Chapter 1 - The Melon and Lemon Kingdoms

In a new universe very similar to the one that got destroyed, there were two Melon Queens - VannaMelon the watermelon and Jade the Black Diamond Watermelon. They both shared the Melon Throne and worked to bring joy and peace to their people. But one day, that peace was shattered. Huge flowers had started coming out of the ground and invading all of the Fruity Kingdoms. These plants spread green smoke through the air as a defense mechanism. When inhaled, it is absorbed into the body and turns people into man-eating monsters, making them lose their mind in the process. The effect of the smoke is a gradual, painful transformation, with thorns, vines, and other parts of the parasitic plant penetrating the skin and growing all over the host‘s body. Rose-like flowers grow out of the eye sockets, forcing the host’s eyeballs to fall out of their face; thorns grow out of the fingertips, and function as sharp, black claws when fully grown; their clothes are ripped to shreds, and bloodstained leaves and petals grow in their place; the lips are split four ways, stretching and extending the gums, and grow thorns around the edge of the mouth that function as extra teeth. These flowers have existed for a very long time, but they only grow for one season out of the year. They are called Fumora Belladonna. Scientists have attempted to conduct research on the Belladonna disease, but it did not end very well for them.

Jade had to get some seeds in the forest to plant more food in her and Melon’s garden. VannaMelon didn’t want Jade to go alone, because she was worried about the deadly Belladonna flowers. She suggested letting the Melon Guards go with her so she can be protected, but Jade kindly declined the offer. She said that she could take care of herself, since she’s well experienced with fighting, and she grabbed her spear and went off into the forest alone. Jade collected the seeds she needed in a plain area of the forest, and was ready to return, but then she heard and felt the ground shaking. Tendrils of a Belladonna flower began to break through the surface of the dirt. Seeing the ground cracking below her, she backflipped in the air to avoid the flower from almost devouring her. She started to fight the deadly flower, but the flower fought back, trying to grab her using its vines. She evaded it, though dodging quickly between the vines and chopping them down. She could only dodge for so long, though - eventually, a stray vine hit Jade in the stomach, pushing her away and leaving her vulnerable for a second. As she tried to get up, the Belladonna sprayed its green smoke at her face. She was coughing, but was able to grab her spear and throw it into the flower’s throat.

The flower died and crumbled into ashes. Nothing had happened to Jade. She thought she was completely fine. She went back home to VannaMelon, who had been really worried about her. Jade told her that she was fine, and walked to the garden to plant the seeds. By the time a few weeks had passed, she was getting weak, and her skin was turning pale. She was watering the plants again when she noticed that there was a thorn on her thumb. She tried pulling it out, but it was attached to her skin, so she immediately stopped pulling. Jade was freaking out, so she decided to go to the library and try to find a book about the Fumora Belladonna flowers. With the guidance of the librarians, she found the book and started reading to figure out if there was a cure to the terrible disease. At the end of the book, there was a note containing the address of the lab where an antidote had been created.

She went back home, grabbed another spear, and tried to go alone. VannaMelon stopped her, though, and said that she was not going anywhere until Jade told her everything. Jade explained what happened and apologized for not being careful. Melon was crying for her then, and decided to come with her - she did not like the idea, but felt she didn't have a choice.

The directions on the note led to an abandoned hospital. They went inside to find rooms overgrown with thorn vines and roses everywhere. Being there seemed to make Jade’s symptoms worse. After she and VannaMelon roamed the hospital for some time, they found the lab room. When they entered, Melon found a VHS tape and inserted it into an old TV on the other side of the room.

It showed a recording of a doctor making the antidote for himself. He had the pale, almost green complexion of someone already in the process of being infected. The sounds of something banging on the walls, screaming, and a sickening crunching noise could be heard in the background of the recording. The doctor glanced nervously behind him as he poured ingredients together, as if there were something waiting for him on the other side of the wall. He mixed in the final ingredient and drank the antidote with no hesitation. The infection was going away quickly - the vines receded from his flesh, and his skin regained some of its natural color. After taking a short moment to breathe, he pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down the ingredients to the cure. He crammed the paper in a drawer and escaped through some sort of secret passage in the closet. The door behind him broke open, infected victims came pouring into the room. In their mindless, violent state, they destroyed everything in the room, including the camera. The video ended there.

By then, Jade was breathing heavily. She fell down onto her knees as a long thorn grew out from within her, piercing through some of her chest. VannaMelon rummaged through the drawer to find the paper and immediately started to make the antidote. When she finally finished, she looked up from her work, but Jade was nowhere to be seen. Melon heard loud noises in the distance. Cautiously, antidote in hand, she walked out of the room and looked around for Jade. She was a few rooms down, scratching at the wall with blackened claws. Melon called her name. Neither of them moved as the sound echoed off the walls. Jade turned around and stared at her with hollow, unseeing eyes. Running across the room, she tried to pounce onto Melon, who moved out of her way just in time. Screaming, she broke into a sprint towards the other side of the room, with Jade chasing not far behind her. She grabbed a broomstick off of the wall and broke it with her leg and used the longer half to fight off Jade.

Melon was not an experienced fighter. In her day to day life, she avoided violence, since more complex or violent missions were usually seen to by Jade, who was confident in her fighting skill. Jade had tried to train her, but she was a slow learner and difficult student, so she gave up on trying to train her to fight. Despite her failures, she had picked up just enough to keep her alive.

Jade kicked her in the stomach hard enough to break her through the wall. Trying not to cough in the dust of the crumbling drywall, she got to her feet and ran towards the stairs. The stairwell was blocked off by a tangle of Belladonna vines, though, so she turned into the next open doorway, which was the elevator. It would be pointless to see if the buttons still worked, so she climbed on top of the elevator and tried to scale her way up the shaft. Jade tried to follow, and ran into the elevator itself. From atop the elevator, VannaMelon cut at the cord holding it up. Just before it dropped, she jumped off and clung to the shaft. Both Jade and the elevator fell all the way down to the first floor.

She made the ascent to the top floor through the shaft and wandered into the first room she saw to take a breather. She had hardly been there for a few minutes before Jade’s fist broke through the floor from below. She pulled herself up and through the floor, dislodging the old, cracked tile, and glared at VannaMelon. Melon apologized and told her she didn’t want to fight anymore. She held out the antidote in her hand, offering it to Jade, but she took the opening to attack her instead. Melon tried to force her to drink it, but Jade slapped it out of her hand and bit her arm. Melon pushed her away and backed up so that she stood in front of the windows in the room. Cornered, she begged Jade to stop. Jade did not respond. Her gaze dropped to the floor. She didn’t move as her eyes began to water. Belladonna tendrils pushed through her eyelids. They expanded, blooming into roses, and forcing her eyeballs nearly out of their sockets. She shifted her weight and attempted to pounce onto VannaMelon. Tired out by their combat, Melon’s instinct was to duck out of the way.

Jade couldn’t change trajectory in time, and she crashed straight through the window. Melon screamed her name as she watched her fall. She plummeted down. It was too late. She fell right on top of the decorative metal fence that surrounded the building. She was impaled. Melon could see the spiked post of the fence jutting out of her chest. Traumatized, she ran out of the hospital and hurried to reach her body.

In a moment of shock, she stood in front of the fence, unable to move. Her face and hands wet with tears, she struggled to remove Jade’s body from the fence. When she finally got her off of it, she fell to her knees and held Jade tight to her chest. She apologized over and over again, hoping that Jade could hear just one of them. She couldn’t stay there all night, but she couldn’t let go of Jade, so she carried her all the way back to their kingdom.

The Melon Guards helped her take care of the body. She told them about everything that had happened. Jade’s funeral was held at a church far from the Melon Kingdom, and she was buried at its cemetery. This was done to prevent anyone from finding out that VannaMelon had killed her. No one could know - not even her own people. So they went to the Church of St. Julian, which was situated in the middle of nowhere. The Head Nuns agreed to host the funeral. They prepared Jade’s body, lay her in a coffin, and walked her to her grave site. They slowly lowered the coffin into the ground using their various magic powers. As Vanna stood and watched the process, a strange nun walked over and stood next to her.

“Tragic, is it not? These hideous flowers just won’t stop,” VannaMelon looked over at her, but said nothing. “Hm…you said the cause of her death was the infection, right?” she paused, as if to let Melon answer, and glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. She said nothing. “That looked like a stab wound to me. Did you have something to do about it, Melon Queen?” she giggled, a sly grin spreading across her face. "Don’t worry. Your secret's safe with me,” she turned away. “Hope to see you again one day…”

Melon felt a cold chill down her spine as she walked away. Who was that girl?

The Lemon Kingdom is the place that the sour fruits call home. The Kingdom had long been missing a Queen to control its people, the lemonheads. Lemonheads, specifically, produce energy in a different way than most fruits because they have to create much more sour energy than they do. It’s not very efficient, so they tend to get weak and fatigued often. In order for them to survive, they have to absorb energy from other, sweeter fruits.

This was a huge problem for the entire population. Without a Queen, the kingdom was slowly falling apart. With most of the government gone, the most powerful groups in the kingdom were company businesses. Without the government to restrict them, they ran rampant. The largest one happened to be a medical corporation, primarily, although it dabbled in the invention of everything from shopping carts to nuclear weapons. It hired a huge number of people all across the kingdom for a new project - they wanted to find a way to produce sweet energy artificially so that the Lemons could survive without having to attack other fruits. With this objective, they sent out their employees far away from the kingdom to search for answers, without telling them how long they would be gone for. With the amount of power and control that the company had, the years during which so much of the adult population was gone began to rack up. Their young families had been left behind to fend for themselves.

It had been twenty years before some of them had finally returned to their kingdom, and when they did, they tried to take back control once again. They created a factory of machines that could generate the sweet energy they needed to survive. They had finally achieved their goal. Everyone was able to live thanks to their invention.

Now that the company had finished with that, they needed some other scientific pursuit to go through with. Those same employees that created the energy factory started experimenting on other lemons. They abducted them from the streets and used them against their will. The young lemonheads tried fighting back, but there was nothing that they could do. They were too weak. For months, they were tormented and attacked by their own kind.

One lemon, Leon, had enough of that madness, so he snuck out of the Lemon Kingdom and went to the Melon Kingdom instead. Weeks later, VannaMelon noticed him roaming the streets, injured and weak, and ran towards him.

“Hello?? Oh geez, are you hurt?” she grabbed his hand. “Here, come with me. I can help you.” She walked him back to her house, and when they got there, she sat him down and treated his wounds.

“Why are you being so kind to me?” Leon asked. “I’m a lemon. We’re dangerous. You shouldn’t want to be around me.”

“I’m the Melon Queen. It’s my job to be kind to others. Besides, you don’t seem to be doing any harm here,” she said, looking over some of his bruises. “I can tell that you're scared.”

Leon said nothing. After she finished treating his wounds, she told him that he could take some time to rest in her Kingdom until he was ready to go back home. He decided to stay for a little while. For a couple of days, he was helping her around her house and garden. She was grateful for the help, but she began to notice that he was getting weaker for some reason.

She and Leon were eating dinner one night when she pointed it out. “...it's your sour energy, right? I know that all lemons forcefully absorb sweet fruits’ energy,” she looked away. “…leaving them lifeless. But you showed me kindness!” she looked back into his eyes with a sudden conviction. “You knew that you were going to be weak and you didn’t care.”

She slid a jar across the table. It was filled with pink juice.

“This is a bit of my melon energy. Take it.” He noticed the white wrap around her palm when she pushed it towards him. He grabbed it and drank half of it. His energy returned to him very quickly, as if VannaMelon’s energy was stronger than that of a typical fruit. He put the rest of the juice in his bag.

Revitalized, he told her that he was finally ready to go home, and that he was grateful for what she’s done for him. She wrapped his arms around him. He seemed tense and confused.

“It’s called a hug, dummy,” she smiled patiently at him. He had never had one before. He hugged her back, taking in the warm feeling that it gave him inside. They said their goodbyes, and he walked back home to the Lemon Kingdom

As he was getting closer to home, he saw a little lemon tree. Every lemon on the tree was rotten except for one. It was bright yellow, the perfect size and shape. He pulled it off the little tree and put it in his bag as he continued to walk towards the factory. Just before he entered, he noticed a little lemon boy propped against the wall, shaking in pain. He walked up to him and gave him a sip of the melon energy from his bag. The boy stopped shaking and sighed in relief. Leon patted his head and went inside the factory. He went into his private lab room and locked the door behind him. He put both the jar and lemon on the experimentation table, and took out a syringe. Carefully, he took some of the melon energy and injected it into the lemon. He got a notepad and waited for something to happen. As he was waiting, the spirit of Bellona entered the room and went inside of the lemon.

Overhead, the lights flickered and buzzed, and a few of them burnt out. Leon didn’t know what was going on until he saw the lemon. It shook back and forth on the table, deforming and expanding. The rind of the lemon stretched into muscle, forming limbs. The lemon had become a humanoid body. Three horns pushed out of the top of its head. Leon backed up against the wall. As its features nearly finished developing, it became clear what they were supposed to be, despite her lack of skin and hair. It was the body of a girl. She attacked him, leaping off of the lab table. Leon scrambled out of the way just in time. He flung the drawer open to pull out a tranquilizer. She snarled at him in an unnatural, demonic voice. She threw herself at him, trying to bite him, but he quickly jabbed the tranquilizer into her neck. She passed out and fell to the floor.

Leon picked up the body and carried it across the room. He dropped her into an old hospital bed and strapped her into it with belts so that she couldn’t cause any more chaos when she awoke. Out of breath, he stopped to consider his next move. The sweet energy seemed to have made the lemon into a creature more like the melon queen. Maybe if he injected more of VannaMelon’s blood, it would be even more like her. If that was true, and he put in enough, then he could almost make a clone of her. She could be the Queen that the Lemon Kingdom deserves.

Since she was safely restrained and asleep, he went ahead and injected more melon energy into her. She stayed asleep for a couple of days. He put more and more of it in gradually, and her body reacted to each new injection, changing slowly in response. When he had injected the last bit of VannaMelon’s blood, she woke up and started screaming in pain. Her open body formed skin and nails. Blonde hair grew out of her head, and her horns melted away. Last, a little lemon slice formed on her head. Bellona’s spirit had been put to sleep at the core of that body, which was its own, new individual. The clone opened her eyes again. She looked at him and said nothing. He unstrapped her from the bed and wrapped a towel around her. She sat and watched him as he looked around for clothes that he could give her to wear. He got an outfit together and helped her put it on.

Leon did his best to think of everything that she needed to know, not only to be a part of the Lemon Kingdom, but to maybe become its Queen. He told her as much as he could about the history of the kingdom and the lemons’ culture, and explained how and why he created her. To his surprise, she was a quick learner, and had little difficulty picking up on what he was saying. By the time he got to the more recent events of lemon history, she was heavily invested in what he was saying. She told him that, if given the chance, she would punish the lemons experimenting on their own people. That was when he knew that she was going to do just fine ruling the Lemon Kingdom.

The next day, Leon brought her out to the front of the factory so that she could make an announcement.

“Hello there, lemonheads!!!!” she said, laughing. That got everybody’s attention. They seemed to like her already. “I’ve heard all about the bullshit that has been going on in this kingdom! You’re telling me that those motherfucking experimenters, your own kind, have been causing you so much pain???” the crowd roared in agreement. “Well, as your Lemon Queen, Mini Lemon, I will not let this stand! They’re keeping all that sweet energy for themselves, huh?!?! I promise all of you, I will stop them, even if it means killing them,” she scanned the crowd, looking into the eyes of her people. “Now WHO’S WITH ME!!!!!??” the crowd went wild, screaming and cheering for their Queen. From then on, all the lemonheads beat the adult experimenters’ asses when they did so much as try to touch them. After her speech, Mini Lemon marched to the factory, stole all of the sweet energy they were making, and distributed it among her people.

Her reign was going great until the day she realized that a lot of people hated lemons. Everyone was paying attention to VannaMelon, in particular, and adored her more than her. This made her blood boil. Her jealousy made her truly believe that the Melon throne was originally hers, and that VannaMelon stole it from her. She pledged to take back what rightfully belonged to her.