7. EVEN PRINCESSES LOVE BIG CHOPPERS.
It took several hours for Mibbet to come down off the rush and resultant meteoric crash, and she could have sworn the world was still shaking somehow. On the positive side, she had found a better way to move for herself than that awkward two legs walk.
“The word that seems to be failing to enter that empty head of yours is Human,” Rosalind said with a scoff. “Two legs sounds weird.” Mibbet quickly filed that in the box in her head labelled useful information, which was relatively empty save for occasional titbits on how assorted insects taste, masterclasses on swimming, and a very detailed class on what would try to eat her, including some very graphic descriptions for emphasis. Well, on the plus side, that particular list was a lot shorter now that she was at her current size than when she was a frog (see also bite-sized to pretty much everything.) Anyway, back to walking.
She had finally figured out that there was a happy medium between walking, hopping about, and leaping that worked fine with a two... I mean the Human body, and it made her legs much more robust as an added bonus. Rosalind called it “Skipping” and nearly had a conniption when she started using it rather than a so-called “proper walk”, which for some reason involved noses in the air, backs straight, heels to toes in a straight line, and often for no logical reason that Mibbet could see books on the head, apparently. It seemed rather inefficient to Mibbet to balance thinly shaved lumps of wood on her head; it didn’t seem conducive to leaping to safety at all. What if a giant human-sized owl passed by and saw her as a snack?
“Owls don’t grow that big, Mibbet”, sighed Rosalind, somehow managing to pack all the energy of a sigh, a facepalm and the headache behind it into her voice despite being intangible.
“Says you”, Mibbet shot back“, if there’s one thing being a frog has taught me, it’s that you should always expect owls. When you stop expecting them? That’s when they find you in a pellet. That’s exactly what happened to my great uncle Grog, you know? He was doing really well too, lived to a ripe old age, probably half the local tadpoles were his, then he went and let his guard down, and BAM owl food. ”
Rosalind had no idea how to respond to this; it seemed you could take the frog out of the prey animal, but try as you might, you couldn’t take the prey animal out of the frog. (Though she personally would settle for getting the frog the hell out of her body. But apparently, that wasn’t happening just now.)
Mibbet, meanwhile, was proud that her Froggy wisdom was so great it had apparently struck the normally extremely verbose Princess Rosalind dumb with sheer awe.
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Well, next on the agenda for Mibbet was learning to harnesses this bodies freakish strength and learn to swing the big choppy thing she had commandeered from the bandits to best effect. She tried to lift it for a good swing; after all, it had seemed so easy when Rosalind had swung it. But no matter how hard she tried, it wouldn’t budge for her at all, and Mibbet found herself getting angry; Rosalind wasn’t helping at this point; she just kept snickering away at her companion’s poor attempts to lift half her body weight in oversized chopper (not that kind naughty), and Mibbet found herself growing Angrier and angrier and an....... wait a second, did it just lift? What in the name of the first spawn?
Her anger momentarily forgotten, she started to think and wonder why it got lighter, only for the weight to suddenly increase to the point where almost she dropped it, the stupid blade embedding itself in the ground mere millimetres from her foot. What the hell? Mibbet raged, pondering kicking the damn thing, then suddenly the weight was nothing.
From that moment, there was nothing to training but rage; this thing went chop, and any bloody OWLS that pushed their luck with her now would be in for a very nasty shock.
Not that that was an invitation, Mibbet thought to herself. The world doesn’t need to send any giant owls her way, no way, nu-uh, no siree bob. She was quite happy with an almost peaceful and completely owl free life. Also, what the hell? This damned axe was getting heavier yet again; couldn’t it just pick a weight and settle there? Apparently, it could not, as the weight almost weighed her down again.
This, of course, made Mibbet furious, and if it didn’t weigh a lot right now, she’d have thrown it in.... as the axe left her hand, it practically flew, embedding itself half a log deep in the village walls with a SLAM.
At that, Mibbet was too distracted by the absolute power in her Froggy hands to ponder how it worked any more, so long as it did its job. To her surprise, it pulled out of the wall as easy as pie, (no, not the really long number that past a few digits is really hard), seemingly weighing nothing as she strapped it onto her back. Rosalind was, of course, ranting and raving about it in her head, but all Mibbet thought was “heh heh heh choppy chop good", as far as she was concerned, that was all the explanation she would ever need.
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Sir Humphrey, meanwhile, looking rather the worse for wear from his long run, was at last closing in with his squadron, they could see the village in the distance, They tidied themselves up quickly, into some semblance of a presentable guard squad as they stepped up to the gates with relief. “At long last,” he thought to himself, “we’re here, now we can retrieve our wayward ward and return to the castle”. All would possibly have been fine from there if the gods and fate were not watching when he uttered the phrase they could never resist. “It should be plain sailing from here.”