How About No?
Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2008 6:14 pm
Yes, watching a couple of X-Files episodes gave me the idea to repost this oneshot which I expanded into a mini-arc.
Chapter 1: No, Not the Bees!
"Bees?"
Karen Salinas peered over the headlines of the newspaper handed her by her Blacksuit "minder" Clarisse Lewyn, wondering what business a Pointwatcher had investigating unreliable reports of gigantic, vaguely bee-like monsters.
With the voice of a schoolteacher eagerly awaiting the day's last workhour while educating an increasingly disinterested classroom, Clarisse replied: "We could have a genuine Byakhee sighting."
A certain chunky Ashkenaz Jewish boy roughly the same age as the Karen currently looking at the tabloid in equal parts bemusement and irritation extrapolated: "Neither crows, moles, bees, gargoyles, owls, winged cats nor elephant seals or even groundhogs... speaking of groundhogs, why is it exactly Groundhog day that the time loop in that movie occurs on? Because it's a rather obscure holiday so the people looking for the movie in the video store wouldn't rent The Valentine's Day Massacre instead by accident, or that-"
Karen's gaze now changed targets from the sensationalist rag to Kenny (as the hyperactive Jew was called) and it wasn't friendly. "The thing is that Byakhees don't exactly look like bees either... and the crosspoint that opened last night didn't have anything to do with any bees yet?"
Standing taller and blonder than anyone in the Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Team, even the skinny guy with a sentient extradimensional claw for a left hand, Clarisse explained laconically: "I'll admit it, I don't understand it either but I have orders from above to investigate it. The SDI is busy investigating possible hints at the resurgence of-"
"Yeah, yeah, I get it already. The giant bee-oids were seen nearby the newest crosspoint and X follows Y, we can't afford not to investigate because the Dreamlands are poorly explored by humans, yadda yadda yadda. Let's get it done anyway."
Max Li, as the boy with the spiky demigod for a hand was called, very much looked like he was about to call Karen a bitch but only refrained because... well, there were bigger threats to him (and bitchier girls) in the world than Karen.
"I wonder if they know what we're really doing."
Max sounded like he didn't expect anything else than a rhetorical answer from the other passengers of the Black Helicopter except possibly Kenny, who was humming a piece of music that reminded Max of some movie he had seen a while ago. Or at least, Kenny hummed it until Karen silenced him with a slap. If there was one observation that Max had made the most often during his tenure as a Blacksuit, it was that everything seems to piss Karen off. She would be rather cute if "everything crankier than everyone else" wasn't her default attitude.
"Of course, as usual I'm the only one who takes things seriously other than goofing off like a mechanical doll that hasn't been rewound or walking and talking exactly like an idiot savant version of Ralph Fucking Wiggum."
"Hate to say it, but you're wrong, Karen. I'm just not as much into petty infighting as you are. I also believe that we're officially visiting some sort of therapy centre we've volunteered to, or something."
She seemed conflicted in the look she now gave Max, or at least just expressing some sort of frighteningly casual revulsion at... well, just existing. For approximately time 10,191 in his life, he wondered whether or not Karen was very distantly related to that one-eyed French girl. They certainly had a lot of common in terms of personality.
The BH-53's pilot then announced something about a zeppelin refusing to identify itself being in the vicinity and a complete lack of apparent contact with the village below, as if it had been hit by a power shorta-
A sudden spread of thuds against the sides of the helicopter ricocheted in a metallic clanger from all sides as the craft shook from side to side.
Kenny panicked. "OY VEY! What the hell is going on?"
The pilot answered: "Giant man-bee things attacking! There's one obscuring the windshield right now!"
"Can't you try to land?"
All Karen Salinas could think about right now as the helicopter spiralled downwards in a barely successful attempt to land was how appropriate a microcosm of her life this moment was. Every time it appears to have hit rock bottom, things suddenly become ten times worse. If only my teammates hadn't been a brain-damaged nerd and an emotionless dweeb with a space god for a hand, then it would at least be tolerable more than a couple of days a year, but apparently the universe decided to hate me as soon as I started at the Academy. This day, though, it seemed to be spectacularly worse - maybe it had something to do with the new make of cornflakes they had started eating at the school?
She also noticed that the pilot was squabbling with some red-taper in the other end of Massachusetts, Clarisse sighed as a tacit admittance of how hopeless the situation was. Pretty much everyone could understand that the best thing about this was that... well, it could have been a lot worse even when Kenny's head hit the side of the windowless helicopter cabin, knocking him unconscious.
"See? What did I say? Just as it seems like it can't get worse, it doesn't."
"You didn't actually say that today, Karen."
"Shut the fuck up."
The helicopter pilot's argument with some military bureaucrat (probably SDI or even Black Light, an obscure branch of the US military authorized to assist in operations usually known only to the more secret agencies like SDI, Blacksuits or the even more mysterious Pluto Institute) ended as a chitinous limb tore open the supposedly bulletproof front window with a deafening echo shrieking cacophonically through the compressed-space enhanced interior of the helicopter as it suddenly fell some metres down on the hard ground.
Both Clarisse and Max were now basically knocked out - if still conscious, then both very much hurting by how much they had been thrown around by the turbulence, testing the seatbelts' ability to restrain. Yup, we are most definitely near a fuck-up zone. The merest shadow of such a doubt drowned as the multifaceted rattle of noise echoing throughout the helicopter changed to one of buzzing, splattering and a shriek of: "No, not the bees! NOT IN THE FACE! WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE BEES... IN THE FACE? NOT IN THE FACE!"
"Don't worry, you other guys... I'll do it myself." With those words, Karen let loose the seatbelts. To be honest, she felt some relief that she had to do this on her own and not with the annoying rest of the team.
There it was, right in front of her. Something of distinctly mutated countenance, a many-limbed insectoid abomination charged forwards with an infernal buzz of wings, bee-like horrors flanking the obscene hybrid. Leaping up through the room in a low-angle curve to grip a railing with her hands, Karen delivered a powerful kick with both feet to a head disturbingly humanoid for something at the end of a giant mutant bug. As sprays of blackish-purple ichor, chunks of carapace and gleaming eye segments flew through the helicopter's dark interior, Karen pulled out a certain modified Colt Python from a compressed-space pocket to hold loose the hammer while pressing the trigger.
With each gunshot, a monstrous insect the size of a small cat fell to the helicopter's floor with the distinct sound of hard carapace and icky fluids splattering across the room echoing throughout. Seeing more insects, both the cat-sized ones and the quasihumanoid hybrid atrocities swarming the inside of the helicopter, Karen lept elegantly in a randomized yet pattern across the cavernous interior of the downed helicopter, weaving an echoing symphony of punches using the still white-hot handgun as a club, kicks and offensively applied jumps that splattered overgrown monster bees against walls and making explosions of ichor-smattered chunks of carapace and insectoid organs flying in all directions out of winged nightmares neither vertebrate nor invertebrate.
By the time a high-serenaded salvo of high kicks and furious elbow kicks split an entomoform monstrosity into two, the seemingly dead pilot now staggered towards the ichor-soaked schoolgirl like a plaguebearing mutant . The slimy shards of carapace still sticking in her hair fuelling her rage by further ruining the hair she spent a lot of time dressing up herself this morning, she somersaulted up in another angle to land with the Colt Python just a few centimetres away from bashing the pilot's skull in.
"You know, maybe there is a cure."
Sickly, sticky slime drooling from the infected pilot's mouth as his shape seemed to have taken the first step in metamorphosis towards a bee. "But you know, Karen... in the meantime you might have to let me harvest the nerve-pollen of your BRRRAAAIIIIIINNNNSSSSS!"
Another gunshot, this one from a hasty reload done within less than two seconds and the cabin of the black helicopter was literally splattered with human headcheese and gooey wet pieces of brain quickly dissolving into some sort of strange greenish mass Karen had never, ever seen before.
Feeling something distinctly nonhuman materialize nearby, Karen turned behind and so - lo and behold, two Greys both wielding retro-spaceguns straight out of The Jetsons.
"It would be much appreciated if you two guys started respecting the border between different types of reali-"
One of the neotenous visitors apparently being smarter in this sitation than her, it aimed its unidentified gun directly at Karen only to have her leap with lightning speed in a many-angled arc through the helicopter. Within three seconds, the very same Grey's head was sent rolling off its dystrophied body with a powerful kick. The bloodied stump sprayed a sickly-smelling fountain of nonterran blood in several seconds afterwards, the alien fluids soon dripping from the floor of the helicopter cockpit. The other Grey was absolutely terrified, not being able to react before a swing with a still-hot gun hit it between the eyes, causing it to collapse dead.
Suddenly, Clarisse and Max arrived sleepily in the cockpit, surprised at finding two fresh Grey corpses (one decapitated) in the cockpit.
Max then went: "I understand that... but the bee creatures?"
For the very first time, Max got the impression that something was seriously wrong with Karen's mind. As if she had completely changed, mentally and physically - it certainly wasn't within her capabilities to absolutely massacre a group of creatures like the mutated insect-people this easily.
"Shut up. I just killed them, that's what. Apparently, if you get stung by them you turn into one of them as the pilot shows."
Clarisse gasped, shocked. "You... you killed the pilot?"
"He attacked me, looked like he was turning into a giant bee and said that he would eat my brains. Tell me what else I could have done?"
The Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team stepped out of their crashed helicopter.
"My head hurts. It feels like my brain has been replaced by antifreeze, sorta like French people do to wine in order to make it taste better. Did you know that... urghh... that in old times, licorice was made with whale blood?"
Kenny was the last to jump out, following the other three through the clearing which he sensed was full of Dreamlands creatures behind every corner. More of the insectiform mutants appeared in the sky to fall from a flurry of gunfire from Kenny's akimbo .500s-
With only a faint hum, a beam of light from between the wood lanced from the crown of one of the trees, wounding Kenny's left arm.
"AAAAARRGHHHH!"
Discharging two bullets from the gun in his right hand into the tree crown where the beam came from, a groaning Kenny saw a Grey clutching a futuristic-looking sniper rifle falling like a ragdoll from the very tree.
Then, suddenly, an infernal buzzing deafened all other sound as a literal cloud of the gigantic infector bees swarmed forth to swamp Karen Salinas, who reacted by becoming a human whirlwind tearing into the horde of bees like a cornered predator, standing above a mountain of dead giant bees within half a minute but now with at least two stings on her body.
"This... is the worst day of my life. I'm soon turning into a giant fucking bee. Go ahead and kill me."
Clarisse rushed to the angry, somewhat depressed Karen to attempt to remove the stingers.
"I'll see what I- I mean, we can do." Max joined too, trying to get them out with Lefty, the symbiotic creature that was his left hand.
"Erm... Max and Clarisse, those bees had barbless stingers."
A fifth voice, clearly female, interrupted from afar: "Curses! Unfortunately for me, you don't have to worry about becoming one of my precious messengers!"
That woman, wearing a black/yellow striped jumpsuit and a bizarre-looking helmet, ran towards the MABRT from inside the forest.
"Damn you, Karen! Once I finally have teamed up with the Dreamlanders to remake the plague that is humankind in the image of my beloved bees, you not only ruin it but turn out to be the dreaded Bee-Slayer foretold in legend!"
"Bee-Slayer? What the hell are you on about, Alex?"
"STOP CALLING ME THAT!"
The woman in the strange outfit, whom Karen now recognized as supervillainess Queen Bee, threw a punch at the teenaged monster hunter only to turn around in confusion, finding out that she now stood behind her.
"You need to practise some more, Ms. Gale."
A certain non-human claw then tore a gash through Queen Bee's back, prompting her to turn around again, throwing a punch against Max while commanding another swarm of cat-sized bees in his direction.
"Do you know, Professer Elder God-For-A-Hand, how much these jumpsuits cost?"
Max pulled a Glock from his pocket to shoot down the bees, then fired the last bullet at Queen Bee, who let loose an air-shattering shriek and a lament of: "Fuck! You... ughhh... ahhhh.... are another Bee-Slayer too?"
Queen Bee groaned further as she removed the bullet from the wound with her own hands, muttering something about an ancient prophecy by the priests of He Who Must Not Be Named, while sensing Karen's .357 Python pointed right at the back of her head and the words: "Move the slightest, Queenie, and it'll suddenly hurt a lot more."
Karen's devilish smile turned into an expression of total bemusement as the wounded supervillainess answered with absolutely no irony: "I'm okay with that."
As Queen Bee finished those words, a flying saucer painted in yellow and black stripes swept down upon the clearing and she vanished into the air. Her voice now sounded from the saucer's speakers, vaguely distorted: "Remember... this is not the last you have seen of the alliance between the Dreamlanders and Queen Bee!"
The sound of approaching helicopters undoubtedly belonging to Black Light grew louder as the bee-striped flying saucer zapped away, all members of the MABRT seeing some of the helicopters give pursuit of the saucer.
"Is the Black Helicopter still salvageable? I mean, we still have another one in spare but we're running out of funding these days..."
Clarisse sighed as she looked up at the UH-60 Blackhawk descending to pick the MABRT, Karen quipping: "Today's lesson: With great power comes a life that absolutely sucks."
Chapter 1: No, Not the Bees!
"Bees?"
Karen Salinas peered over the headlines of the newspaper handed her by her Blacksuit "minder" Clarisse Lewyn, wondering what business a Pointwatcher had investigating unreliable reports of gigantic, vaguely bee-like monsters.
With the voice of a schoolteacher eagerly awaiting the day's last workhour while educating an increasingly disinterested classroom, Clarisse replied: "We could have a genuine Byakhee sighting."
A certain chunky Ashkenaz Jewish boy roughly the same age as the Karen currently looking at the tabloid in equal parts bemusement and irritation extrapolated: "Neither crows, moles, bees, gargoyles, owls, winged cats nor elephant seals or even groundhogs... speaking of groundhogs, why is it exactly Groundhog day that the time loop in that movie occurs on? Because it's a rather obscure holiday so the people looking for the movie in the video store wouldn't rent The Valentine's Day Massacre instead by accident, or that-"
Karen's gaze now changed targets from the sensationalist rag to Kenny (as the hyperactive Jew was called) and it wasn't friendly. "The thing is that Byakhees don't exactly look like bees either... and the crosspoint that opened last night didn't have anything to do with any bees yet?"
Standing taller and blonder than anyone in the Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Team, even the skinny guy with a sentient extradimensional claw for a left hand, Clarisse explained laconically: "I'll admit it, I don't understand it either but I have orders from above to investigate it. The SDI is busy investigating possible hints at the resurgence of-"
"Yeah, yeah, I get it already. The giant bee-oids were seen nearby the newest crosspoint and X follows Y, we can't afford not to investigate because the Dreamlands are poorly explored by humans, yadda yadda yadda. Let's get it done anyway."
Max Li, as the boy with the spiky demigod for a hand was called, very much looked like he was about to call Karen a bitch but only refrained because... well, there were bigger threats to him (and bitchier girls) in the world than Karen.
"I wonder if they know what we're really doing."
Max sounded like he didn't expect anything else than a rhetorical answer from the other passengers of the Black Helicopter except possibly Kenny, who was humming a piece of music that reminded Max of some movie he had seen a while ago. Or at least, Kenny hummed it until Karen silenced him with a slap. If there was one observation that Max had made the most often during his tenure as a Blacksuit, it was that everything seems to piss Karen off. She would be rather cute if "everything crankier than everyone else" wasn't her default attitude.
"Of course, as usual I'm the only one who takes things seriously other than goofing off like a mechanical doll that hasn't been rewound or walking and talking exactly like an idiot savant version of Ralph Fucking Wiggum."
"Hate to say it, but you're wrong, Karen. I'm just not as much into petty infighting as you are. I also believe that we're officially visiting some sort of therapy centre we've volunteered to, or something."
She seemed conflicted in the look she now gave Max, or at least just expressing some sort of frighteningly casual revulsion at... well, just existing. For approximately time 10,191 in his life, he wondered whether or not Karen was very distantly related to that one-eyed French girl. They certainly had a lot of common in terms of personality.
The BH-53's pilot then announced something about a zeppelin refusing to identify itself being in the vicinity and a complete lack of apparent contact with the village below, as if it had been hit by a power shorta-
A sudden spread of thuds against the sides of the helicopter ricocheted in a metallic clanger from all sides as the craft shook from side to side.
Kenny panicked. "OY VEY! What the hell is going on?"
The pilot answered: "Giant man-bee things attacking! There's one obscuring the windshield right now!"
"Can't you try to land?"
All Karen Salinas could think about right now as the helicopter spiralled downwards in a barely successful attempt to land was how appropriate a microcosm of her life this moment was. Every time it appears to have hit rock bottom, things suddenly become ten times worse. If only my teammates hadn't been a brain-damaged nerd and an emotionless dweeb with a space god for a hand, then it would at least be tolerable more than a couple of days a year, but apparently the universe decided to hate me as soon as I started at the Academy. This day, though, it seemed to be spectacularly worse - maybe it had something to do with the new make of cornflakes they had started eating at the school?
She also noticed that the pilot was squabbling with some red-taper in the other end of Massachusetts, Clarisse sighed as a tacit admittance of how hopeless the situation was. Pretty much everyone could understand that the best thing about this was that... well, it could have been a lot worse even when Kenny's head hit the side of the windowless helicopter cabin, knocking him unconscious.
"See? What did I say? Just as it seems like it can't get worse, it doesn't."
"You didn't actually say that today, Karen."
"Shut the fuck up."
The helicopter pilot's argument with some military bureaucrat (probably SDI or even Black Light, an obscure branch of the US military authorized to assist in operations usually known only to the more secret agencies like SDI, Blacksuits or the even more mysterious Pluto Institute) ended as a chitinous limb tore open the supposedly bulletproof front window with a deafening echo shrieking cacophonically through the compressed-space enhanced interior of the helicopter as it suddenly fell some metres down on the hard ground.
Both Clarisse and Max were now basically knocked out - if still conscious, then both very much hurting by how much they had been thrown around by the turbulence, testing the seatbelts' ability to restrain. Yup, we are most definitely near a fuck-up zone. The merest shadow of such a doubt drowned as the multifaceted rattle of noise echoing throughout the helicopter changed to one of buzzing, splattering and a shriek of: "No, not the bees! NOT IN THE FACE! WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE BEES... IN THE FACE? NOT IN THE FACE!"
"Don't worry, you other guys... I'll do it myself." With those words, Karen let loose the seatbelts. To be honest, she felt some relief that she had to do this on her own and not with the annoying rest of the team.
There it was, right in front of her. Something of distinctly mutated countenance, a many-limbed insectoid abomination charged forwards with an infernal buzz of wings, bee-like horrors flanking the obscene hybrid. Leaping up through the room in a low-angle curve to grip a railing with her hands, Karen delivered a powerful kick with both feet to a head disturbingly humanoid for something at the end of a giant mutant bug. As sprays of blackish-purple ichor, chunks of carapace and gleaming eye segments flew through the helicopter's dark interior, Karen pulled out a certain modified Colt Python from a compressed-space pocket to hold loose the hammer while pressing the trigger.
With each gunshot, a monstrous insect the size of a small cat fell to the helicopter's floor with the distinct sound of hard carapace and icky fluids splattering across the room echoing throughout. Seeing more insects, both the cat-sized ones and the quasihumanoid hybrid atrocities swarming the inside of the helicopter, Karen lept elegantly in a randomized yet pattern across the cavernous interior of the downed helicopter, weaving an echoing symphony of punches using the still white-hot handgun as a club, kicks and offensively applied jumps that splattered overgrown monster bees against walls and making explosions of ichor-smattered chunks of carapace and insectoid organs flying in all directions out of winged nightmares neither vertebrate nor invertebrate.
By the time a high-serenaded salvo of high kicks and furious elbow kicks split an entomoform monstrosity into two, the seemingly dead pilot now staggered towards the ichor-soaked schoolgirl like a plaguebearing mutant . The slimy shards of carapace still sticking in her hair fuelling her rage by further ruining the hair she spent a lot of time dressing up herself this morning, she somersaulted up in another angle to land with the Colt Python just a few centimetres away from bashing the pilot's skull in.
"You know, maybe there is a cure."
Sickly, sticky slime drooling from the infected pilot's mouth as his shape seemed to have taken the first step in metamorphosis towards a bee. "But you know, Karen... in the meantime you might have to let me harvest the nerve-pollen of your BRRRAAAIIIIIINNNNSSSSS!"
Another gunshot, this one from a hasty reload done within less than two seconds and the cabin of the black helicopter was literally splattered with human headcheese and gooey wet pieces of brain quickly dissolving into some sort of strange greenish mass Karen had never, ever seen before.
Feeling something distinctly nonhuman materialize nearby, Karen turned behind and so - lo and behold, two Greys both wielding retro-spaceguns straight out of The Jetsons.
"It would be much appreciated if you two guys started respecting the border between different types of reali-"
One of the neotenous visitors apparently being smarter in this sitation than her, it aimed its unidentified gun directly at Karen only to have her leap with lightning speed in a many-angled arc through the helicopter. Within three seconds, the very same Grey's head was sent rolling off its dystrophied body with a powerful kick. The bloodied stump sprayed a sickly-smelling fountain of nonterran blood in several seconds afterwards, the alien fluids soon dripping from the floor of the helicopter cockpit. The other Grey was absolutely terrified, not being able to react before a swing with a still-hot gun hit it between the eyes, causing it to collapse dead.
Suddenly, Clarisse and Max arrived sleepily in the cockpit, surprised at finding two fresh Grey corpses (one decapitated) in the cockpit.
Max then went: "I understand that... but the bee creatures?"
For the very first time, Max got the impression that something was seriously wrong with Karen's mind. As if she had completely changed, mentally and physically - it certainly wasn't within her capabilities to absolutely massacre a group of creatures like the mutated insect-people this easily.
"Shut up. I just killed them, that's what. Apparently, if you get stung by them you turn into one of them as the pilot shows."
Clarisse gasped, shocked. "You... you killed the pilot?"
"He attacked me, looked like he was turning into a giant bee and said that he would eat my brains. Tell me what else I could have done?"
The Miskatonic Area Blacksuit Response Team stepped out of their crashed helicopter.
"My head hurts. It feels like my brain has been replaced by antifreeze, sorta like French people do to wine in order to make it taste better. Did you know that... urghh... that in old times, licorice was made with whale blood?"
Kenny was the last to jump out, following the other three through the clearing which he sensed was full of Dreamlands creatures behind every corner. More of the insectiform mutants appeared in the sky to fall from a flurry of gunfire from Kenny's akimbo .500s-
With only a faint hum, a beam of light from between the wood lanced from the crown of one of the trees, wounding Kenny's left arm.
"AAAAARRGHHHH!"
Discharging two bullets from the gun in his right hand into the tree crown where the beam came from, a groaning Kenny saw a Grey clutching a futuristic-looking sniper rifle falling like a ragdoll from the very tree.
Then, suddenly, an infernal buzzing deafened all other sound as a literal cloud of the gigantic infector bees swarmed forth to swamp Karen Salinas, who reacted by becoming a human whirlwind tearing into the horde of bees like a cornered predator, standing above a mountain of dead giant bees within half a minute but now with at least two stings on her body.
"This... is the worst day of my life. I'm soon turning into a giant fucking bee. Go ahead and kill me."
Clarisse rushed to the angry, somewhat depressed Karen to attempt to remove the stingers.
"I'll see what I- I mean, we can do." Max joined too, trying to get them out with Lefty, the symbiotic creature that was his left hand.
"Erm... Max and Clarisse, those bees had barbless stingers."
A fifth voice, clearly female, interrupted from afar: "Curses! Unfortunately for me, you don't have to worry about becoming one of my precious messengers!"
That woman, wearing a black/yellow striped jumpsuit and a bizarre-looking helmet, ran towards the MABRT from inside the forest.
"Damn you, Karen! Once I finally have teamed up with the Dreamlanders to remake the plague that is humankind in the image of my beloved bees, you not only ruin it but turn out to be the dreaded Bee-Slayer foretold in legend!"
"Bee-Slayer? What the hell are you on about, Alex?"
"STOP CALLING ME THAT!"
The woman in the strange outfit, whom Karen now recognized as supervillainess Queen Bee, threw a punch at the teenaged monster hunter only to turn around in confusion, finding out that she now stood behind her.
"You need to practise some more, Ms. Gale."
A certain non-human claw then tore a gash through Queen Bee's back, prompting her to turn around again, throwing a punch against Max while commanding another swarm of cat-sized bees in his direction.
"Do you know, Professer Elder God-For-A-Hand, how much these jumpsuits cost?"
Max pulled a Glock from his pocket to shoot down the bees, then fired the last bullet at Queen Bee, who let loose an air-shattering shriek and a lament of: "Fuck! You... ughhh... ahhhh.... are another Bee-Slayer too?"
Queen Bee groaned further as she removed the bullet from the wound with her own hands, muttering something about an ancient prophecy by the priests of He Who Must Not Be Named, while sensing Karen's .357 Python pointed right at the back of her head and the words: "Move the slightest, Queenie, and it'll suddenly hurt a lot more."
Karen's devilish smile turned into an expression of total bemusement as the wounded supervillainess answered with absolutely no irony: "I'm okay with that."
As Queen Bee finished those words, a flying saucer painted in yellow and black stripes swept down upon the clearing and she vanished into the air. Her voice now sounded from the saucer's speakers, vaguely distorted: "Remember... this is not the last you have seen of the alliance between the Dreamlanders and Queen Bee!"
The sound of approaching helicopters undoubtedly belonging to Black Light grew louder as the bee-striped flying saucer zapped away, all members of the MABRT seeing some of the helicopters give pursuit of the saucer.
"Is the Black Helicopter still salvageable? I mean, we still have another one in spare but we're running out of funding these days..."
Clarisse sighed as she looked up at the UH-60 Blackhawk descending to pick the MABRT, Karen quipping: "Today's lesson: With great power comes a life that absolutely sucks."