The toad’s den – Rapunzel’s story (3)

* Rapunzel’s perspective

“Hey!”

My fists, which I had trained with the best martial arts master in the Mirrorlands every day, seemed to be of no use as my body grew smaller. No matter how many times I pounded Chester’s back as he flew through the sky carrying me, he, who had transformed into a furry feline, seemed to feel nothing.

“I! Don’t! Know! Where! To! Find! The! An-! Ti-! Dote!”

Squeak!

He must have finally heard my voice.

As the White Queen’s chess soldiers were poured out of the castle at lightning speed, Chester came to a halt.

“Oh, that’s right! The antidote! What should we do? But it’s too much of a risk to return to the tower.”

“Well, since we’ve already left the castle, please let me down. We haven’t even decided where we’re going or what we’re going to do, anyway. Let’s go down somewhere and make a plan.”

As if he understood, Chester, still carrying me, went down to the ground. As he landed, I climbed off of his back and stepped on his tail.

“Chester, can you go back to your human form now? Now that my body is smaller, every time your cat’s claws move, it feels I’m on the executioner’s block.”

Poof!

“Is that better?”

At my request, Chester quickly returned to his human form.

“But now that I’ve become a human, I can’t hear your tiny voice, Rapunzel. Or, should I say Alice now?”

When he was a human, Chester was well over 180 cm tall, so it was understandable that my small voice coming from this small body couldn’t reach his ears.

“No, just keep calling me Rapunzel. As of right now, I don’t have a single memory of Wonderland. And besides, I think it would be very awkward for you to call me anything other than Rapunzel. Can you give me a ride on your shoulder so that you can hear my voice?”

Chester gently picked me up and carefully placed me on his shoulder.

‘Wow, looking now, he really has a perfect V-line…’

As I sat on his shoulder and looked up at Chester’s jawline from below, I realized once again that Chester was quite a handsome man, and my heart began to pound as hard as it had when I first met him.

‘Well, when I first saw him, he was so handsome I didn’t even feel scared… No, now isn’t the time to think about such things! Focus on finding the antidote!’

I shook my head to regain my composure, and then looked up at Chester with a natural look on my face, as if nothing had happened.

“For now, I think I need to find a way to rescue the Queen of Hearts, who was imprisoned in the tower instead of me. What do you think?”

“I agree with you, Rapunzel. But do you have any tricks up your sleeve?”

“Hmm, I read in the book that there are scattered pieces of mirror all over the Mirrorland. It’s said that if you collect the pieces and complete the broken ‘Absolute Mirror’, you can obtain ‘Absolute Magic’ that can control deadly monsters like the Jabberwock, Bandersnatch, and the Jubjub bird. … If we can get the power of ‘absolute magic’, wouldn’t we be able to fight against the White Queen and save the Queen of Hearts?”

“Good idea! But do you know where we can get these mirror pieces?”

“I don’t… I’ll just have to go around the Mirrorland and hope that I can find the scattered pieces of broken mirrors. Rather, let’s first find an antidote that will restore my body to its original state!”

Rumble…

A sound came from Chester’s stomach.

‘Well, he did his best to get us out of the White Queen’s castle, flying all day with me on his back, it’s no wonder he’s hungry.’

“Chester I’ll wait here, you go hunting.”

I said this to Chester and sat down on a nearby rock.

“Uh, is that really okay?”

He asked with a worried expression as if he felt uneasy about leaving me, still the size of a thumb, alone.

“Of course. I’ll sit on the rock near the pond. I’ll sing when I see the stars, so you can use my singing to come and find me, right?”

“But if the White Queen’s chess soldiers hear you singing…”

“It’s okay. Now that I’ve become this small, my songs won’t even be heard by normal people unless they can transform into an animal like a cat.”

Apparently agreeing with me, Chester nodded and transformed back into a cat.

“Then I’ll be right back. Be careful, Rapunzel.”

“Don’t worry about me!”

I stood on the rock and waved my hands high in the sky until I could no longer see Chester moving away.

—

How much time has passed? One by one, stars began to appear in the night sky.

“Twinkle, twinkle little star ~ How I wonder what you are~”[1]

As I promised Chester, I started singing.

Swfswiiish.

Chester must have returned after hearing me sing. The grass on the other side of the pond began to shake as if something was moving through it.

“Chester! Did you have a good hunt?”

I was so happy to see him that I got up from the rock I was sitting on, stood on tiptoe, and waved my hands as high as possible to greet him.

‘!’

However, what appeared from the grass was not the Chester in his cat transformation, but a toad. The toad, wearing a deep, cool-toned hot pink lipstick that didn’t match the warm olive-colored toad skin at all, hopped towards me with a splash.

“Oh my, what’s such a pretty lady doing here?”

“Hello, Mrs. Toad. I’m waiting here for a friend who has gone hunting for a while. What brings you here at this late hour?”

“I was led here by the beautiful voice of a lady the size of a thumb. My son said she had a very pretty voice. Could you come to my toad house and sing a song?”

“Thank you for your kindness, but I’m waiting for my friend. So I’m sorry, but that would be a little difficult right now.”

“If Miss Thumb really means that, then it can’t be helped!”

Squelch!

When I declined Mrs. Toad’s invitation, the friendly woman suddenly turned 180 degrees, opened her big mouth wide, and swallowed me whole.

“What? Let me out right now!”

I clenched both hands into fists and beat the roof of her mouth as hard as I could trying to get out, but it seemed like there was nothing I could do with my smaller body. Without any hesitation, she kept me trapped in her mouth, taking me somewhere with large jumps.

‘Ugh, it’s wet.’

Trapped in her mouth as I was, every time she jumped up and down, I bobbed up and down, my whole body got soaked with the sticky discharge that filled her mouth. The inside of Mrs. Toad’s mouth, covered in saliva, was truly disgusting. Even if I felt like I would vomit right now, her mouth was so slimy and wet that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between my puke or the saliva of this mean frog lady.

‘Ah, that’s right! Chester! Chester will panic when if he finds out I’m gone… But what if Chester never finds me?’

As I thought about how I would survive in this unfamiliar world outside the tower, without knowing anyone, my eyes glazed over.

Moreover, it was really upsetting to be kidnapped by such a hideous, evil toad!

“Blargh!”

At that very moment, Mrs. Toad spat me out of her mouth. After wiping away the toad spit that covered my face, I barely opened my eyes, and in front of me was a toad that looked exactly like the toad lady who had kidnapped me.

“Mom, is this the young lady?”

As soon as it saw me, the toad that looked exactly like Mrs. Toad asked this.

“Yes, that’s right. The voice you were looking for.”

“Hmm… But she’s a lot uglier than I thought…”

‘What did you say? Who says something that when they look like a toad?’

It was unfair that I’d been captured here in the first place, but it was really the worst to have someone like a toad make personal attacks on me for being ugly.

“You can’t say things like that, son. Right now, it’s because momm was carrying Miss Thumb in her mouth and her saliva is all over her. When mom first found her in the pond earlier, how pretty and cute she was!”

Well, it was a moment where I was completely speechless. They were evaluating among themselves what I was like with me right in front of them, like I was invisible to them.

“So, she’ll take a bath and come dressed up pretty before the wedding, right?”

‘What? Married? Me and this ugly toad who has no personality at all?’

“Of course, son. Mom is going to take Miss Thumb and prepare for the wedding, so son, please go and get ready as well.”

“Yes, Mom.”

He was definitely Mama’s boy.

The world that would unfold if I married that kind of mama’s boy toad was so obvious.

‘If I don’t escape at all costs, I might go crazy and die.’

But contrary to my determination, the toad soldiers dragged me somewhere as soon as the son toad disappeared. The place they dragged me to was none other than prison. The toad soldiers opened the prison door, pushed me into it, checked that the prison door was locked tightly, and leisurely left.

When the toad soldiers left and I was left alone, I felt so miserable about my situation that I burst into tears.

“Hic—sob, sob!”

My cries echoed throughout the dark and dank prison.

“Psst.”

I heard a voice from somewhere, but I pretended not to hear it because I didn’t want to talk to the toad again.

“Excuse me.”

I sat down with my back to the sound, looking at the wall, as if it would be useless to call me.

“Did you get caught by the toads?”

‘?’

‘Caught by the toads? So, does this mean that the identity of that voice isn’t a toad, but someone who was kidnapped by a toad like I was?’

I carefully turned my head and looked in the direction where the voice came from.

There was a small person like me there.

He was a young man with a slender figure and long legs. The prison was so dark that I couldn’t see his face, but his whole body was covered in saliva, as if, like me, he had been captured by a nasty toad lady.

He asked me carefully, “Are you going to marry a toad, too?”

“How did you know that? Are you, by any chance, marrying the toad’s son?”

Well, I figured it would be natural for a family desperate enough to kidnap  someone into a forced marriage to have a few more wives besides me, I never thought that they’d bring in a second groom. It was clear that the White Queen’s indoctrinating education had left me stuck in a too conservative frame of mind!

“I’m afraid I won’t have the chance to share Miss’s husband. I’m going to have a wedding with Princess Toad, not Prince Toad.”

‘A prince? That toad?’

I’d never read anywhere in my books that proper royal people, or rather toads, kidnapped marriage partners. And it was truly shocking to think that people with such ugly personalities were members of the royal family.

Think I’d rather die than marry such a ridiculous toad royal, I asked, “Is there really no way to escape from here? You never know, if we work together, we might be able to beat the toads and escape!”

“It’s a pity, but I don’t know what I can do with this body that has become so small. If only I could get my original body back, it’d be no problem to kick the toad’s home and ‘poof’, escape! Were you always as small as a thumb?”

‘I can’t believe there are people other than me who have shrunk!’

Thinking that perhaps this young man might know how to find an antidote that would return the body to its original state, my voice filled with anticipation.

“No! Just like you, I originally had a body the size of a normal human, but I ate a ‘shrinking cookie’ from my mom, er, I mean, accidentally… Do you know how to get an antidote?”

Even if I did find someone I could identify with in this toad prison, there was no need to reveal my worst-of-the-world family history to a stranger I’d just met.

“I was wandering through Mirrorland and as a result of a filthy rat’s prank at a Mad Tea Party, I ate a ‘Shrinking Cookie’ that made me smaller.[2] If I ever go back there again, I’ll be able to get a ‘Giant Giant Cookie’ that makes you grow!”

It was a welcome news to hear.

However, finding an antidote was something that would have to be done after escaping from this toad’s den.

“Then let’s work together and somehow get out of this toad’s den! My friend Chester must be looking for me by now …”

Clank!

Just then, toad soldiers suddenly burst through the prison door and stormed in. They dragged me and the young man in the cell next door to a small nearby pond, stripped us both of our clothes, and threw us—naked—into the pond.

‘Hey​​, wait a minute! What?’

Embarrassed, I quickly moved as far away from the young man as possible. Reaching the edge of the pond, I looked up at him, just in case. Perhaps because he fell into the pond water, his face was completely clean. Strong, well-defined features and manly jawline…and his shoulders, visible above the pond water, were broad. It was to the point where I doubted whether he was the same scruffy person I’d seen in prison a while ago.

‘Yikes, did I observe his body too openly?’

It was only then that I noticed his expression.

He was fidgeted restlessly, with a red-flushed face and eyes that seemed unable to know where to land, and looked as if he was trying to conceal something about to come up between his legs.

It was only then that I realized that I was also standing in front of him with nothing on…

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T/N: Oh hey there, another ML candidate…

[1] Actual line is아름답게 비치네~ which translates better to “you’re shining beautifully”. Kind of fun to see localized versions of familiar lullabies!  

[2] 시궁쥐 can mean ‘brown rat’ or ‘gutter rat’ 쥐 alone can be rat, mouse, fieldmouse, house mouse.

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