[Standard Content Warning: This is an ABDL story blog, that means stories on this page contain diapers, diaper usage (like, lots of it), infantilism and the like! In addition, mental and physical manipulation, bondage and nonconsensual or dubiously consensual employment of all of the above themes and many others may also apply. Viewer discretion is advised.]
You sell off some of the jewelry you knicked from the princess and make a pretty sum, as per usual and as per usual, you decide to put most of it away for safekeeping. You give one chunk to a friend who can keep it secure, who out of the kindness of his heart, lets you help yourself to a few of his refreshments. You give one chunk to another friend, who has made you aware of a limited time investment opportunity in the world of wyvern racing and you share some of it with another individual with whom you have a frank exchange of ideas regarding whether his mother’s circumference was great enough for her posterior to require its own lord.
Okay, so, you spent most of the money drinking, gambling and fighting. At least you also replaced your boot.
While nursing a hangover (and also nursing your busted up jaw), you find yourself going through what’s left of your loot. You haven’t burned through all of or even most of it yet. That princess really is keeping some valuable crap around. But you’re going through it quicker than you’d like - at this rate, you really are going to have to go back to that tower sooner than you’d like.
The risk is still bafflingly small. You’re practically daring them to catch you at this point, always going in the same way, but there’s just never a guard on that tower, no matter how many times you use it to break into the princess’ room.
“Lousy girl is keepin’ her guards away on purpose,” you growl to nobody in particular as you rub your head. You fall into your own bed and take a swig of your drink (water, probably the first cup of water you’ve had in a few days, the more you think about it). Your bed is a sad sight compared to hers, her giant four-poster behemoth could fit three of your crummy mattress. The rest of your home isn’t much better. For all the money you’ve made stealing from the princess, it never really occurred to you to buy some nicer things. Your home is just kind of the same hole in the wall it was before you started thieving.
And it’s starting to bother you a bit just how out of place that dress is amongst all of your other crap.
You didn’t sell it with the jewelry. You’re not sure why. You just left it hanging on the wall across from your bed and you just keep…sitting on your bed, staring at it.
“I’ve always thought pink goes better with black hair.”
Those words keep bouncing around in your head. You grab a handful of your own hair. You run your previous encounters with the princess over in your head, trying to remember if there was ever a time when your hood wasn’t up, if there was ever a time it wasn’t too dark for her to get a good look at you, if there was ever a time when she could’ve gotten a good look at your face at all, muchless the hair on top of your head. Was she just idly sharing an opinion or was she specifically referring to….
You let out a groan and look away from the dress. You don’t know why you’re spending so much time thinking about it. So much time trying to figure out what some strange bookworm royal girl is thinking. Why she spent so much time telling you about that treasure. Hell, she practically invited you to come back after she had it.
‘Is that why you’re burning through the money so fast? So you have to go back again? And when you see her and she has that treasure….’
You groan again, louder this time, to shut your own stupid inner monologue up. Right about now you’re regretting that you decided on water. You don’t know what’s happening to you. Easiest score in the world, all you have to do is go and take the jewels, then sell them, and the person you’re robbing never says boo about it. Why are you over-complicating it? She’s just a sheltered, pampered princess who’s never had any excitement in her life. She probably never says anything because she thinks this situation is like something from one of those books she always has her nose in, where some dashing rogue who steals from the rich and gives to the poor or something stupid like that falls in love with the fair maiden.
That’s it. She probably has a crush on you because she thinks you’re some handsome fantasy character. She only sees you in the couple of hours when you’re actually on your game. She never sees the weeks of drinking, listlessness and general futility that makes up the rest of your life. She doesn’t know you’re just a busted, drunken thief who found an easy score and keeps using it because they prefer when things are easy.
And, okay, sure, maybe you toss some gold coins at a couple street urchins here or an orphanage there. But she doesn’t know that, and you’re pretty sure you’re drunk when you do that, so she doesn’t get to assume it’s out of the goodness of your heart!
She just thinks you’re a lot more than you actually are.
And the more you think about it, you realize you are really pissed off at her. You think about going back into that tower tonight and giving her a piece of your mind. You think about figuring out which books are her favorite and then stealing them and telling her you burned them for warmth (before you remember that it’s summer). You think about throwing her mattress in that lake. None of these feel appropriate and most importantly, you don’t want your petty vengeance to actually harm your relationship enough to jeopardize your easy score, this is your income we’re talking about here.
After ruminating on it for a bit, something occurs to you. You go back to your satchel and open it up, brushing aside some jewelry to find a rolled up piece of paper, the only thing you took besides the dress that wasn’t shiny. It was a snap decision, right at the end, you didn’t even understand it yourself. You grabbed the dress, then you walked over to the desk and ripped this page right out of her notes.
It’s her notes on that treasure. The one that she was telling you about. The one that lets you become anything else.
She told you to come back and see her when she got it. You would really like to see the look on her face when you show up in her room with it in your hands. You think about that look for a second. Then you stop, furrow your brow and shake your head.
“No, no, this is insane!” You yell out to nobody. “This isn’t some jewelry we’re talking about, this is a massively powerful magical artifact in the hands of the strongest spellcaster in the country. For God’s sake, I am NOT, under any circumstances, seriously going to consider trying to rob the Witch Queen!”
—
Some time later, the night has finally come where you’re going to try and rob the Witch Queen.
You’ve parked yourself at the edge of the forest surrounding the Witch Queen’s tower. After you finished cursing yourself and telling yourself this was crazy, you did eventually do your research on the place and come up with a plan to get inside. The vault, with all the Witch Queen’s treasures, was at the top, right above the Queen’s personal chamber. The tower only had one entrance, with guards posted at all times. So going in the front door wasn’t an option, but scaling the tower wasn’t much better. It was very tall and even at night, you would eventually be spotted, not to mention there was security charms on all of the windows. Real ones, not basically-a-practical-joke ones like the Princess’ teleportation charm that had put your boot in a lake.
It seems impossible to get in without the Witch Queen wanting you there first, but you eventually realized something. The tower was covered with charms to prevent breaking in, but one area wasn’t - the one underneath the surface.
You were going to steal from the Witch Queen by breaking into her dungeon.
Finding a teleportation charm of your own hadn’t been cheap or easy. It was single use and single direction, so the spellcrafter you bought it from had insisted that you only use it when you had direct line of sight to where you were going. If you misjudged and teleported into a wall, you would be crushed instantly. You’d promised the crafter you weren’t planning to teleport through a wall. You had not chosen to divulge you were planning to teleport through a bunch of ground and a wall.
Because the charm was single direction, teleporting from the ground downward into the dungeon was a no-go and probably would’ve clipped the security charms anyway, so, you found yourself a quiet, secluded stretch of the forest and started digging. It was really quite important that you started digging at the right point because, can’t stress this part enough, if you got the distance wrong, you were going to have a lot of dirt and stone occupying the same physical space as your person and you really didn’t wanna learn what that felt like.
Why were you doing this again? For money? Or power? No, it was for spite. Right. Just making sure.
You’d never considered yourself a Godly burglar, but when you stood in that hole you’d dug with the charm in your hands, you found yourself murmuring a quick prayer to whichever of the divine cared to listen. Eventually, you decided the anticipation was making you sicker than the possibility of your imminent crushing death, so you sucked in a breath and said the word. The charm crackled to life and a blue electricity surrounded you. Your stomach filled with a feeling of weightlessness.
Thunk!
And you were dropped onto your knees in a dark cell. You take in and let out several breaths and look around.
You’re alive.
And you’re not dead.
Which means it worked?
You pat yourself a few times. Yup still in one piece. And from the iron bars in front of you, it looked like you were exactly where you wanted to be, a cell in the Witch Queen’s dungeon. A quick look around shows what you had suspected from your time planning this job to be true - nobody else here. Either imprisonment had fallen out of favor with the Witch Queen as a punishment or she’d built a better dungeon somewhere else. Given that you’re currently trying to steal from her, you really hope you never find out.
Right, stealing. The heist. You’re here for a heist. The good news is, you didn’t crush yourself getting in. The bad news is, this was by far the easy part. Now you have to climb up every floor of this tower, including past the Queen’s own chamber, without being detected. On the way, you have to not only figure out a way to get past the person guarding the vault (which is a big problem, but more on that later), you have to find a way to actually open the vault itself.
But, somehow, you have a plan.
See, your first idea had just been to find somewhere to make yourself invisible long enough to scale the wall, then just cut through the spells on the windows of the top floor, similarly to how you broke into the princess’ chamber. But when doing your research, you found the Witch Queen, naturally, as a famous witch, didn’t guard her home with charms you could just cut off that easily. Obviously, she had in-house spellcrafters to make her charms for her and trying to cut them from the outside would just trigger them. But if you could find the charm at the point of creation….well then you might be able to do something.
You made your way up from the dungeon and waited until the doors opened, allowing a shipment of spell-making supplies to come inside. Since you needed to get to the spellcrafting workshop anyway, you’d considered just sneaking into the tower itself with the supplies, but every shipment is thoroughly inspected for security and accuracy. You’d heard a rumor that a shipment had come up missing a key component the Queen had expected and in response, she’d turned the guard who had failed to properly inspect the shipment and the courier who had failed to properly fulfill her order it into a pair of boots and spent an hour kicking the merchant she’d ordered from in the stomach with them. A story like that had to be true.
So sneaking in with the supplies was a no-go. But after the supplies were already in the tower, there was no reason for them to be inspected again until they were in the workshop. So you put your mask on, hold your breath and find yourself a crate big enough to fit in (you may have slipped a piece of jewelry to the courier to make sure they used an extra large crate with a loose board for a relatively unimportant part of the Queen’s order).
Holding your breath as you travel up the stairs isn’t easy, but you’ve trained to be able to do it for longer. The box you’re hiding in eventually gets brought to a room and you hear a conversation.
“Yes, yes, yes, put those ones over there. Her Grace will be in workshop tomorrow. Need to have everything out of boxes and on shelves by then.”
“Want any help? Some of those crates were awful heavy.”
“No, no, no, should be fine. Her Grace, very particular about how things are organized. Whole system. Better done myself.”
“Right. She’s a stickler for inspection, too.” A chuckle could be heard as the crates were moved. “I hear she has some important project she’s working on.”
“Yes, yes. Very important. Very very important. Very secret. Rank-and-file spellcrafters not told what it is. Only what materials to gather. Not willing to divulge to details to any outside of her chief crafter and her Queensguard. Hear rumors, though.”
“Yeah? Rumors like what?”
“Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm.”
“Come onnnnnn. It’s just us.”
“Hm. Hm. Alright. Hear Her Grace. Experimenting with her own mana.”
“Pfffwhat? Why would she want to do that? She has the most powerful mana in the country.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Have seen it. Studied it. Never seen anything like it. Like holding sun. In palm of my hand. Perfect. No room for improvement. None.”
“Can’t imagine what she might want to do to change it, but….she must know what she’s doing.”
“Yes. Yes. Her Grace, wisest witch in the land. Trust her.”
“Alllright. That’s the last one. My shift is almost over. You want to meet at the bar after you’re done with this?”
“Yes. Yes. Imbibing. Yes. Will be there.”
Somewhere during that conversation, you released your breath. The conversation ends and the door closes to signal the guard has left. You hear the sound of crates opening. You grip your club and take another breath.
The orange lamplight pours in when the top of the crate opens. You stand up and swing your club right at the diminutive bespectacled spellcrafter’s head. One swing puts them out instantly and you catch them before they hit the ground, the whole thing taking about three seconds and happening in complete silence. Poor bastard never saw it coming.
You relieve them of their cloak and shove them in a closet. An ignominious moment in, you get the feeling, a dedicated career, but, they’ll be fine when they come to. You start looking around the workshop. From here, your plan had two options. One, you could find the charm they use on the windows and create a mixture that you could put on your knife to cut through it. That would let you climb the outside of the tower and go in and out of the windows without being detected. Or you could put on the cloak you just “borrowed” and pretend to be one of the Queen’s spellcrafters. As long as you were careful, one option would get you to the top floor and then you could use the other to get out safely.
But neither would get you inside the vault. That was the hard part. The vault contained all of the greatest and most powerful treasures the Witch Queen had to her name, so the vault and its keys were guarded by the Queensguard, elite warrior-spellcasters sworn to protect the Witch Queen. When they were on duty, each member of the Queensguard kept a key to the vault on their person. Meanwhile, one member of the Queensguard would stand watch in front of the vault, a different one each day. Getting inside meant not only swiping a key off of one of them, it also meant somehow getting past one of them. These people were the best of the best, you weren’t gonna get them by sneaking up and whacking them once with your club.
This was the crux of everything. Procuring the teleportation charm, digging the hole, figuring out a way into the workshop, that had all been relatively straightforward to plan and pay for. This was where most of the budget for the heist had gone, in terms of time, thought and coin. After about a hundred false starts and bad, unworkable plans, you had eventually come up with something, but you were going to have to execute it perfectly. It couldn’t be understated, these were some of the savviest, smartest, not to mention deadliest magic users in the country and they were all top-level swordswomen and men as well. You were going to need a bit of luck in even the best case scenario and if you made a mistake at any point, it was instantly curtains. If they didn’t strike you down right there, you’d be thrown before the Witch Queen and that was not an eventuality you felt comfortable dwelling on.
You take a deep breath and hold up the cloak you had “borrowed” from the spellcrafter.
Time to go.
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