HappyHummingbird

Now obviously Cassandra isn't there to take Rapunzel to Varian, but that doesn't mean that no one would tell her about him. So she and Eugene go to see this "wizard" and all the stuff with Varian still happens. But in this AU, they get Rapunzel out of the machine before the house comes down, since Eugene wasn’t spending all his time trying to have a secret that he wasn’t sharing with Rapunzel and Cassandra, and it's her magic hair that shields Varian from falling debris. Only now, Quirin is a witness to this. He sees first-hand that Rapunzel is definitely the Sundrop. So, concerned about his family and his town, instead of forbidding Varian from touching the rocks, he tells Rapunzel directly what he knows, but in private (he still needs to keep Old Corona calm, after all). So Rapunzel is able to relay that information to Varian, to help inform his experiments. This does not mean that absolutely nothing would go wrong with the experiments, though. Let's say Quirin still ended up getting trapped in amber during the storm. Rapunzel still wouldn't have been able to help Varian when he asked, but with a personal connection to Quirin, she may have gone to check up on him directly after the storm and discovered immediately and willingly that there was nothing she could do to free him at this time. But since she showed up and helped Varian right away, he’s not so rage-filled.

So now we have Rapunzel, Eugene, Lance and Varian as the team working on the mystery. (Yes, Lance. I am not leaving my boy out of this retelling, and there is no reason for the things that happened with him not to have happened, since they were disconnected from the main story. In fact, he gets to be in MORE of the story.) With the information about the Moonstone and the Sundrop, they search the house for anything else they can find that might help. They find the graphtyc and Quirin’s stored armor, all of them together. Only now, the black guard (idk what else to call them) are attacking the four of them. They flee to the tower, which falls when Rapunzel's hair touches the rocks.

She confronts Frederic, who locks her in her room "for her own good" (on her birthday!!!), and Eugene, Lance, Varian and the Pub Thugs help break her out. Without the end of S1 fight to face, Rapunzel just takes off with her crew. She doesn't need her father's permission to leave, she's an adult. She was following his wishes out of respect for him, but he clearly doesn't respect her enough to do the same. So they're out. They decide they need to go to the Dark Kingdom and get to the bottom of this black rock nonsense by any means possible. Except how are they going to get two horses (and a caravan? idk if they acquire that little commodity before or after leaving Corona) over the unbroken wall?

Now is where Adira shows up. She's there, in Old Corona (just like she was at the end of the episode). She tells Rapunzel what she knows about the Moonstone and the Sundrop (it seems to mostly coincide with what Quirin said), and she suggests Rapunzel try to connect with the rocks on a deeper level, queue the ending of S1, where she's holding onto the rocks and they bust the wall down for her.

Now they can head off into S2.

The beginning of S2 can happen basically the same, since Cassandra being there didn't have a huge influence on the plot. (We'll lose "Goodbye and Goodwill," though, and get "The Trial of Fitzherbert and Schnitz" instead.) Only you know what? Rapunzel never lost her connection with the Moonstone/control over the black rocks, cause that was never explained and was just for Plot reasons. Part of S2 is her learning how to actually control it, and her hair. We lose "Freebird," but have a similar plot (without them turning into birds) where Rapunzel is called out for insisting they do everything she wants to do and none of the little diversions that everyone else is interested in. She points out that everyone else wasn't locked in a tower for 18 years, and Varian is like, "Yeah, but I definitely never left Corona until now. I've barely set foot outside of Old Corona, in fact." Something something Rapunzel learns the value of actually listening to others and not insisting on having things her way all the time.

But you know what? Since Varian is here now and he missed his villain arc, how about if he's the one who gradually grows more and more issues with Rapunzel, because his primary concern is still his father, and hers is seeing the world and also following this trail, but the seeing the world part keeps causing her to stray off-course, and he's like, "Could you please focus?! Lives are at stake!"

And you know what? I had a dream once that would have been a super intriguing plot for an S2 episode where, while they were travelling, they came across a village that was suffering from a plague, and Rapunzel was really upset because she didn't have healing hair and didn't know how to cure them. This idea will be fleshed out and inserted somewhere into S2, because I say so.

So they follow the rocks and shenanigans happen. "The Eye of Pincosta" sees Eugene being the one to retrieve the ruby with Stalyan and putting closure on his own backstory instead of Rapunzel doing it for him. In fact, more of S2 genuinely focuses on him and his backstory. Perhaps Adira suspects who he is, but has no solid proof, so keeps it to herself until they get close to their destination. And Eugene would be like, "Sure, okay lady. I am not a prince." But TAH-DAH! He actually is!

Anyway, Varian is the one who takes the Moonstone because in the House of Yesterday's Tomorrow, Zhan Tiri told him it was the only way to save his father. (It has literally nothing to do with his hair streak. He wasn't "destined" for it, or have any Moonstone energy already in him. That design choice was foreshadowing, but not a literal tie in.)

So now we enter S3 without Cassandra, but with Moon Varian.

Edmund does come with them because he has no reason to stay in the Dark Kingdom, but Adira does not. She's determined to follow Varian and collect Hector and try to fight this force out here in the world before he gets back to Corona. But Varian can't get back to Corona as quickly as everyone else can (since they took a hot air balloon), and he's still not really out for revenge, he just wants to save his father. But when he finally arrives, from his POV, nothing has been done about Quirin in the mean time, and he loses it. He shows up to Eugene's birthday and takes him to lure Rapunzel to him. See, when he took the Moonstone, Rapunzel lost what little connection she had to it, so she couldn't do the Reverse Incantation to free Quirin. (She tried, it didn't work.) So thinking/knowing that the only way to save Quirin would be to join the Sundrop and Moonstone, he tries to take it by force. Big battle, Zhan Tiri gets freed from the Lost Realm, but wastes no time taking the Moonstone from Varian. Rapunzel manages to escape with Eugene and Varian in hand, Sundrop intact.