It is with great regret that I announce that no, I do not own a single one of Gosho Aoyama's stories. This is the one sorrow in my otherwise enjoyable life.
The Bird 'Grip'
(More or Less Mutilated.)
Once upon a time there was a kingdom with a problem, and also a prince, by which I mean to say that the kingdom had a prince and a problem, and that the prince also had a problem.
The kingdom's problem had to do with magic; or, more specifically, with magicians, and which comes in two parts. The first part is this: every single adept in the kingdom was a specialist, which meant that each and every one of them had only one spell which they could cast and reverse. A few very good ones had other spells which they could only cast, and there were one or two very powerful witches who could reverse almost every spell.
The second part of the problem was that all the kingdoms within two hundred miles had exactly the same problem. This meant that if a witch happened to turn one into a Crumple-Horned Snorkack for a lark, then one had a jolly good chance of staying a Crumple-Horned Snorkack until the witch was done larking, or until one had gathered up enough gold to pay a reversal specialist. As most people were not able to afford a whole cottage-full of gold, and as witches were notorious for forgetting what exactly they'd been doing while they were larking, the above is as much as to say "forever".
The prince's problem was that adepts kept on turning him into things.
I think (though I am not sure) that this was because his fairy godmother mumbled at his christening. (He was christened Shinichi, by the way.) She was the only christening fairy within three hundred miles of anywhere, you see, and she was a bit overworked. Anyway, no one liked to say that she must have said the wrong thing and Gifted him with the ability to be turned into something by every adept who saw him, so it was generally assumed that the Gift had granted him the ability to grow hair on his head or something.
(I have to digress a bit here – his younger twin brother, Prince Kaito, was more lucky, and was only Given the ability to pick any lock without half trying. The worst problem that this Gift gave him was that if he actually was trying to pick a lock he couldn't, so that he had to sidle up to it obliquely, metaphorically speaking, and pick it without letting his conscious know that he was doing it on purpose.
His parents ignored his gift, because it wasn't a proper sort of gift for a prince to have, so when he was eight Prince Kaito picked his way into the castle dungeons and apprenticed himself to the master thief, Kaitou Kid, who had taken residence there on purpose, because he was tired of people chasing him. He was very lucky, and finished his apprenticeship after only four years.)
Prince Shinichi wasn't lucky at all.
On his first birthday a friendly fairy turned him into a rock, "to keep him from wiggling away from his nurse like that". She thought she was being helpful. I'm not exactly sure what the nurse thought, but anyway she screamed a lot, and the Queen fainted. The fairy wouldn't turn him back into a baby until the King explained that the birthday party was in five minutes, and that his people would think he had gone mad if he showed them a rock and wanted them to sing "Happy Birthday" to it.
When Prince Shinichi was five his parents took him and his brother to the seaside for a holiday. He fell off a bit of a rock into one of those rock pools that are always under the cliffs, and while he was splashing happily in exactly five inches of water his mother fainted and a passing adept turned him into a fish to keep him from drowning. Of course he found where the water was getting into the pool and swam out to sea, and his father had to hire a djinn to get the water out of the ocean, and another to wade through all the fishes and find the one with a gold circle on its head and get it back to the fairy.
A few years after that a witch who was passing through the kingdom happened to see the Prince climbing a tree, and turned him into an apple on a whim. The under-gardener nearly ate him, and the Queen fainted. The King had to pay the witch four times her weight in gold before she would restore Prince Shinichi to his proper form and go away.
The year after that the Queen fainted, and the Queen's maid turned him into a feather. She was going to burn him under his mother's nose, but his father objected (he said that burning incense was all very well, but that he hardly thought his wife would appreciate her son being burned in her honor) and they had to find another adept to turn him into a bottle of smelling-salts.
Mind you, these are only a few examples of the things that happened to Prince Shinichi. You will have a better idea of what kind of life he led when I tell you that by his seventeenth birthday he had been turned into a baby's rattle, a pair of scissors, a cat, a grasshopper, a small dragon, an extinct fly, a cheesecake, a goldfish, a pair of gold-embroidered dancing slippers, an ant, a magnifying glass, an amoeba, a lampshade, a butterfly, an incomplete oil painting, an armadillo, a doorknob, a castle, a mouse, a jar of pickled prunes, a centipede, a top hat, a zebra, a koala bear, a first-edition copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, a magpie, an avocado, a frog, a soup-tureen, a fox, a poet, a set of half-used pastels, an antelope, a moth, a lizard, a small island, an elephant, a squirrel, a rose-bush, a screw-driver, a pig, a dirk, an orangutan, and a typewriter.
I may have forgotten a few things.
As you can no doubt imagine, his family very quickly got fed up to the royal teeth with this state of things. The Prince took up detecting as a hobby to keep his mind off it, and got quite good at it, but this was no solace at all to his mother, who took to fainting every time she saw an adept, so as to save time.
Anyway, after he had been turned back from an egg-beater to a boy (that was around the time he was fourteen) his father called a meeting about it. The Queen said it made her feel faint, and Prince Kaito said that it was unsettling to be related to a pickled prune. The King and Prince Shinichi exchanged eloquent glances, and the upshot of it all was that the King sent one of his most clever knights to steal a magical artifact from a very powerful witch who lived about four miles down the road. The artifact was a stone called Pandora, which was said to occasionally bleed a liquid which was capable of reversing any enchantment.
After the knight left they waited a year, in case he was being delayed by traffic, and then sent another, cleverer knight in his wake. They were going to wait two years for that one, to allow for inclement weather, but Prince Shinichi's seventeenth birthday arrived barely a year later and precipitated a – a – an incident which, for lack of a more expressive word, I will label as a "crisis".
This was entirely the fault of societal norms. In those days it was protocol to invite every single adept within four hundred miles to any parties, and, adepts being adepts, it was considered wise for royalty to meet them personally and welcome them to the party. This meant that Prince Shinichi spent most of his birthday standing at the door to welcome the guests, and being turned into things and back every twentieth adept. (It would have been more often, but his Gift had apparently included the ability to become immune to a spell after it had been used on him twenty-seven times or if he had happened to sneeze at the exact same time that the spell was being cast.) And that meant that he had to spend all that time trying very hard not to look patient, because a good prince never lets on when he's having to exercise patience.
It was very tiring.
It was so tiring, as a matter of fact, that Prince Shinichi began actually to look tired. Then a fairy he was greeting remarked brightly that he looked simply adorable, "like a sleepy child!" and the sorcerer behind her decided to turn him into a seven-year-old for a lark – and then remembered that he'd left the stove on at home and vanished. And then it turned out that he was from the other side of the world and that no one knew his name or address.
The Queen fainted.
While the King was making sure that no one turned his son into a fan or a cup of water, Prince Shinichi and Prince Kaito exchanged glances, and the upshot of that was that Prince Kaito disappeared from the crowd, and later someone reported having seen the Kaitou Kid going down the street in the direction of a certain witch's house.
If the King knew what his second son was doing, he didn't say anything, but when two days had passed, and neither the sorcerer nor Prince Kaito had put in an appearance, he began to look worried; and when it had been a week, Prince Shinichi threw in a metaphorical towel, saddled a pony, and set off to get his brother back himself. (And maybe Pandora into the bargain.)
Unfortunately, he took a wrong turn somewhere. You see, those were the days when most kingdoms were a mile or two square, at the most, and it was very easy to set out for the kingdom next door and miss it because you'd happened to look in exactly the wrong direction for exactly the wrong five minutes; and you'd wind up four kingdoms down and one over from where you'd meant to be without any idea of how or where you'd gone wrong. And that is exactly what happened to Prince Shinichi. When night fell, he was in a town he'd never seen before, in a kingdom he'd never heard of, and he was beginning to suspect that the road was bewitched to send people off in the wrong direction. (He thought that this was perhaps what had happened to his brother and the two knights.)
Also his seven-year-old body was acting up on him. He wanted a glass of milk and a bed, and he wanted them immediately. So he put up at an inn and got both, but just as he was getting to sleep, something threw the door of his room open and dived under the bed. Before the Prince had quite grasped what was going on, the door burst open again and the innkeeper stormed in, waving a poker in an aggressive manner.
"Where'd he go?" he roared.
"Er – " said Prince Shinichi; and then, recollecting that the something had looked white and person-shaped: "Umm ... he went thatway."
"Arr!" said the innkeeper, and dashed off in that direction.
Once the door had closed, the something crawled out from under the bed and adjusted its top hat and monocle. "Well," said Kaitou Kid, "that was close."
"What are you doing here?" demanded Prince Shinichi.
"Rescuing you?" suggested Kid. (He did not sound very sure about it.)
"I just rescued you," pointed out Prince Shinichi. "Weren't you going to go get Pandora?"
"Well, yes," said Kid, "but, er ... you see..."
"She caught you, didn't she?"
"Yes," admitted Kid, dismally. "And she put a spell on me. Everything I put on changes into this outfit, and," said Kaitou Kid, "while I've no objection to nattiness, as such, I would sometimes like to be able to get through town without a bajillion people screaming 'Kaitou Kiddo da!" and chasing me all over everywhere with pitchforks. Or pokers," said Kid, "but since you're here, I can help you steal Pandora."
"Oh no you can't," said Prince Shinichi. "I'm a detective, not a thief."
"It's technically not stealing," said Kid, "since her grandmother stole it from an ancestor of ours. Legally we're simply recovering stolen property."
"But physically I'm going in there and taking something she wants to keep," retorted Prince Shinichi.
"Don't be a chicken!"
"I'm not a chicken, I'm a seven-year-old – or have you forgotten?"
"But it's easy!"
"Then you do it," said Prince Shinichi.
"I can't," said Kid patiently. "She put up a barrier to keep me out right after I left. I felt it. And anyway, all you have to do is follow my instructions, and you'll be in and out in no time."
"Like you were?" muttered the Prince; but his younger brother ignored him cheerfully, and the next morning they set out for the witch's house together, and got there right after lunch. Kaitou Kid said she'd be taking a nap, and all Prince Shinichi had to do was nip in, grab the stone, put it into a plain wooden jewel-case that would be near it, and nip out again.
"And," said Kid, "you are not to put it in the gold case. Don't even touch it."
"Why not?" asked Prince Shinichi.
Kid sighed. "This is a fairy tale, remember? You don't get any reasons – just don't do it. And if you get caught by the witch, agree to the second bargain she suggests to you."
"What? Why?"
But Kaitou Kid merely vanished in a puff of pink smoke, and Prince Shinichi shrugged and went on into the witch's house.
There was Pandora, set in plain view, and there, to one side of it, was the plain wooden box, but –
It was so very plain. It was unfinished and unlined and blocky in shape; the edges were worn, and the little nails that held it together were rusted. One of the hinges was mysteriously absent, and the other looked on the point of snapping, and there were a number of magenta blotches on the lid.
On the other hand, the golden jewel-case was both clean and pretty. The lid was crusted with semi-precious stones set in a clever swirling pattern, and the inside was lined with velvet. It glinted. It sparkled. It was shiny.
It was also apparently booby-trapped, because there was a sort of shriek and a sort of crash when Prince Shinichi picked it up, and then a witch with her hair up in curlers came shooting into the room. The Prince was so surprised at first that he remained rooted to the spot, and afterwards he remained rooted to it because the floorboards wrapped themselves around his ankles and held him there.
"Child," droned the witch, ominously, and then paused. "Hullo!" she added, with less menace and more interest. "You're not a child at all, are you? What are you doing here?"
"I was stealing Pandora," said Prince Shinichi, truthfully, "but you've interrupted me."
"Oho," said the witch. "So that's what Kid was after it for. Brothers, are you? Well, well, well."
Prince Shinichi did not look cross or patient.
The witch considered him for a moment, then smiled brightly. "See here, I am a witch, so I can't give it to you, but I'll make a bargain with you." She held up three fingers. "You can let me test a new spell on you – and I'll give you Pandora if you survive. Or you can go and get me something I want – and I'll give you Pandora when you bring it to me. Or you can stay here and help around the house for a year – and I'll give you Pandora at the end of the year if you've completed all the tasks I set you."
"The second, please," said Prince Shinichi politely.
"Wise choice," said the witch, grinning. "Right, then. It's a princess I want. Not to eat or anything," she added, at the look on the prince's face. "She's been kidnapped by ogres, and her father's offering a reward, so I thought – not the usual kind of reward," she added, at the other look on the prince's face. "Just money. Anyway, she's in their den. It's only a few miles away, you can't miss it, down the road for about two minutes until you get to the briar thicket, left at the third fork after the thicket, right at the dead oak, go on until you see a crumbly tower and take the road that goes away from it, and you're practically there."
She beamed.
Prince Shinichi looked at her.
"Well?" said the witch.
"Can I have a map, please?"
I will spare you the details of how unmercifully Kaitou Kid teased his older brother as they made their way to the ogres' den. Let it suffice to say that, by the time they reached the den (it took longer than it should have until they realized that they were looking at the map upside-down), Prince Shinichi had gotten to the point where he actually looked slightly cross.
"Now," said Kid, when they had found the door, "when you go in – "
"You aren't coming?"
Kaitou Kid chuckled. "No. I bought have a portable sleeping spell with me, but to work it I need to be outside the field it generates – and don't ask if you can do it; we all know you have less magical ability than a grain of rice. Just go in, get the princess, and don't – "
"Put her in the gold box?" suggested Prince Shinichi.
"Actually, this time the stipulation is that you don't kiss her," grinned Kid.
"What would I want to go and do that for?" demanded Prince Shinichi, crossly. "I don't even know her!"
But Kaitou Kid only grinned and said, "It's the second thing again."
Of course, Prince Shinichi fully intended to take his brother's advice this time (although he didn't quite see why he'd felt the need to warn him off a girl he'd never even seen), and he strode into the den filled with purpose, but – there was the princess, lying peacefully with her dark hair spread around her, trailing over her oval face: over delicate eyebrows, over long dark eyelashes resting on smooth, pink cheeks; and her lips were curved in a gentle half-smile...
So presently the prince found himself as the chief witness and defendant in an impromptu trial, which was judged, juried, lawyered, witnessed, and spectatored by about a dozen sleepy, puzzled ogres in pajamas. The princess was there, too, but she stood near the back of the room, and when she looked at Prince Shinichi it was with the mildly bewildered gaze of a woman who knows that a child is in love with her and is not at all sure what she is supposed to do about it.
Prince Shinichi was very busy looking at the princess (he gather from an ogre that her name was Ran) for most of the trial, and said "yes" to more or less everything that the ogres asked him; and when all the evidence and everything had been summed up, he was somewhat surprised to find that he had admitted to being a famous thief, said that he had snuck into the den a week before in a delivery of fine-ground flour, and claimed that his objective had been the chief ogre's favorite purple bathrobe.
Fortunately the chief ogre was very understanding, and proposed to let the prisoner choose his own fate: he could be eaten, or be set a task, or die painfully, according to his preference.
"The second, please," said Prince Shinichi, without really attending properly, and was sent off with a metaphorical flea in his ear, and instructions to steal the princess' father's car, for which they would trade the princess.
Kaitou Kid laughed for a long time.
"Now," he said, when they had reached the other kingdom, "it's the middle of the night, so everyone's asleep. Go into the garage, get the car, and come out. The keys will be on a rack near the door – don't use the gold one."
"Yes," said Prince Shinichi, absently, and then went and did exactly as he had been told. He didn't even look at the gold key. (I think that perhaps he had something else on his mind.)
Apparently Kaitou Kid thought so, too, because when his older brother drove up in the car (nearly running over him in the process) his eyebrows went up, and on the way back to the ogres' den he stared a lot, and eventually said casually, "So what's her name?"
"Ran," said Prince Shinichi. "Isn't it – hey!"
"Hey what?"
"How did you know?"
Kaitou Kid looked thoughtful. "Well, it was either the sluggish movements, the vacant stare, the fact that you actually did what I told you to do without so much as asking 'why?', the heart-rending sighs, or the way you keep on getting your eyes crossed and having to think before you can uncross them – watch it! That dagger's sharp, you know."
"Of course I know," said Prince Shinichi crossly. "That's the point. And I'll have you know this isn't funny."
"Yes it is."
"No, it's not! I can't court her as a seven-year-old, and I can't not be a seven-year-old unless I get Pandora – and I just stole her father's car! And I am not going to give her to that witch."
"She's just going to ransom her," said Kaitou Kid, with amusement in his voice.
"She says she's just going to ransom her," corrected the prince.
"It amounts to the same thing."
"No, it doesn't."
"Yes, it does."
"It doesn't!"
"It does!"
They were still – er – discussing the subject of whether or not a witch's word was to be taken at face value when they arrived at the ogres' den. Ogres are deep sleepers, fortunately, but their voices woke the princess and she came outside to see what was going on. For a moment it looked as if a passing adept had turned Prince Shinichi's head into a beetroot, but he recovered quickly and said, brightly:
"We've come to rescue you, princess!"
"Oh!" said Princess Ran, a little mystified at this unorthodox method of retrieval. "Thank you very much, then. But aren't you going to trade in the car?"
"What for?" said Kaitou Kid. "The ogres aren't exactly looking."
The princess said doubtfully that she wasn't sure it was protocol to do such a thing, and it sounded a little like stealing.
Prince Shinichi winced, but Kid grinned. "Well, they stole you first. Anyway, the kid here" (Prince Shinichi very determinedly did not glare) "is worried about you, so he's going to drive you back to your parents' place. I'll meet you at the witch's house some time tomorrow, okay, niichan?"
With which he left them in another burst of pink smoke.
In the blank silence which followed his departure, Princess Ran said, with desperate politeness, "You and your, er, younger brother look very alike."
Of course this did not help at all.
I will pass lightly over the trip back to Princess Ran's kingdom, because it was very, very awkward, and involved a lot of the princess being infuriatingly kind to Prince Shinichi, and a lot of Prince Shinichi not looking heartbroken, or angry, or embarrassed. I will say only a little of the princess' welcome home, which involved a lot of hugging and crying. Her mother called the prince a "little hero", her older sister patted him on the head, and her father regarded him with the deepest suspicion; Prince Shinichi was not sure which was worse. They gave him a glass of milk and a cookie and put him to bed in the guest-bedroom, which he promptly vacated via the window, so as to avoid being given any rewards.
All in all, Prince Shinichi was almost glad to see his younger brother again when he found him the next day, and greeted him quite genially. If Kaitou Kid was pleased to Prince Shinichi, he did a very good job of concealing it; he didn't even say "hello", but simply rounded on him and said:
"Oh, there you are! I need you to do something for me."
"It's nice to see you, too," said Prince Shinichi politely. "What is it?"
Kaitou Kid produced a gleaming needle from somewhere in his fantastic costume. "I need you to prick my finger with this."
There was a sort of meaningful silence while Prince Shinichi stared suspiciously up at his little brother. Then:
"Prick you?" said Prince Shinichi.
"Yes," said Kid.
"With a needle?" said Prince Shinichi.
"Yes," said Kid.
"I don't like the sound of that," said Prince Shinichi, after another meaningful of silence. "Are you sure?"
"Oh, for the love of turtle soup!" said Kid, dancing a bit. "Yes. I want you to prick me with a needle. Stop dawdling and get on with it!"
Prince Shinichi said, mulishly, "You do know that nothing good ever comes of pricking people with things, don't you?"
"That's only princesses," explained Kaitou Kid, "and if you don't do it right now, I am going to turn you over my knee and spank you, older brother or no."
Perhaps it was this threat that caused Prince Shinichi to jab (it was actually more of a stab) his beloved little brother so very enthusiastically, but we will give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, after Kaitou Kid vanished with a yelp and an explosion of pink smoke, and reappeared as Prince Kaito, dressed in a neat outfit which practically screamed "incognito", the two brothers had a friendly tussle, Prince Shinichi went on to the witch's house. Prince Kaito followed him at a cautious distance, in case of accidents.
When the witch (whose hair was still in curlers) answered the door, Prince Shinichi explained politely that at the princess' house was on the way back to the witch's, he'd taken the liberty of dropping her off there himself. He said the witch could have the pony if she wanted, though.
The witch squinted at him and said resignedly, "Took the scenic route, did you? Well, I might have known. Put the pony in the drawer, there's a good boy. Oh," she added, "and you get points for trying."
She twiddled her fingers at him, and there was a flash and a bang and a great deal of foul-smelling smoke, and when the prince had stopped coughing and was able to take interest in the world again, he was astonished to discover that he was his proper height, and possessed the number of organs, apertures, and appendages which it is normal for a human being to possess, and that he was not covered in fur, feathers, scales, an exoskeleton, metal, plastic, slime, or any combination of the above.
It muddled him rather.
However, he managed to thank her and get the pony into the drawer (although he was never sure afterwards how exactly he managed the latter) and then he tottered down the road to rejoin his brother, who was very glad to see him again.
Only two more things happened to them on the way home: first, the witch came running after them and shoved a note into Prince Shinichi's pocket; second, they discovered that the King's two cleverest knights had been unavoidably detained at an alehouse approximately halfway between the castle and the witch's house.
They took them back to the castle to be court-martialed, and while Prince Shinichi was signing the necessary fourteen pounds of paperwork, Prince Kaito took the King aside and divulged certain information to him. The result of the information was that the next week the King informed Prince Shinichi that he'd been trying to whip up an alliance with a certain King Kogoro for a while, and that negotiations had now formally opened. In those days of course that meant that they had matched up two of their children and wanted to see if they got along before signing any treaties. So Prince Shinichi was rather dazedly packed off with instructions to court Princess Ran.
As it happened, they got along rather well, once Prince Shinichi had explained how he had managed to age ten years in a week. They got engaged the very next day, because it wasn't considered socially acceptable to get engaged to someone five minutes into your acquaintance with them, and everybody was very pleased.
They had been engaged for less than a month when, as they were walking together in Princess Ran's garden, a certain sorcerer from the other side of the world flew past and happened to look down.
"Ha!" he said to himself. "Why, that's that sleepy young man, what's his name. Young. Ha, ha," chuckled the sorcerer, and twiddled his fingers.
Princess Ran looked down at her betrothed, and said, with mild concern, "You've gone short again, Shinichi; did you know?"
"Oh, bother!" said Prince Shinichi.
But I promise that they did live happily ever after (eventually).
The End
A/N: And that is (at least part of) the story of the shrunken Prince Shinichi. I hope y'all enjoyed it.
Oh, and I'm working on a non-fanfiction version of The Bird 'Grip', in collaboration with my original plot-bunny, and that's the version that I'll publish for real (if I ever do publish anything for real). I've got non-fanfiction ideas for most of the other fairy tales I've done in my head already; Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel just need a little work... Anyway, I don't know what the next fractured fairy tale will be – I'm going to concentrate on finishing chapter six of The Empty House. (Anyway now I know that six is an unlucky number. Blast the thing!) Thanks for all your support!
And oh yeah. There really is a fairy tale called The Bird 'Grip'; it's in Andew Lang's Pink Fairy Book. (Don't ask me why anyone would name a bird "Grip" because I really have no idea.) There's also one called "The Golden Blackbird" (bit of an oxymoron there...) in another of his volumes, which is almost identical to The Bird 'Grip'. There are a lot of weird fairy tales in those books...