Chapter Text
It has already been just over a century since all the Musical Tribes have gone into isolation with one another and the many tribal leaders wanted to keep that way. Their ancestors from a century ago had been the ones to go to war with the Pop Tribe for ten grueling years just to get their strings back.
In the wake of the final battle within the hidden Pop capital, it was agreed that isolation for the tribes was the best bet for all of them to live peacefully. But isolation was never going to be achieved, at least not completely, their ancestors knew this and so while in the law along with most of their subject’s perception.
Isolation had become the rule, contact with other tribes and some subgenres still happened though only minimal. The only truly important contact that happened was between the Tribal leaders.
When isolation was established there were outliers, and this was one of them—the tribal leaders once every two years would meet with one another for a summit to keep the isolating peace upheld. It's just been over a century since this tradition had been upheld, originally their ancestors had hoped these meetings would dwindle and isolation of the tribes would become absolute.
That absolute isolation and the last of the meeting of leaders did happen.
For barely thirty years at least, before another meeting was to be planned for the new tribal leaders to fix the mess their predecessors neglected to see coming.
For the circumstances of the subgenres was the one thing that led this very mess they were in.
The unforeseen problem that made total isolation completely impossible to do now.
What might that be?
The rise of bounty hunting.
It had started out something small, something that their ancestors didn’t pay attention to at all. In the world after the conflict with Pop, many trolls were struggling to survive, especially the subgenres, and there were still many dangerous trolls out there leftover from the war. Bounty hunting was a natural reaction to this state, it acted as a way to get money for the subgenres and a couple of tribal trolls that needed it while eliminating old enemies.
Until those wretches of hunters began to trade trolls to Mount Ragoues
Kidnapping from both subgenres and the main tribes.
They pawned them off to be sucked dry of their musical essence and die crystalised.
Trading money for the lives of innocent trolls.
The cases of missing trolls and the clear evidence of trolltrafficking happening under the nose of all the tribes and subgenres finally grew to a boiling point when after thirty years since the so called ‘last summit’ was done, a determined and ruthless eighteen year old Queen Hell of the Rock tribe called forth for the another summit.
If only they had known what chaos this summit would bring to the future.
Hell, had only been four years old when she saw the depravity of the bounty hunters trade. It was just shy of her first concert to the Rock Tribe and her father along with many of her aunts and uncles went outside of their territories to hunt for food.
It was a shared tradition of the royal family and right of passage for the young girl who would one day become Queen after her father.
If she had known how that day would end, Hell would’ve begged for her family to stay put in volcano city.
Things had been wonderful for the young girl as she rode and played music with her family on the Angler Buses. Hell standing and performing on the platforms was a bright and competitive child by all means, as she tried to keep up and one up her cousins in playing their favorite melodies. Her father was taking a seat back with a drink enjoying ride they were on before they got to their camping grounds
When Hell saw the outline of a familiar stone entrance with faintly glowing chord strikes on it, a wild joy erupted in her. Challenging her youngest cousins to race with her.
Hell was so caught up in her excitement and joy that she didn't see the strange silhouettes lurking about. Her dad screamed and had his guitar on him in a flash just as a rag came to her nose and mouth. Her first instinct had been to bite the hand that got hold of her but a horrible smell drowned into her nose and she blacked out.
The last thing she could hear as she went limp was a loud haunting cry of her father as his rapidly blurring figure was getting closer.
The last image of him that she would see…
She wished she hadn't woken up.
Her head was bleeding and all she could hear was a long sharp ring in her ear. Slowly as her eyes opened she heard unfamiliar voices and screaming.
Wails of anger and pain.
Hell had jolted up when she recognized those voices to be her family—she was ready to help get them out of trouble just as any one of them would’ve. Then her head hit something hard that knocked her back down. She saw quickly she was trapped in a strange bottle and as her vision came back to her she saw there were other bottles besides her own. And she caught on quickly when she heard a strange noise coming from them.
“Auntie…?” Hell’s voice had been so weak and scared when those words slipped out of her mouth. In front of her bottle, a slumped figure against the bottle whose neck was at a weird angle, splotches of blood were all over the inside of the bottle like her aunt had clawed herself to death.
Her colors weren’t the comforting muted shades she always knew; instead it was sickly shiny like the stars in the sky. Like a crystal corpse, her hair having gone pure white and wisps of purple was coming out of her body as the noise continued on. The corpse had a petrified look and her aunt’s eye looked directly to her from the ground.
Hell sat frozen with her hands shaking as her eyes focused only on the mangled corpse of her aunt—
Wait…her dad.
Where was he?
Hell ignored the bile that felt like it was building a dam in her throat and the disgust she felt at the smell of iron all around her. She pushed herself up—to do what? She didn’t know what, all she wanted was her dad. Her dad was there–to be at the camp ground like they were supposed to be!
Her legs were shaking in pain as blood drizzled down her thigh from a wound and her nerves felt like they were fried but she pushed and needed to find her dad. He would know what to do then next when she got to him.
They’ll save the rest of their family, beat up the trolls who got them here.
The ground shook and bottles clanked against each other and further scaring Hell with the looming grunts of a larger somewhere out there.
Get to the camping grounds, do the hunt, and go home—
“Hell…”
Her blood ran cold when she turned her head to the bottle next to hers, laying on the floor with his hand reached out to her against the purple glass of the bottle. Bloody and mangled, one of her cousins whose colors were bleached so badly and the wispy air that sucked something out of him.
Hell’s throat was stuck, she couldn’t say anything as fear made her frozen, shaking with terror as she watched her cousin in the bottle go limp. The noise of the bottle drowning out whatever he could have said or screamed.
She heard for a half a second—whirling noise and the bottle shook then she felt like she was being torn apart from the inside. Her feet floated upwards and the wispy air came all around her as she screamed. Needles sunk into her skin, her bones twisted but stayed in place, and a piece of her felt like it was being ripped away from her. It only lasted for a few seconds before Hell dropped back to the ground of the battle. Breathless, heart pounding so loud she couldn’t hear anything, and so much pain in her body she should’ve passed out.
She would’ve.
The bottle was lifted from the whatever ground they were on and her eyes widened when she saw how high up her bottle was going.
Who?
“Uhh… Are you sure this little thing is gonna give me what I need? I don’t think she’d have so much talent for me to use.” Bulging eyes looked at her through the glass like she was trinket.
Hell had wanted to ram against the glass wall, scared shitless at the giant that had taken her so high up in the air. Another whirling noise came and pain followed—when she dropped down again her fingertips began to fade to white.
Helplessly she didn’t notice when her bottle was put back down and before she knew it she saw them.
Their figures were blurry in the pain she was in but Hell could never forget what they said to each other as they both walked away from the sets of bottles that held her fading family.
“Muses, I thought this was going to be harder but that princess pipsqueak made it so easy.”
“Shut up, we still have to finalise the deal with that rageon weirdo. Still we need to be more careful, the others are getting more reckless and the boss is already pissed. We can’t paint another fucking target on out backs.”
Hell had never felt more anger than she did when their voices kept going. The rest of their conversation was a blur to her except for the scarring pain of something being sucked out of her and the rage that pooled into her body. She tried. She tried so hard to get up from the floor. To ram into the glass and break it. Break something! Break anything!
But there was nothing but pain and her body refused to move.
Her head was spinning and her heart was so loud that it drowned the entire world.
Hell could hear, could remember, could see how death had been coming for her.
And she would should've died with her family.
But her dad had always cared too much for her.
She couldn’t have known at the moment but it had made sense. Hell was his daughter and the heir to the rock tribe. If all of them had died…who knows what would’ve happened to the rock tribe? To their people?
All she heard was a shriek of those fading voices that belonged to those trolls who got them here in the first place. The sound of something shattering somewhere far from her, then thunderous desperate footsteps got closer to her, then…
She was falling.
Her bottle as it still sucked something out of her fell off whatever high surface it was on.
Then her world faded once again to black and the sounds of glass breaking accompanied it.
It was night by the time a scouting team from Volcano City was sent out by one of the king’s advisors to look for the royal family. They searched at the hunting grounds only to find it thrashed and hints of a huge struggle. It didn’t take long to find blood, then glass, then the subtle feeling of stray essence in the air. Another hour or so before the team found a broken purple crystal bottle and inside of it was princess Hell knocked out cold. They panicked thinking the princess was dead but miraculously she still managed to hang on.
Barely.
Hell woke up to the mocking white light of a room.
Her body felt numb, like she was floating and her throat felt like it was stuck in place. She couldn’t feel her legs and was vaguely aware of the ache across her entire body. She hissed when the sound of another troll’s voice came to her. Hell’s eyes landed on a stunned nurse a bit away from her bed. Eyes wide and shaking a bit before sprinting to Hell and checking up on her.
It was a blur from there for the princess.
Before she knew it the nurse had helped prop her up onto her back against the bedframe. Hell regarded her numbly, lost in blurry pain and confusion of why she was here.
Wasn’t she just on the angler buses with her dad and family?
Did one of her uncles or cousins crash them cause they got drunk again?
“Where’s dad…?” She croaked, her eyes half closed, her attention wrapped around the nurse that flinched when she talked. That reaction only made Hell worry further and a sense of dread and nausea came to her. “Where’s my dad? Is–is he hurt?”
“Pri—My Queen I’m sorry…” the nurse whispered as Hell’s world once again cracked in its image. The flurry of memories of what happened to her, her dad, her family those crystal corpses.
In an instant bile came into Hell’s throat from her stomach as tears streamed down her face at the rush of remembering. Like stone breaking her bones, she vomited out on the floor nearly falling off the bed if she wasn’t being held up by the nurse who was calling out for help.
All Hell could feel was the fear that gripped her in that crystal bottle now back to haunt her, making her tremble and when her eyes caught a flash of white on her hand…
She screamed.
Her lower arm was sickly white and near see through just like her family, recoiling in fear that those trolls were somewhere in the room and she was back in that bottle.
Voices and screams mixed together for the young girl. Other trolls spilled into the room to calm down their screaming ruler and calling her.
“Queen Hell!”
“Queen Hell!”
Not princess Hell.
Hah…that princess that died in that crystal bottle with her family.
Now she was Queen.
Fucking Queen Hell.