Your Princess is in Another Castle (19 page)

“Yeah,” says Jimmy.

“I guess mermaid Ari
el would do nothing for you, huh, Chris?” I ask.

“Well
, no, but she gets feet when she becomes human.  And I bet you she was all about having Eric touch them, because it would be such a new and unique experience for her.  Ariel would like her foot rubs, definitely.  So who was your cartoon crush?”   

“I had a crush on Princess Zelda from
The Legend of Zelda cartoon,” I say.  “Remember how the Super Mario Super Show was on Monday through Thursday and Zelda was on Friday?  I liked Zelda on her own series, but she was even hotter when she guest starred on that one episode of Captain N because she wore a belly shirt in it.  I like navels even now, but it was pretty revealing for a kid to see.  Showing a midriff was about as sexualized as American cartoons could get back then, and that was long before bountiful anime women would make their journey to the West.”

“Man,
Zelda was a total bitch in those cartoons,” says Chris.  “All she was ever doing was putting Link down.”

“There was so
me hostility,” I say.  “But they were just like Han and Leia.”

“Not really,” says Seth.  “Han and Leia were both anta
gonistic towards each other.  Link was always vainly seeking Zelda’s approval and trying to get a kiss from her, and she always responded with so much abject hatred for him that I thought she’d rather plant one on Ganon.  And while Link was trying and failing to put the moves on Zelda, he was oblivious to the fact that Sprite the fairy
was
in love with him.  Actually, you know it all makes sense why you would have liked Zelda so much.”    

“
Sprite the fairy was barefoot.  As all good fairies should be,” says Chris.  “And I had a crush on Galadria.  She was the one female knight on the good guy side from Visionaries.”

The three of us look at Chris blankly.
  “It was a cartoon,” he says.  “And a toy line.  It was awesome.  They all had these animal totems which gave them their powers.  Their action figures had these cool holograms on their chests that depicted their totems.  To summon their power, they all had these rhymes they had to speak aloud.  Galadria’s totem was the dolphin and she had the power of healing.  Her rhyme was ‘By warmth of heart, your pain I feel. Grant me the power, your wounds to heal!’”  Chris speaks the rhyme as if he were laying hands on one of us to bring us back from the brink of death.

“That sounds pretty lame
,” says Seth.

“Well
, she had the power of healing, a useful but not particularly awesome power.  Darkstorm, he was the lead bad guy, his totem was the mollusk and he had the power of decay.  His rhyme was much cooler.  He shouted ‘By what creeps, what crawls, by what does not, let all that grows recede and rot!”

A moment passes where in my mind I hear
crickets chirping and imagine a tumbleweed rolling past Chris.

“What kind
of totem is the mollusk for a lead bad guy?” asks Jimmy.

“That was the genius of the show,” says Chris.
  “It didn’t go the predictable route.  It didn’t make a dragon the totem of the lead villain, which would have the obvious thing to do. And the storylines were more advanced than your typical cartoon series.  But that’s why it never really caught on.  It was far too ahead of its time.”

“If they gave the one girl on the team the tote
m of the dolphin, it wasn’t that revolutionary of a show,” I say.

“They had to cater to the little girls, too,” says Chr
is.  “And dolphins are a little girl’s third favorite thing in the world right after rainbows and unicorns.”

“I gotta tell you,” says Seth, “that this show s
ounds like it sucked.”  

“Screw you philistines!”
shouts Chris.  “I pity the fools who don’t like the Visionaries.  They were the knights of the magical light!”     

“Moving on,” says Seth, “what celebrity would you most like to do?
  And no busty behemoth pornstars, no professional foot models, and no cosplayers doing an anthropomorphic character.  I’m talking mainstream celebrity only.” 

“Then no blondes for you,” says Chris.

“Fair enough,” says Seth.

“Come back to me,” says Jimmy.  “I’ll need a minute.”

“I pick Fuko,” I say, spouting off her name like she’s the first toy I’d ask Santa for while sitting on his lap.  

“Who’s that?” asks Jimmy.
  “The name sounds Japanese.”

“She is,” I say.  “She’s a Japanese model with e
xtremely large natural breasts, reaching otherwise unheard of proportions for an Asian.”

“I don’t know if I can count her,” says Seth.

“She doesn’t do porn,” I say.  “Topless modeling, yes, but only softcore stuff.  And she’s all natural.  And she’s very big in Japan.  Most haven’t heard of her here stateside because we put women like Kate Moss on pedestals.”

“This Fuko,” says Jimmy, “does she posses a kitsune quality?”

“I’ve never considered it,” I say.  “So I don’t know.  Google some pics and see for yourself.” 

Jimmy brings up her Google image search results on his phone.
 

“The picture
where she’s holding the watermelons up to her breasts is one of my favorites,” I say.

“Those
boobs aren’t real,” says Seth.  “They can’t be real.”

“They’re real,” I say.  “Notice the teardrop shape
of her breasts.  Implants would appear much more circular.”

“He’s right,” says Chris.  “They look real.  Now
, I don’t normally go for Justin’s kind of over-endowed women, and Fuko’s boobs on a woman of any other race would probably disgust me, but the sheer size of those on an Asian make Fuko so much of a rarity I’d tap her for the uniqueness value.  Like if someone handed me a copy of the Necronomicon, I’d know that I should just throw it away, but I wouldn’t be able to.  I’d have to open it up and read it.  And I’d do Fuko for the same reason.”

“I wouldn’
t,” says Seth.  “Having your face melted off by opening the Ark of the Covenant would be a unique death.  That doesn’t mean I’d want to experience it.”

“No doubt Fuko
is special,” says Jimmy.  “But she does not have a kitsune quality.”

“How about someone from the American
mainstream?” asks Seth.  “Can you give us one?”

“Fine,” I say.  “Amanda Bynes.”

“Amanda Bynes?  She’s not
busty at all,” says Jimmy.  “I’d have assumed you’d at least require a Scarlett Johansson-esque bust to be at all satisfied.”

“That’s not the only thing I care about,” I
say.  “Amanda’s a real cutie.”

“She’s okay,” says Seth.
“She’s hardly a first round pick.”

“Yeah, she’s
just okay,” says Chris.  “And the beauty of Scarlett’s bust is eclipsed by the magnificence of her ten little piggies, Jimmy.”

“Okay, so who’d the
rest of you pick if you wouldn’t take Amanda?” I ask.

“Amy Lee from
Evanescence,” says Seth.

“A fine
non-blonde choice,” says Chris.  “Although anyone remotely connected to the Daredevil movie has some serious apologizing to do should they ever cross my path.” 

“Let’s see,
” says Jimmy.  “I’d take, uh, Yvonne Craig, Batgirl from the old Adam West series.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” says Seth.  “Althou
gh I would have expected you to say Julie Newmar.”

“I’ve always wanted to do Linda Blair,” says Chris. 
“That scene in Exorcist II
where she’s seducing the priest, man that was hot!  Awesome scene from a really bad movie.”

“Linda Blair?
” I ask.  “How can you like Linda Blair but not Amanda Bynes?  Linda Blair’s like an Amanda Bynes from the 1970s.  Nowadays they could play mother and daughter they look so much alike.  You can’t be into one and not the other.”

“I don’t see that at all,” says Chris.
  “And I’m not saying I’d have to be a sexual Perseus and have to do Bynes doggystyle and only be able to look at her reflection through a finely polished shield.  That’s not what I’m saying.  All I’m saying is she isn’t the very first girl that comes to mind for me, that’s all.”

It’s 8:00pm, and we’ve finally hit the halfway point.  A viewing of The Wizard has helped us to reach this moment, along with a spirited contest to determine who could best utter the epic word
California
as well as the single greatest villain declaration ever:
I love the Power Glove.  It’s so bad
.  Jimmy took the prize for California, while Seth won for the Power Glove remark, which he claimed was due to him being perhaps the only person in the entire world to have successfully mastered the Power Glove for its original purpose back in the 8-bit era.

We move
d on to arguing about whether or not Seth overtipped the blonde pizza delivery girl.  He insisted he did not, with Jimmy taking his side, citing the convoluted order she was tasked with managing, which consisted of three special order pizzas, breadsticks, desserts, and several liters of soda.  Seth also pointed out that she had no trouble finding our tent amidst the rest of the geeky shantytown.

Chris decried
her for what he perceived as visible contempt for the lot of us and the night’s mission.  I maintained it was simply a question of mathematics, as even with what I admitted was superior delivery service fifteen dollars was too much to give.  The argument concluded when we all agreed that she was hot (according to Jimmy, she’d make for a most exquisite fox-girl). 

Currently we’re asking each other random questions
.  “I got one,” I say, chugging down the final swig from a bottle of Dr. Pepper, the only carbonated beverage I’ve ever chugged.  “What was one of the crazy beliefs you held as a child?”

“I ruined my first NES deck on a crazy rumor I bo
ught into,” says Seth.  “On the bottom of the NES there was an expansion port.  As far as I know, Nintendo never did release any official device that made use of the port.  But it was there, and its lack of purpose perplexed me as a kid.  So when my friend told me that you could play Sega Master System games by inserting them into the port and it was this really big secret Nintendo didn’t want people to know about, I believed him.  We tried it with an Alex Kidd cartridge, and when it didn’t fit, we tried to force it and wound up breaking the cartridge.”

We all laugh.  “A double agent employed by Ni
ntendo but secretly working for Sega could have engineered it,” says Jimmy.  “I might have believed that had someone told me about it.  And I have a NES myth of my own.  A friend of a friend of mine was playing through the second quest of The Legend of Zelda for the first time and he’d finally reached level 9 when he had to go to his grandmother’s for the weekend.  He took his NES with him and so he faced Ganon on his grandma’s old black and white television.  Now Ganon was ordinarily invisible when you fought him, but somehow a black and white picture made him visible for the entire fight, or so this friend of a friend claimed.  That made Ganon easy to beat, given that his primary advantage was invisibility. 

“
So when I heard his story I tried it out for myself.  I adjusted the picture on my own TV to make it black and white, but Ganon didn’t become visible.  I called the friend of my friend out for lying.  He said the reason it didn’t work for me must have been the fact that I simply changed my color screen to a black and white picture using my set’s tint controls.  He said what made it work for him was that his grandma’s TV couldn’t actually display color properly, so that was why Ganon was visible for him and not for me.  And I had no black and white TV to play on, so I could never disprove him.”

“That’s not necessarily crazy,” says Chris.  “I
f you’ve never actually seen it disproven for yourself, the friend of your friend might have been telling the truth.”

“I don’t see why the lack of color on a black an
d white TV would cause Ganon to always be visible,” says Seth.

“
And I don’t think you even could hook up a NES to an actual black and white television,” I say.  “Those things predate even the Magnavox Odyssey, they wouldn’t have the right connectors.”      

“I don’t know,” sa
ys Chris.  “It’s probably bogus just like fighting the dog in Duck Hunt, but still-” 

Wh
atever Chris was planning on saying next is drowned out by the sudden, loud moaning of a woman being brought closer and closer to an orgasm, set to a metal beat.

“That’s
More Human than Human by White Zombie,” says Seth.  “But who’s out there blasting it?”

We all
exit the tent and see that our fellow line-waiters have done the same.  Our eyes focus on a white van with the logo for Lux, a local radio station.  As the woman’s moaning ends and the song proper begins the music abruptly cuts out.  The doors of the van are thrown open by a man wearing sunglasses at night and an all black outfit.

“Hello, losers!” the man bellows into a megaphone.