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“Here is the palace where we’re going,” Every suddenly says, startling Lily, who has now completely forgotten his existence, her senses consumed wholly by the smell of grandma’s freshly baked chocolate chip cookies wafting in the air around them. He points to a large green plastic object on the ground that looks like a crossover between a manhole and a water pipe. Three fairy guards dressed like nutcrackers with metal wings stand around it.

“The fuck is that?” Lily asks. The guard closest to her gives a look of absolute shock upon hearing her swear.

The guard beside him snorts.

“A fucking pipe, woman,” a different guard, this one with a gruff brown beard, answers. “You slide down that to go to the palace.”

“These are Glucose, Fructose, and Galactose,” Every informs his girl with a wide smile, so bright and shiny that it would make a dentist proud. The three weirdos with weird names take turns shaking Lily’s hand, starting with Glucose, the scandalized one earlier. He simply grunts.

Fructose follows with a wide grin under his handlebar mustache, then Galactose, the one who answered Lily’s question earlier. “Why are you guys named that way?” Lily decides to ask him.

“Don’t be mean,” the bearded man frowns. “We actually named ourselves this way. We like it.”

“Oh, my bad,” Lily says, sounding incredibly stupid now for a supposed fairy queen. Though no one really knows that fact yet, except for her and Every and the high-ranking dudes she’ll later meet. But not giving up, she turns to Every. “Why’s the palace underground?”

“It wasn’t always this way, you know,” he says after recalling his history class, “but the last, last ruler here was inspired by a certain plumber brothers adventure video game and decided to move the whole place underground.”

“The ones with Italian names?”

“Yep,” Every answers before sliding down the green tube, and the now-annoyed guards accidentally push Lily down after him.

At the end of the trash-collecting-truck-green winding tube slide, Lily Lilyola Liliya gets up and peers from behind her boyfriend, only to find three more nutcracker guards in similar clothing to the three others above.

“Lily, meet Sucrose, Lactose, and Maltose, the second-gate guards,” Every announces in his dark, deep voice.

“What’s up, brothers?” Lily greets them, the mighty fairy queen she is.

Sucrose grimaces, making his soul patch twitch to the right side.

Turning to Lactose, Lily continues. “Do you by any chance have lactose intolerance, brother?”

The guard blinks before furiously rubbing his blonde stubble, not knowing what to answer without disrespecting the seemingly important guest. Finally, he remembers something. “Lactose intolerance, no. But lactation fetish, yes.”

What’s with these nutcracker guys and the obsession with their facial hair styles anyway?

His friend, Maltose, a young man with a ruddy complexion, sighs heavily, the upturned tips of his Dali mustache wilting down.

Guess even the thickest hair gel gives way after witnessing Lily’s absolute awkwardness, huh?

Lactose decides to simply let them in, unable to stand their presence any second longer. The tall gates of entwined cola-flavored gummy belts slowly push open, kinda like the expensive electric house gates the cool kids have in their houses these days. Lily and her man walk past it into the corridor, with chandeliers dripping with syrup and fluorescent walls of Turkish delights.

What a dream.

Just the kind of dream you usually have right before waking up and finding out you slept in and are now late for your finals.

Wow, what an interesting turn of events, a certified plot twist.

Lily hops around with delight, the broke girl having never seen or even dreamt of this kind of luxury in her life. It is more than what the thrift store and Dollar Tree ever gave to her. She then breathes in lungful wafts of air.

Even the air here smells rich, like vanilla cream puffs and cherry pies.

Yes. Now switch the words around.

Vanilla cream pies and puff cherries.

“Shit, you scared me,” Every says matter-of-factly as they both come. What? No, as they both come to a sudden halt. A delicate ruby throne stands erected before them, presumably wrought from hand-crafted sugar candy, and a small pool of honey encompasses the base, surrounding the throne like a rubber ring around a co—

Never mind. Koi fish swim gracefully in the pool of honey, and how they manage to even survive in that sludgy, oxygen-deprived liquid, one would never know. Nice aesthetics for the story, though.