Beanstalked: Better Than a Princess

Story Time and Comfort

Najla sat in Jack's lap, her eyes closed as she rested her head against his chest. His head rested right on top of hers. His eyes were busy gliding over the pages of the book in his hands, plopped in the middle of Najla's lap. A gentle purring emanated from the weregirl's throat as she listened to him narrate and occasionally comment on the tales he read.

At the moment, Jack was halfway done reading Little Red Riding Hood. Mild concern crossed his face as he turned the page and saw an illustration of the red hooded girl being dropped into the open maw of the Big Bad Wolf. Whoever had drawn it had added the extra morbid detail of her grandmother peeking from the back of the wolf's throat. Her mouth hung open in a silent scream.

"This...book is kinda a lot darker than the other one I checked out of the library." Nervousness coated Jack's voice, his eyes flickering downwards to the curly haired girl in his lap. Half of him was waiting for a response. The other half was checking to make sure she was still there.

Najla's left ear twitched as her purring lowered in volume to a soft humming. A questioning trill came from her. "What? Is this another one where she gets swallowed up by the wolf?"

"Y-yeah." He responded through a shaky laugh.

The wolf girl sighed as she reached a hand up and patted Jack on his cheek. "Don't worry, some big strong man with an axe will come cut her out. Just like in the other book." Najla's tone was a mix of comfort and teasing, knowing that specifying the hunter's weapon would calm her boyfriend down.

Briar Patch was an interesting town as, aside from being populated by people bookmarked with fairy tales, it also was located near one of the hot spots for bloopers to spawn. These were objects that happened to fall through the occasional gaps their world and the other simply known as "The World without Happy Endings". Rather than treating these minor pop-ups as alien artifacts, Briar Patch residents winded up embracing their strangeness. The library especially adored those that came in the form of books.

The two had been spending the evening reading over some of the books from the Briar Patch library. Due to them being bloopers from the World without Happy Endings, much of them were collections of fairy tale retellings, which had a strange layer of irony the two couldn't quite pinpoint. The book they were reading prior had a similar outcome for its little red riding hood, granted it was solved by the hunter busting in moments later with a gun. The book before that one had little red wielding a gun herself.

Jack murmured out a "Hopefully" that was muffled by him pressing his face into Najla's hair and turned the page. Sure enough, there was artwork of a large man with a lumber axe. The wolf looked at him in fear as the weapon loomed over his head. Jack's head raised a little, his tone now lighter. "Oh yeah, you were right."

A smug grin came to her face as Jack turned the page. The removal of little red and her grandmother was unrealistically clean as the hunter pulled them out of the gaping stomach of what seemed to be an unconscious wolf.

"Um...they got out but there isn't any blood," Jack squinted at the page. "I don't think that's...right."

Najla chuckled. "Babe, I'm pretty sure this book is for children. In the last story, Hansel and Gretel shoved the witch into the oven and she came out as a pie instead of a corpse."

Jack's face returned to Najla's hair again, muffling his voice once more. "I mean...who knows what happens when you kill a witch. Maybe they do turn into food..." He trailed off as he flipped the page. It revealed little red and her granny enjoying the food in the basket with the hunter scolding a bandaged up wolf in the background.

"Never mind, you're right. This book is for children."

Najla snickered at Jack's change in tone as he turned the page to see Jack and the Beanstalk in big green letters, wrapped in vines. The farm boy did a complete 90 degree change in his attitude as he grinned widely. "Ah, Nana! They put my story right after yours!" His heart nearly leapt out of his chest, overcome with joy at the thought of being together with his girlfriend, even in a book from a different reality that had no idea they existed.