Do You Want to Hide a Body?, Peter E [microsoft ebook reader .txt] 📗

Disclaimer: I do not own Frozen, Fullmetal Alchemist, or an anvil.

Princess Anna was sick and tired of life in the royal palace of Arendelle.

Her big sister, Crown Princess Elsa, had become distant many years ago, apparently in retaliation for the most epic snowball fight in the history of ever, as far as Anna knew. At the same time as Elsa had shut herself in her room, their parents, the king and queen of Arendelle, had locked the royal palace off from the rest of the world. Anna (or any of the royal family) could only leave the palace under armed guard in a closed, stuffy carriage for the tiny nation’s Arendelle Day Parade, so she had no chance to make friends with the commoners. And the castle had operated on a skeleton staff since the gates were closed, leaving the princess with severely limited and taciturn social options. Sometimes, Anna honestly had to wonder if the royal treasury was running low.

Mostly, Anna spent her days ‘polishing’ the grand bannisters of the palace staircases (the actual polishers complained that half of them would be below code in a few years with how enthusiastically they she ‘polished’ them) or dancing with suits of armour (they weren’t great at the gavotte, and lifts could be simply disastrous). If she was feeling less active, she chatted with the palace staff (she knew all the gossip, which wasn’t much) or had tea with her parents (stiffest, most awkward meals ever, where no one ate much of anything).

Of course, no matter how social Anna might be, Elsa’s needs, wants, and whines took priority over whatever Anna’s might be. If the elder princess sent a servant down to the kitchens for something, the cooks would drop everything, even another princess (that cookie jar search had ended badly). Her parents often cut their conversations with their daughter short, claiming that Elsa needed extra lessons on ruling the nation. Well, certainly Anna also deserved those lessons, if only to spend time with her family!

When no one was around to talk to her, Anna might examine the carpeted floors of the castle (she had counted exactly how many threads were on the silk ones in the great hall) or make bets with herself on trivial castle matters (once, she won an entire chocolate bar from herself for betting that the ice in the castle refrigerator would only take two days to melt completely. The uncultured swine she was against had bet five. Five!).

Of course, Anna was perfectly aware of the cause of all of this. Elsa, the ice queen whose obvious grudge against her sister had turned the palace itself against her (sometimes, the walls closed in when she slept – she had measured it – and Elsa was the cause). To try and stop this horrible occurrence, Anna had quickly taken to trying to bridge the gap between the sisters. Every Saturday she dedicated several hours to singing in front of their old bedroom, now Elsa’s private chamber, trying to convince her to open the door and play with her.

It was on just such a Saturday morning that Anna sat cross-legged in the hallway, considering what to sing this week. Some weeks, she went with her old standby, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” but she had branched out to more original verses long ago. Not to mention that it was hardly appropriate to sing about snow in summer.

A few weeks ago, she had been so sure that “Do You Want Some Fresh-Baked Cookies?” would get Elsa out, but the day had ended with Anna, having insisted on making the cookies for her sister herself, covered in flour from head to foot, insisting that it was perfectly reasonable to mix cookie batter by standing in the bowl (and certainly less difficult that swirling a spoon through the molasses-like stuff).

Last year, following a burst of interest in boys (she had encountered a painting she had never seen before while exploring a passage, featuring a highly exposed man), Anna had sung “Don’t You Want to Have a Boyfriend?” pleading with Elsa to join her on a journey to find nice, attractive men to romance. After all, no one could stop her from leaving the palace if the crown princess went with her. The next day, a servant had handed Anna a neatly wrapped package containing a book on safe sex and a cheap magazine full of images of young men wearing very little clothing (very awkward, and many giggles were had).

After a lesson on international policy a couple of years ago (boring, and Anna didn’t see why she couldn’t have had it with Elsa), Anna had created “Do You Want to Build a Nation?” To assist with the musical number, she had assembled the palace’s suits of armour into ranks outside of Elsa’s bedroom, dressing herself in one and clanking about loudly while singing at the top of her lungs. The day had ended with Anna receiving a scolding and going to her room, where she assembled a complex and specific Settlers of Catan Board, organizing it so that the green and red teams (allied into the Ignerra Pax) had inhabited large swathes of land full of green fields and lush forests, while the blue and white teams (the Glaqua Pact) were forced to inhabit the barren mountains. The Ignerra Pax constantly assaulted the lands of the Glaqua nations for ores and clay, and traded for what they could not find with the merchant ships of a tiny, distant nation called Sealand (it was only a rock in the sea, but it was home for the Sealanders). They didn’t particularly care for Sealand, but its merchants were the only ones who ever came to Catan.

Only last month, Anna had created “Do You Want to Make a Human?” The idea had been to use some sort of magic to create a replacement parent figure that would care for Anna and allow her to not pester her parents so much (they had started avoiding her after the armour fiasco). The next Monday, Anna had discovered an old alchemical text that certainly hadn’t been there before on her bookshelf, with a detailed ritual for the creation of a human (it also had a potion called the Draught of Living Death in it, not that Anna was interested). She had prudently gotten a lowly member of the cleaning staff to perform the ritual, a good decision, as they had disappeared in a flash of purple light at the conclusion of the incantation (well, not completely: Anna had found a perfectly severed arm and leg left behind). A… something had been left in the pentagram after the light faded away. Before the princess got a good look at it, it had scuttled away into a patch of deep shadow and vanished.

The next week’s song had been “Do You Want to Kill a Monster?” and Anna kept a lamp on at night these days.

Through all of her efforts, Anna still never saw her sister. As time passed, the staff had become more dedicated to Elsa and more averse to Anna’s company (she didn’t see why, as she was a perfectly good conversationalist, full of anecdotes on castle weather conditions and the state of the lint on her clothes), while she saw less and less of her parents. Sometimes, she thought she saw them walking down a hallway a ways away, but when she reached the spot where they had been, all that she could find were suspicious moving bumps behind tapestries and oddly bulky suits of armour. Overall, they spent almost all their time with Elsa, and she could walk past Elsa’s room (or, as she called it, the Chamber of Mystery) to hear her sister crying and her parents frantically comforting her more often than not. She had tried sobbing loudly on her bed in response to that, but a guard came quickly to check her over for injuries, ending that approach before it had really started.

Then she thought of it, slumped on the wall there: the sure-fire way to get Elsa out of her room and gain permanent recognition within the castle! But first she would need…

Princess Anna stumbled to her feet and sped off, grabbing the nearest lamp on her way.

Crown Princess Elsa sat alone in her room at around noon on a warm Saturday in summer. She had spent the morning reading a book on advanced geometry and building three-dimensional models of the book’s descriptions with some toothpicks and a ball of modelling clay. Her gloves lay in front of her boudoir, spotlessly clean and as far from the clay mess as possible, and her long blonde hair was tied back in a severe bun to keep it far from the mess on her desk.

As she reached for the modelling clay and yet again froze it with an accidental flex of her fingers, the princess sighed, leaning back in her chair. She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her fists, annoyed with herself for the unintentional outburst. She had done so well with her curse this week, too, not freezing one meal, but she couldn’t work with this stupid modelling clay!

To be perfectly honest, Elsa was feeling a little down today. Every Saturday morning since the disastrous snowman incident when they were small, her little sister Princess Anna sang a song to try and bring Elsa out of her bedroom so they could play together. While the reasons for Elsa’s distance were suitably tragic, and Elsa hated the thought of what might happen should her resolve falter and she open the door, Elsa considered the weekly serenade as a sort of ritual of sisterhood; a way for them to maintain a relationship at arms length. If she could pluck up the courage, she would join in, but Elsa knew she was a great coward, and was too scared to risk losing her will to maintain the separation should she reopen their relationship.

The princess smiled as she remembered some of Anna’s older songs. As a little girl, Anna had made up “Let’s Go On an Expotition!” after learning about the African explorers from her tutor. The king and queen had fondly explained how the tiny princess had stolen a pot from the kitchen to be her helmet, and kitted herself with a soup spoon and roasting fork for an ‘expotition’ through the secret passages of the castle.

Years later, while the sisters were learning about story structure, Elsa had heard “Would You Like Some Exposition?” through the door. For that, Elsa had taken pity on her sister and cobbled together a brief fairy tale about a lonely princess living in a locked palace, who eventually escaped the confines of court life, fleeing to the mountains, where she battled terrible monsters and magical challenges – no ice, of course – and saved her true love from the clutches of rock trolls, who spoke in honeyed words while dealing pain and suffering with terrible magic.

The song “Don’t You Want to Have a Boyfriend?” had made Elsa want to laugh. She had never considered romance as a viable part of her life; that would be Anna’s role in Arendelle’s future. Thus, she had never suspected that her little sister was growing up into a woman, one with all the needs and desires of any other woman. Though she knew her parents would not approve, she had swiftly remedied any naïveté her sister might have had with the best educational texts she could find on such matters.

Only last month, Elsa remembered Anna singing “Do You Want to Kill a Monster?” despite the fact that she was far too old for such childish beliefs. Judging from the description lavished upon the ‘monster’ in the song, Elsa suspected that there