The Ninja and the Princess

Disclaimer: No matter what century I don't own Kim Possible

Prologue: History and a Warning

please note all information scribed within the lifetimes of those who were active during the Second Invasion or of events before the Second Invasion will be subject to update by archival librarians without notice for some time as new information comes to light

all information regarding historical events, figures, and locations is provided courtesy of the royal archives in Middleton

For more detailed information on any of the subjects contained herein please consult the specific entries relevant to your inquiry

-Excerpt from volume LXVIII of General World History-

For as far back as the oldest history records the world has been divided by the Rockwall mountains, these impassable spires of rocks ensured that the world north and south of them would remain separated but for a handful of passes that allowed only the scarcest information to pass between the two halves of the world. In the southern half of the world only the oldest histories record a time before the Three Kingdoms and even these records only state memories of the oldest people alive in those days as their sources. And but for a few brief instances the existence of the kingdoms of Middleton, Upperton, and Lowerton has been one of peace with one another.

The Rockwall Mountains themselves are not wholly devoid of life, high pastures, valleys, and plateaus dot their slopes and numerous tribes of nomadic herders make their homes here. Only in one place however do these peaks allow for agriculture and settlement on any sort of permanent basis. The realm that has arisen here is appropriately enough named the Rockwall Kingdom, barely one hundred fifty miles at its widest point this kingdom might be ignored by history were it not for the fact that the only passes running the length of the Rockwall Mountains have their ends at the borders of the Rockwall Kingdom.

North of the Rockwall Mountains was for many years a much more tumultuous existence, a constantly shifting patchwork of states and alliances writhed in a state of constant warfare. Eventually one state, known as Drakanada, slowly started swallowing the states surrounding it. This process continued and sped up over several generations and by the time Drakanada engulfed the last northern independent state its army was a massive behemoth that could not easily be stopped. Thus began what has become known as the First Invasion.

The people of the Rockwall Kingdom and the Three Kingdoms had no warning of the danger approaching them, their first sign of imminent crisis being Drakanadian armies marching through the mountain passes and fleets of ships appearing south of the Rockwall Mountains loaded with men and the materials necessary for war. This surprise strike allowed the invading armies to make great inroads inland and they laid siege to the capitals of the Rockwall Kingdom and Upperton among their many other conquests in the early years of the war.

However for all these gains this attack was unlike any Drakanada had ever made for south of the Rockwall Mountains was not a patchwork of weak states that would rather be conquered than cooperate. The Three Kingdoms quickly banded together and formed an alliance with the Rockwall Kingdom to resist the invaders and thus began more than a quarter century of unbroken warfare. Early battles saw squabbles among commanders from the four armies over who would have overall command of the battle. But as the strongest of all the allied kingdoms Middleton quickly established itself as the senior most partner of the alliance.

With the politics of the alliance played out the Allies began to fight back and the shock of such resistance allowed them to undo several key gains made by Drakanadian forces the greatest being to lift the siege of the Rockwall Kingdom's capital. The siege of Upperton however would continue until the very end of the war. For several years the war swung back and forth with the experience and cunning of Drakanadian soldiers and their commanders allowing them to win despite Allied soldiers outnumbering them in nearly every battle. Eventually though this advantage evaporated as the Allies relearned the art of war after many generations of peace, the great turning point was when a Drakanadian army launched an offensive into Lowerton towards the southern mouths of the passes through the Rockwall Mountains seeking to separate the Alliance.

The army laid siege to the city of Lowerton itself and had nearly captured the whole city in the fiercest fighting of the whole war when a massive counteroffensive was launched that cut off the Drakanadian army in the city of Lowerton. Devoid of supplies and reinforcements and now under siege themselves from an Allied army the Drakanadian army in Lowerton was forced to surrender. With this defeat the tide of the war shifted, Allied armies began to find themselves on the offensive rather than the defensive and the strain of supplying such an undertaking across an entire continent began to tell upon Drakanadian forces at the same time as Allied numerical superiority began to assert itself.

This however was not the end of the war for Drakanadian forces still occupied most of the Kingdom of Upperton and had entrenched themselves deeply. Momentum though would never shift away from the Allies for the remainder of the war and over the next several years Allied armies pushed forward liberating great swathes of occupied territory. The last great battle of the First Invasion was fought before the walls of Upperton, Drakanadian forces were loathe to abandon their last position of strength south of the Rockwall Mountains but when the dust cleared they had fled back to their ships and Drakanada itself.

Thus ended the First Invasion as a military conflict but its effects were not through with the world yet. The Kingdom of Upperton had been devastated by the war as had large parts of the Kingdom of Lowerton and the Rockwall Kingdom. The Kingdom of Middleton had escaped such destruction but not for lack of trying by Drakanadian forces to gain a foothold. Potentially more serious was the effects of the war on the governments. During the final battle the kings of both Upperton and Lowerton had been killed, along with their heirs. It seemed as though war might once again ravage the world but the nobility of both kingdoms eventually reached a compromise. Being unable to settle on one of their own to take the monarchy and having for years already been under its military command structure they sent emissaries to Middleton to ask its royal family to assume the mantle for the Kingdoms of Upperton and Lowerton as well.

The Rockwall Kingdom suffered a great deal from the war as well but its royal family retained a line of succession, though of necessity it maintains a close relationship with the Three Kingdoms to this day. This returns our history to the Kingdoms of Upperton, Middleton, and Lowerton. The royal family of Middleton accepted rulership of its neighboring kingdoms and though they retain de jure independence since the First Invasion the Kingdoms of Upperton and Lowerton have been de facto absorbed by the Kingdom of Middleton creating a new state known to its inhabitants as the Three Kingdoms.

Nearly five hundred years passed and the world recovered from the war, people returned to their lands and seeded their crops anew, towns were rebuilt and the people prospered once more. However all decisions made in Middleton were made with a wary eye turned to the north as Drakanada had never signed any surrender or armistice even and the threat of a second invasion remained an ever present threat. As part of its efforts to reconstruct the affected areas the Three Kingdoms provided funds for the Rockwall Kingdom to build a network of great fortresses across the northern mouths of the passes that stand to this day as the first line of defense against an invasion by Drakanada.

At the publication of this volume the Three Kingdoms and their ally the Rockwall Kingdom continue to prosper many generations after the First Invasion. King James Possible of the Three Kingdoms is yet another strong ruler in a line of strong and able rulers stretching back for generations, Crown Princess Kimberly seems well set to at the least continue this trend if not surpass her father when she assumes the throne. To the north the Rockwall Kingdom remains stable for the time being, there is as of now an issue of some concern between the two elder princess, Princess Connie and Princess Lonnie, of who will be named Crown Princess. Challenges such as this are nothing new and all signs are this will be weathered as have the others. There are however disturbing signs reported by scouts who venture north of the Rockwall Mountains, more activity has been reported in Drakanada than has been seen in generations and some have begun to whisper that a Second Invasion may be approaching.

-Off the Western Coast of Drakanada-

One of the first things taught in the Royal Naval Academy was never ever stand up in the longboat and while Lieutenant Will Du was normally a stickler for the rules, it was how he'd become a lieutenant at such a young age, in this case he decided to risk standing up in order to better peer into the foggy gloom. The young man wasn't even entirely sure what he was supposed to be looking for as he attempted to pierce the dense fog shrouding the coastline, the orders that had come down from the King himself had been to take the small clipper into Drakanadian waters and then wait for two operatives to show with what was supposed to be critically important information.

Nor was his captain who had ordered him to take the longboat into waters too shallow for the ship to enter entirely sure what they had been sent here for, precious few Kingdom ships entered Drakanadian waters and precious fewer still returned. Their trip however had been almost entirely uneventful, they had set off from the great port of Upperton and sailed around the southern tip of the Three Kingdoms, from there they had sailed up the western coast. It had taken several weeks as the foothills of the Rockwall Mountains began and steadily rose into the great spires of rock that divided the world, great cliffs plunging straight into the sea. Eventually though the mountains had begun to fall into their northern foothills and the crew knew they were seeing the coastline of Drakanada. The captain had ordered double watches and for all the men to be on extra alert but it was an order that had proven almost useless as the men were already doing just that.

What little they had seen of Drakanada as they hugged the coastline was strangely familiar and yet almost unrecognizable. The small communities they'd seen dotting the landscape could have been taken from anywhere in the Three Kingdoms on the surface. The differences though were quite easy to spot and readily apparent, where even the smallest community in the Three Kingdoms was always bustling with traffic going in and out and people going to and fro, they had only seen one caravan going between villages once they'd gotten north of the Rockwall Mountains and it was easy enough to recognize it as a military caravan. The emptiness of the landscape had been only one of the many things that had disconcerted the crew as they sailed north, the land itself seemed to be somehow less vibrant than the lands they had come from. Grasses and trees seemed to struggle to take root in the land and it appeared to the whole crew as though the whole of this strange land was bathed in a pale imitation of reality.

All of them knew though how real the danger at any given moment was, five centuries had passed since the First Invasion but every citizen of the Three Kingdoms and the Rockwall Kingdom knew that peace could be shattered at any moment as it had been for their ancestors. It was a particular risk this far from the Three Kingdoms, south of the Rockwall Mountains they would be able to rely on the power of the Royal Navy to ward off any attackers, but in these waters they were very much alone. Especially in waters to the west of the Three Kingdoms, Upperton was the largest port in the world and was on the eastern coast of the realm so consequently most shipping occurred in eastern waters. There was some limited safety in that they knew Drakanadian ships were also more likely to patrol in the east rather than come looking for them but that was scant comfort to men in a longboat in fog so thick there were times the men at the back of the boat could not see the front.

Were the weather not so gloomy Lieutenant Du would have almost certainly taken the opportunity to study this strange land more. As odd and unsettling as it was few people had ever seen Drakanada and returned to speak of it and as a member of the Royal Navy Will Du saw it as part of his duty to observe and report on situations of interest. Certainly any information on the greatest threat to the continued freedom of the Three Kingdoms would fall under the blanket of a situation of interest. But even were the day to be perfectly clear he would still have preferred the two people he was supposed to be waiting for to show sooner than later so the captain could turn the clipper around and get them away from this place of never ending danger and back to waters he considered home.

Nearly an hour passed in agonizing slowness with the only noise being the muffled sound of the waters lapping against the rocky shore and the occasional sound of the men at the oars working to keep the longboat in a steady position. And then out of the gloom two silhouettes slowly began to take shape, one appearing to be supporting the other as they struggled towards the beach. Lieutenant Du quietly ordered the men to take the longboat all the way onto the beach and as he heard the bottom hit land he jumped off into the water and ran forward to meet these people he was supposed to be picking up.

Both were quite young, perhaps even younger than his twenty two years, the one supporting the other appeared to be a young blonde man as they finally got close enough for him to discern any details about the two. His companion was a young woman with glossy black hair surrounding her tanned face and he noted a small trail of blood running down from the corner of her mouth. They were both wearing identical black garb that as they neared was revealed to have undergone a great deal of wear and tear in a fairly short period of time.

About twenty paces or so from the young lieutenant the blonde man finally gave out and collapsed to the ground his companion trailing after as gravity took over. Lieutenant Du motioned for some men to come help him and together they dragged the two back to the longboat, as they pushed off to get back to the clipper Lieutenant Du took the time to give these two mysterious passengers a closer look. Rather one passenger it seemed as he noticed the girl was not breathing and she had the pallor of one recently deceased. A quick look revealed several wounds in her back that appeared to have been arrows or crossbow bolts and he could only wonder what these two were sent to find out that would put them in such danger.

A look at the young man revealed him to be still among the living but obviously more than a little the worse for wear. Opting to try to help the one he could, Lieutenant Du quickly took off his coat and spread it over the young man in an effort to keep him going till he got back to what care the ships doctor could offer.

The coat being draped over him caused the young man to groggily open his eyes and Lieutenant Du decided to try to find out some of what had sent them all to this forsaken place, "What happened, what did you find out?"

The man's lips moved slowly in a rasp and Lieutenant Du had to lean in close to hear they answer, "They're coming."

AN: Hm, two of these in one week now there's a conundrum. Well on to business then, I'm fairly sure you can pick out all sorts of historical and literary allusions in this, the list is so long even I've lost track of it. And this being a wholly original world expect an opening like this for many chapters to come as I fill in more and more details about this story. If you have questions that you absolutely must have answered now though don't hesitate to ask and I'll see what I can do. Now if you haven't already gone and read Bad Girls then do so once you've recovered from the awesomeness of this chapter, ciao.