RODENT PRINCESS Chapter 1: New Head, New Voices
The world was without form, and void, so far as they could tell.
And then the voice of the narrator spake, saying, “Dear Twilight…”
A gruff, surly, somewhat higher-pitched voice snapped, “Who’s that?”
“Sunset Shimmer,” said another voice, less gruff and more optimistic, but otherwise very similar to the first. “She’s a friend of mine. She loaned me-“
The first voice continued with barely a pause. “… this is the omnibus edition of the first two books in a children’s series from this side of the mirror. Both Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy love it, so I’m sure you’ll like it. And it’s fascinating how these book take fairy tales from both sides of the mirror and poke holes in them. Hope you enjoy! Your friend, Sunset Shimmer.”
Yet another voice, also similar to Gruff and Cheerful, said, “So it’s true about being in a book. Wonderful. So, I guess we’re just going to keep collecting new voices until our collective skull explodes?”
“You’re just grumpy because you can’t narrate in your head anymore,” Cheerful said.
“No, I’m grumpy because I don’t know whose head it’s going to be!” Snarky said.
There was the faint sound of a page being turned.
Nobody said, “Let there be light,” but suddenly there was indeed light. It winked in and out for a moment, and then the slightly blurry world came into focus…
The voice of Sunset Shimmer continued:
Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a princess named Gertrude Gerbaldine, who, as her name indicated, was a gerbil.
Gertrude’s eyes blinked, and her head lifted off her little travel pillow. “Yep, that’s me,” she said. “And if I may say so, quite a stunning gerbil at that.”
Gertrude was brave and intelligent and excelled in traditional gerbil things, like board games and fractions.
“Oh, fractions are easy!” a cheerful voice said. “Wait until you get to algebra! Solving for X is so much fun!”
“Hmph! Child’s play compared to calculating longitude with nothing but an hourglass to work with!” a much grumpier voice put in.
“Wonderful,” a third voice said, whose tone sort of split the difference between the first two. “Not only am I stuck in somebody else’s head, but I’m stuck with Smiley Geek and Grouchy Geek.”
She was not very good at pining, languishing, or wearing long loose gowns, which are traditional princess things. Her parents had tried hiring deportment coaches to help with this, until the day they found the latest one mummified in a seven-foot-long satin nightgown.
“Reeeeeally now?” the snarky voice asked in tones of keen and amused interest.
“Well,” Gertrude said matter-of-factly as she changed out of her nightshirt, “there’s only so long I’m willing to put up with people trying to balance a book on my head, that’s all I’m saying. And I was so disappointed when I found out that ‘trailing listlessly around the castle’ had nothing to do with learning how to track monsters.”
So, instead of learning to become a helpless maiden who sat in towers and waited for charming princes to come along, Gertrude rode across the countryside on her faithful riding quail, Hubert. Riding quail can’t actually fly, but they’re a perfect size for a gerbil to sit on one’s back as they seek out monsters to fight and helpless victims to save.
“And this is a princess?” Gruff snapped.
“Hey!” Cheerful protested. “I’m a princess, and I fight monsters! Of course, I don’t ride around on a steed. It’d be kind of silly, me being a pony.”
“Mom won’t let me actually kill any monsters,” Gertrude said. “She says it’s not princessly. But if a princess is doing it, doesn’t that make it princessly?” She crossed her forepaws sulkily and added, “I want to know who makes these stupid rules. I mean, I’m already eleven. That should be old enough, right?”
One morning, while Gertrude and Hubert were on a quest through the Sinister Swamp (formerly the Baneful Bog, formerly the Fearful Fen, formerly the Wicked Wetland, formerly Farmer Bob’s Reeds and Rushes Ranch) hunting for ogrecats to smite, she began hearing voices in her head.
Gertrude, for lack of anyplace else to look, looked up at the canvas of her little tent. “Yeah, thanks, I think we noticed that,” she said.
“You’re taking this calmly,” Cheerful said.
“Indeed,” Gruff said. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going mad?”
“Pshaw,” Gertrude said with a giggle. “Stuff like this happens to me all the time. So somehow some magic thing put you inside my head. Big deal. I’ll just ask a crone or witch for advice, go on some quest or other, and get it all sorted out.”
“That’s… surprisingly logical,” Cheerful said. “By the way, I’m Twilight Sparkle.”
“Harriet Daresden,” said Snarky.
After a mental grunt, the gruff voice said, “Captain Hornsparker of Her Royal Highness’s ship Lydia.”
“Nice to meet you,” Gertrude said, doing a few quick stretches. “Now, if you’ll excuse me a moment, it’s time for breakfast.”
“Oh, yeah,” Twilight Sparkle’s voice said, “we are kind of hungry, aren’t we?”
“Right after my morning cliff dive into the Waterfall of Narrative Convenience,” Geraldine said, kicking off her blanket and trotting out of her tent towards the nearby cliff.
“Her morning WHAT??” Hornsparker’s mental voice shouted.
“Into the WHAT??” Twilight chimed in.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Daresden said. “Twilight, you kept taking control of my body before, right? Hurry up and do it to this gerbil kid!”
“Yeah, not gonna happen,” Geraldine grunted, picking up speed rapidly.
“I’m trying!” Twilight grunted. “But it’s about willpower, right? Hornsparker made it hard, and your mental shields made it harder when you weren’t getting your head kicked in!”
The cliff closed in with surprising swiftness.
“Yeah, that’s their job!” Daresden said. “You got around that! Why not now?”
“Did you ever meet anyone more willful than an eleven-year-old girl?” Twilight snapped.
“Yes,” Hornsparker said, “a ten-year-old-“
The cliff edge passed under Geraldine and all the voices in her head, and the world tilted, revealing the distant and rather small blue pool surrounded by gloomy swamp vegetation and other much less healthy-looking patches of water.
Back on the cliff top, Hubert the quail shook his feathers loose at the familiar sound of his mistress shouting, “WHEEEEEEE!” as she plummeted down to the water below. He couldn’t hear the three mental voices screaming in terror, but to tell the truth, if he had he would have found those familiar too.
You got used to other people screaming in terror, if you spent more than a little time around Princess Gertrude Gerbaldine.
A little cauldron of oatmeal bubbled on the campfire while Gertrude toweled herself off. Hubert, who particularly enjoyed oatmeal with little chunks of fruit in it, eyed the pot with interest and ignored the conversation his mistress was having with voices he couldn’t hear.
“Well, I did say it was my usual morning thing,” Gertrude said aloud. “That is, whenever there’s a cliff available with water at the bottom. Sometimes I have to settle for the highest tower of a castle and jumping into the moat. But cliffs are more fun!”
“But that’s not the point!” Twilight Sparkle said somewhere in the darkness behind Gertrude’s eyes. “One of these days you’re going to dive into a pond that’s too shallow! Or the moat will be dry! Or there’ll be this one rock that sticks out of the cliff-“
“Relax!” Gertrude said with a confident grin. “I’ll be fine. I mean, I’m invincible!”
“Yeah, I thought that way when I was a kid,” Daresden said. “Then my adoptive father-“
“No, really,” Gertrude interrupted. “I’m under a spell. I was cursed by a wicked fairy at my christening. And while it’s on me, absolutely nothing can harm me until my twelfth birthday.”
The mental voices took this fact in silence. Finally Twilight said, “That’s… awfully convenient, for a curse. What happens to you on your twelfth birthday?”
“Well, apparently I’m supposed to crawl into a habitrail and get a splinter or something like that,” Gertrude said. “I mean, it’s kind of silly, because nobody in my family has ever even seen a habitrail. We’re free-range gerbils, you know. So why-“
“So you’re cursed to get a splinter?” Daresden interrupted.
“No, I’m cursed to fall into eternal slumber unless a prince kisses me,” Gertrude said. “Originally I was supposed to die, but the good fairies at the christening altered Long Game’s-“
“Long Game??” Daresden shouted.
“Um, yeah,” Gertrude said. “Did just say that.”
“First Xipe Totec,” Hornsparker grumbled, “now Long Game. Miss Sparkle, do you intend on dragging every pony you meet on this insane jaunt through alleged literature?”
“This is not my fault!” Twilight’s voice insisted, followed almost immediately by, “Well, actually, maybe it is, since I cast the spell and everything - oh, you know what I mean!”
“Magic, huh?” Gertrude said. “Yeah, definitely need a talk with the Childe of the Withered Heath.” (She pronounced it chill-dee, because she’d seen it written that way but never heard it spoken.) “She knows all sorts of magic. I’m sure she can fix this.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Twilight sighed. “You aren’t the only one under a curse. Apparently the spell I cast that put me here won’t let me leave until I’ve gone through all the books. And it won’t let anyone in the books tell me how to leave, either.”
“Really?” Gertrude reached a paw up to pat someone on the back, which is kind of pointless when the person you want to comfort exists only as a disembodied voice. “That’s too bad. But the Childe really does know a lot of magic. I bet she could do something for you anyway.”
Of course, the voice of Narrator Sunset cut in, that would have to wait until Gertrude’s current business was concluded. For the past month and a half she’d been traveling the shores of her kingdom and the adjacent ones, dealing with the ogrecats who had been making a nuisance of themselves, what with eating people and terrorizing the countryside.
“Yeah, I was just about to say,” Gertrude said. “And then there are a couple of dragons over in the Turnagain Hills, the jousting tournament in the kingdom of Hampsterdam, and then the Heath is on the other side of that. So it’ll be a couple days.”
“A moment, young miss,” Hornsparker said. “You intend, if I understand correctly, to slay three monsters, fight in a jousting tourney-“
“Win a jousting tourney,” Gertrude corrected.
“-cross an entire kingdom, and visit a witch of some sort in a wilderness, in a couple of days?” Hornsparker finished.
Gertrude shrugged. “Well, I might let one of the dragons off with a warning,” she said. “It’s happened before.”
“How large, exactly, are your kingdoms around here?” Daresden asked. “They must be kind of small, if you can cross one in two days.”
“Actually most kingdoms you can cross in less than a day,” Gertrude said. “I mean, we’re rodents, right? How large do you think rodent kingdoms are gonna be, exactly?”
“Point taken,” Daresden’s voice said in surrender.
“Besides, I was going that way anyhow, after this,” Gertrude said. “It’s two and nine-fifteenths months until my twelfth birthday. And as much fun as this curse has been, I probably need to do something about it.”
“Rrrrgh,” Daresden groaned.
“What’s the matter?” Twilight asked.
“For a moment,” Daresden said, “I think I understood what it feels like to be someone else talking to me.”
“Well, anyway, time’s wasting,” Gertrude said. “The sooner we take care of that last ogre, the sooner we get out of this swamp.”
“Out of this head,” Daresden said.
“Out of this book,” Twilight added.
“How, exactly,” Hornsparker harrumphed, a little miffed that she couldn’t think of her own “out of” line, “how exactly does one go about finding one of these, er, ogre-cats? I should think they’d be difficult to track.”
“Not so much,” Gertrude said, gesturing down the slope at the marshland below. “Just look for tracks slightly longer than I am tall. I’ve done this before, you know.”
“Slightly longer than you are tall,” Hornsparker said, sounding a little choked. “Which would make the actual ogre roughly the size of a sloop of war, correct?”
Gertrude thought about this a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’re a land-locked kingdom at home, so I haven’t had much to do with boats. But I do know how to swim with a snorkel. There was this squid monster, you see, and-“
Speaking for the others, Twilight moaned, “This is going to be a long book, isn’t it?”
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I love the flagrant abuse of her Destined Doom, truly the best possible perspective on the whole business.
Does this story have any OCs in it?
I just realized, this is like what I guess is called the "Dreamdorp Paradigm." The character, through a sequence of repetitions of the same problem, keeps trying to do better than they previously did.
There is not enough
in the world, but I'll certainly try. 
So they ARE following along with every book! Good to know. It would have been a shame to say goodbye to Hornsparker.
Maybe an alternative to not dragging along hornsparker would be some method to prevent the current host from jumping along with them... Either way, the villain pileup is gonna get very bad for them very quickly...
Well, this is a lovely, lighthearted departure from the other works thus far. Going by what else is on Twilight's reading list, I think she'll be grateful for the relative reprieve, waterfall diving and all.
Said a Grumbly Nerd.
I am gonna LOVE THIS XDXD Absolutely fabulous! And its hilariously perfect that their new 11-year-old character is completely blase about the whole situation! Really rounds things put nicely. I think skx books will be just right, and Im fascinated to see whatll happen as even more people get packed into all this! But right now Im mostly excited for silly fairg tale trope parody adventures with three adults get dragged along for the ride with a determined invincible kid. XD Looking forward to more!
Hornsparker has a point. Seriously though, this story has been awesome so far, but it seems like this section might be the most hilarious one yet.
I am so exited to see how this goes!