Twisted Fiction Quarterly Contest: Disney Edition

Time to announce the winners of last month’s Twisted Fiction Quarterly Contest! This was the big one! Our top entry earned a 100 dollar Amazon Gift card!

For this contest, we asked writers to rewrite their favorite Disney movies to make them deeper, darker, and more daring then the original. We had a lot of amazing entries that featured a wide variety of movies. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did! Check out the winners and their stories below!


First Place
By Meagan Noel Hart

Experiment 626 rubbed his face across the concrete floor, the stench of urine greeting him. He pushed himself up with two arms and lifted his other two to rub his oblong face. What had hit him? He hadn’t been knocked out like that since Durability Trial 3,465, when Jumba ran him over with a freighter ship.
His brain began processing. Odd smells, cell dimensions, a high-pitched whining chorus coming from the corner. He sprang to his feet, reached for his plasma guns, and shouted threats and curses. If they’d managed to cage him, they were not to be dealt with lightly.
But his claws triggered nothing but air.
They’d unarmed and disrobed him.
The whining continued, and it became obvious these creatures weren’t a threat. They huddled in the corner, sweat and heat from their bodies filling the room with a dusty musk, their claws clicking. They were similar in size to him, and covered with fur, but their proportions were leaner, and they lacked the additional limbs, rear sensor spurs, and atenna that made Experiment 626 so effective.
They were simple-minded prisoners. Their yelps were meaningful, but useless.
He cared not for their fear nor their circumstance. Experiment 626’s purpose was one of destruction. Not sympathy. Not rescue. He had been created to destroy. To dismantle. Vaporize. Crush.

From the first moment he had flicked his eyes open, Jumba’s voice had boomed in his ears. “YES! YES!” The bulky, purple pulp of a being loomed over him with four large yellow eyes. “MY MONSTER. HE LIVES.”
He’d handed him a small, dense metal ball.
“Crush it,” Jumba had demanded, demonstrating with a paper ball of his own.
A fast learner, Experiment 626 imitated, feeling how simply the metal cracked and became powder in his fist.
The small thing of beauty was no more.
Jumba’s exhilarated cries lifted him up into the air. “Yes. YES! More!”
Nothing was created but to be destroyed, and Experiment 626 was a fast learner.
But the jubilation was short lived.
Soon after, the trials began.
Acid. Fire. Crushing. Stabbing. Plucking. Pulling. Stretching.
Durability Trials, Jumba called them.
Experiment 626 was strong, but he still felt pain. His small body was packed with nerve endings, a fact surely his creator knew.
“This is good for you,” Jumba had said one evening before returning him to his cell. “You will build up a tolerance, no? You will be unstoppable.”
At that moment, the only thing he wanted to destroy was Jumba and his lab.
But that was the night the Federation had found them, and those that should have been his saviors, only threw him into another prison. Apparently, Experiment 626 never should have existed.
They were not as smart as Jumba; he had easily escaped. They’d trailed him, though. Knocked him off course. Landed him, somehow… here.

“We’re looking for something sturdy,” a strange voice echoed behind. “Something that won’t die.”
He didn’t yet understand, but the language was far more sophisticated than the moans in the corner.
Turning, he realized his cell was nothing more than a primitive cage, one he easily tore apart. He climbed to the top, the chains rattling gently, and dug his claws into the soft ceiling. From here he could smell the strange salty air of this new land: freedom.
He scurried into the next room—the door wasn’t even locked. He was unnoticed by the odd aliens below, their bodies far taller than the prisoners. In micros, he was out the exit.
Before he saw the red dot, he heard the charge of the plasma rifle, the heavy breath of Jumba, his unmistakable grunt. A silent shot was fired, and Experiment 626 retreated inside, across the ceiling and the creatures below (“We’re getting a dog,” one of the larger ones was saying to the small one), and down into the cell room.
His vile creator had turned on him, ready to trade his corpse for freedom, but he wasn’t alone. A stranger had been by his side, wearing a Federation jacket. If Jumba was accompanied by the Law, they had to keep a low profile. They couldn’t attack when near natives.
A faded poster on the cracked wall displayed a small alien embracing one of the prisoners, smiles on both their faces. The scene he’d seen in the other room started to make sense.
Experiment 626 realized his escape.
He could blend in. Straining some, he sucked in his lower arms, his antennae, and his rear sensors. It was uncomfortable, but pain was as much of part of his existence as the limbs he was working so hard to hide.
If he walked on his hands and feet, he could be mistaken easily for one of the sub-creatures.
“Hello?” The tiny alien had dark hair growing only from her head and a soft brown skin that looked breakable. She shuffled her feet, her garment dragging on the ground. An emotion Experiment 626 recognized immediately emanated from her entire body.
Before she could spot the real sub-creatures, still in hiding, he scurried to her.
“Hi,” she said, waving her hand, her shoulders slumping.
He tried to imitate, the language gurgling from his throat, his tongue too large to properly form the syllables, yet.
She frowned.
Before she could abandon him, he rushed to embrace her, exactly as the instructional poster had shown.
“Wow,” she breathed, her breath hot on his long ear. A sudden jubilation emanated from her like he had not felt since Jumba had cheered the crushing of the ball.
He immediately distrusted it.
“You’re perfect,” she said. She squeezed him tighter. He almost ran away, not recognizing the sensation warming him. She squeezed, but it did not hurt.
“I’m Lilo,” she said. She let go enough to see his face, her frown returning, a sadness lilting in her next question. “If I save you, will you save me?”
He would soon learn the answer to this question would be an astounding, yes.


Bio:
Meagan Noel Hart has chased words into stories her whole life. It’s no wonder she ended up an English professor who whiles her nights away at the keyboard. Her work spans many genres, but usually literary fiction, magical realism, horror, or poetry. She currently lives in Baltimore with her husband, rambunctious boys, and fur babies. She has three collections of short and flash fiction. Her work has appeared most recently in A Wink and a Smile and The Corvus Review, and is forthcoming in Dread Naught but Time, a Scribes Divide Anthology. Learn more about her here: http://mhart06.wixsite.com/mnhart  or follow her on twitter @mnhart.

Process:
I was excited when a friend posted about the Twisted Disney prompt, but I have to admit I was stumped for a bit. Some of Disney’s stories come from originally dark tales or have been re-told many many times. So, I knew I wanted to do one of their original stories, and preferably something that wasn’t very dark at all, at least on the surface. Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorite Disney movies, the first DVD I ever bought with my own money, and one of the “cutest” tales I could think of. I spent the week imaging Lilo and Stitch in so many dark or rebellious situations, but in the end I knew two things. There were already dark undertones in the story that could be exploited, and I couldn’t totally remove the heart without losing the essence of the story. In the final hours before the deadline, I tossed all my other ideas, and returned to that moment where they first meet and realize ( though at the time, for all the wrong reasons) that they need each other. Choosing Stitch’s perspective came naturally because I like to write from animal point of views or unexpected point of views, and he seemed to be in the darkest situation: on a planet he didn’t recognize, on the run from the law, being hunted by his creator, with a whole history that could not have been altogether pleasant. The rest flowed from there.


Second Place
By Eva Schultz

“Come in, Your Majesty.”
Kuzco stepped through the doorway into Yzma’s chamber and squinted in the torchlight. It took him a moment to locate the elderly advisor standing in the shadows.
“Thank you for the dinner invitation,” Kuzco ventured, taking a seat at the table spread haphazardly with a plate of fruit and several empty pitchers.
“Is that what you thought this was?” Yzma moved into the light, and Kuzco’s breath caught. Her hands and arms were painted with symbols of black magic.
Yzma had been the emperor’s advisor for decades until she began to practice the dark arts. Kuzco remembered his father ordering her from the throne room when she arrived with the remnants of a spell-casting session painted on her skin.
“Your vile sorcery isn’t welcome in my kingdom,” Kuzco’s father had shouted. After that, he stopped summoning his old advisor, and she spent most of her time in her chamber deep in the bowels of the palace. There was a rumor that the emperor had tried to expel her, but her web of dark magic – backed by the force of her stone-faced personal guards – had made it impossible.
Kuzco had quarreled with his father for what he’d done. If they could strengthen their empire through magic, why not do it? He’d come perilously close to being banned from the emperor’s presence, himself, and had spent months fuming about his father’s backward, close-minded ways. One day, the empire would be his, and Kuzco’s reign would eclipse his father’s completely.
Now, sitting here at her table, Kuzco could only stare at Yzma’s painted arms, sucking in shallow breaths.
“I think you know why you’re here,” she said.
He felt a coldness spread from his stomach up his chest as he remembered the only other time that he had seen her painted for a spell-casting.
The emperor had fallen ill; after days of treatment, the physician had finally told Kuzco, with weary relief, “He will recover.”
Kuzco had felt a stab of disappointment as he left his father sleeping peacefully. He tried to push the feeling away, but the thoughts boiled inside him – when would the empire finally be his?
Leaving the bedchamber, he had passed Yzma in the corridor, her hands and arms covered in symbols.
They had locked eyes. Kuzco had moved to the side to allow her entrance into his father’s room. Then he had walked away.
Word had come the next morning of the king’s sudden regression and demise overnight. Kuzco had returned to the chamber on quivering legs but stopped in the doorway when he saw Yzma standing beside the shrouded figure in the bed like a stony sentinel. He had stared out at him, and he had mumbled to his courtiers that he did not wish to look upon his father’s face in death. In the months since his own ascension to the throne, Kuzco had never returned to that room.
“You know why you’re here,” Yzma repeated. She set a tall golden goblet on the table, uncorked a vial, and poured a shimmering liquid into the cup. “Let us toast to your long and healthy rule.” She set the goblet before him.
Kuzco stared into the cup. The wine bubbled and shivered. “You can’t make me drink your poison,” he said, pushing his chair back.
Yzma looked to the doorway and nodded, and Kuzco saw her bodyguard reposition himself to block the door.
“You can’t get away with killing an emperor,” Kuzco said too loud, his voice betraying his fear.
“I have never attempted such a thing.”
“But my father…”
“Your father is in the field beyond the palace.”
Kuzco blinked. “What do you mean? My father is dead.”
“No,” Yzma said, smiling. “You saw a body in the bed that morning, but you didn’t come close. How could you look into that face again after you had left him to my… ministrations?”
Kuzco fell back into the chair. “I didn’t know what you were going to do to him.”
Yzma grinned at him. “You didn’t want to know. Bu you knew that once I was done, you would inherit the throne.” She turned her inner arm toward him and pointed at a rough figure of a llama painted in white. “He is in the field, Your Majesty. In the llama pen.”
Kuzco couldn’t speak. An image crowded everything else out of his mind: a tall, white llama that crossed to the fence every time he passed, bleating, its eyes swimming with intelligence.
“It wasn’t enough to kill him,” Yzma said. “I wanted him to watch while I took away his kingdom – first from him, now from his son. With the royal bloodline gone, I will seize the throne, while the emperor eats grass in my fields.” She gestured to Kuzco’s tunic, a gift she had presented to him after his coronation. “That is woven from your beast-father’s very hair.”
Kuzco leapt from his chair and tore the tunic off, gagging. He stood bare-chested in the cool of the cave.
“Drink,” Yzma said again, her smile gone. “Join him.”
Kuzco cast another desperate look at the guard in the doorway but knew there was no escape. He took the goblet in shaking hands and looked up at the old woman. “Please,” he said, and he was once again a boy, with no need of thrones or acclaim, just the love and protection of his father.
Yzma said nothing.
Kuzco raised the cup to his mouth. The drink was warm and salty, and his eyes watered as he forced it down.
“I’m sorry, Father,” he murmured, and he howled in pain as coarse white hair sprung from every inch of skin, as his neck stretched, as his fingers fused into hooves.
The last thing he saw was Yzma, as down a long tunnel, raising her goblet. “A toast to the emperor,” she said. “Long live Kuzco.”


Bio:
Eva Schultz lives in Naperville, Illinois, where she is a business writer by day and a fiction writer by night. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Everyday Fiction, and 365 Tomorrows, and she won YeahWrite’s Super Challenge for fiction in 2017. She lives with a big orange cat named Gus and enjoys drawing, painting, and cheering on her favorite WWE pro-wrestlers. Visit her artist site at http://www.facebook.com/EvaSchultzArt.

Process:
When I saw the prompt, I started listing my favorite Disney movies in my head. The moment “The Emperor’s New Groove”  came to mind, I knew in an instant that it was perfect for this prompt, and I knew exactly which scene I wanted to rewrite.

“New Groove” takes a really dark starting premise – the emperor’s advisor trying to assassinate him – and makes it wacky, light fun because it never takes itself seriously. All I had to do was make it serious, and the darkness was right there for the taking. Making Kuzco’s transformation into a llama intentional and horrifying was the first step. Then I asked myself, why is Kuzco the ruler of the known world at such a young age? Once I realized that he must be an orphan – and that Yzma probably knew his parents – the remaining pieces of the story snapped into place. I rewatched the original scene to pull in a little visual detail and a couple lines of dialogue, and the story practically wrote itself

Third Place
By Helena Dove

The last thing Marie remembered before the bombs started dropping was Madame Adelaide’s hand gently stroking her. A year after Marie, her siblings, and her mother had returned from an “unexpected visit to the countryside” (as Madame, their owner, put it) facilitated by the (now unemployed) butler, Edgar, life had almost returned to normalcy.
The European war hadn’t affected the family yet. The radio called it the Sitzkrieg, with nothing happening on the front. Everyone seemed to think the war would be over any time now. It certainly wouldn’t reach Paris. That illusion was shattered by the sound of Stuka sirens.
“Get to the cellar!” Duchess shouted. Through bleary eyes, Marie saw her brothers, Berlioz and Toulouse, running downstairs; she followed them. The house rattled and shook as explosions rocked the street. “Is everyone here? Berlioz, Toulouse, Marie. Where’s Madame?” Duchess looked distraught.
Marie, fully awake now, tried to run to the door, but Duchess grabbed her by the scruff of her neck. “Let me go, I have to save Madame!” shouted Marie.
“You can’t go back up there! We have to wait for the bombs to stop!” Duchess said through clenched teeth. “She’s probably sheltered in a closet. We’ll go back up as soon as it’s safe.”
The bombing went on for what seemed to be an eternity. Throughout it all, the kittens shook, and not just from the vibrations of the explosions. Duchess tried to make them feel safe, but she too was worried. After thirty minutes of eternity, the pace of the bombing slowed. The sirens grew fainter. Finally, it was safe to go back upstairs.
Marie was the first up the stairs. She ran past fallen dishes and shattered vases as she entered the sitting room. When she burst into the room, she gasped.
“Marie! Where are you, Ma-“Duchess stopped when she saw Marie’s shocked face. “Marie? What’s wrong?”
“Ma-Madame isn’t moving.” Marie said haltingly.
It was true. Madame Adelaide seemed almost asleep. Her eyes were closed, but her chest wasn’t moving. She had had a heart attack from the shock of the bombing.
“Kittens, I think we must leave the house.” Duchess, unmoved by the bombing, seemed shaky now. “We still have no butler, and we need somewhere to stay until something is done about the will and house.”
Toulouse chimed in, “Could we stay with O’Malley Cat? They’re still living in that abandoned apartment building.”
Duchess looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s across town, but it will work. We’ll leave tonight. Get your belongings together.”
The family started preparing for the trip. They all realized that they wouldn’t be coming back to the house for a long time. Marie grabbed a few extra bows for her fur, and her brothers each carried a favorite toy in their mouths. When the kittens had all gathered together, their mother addressed them.
“We’ll travel along the rooftops to the Scat Cats’ building. We’ll avoid the streets.” Duchess had regained her composure by this point. “I remember the way, so just follow me.”
The kittens nodded. Duchess squeezed through the cat flap, and her kittens followed. Marie took one last look at their home as they walked across the neighboring house’s roof. Duchess noticed and tried to comfort her.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be back soon.” A touch of unsureness crept into Duchess’s voice. “We’ll be back soon.”


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