When Peter and the Ghost of Christmas Past slipped away through an infinite gravitational bridge, breaking all the rules of space and time as we know it, his bedroom at the North Pole was left barren. Now, dear reader, if you are inexperienced in the art of romance, let this serve as a valuable lesson: you must never wait for a girl to make the first move in a relationship, because it will never happen. Even if a girl is madly in love with you, and spends every hour of the day scribbling your name in her notebook, and secretly taking photos of you, and meticulously crafting an hour by hour schedule of your activities and whereabouts, and looking up magic love potions on the internet to trick you into drinking, she will still never approach you and ask you out on a date. Girls simply don’t function like that. If you wait for her, you will wait forever. The best you can ever hope for is that a girl will take an opportunity for a date, and gift wrap it, and present it to you in a very obvious way, so that you can then give it back to her and ask her out.
When Peter had arrived at the North Pole, this is what the elves had been plotting. They would never go up to Peter and ask him out. How unbecoming! How vulgar! How unladylike! Instead they schemed ways to put themselves firmly in Peter’s mind, so that he would believe Yuina or Yuika or Yuzuka or Yumeka or Yuna would make the greatest girlfriend compared to all the other pointy-eared, pagan elves in the North Pole. These crafty, love-starved elves had watched him from afar, and several of them had decided that tonight they would make their move.
It began with Iumina, the most famous and least subtle of the elves, choosing to introduce herself to him at the stroke of one. She had twisted her blonde hair into two cute buns, like a certain Street Fighter character Peter was fond of, and donned her favorite pajamas. Now girls have pajamas for when they go to bed and they have pajamas for when they ‘go to bed’— wink, wink, rawr, rawr, uwu, nyaan, owo, teehee, blows kiss— and she was definitely wearing the later.
Oh yes. The risqué, all cleavage, no skirt, babydoll, eyeshadow in bed kind of pajamas girls hide from mom in their sweater drawer. Let your male gaze ooze over her see-through pajamas, lecherous reader. The shameless elf Iumina leaves nothing to the imagination! Not even the shape and size of her— unmentionables!
Candlestick in hand she stood outside Peter’s door and waited. And as she waited, other doors in the hall cautiously creaked open, and the narrowed eyes of other girls saw what she was scheming and fumed with jealousy. Setting into motion a chain of events too absurd to be believed— even in the North Pole.
A flash of blue light winked from under the door, and when Iumina peeked into Peter’s bedroom she saw only darkness.
“Peter,” she whispered.
But there was no answer. So Iumina tiptoed barefoot across the cold wood floors and crawled into his bed, finding it warm but empty. She blew out her candle and lifted the covers up to her neck and awaited his return, softly giggling at the genius of her plan. She had no way of knowing that Peter was currently with the Ghost of Christmas Past, traveling to one week ago.
The door squeaked open inch by inch, and a crevice of light from the hall cut into the room. Iumina held her breath in anticipation for Peter, unbeknownst to her that the individual entering the room was, in fact, Yunana. Whereas Iumina went full semen demon with her transparent attire, Yunana went for more of a little sister approach in her choice of peejays. Yunana was thrilled to see the bed occupied by a single person, who she took to be Peter, and tiptoed across the room in her fuzzy bunny slippers to sleep in his arms, but while she was in the middle of the room the door opened again.
Without thinking, Yunana fell limp to the floor and scuttled under the bed. This third visitor was Yuko, whose beauty was unmatched except by those who had a similar appearance, and she too mistook Iumina for Peter, and was also on her way to the bed when the door opened without warning. Yuko flung open the armoire and hopped in among Peter’s clothes and shut the door.
This fourth visitor was the jealous Yukina, the elf in charge of sleigh maintenance, not to be confused with Yuika, the elf in charge of baked goods— although both their names, and their hair color, and their statures and builds were quite similar. Stay with me here. Yukina had seen Iumina enter, but not the others, due to reasons that will not be written here, and when she saw only one person in bed, she had assumed falsely that perhaps Peter had kicked her out. Yukina shut the door, and in darkness flung the bed sheet open and dove into Peter’s bed.
What happened then in that bedroom of perfect darkness can only be described by a semi-omniscient narrator as a series of sounds: bedsprings squeaking, limbs brushing against sheets, pillows plopping against heads, and kisses. A more omniscient narrator might describe the two elven girls snuggling up, face to face, their long legs entwining. Both of them perhaps a little too overwhelmed to wonder why Peter had such a soft chest and hairless legs like a girl. And a more lecherous narrator might go on and on in graphic detail about elven anatomy— blackening pages like a Russian romantic— with verbs like nibble, lick, probe, caress, and write purple prose about tongues and lips gluing themselves to body parts. But not I! On with the plot! The delicious, sensual plot!
The two elves in hiding could not see what was happening, but they could hear it, and like hot coals their anger burned at having missed their opportunity. From under the bed, Yunana banged her fist against the underside of the mattress, hoping that the bump would interrupt the two up top. From the armoire, Yuko chucked a sock roll at the two in bed, which with perfect accuracy bounced off Iumina's head.
But these attempts at interrupting Iumina's and Yukina’s passionate and frenzied Frenching were trivialities, and they continued unabated. In fact, Iumina reached down, grabbed the very bottom of her gown and stripped it off, almost as if she were trying to get this story removed from the YA section of the bookstore. When Yunana, hidden under the bed, saw the lacy piece of nightwear fall to the floor, she audibly gasped.
“What was that?” Yukina whispered.
“Shut up,” Iumina whispered.
And funnily enough, when voices are whispered softly, they are robbed of their gender. So even then, after speaking, the two elven girls did not realize Peter was not there among them. As Iumina flung Yukina’s pajamas off, suddenly there came a tapping from the window outside. The tapping quickly grew into a rapping, and then a voice came from outside, “Excuse me, Peter? Can you let me in? I got locked outside. Are you awake? It’s very cold out here.”
The two buck naked elves stopped and peered out from under the covers to look at the girl out the window, and for a moment they wondered if they should shut the blinds or let her watch, but before either could take action the door opened again, and the elf that came in carried an enormous candleabra with a dozen flames, illuminating the whole room. Nude and confused, Iumina looked at Yukina, and the smears of lipstick that were all over her face and neck. The two of them then searched under the covers for Peter, who had seemingly vanished.
“What the fudge? Where’s Peter?”
The two elves in hiding came out, equally confused, equally embarrassed, although still clothed, and they hurried out the door like mice. The elf outside the window, unsure what was going on exactly, but knowing now the plan had to be aborted, slipped away. And soon the room was empty again, all the elven girls retreating back to their assigned beds.
“No, seriously, where is Peter?”
Now imagine me, the narrator, wiggling my incorporeal narration fingers in your eyes, working my omniscient magic, and now we’re back to the business of Yuzuka and the Ghost of Christmas Past. When last we left them, they were struggling in Peter’s childhood bedroom. They banged against the ceiling, bounced off the bed, swept all little league trophies off his dresser, and went about destroying everything, as little childhood Peter slept in heavenly peace, and adult Peter watched in horror, as one who watches their two friends fight to the death does.
Fiercesome Yuzuka ripped at the spirit’s pretty blue ballroom gown and strangled her. The poor Ghost of Christmas Past was like a boxer on the ropes, dazed and defenseless, unable to block or dodge a single hook or jab. Suddenly the floor sank as though it were made of putty, and the three of them tumbled into an endless vortex of starlight. Peter’s bedroom swept away from reality as they traveled back to the current year. The three of them dropped into bed, bounced, and crashed to the floor.
Yuzuka slapped a pair of handcuffs onto the Ghost of Christmas Past and shouted, “Stop resisting!”
“Hey, hey,” Peter said. “It’s okay. She’s the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“There is no Ghost of Christmas Past, Peter.”
“No, he’s telling the truth!” the spirit said.
“Shut up!”
“But we went into the past, and I saw Christmases from my childhood.”
“It was all fake,” Yuzuka said. “Time travel isn’t real. It was just a memory enchantment. She’s just an ordinary sugarplum fairy. She was going to show you a bunch of warm, cozy memories, and then have her way with you sexually. And you almost got away with it too, didn’t you?”
“Oh my god! What the hell is wrong with you?” the Ghost of Christmas Past shouted. “I want a lawyer!”
Yuzuka pushed and shoved the spirit out the door.
“I’m not a police officer,” she said. “I’m a private mercenary, and you’re a magical fairy who doesn’t have any rights. Lock the door behind us, Peter.”
The bedroom, which had just been full of so much commotion, returned to silence. Peter locked the door and sat on the bed, which felt oddly warm. He thought he was touching bed sheets, but when he lifted his hand, he found he was grasping a pair of black, transparent panties.
“What the hell?”
And elsewhere in the workshop, Iumina was in a bathroom, furiously brushing her teeth and scrubbing the taste of girl saliva off her tongue, and spitting, spitting, spitting, over and over into the sink. She chugged half a bottle of mouthwash, spilling most of it over her face, swished, gargled, swished again, and felt like vomiting from the thought of all the things she did to Yukina in the dark. Disgust swirled inside her like a flushed toilet. Hurling her toothbrush into the sink, the shameless elf shrieked a fortisitisitisimo note high enough to shatter glass— loud enough to wake everyone in the North Pole.