So you're gonna take up walking, eh? Can't blame ya. I mean, I'm such a famous author that people want to read every word that flows from my fingers.

My minion Francis: You have some spittle on your mouth.
Me: Naw, that's just sarcasm. My voice was dripping with it.

If you really want an explanation, this'll be a villains crossover story. I know here it concerns Osmosis Jones, but I'll have folks like Ganondorf and Bowser too if I ever post it.

TESTING 123

Chapter Something

While Vaati and Ganondorf were busy falling through their respective voids of nothingness, the Earth we know had its own villains to deal with. Admittedly they were not as traditional as the megalomaniac sorcerers and swordfighters of Hyrule, but they were just as dangerous.

In a clean-looking conference room within the labyrinth that was the architecture of New York City, a meeting was taking place. New nanotechnology, for those whose voices had been lost in the course of illness or medical procedure, was being developed, and it had gathered quite a bit of medical and scientific attention.

"-and so, the end result is a coating of the airway leading to the carriage and magnification of respiratory vibration, in a functional imitation of vocal chords," the orator concluded loftily.

"Excuse me," called the administrator of a local hospital. "Will the magnified vibrations be similar in pitch and frequency to the normal human vocalizations?"

The throng scribbled notes as the orator replied to each inquiry, reassuring the public that the product was still in development, and would be fully functional when released. The questioning continued for quite some time, and a smidge of inexperience peeked through the speaker's confident air as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, glancing more and more frequently away from the audience at his nanotechnology sample, as if it fascinated him.

Actually, there was another man in the room who was fascinated with the sample. This man had never so much as set foot in a hospital- invited, that is- and his name was Thrax.

Under normal circumstances, "Thrax" would be an extremely odd, not to mention sketchy, name. Then again, under normal circumstances, a man of any name who had jumped onto the row of cabinets on the side of the room and started sprinting across it would have been forcibly removed from the building.

Needless to say, these were not normal circumstances.

Thrax, in fact, was a microorganism, which meant that he could get away with just about any name or course of action he chose, and that included his chosen course of racing over the cabinets. As a rare and unusually powerful strain of scarlet fever virus, Thrax was red-skinned and angular in his facial features, with yellow eyes and something like the cellular equivalent of purple dreadlocks. The long talons replacing his fingers didn't harm the antagonist look either: in fact, Thrax's left index finger was an especially long claw that could heat up to furious temperatures. He was also tall for a virus, a fact emphasized by a long black trenchcoat he wore closed over his gray shirt. There was something missing from his attire, though, something that bothered Thrax much more than the chemical composition of his dreadlocks or the fashion sense of his trenchcoat. It was his chain.

Now Thrax worked in a certain fashion. He would weaken the body with a cold or something, but then he would pluck a certain bead of DNA from his host's brain (his hypothalamus, to be exact), which caused chaos as the body's temperature setting soared into a fatal level of hyperpyrexia. And then, as a token to his reputation, Thrax would store that bead in a chain, his long bluish trademark chain he wore wrapped around his wrist. That chain did wonders- wonders- for his reputation. It was evidence of his capabilities, tangible evidence that he wasn't just another influenza germ out to try- and fail- to make a name for himself; it made others genuinely frightened of him. And fright, as any experienced antagonist knew, was one of the best weapons to have.

But recently, something had gone terribly wrong with this plan, a something by the name of Frank Detorri. More specifically, it was a something by the name of Jones, which resided in said Frank Detorri. When Thrax found himself in the human Frank, he tried to break a medical record- and get himself known and feared in the macroscopic world- by killing him within 48 hours. He almost did, too- but at the last minute, in a hospital, this white blood cell Jones had stolen his chain outside of Frank's body, and somehow made his way back while Thrax did not, falling onto a cart of medical equipment.

Thrax may not have been as traditional a villain, but he had his gripes with protagonists.

Jones had somehow made his way into the hypothalamus and replaced the DNA bead, and as Thrax's cart was wheeled away, he heard a rhythmic beep telling him Frank had lived.

So not only had he not broken a record, he didn't have one of his big sources of fear either, so Thrax was desperate now to seek out everything that had to do with nanotechnology in the hopes of finding something that would help him bring that source of fear back.

Which brings us back to the sprinting across the cabinets.

Thrax knew that, even if it was just tiny microphones for humans, there was a horde of this kind of technology in that sample the orator had: if he figured out how it worked, it would bring him one step closer to finding- or even making- something that functioned like his old chain. He was at the end of the row of cabinets now, the end closest to the orator's podium.

Suddenly he was quite appreciative of his trenchcoat, because the gap between the cabinets and the podium was a long one.

Some people might argue that those two clauses are unrelated. They are not. Thrax saw a large stack of boxes behind him, climbed atop, and jumped- his coat opening like a parachute and letting the deadly virus glide gracefully onto the podium. Thrax smiled, satisfied, and climbed onto the microscope that held the sample on a slide.

Before him, he saw hundreds and hundreds of small metallic panels. They were thin rectangular panels, about the size of his torso. He picked one up and found that it was flimsy, but it didn't break. Marveling at the little panel, Thrax turned it over and over and then peered at it closely.

"My, my, this cat has outdone himself!" Thrax chuckled to himself.

"My, my, this cat has outdone himself!" a disembodied voice chuckled to everyone else in the room.

At first, it was silent, except for a pair of young nurses who inexplicably cried "LAURENCE FISHBURNE!" and swooned. Then, after a few moments, one man called out, "It's a virus!" and chaos erupted.

Thrax, absorbed in his marveling, had failed to notice two things. First of all, he was speaking directly into a nano-microphone, which magnified his voice (which normally would have been squeaky and inaudible to humans who were used to larger larynxes) to a human-volume, human-pitch sound. And second of all, the microscope slide was being projected onto a screen behind the orator to allow the throng to see his sample. Being focused on said orator who had wandered a few feet from his podium, apparently no one had noticed the red splotch moving across the projection... until he had quite stupidly made himself noticeable.

Now some were calling out more questions than ever to the poor orator, some were just demanding explanations, and some were crying out helplessly to know who Laurence Fishburne was, but all Thrax knew was that there was a bottle of isopropyl alcohol heading straight for him.

He ran.

Yes, he flew on the trenchcoat, missed the cabinet, and landed on the white tiles, so that once more the man with the sketchy name was sprinting across the side of the room. It was only once he got outside of it, breathing hard, that he remembered he would have been completely lost to the humans as soon as he had stepped off the slide- being a microorganism and all- but the alcohol had scared him more than, he feared, it should have. He nearly fell into that stuff and died during the Jones incident- yes, the very same one where they had stolen his chain...

And then he remembered something else. The nano-microphone was still clutched in his hand. He looked at it, and the thought "about the size of his torso" wandered through his mind.

No, no! he thought. I can't do that, look what this thing nearly got me into!

He started to walk off, leaving the microphone behind.

...but then again, he rethought, I'm slick enough that I won't be so stupid with it again.

I'm not gonna leave something like that just sitting here.

He walked back...

I'm gonna make that thing work for me.

Thrax opened the top of his trenchcoat and slid the flimsy panel in over his shirt. He closed the coat, walked a couple of paces, and smiled when the panel stayed put.

"Perfect," he whispered. A woman who was walking by stopped in her tracks and looked around, before continuing on anxiously.

I'll have to learn how to roll with this, though, Thrax thought, observing this. He started walking. Gotta keep myself to myself now.

Suddenly, something very large and very purple materialized right where Thrax was about to step.

So much for keeping himself to himself. Thrax joined a throng of passersby in a yell of utter confusion.

END TEST

tiger-SAMBA signing off