Your Princess is in Another Castle

by Richard Fore

  “I remember that show,” I say. “She was cute.”

  “I don’t think I ever saw it,” says Jimmy. “As far as cartoon crushes go, aside from Maid Marian, I also liked Catra from She-Ra.”

  “That makes sense,” says Seth. “Other blonde cartoon crushes of note include Penny from Inspector Gadget and the Disney version of Alice, of course. I even watched Captain Planet when it was a Dr. Blight episode. And Rapunzel was my favorite fairy tale, so I was disappointed Disney never did an animated film version.”

  “Cinderella was always my favorite of the Disney fairy tales when I was little,” says Chris.

  I glance at Jimmy quickly, who nods approvingly. “Pre-Awakening evidence of your foot fetish,” I say.

  “How so?” asks Chris.

  “Oh, please,” says Jimmy. “A man and a woman come together when he places a perfectly fitting slipper on her foot after rejecting so many other imperfect feet and you fail to see the significance?”

  “You’re reaching,” says Seth. “That’s such a small part of the film.”

  “But it’s the most important,” I say.

  “And I wasn’t obsessed with it,” says Chris. “I just liked Disney movies.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Jimmy. “Well, while we’re on the subject of Disney, I almost had Ariel once at the Magic Kingdom. I was there on a family vacation. I took my little sister to see Ariel in her grotto and naturally I started chatting her up. She was gorgeous. The red hair. The fin.

  “But that’s the eternal paradox with mermaids, one worthy of Xeno himself. For as hot as a genuine mermaid would be, there’s just no practical way you’d be able to do it with one. A girl in a costume sure, all I’d have to do would be take out my Swiss army knife and cut a slit into the crotch of the fin. And that’s what happened with Ariel. I worked my magic and she was willing.

  “We snuck back into her changing room and began making out. But at the very moment I was gonna make her part of my world, Snow White walked in on us. She wanted to grab some lunch with Ariel. And Snow White freaked out. Now I’m not sure if Snow White noticed Ariel’s fin with the slit and was disgusted by the thought of anthropomorphic sex or if it was just general outrage that I was going to defile a Disney princess, but she starts going off on me. Bad. Snow White’s cursing me and hitting me while all Ariel can do is put her top back on.

  “So I just had to get the hell out of there. Join back up with the family at the It’s a Small World ride and pretend like nothing happened. I can only hope that Ariel and Snow White worked things out and that Ariel didn’t get fired. Now I’m not usually the kind of guy who keeps trophies, but I came home from that vacation very disappointed that I didn’t have Ariel’s clam bra as a souvenir.”

  “Wow,” says Seth. “Was that your only non-Felicia experience so far?”

  “Yeah,” says Jimmy.

  “I guess mermaid Ariel would do nothing for you, huh, Chris?” I ask.

  “Well, no, but she gets feet when she becomes human. And I bet you she was all about having Eric touch them, because it would be such a new and unique experience for her. Ariel would like her foot rubs, definitely. So who was your cartoon crush?”

  “I had a crush on Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda cartoon,” I say. “Remember how the Super Mario Super Show was on Monday through Thursday and Zelda was on Friday? I liked Zelda on her own series, but she was even hotter when she guest starred on that one episode of Captain N because she wore a belly shirt in it. I like navels even now, but it was pretty revealing for a kid to see. Showing a midriff was about as sexualized as American cartoons could get back then, and that was long before bountiful anime women would make their journey to the West.”

  “Man, Zelda was a total bitch in those cartoons,” says Chris. “All she was ever doing was putting Link down.”

  “There was some hostility,” I say. “But they were just like Han and Leia.”

  “Not really,” says Seth. “Han and Leia were both antagonistic towards each other. Link was always vainly seeking Zelda’s approval and trying to get a kiss from her, and she always responded with so much abject hatred for him that I thought she’d rather plant one on Ganon. And while Link was trying and failing to put the moves on Zelda, he was oblivious to the fact that Sprite the fairy was in love with him. Actually, you know it all makes sense why you would have liked Zelda so much.”

  “Sprite the fairy was barefoot. As all good fairies should be,” says Chris. “And I had a crush on Galadria. She was the one female knight on the good guy side from Visionaries.”

  The three of us look at Chris blankly. “It was a cartoon,” he says. “And a toy line. It was awesome. They all had these animal totems which gave them their powers. Their action figures had these cool holograms on their chests that depicted their totems. To summon their power, they all had these rhymes they had to speak aloud. Galadria’s totem was the dolphin and she had the power of healing. Her rhyme was ‘By warmth of heart, your pain I feel. Grant me the power, your wounds to heal!’” Chris speaks the rhyme as if he were laying hands on one of us to bring us back from the brink of death.

  “That sounds pretty lame,” says Seth.

  “Well, she had the power of healing, a useful but not particularly awesome power. Darkstorm, he was the lead bad guy, his totem was the mollusk and he had the power of decay. His rhyme was much cooler. He shouted ‘By what creeps, what crawls, by what does not, let all that grows recede and rot!”

  A moment passes where in my mind I hear crickets chirping and imagine a tumbleweed rolling past Chris.

  “What kind of totem is the mollusk for a lead bad guy?” asks Jimmy.

  “That was the genius of the show,” says Chris. “It didn’t go the predictable route. It didn’t make a dragon the totem of the lead villain, which would have the obvious thing to do. And the storylines were more advanced than your typical cartoon series. But that’s why it never really caught on. It was far too ahead of its time.”

  “If they gave the one girl on the team the totem of the dolphin, it wasn’t that revolutionary of a show,” I say.

  “They had to cater to the little girls, too,” says Chris. “And dolphins are a little girl’s third favorite thing in the world right after rainbows and unicorns.”

  “I gotta tell you,” says Seth, “that this show sounds like it sucked.”

  “Screw you philistines!” shouts Chris. “I pity the fools who don’t like the Visionaries. They were the knights of the magical light!”

  “Moving on,” says Seth, “what celebrity would you most like to do? And no busty behemoth pornstars, no professional foot models, and no cosplayers doing an anthropomorphic character. I’m talking mainstream celebrity only.”

  “Then no blondes for you,” says Chris.

  “Fair enough,” says Seth.

  “Come back to me,” says Jimmy. “I’ll need a minute.”

  “I pick Fuko,” I say, spouting off her name like she’s the first toy I’d ask Santa for while sitting on his lap.

  “Who’s that?” asks Jimmy. “The name sounds Japanese.”

  “She is,” I say. “She’s a Japanese model with extremely large natural breasts, reaching otherwise unheard of proportions for an Asian.”

  “I don’t know if I can count her,” says Seth.

  “She doesn’t do porn,” I say. “Topless modeling, yes, but only softcore stuff. And she’s all natural. And she’s very big in Japan. Most haven’t heard of her here stateside because we put women like Kate Moss on pedestals.”

  “This Fuko,” says Jimmy, “does she posses a kitsune quality?”

  “I’ve never considered it,” I say. “So I don’t know. Google some pics and see for yourself.”

  Jimmy brings up her Google image search results on his phone.

  “The picture where she’s holding the watermelons up to her breasts is one of my favorites,” I say.

  “Those boobs aren’t real,” says Seth. “They can’t be real.”

&nb
sp; “They’re real,” I say. “Notice the teardrop shape of her breasts. Implants would appear much more circular.”

  “He’s right,” says Chris. “They look real. Now, I don’t normally go for Justin’s kind of over-endowed women, and Fuko’s boobs on a woman of any other race would probably disgust me, but the sheer size of those on an Asian make Fuko so much of a rarity I’d tap her for the uniqueness value. Like if someone handed me a copy of the Necronomicon, I’d know that I should just throw it away, but I wouldn’t be able to. I’d have to open it up and read it. And I’d do Fuko for the same reason.”

  “I wouldn’t,” says Seth. “Having your face melted off by opening the Ark of the Covenant would be a unique death. That doesn’t mean I’d want to experience it.”

  “No doubt Fuko is special,” says Jimmy. “But she does not have a kitsune quality.”

  “How about someone from the American mainstream?” asks Seth. “Can you give us one?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Amanda Bynes.”

  “Amanda Bynes? She’s not busty at all,” says Jimmy. “I’d have assumed you’d at least require a Scarlett Johansson-esque bust to be at all satisfied.”

  “That’s not the only thing I care about,” I say. “Amanda’s a real cutie.”

  “She’s okay,” says Seth. “She’s hardly a first round pick.”

  “Yeah, she’s just okay,” says Chris. “And the beauty of Scarlett’s bust is eclipsed by the magnificence of her ten little piggies, Jimmy.”

  “Okay, so who’d the rest of you pick if you wouldn’t take Amanda?” I ask.

  “Amy Lee from Evanescence,” says Seth.

  “A fine non-blonde choice,” says Chris. “Although anyone remotely connected to the Daredevil movie has some serious apologizing to do should they ever cross my path.”

  “Let’s see,” says Jimmy. “I’d take, uh, Yvonne Craig, Batgirl from the old Adam West series.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” says Seth. “Although I would have expected you to say Julie Newmar.”

  “I’ve always wanted to do Linda Blair,” says Chris. “That scene in Exorcist II where she’s seducing the priest, man that was hot! Awesome scene from a really bad movie.”

  “Linda Blair?” I ask. “How can you like Linda Blair but not Amanda Bynes? Linda Blair’s like an Amanda Bynes from the 1970s. Nowadays they could play mother and daughter they look so much alike. You can’t be into one and not the other.”

  “I don’t see that at all,” says Chris. “And I’m not saying I’d have to be a sexual Perseus and have to do Bynes doggystyle and only be able to look at her reflection through a finely polished shield. That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is she isn’t the very first girl that comes to mind for me, that’s all.”

  It’s 8:00pm, and we’ve finally hit the halfway point. A viewing of The Wizard has helped us to reach this moment, along with a spirited contest to determine who could best utter the epic word California as well as the single greatest villain declaration ever: I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad. Jimmy took the prize for California, while Seth won for the Power Glove remark, which he claimed was due to him being perhaps the only person in the entire world to have successfully mastered the Power Glove for its original purpose back in the 8-bit era.

  We moved on to arguing about whether or not Seth overtipped the blonde pizza delivery girl. He insisted he did not, with Jimmy taking his side, citing the convoluted order she was tasked with managing, which consisted of three special order pizzas, breadsticks, desserts, and several liters of soda. Seth also pointed out that she had no trouble finding our tent amidst the rest of the geeky shantytown.

  Chris decried her for what he perceived as visible contempt for the lot of us and the night’s mission. I maintained it was simply a question of mathematics, as even with what I admitted was superior delivery service fifteen dollars was too much to give. The argument concluded when we all agreed that she was hot (according to Jimmy, she’d make for a most exquisite fox-girl).

  Currently we’re asking each other random questions. “I got one,” I say, chugging down the final swig from a bottle of Dr. Pepper, the only carbonated beverage I’ve ever chugged. “What was one of the crazy beliefs you held as a child?”

  “I ruined my first NES deck on a crazy rumor I bought into,” says Seth. “On the bottom of the NES there was an expansion port. As far as I know, Nintendo never did release any official device that made use of the port. But it was there, and its lack of purpose perplexed me as a kid. So when my friend told me that you could play Sega Master System games by inserting them into the port and it was this really big secret Nintendo didn’t want people to know about, I believed him. We tried it with an Alex Kidd cartridge, and when it didn’t fit, we tried to force it and wound up breaking the cartridge.”

  We all laugh. “A double agent employed by Nintendo but secretly working for Sega could have engineered it,” says Jimmy. “I might have believed that had someone told me about it. And I have a NES myth of my own. A friend of a friend of mine was playing through the second quest of The Legend of Zelda for the first time and he’d finally reached level 9 when he had to go to his grandmother’s for the weekend. He took his NES with him and so he faced Ganon on his grandma’s old black and white television. Now Ganon was ordinarily invisible when you fought him, but somehow a black and white picture made him visible for the entire fight, or so this friend of a friend claimed. That made Ganon easy to beat, given that his primary advantage was invisibility.

  “So when I heard his story I tried it out for myself. I adjusted the picture on my own TV to make it black and white, but Ganon didn’t become visible. I called the friend of my friend out for lying. He said the reason it didn’t work for me must have been the fact that I simply changed my color screen to a black and white picture using my set’s tint controls. He said what made it work for him was that his grandma’s TV couldn’t actually display color properly, so that was why Ganon was visible for him and not for me. And I had no black and white TV to play on, so I could never disprove him.”

  “That’s not necessarily crazy,” says Chris. “If you’ve never actually seen it disproven for yourself, the friend of your friend might have been telling the truth.”

  “I don’t see why the lack of color on a black and white TV would cause Ganon to always be visible,” says Seth.

  “And I don’t think you even could hook up a NES to an actual black and white television,” I say. “Those things predate even the Magnavox Odyssey, they wouldn’t have the right connectors.”

  “I don’t know,” says Chris. “It’s probably bogus just like fighting the dog in Duck Hunt, but still-”

  Whatever Chris was planning on saying next is drowned out by the sudden, loud moaning of a woman being brought closer and closer to an orgasm, set to a metal beat.

  “That’s More Human than Human by White Zombie,” says Seth. “But who’s out there blasting it?”

  We all exit the tent and see that our fellow line-waiters have done the same. Our eyes focus on a white van with the logo for Lux, a local radio station. As the woman’s moaning ends and the song proper begins the music abruptly cuts out. The doors of the van are thrown open by a man wearing sunglasses at night and an all black outfit.

  “Hello, losers!” the man bellows into a megaphone.

  “Jerry Reeves,” says Seth.

  “The Blitz. He’s a shock jock,” says Chris, presumably for the benefit of Jimmy, but also for myself.

  “What’s he doing here?” asks Jimmy.

  “He probably just came to make fun of us,” I say.

  “Not his style,” says Seth. “Whatever it is, it’s more than that.”

  Support and security personnel make their presence known as the Blitz makes a big show of checking his watch. “Well, well, well,” he says, “it looks like in just a little under twelve short hours, you’ll all be able to start pissing your pants in excitement as a most auspicious day in the history of your sad lit
tle lives will begin!”

  Making his way over to us the Blitz spots the Optimus Prime play tent and pushes the handle of his sunglasses down his nose, exposing his eyes. He’s greatly enjoying himself.

  “Ah, the first fellows in line,” says The Blitz. “And just how long have you been sitting out here on your ass for?” he asks, putting a microphone to my mouth.

  “Since eight o’clock this morning, sir!” I exclaim in my most over the top nerd voice. My friends all chuckle and I hear laughter from the rest of the crowd.

  The Blitz actually seems pleased knowing he’ll have to work harder to shake up the crowd. “Okay, you can bet that’s going to be a sound bite,” he says. “You’re certainly excited for the… what was it again? The Sega Dreamcast?” He walks back to the van. “But seriously guys, I’m not here to make fun. In fact, I’m here to help you out. I’m going to make you all an offer you damn well shouldn’t refuse! No, no, that’s not entirely accurate. She’s about to make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse!”

  A woman emerges from the van. Tall, perhaps six feet, with jet-black hair extending to her lower back, she bears a wicked smile that makes her look like she sprang to life from the pages of The Book of Vile Darkness. Pale as a vampire, she wears a cleavage-bearing leather outfit complete with boots and is heavily tattooed.

  “Direct to you from her stint at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a fully licensed and legal Nevada brothel, pornstar Delilah Summons!” declares the Blitz.

  “That’s right,” says Delilah. “The Moonlite Bunny Ranch. Fully licensed. Fully legal. You want me, you can have me. No rules. No limits. Want another girl? Want me and another girl? Have a fantasy you’ve never fulfilled? Whatever you want, you’ll have it. All you can handle. Completely free. All you have to do is walk away from this line. Walk away right now and you get a free trip to the Bunny Ranch and a complimentary party with the girl or girls of your choice.”

  The four of us look at each other. Everyone in every group looks at each other. The few women in line glare at Delilah and the Blitz with disgust. The Blitz grins, a monkey thrown firmly in the wrench. And once again, the party crashers signal us out first, with the temptress herself walking directly toward us. Delilah says nothing at all, instead grabbing Jimmy’s crotch and pawing at his face to get her message across. He smiles at her like a disinterested waiter would at a flirty customer, silently removing her hand from his face with his own. She squeezes his groin hard before relenting.