For the first time ever, listen to a story on kellinkston.com in audio!! (Please mind the choppy audio in parts – this was the result of a lot of learning and practice over the past three months.)
DREAM ON!
A Halloween(ish) short story
By Kell Inkston
If only they had known that tonight would be almost as bad as last year’s trip, they might have reconsidered— but they didn’t.
A pair of mighty, light-absorbing claws slam the quaint Mexican-American styled blue, pink, and tan clay bowl onto the rustic wooden table. Filled to the brim with delicious pretzels, chips, and various other tasty carbohydrates, these delicacies soar up from the bowl, only to fall neatly back into place.
“Who’s ready for some gross solstice partying?!” Super Maniac Ultra Echelon XXX Minion shouts. “I’ve been waiting all year for this shit!” With another slam of the bowl, he rouses the rest of the cabin-goers, breaking a contemplative but excited silence and finally beginning the events of this one, horrid evening.
“Dude, can you shut up for five seconds?” Scout Minion snips. “It’s the worst thing ever that we got assigned with you for the getaway,” she says, opening up her suitcase to compare different scarves: She’s feeling like something a little “Springier” since they only have a few days to enjoy their freedom from their regular minion-type duties but, as usual, she opts for the classic.
“Oh, he’s just having a good time,” Fashion Minion snips back at Scout, his rustic springtime wear and ascot set looking particularly cozy. “I feel for you, though. We can’t all be paragons of enjoying ourselves on the job, Scout.”
“Huh?! Hell’s that supposed to mean?” Scout says as Fashion Minion glances away, his sly smile plastered across his face as if he’s always one or two steps ahead of everyone else, but particularly her.
“Oh, you know, some of us are just a little more… invested in our work.”
“Tryin’ to say I don’t know how to have fun?”
Fashion Minion, tall, graceful, and flamboyant as always, gives a gentle shrug. “Not necessarily. What I’m trying to say, young lady, is that—”
“Oh, that’s exactly what he’s trying to say,” Maniac Minion snips. “But don’t you worry, sweetheart. I got a whole night planned. We’re gonna do drugs, we’re going to get super wasted, we’re going to play board games, we’re going to summon demons, we’re going to do the nasty!“
Scout flinches back in disgust as Fashion Minion hums wistfully.
“Even if we could, I wouldn’t even consider it even as a dying wish,” Scout snips back, her blades still at the ready at her hips, even on a holiday like this. “But if you want to cut this little vacation early, all you need to do is ask,” she says as she places her hands at the sheaths.
“Everybody, please,” a gentler, more motivated voice comes from the side of one of the nearby rooms. Everyone turns to see Cardio Minion finally finishing unpacking and emerging from her chosen room in the cabin.
“Oh great, here’s Little Miss Sunshine here to tell us how we should live our life,” Fashion Minion hisses.
“The hell do you want, Bunny?” Scout Minion asks.
“Don’t interrupt me, bitch!” the three of them say in their own special, unique little minion ways.
Cardio Minion, taller than the first two and only slightly taller than Fashion Minion—gives an ineffectual smile. She’s entirely used to this kind of treatment. As part of her athlete nature, little pains, even the emotional kind, don’t seem to hurt as bad when she’s so used to it.
Her track jacket, this time a springing green and brown instead of her normal bright red, flexes in the dim light of the cabin as she lifts her arms behind her head. “I think all you guys should just relax. We only get to do this like once a year, and whoever it is I’m with, I am certain we’ll find a way to have a great time.”
Fashion Minion crosses his arms before turning away once again in about the haughtiest way you can imagine. “Well, you can count me out of all the outdoors stuff,” he says. “I was only going because I thought Lumberjack Minion was coming.”
Maniac Minion winces in confusion. “Why did’ya want him to come along?” before receiving a quick shove from Scout.
“Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot that you’re totally gay,” he says with a sarcastic tone.
“I shall not confide in ruffians like you why I’m interested in spending time with a man of culture like him.”
“Yeah, imagine you’d like to culturally enrich things with him quite a bit,” Maniac Minion says with a snarky little smirk.
“Cut it out,” Cardio Minion says with a chastising smile. “Now, I think we all know better than to dig up each other’s pasts,” she says, winning a curt, irritated glance from Fashion Minion. “Listen, the cabin has everything we need. We are going to have a great time. There’s s’mores, there’s board games, there’s even this little… television thingy,” she says, turning to an array of boxes facing the couch in the living room.
“That’s called a DVD player,” Scout Minion corrects.
“Rrright, DVD player,” Cardio Minion corrects.
“Whatever. It’s all boring,” Maniac Minion says. “You think I wanna watch my movies in 2D? How old are DVDs anyways? Like a thousand years old or what?”
“Only about 400 years, actually,” Scout Minion explains, winning a quick white glowing grin from Maniac Minion.
“I love how you just know that off the top of your head. It’s so normal.”
A white flush appears on Scout’s face. “I-I mean, anyone would, idiot. Do you just not remember information?”
“I’m not absolutely obsessed and autistic with tiny little details about technology, Scout Minion. If you spent 1% of that time learning all those useless facts on chasing down and fighting the Knights, we probably would own the entire obliterating universe by now.”
“You little cockroach,” she says, stepping forward with her claws readied. Granted, Scout Minion is still pretty much on the small side, but she’s bigger than Maniac Minion, who’s certifiably a pipsqueak to 90% of the Minionry… and let’s be honest here: even if she was even smaller… even if she was the size of a quarter, she could beat him faster than he could toss out a racial slur, which is pretty stupidly fast.
The irony here is that Maniac Minion loves the sense of control he gets from ruining the best-laid plans of mice and men. At least, that is until the likes of Scout Minion and some of the other well-to-dos mess it up for him time and again—but not this time.
His eyes slant with a mischievous aura.
“You know what? I guess you’re right,” he admits.
Scout doubles back, surprised by the look of humility on his face.
“I suppose there’s nothing that can really be done about it,” he says with a smile. “I am sorry.”
Once the situation is disarmed, Scout Minion, still in shock, slowly pulls away, her eyes wide like full moons. “Did you just… apologize?“
“I sure did. You know, we should all cook up something nice and watch a good movie and have a time of it. After all, I’m getting off this week from the Mintuanamo Bay prisoner exchange program, and I should probably waste it on something fun rather than trying to mess up everyone’s day.”
“Which you usually wouldn’t miss anything for,” Scout Minion says.
“Yes,” he says, waving dismissively. “But I don’t know. I feel… different this time. Maybe I can actually make friends for once.”
Scout Minion snorts at the thought. “That’ll be the day.”
“Friends?! Oh, goody!” Fashion Minion says, leaning down and swooping up Maniac Minion for a hug.
“Hey, get your hands off of me, you delirious fa- uh friend, you strange fellow. You wonderful, strange fellow.” He takes a deep breath, and Fashion Minion, who was expecting a response like that, is only too pleased to receive an apology coming afterward.
“Quite accepted, my little friend.”
The criminal takes a deep breath and forces out a smile. “Can I get some snacks now? Is that how this works?”
Fashion Minion smiles back and puts him down. “Well of course my little Machiavelli.”
Cardio Minion, already with the snack bowl ready, offers it to the little maniac who immediately puts back a jaw-full of the assorted carbohydrates: it’s salty, zesty, sweet, and altogether great.
“Let’s make the best of it,” Cardio Minion says with a grin as she releases the bowl to let Maniac Minion dunk his face into it. “I’ll get started on the fire. Scout Minion, would you like to pick out the movie?”
“Sure thing.” Scout Minion says just as the front door opens with the smoothness of the breeze.
A mystic wind blows through the cabin as a bevy of old fall leaves flush past the threshold of the door. Amidst all the earlier commotion, no one had noticed Druid Minion stepping her way up to the cabin.
“Good morning, everyone,” she says calmly, demurely, and sleepily. “I see I’m with entertaining company this time.”
“Druid, how you doing?” Scout Minion says before looking back into the case of dozens upon dozens of old, weird, and classic DVDs.
Druid Minion waves back with a lightened expression, genuinely pleased to see someone even a chief introvert like herself would consider a loyal friend. “I’m doing well– figured a change of pace would be nice.”
Maniac Minion scoffs before rising back to his feet, his mouth half full of crunched-up pretzels. “Wanted a change of pace from hugging trees so you can go and hug trees that have already been cut down and made into a cabin?” he asks, as sensitively as he’s capable.
Druid Minion, generally a pretty level-headed sort, makes no shift in her expression but slowly reaches up to her hood to pull it off her antler-like antenna and reveal her face. “You know that’s not what I really do, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he says before winning a razor-sharp glance from Scout Minion, who turned just far enough to look at him out of the corner of her eye. “I mean, yes, I do indeed. I’m sure we’re gonna have a great weekend… huh, so why do we call it a weekend, anyway?”
“It’s an otherworldly tradition,” Druid Minion says, winning a nod from Scout and the clearing of the throat from Fashion Minion.
“Well, when I was still a little woodchuck, I understood that there was a certain cycle to the week, but I’d imagine that this whole weekend thing is a time to celebrate the ending days of the seven-day cycle, at least. So I’ve heard. People would come by the zoo more on weekends,” he says.
Druid Minion gives a slightly bemused glance as Cardio Minion, the one with a really good answer, finally speaks up.
“So, it’s like a human society thing. They work five days in a lot of their worlds, and so they take two off, then call it ‘the weekend.’ It works pretty well with most of their planetary calendars.”
“Oh, so it’s just some kind of weird human shit,” Scout adds.
“It kind of makes sense that you guys wouldn’t really know the origin of the word,” Cardio Minion says before turning to the back of the cabin. She steps across the linoleum tile over to the breathtaking view of the lake. “I’m gonna to go for a short run. I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”
” ‘Course you are,” Scout Minion says.
Cardio Minion just gives a short smile and nods. “Of course I am, but we can only deny our nature so much,” she says with a light hearted scoff as she opens the screen door. “I mean… just look at all this!” she shouts from outside before cutting off at a light five-minute mile warmup pace.
Druid Minion hurries in with her things, which consist proudly of dried leaves, acorns, and some unspeakable powder-type stuff in nice little jars that she has hung up under her cloak by tiny little strings. Next, she lets out all of her bugs and her tiny little mammals and her bird friends, all living somewhere in her cloak, and they make their home somewhere in Scout Minion’s room.
“I’m… sleeping in there,” Scout Minion says.
“Well, that’s okay. I’m just going to read some poetry for the night, if that’s alright with you,” Druid Minion reports cheerily.
Scout Minion’s expression slants.
“Right… sure.”
With a sigh, she turns back to the DVD cabinet wall. Fashion Minion reaches for a nice apron in the kitchen. “Oh, well just look at this. I’ll get started on something!” he says with a winsome smile.
Scout Minion nods and says, “Sounds like a plan, Stan,” and then looks back to the cabinet once again. She sighs.
“Anything good in there?” Maniac, now crashing out on the couch and eating from his little snack bowl, asks with an already-bored tone.
“It’s mostly just Magic Minion’s horror movies and Romance Minion’s rom-coms.”
“Why does she like horror movies so much?” Maniac asks.
Scout Minion pauses, glances over across to the kitchen where Fashion Minion is, and they both exchange a beguiled, humored smile.
It’s true. They’re not on necessarily good terms. Even though originally it was Fashion Minion that gave Scout Minion that close copy of Ski-Infantry Minion’s scarf when she sent it in to Mending Minion for repairs that one time a few centuries ago, past that, they don’t like each other very much. It’s a very rare occasion in which they both relate to something well enough. In this case, their humor for how cluelessly naive Maniac Minion can be sometimes. It’s times like this that they’re able to reach over that barrier and connect. It’s a bit wholesome in a cruel kind of way.
“She thinks the monsters are… cool,” Scout says with a deflated tone.
“Huh,” Maniac Minion gives a perplexed look as he ponders it over. “You know, I guess they are kind of cool.”
This, of course, wins a quick chuckle from Fashion Minion.
“What?” Maniac asks.
“I’ll say nothing, darling. Just an inside joke,” he corrects.
Maniac Minion digs moodily into the sofa. “Psh, okay.”
And that’s all they say for quite a few minutes.
Druid Minion, still wearing her filthy cloak after putting up all her things, takes a big seat on the couch and nestles in like a tiny little bird covered in thread upon a grand nest.
Scout Minion can’t seem to find anything that’s really good. It’s either the “saw it so many times it’s boring” classic film, the kind of romantic comedy that melts a person’s brain for the next hour and a half—or the kind of quote-unquote “horror” featuring bothersomely muscular monsters and murderers pursuing heroines in ways that could never be considered publishable under regular theatrical licenses.
“Yeah, I don’t wanna watch any of this,” Scout says.
“Why is everything so boring!?” Maniac Minion says, crashing his head back into the seat of the couch.
“It’s not boring, dude. We haven’t even started anything yet,” Scout Minion says.
“This is what we’re going to do all day?!”
She glances at them with an irritated look. “Well, no,” Scout Minion snips back. “We can, like, go, I don’t know, for walks and play games and watch movies and eat tasty food and sit by a fire and play music. It’s going to be fine, dude,” she says.
Maniac Minion scoffs. “Do any of us know how to play instruments?”
“Of course I do.”
“Did you bring any?”
She looks away. “I mean, no, I mean, I thought we were going to do other things.”
Minion crosses his arms before responding. “This is going to suck.”
“Great. That was like three minutes,” Scout Minion says. “New record for you.”
“This is going to be the worst weekend ever,” he exclaims. “I hate this. You guys are lame.”
“Well, if you hate it so much, get lost, asshole,” Scout hisses back.
“Already?” Fashion Minion sighs out.
Druid Minion’s expression says it all: she’s clearly irritated by their argument.
And as for Maniac Minion? He gets up from the couch, tossing aside the bowl into Druid Minion’s lap, who barely catches it. “Yeah, I’m going to go up to the attic.”
“For what?”
“Who knows, I might find some weed. Then it’ll be cool again,” he says with a scoff. “See you losers later.”
He struts past the kitchen, passing by a smirking Fashion Minion, and around the corner to the upstairs, which leads only to the attic.
They listen to him creak up the stares for a moment before Scout pops her head over the couch. “Don’t make him anything,” she says.
“I heard that,” Maniac snaps back.
Druid Minion pulls in a deep breath, and sighs. “I wonder when our last guy’s getting here.”
Scout looks over.
“Last guy?” Scout asks, still bent over with her face deep inside the cabinet, looking for one decent movie that she can actually watch without someone complaining,
“Well yes, there’s supposed to be six of us to each cabin,” she notes before reaching into the bowl and taking a quick handful of some of the now-crushed pretzels.
Scout Minion flinches.
She ponders the idea, and then the pondering became panicked pondering deep inside her. She lifts up a prayer to whatever spirit, deity, or demon would listen. Above all, she invokes the divine right of her father, the High Overlord himself—neither divine nor her father, but after having seen the things he had done, he might as well be both of them. “Please let it be somebody cool,” she prays, hoping beyond hope as her mind reels through all the horrible, terrible folks that share the title of minion with her.
Trap Minion…
Crime Minion…
Pyromancer Hell Minion…
She shudders as she visualizes their grinning faces. If their number six is not yet known, then any of them might be showing up to add fuel to Maniac Minion’s fire.
…Or even… perhaps Lady Minion?
No, that’s too far. There’s only six people out for each cabin, and she wouldn’t be caught dead without her goon. Surely, she knows what would happen if she showed her face in front of Scout Minion again without protection.
A crass, wry grin crosses her face as she remembers that last time. She finally leans back from the cabinet. “Yeah, it’s all terrible,” she says.
Druid Minion looks over. “Really?”
“It’s all a bunch of mid rom-com shit or like, like horror,” Scout Minion says with a knowing tone that Druid Minion doesn’t quite pick up on. “Like, just never mind. I have no clue why she left all this shit here.”
“Well, as long as there’s no Romans in it, it can’t be that scary,” Druid Minion replies with a deceptive smile.
Scout Minion just returns a look. Of course, Druid Minion is a pretty nice sort of person, relatable in most cases, enjoyable, calm, but absolutely obsessed with Romans, their empire, their centurions, and all the horrors they conducted across the worlds and eventually realms when they discovered how to do extra-dimensional travel.
“Perhaps you could find… Surely there’s something that we can just get along with, right? They can’t all be bad?” Druid Minion adds.
Scout Minion shakes her head, closes the cabinet, and stands up. “They are all bad. They’re all bad.” she reasserts.
Putting aside the bowl, Druid Minion steps up. “Truly, can I take a look?”
Scout Minion waves off dismissively. “Help yourself. There’s nothing you’re gonna find in there that’s gonna be worth your—”
“Oh, this one looks cool,” Druid Minion interrupts over Scout, who just shakes her head at her friend. She’s settled on the first DVD she saw.
The come-what-may, lackadaisical Druid Minion waves the cover in front of Scout’s face. It has a shirtless guy on it, and as if that were the magic word alone, Fashion Minion glances across the kitchen halfway through gathering the ingredients for a sauce.
“Oh, let’s watch that one,” he exclaims as a sort of half gasp.
Scout does her best to stifle the oncoming sigh. “Oh yeah, this is gonna be a weekend, alright,” she mumbles to herself.
Up in the attic, Maniac Minion, with all of his adjectives and surnames tagging along to cheer him on, glances from one dusty box of articles to an antique to another. He sees various bits and bobbles from conquests and wars and things passed thousands of years ago. Pictures and memories between the minions, Chaos, those others, friends and foes, past and present, onward into history like a never-ending circular knot of adventure and lessons learned.
He has an uncharacteristically sober expression, the kind of face he’d never make when around the others. Arguably, he’d be more open around High Overlord Chaos, but to his fellow Minions, he has to keep up appearances.
After all, someone’s got to keep things fun around here.
He steps through the hall of anachronisms and old memories, and he happens upon an old camera, an air exposure Model 1. He takes a picture and it prints it right there in his hands. He scoffs at the thought of the DVD player downstairs and the tube television with its AV ports. The first time the tower came across technology like this was thousands of years ago, and yet in other worlds, this is the first time they’re figuring it out. He gets a unique twinge of humor in his face, pondering how the tinkering minions love preserving the past and technology so dearly that they’ve made it a matter of pride and honor to adhere to a strict schedule of maintenance and refurbishing to everything they find.
It seems to him that their lives are not just inconvenienced by this endless march of technology and fate, but are consumed by it.
He scoffs as he looks over a dear picture: High Overlord Chaos lifting a couple of his brave fit operator minions over his head as if they were just a pair of small cats. The grins on those ether cursed faces span across the frame of the picture, and he shakes his head. “One hell of a history,” he says.
For a brief moment, he wonders how long he’s been an outcast. Memories blur when time no longer truly matters. In fact, the few minions that still have a healthy regard for time are the ones with the jobs that matter. The scientist minions, the engineer minions, the aforementioned operator minions, along with a fair list more, are the ones that keep everything going, but even if they weren’t there, even if there was not an endless supply of delicious, nutritious food, free energy, and generally no real work for the vast majority of the Minionry— ever-wry Maniac Minion knows that they’d get along just fine. After all, not needing to eat ever is a particularly considerable advantage to those who are also physically immortal, like they are.
Immortal? Yes… but invulnerable to the temptation of a little bit of goofy, silly fun? Not quite.
His eyes, almost as if being drawn there, pull over to the edge of the attic.
There, framed under the dull sunlight through dusty windows, sits an unassuming, but very alluring box. His eyes focus on it. For some reason, his magic sight, granted to any etherian minion of the Overlord, cannot quite see inside.
Theoretically, he should be able to peer through anything unless it’s enchanted specifically to prevent such observation. Theoretically, he could look inside and see the contents just as easily as a human would need to focus on a branch to see a sparrow nearby… but there’s something about this box. It’s like a gas is swirling around it: some kind of wretched, blackened flame.
It consumes and swirls around the vessel as if it were leaking from the seams of the box, so filled with mal intent that it cannot help but eventually pour forth, demanding all nearby to come and witness its beauties.
Then, very briefly, Maniac Minion wonders why in the world Magic Minion left a controlled magical item, or at least something that he assumes is a controlled magical item, in a place accessible to the Minionry at large… at least whenever they put in a reservation for it.
He understands that as the functional head of Chaos’ department of the Arcane, she has a lot of work on her hands, so he too can understand that she might overlook a bobble or two that should have been locked away in a secure vault somewhere.
Telling himself that he’s not to be lured by something so garishly nefarious, he decides that he should at least check its contents and make sure it’s nothing dangerous. It’s not tempting, him, really: he just needs to check out all the things in the box so he can be sure they’re not tempting him.
Leaning up from the box of photographs, he saunters over just as the black flames seem to pulse ever higher by his proximity. The closer he gets, the more irresistibly it tugs on him, as if the blue-black columns of smoke are forming hands and drawing him in to focus on the small, unassuming latch around the unassuming black box filled with unassuming, unknowable something.
With a savoring slip of the hand, Maniac Minion undoes the latch of the box. The black smoke from within bellows over and fills the attic. The hot scent of sulfur reacting with blue fire enters the room.
His eyes, crescent moons of observation, widen into their full lunar brilliance as he looks upon what’s inside. “Well, well, well… what do we have here?” he whispers under his breath as the air from his lungs deep within that ether-bound body curl with black smoke. “This should make things a little more interesting,” he adds before reaching inside.
…He feels something reach back.
Opting against a wholesome dinner at the table, the crew decides instead to take their dinner and sit by the TV. Fashion Minion’s pot roast is delicious, and now it’s time for the part everyone’s been waiting for.
Druid Minion, Cardio Minion, and Fashion Minion all hold their eyes glued to the screen as they shovel handful after handful of fireplace s’mores into their mouths. It was only possible with a bit of assistance from the fire that Cardio Minion got roaring once she brought in all the wood that she found from her run (yes, she did indeed just run with 100 kilograms of sticks under her arms for resistance training, or at least so she says).
After that, tomato soup with lots of crackers, grilled chicken, and Drake wings, both sauced over to the point that it was difficult to tell which was which, and of course massive mugs of hot cocoa – truly a feast fit for The Overlord.
Scout Minion, having taken a spot on the couch where she can keep the film in her peripheral vision and the other three minions’ expressions and actions front and center, gives a long, silent sigh. She’s only tuning into the dialogue every now and again to confirm her suspicions that it is in fact, totally, painfully brainless. She wasn’t a human before she was infested. She had no love for humans. She thought humans were horrible. In many ways she still believes that whole heartedly.
It is with this in mind that seeing this confident, successful, smart young man suddenly take a phone call that he asked for in order to maintain his $1 billion a year super surgeon job, leaving behind the stumblingly awkward but very conventionally attractive young lady who is no doubt the protagonist and the one that the director wants all the women in the audience to relate to, she can’t help but chuckle a little.
The thing that grasps the attention of the others isn’t the chuckle: it’s that the chuckle happens at a part of the movie that is actually quite tragic.
It’s the beginning, and the call the surgeon has to take over the intercom is to begin operating on the protagonist’s mother. The other three minions are in full empathy mode, or at least they are mostly empathizing with the things that they empathize about. Druid Minion is perhaps the only person interpreting this in a human sort of way. Cardio Minion is obsessed with the movement on the screen, especially spotting the moment when the surgeon runs off: she admires his energy, the peppiness, the attitude, the winner “can do” spirit of it all. Fashion Minion, on the other hand, is just looking at his biceps. He has no clue, none of them do, why this hospital’s uniform does not have full sleeves for the coats, but it shows off the guy’s arms really well, and he likes this a lot.
Scout has no idea why he had to take a phone call to answer the intercom, but it seems that the movie’s logic, like that of a dream, doesn’t expect all that much from its viewers.
That said, none of them are engaged in what they are seeing and hearing quite enough for them not to notice when Scout Minion gives out a single jarring, “hehe.”
“Something funny?” Cardio Minion asks with a smile just as the main character breaks down to her knees and begins weeping in the middle of the hallway, one that’s very busy with gurneys being pushed between masses of nurses and doctors inches from running over her hands.
“Why are you laughing?” Druid Minion adds, her mouth filled with chips, glancing over with a chastising glare. “Her mom’s about to die.”
“Nah, nah,” Scout Minion says, leaning back and lackadaisically waving her hand forward as if to dismiss her behavior. “It’s just… wasn’t expecting that.”
“Wasn’t expecting this?” Druid Minion nods. “Yeah, I suppose the writing’s pretty good, isn’t it? I really didn’t see that coming.”
Scout Minion inhales sharply to stifle another scoff. “Yeah, you bet,” she answers.
Fashion Minion gives a single knowing puff through his serrated, triangular jaws. “Not to your liking?”
She sighs. “I mean, no,” she says, glancing over to the scene where the main love interest surgeon is practically crying over the operating table for this woman’s mother. They’ve had no reason to be this close, but he’s just that sensitive.
Fashion Minion gives her a slant look. “Hmm. So since you can’t have any fun, you’re not going to let anyone else-“
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Scout interrupts. “I didn’t say anything. I just scoffed. I chuckled. That was it, dude, stop reading into things. This movie sucks, straight up.”
The other three share a conjoined chuckle. “You really sounded like Maniac Minion now,” Cardio says.
“Yeah, but like,” Scout Minion reels out her hands, reaching towards the television as if to try and blame it for all of their problems. “You know what? You’re right. I’m not going to inconvenience y’all when you’re enjoying high art. I’m just gonna go check on him,” she says, swinging her little black hands down to push her up from the couch and set her on her way towards the attic steps.
“Try not to disturb him if he’s built his nest up there,” Cardio Minion says with a chuckle. “You know how territorial he can be when he’s having a bad time.”
“Certainly do,” Scout adds as she steps on.
“You two be good up there,” Fashion Minion says with a parental tone.
And just as quickly, Scout Minion, still turned away and heading to the steps, gives him a single flick of the middle finger from her right hand.
Scout Minion goes up the steps, creaking lightly under her weight. She pops her head up through the open way into the dark of the attic… but this time, dinner has been enjoyed, and the sun’s already set. The gentle, dull light of the growing evening that Maniac Minion enjoyed is now silhouettes, stillness, and a growing sense of something hidden nearby.
“What’s poppin’, shithead? Where you at?” she asks, glancing around and her antenna flickering to try and ascertain the location of her not-in-any-way-close-to-being-a-friend type of friend.
She receives no reply in that weirdly cold attic. It’s as if all life has been pulled from the room… except for a single, looming feeling of anticipation – something between the realms of life and death that’s waiting for her to find it.
Her enchanted eyes dart about the boxes and antiques and knickknacks. Anything could be hiding in there. Very faintly, she can now feel the presence of one of her fellow minions at the other end of the attic. Weaving past the antiques and with one hand on the grip of one of her short blades, she eventually spots him, collapsed in front of a black box with an open latch.
There rests Maniac Minion, the signs of a heavenly rest over his face: a sleep filled with actually good dreams.
She winces.
Scout Minion finds the concept of a happy Maniac Minion positively revolting. She can’t help but be surprised when she sees him, snoozing off like there’s no work to do.
“Still slackin’, even up here.” She mutters to herself. She chuckles, shrugs, and starts heading back to the steps. Just as she does, she passes by a coat rack, which happens to have one of those big comfy wool blankets on it. Her gaze slants.
It’s a very cold attic, after all.
A half-minute later, Scout Minion descends from the steps and turns around down the hall. She thinks she’s just going to grab some graham crackers and chocolate and marshmallows and maybe just go out to the fire pit outside and make some more s’mores for her and her alone. Yes. That was her idea of what this weekend was going to be like, but it’s clear that the others are more interested in watching cringe-inducing rom-coms and whatever else they’re going to fancy for after the aforementioned cringe-inducing rom-coms.
“How is he?” Fashion Minion asks, being able to peel his eyes from the extremely handsome surgeon and his extremely handsome surgeon friend, talking over extremely handsome surgeon stuff just long enough for him to address her with his gaze.
“Fine,” she says, heading over to one of the cabinets in the kitchen.
“Little guy just fell asleep, eh?” Druid Minion asks.
“I would say I’m surprised, but I’m not,” Fashion Minion says, glancing back to the television. “I think some of us aren’t too far away from that, to be frank,” he says, glancing over to Cardio Minion.
Scout Minion pops her head up from the countertop just long enough to get a glance at Cardio Minion, who, her arms crossed in a rocking chair and a wide smile on her face, is steadily dozing off.
“I mean, it was kind of a long walk out here,” Scout says.
“30 minutes?” he asks with a scoff.
“And, she was kind of running all the way around the lake.”
He shrugs.
Running or not, it is true. After all, when most destinations around Towerne can be reached by space gate in about five minutes, it’s kind of a surprise to spend more than a few moments getting to where you need to go. So even if it’s just a 30-minute hike out from the lake cabins from Lake Tower, it still is a 30-minute walk.
They are practically isolated in comparison to their regular lives.
Scout Minion turns away, her left arm filled with bags of all the ingredients she needs with the poker stick in-hand. She goes past the open doors leading to the various bedrooms, and she double-takes at one of them.
“Huh. Hey, Fashy,” she starts with an uneven tone.
Fashion Minion glances over like diva.
“Umm, do you fish?” she asks.
His eye squints with intrigue. “What… do you mean?” he answers back.
“The… fishing stuff,” she says, looking over the last bedroom to the left, which is positively filled with fishing lines, poles, nets, tackle boxes, boating items, and more.
“That was already there,” he says with a deflated sigh.
She glances back at the fishing stuff. None of it looks particularly modern, so it fits in well for the place.
“Weird,” she mumbles as she turns for the door.
Could this mean that either Romance Minion or Magic Minion are into fishing? She hums at the thought before opening the door.
She heads outside, goes down to the side of the lake with a fire pit, and with a quick fire spell— she does know a thing or two, after all— she alights some of the wood left to the side to dry. With a deep, deep breath, she gets to her special time.
Scout starts with a couple s’mores, and then a couple more, and then a couple more once again. Another advantage to being a minion of The High Overlord is that you can pretty much eat whatever you want with essentially no side effects, at least up to the point until it changes your own self-image of you as a creature: Gourmand Minion is a fitting example of this, the poor dear.
Scout Minion twirls the marshmallow about on her poker, simulates a gigantic meteor smashing into a chocolate city, complete with extra sound effects for added immersion, and stares up at the stars between the pine tree boughs until the voices stop shouting… the imaginary ones, that is— it’s a very peaceful night.
Next, she steps up to the fire, bathes in it for a couple minutes just to remember how nice it felt to be alive and an actual normal creature. She marvels at the fact that she cannot feel any pain from this whatsoever. She thinks back to her clan’s old charring ritual, and how happy that hunter looked when he came back from his first successful trip.
She hums an old song, takes a very quick nap, eats some more s’mores, and then sings another song. By the end of it all, she’s spent through about eleven logs, and hours have passed. She glances over to the cabin. Its lights are out now, looking like an old drapery across the hill, slipping around into the lake. From where she’s at, it feels like a natural formation from the rock, and there’s something she would admit that’s admirably sacred about it. Once again, she doesn’t care much for humans, but she does like the places they’ve made, and the architectural ideas that they’ve come up with. “Comfy,” she mumbles to herself, almost as if it were a blessing.
Satisfied with her evening, she gets up. The very second she does, however, she notices that all the way across the lake, shining in the moonlight near the opposite shore, is a boat with what looks like someone fishing inside of it.
She stares at the scene for a moment, and responds to her own curiosity with a single, perfect, “Huh.”
But by this time, the s’mores and the moonlight, and the very, very quick nap, and the song and all the old thoughts about old times and old people have caught up to her, and she’s been had— she’s fallen into a stupor of pure comfort and satisfaction.
It’s about time to turn in and retire for the night.
She nods to herself, and a genuine calm smile crosses her usually crass, expressive face. She takes up her things, the poker, the remnants of the trash, and any of the graham crackers and stuff, the plate she placed it all on, and she takes it into the cabin, and it feels like a tomb in the best possible way.
She places the stuff by the sink and goes to her room where, greeted by the flickering of wings and the furrowing of feathers from around the room by Druid Minion’s many compatriots of nature, she takes her own bed. Sure, it’s a bed now shared by a raccoon of some kind, but she still cuddles in under the sheet. She has a good dream, the same way everyone else in the cabin is having a good dream tonight.
Unfortunately for them all, it’s not a guarantee of a peaceful night.
The ref’s whistle blows proudly as a blaze crosses the finish line.
A bright red tracksuit blur slows down just enough to give a quick wave to the uproarious audience before running over to the champion’s podium. The loudspeakers click on as the stadium erupts in cheers.
She came in with a time of .0001 semi-seconds—a new interdimensional world record for all of history. It’s Cardio Minion, the fastest thing alive, and of course, she makes it look so easy. She had been training for this, of course; training so much that her point of view for who she was and what she was meant to do in this life is warped so deeply that her goal has become a cosmic inevitability.
Cardio Minion stands supreme on the 1st place podium above the number 2 contestant: Faster-than-Light travel, who is now groveling in prideful, arrogant frustration. He can’t believe that she beat him. The Omniverse-wide community, composed of peoples from millions of countries, worlds, and dimensions, gather round as they deliver to her the trophy, the medal, the title.
There are hugs, kisses, cheering, and there is the champion’s cloak draped over her by a group composed of the greatest athletes of history throughout the universes. Finally, she takes a breath of satisfaction. Truly, a dream is what a person needs to be able to do anything.
Long ago, she decided that all she was when it came down to it was not chemical processes or magic or ether, but belief. It’s belief that constructed her entire body, and belief is what got her the one greatest gold medal that history will ever know.
Amazing.
And then a contract is presented to her from the side. Past her beloved audience, she peers to a strange hatted man, the brim of his cap curling over a furrowed brow.
“Well done, ma’am. Perhaps you’d like to make this a permanent occasion.”
“Permanent occasion,” she thinks out loud. Amidst the cheering, she looks over the contract: it is a piece of paper with some words she can’t read, but there’s a signature block.
She knows what this is.
And even though she has no clue what the language is or what the words are in particular, she can make out the message as if the words’ meanings seep directly into her mind.
“Infinite speed forever” is the term of the bargain for her… and for the granter of this infinite speed… he receives…
She focuses on the contract, and her antenna, somewhat bunny ear-like in appearance, begin to droop.
“I… can’t give you that,” she says with a tone, a quick shift from the prior sunniness.
The man, slim, tall, and his face well concealed somehow by such a small hat, forms a long curling grin across his face. His teeth are inhumanely large, and have a bit of yellowness to them. It’s not as if he weren’t brushing his otherwise white teeth It’s more so as if the yellow is the actual natural color of his teeth.
Yes, rather than yellow upon white, it is white upon yellow. An appealing falsehood bleaching over the truth. It is not layers pulled away to show its brilliant gleam; it is layers added to conceal the decay within.
“I…” Cardio Minion shakes her head. “I don’t think I can do that. I don’t even know if I have that thing to give away,” she says.
The man smiles again. “Suit yourself.” He disappears into the crowd, but the contract and the pen for signing are still in her hands. She tosses them aside. No way she is going to go through with something like that. After all, she got all this by herself. It was her own effort that got her here.
“What the hell?” she mumbles to herself the very moment that the sky begins to turn a hot red, just like her track jacket, and the moon to a dense, insidious black, kind of like the stripes on said jacket. Her adoring fans, those that look up to her and want to emulate her and become her, her fans all look up to the moon instead of at her… and they begin screaming. They scream as if nothing she’s ever done mattered, and that she is just another insignificant bystander awaiting her destruction. She looks on with her audience as they shout and cry up at the moon.
It’s becoming larger, and it’s headed right for them.
Cardio Minion, in a regular moment, would know this doesn’t make sense, but in her moment of dreamlike delirium, she realizes that this massive black moon’s headed right for the stadium, and it’s going to kill everyone unless she can get them out. She can move, but she can’t move particularly fast. Everyone else has slowed down to a molasses-like crawl as they all turn for the exit of the stadium, even though they can no longer run and have slowed practically to a halt.
The screams are still at full speed and full volume, like a demonic nightmare, and it sends a chill down her spine of the kind that she’s never known before. This is the first time she’s felt to be in the clutches of something that’s both overwhelming and yet unrecoverably malicious.
She’s trapped in a world where she cannot be the hero, a world where, despite how fast she is, it doesn’t matter. She can’t save everyone. She’s the fastest, but she’s nowhere close to fast enough.
Even so, she’s going to try.
She picks up a pair of kids and sprints for the entrance. The sky lightens up, and the moon, despite still descending, does not look like it’s coming towards them. Again, dream logic, she puts down the two kids frozen like statues, and she turns around for the next group. “Only two billion left to go,” a voice says in her mind.
The ascot really does make him look extremely attractive, smart, muscular and fashionable, oh yes.
Out of a dense entourage of very attractive men, applause erupts as a woodchuck poses proudly on a little pedestal, his pink ascot flying brilliantly in the wind from a fan’s blow.
He’s within the art studio, back in the glory days as a… well, a gay, woodchuck fashionista – the omniverse is a very large place, mind you, and to say there can be gay woodchuck fashionistas somewhere is not really that much of a stretch by the end of the day, is it?
Even though his dream is a repeat of the past, don’t get Fashion Minion wrong. He’s a happy fellow and lives a very fulfilled life, making sure all the minions of the High Overlord are as stylish as possible, as is his stated goal, but when it comes to his dreams and how he remembers him self, he thinks back to the old times when he was just a little woodchuck, quite literally.
He hops about on his four legs flamboyantly and in charge, marveling at the fine details of his work with an immense sense of satisfaction and gratitude to those who’ve gotten him this far. Surely he is the most stylish and fashionable woodchuck to ever exist.
It is the annual ascot Fashion Summit, and he’s brought his A-game today.
“Oh, if it isn’t the woodchuck, here to bring some of his mid designs and burn our retinas out with his garish sense of color,” another equally flamboyant contestant says with a wave of the head, this one a human with hair that he probably sourced from a sheep’s fleece.
Chuckles nods his head left and right in the sassiest way a woodchuck possibly can, which, to the surprise of most people, is actually insanely sassy— like at least twice as sassy as Scout Minion. He gives a few nasty, passive-aggressive, yet quite clever squeaks, and what he says is so funny and clever that everyone starts laughing at his nemesis.
Then a giant bucket of tar falls down onto his fashion foe’s head, covering him in tar and feathers, and also killing him instantly. His body lights on fire, and he screams to death, even though he is already dead. It is great, and all the smartest, hottest men are there to congratulate him for killing this guy.
“He has no idea what he is talking about.” One of his super hot, smart friends says, scooping up the stylish little woodchuck and giving him a nice kiss on the cheek. “You’re the best there ever was, Chuckles.”
The woodchuck’s heart shines in the light of warmth and belonging reserved for those who have lived a true life of dedication to their craft. As the smoking hot waitstaff serve the cranberry mimosas in the adjoining conference room, the bodybuilding competition begins on the other side of the gallery, and of course Pomomofo starts playing their newest song. Fashion Minion feels as though there’s truly nothing missing from today.
Almost, at least.
A strange man shows up behind him, and it’s not until he’s finished making out with one of his friends that he finally notices.
“Well, hey there, big shot,” the man says, the brim of his hat curling just gently over his eyes, shadowing his face in mystery. At first, Chuckles isn’t interested because the man’s not very hot, however, he does have a contract in his hand. Something about it just tells him that it is, he just needs to look at it to know.
Chuckles gives a few permissive chirps.
“Of course, sir,” the man says, unrolling the contract for Chuckles to get a better look. Held up by one of his hot friends, Chuckles looks carefully, reading over the terms of the contract. He doesn’t know what the words say, but he knows what the words mean, if that is at all a possibility.
The terms: Chuckles will remain the most fashionable woodchuck in the universe forever.
The cost, however…
His beady eyes focus on that part, and then suddenly he bounces back and shakes his little head. He’d never do such a thing.
“Oh, are you sure?” the man says, and Chuckles comes back, squeaking something that is simply not publishable. He has enough room for just one all-powerful overlord in his life, and it definitely won’t be someone asking for something like that.
The man shrugs and leaves the contract on the nearby table with a pen to sign it. “Suit yourself, offer’s open if you still want it,” he says before turning away and exiting the conference room.
Chuckles gives a commanding squeak to his entourage for them to go and enjoy their mimosas. They do, and they sit down, and just as Chuckles leans back, tipping the glass over his stomach to enjoy his fizzy, zesty delight... things begin to go awry.
“So I’ve been thinking about your contest winner,” his very best hot friend says. And of course, Chuckles squeaks back in the affirmative as if to say “Go on.”
“Yeah, I think you tried hard on that one. It’s really… cute,”
But there was just something about the way he said it. Chuckles is well-versed in the language of subtext, and in his hot friend’s tone, he can feel something razor sharp underneath.
“Yes,” another ambiguously formed hot friend says, “it was very nice. I think you should be proud. You really worked hard!”
But again, there’s just those tiny passive-aggressive micro notations in the voice that tells Chuckles that he shouldn’t be proud, and that it wasn’t cute.
He looks across the gallery and past the shoulders of a couple businessmen chuckling at something in front of them. He realizes that his outfit, complete with its ascot, is in perfect view. They’re laughing at it. He squints as his friends give him more empty platitudes. He looks deeper and deeper into his clothes, the design that the unbiased businessmen are having their little chuckle at.
The colors are so garish: green, purple, bright yellow. What was he thinking? Just then, the tarred and feathered corpse of his nemesis rises up. “You really did do your best, sweetie,” he says as the businessmen’s laughter grows louder and louder, gaining a demonic twinge to their tone, guttural as if dug up from the depths of hell.
This can’t be happening, and yet it is, right in front of him. He made a horrible-looking outfit. He squints as hard as his little woodchuck eyes can, stepping forward to the title upon the contest ribbon… He sees it.
It doesn’t say “first place.”
It… it says “worst place!”
He throws his little hands up to his head, clenches his paws into his face, and emits a woodchucky screech. It sounds really silly and cute, but not to him. He’s having the worst day of his life as he’s buried in more and more empty compliments, as the reality of the laughing businessmen and his horrible fashion across the room tells him all that he needs to know.
“What… do I do?!” he squeaks in his plagued rodent mind.
It’s another night, somewhere deep in the past.
A young lady raises her hands to the heavens within the warm night of a dense forest. An ancient chorus of shadows, insects, and animals sing back as the leaves and the wind create their own symphony. An orchestra of beauty and nature overtake the atmosphere of the small village. It is the night of her induction into the brotherhood of the druids, and she is dedicated to leading the next generation of her tribe down the path of wisdom.
Rows upon rows of delicious food are served as the festival begins. She dances, sings, and plays instruments with her folk, until, of course, she sees the flames in the distance.
“What’s that?” someone asks, and she’s short of breath, because she already knows— this is her favorite dream, after all.
“Oh, just some stupid spirit hovering about. Methinks he’s happy to see that our little Aisling’s joined us,” one of the head druids says. He is a man draped in moss several times over, to the point where it is just a white beard under an enormous blanket mat of green and olive colors and flowers, with a thin pale arm sticking out to hold his walking staff.
Druid Minion, called “Aisling” by her clan for her otherworldly beauty, stands up from her place of honor.
“I’m going to go out and meet them,” she says. “You all should snuff out the fire, pack up, and go as soon as you can,” she adds with a certain tone.
“But why?” the head druid retorts.
“I think the spirits are talking to me,” she says. “It is me that has to do this… on my night.” With that, she drops her new hood and begins heading into the woods towards the distant flames.
“If you say so,” he says, turning to the other druids and people of the clan. “Alright, everyone, party’s over. The new druid thinks we should stop, and you know the rules about initiation night.”
There’s a huge conjoined sigh as everyone realizes she has totally pooped the party by invoking the one rite of the clan that no one really ever invokes.
“But what do you say, Elder?” one of them asks as she walks off into the woods, she can hear the voice of the elder chastising a young hunter, saying they should indeed stop the party because when the spirits speak, they mean it, and they must be listened to no matter what.
She continues on until submerged in the emerald shadow of the night. Her responsible gait becomes a little more carefree now that she’s out of sight from the villagers. She saunters more youthfully, as if intentionally entering a new role, one that is not quite as serious as that of a druid initiate.
She was ready last time, but she is even more ready now, and she misses it.
She heads a mile into the light, and of course, in dream time, that’s only a few seconds. Immediately, she’s surrounded.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?” a hot, tall, shirtless Roman Centurion asks. The only thing he wears is a small loincloth marked with SPQR embossed into it, and a Centurion helmet brushing over his head with an official grace.
“Oh,” she says, as if she doesn’t know, though the smile is hard to keep off her face. She is surrounded, and yet it is all the same man. She pulls her hands into her very human chest and joins them together. “Aurelius Crucius,” she whispers, almost like a prayer. “You’ve come.”
“Anything for you. I’d cross the Rubicon a thousand times just to see your face,” he and his one dozen other identical compatriot copies of him say as they draw in.
They kiss without the corruption of her future overlord’s ether cutting his lips. Between them, she feels the full effect of what it’s like to be human, and her heart leaps with the same thrill of meeting her lover in her dreams, if only one last time.
He pulls away.
“So, I suppose if you dreamt up this many of me, you want to go ahead and get on with it, don’t you?”
Rapidly, she nods her head. Of course she does. She’d been waiting for this moment again for over a thousand years. He gives a knowing nod and leans in to kiss her again. She can feel every single set of Crucius’s hands upon her as they slowly warm each other up for the moment. Tears appear like stars in her eyes. This is what she’d waited for all this time, and even though she knows it’s a dream and a falsehood, she would do everything she could to hold on to this sensation of him holding her.
Then, between kisses, she opens her eyes and sees a man that isn’t Crucius in the crowd.
“Ah, uh,” she stumbles over her words for a moment. Crucius doesn’t seem to notice him. He draws in as Crucius and all the other ones of him pause, as if in a painting.
“Good evening, young lady,” the man says. There’s an immediate rottenness to the air, and she can smell it easily. The scent of wine and incense clings hard on Crucius, but in between those smells, she can pick up something else: like an elk that died in a bog and was left to rot, it’s really quite intrusive. It is rude, in fact. How, in the moment of her absolute perfect bliss, the moment that she’s pinned for the rest of her life as her most wonderful encounter of sincere, intimate connection with another person, this smelly fellow just pops up with some paper in his hand.
“Having fun?” he adds.
She glances over to Crucius, whose face has almost disappeared like an expressionist piece of absurdism: it isn’t really an expression anymore.
“Yes, and you’re in the way of it, thank you,” she admits.
The man with a hat with a brim that shadows his face in a mysterious way creates a wide grin that simply cannot be made by a real human.
“So, what if I could tell you that Crucius didn’t have to go back to Rome tomorrow?” he says with a breathy tone.
Her eyes alight.
“What?”
“Yes, what if they weren’t routed by the Celts? What if they didn’t have to build the wall? What if he could stay with you forever?”
She quickly grabs the piece of paper.
“Then what is…” She stops herself as she looks over the terms. Actually, they seem quite promising.
“You… you can do that?”
“I can.”
“You can change the very fabric of history!?” she asks, forgetting that it’s a dream.
“You can live with him forever in your own perfect world. All the wars will stop, and you will no longer need to heed the words of the spirit if it will pitch your lands against each other. An end of the violence, and a beginning of eternal love.”
The tears of excitement welled up in her eyes turn to tears of deep awe as they stream down her face.
“I can’t believe…” she stops herself, holding the contract like a sacred relic. She looks down at the rest of the page, and the feeling of liberation stops.
Her eyes scroll across the words down below, and she blinks. After a moment, she wipes the tears off her face entirely. It’s not initially clear what the strange language says, but the longer she stares, the clearer it becomes.
“I,” she chokes up again, shaking her head in profound, soul-destroying disappointment. “Not even for him. It wouldn’t matter. I’d never… see him again. This…” Her breathing becomes unsteady. “I, I, I don’t know.”
“Take all the time you have to think about it,” he says, entirely calm, unbothered, and in control. He leaves, allowing all the Crucius’s to continue movement, her eyes wide open at the sky with something left to think about.
“And where were we?” Crucius says, setting one of his copies to lean down a little lower to her waist and gently kiss her stomach after parting the robe away. The thought bothers her, but not enough to detract from the moment. She reaches her fingers down, crossing them through the brown curly hair of her adored one, upsetting the fine scented oils laced inside his hair.
“We’re together,” she says. “That’s all that…” A clarion calls out, a sound calming and beautiful to her, but to Crucius: the sound of a death knell. All at once, the twelve Crucius’s merge into one, a certain sign that whatever kind of strange dream logic is in the moment, this one is going to be personal and related only to one moment with him, rather than a dozen.
“No,” is all he says. He turns up and reaches for his robe, nonexistent from before, but for some reason, it feels right that he has to put something on.
“Wait,” she demands. “It’s okay. I can talk to them!” but it’s too late when she hears a hiss behind her.
She swings around.
Held up by a long, bony hand about the size of an old tree, dangles one of the druids: the mossy fellow from before. He’s been beaten badly, and blood drips from the green tips of his moss.
“I’m… sorry… Aisling,” the druid coughs out. The massive hand throws him down into the grass as the enormous skull connected to the hand leans forward into the moonlit glade.
“Lovers on my warm twilight.”
“No,” Crucius says, “no, it can’t be!”
“Please, Woods Mother,” Druid Minion shouts. “Not him, not him!”
“Not only will I kill him, child, I will make you watch, and it will be very… slow.” The bony hands and vines reach up from the ground, entangling Crucius’s feet. He reaches for his love.
“Aisling, help me!”
She grasps onto him, but the forces of raw nature are too strong. She spots the contract out of the corner of her eye, lying in wait upon the grass nearby.
“B-b-but I can’t!” she cries out as she watches Crucius fall down to the earth by the swing of the Woods Mother.
Somewhere else, in a time that waits within her ambitious, Scout Minion’s having a totally kickass time.
“You’ll never defeat me,” Overlord Superkill says as it looms over the mountainside, its grand dragon skull wreathed in evil flame. “I devour galaxies, breathe worlds, and—”
Scout Minion interrupts it with a quick scoff, twisting the blades around in her hands the way a pro basketball player might spin a ball if she had two of them… or whatever.
“Arrogant welp. I’m immortal. You couldn’t dream to surpass the power of your master, as weak and foolhardy as he i-”
“Right on. We’ll see about that ‘immortal,’ part,” she says, glancing back behind to dozens of mountainous corpses as High Overlord Chaos battles in the distance, downing silhouettes the size of countries and nations and planets. She does her own part, drawing her blades against this dragon pretender.
“Die!” Superkill shouts, spewing black flame with a white-hot core across the entire country or something – dream logic messes around with the distance a good deal.
Scout Minion spins, flips, dashes, slides, and dodges her way across the mass of fireballs, laser beams, rockets, missiles, bullets, ballista munitions, crossbow bolts, and more as she enters his striking space. With a single godly cut, she obliterates the neck of Superkill in one strike, splattering his cosmic blood across the universe like the eruption of a star.
Sick guitar music plays a radical riff as the battle chorus says something in Latin.
She falls to the ground and sets her blades back into their sheaths, and no, she doesn’t look behind herself to see Superkill’s corpse crash into the wasteland valley behind her.
With a sigh, she smiles. “Nice one, f****t,” is all she says causing the body of Superkill to explode in a violent detonation that sends tidal waves of its blood across the world.
Please understand, dear reader, Scout Minion’s internal world is almost as crude as the kinds of things that come out of her mouth – she simply cannot help being a product of her upbringing.
Her scarf, blown back from the immensity of the blast, billows in the wind before she grasps it to brush it off for dust.
“And that’s number ninety-two,” she says, drawing a quick scratch mark in the notebook tucked into her scarf. She turns and sees number ninety-three coming along, some enormous Cthulhu-looking octopus dumbass weightlifter guy with machine guns for eyes. Just as she prepares for the next battle, someone else taps her on the shoulder. The little minion skirts around with a sharp glance and sees a strange-looking man.
Immediately, she doesn’t trust him.
“Ah, doing pretty good, eh?” he asks, smiling.
She gives a short nod. “Hell’re you?”
“Oh, an interested benefactor,” he responds, “a big fan,” he says again before he unrolls the document in his hands and hands a pen to her.
Her expression curls up crassly. “Huh?”
“How’s this? I’m sure you’d like to continue serving your beloved overlord as best as you can.”
She squints and mouths out the words and the terms.
“Matter to him… forever,” she recites.
There’s no need to contextualize for her as to who “he” is. It’s High Overlord Chaos, the one person whose approval she simply cannot do without.
“Well, of course, only for those most deserving… I’m sure you understand,” the weird man says.
She nods and looks over the terms of the contract in this language that seems to her vaguely demonic. She knows she’s seen it before. She’s seen quite a few languages when campaigning with Overlord Chaos, and this one looks like some kind of Abyss Script. She doesn’t quite know Abyss Script, yet she can suddenly understand all of these scary-looking squiggles on the contract. The words seem to reach out to her, and she sees the terms of the contract for what she’s giving up.
She smiles.
“Nah, dude,” she says, attempting to rip the contract in two, failing, and then tossing it aside. “That ain’t me. You can go do your… I don’t know, Faustian bullshit somewhere else.”
The tall, slim man with a hat gets a big grin on his face and nods.
“Sounds good. I’ll just leave it here if you want it.”
“I won’t,” she reassures.
All at once, he disappears into the wind.
The sick guitar music begins again, but this time there’s a heavy metal twinge to it, as if she is approaching something particularly rough. In fact, the Cthulhu guy from before, that tentacle-faced idiot, has totally disappeared. Something else is waiting for her. At first, she doesn’t see anyone, until she looks up at the moon at night and sees the moon staring back: its pupil fiery with anger.
“Ah,” she says. As the form of the cosmic destroyer slowly turns its head to behold her, its 80,000,000 eyes looking straight at her with untouchable malice. The sick guitars begin sounding more like a funeral dirge than boss fight music. Surely, once she hears the pipe organ come in on the track, she knows that this isn’t going to be easy, perhaps not even possible.
“Die,” is all it says before shooting a billion-billion–billion energy bolts at her. They aren’t fast, but they sting like hell, and there’s so many of them it’s impossible to escape.
Like a bat out of the nether, she dodges, scrambles, dives, blocks, and seethes in pain as millions upon millions of bolts cut into her from all sides. After long minutes of concentrated struggle, she’s already pushed to her end. Ninety-two Superkills, ninety-three, ninety-four, it doesn’t matter.
She could have fought a million of them and still wouldn’t be ready for this battle. It is truly a Sisyphean task to even land a single hit on this thing. despite its immense size looming over her like the night sky. It’s a critical, wild battle where she uses every ounce of her skill, speed and wits, but increasingly it feels like she’s a rat trapped in a cage: poked at with a long needle. She hasn’t decided if the cage is real or not. That is something she’s not ready to admit.
With a Grand Slam strike, the enemy buries her into the ground, pummling her into an aching, bloodied ether-spilled mess. It raises a massive longsword perfectly the size of her skull, a star-system back, to impale her with a realm-traveling strike.
“Die,” it says again, throwing it down to destroy her. She dodges out of the way with everything she has and runs for the only one she knows who can help.
“Poppi, I’m comin’!” she squeaks, dashing as fast as she’s ever dashed before. It takes a long time for her to get to him, and she takes a few injuries while running away that she thought would be fatal, and yet she keeps going. She doesn’t give up. She just continues on running to her world-conquering surrogate father.
A swamp appears as if out of nowhere to slow her down, and then an obstacle course and a gauntlet of traps, and then a massive volcano that she has to swim through, but she doesn’t stop. She just keeps going.
Walls box her in, but she smashes through them, and infinite distance shows up between her and her destination, but she just keeps running as if nothing at all could deny her from the love of her Master. With every ounce of faith she has from a wellspring of belief that borders on eternal, she finally, finally makes it to him, as if reality itself has surrendered to her will.
“Poppi, I need you to help me with this guy,” she shouts, pointing over High Overlord Chaos, who has just murdered an entire rival galaxy that is not simply their nations and militaries, but the galaxy itself. He glances over to the thing that Scout Minion is worried about.
“Ah, this?” he says, picking it up by its collar and waving it around like it is a puppy. She doesn’t know how the thing that is as big as the planet is now small enough for Chaos to just mingle around and treat like a little baby, but that doesn’t bother her too much. She’s seen him do crazier things.
“Y-yeah, that,” she says.
Chaos tosses it into the air, chucks back with his sword: The Kingdom Slayer, and delivers a broadside strike into the small thing, sending it out into the cosmos like a batter hitting a home run.
“Don’t worry about any of that.”
She leaps into his arms and embraces him, and he spins her around before looking at her.
“Ah, darling, I’m so happy. Everything’s good. So how are you doing?”
She laughs with relief. “Oh, I’m doing well, Poppi. Very nice.”
He smiles. “Very nice. Goodbye then,” he says, putting her down and turning away to go off somewhere.
“Well, what? But, but wait, wait. Poppi, wait,” she says, catching up to him, if only barely. “It’s not like before. We’re, we’re, you know, daughter and father, we’re together. We’re buddies. We’re pals.”
“Are you sure? I don’t even know who you are,” he says. “And besides, I’m just too busy to worry about things like that: The Verses call me to remind them of their frailties,” he says his jaws growing wide enough to encompass a human head.
Something deep in Scout Minion activates. She’s able to beat through the trauma of the fight, but now it seems like the person she cares about most in her life has… reset. He’s forgotten about her again, (again!) and she’s going to have to do everything in her power to be remembered if it could even be called remembering. She doesn’t even know how to start.
“I…” She winces. “I don’t get it. I worked so hard for us to be together. I worked so hard to win your love.”
“You cannot win love by working hard,” he says, looking up to the stars. “You get love by being special.”
Her eyes slant. “I mean… that does sound like something you’d say, Sir, but that just makes sense to you, Poppi, not to me.”
Chaos does not look over. “And you’re not very special, by the way,” he adds.
She slants her eyes. “Th-thanks.” She does her best to put on a crass tone, but it’s obvious to both of them that he just hollowed her out from that alone.
“Perhaps you should be more like, hmm, Secretary Minion. She’s always very helpful, and she’s special, too.”
Scout Minion waves her hands around her head in disbelief. She hops in irritation like a frightened cat. “You think that bitch could do this?!” she snaps, leaning back to show the High Overlord all the other overlords that she killed, you know, the ninety plus overlords that she’s just destroyed for him, that should be more than proof enough of her dedication.
He scoffs.
She looks back where he is looking, and they are all gone. Chaos shrugs with his normal moonlit grin and shakes his head.
“Perhaps Cooking Minion could use some more ingredients. That might be a nice thing for you to do if you want to be more useful.”
She hops furiously, like an angry little black rabbit. “You, you!! That’s not how this works!” she shouts like a breeze. The wind of the dream blows and the contract, with its pen lighter than air, seems to move over to her with a power that seems almost intentional.
“The hell is…” she stops herself. She looks down to the contract. Yes, the terms are something that are undeniably attractive to her, and yet her sense gets the best of her. Clasping the contract in her hands she looks slowly over to her father, and she stops herself.
“And you… don’t care about me?” she asks.
The dream Chaos shrugs. “You’re only a minion, after all.”
Her gaze slims, trembling over as if she’s about to submit. She tightens her grip around the contract more and more.
A rumbling around her emits as she tries, once again, to destroy the contract – this time, not simply with her dream body, but with her spirit as a conscious effort.
“I… I won’t cheat!” she says as the rumbling becomes louder. “There’s nothing here worth a soul, and there’s nothing worth getting without fighting for it!”
Just as she sees the dream Chaos’ face contort into hatred, the paper gives way, and the contract, as well as the dream predicating its existence, shear in-twain.
The moment she feels the contract tear in her grasp, she pulls in a breath of air from the waking world.
She’s in her bed in the cabin, and it is silent like a tomb, but this time it’s in the very worst way. Her eyes, wide and violated, search the ceiling for answers.
“What the living hell is going on?!” she whispers to herself. She looks around. Even the animals are all asleep. Everyone is asleep but her, and there’s something in the air – that feeling from the attic.
Well, not for long. Scout Minion’s not the sort to flick her antennae around begging for someone to come and answer her distress call – she can flatten lesser overlords, and she can meet whatever’s creeping around the cabin head on.
She gets up and sneaks over to Druid Minion’s bed. Druid Minion’s trembling.
“No, no, Crucius!” she mumbles under her breath. Scout Minion lifts her hand and gives Druid Minion a firm, authoritative slap.
“C-Crucius?!” she whines again.
Scout Minion sighs out a single, motherly “nope,” and straddles Druid Minion before going to town on her face.
“Wake up, ya’ stupid tree hugger,” she snips, one word for every full-armed slap.
Nothing. Druid Minion’s still out.
Scout pulls away. “This is stupid.” She turns to leave the room and get someone else, and that something is clear in the air again… but this time, it isn’t like before.
There’s something alive now, and it is alive with her, and it knows she’s awake. A chill runs up her ethereal spine, but she’s undeterred. She turns to go to Fashion Minion’s room, where he convulses and makes little weird woodchuck squeaks as he rolls over in dread every few seconds.
She gives him a few slaps too. Nothing.
“What the f*** is going on?” she asks.
Finally, she hops over to the next room over and pulls up on Cardio Minion’s face, who just shakes her head and keeps whispering that she “can’t do it in time”.
“What is going on here?” She snips before storming up the attic, finds the soundly sleeping, chuckling Maniac Minion and she gives him a few swift kicks to his groin. Not that this would hurt anywhere else more specifically than any other place on one of Chaos’ minions, but it is a habit she’s picked up for him.
“Wake up, idiot,” she demands.
Yet, he seems perfectly happy with everything. Without a single wince of discomfort on his brow, he’s truly in a wonderful, wonderful dream and cuddled up in the wool blanket that Scout Minion may or may not have put over him earlier.
She scoffs. “Huh. Right. Thanks,” she takes a few deep breaths and looks around as if it would have the answer. This is weird, and if there’s something weird in the dreams trying to get them to sell their souls, if that even works or not is beyond her, but she does know that dealing with that sort of stuff is risky business either way, especially when there’s no High Overlord around to just beat the ever living souls out of any demons that run around who are in the business of stealing souls.
She looks at the box that he is sleeping next to, and finally, her curiosity gets the best of her. She opens it up and she finds a summoning kit.
“Oh, you bastard,” She snips over her breath. She, again, is not very well versed in magic or demonology, but she’s taken it upon herself during some raids to various hell dimensions to take all of their cool stuff and also make fun of them, for the ‘funnies’ of it, of course. Demons are usually kind of pushovers, but right now the cat is away so the mice will play, and what’s even worse is it looks like Maniac Minion’s invited the mice into their house in a very big way. A lit candle, waxed over with a tiny bit of paper creating some kind of a scary star… a hexagram, a sexy gram? What the hell is that thing called? Whatever. It’s a six-pointed star and very magical looking.
It shines out with a menacing demonic irritation. Even the air around it feels corrupted by the sizzling heat of its spitting candles and glowing incantations.
Scout Minion scratches out the incantation, and blows out the candles – the magical feeling in the air does not disappear.
“ ‘Put the relic in the box! I’m sure no one will open it! Back to my shows!’ ” she mocks under her breath with a crude imitation of Magic Minion. “I am gonna kick her ass so hard for this.”
And indeed, kicking Magic Minion’s ass for being irresponsible and leaving extremely dangerous magical items around is on her priority list now, but even higher is getting everyone out of this evil trance and maybe salvaging the weekend. She glances around when she finds, almost, inexplicably, a book about dream walking. Written by Magic Minion in one of her half-finished tomes, its title is Stuff About Dreams and Thoughts About Dreams— good enough for her. This must be Magic Minion’s storage room for sleep magic related items.
Scout Minion glances over to the contents of the black box, complete with the small magic book required for its incantations. With a little study, she realizes that the entity they’re dealing with is a demon called Long Night, and is chief in his demonic hierarchy for delivering things such as beautiful dreams and completed wishes within the realm of the night. Scout Minion, firmly a “dreamer-of-the-day” type, couldn’t care less about such a laughable proposition: selling one’s soul for an ideal nightlife, as it were, but she can’t put it too far past one of her little buddies… if she could even call him her “buddy,” that is.
She glances over to Maniac Minion, sleeping soundly in bliss, and she leans over to the hexagram, where she takes up the piece of paper resting in the center. She unfolds it, and realizes that it’s a description of his perfect dream. A scowl of pure disgust crosses her face, realizing that this is what he’s willing to trade for the peace and sanctity of their little weekend cabin, as well as everyone within it.
No longer.
Scout Minion cross-references between the two books until she finds a nice passage written in Magic Minion’s long cursive script about entering someone else’s dream. Scout Minion stops reading there, because she has an idea. She rushes down to her room and hops in Druid Minion’s bed.
A moment passes as Scout Minion utilizes her practiced sleep technique, and loses consciousness right next to her leaf-covered friend.
Then, a good half minute passes, which could be any length of time within dreams…
All of a sudden, Druid Minion’s eyes open wide and white, her human body once again just a figment of her imagination, the true one packed down deep away around the High Overlord’s ether that surrounds her.
“I,” she stumbles, trembling and gulping down her stress. She looks around, realizes that it was truly only a dream, and then takes a deep breath. “That was… horrible,” and she glances over Scout Minion, having awakened the second she freed Druid Minion from her prison of her own mind.
“How’s it goin’, kiddo?”
The cloaked minion blushes a little bit, stripes of white marking her face. “I mean, if you were scared about… you know, sleeping by yourself, you could have just asked. I thought the raccoon in there would keep you company,” Druid Minion explains. “We’re good friends, but I didn’t really think—”
“I’m fine,” Scout Minion interrupts. “You really don’t remember anything about the dream?“
And suddenly Druid Minion remembers everything.
“Oh…. Oh no. I’m sorry,” she replies, looking away with her black face almost fully white with embarrassment. The reality is that she had remembered the dream, and more so was hoping that Scout Minion wasn’t actually in her dream, judging her.
“Yeah, so like, did he always look like that?” Scout, finding a way to enjoy herself despite the seriousness, asks her friend.
“N-no. I mean,” Druid Minion stumbles over her words as she tries to find the most correct way to tell Scout Minion about her total sexy fantasy without coming across as a total freak, “we were… good friends, and it became romantic.”
“Really,” Scout Minion says plainly.
“Y-R-Really,” Druid Minion lies.
Scout hums. “Well, can’t blame you,” is what she comes back with, winning a shocked look from her antlered friend. “Now get up. Come on. We need to, like, dismiss this demon or something.”
“Demon…” Druid Minion’s eyes alight. “Wait. A contractor?”
Scout Minion, stretching up for movement, smiles, “Uh, yeah, one of those losers.”
Druid Minion struggles up and gets out of bed, pushing over the owls that were nesting in the blankets next to her.
“Well… how?! Those have to be invited in by someone.”
“Yeah, no time to explain. Let’s go.” Scout Minion replies.
Druid Minion gets her stuff on, pulls over her cloak, makes sure that the acorns are tied to her antlers, and other such bits and bobbles that are important for druids.
As the animals snore soundly, the two minions creep out from the room.
“We’re just gonna go right across, and we can get Fashion Minion, okay?” Scout directs.
Druid Minion nods, but just as they dip her antennae out into the hallway, they feel a presence.
There’s someone nearby down in the hallway, looking right at their door, and as much as Scout Minion doesn’t want to admit it, there’s a part of her that feels the presence is familiar, very familiar and disliked. Yes, she may dislike it, but to the others, it’s dangerous: downright terrifying.
The two pause in a moment of conjoined stupefaction.
“No way,” Scout hisses through her jaws as she gets her blades ready, her wide white eyes sharpening to critical slits.
“W-who is it?” Druid Minion, who more or less knows what is going on by this point, says as she pulls out a stick that would definitely help her in the moment to come.
“It’s—”
“Who?!” Druid Minion interrupts.
“—that bitchass,” Scout Minion says in her unique and beautiful type of colloquialism.
The mana signature they’re both picking up with their antennae is that of Lord Knight Justice: a title given to the man called Eine Ainsworth.
The Royal Knights, as one should know, is considered by Chaos to be the greatest nemesis to him and his goals, and yet one worth sparing in most cases, albeit with a bit of tasteful pranking here and there.
This isn’t simply one of the regular knights from the old Knights of Reinen, oh no. This is one of their Lord knights; one of their greatest knights. This man is one of their commanders, someone older than most civilizations, might be as old as Chaos himself, and could probably slaughter an entire tower of his minions single-handedly, a feat that even the greatest overlords would have significant difficulty with. Justice has slain high dragons single handedly, forced the retreat of enemy armies from his sight alone, he’s not simply a man: he’s a living legend within interdimensional society at large.
Reinish Knights are widely considered the greatest human fighters in the known universe, and by the feel of it, one of their fiercest is standing in the hallway right now, looking right at their door.
“No, no, no. No. No, no, no. Noooo.”
“Calm down,” Scout Minion snips over Druid Minion, “it’s fine.”
But it isn’t exactly fine, is it? For some reason, the feeling is so real, it feels like an actual, perfect reproduction of that man’s mana signature: if she knew better, she’d say it’s just an illusion created by that stupid demon.
Perhaps it could pull the dream world into reality somewhat, but again, the mana signature is a perfect reproduction. She closes her eyes, putting everything she has into the act of feeling. To her antenna, it seems like the real package, the true Knight Justice, a man who, at his chief’s command, would stop at nothing to shred them all into little ribbons in the fraction of a second.
She takes a deep breath and prepares for the fight of her life.
But just before she dips out into the hallway and charges him, something else happens. A fish smashes through the window near the side of the kitchen and hits the Knight dead in the face.
“Hit” isn’t really the right term, though.
The knightmare reaches out and catches it like a cat striking a fly out of the air: It’s easy for him. The form of the knight starts back, looks out the window, and immediately darts out the door in pursuit of something else.
The two terrified minions dip their heads fully out their door in disbelief.
“What in the world,” Scout Minion mutter, stepping out and going up to the fish on the floor that the presumed Knight Justice dropped. Quickly closing the front door, she turns back to Druid Minion.
“Let’s get to work,” Scout says wearily.
Druid Minion pops out from the room.
“Okay!”
Scout Minion directs her to a door. “You take fancy boy. I’ll get miss perfect,” and with that, they depart and hop in separate beds. It’s a simple spell: just go to sleep next to the person, and their experience becomes shared…
Druid Minion steps into the art gallery, and it’s degraded significantly.
Fashion Minion’s ascot ensemble, the one that had originally won first place, has a ribbon that’s falling off because it’s transformed into poop. There’s really no better way to explain this other than it had literally transforming into feces, but again, the dream world is a delightful place filled with mystery and magic.
“Oh,” is all Druid Minion starts with as she begins looking around for her friend. The woodchuck, trembling over the table that somehow transformed into a pig’s pen, holds his eyes, welling up with tears, tightly shut. He slowly, painfully motions his little hands (on account of him needing both of his stubby woodchuck arms to hold the pen,) over to the signature block on the contract.
“Hey, that’s enough,” Druid Minion says. He opens his eyes just long enough to see her, but then he looks over the room filled with tables, each one manned with people laughing and chuckling at him from behind his back.
Druid Minion steps into the muddy pig’s sty, and she places her hand on his back. He drops the pen.
“This whole thing is fake. You’d never make anything like that.”
“Look,” he says, now inexplicably able to speak perfectly well. “Fashion Minion… it has my name on it! My honor! My Dignity as a designer!”
Druid Minion shakes her head, the antlers jingling the things tied up to them. She moves over, blocking the view of the ascot ensemble.
Chuckles the woodchuck can no longer see the horrid piece parading as his work: instead Druid Minion’s eyes focus on his own with a gaze of unfettered acceptance.
“You’d never make anything like that, but even if you did, it wouldn’t change that you’re the finest woodchuck I know.”
Immediately, she seems to have an effect on him, which in turn has an effect on the atmosphere. The laughter stops, the lighting changes to something normal, and Druid Minion approaches and gives Chuckles a small tug on his own ascot.
“Besides: are you really trying to tell me that someone that can wear an ascot this stylish made something like that?” she asks.
“I…” he thinks of his words as he looks down to his body. “I… guess you’re right,” he says. “You’re right, I am stylish. Look at me. I look awesome. I’m so fabulous, fashionable, and I’m so trendy and I know things, and I set trends and I’m the best!“
Druid Minion hums half-heartedly.
“You are. So go ahead and tear up that contract. You don’t need it, do you?”
“You’re… you’re right!” he says, squinting, grabbing it and trying to bite into it. This time, the previously impervious paper gives way under his teeth. The dream begins to shroud out of reality, surrendering to what’s real.
He turns to her proudly as she smiles back and leans closer. “I know what it’s like to feel like the past wasn’t right,” she says before giving him the biggest hug that he’s received in decades. “Sorry.”
For a short moment, he feels like he’s in his old owner’s arms again.
“Oh, that’s…” he sniffles. “Yes, this is delightful… sometimes it’s easy to forget how far I’ve come, I suppose.”
The dream world breaks away and fades into shades of gray as everything becomes slower and slower around them.
“I’d say so. Now let’s go back and have a good weekend.”
“… You know it, girl.” Chuckles looks up to Druid Minion with eyes gleaming with positivity. “Let’s slay it.”
In the stadium, Cardio Minion has rescued a whopping 17,585 people so far, but she still has a truly insane amount to go.
As the Black Moon looms just minutes away, Scout Minion leaps in to help. She picks up a kid and Cardio Minion bounces back.
“Sc-Scout Minion? Why are you here?!”
“Hey, listen up,” she says before she tosses the kid into a concrete wall.
Cardio Minion stops flat in shock as she watches the kid slam into the stadium wall.
“Wh-what are you thi-”
“Hey!” Scout interrupts as she picks up an elderly lady right in front of Cardio Minion and then swings her into the wall with the kid.
“W-w-w-wh-what the hell are you doing?!“
“They’re not real,” Scout points out.
“What? Of course, the real look at them. They’re horrified.”
“From what?” Scout asks.
“The moon!” Cardio Minion says, pointing out the very obvious, gigantic obsidian sphere that is hurtling down into their world.
“Right, and you need to pick them up and move them… how far out of the area?”
Cardio Minion double takes, looking for the next person to grab until the implication hits her. She stops herself. “Oh yeah…”
“ ‘Oh’ is right,” Scout Minion helps along with an impatient frown. “This is a dream.”
Cardio Minion finally stops altogether, looks around, and realizes what she’s doing, carrying people out of a stadium to somehow save them from the moon impacting the world?
“Wow, I can’t believe I fell for that,” she admits before chuckling. “Dreams are engaging things, I guess.”
“Come on, Speedo, let’s go,” Scout Minion snips.
Cardio Minion shakes her hands in a way that tells Scout she’s a bit overwhelmed. “But I’m not. I’m not….” Cardio Minion stops herself and looks over to the contract, waiting for her in the same spot where she dropped it. “Will I ever be the fastest, Scout?”
“Does that matter if you didn’t become the fastest by working hard? Is your soul really worth that?” Scout asks, not turning back to look at her.
“Well… to me…” the way Cardio Minion says it is so honest, so personal. Truly, she could have her dream of being the fastest thing ever, and she’d deserve it for trying so hard for so long, couldn’t she?
Scout Minion sighs. “You should keep working to be as fast as you possibly can, and it won’t be your victory unless it’s you who do it. You know that the best out of any one of us,” Scout Minion says, but Cardio Minion still looks back at the contract.
“…but I could outrun the moon. I could even outrun… Big Coach.”
Scout Minion scoffs. “That thing’s just going to steal your soul, you dork. You’ll be fast in your dreams, but that doesn’t matter: it’s not real life. You’re still not even close to Chaos. He’s so much faster than you. Full stop. You have to accept that there’s always someone with fewer limitations than you. You can remove as many as you want, but there will always be someone who sacrifices more. He’s going to be faster than you forever, and you can accept it, or you can keep struggling with not being good enough.”
Cardio Minion blinks back tears. “Wh-what?”
“You are good enough, but you’re good enough as you are. You’ll never be faster than him.”
Despite the cheesy, and perhaps nonsensical way of putting it, Scout’s words hold the power of the dream at a standstill, as if the thought of humility and acceptance has cut through into her friend’s sense of reality.
Cardio Minion gives a long, sad pause. “F…Forever?“
“Yes, forever,” Scout Minion reasserts. “Continue doing your very, very best, but you have to play with the cards you’re given, and ‘instantaneous inter-dimensional travel’ is not something anyone else but him can seem to do. So there – forever.”
The tall, track-suited minion takes a deep breath, and comes to an accepting nod. “Okay… forever,” she reiterates.
“It’s going to take time,” Scout says, “but you’re going to be here with us, and we’ll help you get faster as long as you’re willing to keep trying,” she adds with a surprisingly gentle smirk. “I can relate to not feeling like you’re doing well enough – believe me.”
Cardio Minion squints at the ground, and then the contract resting on it. She looks over all the people at the podium. The trophies have now fallen over from the panic. She looks over at the second place podium for a second, and then back at first.
“You know, it wouldn’t really be my victory if someone gave it to me, would it?”
Scout grins. “No, it wouldn’t,” she says. “We’re not going to give you anything. But you know we’re all backing you up. We’ll help you every step of the way.”
“Really?! You’ll go to my meets?” Cardio Minion asks, her voice hopeful and her eyes wide in surprise.
Scout Minion glances away. “M-maybe, yeah.” And that maybe alone is more than enough to pep Cardio Minion back to her usual self. She tears the contract in half.
“Alright, let’s do it! I’ll work to become the second fastest in The Verses!” With the dream already melting away, she picks up Scout Minion and spins her around before bringing her in for a hug. “You know, Scout, you’re a good friend,” she says, looming over her as Scout Minion falls limp.
“Uh, yeah, whatever,” she says. They pause for a second as Scout Minion clears her throat awkwardly. “Thanks, I guess,” she adds at the end of it.
All at once, the four open their eyes, ready to go. They bust out of their prospective rooms, and share on-task glances.
“Alright, so now all that’s left is…” Scout stops herself, looking down the hall again. The guy is back.
“Pah! Another dream, no doubt,” Fashion Minion says with a haughty glare before he starts up to the from of Knight Justice. “And just who do you think you are, Mr. Knight? Very big and strong, eh?”
“D-Dude,” Scout Minion starts, trying to pull back even a little bit on Fashion Minion’s brash certainty of what all this is.
“Another dream here to trick us, no doubt,” he says, loading his finger behind his thumb to give the helmet a flick. “Be gone with you- ow!“
A metallic clang emits from the supposedly illusory Knight Justice as Fashion Minion pulls back his hand.
“…You minions have some pretty sick ideas when it comes to practical jokes, just like your master,” Justice says.
There’s a pause as everyone comes to terms with what’s going on. Three of the minions, excepting Scout, scream at the top of their lungs as they dart around in shock. Scout Minion, who delivers more of a challenging yawp than a scream, draws her blades ready for the fight as the other three cower around the cabin.
“Now you just listen here, you stupid son of a—” before she can strike with her blades, Justice proves twice as fast, cutting through one of her short swords and marking across her face with a wide white scar.
She notches back in surpise.
“I’m going to stop you and your evil ways once and for all,” Justice hisses through his helmet, glowing an authoritative blue from his myriad armor enchantments. Scout, giving a single sad glance at her broken blade, pushes the other sword into her two hands.
“Try me then, ya’ cheesy bitch!”
A wild clashing emits from the living room and kitchen.
Druid Minion turns to the other two. “We have to get Maniac Minion.”
“He’s in the attic, right?” confirms Fashion Minion.
“But what about Scout?!” Cardio asks with a yelp.
The other two look at her with slant, stressed gazes.
Cardio heads along with them for the attic. “I guess she’s the only one for it…” she whines as they reach the stairs.
The three start up as Scout Minion’s essentially forced to duel one of history’s greatest knights.
With a twist and a cut from his weapon, he cuts through the couch like butter, leaning forward and casting a magic spell to smash her down to the size of a coin. She dodges over when she feels the change of mana in the air, manipulated by such a powerful wizard.
“How could you do this?! We had an understanding,” he says with an unbothered tone as he slices forward.
“We didn’t do anything, turd. This is our lake.
“Too far away from your tower. We don’t consider this your territory. And if you wanted to keep all of your rotten sloven activities to yourselves, you will do it at the towers.”
She scoffs, “S’mores are delicious, asshole. There’s nothing wrong with s’mores!” she reiterates, going another lightning-fast bout of strikes as she tries to create an opening.
Now it is reasonable to understand that Justice is not the kind of fellow to be trifled with. After all, he’s killed armies single-handedly, but so has Scout Minion, as Chaos’s top ass-kicker on regular ass-kicking duty, and arguably one of the very, very strongest. She’s the kind of minion that’s called for when it comes to beating upstart Knights around their home, but Justice is no upstart.
She clings to the wall to avoid another lightning-strike slash and slides across to dodge a blink-fast follow up from Justice’s blade.
All she needs is the right moment… and then suddenly, between the beats of a butterfly’s wing she sees her spot. She strikes down, looking for the gap in Justice’s armor: very slight due to its magically sealed nature, but with enough force, she can depressurize the armor and strike it down into his collarbone in a single hit.
“We decide where we go!” she shouts at the top of her ether-charged lungs as she buries her blade into his shoulder. Real red human blood spits out along the blade as she twists it just in time for him to reach around and catch her.
A hit like that would kill a normal person, but she underestimated him, as incredible as that sounds.
Grasping at her left antenna, he swings her around down to the ground and pins her under his knee before he sends his elbow into her skull. The rock-solid armor is painful as it cuts down deep into her body, and like a pulse of light, she no longer can understand what’s happening. Everything speeds up, but it becomes a blur, and she can’t respond to the attacks anymore. Another hit and then another, and then a fierce white-hot gauntlet sent straight into her face. She feels her blood and nerves splatter out as her consciousness fades. She has enough sense to say one last thing: concentrating her remaining energies, she breathes it out.
“Pussy.”
She can hardly get the word out before everything goes black…
Time passes…
Scout Minion flinches awake after almost an hour. Mumbling to herself, she looks around the cabin. It seems real. This doesn’t feel like a dream.
“Ah, I see you’re finally awake,” a suave, banjo-twang voice says from the rocker where Cardio Minion had dozed off upon last night. Scout Minion pulls herself up, only the slightest hint of infusia leaking from her front side. Now she’s mostly recovered, and in record time too. The question she has, is why she is still alive?
“Yeah,” she says, uncertain. “And… who are you?”
The voice gets down from the rocker, revealing a stature somehow even shorter than hers, but due to the trucker hat on his head—it makes him look quite a bit taller.
She squints at the words as her vision returns to her:
“Women need me, but my love is the ocean. Wildlife itself is my only companion, but I walk alone on this bare earth with a rod in my left and a Bible in my right,” and then there is this ellipsis before going on to say “—and by that we’re talkin’ about a fishin’ rod and a fishin’ magazine. Yee Haw.”
This script alone, with it’s big font, makes it roughly seven times taller than a regular trucker hat, so it’s truly, outrageously tall.
“You’re… you’re…” she waves her finger around, trying to place the name.
“Fishin’ion,” he says. “I do at times go by Fishion’, though. I’m the High Overlord’s number one Fish-Man.”
“Oh,” she replies suspiciously.
“He wants it, I pull it outta the water.”
“So you must have been the guy on the lake,” she asks.
“Yep. Been here the whole time. Went fishin’ ‘cause I got here early.”
She blinks at him. “And you just missed everyone else?”
He shrugs. “Fishin’ don’t wait.”
She nods. “Right. Sure,” she says, not scorning his hand attempting to help her up as she pushes herself to her feet. “Where’s everybody? Where’s That dickass Knight?” she asks, stretching for round two, wherever it could be.
“I don’t rightly know. It seems as though everyone’s upstairs,” he says with a flick of his antennae with little hook shapes at the end. Scout Minion squints, and with her enchanted eyes she can just barely make it out. There is not just one presence up there: it’s five now; in fact, she can almost feel it as six.
“The… hell?” she mumbles as Fishin’ion gets back in his chair to do a little rockin’.
“He must’ve gone easy on you,” he says, “probably wanted to get to the bottom of it before makin’ his decision.”
“No, he tried to kill me,” Scout Minion steps back. “No one goes easy on me.”
“Then why are you alive, darlin’?” he asks, tapping his cool little fishing boots together. Really, they look like regular boots, except for the fish on them, and he likes that because he likes fishing, and fish.
She sighs. “This is so messed up. Like, how did they find us?”
“Can’t recognize. I know when I tossed that fish out the window, I was figurin’ he’d just run off like some bear. But he looked ‘round for me for the better part of a half hour, then went back around t’ the cabin… Went back around here to take a look again. Imagine they’re all up there. You wouldn’t reckon t’know what’s goin’ on, would ya’, miss?”
Scout Minion gives an exasperated sigh as she searches for her good sword. “I mean, it’s like a…”
“It’s like some kind of demon,” he says.
She flinches. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
He nods as he continues to rock in the chair. “When I fell asleep on the boat,” he takes a deep, manly breath in sweet, rustic reminiscence: “It was a recreation of ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ and that was just wonderful… and then it was a perfect recreation of ‘Moby Dick,’ and that was just wonderful too… and I was havin’ a great time. I don’t always subscribe to none of them big philosophical arguments, but you can bet me when I see a fish, I’m gonna catch it, but my rod just kept breakin’.”
“Oh, so he offered you, like, a really good rod in exchange for your soul?” Scout asks.
“But right away, I knew that my strings don’t break like that because I’m the best fisherman there ever was,” he says, pulling aside the brim of his cap to conceal his wide eyes filled with the mystery of a man and his battle against the aquatic life of the many worlds he’s traveled.
Scout Minion almost snorts in pleasure. “Oookay. Well, we gotta get him.”
“Damn right,” he says with a single tip of his hat. “When you’re ready, let’s go up and get ‘em.”
The scout takes every precaution before she goes up the stairs – professionalism is key to a professional, after all.
Fishin’ion, on the other hand, just kind of saunters up: an old country boy, unbothered by anything. To him, it is quite obvious that this is just another day not fishing, and as such, it is to be dealt with the maximum amount of lackadaisical, lazy sort of gallivanting that would most easily deliver him to the next session of him fishing without worry, which is clearly the one thing he truly cares for.
“Can you quiet down?” she says with a quick, silent flick of the antenna to transmit the message to him.
“I save my quietness for the water, Missy,” he replies back, out loud. “Let’s get this over with.”
The demonic exuberance within the attic is palpable. It isn’t simply a feeling now, but a sight, a sound, a scent: a complete envelopment of warning: that whatever is before them is encroaching, ugly, and unspeakably evil.
Through the engulfing miasma, they can see the skim outlines of downed minions and a kneeling knight, as well as the spell circle from before spewing rotten demonic energies in all directions as an affront to all that is beautiful and good in their world.
“Looks like they entered the dream,” Scout notes with a hiss. “Why?”
“Yup. Looks like they’re in the grasp of that demon again,” he says with a matter of fact tone as he grips his suspenders and leans forward.
She looks over to him with a mixed expression. “I mean… duh? The question, is how are we going to get—” She stops herself as a spiritual tremor runs through both of them. She stumbles back. “H-how in the world?!” She stumbles over her words a moment doubly in shock.
Granted, for a minion, it isn’t a usual happenstance for some attempted demonic possession to be successful in any way. Obviously, with the protection of the High Overlord’s ether, one gains an arguably ludicrous amount of resistance to almost any kind of control—mental, physical, spiritual, or otherwise. The realization that this pulse of energy almost took them off their feet is proof enough that the creature they’re dealing with is extremely powerful.
Scout Minion’s eyes slowly dim in concentration. The downed knight, kneeling as if in prayer or contemplation, seems entirely unguarded. Could it be that this great warrior has allowed himself to become vulnerable to banish the demon and save them? If he’d truly been taken in by the demon’s dream, then she could simply, with a few sturdy strikes of her blade, be away with him forever… but in these days, a semblance of honor does exist between the Minionry of Towerne and the Royal Knights of Reinen…
To each other, they are something to foil, perhaps capture and imprison, but not kill. For her to kill a Knight would issue a rampage of climactic proportions from the Knighthood, one that would set Lord Knight Captain Order on her next rampage against them. She knows better, just as she’s relieved to see that he does too, as a result of her survival from their rare engagement.
She sits down across from the wall, joining her hands together, and enters a Zen-like stance, prepared for a meditative trip that will test her to her maximum limits.
“Alright,” she says. “I’m going in. You can come along too. Just take a few deep breaths and—”
“I don’t think I’ll be doing that one,” Fishin’ion says. “The Good Lord forbids such dealings with demons. There ain’t nothin’ a little faith and a good fishin’ rod can’t fix,” he says, correcting her.
Scout Minion’s eyes squint with disgust. “I mean, we probably need to meet this thing on its own playing field if we’re going to beat it, but if you want to just go sit around and play with your rod, I guess you can keep a lookout.”
Fishin’ion turns to look through the other side of the window over to the lake. “Oh, I’ll be lookin’ out, all right.”
“Great,” she sighs.
“For some fish,” he adds.
Scout Minion sighs and closes her eyes. “…Okay, whatever,” she says, trying to calm down. “Just don’t do anything crazy,” she adds, winning a smile from him.
The next pulse from the demonic circle fires out, and immediately she’s swept into the dream… but it isn’t like last time. Her senses and consciousness are integrated seamlessly into the new paper-mache-like reality that she steps into…
She opens her eyes, and the first thing she sees is the 24-karat, fully solid, 70,000-ton head of Maniac Minion, wearing a crown in statuesque elation, looking up to the sky as the centerpiece for a great gate.
She reads the words: “Maniac World.”
“Nice,” she mumbles to herself over the cacophony of carnival music playing all around her. A massive parade of cool robots, all in his likeness, parade across the street, playing grand scores all for the glory of Maniac Minion. There’s Maniac Minion-themed food sellers on the sides of the street selling Maniac Minion-themed hot dogs, pork buns, pretzels, and more. An everlasting 24/7 fireworks display erupts all across the land, flooding the universe with a thin patina of rainbow light with each explosion, each one exploding to display Maniac Minion doing something cool.
She gets up to her feet and tries to make sense of everything as she’s quickly approached by a pair of bulky guards in Maniac Minion-accented armor.
“Well, well, well. Look who’s here for the party,” the one on the left says as he positions his broadsword over his shoulder for a quick slash. “Now you better come with us, little girl.”
“Oh, where are you taking me?” she asks, keeping her hands on the handles of her dreamed up blades with a nonchalant, deceptively unready-looking poise.
“Where else?” the douchey-sounding guard on the right ejaculates with a shrug. “Over to see the big boss himself. Not like there’s anywhere else worthwhile to go— know what I’m saying?”
The two guards produce a gut-reversing chuckle: overfed jovial laughter with an equal part of pre-vomit gurgling thrown in.
With a curt nod, she steps forward. “You know, that sounds good to me. Let’s go, fellas.”
How nice of them to take her exactly where she wants to go. If they become a bother, she’s dealt with fellows that size hundreds of times, perhaps thousands— one tends to lose count when they’re considered the best for so long.
Her checkerboard scarf billows in the wind as the two great doors, both embossed with galactically exaggerated depictions of Maniac Minion, display him as a ten-foot-tall Adonis capable of downing any enemy in his wake, surrounded by beautiful women of all kinds as he slides down the block on a cool skateboard all at once.
She distills mental paragraphs of disgusted, irritated, pitying observations into a single disparaging thought.
“Loser,” she thinks to herself with a smirk.
They lead her through gaudy platinum, gold, and silver-plated corridors encrusted with jewels from the farthest reaches of the strangest, most dangerous places in The Verses. Across great paintings of great acts and great moments in his history, the vast majority of which being outright fabrications, they ascend the steps fashioned with a marble so pure and so rare that they exude a cloud-like glow.
Scout’s antenna twitches. She can hear a fight somewhere nearby, but she isn’t quite sure where. The walls lie to her here, untrustworthy matter in an untrustworthy realm.
At the summit of the stairs, in a massive Jacuzzi throne room/amusement park/cafeteria combo, sits in the center, his greatest and most royal of majesties: Maniac Minion. He waits, surrounded by a hundred attendants, viewed by a thousand, and worshipped from afar by millions. He, upon his holy throne, looks down upon Scout Minion as she’s demurely led up like a captured maiden to his grand pedestal of attendants.
He mutters his greeting out like a long, confused string of things he could say, but none of them sound good in his head, so he doesn’t. “A fan of the place?” he gets out, despite the complete awkwardness of the greeting. All the attendants seem very pleased with it, however; and give him a round of applause for the very clever thing he said.
Scout Minion squints. “It’s cringe. So what’s the big idea with this demon?” she asks, cutting right to the chase.
“Demon?” he laughs back. “There’s no such thing. I met a guardian angel,” he says, bringing his hands to his chest as if preparing to make a glorious soliloquy. “And he helped realize my dreams forever: No more pain. No more suffering… Is that something a demon would do?”
She scoffs. “Dude, what pain and suffering?” she asks. “We’re minions of, you know, him. Like, we don’t need to worry about anything. The only thing we have to suffer with is when you go out and do stupid things like this!“
“Pain,” Maniac Minion interrupts, “the kind of pain one has when you’re belittled your whole life, day in and day out. Suffering… the kind that you could not even begin to fathom, the sense of worthlessness, the ineptitude of it all.”
“Very good, very good,” says one of the bystanding courtesans, who joins in with her fellows to give Maniac Minion another round of applause.
“Ah, seems like that was just the right thing to say, wasn’t it?” Maniac Minion says with an incorrigibly punchable smugness as he adjusts the ten pound crown atop his head.
Scout Minion glares at him before going on. “Either way, you need to call this off. Get us out of here.”
He laughs, pauses, and then laughs again. “Oh, dear. That’s not how it’s going to work,” Maniac Minion says, his gaze slanting with pure elitism. “This dream is now our reality. We’re here forever. Nothing will be able to rescue you, my little Scout. It will simply be a perfect dream upon a perfect dream upon a perfect dream… forever!“
“Aw, shut up, will ya’?” she shouts.
With a flick, she draws her blades in the blink of an eye. “If you’re not gonna come willingly, I’m just gonna cut ya’ to bits until you’re begging to wake up!”
Other blades show up as fast and as deadly as her own.
She looks around. Every attendant seems to be a weapon master of some sort— melee, ranged, magical: the entire gamut of warfare seems to be represented here—there’s even a pair of attendants manning a mortar tube aimed in her direction and pointed very, very high.
Maniac Minion snaps his fingers. From an overhanging beam, rope pulleys activate to lower down the other minions from the real world, tied and dangling helplessly in the air.
She sighs. “For real?“
He nods in return. “For real, for real,” Maniac says, glancing up at Fashion Minion, Druid Minion, and Cardio Minion like fetching trophies. “I control reality around here, Scout, and that’s because I’m absolutely the best… and finally, everyone here will know it.”
“Any of us could destroy you,” one of the guards says behind her as the sounds of battle rage on from someplace far off. Scout still can’t quite place the direction. This entire place is overwhelming her.
Smiling, she doesn’t put away her weapons. “You think I’m gonna go down like a bitch and become your little water girl?” she asks with a crass grin.
As if what she said were some kind of dire premonition, he immediately tugs on the collar of his regal, excruciatingly gaudy golden chest piece.
“No thanks, sister. He’s got plenty of people who can serve him something to drink,” a lithe voice says from the back of his surrounding crowd. “Comin’ right up, sir!” the person adds as the crowd parts for them to move up.
Scout squints over as Maniac Minion stumbles over himself.
“O-o-oh there’s no need for a drink right now! I didn’t ask for one, thank you!” he says before bouting into nervous laughter.
The same moment, the source of the voice reveals hereslf, falling out from the crowd with a tray replete with fancy drinks.
It’s Scout Minion… except it isn’t quite Scout Minion.
With drink tray in hand, she strikes an uncharacteristically graceful, coquettish pose. Despite wearing high heels that could only be the marker of either insanity or direct demonic influence, she balances the drinks between her hands with an unearthly skip. Also, the scarf is gone, replaced instead by a tasteful white bathing suit.
Yes, indeed, there’s nothing that either Scout Minions have to hide when it comes to body shape or private parts, after all, the ether conceals and consumes every feature of one’s body… with that said, however; Scout Minion can indeed feel the severe fetishistic impropriety being pushed upon her by seeing her own form in a tight, delicate-looking bathing suit.
She blinks for a moment to make sure that what she’s looking at is real, or at least real within the dream.
With his cover blown, Maniac Minion has to simply accept the glass of water from the clone version of Scout Minion.
“Th-thanks,” he coughs out.
While he drinks the glass of water nervously, Scout Minion, the real one, can’t help but look aside to the others.
Surely, he couldn’t possibly have intended it to be this way, right?
She glances over to the serving girls to confirm her suspicions. The usual suspects are indeed there. At least the kinds she would expect to be talked about, fantasized about, and thought about in this particular way: Magic Minion, loved by some, Lady Minion by a few others, and of course, the top on most of the lists, the practically indescribable Beach Volleyball Minion. These false simulacrums of these people all stare at Maniac Minion with obtuse gazes of endless admiration. Yes, surely he is that guy, and this is his perfect reality, and Scout Minion finally clicks through her head that this does, in fact, include a version of her in a cute one piece.
There’s a waiting pause in the place as she looks to the floor.
She can’t quite say anything about it yet. She doesn’t even have the words for such an uncharacteristically awkward moment, even from him. This is truly a new low.
She glances over at the demure, less vicious version of herself, and then glances back at Maniac Minion, who avoids her gaze.
“Gotcha,” is all she puts out.
He clears his throat.
She releases a quick ‘tsk’ before looking over to her clone. “And who are you supposed to be?” Scout Minion says.
Suddenly, the sweet smile on the clone gains a hint of maliciousness. “I’m you,” then her eyes slant, “but better,” she adds with a little sway of the hip that’s apparently supposed to look a little bit sexy while also being a little evil at the same time: we should ask Maniac Minion just what the hell he was thinking sometime after this.
“Now, ladies,” Maniac Minion says, waving his hands ineffectually. “I’m sure there’s enough of me to share.”
“Shut up,” both Scout Minions say, one arrogantly and in complete fury, and the other one reassuringly and confidently – as if to say “I’ve got this.”
“I’m carvin’ you up first,” Scout Minion says to her clone. As if out of nowhere, a pair of dual blades to match her own appear in the grasp of the copy.
“That’s what the others wanted to do, too. They saw their better half and decided to fight it rather than just give up like they should have,” she leans forward with a predatory grin. “I suppose you’re all about the same amount of stupid,” the clone’s eyes gleam ambitiously. “I’m sure we can have Master imagine some shit for you to clean up after we’re done humiliating you and reminding you what your place is, mmm?”
Catalyzed by its words, Scout Minion leans in for the cut.
“After all~” the clone starts with a truly incredulous confidence, “that’s probably the only thing I’d let you be better at than me!“
Not another word comes out. In a blink-fast instant, Scout impales her jaw shut with a cross from her dual blades. The clone flinches to retaliate, but Scout quits her own blades, lodged firmly into her opponent, and takes those of her enemy, impaling those two into her skull as well. Scout Minion leans in just as a torrent of white blood gushes out of her fake.
“The only thing I’d ever let you be better at than me, Sister,” Scout starts as she leans in, “is fertilizer!” With a kick and a spin, she sends the clone off the massive pedestal, hundreds of meters off into the wall, over the waterfall, and into the massive pool below. She tugged one of the blades in the technique, preserving it for future and probably quite prompt use.
The crowd, because it is what they know best, applauds.
“Wait, wait. You’re not supposed to clap to that!” Maniac Minion shouts before turning around to the invader. “She was like, way better than you, Scout.”
She grins back, and is about to lecture him, when his face lights up in realization.
“Oh yeah!” he scoffs. He snaps his fingers, and in a flash of light, there’s another perfect copy of Scout Minion: white bathing suit and all.
“Whoops,” the new Scout Minion says as she draws her own dual blades with a knowing smile. “Not quite as easy as you thought, was it?”
Scout Minion produces a single irritated grunt as she prepares her singular blade for the fight… and what a fight it is.
Throwing propriety to the wind, the attendants pile in. Her speed is the only defense she has from the dozens, and then hundreds of weapons and projectiles flying her way. She’s trained in this kind of thing. It is far from the first time that she’d had to take out more than one opponent, but it is the first time she’d had to take on more than one fictional opponent that didn’t truly exist.
She feels a bolt shot by a fake Crossbow Minion graze across her cheek, and she feels the cold white blood of her infusia marking her. The damage to her is real, but with every one she defeats, a copy takes its place seconds later. She meets the strike of a clone of Combat Minion, faster, dumber, and angrier than the real thing. Scout Minion can only skirt around the edge of the formation as they rush her down from every corner. It seems more of them appear in the blink of an eye, as if unfolding from the near air to bring her low.
She won’t have it.
Scout Minion fights on fast and hard, disarming one enemy and using said armament to strike at another. The other real minions can be forgiven. They aren’t exactly the fighting types, but her? This is what she knows best.
And then, looming tall within the crowd, is only one that could distract her.
“Well, look who we have here,” Overlord Chaos says, or at least something that appears to be him.
In the split second of her hesitation, Scout winces from the pain as Ninja Minion stabs deep into her with one of his tanto knives.
“You,” she flinches before spitting out infusia. “You cheated.“
Overlord Chaos’s face shifts into another face, and then another, and another. Most denizens of the universe have issues telling minions of Chaos apart. Those blessed with ether tend to lose most of their defining features… that is, until one becomes a minion of High Overlord Chaos themselves, in which case they can see every micron of uniqueness to the faces, antennas, jaws, eyes, and otherwise, and the thing that was Chaos is taunting her with everything it has: it ceases to have a face at all.
Like an amorphous blob of all ether creatures she’d seen, the Chaos-thing lumbers towards her with a wild, fluctuating grin.
“Cheated?” it asks her. “This is my world. I’m only playing by my rules,” it says with a smile before it nonchalantly snaps its fingers.
A jagged knife appears out of nowhere, manifesting directly in her stomach, and she collapses onto her knees as she feels her internal organs part from the sharpness inside her.
With applause and laughter from Maniac Minion’s evil retinue, the little lord of this world gives a confident, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loved grin. “Well, there you have it, biiiitch!” he says, leaning in to deliver a single laugh of untouchable triumph.
Everyone but the dangling true minions laugh at Scout, and her enchanted blood spray helplessly onto the nice marble floor.
Maniac Minion watches the white flow out of her for a moment with a bemused superiority as the sound of combat far away, masked from their quick tussle, becomes more and more audible, as if encroaching up the walls of the city and headed their way.
Scout hears it now and connects the dots in her head. Yes, while all the others are fake, herself and Maniac Minion’s antenna work as intended, and they can feel the magic signature coming closer. Even in a dream, it works for them. Even in a dream, they can feel a Reinish Knight approaching.
“Uh, who’s that?” Maniac Minion asks with a suddenly unnerved smile.
She scoffs, choking out some more white blood. “Do you even need to ask?” she interrupts. She attempts to stumble up to her feet and gets a short moment of edgewise, just as an armored bolt bursts up from the side of the wall. In an explosive landing, bricks and dust turn up for a dozen meters in all directions. It’s like a cannonball hit the pedestal.
In a moment, it clears to show the shining white armor of Royal Knight Justice, the underplatings shining blue as if the man were glowing under all that plate.
“This is the source of it,” he says, his visor pulsing with the tenor of his voice. He turns to the throne. “It’s hiding… there.”
“W-what’s hiding?” Super Insane Maniac Minion says as he tries to squirm over for his ultimate epic weapon. Of course, in most other realities, his ultimate epic weapon is just his very irritating and disaster-prone personality. But here, in his perfect world, he wields a mighty blade known throughout the annals of history as Death Killer.
…
Don’t look at me. He’s the one that came up with the name, and he thinks it’s “hella tight” in his own words.
Knight Justice’s head arches forward as he brandishes his sword, a true epic weapon, and flicks it from all the dream blood of the false creatures he’d had to cut through to get up here.
“Demon, show yourself,” Justice commands.
“I’ll show you these nuts!” the yelping Super Insane Maniac Minion shouts as he points the blade at him, shooting a magic bolt of pure power at Justice. Justice only needs to lift up his blade and intercept the bolt to neutralize it completely.
Everyone’s silent for a moment in awe-stricken horror.
“Wh-what? How!?” the king of this world screams like a chipmunk caught unawares.
Justice scoffs. “I didn’t come here the same way you did. I broke into the dream. I don’t surrender to fantasies,” he explains. “It has no power over me.”
“That… doesn’t make… any sense!” Maniac Minion shouts. He waves his hand, and suddenly a massive abyss opens under Justice, but the Lord Knight is undeterred. He just stands upon the surface of thin air, with the looming drop of one billion lightyears beneath him. Justice steps forward, preparing his sword for another strike.
“Th-th-this can’t be. This is my world. It doesn’t make any sense!” Maniac Minion shouts, throwing aside his crown and taking up the sword with two hands as he steadily backs off the throne. His servants, now all crude caricatures of who they were supposed to represent, run off in droves.
“A power given is never true— it has to be grown to— it has to be earned,” Justice says as he lifts up his blade, as if to strike into Maniac Minion, but instead twists into the throne and cuts across with a dragon-leveling strike. The stone shards blast in all directions, and a malevolent screech fills the massive throne arena, the clouds themselves parting with the force of the scream.
“This matters not. I have their souls!”
Justice reels his sword up for another strike as an amorphous black gas, smoking with demonic cinder, curls in and prepares to lunge.
“No,” Justice says with a tone of undying, practiced certainty. “You could not take that which cannot be given. I do not trust their master, but I do trust that he would never allow you to sneak underneath his nose and steal his children away like this… Just the same as I will not allow you to exist on this plane, or any other where you can deceive and usurp humankind.”
Scout coughs out another helping of white blood. “In whatever form they’re in, humans only?” Scout Minion asks, holding her wound with a sassy refrain.
Justice bends his head down with a critical sharpness as his eyes lock in on the demon, readying for another attack.
“I didn’t stutter, minion. If you benefit from it as well, I have no issue in that, but I do what I do for humans and the Reinish people.” He looms over the demon that throws nonsensical, amorphous attacks at him, but each one is immediately thwarted by Justice’s epic blade. “Mankind ill needs a savior that does not save. Even in dreams, it doesn’t matter. Trading someone’s last hope of reality for a pleasant illusion: It could never be worth it.”
“That’s NOT for you to decide,” Long Night shouts back with another slap from one of its fluctuating limbs. “You do not have the RIGHT to decide what the—”
“I have the right to decide if you live or die, because I have the power to kill you, and the will to do so,” Justice says, raising his blade. “And I say you die.” Throwing his blade down and finishing the incantation under his breath. Justice destroys the illusion that the demon created as he cuts down into it. The throne, the clouds, the gold and plated buttresses and galleries, every bathing suit, every plate of food and tasty drink, every guard, every helmet, every spear, every coin, every scratch on every piece of metal, destroyed in an instant.
Only those that are real remain.
“This… no matter. I won’t let you have the satisfaction. Goodbye!” the demon shouts, riling up to exit the dream and escape.
Justice says nothing as he exits the dream as well, the minions fast behind him, most of them unconscious, Super Insane Maniac screaming his little head off, and Scout Minion pulling in her third wind to kick her little friend’s ass and help him “understand” the acceptable range of things one may dream about.
She looms like a harpy over an innocent, terrified villager as the kaleidoscope of color emerges around them and pushes them out from Insane Maniac Minion’s shattered dream.
Instead of the dreary attic, a bright light shines through them, and the next thing they know, they are out on a large boat.
“Perhaps you’ll see me again, in another drea—” the demon stops, looking in all directions, as he’s surrounded by a lake.
Scout Minion stumbles over her words a moment as Justice steps onto the boat as well, with the unconscious minions phasing in right after.
“What… the hell happened?” she asks, holding tight into her wound, only to realize that it’s completely disappeared. Dream weapons, for dream injuries, she guesses.
Fishin’ion, his rod out, gives a long sigh and reels it in. “Ya’ know, if y’all are gonna be rockin’ th’ boat, it’ll scare th’ fish away,” he says.
“You brought everyone on… the boat?” Scout Minion tries to correct as the demon skirts around to find a place to jump off.
“Well, naturally. Nothing’s going to stop me from my fish.”
Scout Minion gives a weird smile. “Uh, yeah, alright,” she answers, laying a solid grip on the groveling Super Insane Maniac Minion.
Long Night trembles on the boat, an amorphous gas of rotten dreams and caked on makeup.
Justice looms over the rocking demon. “Decided to face your end?” he asks.
Long Night just shakes his head. “I can’t… believe you’ve done this to me.”
The Lord Knight pauses a moment as he tries to understand just what is going on now. “What do you mean?” he asks before Fishin’ion chimes in.
“Yeah, so, this actually goes into an ocean. It’s a saltwater inlet,” he explains.
Justice nods as Scout Minion wins a genuinely impressed look.
“I’m… surrounded by salt,” the demon whines just as Justice steps behind him, his sword poised to strike and dismiss the demon back to his forsaken pit of a realm. “A fitting end: surrounded by the horrors of your own reality as you surrounded others with the falsehood of your nightmares.”
With a scream, Long Night throws up his hands for mercy, but Justice brings down his sword all the same. It is like a star is born for a second in the sky, and then just like that, it dies. The blast almost throws Druid Minion, quite unconscious, over the rim of the boat, but she’s caught by Cardio Minion, whose already regained her wits.
The minions stay silent, except for Fishin’ion, who just sighs irritably as Justice waves his sword of the smoking blackness of the demon’s remains before replacing it into his sheath. He turns over to Scout Minion, which is, incidentally, the only one he recognizes.
“Let this be a lesson.”
“Don’t lecture me,” she snips back. “It was all this idiot’s idea,” she says, waving a whimpering Super Insane Maniac Minion around by the antenna.
Justice pauses, nods, and then gets down on a knee in the boat, as if addressing a school kid. “Hey, you shouldn’t do that,” Justice starts to the squeaking moron. “Life’s never so bad that you have to ask for something big like that to take away your life in exchange for help. A spirit that cared about you would allow you to learn yourself and become a person that could handle hard days, not someone that enables you so you could run away from them.”
Maniac Minion, held tight under the ironclad grip of Scout Minion, scoffs with adolescent dejection. “Oh, lecture someone else, you turd ass dumb idiot! Knights suck!“
Justice scoffs. “Turd… and dumb idiot,” Justice recites, offering a slightly more family-friendly translation to Maniac Minion’s response. “That’s very rude. You shouldn’t talk to people that way.”
“I said F*** YOU, moron!”
Justice bows his head a bit and then looks over to Scout Minion. “…I suppose I can trust you to help him understand.” Scout Minion’s eyes flicker, and Justice scoffs. “I saw what he thought of you,” he says with a good-humored tone.
Scout Minion’s eyes flinch, as if Justice had just identified a chink in her emotional armor. “If you tell—”
“And I won’t tell anyone,” Justice says reassuringly over her voice. He stands up and begins walking across the water with a quick spell under his breath. “Don’t summon any more demons,” he says.
“Yeah, thanks,” Scout says. “Get the hell off our property.”
With a wave of the hand, Justice begins formulating a coalescence gate, a sort of way to teleport between dimensions for the magically inclined.
“The Knights of Reinen go where they please, as always, when there’s work to be done,” he says. “That demon was outlandishly powerful to have such an obvious mana signature. We picked him up the minute your… friend completed the ritual.”
Scout Minion’s grip on Super Insane Maniac Minion’s antenna gets so tight it begins drawing out white infusia from the sharpness of her claws. “Yeah. Why don’t you go tell Chief,” she snips, “tell her all about how you were a good boy today,” she mocks.
Justice flinches, causing the coalescence gate to flicker for a moment, and he slightly sinks into the water before catching himself. “It’s perfectly reasonable to call your commander-in-chief ‘the Chief,’ you prude. It makes perfect—”
“You’re the only one that calls her that, dude. Just get out of here, weirdo,” Scout snips at him, “or I’ll call Poppi over here and he’ll sort you out for real!”
As if his veneer of coolness has been shattered, Justice scoffs as the coalescence gate completes. He moves to step inside, but not before he wags his finger at the group one more time. “I mean it,” he says.
“I mean it too. Now, scram!”
“…Very well,” he says, leaving through the gate into the dark astral blackness, and with the gate closing shortly behind him.
Everyone on the boat takes a moment to appreciate the quiet as the water of the lake laps against the boat. A distant bird croaks somewhere on the other side of the lake…
The minions all float on the boat for a little bit, totally quiet, with the exception of Maniac Minion’s occasional whimpers of anticipatory horror.
“Well, I gotta say, Fishin’ion,” Scout Minion says as she looks over, “this really has been a trip.”
He nods as he gives a short tug of his line. “Damn right.”
Fashion Minion, getting back to his wits, immediately swoons. “Oh, I just had the most horrible dream,” he says, collapsing helplessly over to one side of the boat just a second before his eyes widen with surprise. “Wait. Why are we on the lake?”
Scout Minion smiles. “Oh, we were going for a fishing trip, right?” she says, looking over to Fishin’ion who, now grinning, leans over to the side of the boat and gives the bench nearest him a small pat. Scout looks down under the bench: there’s sets of fishing rods and bait for everyone.
“Fishin’s great alone, but it’s best with a partner or two. Let’s have a good day catching our dinner, alright?”
Scout Minion pauses, closes her eyes, and releases a heart-warmed sigh as she let slip Super Insane Maniac Minion.
“Phew,” he says with a chuckle as Druid Minion and Fashion Minion, and then with a bit more consideration, even Cardio Minion, regard him with an irritated glance. “Oh, wow. Yeah, let’s fish,” he says, reaching for one of the rods and hastily trying to prick one of the artificial bait pieces to it. “Yeah, yeah, this has been a great, great time. Good night. Refreshing, refreshing dreams, everyone?”
“The dreams were pretty horrible,” Cardio Minion says, a rare look of actual disgust on her face.
“I can’t believe that someone did that to me, and I can’t believe that person was you,” Druid Minion says, notching just a little closer to Super Insane Maniac Minion.
Fashion Minion gives a haughty smile as he addresses him with a superior gaze. “You know, darling, there’s not very much fabulous about making such unfun, ungraceful situations for us.”
Insane Maniac Minion dodges back, scooting over to Fishin’ion, who at the moment appears to be his last resort. “L-listen, you guys don’t understand. It wasn’t me that did all that. It was… it was the demon!“
“Maybe that was part of it,” Fashion Minion says. “But you caused this thing to happen.”
Scout Minion leans forward. “Was it his idea?”
He looks aside like a terrified, purse-sized dog. “Wh-what wa-”
“The swimsuit?” Scout reminds with a light, but cold smile.
Super Insane Maniac Minion begins trembling. The boat begins rocking again, and Fishin’ion, with a sigh, draws back his line. “Now I’ve had just about enough of that,” he says. “Are you fishin’, or are you just gonna waste our time?” he says over to the little minion convulsing next to him.
Scout Minion leans forward with a big grin on her face. “Oh no, he won’t be. I think he’s going to be helping us with the fishing, sure… but I don’t think he’ll be doing it himself,” she says, her eyes slanting into lunar crescents of impeding cruelty.
Maniac Minion’s eyes widen with incredulous shock. “Oh no.”
Scout looks behind her. “Would you all mind helping me out here?” she says. Only Cardio Minion flickers with a moment of hesitation, but she also agrees. It is a fair way to handle something like this, especially when Maniac Minion’s the culprit, and lessons have to be taught in the only way he can seem to understand.
“Wh-why are you guys looking at me like that?” Super Insane Maniac Minion squawks as leans to leap off the boat and swim for shore.
He’s not fast enough.
Our beloved dreamer is used as bait for the rest of the day. Obviously, etheriae can’t die when they are torn limb from limb. Only a magical weapon with specific enchantments can actually hurt the creature trapped inside the ether frame, which means you can divide them down into about as many pieces as you’d like when it comes to turning them into chum.
They spend a good ten minutes, tearing him into as many tiny pieces as they can, and with his “help” they catch a lot of fish that way, surprisingly enough.
“Mmm. I guess he is good for something,” Scout says with a smirk. A few of the others on the boat laugh just as Fishin’ion scoffs again.
“Quiet down,” he says. “You’re scarin’ the fish away.”
Scout Minion sighs with a satisfied glint in her eye.
“Okay, so when are we gonna put him back together?” Cardio Minion asks. “I’m sure it’s not comfortable for him to be like a hundred different places at once.”
“Nah, he doesn’t deserve our help,” a knife-gazed Druid Minion says. “No one does that to a person and gets away with it.”
Scout Minion glances over. “He put you in a bathing suit too?”
“N-no,” Druid Minion sighs.
“Oh, that,” Scout chuckles, winning a hidden blush from her friend.
“Nevermind it!”
“If you say so.”
The other minions decide to let it lie, and then the line from Cardio Minion’s rod pulls. “Oh, I think I got something!” she exclaims before rearing back to pull in the catch.
Everyone turns to look when the flash of light cuts into the mists of the morning—an innocuous-looking glass bottle, and on the inside is a scroll.
“Huh. Look at that,” she says, jostling it in her hands. “It’s glowing! Must be magic?”
“Throw it back. Throw it back!”
“Oh my God. Not again!”
“Get that out of here,” three of them shout back.
Fishin’ion sighs, shakes his head, and just keeps to his rod.
“Okay! Easy!” Cardio Minion laughs out, unhooking the clump of seaweed that it’s on and tossing it back into the lake.
Scout Minion nods and turns back to her spot. “Good riddance. I’ve had enough of this magic bullshit for one weekend. Can’t we just do something normal?“
“Like fishing, using our asshat friend as bait?” Druid Minion asks.
Scout Minion sighs. “Yeah, I guess. Can’t be worse than last year’s.”
There’s a conjoined cringe as everyone, even Fishin’ion, recalls the stories from last year’s trip: the hideous, hideous stories.
The End
3 Responses
I loved this story! Thank you for sharing it with all of us. I thoroughly love this minion universe you’ve created. Please continue bringing us joy through your talent. Have a great day.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.