Mickey Mouse in the Public Domain

Chapter 7

The alarm went off bright and early the next morning, the sound of Mickey playing penguins as musical instruments. Now you might think this isn't Antarctica, these are just some snowy mountains, and you'd be right, but the person responsible for worldbuilding in this story just saw a snowy wasteland and conveniently forgot there was a difference. (What a doofus.)

Because the sound of penguins honking apparently wasn't enough to get the two bedridden sleepyheads out of their sleeping bags, Mickey started playing the Mountain Goat from yesterday as well. But that Mountain Goat must be miles away from here, you may say to yourself, how did he show up here? Well again, the worldbuilder just didn't think things through enough to realize this mountain range might be big enough to have more than one mountain goat. (Again, what a doofus.)

Well anyway, that Mountain Goat sure got Oswald and Minnie up.

As soon as they were up, Mickey stopped playing (see, he was learning some restraint, character growth), Oswald was grumpy at being woken up so early, Minnie was disappointed she had missed out on all of the fun.

"Well, now that my sleep has been ruined, we might as well set out," Oswald said, kicking the tent in such a way it caused all the poles to disconnect and the whole thing to spring upwards and fold up into a ball where it landed perfectly in the tent bag all in one smooth motion.

So the three of them set back out across the mountains, the sun rising calmly up over the peaks in the pink sky.

Traveling was way smoother than the day before, with calm winds and clear skies and weather fair, and because I'm not a total sadist (well, unless you read one of my egg laying stories, and then you'll probably come back here with PTSD), before they knew it, Oswald came to a stop atop the edge of a ridge, eyes fixed proudly straight ahead of him. "We have arrived," he said, as Mickey and Minnie arrived at his side, completely full of himself like leading them across these frozen mountains and to their destination was some sort of achievement or something.

You know, maybe I am a sadist, time to knock that pompous rabbit down a peg.

So, as they stood there on the ridge looking out at the snowy tavern that rested, tucked cutely within the mountains before them, the ground that they were standing on suddenly cracked, and sent them all plummeting toward the ground below. Well all except for Minnie, who still had her parachute panties to break the fall.

As Mickey and Oswald pulled themselves out of the snow drift, they looked up at Minnie gliding down to join them in shock.

Minnie let out a yelp, throwing her hands over herself. Mickey looked bashfully away while Oswald instead turned his attention to their tavern of destination.

Minnie landed on the ground smoothly, and gathered up her panties, then she patted Mickey's shoulder, letting him know he could peek now.

Oswald plucked off his ears and handed one to Mickey and Minnie, then he hopped on the other, and rode it like a snowboard down the gentle slope leading toward the tavern. Mickey and Minnie looked at eachother, and shrugging to eachother, hopped on their ear and followed. Just as they were about to reach the doors of the tavern, Oswald glided to a halt, and turned to face his two traveling companions.

"Now, I'll be honest, up until this point, I've never really met our contact in person before - or really even talked to him at all for that matter - but he is a famous toon just like us - or at least you two - so we should be able to convince him to help us without avoid much problem."

Minnie looked at him confused, "Without avoid?"

"It means without much problem," Oswald said, then suddenly he looked confused, "except 'problem' doesn't exactly mean the same thing as 'avoid', and maybe it would've just been easier to cut out the 'avoid' entirely because the double negative would cancel eachother out meaning we would have a problem..." Oswald furrowed his brow, jumbling through his train of mixed up thoughts, then refixed his statement to hopefully make as much sense as toonmanly possible, "It means things will go along so smoothly, we won't even have to avoid any problems."

Mickey and Minnie looked unconvinced.

(Now, you might be wondering, did I just write a whole conversation to justify a typo I made in my last book because I'm too lazy to go back and fix it? Yes I did.)

So, without another word, Oswald threw open the tavern doors and a blast of atmosphere, carrying a gust of fireplace warmth, hit them full, an overwhelming comfort after all this time out in the cold.

They stumbled into the tavern and took in the scene. Toons were scattered about hurling chairs and beer mugs at eachother, a few shootouts were going on here and there; gambling, drinking, all that cartoon tomfoolery you could expect, all accompanied by bouncy piano music performed by a cargo man who had to continually duck and dodge to avoid losing his head in the midst of all the chaos.

"This looks fun," said Minnie.

Mickey nodded jovially, and the two of them readied themselves to rush into the tavern and join the excitement.

But no sooner had they taken a few steps, Oswald had grabbed their tails, pulling them short. He pointed over at a gambling table to where a short black cat was playing cards with some others.

Mickey stopped to watch. From his vantage point, he could see the cat flick one of the spades from the card, and then proceed to tweek the 6 until it looked like a 5. Then, the cat threw his cards down, laughing to himself as he produced a winning hand.

The CHEAT! Mickey thought to himself, he was even worse than Buford the Rat!

Something was clearly wonkey about that whole deck of cards though, because as the opponent looked down at his hand, sweating with anxiety, before his very eyes, all the hearts leapt from his cards and scurried away from him, across the table, unable to be caught. He burst into tears as he was forced to lay down all his 0s of Hearts, a sore reminder of how heartless he really was (or so all his ex-girlfriends told him so. A reminder, don't be this guy).

Mickey narrowed his eyes, "A cat? Your contact is a cat?"

Minnie's eyes went wide, "We can't trust a cat! Cats are the worst!"

"Okay, that's it," said Mickey, throwing a hand up and heading back toward the door, "We are officially out of here."

But Oswald grabbed his tail again, pulling him short. Mickey spun around, snatching back his tail, and looked at Oswald indignantly.

"Okay, listen," Oswald said, "I know you two haven't had the best experiences with cats, I know, I've hung around Pete too, and he's a..." Oswald stalled, not able to think of the word, "Anyway, this cat is different, he's a star like us, which I guess doesn't mean much seeing how you use your stardom to abuse unfortunate animals, but at least he's not written as an antagonist."

Mickey hesitated a second, and then he sighed. "Well, I guess we can give it a shot."

As they made their way over to the table, Minnie couldn't help but wonder, "Wait, if Walt lost the rights to you when he left Universal, then how did we get stuck with Pete?"

Oswald turned to look at her, "Don't waste your time questioning the complexities of what happened under copyright, the Public Domain is quite enough to try to understand."

The cat was still deep within his game of scamming when a pair of rabbit hands landed on the table besides him, making a loud sound and clanking glasses.

"Howdy-doo," said Oswald, "My name is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and these are my companions, the renowned Mickey and Minnie Mouse. You must be Felix; how would you like to join us on a quest?"

Felix the Cat turned to look at them.

And then he began to laugh.