Sorry to disappoint with my implied promise about Reluctant Tap Dancing Ballerina Fairy Princess Veterinarians, but as it turns out my entry is not going to be an A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS fanfic after all. I will try to do one at some point, but this story is going be a somewhat more pedestrian (compared to Lemony Snicket's wacky magnum opus just about every story is pedestrian), and semi-serious in tone. Although it contains a nice little twist or two. It starts something like:
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It's the oldest Reluctant Princess Story in the book. The one in which---in order to save his family or his kingdom---a young man of slight build and delicate features is expected to give up his life as a male, put on a beautiful wedding dress & marry into the royal family of a neighboring country, living from then on as a princess & then perhaps a queen. A life that the hapless teen heroine will fiercely resist accepting, until---mesmerized by the sweet embrace of silk and the vision of loveliness she sees in the mirror (“Ohmigod is that really me?!”)---primal feminine instincts begin to well up within her, and- Well you know this story.

Or do you?

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===> 1.

Yes, it's definitely him, I nodded. Now that they were closer I was certain. Those heavy footfalls of someone coming up the stairs couldn't be anyone but my father's.

I sat down at my desk, quickly primed and started the motor of my kerosene typewriter and fed a sheet of paper through the roller, as if I was finally getting around to that homework assignment I should have begun writing an hour ago. The door of my closet snicked shut just as my bedroom door opened and King Zanus of the Republic of Fidelia came striding in.

I was about to remind him that he had promised to stop barging in without knocking like this, when I saw the expression on his face. “What is it, Papa? More bad news?!”

Breathing a bit heavily from his climb up the long spiral staircase, he looked distractedly around my room. At my models of military airships dangling from the rafters; Then at the big rusty old anchor I had salvaged from the floor the harbor when I was twelve with flotation devices of my own design, as if it was some great sunken treasure and not a worthless piece of junk. Then at the genuine medieval suit of armor I'd found right here in the castle, which actually was worth a few thousand gorram (I doubted if the suit's original owner would approve of its current function of holding my tennis racket and lacrosse stick in its metal mitts...). Finally his eyes fell on the poster for the opera Les Aventures de Robin Hood that the entire touring company had signed for me. The zaftig young soprano who played Maid Marian had a gorgeous smile and a magnificent bosom, but with whatever was weighing on his mind I don't think he really saw her.

It was strange for my father to be hesitating like this. A ruler who could project an air of confidence even during the gravest crisis he invariably spoke with assurance and acted with decisiveness. And he wasn't shy about giving me or anyone else orders. So the way he was acting was unnerving, to say the least. What could have him so confused and conflicted?

“It isn't the Vulgothians again, is it?!”

He stared at me with sadness in his gray eyes before he finally said, “No, this isn't about them. Or I suppose it is, in a very general sort of way; But only as part of the larger picture...”

“Larger picture?”

“Of our country, and its future.”

Somehow I knew that whatever he was talking about it involved me, and I was not going to like it...