"Twelve years!"

"Jasmine, cool off-"

"TWELVE YEARS!"

Genie's ears appeared to explode briefly, then he fixed them and whizzed to the other side of the fuming princess. "Please cool off?" he suggested tentatively, and locked her inside an ice cube.

There was a brief moment of furious pandemonium which would tax the reserves of the greatest of storytellers. Suffice to say that the ice cube was no more, and the leaves of some nearby ornamental flowers had been shredded so badly only a terribly avant garde modern artist would consider them even slightly ornamental. Genie had, quite tactfully, transformed himself into a tree and was watching the scene anxiously.

It was a lovely day. Overused though the phrase undoubtedly was, it could be applied to every element of the summer scene, save for the piece that contained two human beings, a monkey and a very suspicious looking oak. Butterflies twinkled about aimlessly, doing nothing. Flowers waved their bright flags, also doing nothing. The azure sky was doing nothing in an unseemly amount, so to the rich green grass.

Princess Jasmine, on the other hand, was fuming. The Sheik of the Treasury was rocking nervously on the balls of his feet, aware the delicate desert bloom before him could as easily have him beheaded as blowing her nose. Abu was watching him with untrusting eyes, Genie with nervous ones. For a lovely day, there were an awful lot of people in a dreadful mood.

"Are you sure?" Jasmine asked. There was a hard note in her voice. "If this is supposed to be a joke, it may be that Rajah will have to chase his lunch, but I'm sure he'd be grateful for the exercise..."

The Sheik gulped, then squeaked, "Royal Highness, if you don't believe me, go and ask any Tom, Dick or Yusef what the date is. Believe me, you have been gone for twelve years."

"Hang on," Genie interrupted, switching back into his bulbous blue form. "The man is talking porkies. If Jafar had us trapped for twelve years, Yusef down the market would know about it too." He adopted a learned pose, complete with mortar board.

The Sheik looked at him down his hooked but righteous nose. "For an all-powerful magic being, you are dense somewhat dense." He hopped to the side to avoid getting slapped, but the blow never came. "Don't you even remember what Jafar did? He was throwing magic around like breadcrumbs! And you were all being forcefed the crumbs! Twelve years went past in that palace. Time got pickled in sorcery, but you were his prisoners for twelve years."

Agrabah was teetering, mid-anarchy.

Twelve years had elapsed since any personage from the Palace had made a public appearance and attempted to govern the city, always one step away from upheaval since the displacement of the despotic but hideous efficient Grand Vizier, Jafar. Only loyalty to the memory of benign Sultan Hamed and his bewitchingly beautiful daughter prevented a toppling of the social order. For in Agrabah respectable women dressed like harem girls, hashish-smoking assassins gained celebrity status and the night streets were alight with flames and wonder; no city was ever harder to comprehend and rule.

However, twelve years was enough to test the patient of even the most orthodox of royalists. After a twelvemonth of polite turmoil, some well-meaning, conservative merchant-aristocrats had formed a pleasant, useless government under the guidance of the religious leaders and had promptly been dissolved by an invading Christendom army. The invasive force then set up a pro-papacy, anti-flames-and-wonder autocracy that lasted out three violent, turbulent years before border troubles in the Holy Roman Empire forced them to withdraw their forces and consequently their highly resented government.

After about a month of continual celebration (much tugging of beards and pulling-faces at crucifixes, although most Agrabanians had taken immense pity at the sight of Jesus gloomily prostrate on the cross, and gave all the figures a decent burial) the country wondered what to do next. A liberal government, lead by a charming but unconventional lamp-seller, ambled into power and promptly lifted Jafar's income tax (to cries of delight), reinstated the tariffs he had done away with, forcing trading cities to pay whopping great duties to trade with Agrabah, and took the Agrabanian shekle off the gold standard in order to mint more money.

Predictably, within the second year in office, the liberal government had bankrupt Agrabah. Hamed's Jafar-fuelled courteous dictatorship was sought once again, and this time they found a sufficiently nasty character to take the Grand Vizier's place- the leader of the hashish-smoking assassins gang The Eyesore Blade, Omar Krappul. His resemblance to Jafar was oft remarked upon, except he was heavy set and muscle-bound, with sun-burned skin.

Needless to say, his government was corrupt and unholy, but did the job and at least managed to force Agrabah into a state of stunned economic stability. Omar was interestingly murdered in his bath, by the girl who was scrubbing his back, no less, but since his death Agrabah had been ruled by rich, infidel, murderous Arabian gangsters, all of them bearing the same worrying physical resemblance. Some were fat, some were pale, some were even rather handsome, in that saturnine, distasteful way, but it seemed as if, by some strange enchantment or unusual spell, Jafar was ruling Agrabah.

One night a storm of apocalyptical proprotions sprang up, and the heavens themselves boiled with rage. A enormous, blood red, howling demon was seen to fill up the air then vanish as if sucked into a hungry abyss. The strange night culminated with the return of the Palace.

The sudden reappearance of the Palace on the Hill was enough to disorientate even the most stoned of sheiks. The dazzling Jasmine dragging out her beaming father and a surprised but ecstatic looking young man to the balcony and announcing her engagement as if nothing had happened threw the entire Middle East into awed, silent, terrified astonishment.

The mad return of the Royal Family had not been dear to every heart. The new generation, who had spent these dozen hideous years growing up being suppressed and bullied, had developed some dangerous revolutionary ideas. They joined the fugitives of the gangster government (dissolved once Hamed officially took his place on the throne) in an underground, nationalist society- Young Agrabah.

They met every Tuesday and Thursday above a spice-seller's shop.

Including the tagalongs, the happy-go-lucky freeloaders and the occasional lost beggar, they numbered just under eighty people.

"We need funding," growled Faisel bin Najwa for the fourth time in two minutes. He was the minute keeper of Young Agrabah i.e. one of the few literate and competent people in the room.

There came an excited choking noise from one of the darker corners the gangster fugitives kept to. The noise was much like a daft bird swallowing a nut twice the size of itself and feeling orgasmic about the taste but a little depressed about the impending suffocation, but such was often the case when Abis Mal tried to draw attention to his measly existence.

"What we need," he said, in his boyish, enthusiastic babble, "is genuine treasure. Real legendary treasure will give us the funding to topple the Palace!"

There were some sniggers in the darkness, and a very boyish voice said, "I'm sure 'real legendary' is an oxymoron." There were some chuckles from the members of the society who actual knew what the word meant, and calloused but well-meaning hands pushed the pint-sized speaker forward.

Talib al-Yeshwa was an unhandsome child. His past was a string of abusive adoptions, elusive crimes and perpetual sin, shared only by his taciturn, smirking sister, Basmah al-Yeshwa. Their parentage was unknown, and many suspected they had merely adopted their surname as a form of disguise. Their features were bizarre and caste-striding, characterised by their fine aristocratic noses and chins, lidless Oriental eyes, sallow skin colour and round cheeks. They looked like the children of Mongolian barbarians. Talib had a high, hoarse voice that prickled the ears like a localised sandstorm; one of Basmah's otherwise attractive legs was swollen and bent, as if someone had broken the shinbone repeatedly to mar her beauty. It was said this action had destroyed the nerves in her leg and she felt no pain.