"I found it, Cori!" the Kougra shouted as he pulled the large book from the library shelf.

"Good job, Rory!" his sister said, hopping over to him as he laid the book on a table. The Cybunny sat in a chair and peered at the pages as her brother thumbed through them.

"Look, there's Jeran… champion of Meridell!" Rory said, placing his furry paw on the opened page. “This book of heroes is SO cool!"

Cori snuck her paw into the book and peeked at the following page. "Oh look, there's his ingenious sister, Lisha!" she said, sneaking a sidelong glance at her brother.

Rory attempted to scowl at his sister, but it ended up being more of an amused grin. The two had always gotten along quite well as far as siblings ago, and delighted in harmlessly teasing each other.

Rory flipped through a few more pages, then stopped.

"Huh? What this?" Cori asked, sticking her nose by the newly opened page.

"The Happiness Faerie?" Rory asked, raising his eyebrow almost comically. He then looked at his sister, who shrugged. "Never heard of that faerie before..."

"It looks like someone taped it in," the Cybunny said, poking at the edges of the image.

"Kinda funny looking for a faerie... I wonder what she does—"

"Why, she makes Neopets happy!" boomed a voice behind them, which was so loud that the two siblings fell out of their chairs in surprise.

Looking up from the floor where they landed, the two saw...

"I didn't think faeries were so big!" Rory whispered to his sister as they struggled to get up.

"Or so ugly!" Cori agreed under her breath. "Or had stubble..."

The Happiness Faerie wasn't paying attention, though. She was leaping around in what the young Neopets supposed were meant to be graceful movements; it was just that the floor shook every time she landed. Cori rubbed her head and pleaded, "Stop! Stop, I'm getting a headache! Anyway, what are you doing in here? Doesn't the library already have a faerie looking after it?"

"Oh, I'm not here to take care of some silly books!" the faerie trilled in a high falsetto. "I've never seen the point of books, anyway; not when everything can be put on computers. Why make a book no one will read, when technology allows me to reach the whole of Neopia, touching their minds and controlling their..." She coughed, noticing the scared look on the faces of the Kougra and his sister, and quickly corrected herself. "…and make them happy! Because that's all I care about, of course!"

"Of... of course," Rory murmured, edging away and tugging his sister with him. This faerie didn't seem very... well, very sane. He glanced around to see if the nice, quiet, normal-looking Library Faerie was anywhere nearby.

"STOP!" a deep voice thundered, which then coughed and changed to a falsetto again. "Oops, I mean, stop!" Suddenly, the huge Happiness Faerie was blocking their path, straightening out one slightly creased wing while still grinning inanely. "Where are you going, little Neopets? I still haven't answered your question! Why did I come here? Well, I came to find you two, of course! My delicate faerie senses tell me that you two aren't as happy as you could be. Perhaps you, dear little Cori, would like a pretty doll made out of that fabulous new Kreludite material. Or Rory, maybe you'd like a potion to make you big and strong, so you could fight in my new... I mean in an army, like your hero Jeran?"

The faerie suddenly drew out a huge wand, buzzing mechanically with little lights that blinked on and off all along its length. Her grin grew sly as she asked, "What are your wishes? Tell me, and I will make them come true... "

“If you’re a Faerie… how come we’ve never had a quest from you?” the Kougra questioned.

The Happiness Faerie tilted her head, and her eyes lit up with excitement.

“Of course, of course! I knew I had forgotten something. You two must desire to go on a quest for me, is that it? It must be it,” the towering faerie exclaimed, answering her own question before the two could reply.

Suddenly, she twirled the wand in the air. Rory could have sworn she was drawing continuous V’s in the empty space. Unexpectedly, she pressed a button on the wand, and a large puff of smoke erupted from the end.

From the smoke, two lines of words appeared:

“It’s official, young ones; you are now on a quest for me!” the Happiness Faerie happily cried aloud.

“But doesn’t the smoke want us to get--” Cori started.

“No time to talk about it, you’re being timed!” the faerie cut in, shooing the two Neopets along.

Once in the clear, the Faerie stopped. “I’ll return in exactly… one hour! You don’t want to fail the quest now, do you?” she asked, while her previous grin began to take up most of her face.

“Well no, but--” Rory began protesting.

“One hour then!” the Happiness Faerie shouted, pressing another button on her wand, causing a larger puff of smoke to appear.

Rory and Cori started coughing on the hazy gray smoke, which seemed to only last a few seconds. Once it cleared, the two could see the Happiness Faerie run out into the empty street, turn suddenly, and dive into some bushes.

“What a weird Faerie. A quest is a quest, though, and I have a feeling she’ll return soon. What did she want us to get for her again?” the Cybunny asked her brother.

“‘Super Evil Plans for World Domination,’ but I’ve never heard of that book before. Where should we start?” Rory replied, looking around.

“How about over there?” Cori inquired, pointing to a stack of books in front of her…

Cori rolled her eyes at her brother. "You know the Shop Wizard refuses to help with faerie quests!" she said. Laughing, she added, "No matter how weird the faerie might be..."

"Don't you think it's a strange thing to look for?" Rory pondered. "'Super Evil Plans for World Domination'... it must be a story! Let's go look in the story section!"

Cori grinned. Her brother had good ideas… sometimes. They trotted over to look at the novels and groaned as they saw the towering shelf above them.

"I wish we knew the author of the books on these quests. Have you noticed that they never tell us?" Rory muttered, his eyes shifting quickly across the titles.

"What's this?" Cori asked suddenly, flipping a book from the shelf. It was a small red hardcover with silver clasps and a rather odd-looking plaque on the front.

Rory looked at the cover. "'The Gallery of Evil,'" he read aloud, unbuckling the clasp and flipping over the first few pages.

"Ghost Lupe, Vira... oh, these are all silly stories our parents used to tell us to frighten us into going to bed!" his Cybunny sister said, laughing. "Well, they may be evil, but I don't think it's quite what we're looking for..."

Rory turned over another few pages, looking at all the sketchy illustrations amongst the captions. He was just about to turn back to the front and do up the clasps again, when something caught his attention.

"You know..." he started thoughtfully, looking at one of the entries, "this picture looks awfully like the Happiness Faerie... huge, green, erm… the same hairstyle... don't you agree?"…

"You never know," Rory replied. "The Happiness Faerie entry was taped in, after all. Besides, Sloth is an evil mastermind! I still stick with my theory. Dr. Sloth has stooped to the lowest level of attempting world domination."

"And what would that be?" Cori asked skeptically. "Making lame attempts to dress like a faerie? Giving quests for items that don't exist to make us go insane, thus making it easier to force us under his control?"

"Alright, alright! When you put it that way, it doesn't sound quite likely," Rory said. As he spoke, another great puff of hazy grey smoke suddenly appeared around them. After the smoke had cleared, and the siblings had gotten over their coughing fit, the Happiness Faerie -- or Sloth, in their opinions -- stood in front of them. She, or he, had obviously heard them somehow.

"Eh, it's been close enough to an hour. Your quest has been terminated," the Happiness Faerie babbled. Her voice became lower. "Now, you will face my punishment!"...

The Happiness Faerie lowered her wand and gave the Cybunny an odd look. "Just what do you mean by that?"

"Well... you aren't going about it right," Rory reiterated, waving his paws as if it were so perfectly obvious that he couldn't even bother to explain it. He wasn't quite sure what his sister was up to, but he figured he'd better back her up... or at least stall for time.

Cori had taken one look at the real Happiness Faerie and decided that, as weird and implausible as it was, her brother's hunch was right. Nobody had responded to all the loud talking that had been going on, so the Neopets couldn't expect outside help in the library. Thinking furiously, the Cybunny formed a plan… sort of. "Look," she said in a low, urgent voice. "We know who you are; I guess you heard that. If you want to come off as a believable faerie, though, you've got to make some changes. We can help!"

Rory gave Cori a startled look, but Sloth was eyeing her thoughtfully. "I need no help... but what have you got in mind?" Sloth asked.

"Think of it as… image consulting," Cori said with more confidence than she felt.

Sloth gave them another once-over. "I shall feed both of you transmogrification potions and take you along with me," he said.

"No, no, no!" Rory interjected firmly. "That's the first thing. Running around with obvious mutants as minions is just going to give you away."

"He's right," Cori agreed. "We'll just have to go as we are."

"Hmm," Sloth said, frowning at her. "Well... all right. Come along."

As they trailed behind him, Rory whispered, "We aren't really going to help, are we?"

"No," Cori whispered back, "we're going to give really bad advice."

The Cybunny looked up at Sloth's back as he swept towards a crowd of people, beaming and waving his wand as he caroled in a loud falsetto about how they were all so lucky to see the Happiness Faerie.

She'd never get a better chance.

"Now, the first thing we've got to do," Cori said as loudly as she could, "is get you a better color scheme. I recommend hot pink, or maybe a nice cheery yellow -- not the same color as the light faeries, though; that would be confusing. Maybe we can get something with a smiley face pattern. That way, NOBODY WILL REALIZE YOU'RE REALLY DOCTOR SLOTH!" she bawled at the top of her lungs. The crowd, already looking rather baffled by the Happiness Faerie's odd behavior, went dead silent and stared at her, then at Sloth.

Furious, Sloth whirled on her with an expression of terrible rage....

"Do you really take me for a fool?" Sloth snarled. "Anyone can see what you're trying to do!"

Cori's eyes darted about for a possible route of escape as she stammered, "Uh, wh-what do you mean? We weren't trying to..."

"I... DON'T... DO... PINK!" Sloth bellowed, causing the two cowering Neopets' fur to ripple and their ears to flatten back. "Or yellow! Or any such pastel, bright… happy colors! Ugh!" He shuddered slightly as if the mere thought made him ill. It probably did.

Rory scratched his left ear in puzzlement. "But... you're supposed to be the Happiness Faerie. Why wouldn't you wear happy colors?"

Sloth tugged self-consciously at his dark robes. "Black makes me happy. Doesn't that count? Besides, I'm wearing a little happy-faced pin! Isn't that enough?" he asked, indicating the sappy smiley-face pin on his chest as he spoke.

The young Cybunny patted Sloth's knee consolingly, seeing as that was the only part of his anatomy that she could reach. "Dr. Sloth, I really think you should just give up on this and maybe, I dunno, just try to take over Neopia like you normally do?"…

"Erm, yeah... you sure had us fooled! Right, Rory?" Cori asked, forcing a smile. Rory gave her a look that said "you've got to be kidding me!" Keeping the false grin plastered on her face, the Cybunny elbowed her brother.

"Ouch! Uhh... right!" Rory agreed, wincing as he also faked a smile.

Sloth smiled evilly. "Those acting lessons really paid off," he said triumphantly. "I must return home and devise my next evil plot! MUAHAHAHAHA!!" With another puff of smoke from his wand, Sloth took off running. The two Neopets just stood there, watching the smoke fade away.

Cori turned to the Kougra. "That has got to be his lamest attempt yet," she said. "I wonder what he'll try next?"

"Hmm... I haven't a clue," Rory said with a shrug. "All I know is that he'll be back. Maybe he'll turn up on some island and try to give us useless stuff?"

Cori shuddered. "Now that would be evil!" the Cybunny said. "Don't even joke about it!"

Far away, on a tropical island...

"YOU ARE A WINNER! You win a bag of finger crisps!" the mysterious stranger said while handing the red Wocky her prize.

"Ugh! Umm… th-thanks," she said unenthusiastically.

Sloth grinned behind his mask. This was his best plan ever!

The End