned and raised his hands. Red lightning arched from his fingers. Una raised her own hands and gave her lightning a push. The electricity collided with the force field. There was a loud crack and a shower of sparks.
An alarm started ringing.
"Shit!" Mal reached for the wand but was stopped by the force field that was still in place. "Let's go. We need a new plan."
They ran. The guard, who had probably been woken by the alarm, completely ignored them as he ran past them back towards the wand. At least that spell worked.
They kept running until they were back in the forest. Then they had to slow down or risk tripping and breaking their necks.
Mal glared at Una, her eyes glowing acid green in the darkness. "Great job, pirate. Now we have to go to school tomorrow."
Secret 4
Li Lanlei isn't the only child whose name has been taken away from them to suit Auradon's French and English bias. She is the one who can make sure it never happens again.
A/n: This is an AU, so I can totally fudge the layout of the museum.
Lanlei is named after her mother (lan=orchid and lei=flower bud, Mulan literally means "wood orchid", so Lanlei is an orchid bud. I thought it was cute). Shangzhou is literally just named after his dad and his grandfather, because I didn't like that he just got the same name as his dad when none of the other characters did. I'd expect the royals to repeat names, not the military family.
-Cynder2013