This week’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Literary Mash-Up.
There’s no sense pretending on this one. I loved (no, let’s not even hide it, love, present tense) Frozen. So when my random selection gave me a mash-up of The Avengers and Frozen, it felt like Christmas coming around again.
I took the mash-up a little bit more literally than perhaps the challenge is meant to be taken, but I don’t care. I had more fun writing this than anything I’ve written in recent months.
Here’s Cold Fury, in 960 words.
Cold Fury
Get out of the ice business, they said. Market’s crashing, they said.
But what the hell was I supposed to do? I’m just an ice jockey from the sticks. No formal education, no particular skillset to speak of, outside of chopping ice, shaping it, transporting it, preserving it. Who am I kidding? It’s not like you couldn’t teach a rock troll to do what I do. The reindeer can practically do the job without me; he just can’t hold the icepick with his hooves. But that’s hardly the point.
Point is, the world is getting way too strange for somebody like me to make sense of it. I mean, one day I’m hauling a load of prime-cut crystal down from the peaks, and BANG, like magic, there’s this freak snowstorm out of nowhere. To say it’s a few months early is to overstate the obvious. Granted, weather can get weird up in the mountains, but this stuff settles in. Goes on thick, like marshmallow paste, and heavy, like reindeer dung; it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and I might as well be dragging a sledful of sunlight in the summer behind me for all the good this ice is gonna do me. Pity, too. It’s a beautiful haul, but off it goes down the mountainside; no sense tiring out the reindeer. And I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself for the foreseeable future when I remember there’s this shack back down the mountainside a stitch. Maybe I can ponder my troubles with a mug in my hand, away from the cackling of the jerks back in town.
I’m within sight of the shack when this guy steps out from behind a tree. Out-of-towner. Whatever he was doing out there is anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t gonna ask him. He’s got this leathery coat flapping like mad around his knees in the mountain wind, and a gleaming bald black head atop these massive, don’t-mess-with-me shoulders, and he’s staring hard at me like I stole his lunch money twenty years ago and he’s here to pay me back. Or maybe he’s just looking at me, and it’s the eyepatch that makes him look all ominous.
He tells me he needs me. That there’s this girl coming up the mountain, and she’s in trouble. That I should look out for her, help her find her sister. That he needs me to help “bring the sister in,” whatever that means. I ask him what’s in it for me, and he asks if I’ve ever wanted to be a prince. And I’m about to tell him to take a flying leap off the bluffs over there — seven hundred feet straight down. Then I stop. It’s not like I have anything better going on. Endless blizzard and all.
Looking back on it now, I don’t even know if he was real. All I know is, I turned to ask what he was gonna do for my reindeer, you know, to sweeten the deal, and when I looked back, he was gone… and behind him, in the distance, I see this girl lurching up the mountainside toward the shack. Tiny. Frail. Freezing. Then it gets worse. I follow her in, and she turns out to be gorgeous. Weird thing going on with her hair, this pale streak mixed in with all the red, but a face that’s cute like about a dozen baby reindeer and… well. I try to play it cool, but my brain is doing backflips trying to figure out how that angry eyepatch guy knew about her.
We talk. She needs a ride; I could use the money she offers me for giving her a ride. Next thing I know, it’s talking snowmen and imperial guards and a chase back down the same damn mountain we just climbed up. Oh, and her sister? Yeah, turns out she’s some sort of witch or something, and she’s all icicles and snow and eternal cold and… look, I’m not the guy to ask about everything that went down, all right? To be honest, the talking snowman gave me the screaming willies, and now he’s got his own room in the castle and he’s somehow still a snowman despite the fact that summer has come and gone six or seven times now. Ice Witch, right? Anyway. Sister and I get married, do the happily-ever-after thing, and the Snow Queen or whatever you call her rules in grace and splendor and all that good stuff. And then it hits me like an avalanche.
Eyepatch was right. I’m a prince now.
It’s too good to be true, right? Me, the ice-chucker from nowhere marries into the royal family. For years I don’t say anything — don’t look a gift reindeer in the mouth, right? — until one day I’m heading down for breakfast in the lower dining hall and I hear that voice. I go running in and see the guy, eyepatch and shiny head and all, sitting down talking with the queen. And he’s spouting all this stuff about parallel dimensions and ancient artifacts of untold power and how the world — no, the universe — needs her. Before I can even get my wife out of bed (she sleeps like a yeti, that one) the queen goes and gets on this — what can I call it? Like a boat, but made of steel, and flying, just floating over the ground like a hummingbird, if you can believe that — and leaves with the guy. And I try to explain, but my girl just goes into this… this FURY, you know?
Anyway, my wife and I rule the kingdom now while her sister, the Frost Fairy or whatever, is off fighting the evils of the universe, or something. And that’s how I became King of Arendelle.
Accidentally Inspired 
Chuck’s challenge of the week: Build a story around one simple sentence.
I was inescapably drawn to the quirky and goofy sentence penned by Ryanjamesblack: “Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues.”
Here, then, is Merlin in Midtown.
Merlin in Midtown
“I’ve got a care package prepared for you when you arrive,” the man in black said. His name was Smith — obviously a fake — and Merlin much preferred the more ominous-sounding “man in black”.
“Clothes, shoes, letters of writ?” Merlin asked.
“We call them passports, but yes.”
“Hat?” The man in black held up a baseball cap before the mirror. Merlin passed an unimpressed eye over it. “Not pointy enough.”
“No pointy hats here.”
Merlin huffed through his prodigious mustache, blowing its points out toward the mirror. As likely, Smith would say “no beards” next.
“And about your beard…”
“Not a chance! I’ll not shear my face for some little upstart. Maybe in your time the men go around with their faces as smooth as the women’s, but –“
“Relax. You don’t have to cut it.” Smith reached into his devilish little contraption and pulled out a hand-sized box with a smiling, grizzled man on it.
“What in the name of Excalibur is that?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
He had delayed long enough. Worlds needed saving. Again. The man in black had contacted him using all the appropriate passwords; he was a member of the Order, even if his appearance suggested nothing arcane in the least. Still, Merlin had seen stranger things in his time. “Stand back.” He hiked up the hem of his robe, stood up on the washbasin, and stepped through the mirror. Smith stood a respectable distance away as Merlin emerged from the bathroom mirror in his twenty-first century apartment. Now in the flesh, Merlin finally got a good look at the man in his sharp but nondescript black suit.
Of course, Merlin didn’t know what a suit was, but it looked sensible enough.
“Is that how you’re dressing me, then?”
“Not exactly.”
Merlin leaned against the bathroom sink, stroking his smoky beard self-consciously, studying the instructions on the “JUST FOR MEN” box with the surly frown he usually reserved for translating incantations scribed in a dead tongues. After massaging the foul-smelling goop into his beard and a good, healthy rinse, a less grey Merlin looked back at him from the mirror. “What sorcery is this?” he demanded.
“Less sorcery, more chemistry. Your wardrobe is in the other room.”
Smith exited the building in his black suit, got into a waiting black car with black windows, and drove off into a black tunnel. Merlin followed a few minutes after, wearing leather chaps and biker boots and a jacket studded with enough metal, he figured, to defend himself against a knight’s broadsword, not that he expected to encounter any such weapon in this time. At the curb, next to the lumbering steel beasts that glided past in puffs of faint fading smoke, stood a wheeled contraption that looked like some blacksmith’s nightmarish invention, a two-wheeled tangle of pipes and plastic and leather that the man in black had told him to ride to the destination. He tossed one leather-clad leg across its seat, cast a few protection spells about himself, and forgot to breathe as the thing roared to life and spirited him through the streets at ludicrous speeds. Tingles of excitement zinged through parts of him he’d forgotten about.
He dismounted the iron horse and pushed his way through the swinging doors of a tavern that felt a bit more like home than the rest of this world. It was dark and seedy and smelled of ale and smoke. Smith had given him a magical imprint of the man he was here to find, a lifelike image on a piece of glossy parchment which he held at the tip of his long nose as he cast his sparkling eyes around the room. There, bent over a green table in the back, was the very same boy, the likeness impossibly undeniable. In his hand, a quarterstaff, tapered to a fine point, with which he propelled a series of balls around the table. Merlin lowered the brim of his disappointingly un-pointy hat and strode over to the boy. “Arthur?” he used the voice he saved for royal decrees and portents, a deep, rumbling and ominous affair designed to awe and mystify.
“Scram, old man,” said the boy, in complete disregard of Merlin’s melodramatic tones.
Merlin tapped a finger on the table and the billiard balls exploded in a cloud of rainbow-colored dust. Arthur drew a tiny flashing blade and pointed it at Merlin’s nose. Merlin squinted his caterpillar-thick eyebrows and the dagger flung itself into the edge of the table, yanking Arthur’s hand down with it. The boy pulled and wrenched at the blade but it was stuck fast.
Merlin chuckled to himself. In his time, a child of destiny would reveal himself through a feat of strength or a demonstration of wit; this lad seemed capable of neither.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Enough, Arthur. I’m here to help you.”
“My name’s not Arthur, you psycho.”
Beneath his copious mustache, Merlin’s lips creased into a terse line. He left the youth bewildered and shouting obscenities at his back as he stomped out of the bar, the ridiculous garments of leather and steel disappearing in puffs of purple smoke and being replaced with his comfortable, grey robes. Outside, Smith, the “man in black” leaned against his black sedan, smiling a cheshire-cat grin. Merlin waved a hand and the slick facade dissolved, revealing a pale woman in a cascading, swirling dress of green and purple. She held a tiny blinking device in her hand, which she aimed at him with a series of maddening clicks. “Damn you, Morgan!” In her own wisp of grey-green smoke, she vanished.
By the time he arrived back in his own time, all the stained glass in the castle had been replaced with images of Merlin in his ridiculous leather outfit astride that horrendous metal horse intimidating a poor, helpless twenty-first century kid; his latest indignity immortalized in multicolored mosaic.