legionmissions | They're off to see the Wizard...

Ken and Korumaru finally come to a landing in an an idyllic, if cartoonish looking village. Ken, for whatever reason, is suddenly wearing a blue gingham dress, and Korumaru is stuck in a picnic basket that is far too small for him.

A quick glance around reveals that one of the cars dragged away by the tornado fell on a woman wearing bright red ruby-covered slippers.

Ken stops, looks down at his new outfit, and visibly winces. "You've got to be kidding me."

A bark from the basket next to him is enough to take his attention off the sudden blow to his fragile teenage ego, however, and he glances down. "Koromaru?" He kneels (in a way that would look fine for someone wearing pants, but is possibly a little immodest for someone with a skirt on) and takes one of the dog's paws, pulling one front leg and then the other free from the basket. "That enough for you to get out, boy?"

It is - Koromaru twists his hindquarters free, giving the basket a dirty look as he steps away from it.

Ken never read the Wizard of Oz, or saw the movie - not the American one, anyway - but he's not as lost as he could be. He saw the anime! Once. He glances over to the slipper-clad feet sticking out from under the car and frowns. Ah, yes, this is familiar in exactly the way he was kind of hoping he was wrong about. "There's nothing in the story that says I have to stay dressed like this, is there?"

As Ken gets his bearings, a pink orb begins to descend from the sky. Nearing the ground, the orb resolves itself into the form of a woman in an elaborate pink dress.

"Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?"

He's starting to really miss beating up weird monsters at midnight.

"I'm not a witch." He probably sounds a little less surprised than Dorothy ever did, and a little more petulant, but nobody ever said they had to do this story right.

"..well, I'm a little muddled. The Munchkins called me because a new witch has just dropped some sort of vehicle on the Wicked Witch of the East. And there's the vehicle, and here you are, and that's," she points towards the mostly flattened Wicked Witch, "all that's left of the Wicked Witch of the East."

"And, so, what the Munchkins want to know is, are you a good witch, or a bad witch?"

The grass rustles slightly, and there's movement at the windows of the village's buildings. It's as if dozens of small people are trying to stay hidden while still desperately interested in what's going on.

Koromaru whines softly from next to him, and while he may not speak dog, Ken can get enough of a meaning from it. They're not really getting anywhere like this.

So he grits his teeth and plays along.

"I'm definitely not a bad witch. So...I guess that makes me a good one."

"Hmm, I supposed I'll have to give you the benefit of the doubt. It's safe to come out now, friends. He won't harm you," says Glinda as scores of Munchkins come out of hiding and start singing.

"Ding Dong! The Witch is dead! Which old witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead!"

They continue to sing and dance around Ken and Korumaru, while off in the distance a smoke cloud begins to descend, unnoticed by the celebrating Munchkinlanders.

It's an uncomfortable thought to realize that this is really making him miss the creepy death tower from home. At least he knew what to do with that.

As such, his wandering gaze settles on the smoke cloud, and he frowns. "Hey, um - should we be worried about that? Anyone?"

The cloud coalesces into a ugly, green-skinned witch. The munchkins scatter, running and screaming their heads off.

"Who killed my sister? Who killed the Witch of the East? Was it you?" she asks, pointing a gnarled finger towards Ken.

"Answer me!"

"Leave her alone!" Glinda exclaims, interposing herself between Ken and the Witch.

"You stay out of this! I'm here for vengeance!" the Wicked Witch snaps before focusing back on Ken. "So it was you, was it? You killed her...didn't you?"

"Technically, wouldn't you say the car killed her?"

If he's stuck in this role, he's going to be a smartass the entire way and you can't stop him you're not his real mom.

"The car killed her, is that it? Well, don't you worry, my pretty. Technically it'll be my magic that kills you..." The Witch threatens, before Glinda interrupts.

"Aren't you forgetting the ruby slippers?" she says, pointing over towards the car.

"The slippers -- yes.....the slippers!" The Wicked Witch walks over to the car, only to see the ruby slippers quickly vanish, and the Witch of the East's legs to curl up underneath the vehicle.

"They're gone!" she exclaims, but they're not as gone as she thinks. The ruby slippers appear once more, this time on Ken's feet.

Don't look down, stupid.

He knows exactly what's there, but calling any more attention to it than necessary seems...ill-advised?

Koromaru, on the other hand, does not have the same familiarity with the story, and starts sniffing Ken's feet suspiciously.

As Ken and Korumaru follow the yellow brick road, they soon come across a cornfield, where a woman in a burlap dress stands, bits of hay sticking out of her outfit.

What's a woman to do when she's whisked away from an important showdown with a villain into a tornado and opens her eyes to find her fabulous superhero costume replaced with a dumpy burlap dress that had probably been filled with hay mere minutes earlier?

Complain, for one thing.

"Of all the things this weird magical junk could do," Videl grumbled, awkwardly reaching one arm around her back to grab at some of the straw poking out. "Why'd it have to make something this itchy?"

A familiar face.

Thank goodness.

"At least wearing a dress doesn't look stupid on you," says the somewhat grumpy young teenager in the blue gingham.

Videl turned back to the road and spotted a slender young boy in a blue dress with a pair of flashy red slippers that didn't do quite enough from how gangly the dress made his legs look. He looked so unhappy about the ensemble that Videl struggled to hold back a snort of laughter.

"It doesn't look that stupid," she tried to assure him, forcing herself not to smile. No, it really did look that stupid.

"But at least your dress isn't full of straw." Videl strained her arms around again, trying to scratch her back. The wooden pole that kept her suspended in the corn field was making this ordeal a lot more difficult.

"Okay, I guess that's fair. That's got to itch, right?"

Not to mention that pole. It might not be getting crucified by a crazy nihilist (Ken's had a weird childhood), but it definitely wasn't a place to keep hanging around. "Do you need help getting down?"

"Please," Videl entreated. "There's a big nail driven square in my back." She motioned with one arm toward her back, where she and the pole were held together by a big iron nail the size of a railroad spike. "If you bend that down, I should be able to slide right off."

After giving Ken her instructions, Videl wondered if she was perhaps being too blase about the giant nail in her back. But for some reason, it just didn't seem like a very big deal and she wasn't sure why.

"Ouch." He winced; that sounded...uncomfortable, to make a vicious understatement of it. But she didn't sound too in pain or alarmed by it. Side effect of the role, maybe?

He wasn't going to waste the time dwelling on it. He walked around to the other side and reached for the nail. "Like...this?"

Videl felt the nail shift in her back but found herself overall unfazed by the sensation.

"Yeah, that's about right." She wiggled about, trying to scoot herself off the nail so she could slip off the pole. "A little more down... That's it!" With another vigorous wiggle, Videl dropped right off the pole and fell in heap onto some stalks of corn.

He dropped the nail, immediately coming around the front of the pole and crouching to check on her. "Um, are you okay?"

Videl struggled against the corn stalks into a sitting position, breaking a few in the process.

"Much better, thank you!" she replied with a smile. She reached behind her back to the spot where the nail had been, fumbling to cram the straw that made up her insides back inside where it belonged. "It was really quite restrictive, being strung up on a pole like a scarecrow. And before you showed up, some very irritating crows kept flying around and 'caww'ing at me."

"That seems...kind of counter to the point of a scarecrow."

Shouldn't they be flying in the other direction?

Moving further on the road, the trio enter a forest, and eventually end up near a moss-covered cottage, with a slightly rusted metal man standing outside. The man seems to be saying something, but it's hard to hear from where the group is standing.

As the group gathers closer, it becomes somewhat easier to pick up on what Ray is saying, although not by much. Ray's mouth is rusted in place, making it difficult to pronounce any words.

"Geh eh Ugghle-ooh-Ee-orty. Oory."

"I...did not get a single word of that, sorry."

But he does, at least, remember how this part is supposed to go, and starts glancing around. "There should be a can of oil around here, right?"

"'ahn owuh ehre. Ah eh uh."

Sitting on a stump, there is in fact a can. It isn't, however, oil. Rather, it's a can of the WD-40 Ray was asking for.

Edited 2017-04-07 02:08 (UTC)

Tomato, to-mah-to?

Koromaru walks up to the stump and barks once, and Ken moves over and grabs the can. "Good boy."

Videl tilts her head to the side as she watches the exchange, for some reason finding herself exceptionally confused.

"What do you need a can of lubricant for? I thought you didn't understand all his 'oogly googly' talk."

"I didn't, but I've read this book before. Well, watched the anime. When I was a kid, I mean."

(Because he is totally a Mature Young Man and no longer a kid, and he has definitely outgrown things like anime, of course. Why does anyone doubt this.)

Usually Ray was a kind and goodnatured soul. However, being stuck in one place was starting to get on his nerves, and Ken could probably feel Ray's glare boring into his back. The Ghostbuster really wanted out of this.

Videl looks blankly between Ken and Ray. "What's anime got to do with anything?"

She fixes her attention in Ray, studying him intently. Ken has clearly already figured out what's wrong here, so why can't she? Burlap brows knitting together in concentration, Videl tries to break down the problem. There's a metal man who speaks in gibberish and Ken thinks this has something to do with lubricant. But why?

Suddenly, the metaphorical light turns on in Videl's straw-filled head. "Oh, I get it now! He's all rusted and can't move. That's why he talks so funny."

He's getting there, sheesh.

Still, getting stared at was annoying enough to get him moving a little faster as he started squirting the stuff into all the appropriate joints. Legs, arms, waist, neck...

Yeah, okay, jaw, and hopefully that one wasn't about to bite him in the butt.

"Better?"

"Yeah. Small-scale reality warping that alters the form of anybody trapped within is fascinating, but I could've done without being rusted stiff." Ray says, working his jaw and flexing each of his parts to make sure everything is in working order.

Now a quartet, Ray, Videl, Ken and Korumaru find themselves in a deep, dark jungle. The path has become hard to see, even though it's colored as bright a yellow as possible. There could be anything in this densely packed wood. Possibly Lions. Maybe tigers. There might even be bears (Oh my).

Tadashi isn't really a hiking in the woods kind of guy, but he's reasonably sure that it's straight up magic keeping him lost here. Mostly because he keeps going around in circles without making any turns, which he knows because he's been using his brand new claws to scratch arrows into tree trunks. He's pretty tired of that nonsense. He's also pretty tired of being hot and itchy because he's covered in fur that is much less soft than that of a domestic house cat.

As such, he can't quite help growling at the rustling in the bushes nearby. He doesn't particularly want to get into a fight on top of everything else, but he wants to get chased around the woods even less than he wants to wander around them.

"And there's our Cowardly Lion." Ray says, climbing over the bushes.

"You can quit the growling. I can guarantee you that nobody else is happy to be here either."

"You can say that again," Ken mutters under his breath, tugging at his skirt.

"Now that was kind of rude, don't you think?" Videl asks Ray, lifting the burlap hat off her head and picking errant pieces of straw out of her hair. "Calling Tadashi a coward."

"I'm not calling Tadashi cowardly. I apologize if it sounded that way," Ray adds as he glances Tadashi's way.

"The Cowardly Lion is the name of the Wizard of Oz character whose role he's taken."

"The wizard of where?" Videl flattened the hat back on her head, following Ray's glance toward Tadashi. "And why would a lion be cowardly? Has this wizard ever actually met a lion?"

Tadashi brightens considerably at the sight of his teammates.

"I'm actually pretty okay with the Cowardly Lion if it means I'm not stuck in the Lion King," he answers, crouching down and holding his hand (paw?) out for Koromaru to sniff. He hasn't read or seen any versions of the Wizard of Oz in awhile, but he thinks that Dorothy might smack the Lion for scaring Toto when they first meet, and frankly he'd rather skip that.

"And don't worry, I didn't take offense," he assures Ray. "I am secure in the knowledge that, if anything, I suffer more from poor judgment than cowardice."

"Oz," answers Ray, "That's the name of the fictional country the story is set in. And the lion being cowardly is dramatic irony. You expect a lion to be brave and fearsome, and instead you get a lion that's scared of it's own shadow. Cowardly is kind of a misnomer, though. The Lion might have been afraid, but he was still able to help despite that."

"That's kind of the point of whole story, really. Each member of the group needed something from the Wizard. The Scarecrow wanted a brain," he says as he gestures to Videl and the rest of the group in turn, "The Tin Man wanted a heart, the Cowardly Lion wanted courage, and Dorothy wanted a way to return home. The thing was, they all had what they were looking for from the beginning, even though they didn't...know..."

Ray trails off, feeling particularly dumb for not noticing one very important bit of information earlier.

"It just occurred to me that we could've ended this ages ago."

Edited 2017-04-19 07:38 (UTC)

"You mean to tell me we're actually in some kind of storybook?" Videl scrunches up her face, running over Ray's information. "That's just ridiculous."

Or is it? Nobody else seems particularly appalled by this revelation. And come to think of it, Ken brought up the same thing when he helped her down from the scarecrow pole. Videl's brows knit together and she reaches up under her hat to scratch the back of her head. It all feels like a puzzle, one she has all the pieces to but one that she can't seem to solve. It's been very difficult to keep focused ever since first opened her eyes and found herself dressed in a burlap sack.

"Wait, you know the answer?" she asks, turning her attention back to Ray.

Ken glances down at the (ridiculous) ruby slippers. "I guess technically, I could've been out of here before I ran into any of you..."

Which might be an argument for sticking around, now that he considers it all.

"I'm not sure that us being magically forced into storybook roles is any more ridiculous than people getting super powers from drinking chemistry experiments, which is definitely a thing that happens in this reality," Tadashi says in response to Videl's protest. He too glances down at Ken's ruby slippers, then back to Ray.

"If Ken taps his shoes together and goes home before the story's over, do we know that it's not going to trap the rest of us? Or any of the others who might have ended up here? There's still the Wizard, and that's assuming that we're only likely to fill the roles of named characters."

They're off to see the Wizard...

Ding-dong, the Witch is dead...

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If she only had a brain...

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If he only had a heart...

Re: If he only had a heart...

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If he only had the nerve...

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