"Holy perversion, Citizen Spanky!" Shane popped down to chastise. "I am disappointed in you!" Spanky pouted, grumbling, "Blah blah blah, you're always ruining my fun," and flicking his tail, which happened to smack right against Kidman's lips.
"Hey!" the dark-haired cruiserweight snapped crossly. "Get your filthy, hairy, serpentine thing away from my mouth!" Shane nearly fell down in dismay.
"Holy crap! More sexual innuendo!" he groaned reproachfully, as Spanky zinged back up, a heavy melon tucked under each arm.
"Here you go, breakfast! Yum...uh, I mean, I'm still a monkey, right? Squeak squeak, chirp chirp, blah blah, let's dig in," the little blonde cruiserweight sang out cheerfully, cracking his melon against his knee and beginning to eat without the slightest trace of etiquette. Shane glared at him in distaste, grumbling, "Holy contamination--I don't think I want to dig into anything that's been stuck underneath your foul underarms, Citizen Spanky!" In response, Spanky blew him a raspberry, and a couple of melon seeds spilled out and bonked Shane on the tip of his superheroic nose.
"Holy grossness!" our green-haired hero whined.
Below them, a cloaked Lita
was wandering around the open-air market, window-shopping and wondering
which shawls could be cut up into the best thongs.
"Try our TT Enhancement
Elixir," Trish Stratus was announcing from her stand, while Torrie Wilson
behind her struggled to unload the latest shipment of their elixir. Lita
wandered over to their little booth, just as Trish finished pitching, "...and,
not only is it guaranteed to augment them at least as big as mine and Torrie's,
but they'll also make them rounder and smoother as well." Lita laughed,
shaking her head to toss back her long red hair and snickering, "So, this
is what you guys are doing for a living now." Trish forced a smile on her
face, saying tightly, "Yes, well, if I'd only gotten the part of Jasmine...Anyway,
would you like to try our elixir out? You look like you could need it."
Lita glanced down at the front of her cloak.
"Er, right...I think mine
are big enough, thank you very much," she replied with a phony smile. Trish
leaned forward, holding out a magnifying glass to examine closely while
announcing, "Hmm, I don't know--they're big right now as they are, but
tend to crinkle and narrow when your facial features shift, as in a smile
or a frown (whoa, don't I sound scientific?)." Lita frowned in confusion.
"Huh?" she echoed in a small
voice. "They shrink when I smile? What the hell are you talking about,
blondie?" Trish leaned back, the picture of innocence as she whistled,
"Why, your eyes, of course! Now, if you would only put two drops of our
TT--that stands for Trish and Torrie's--Enhancement Elixir in them every
night before you go to bed, they're guaranteed to get larger and stay that
way!"
"Oh-kay," Lita discreetly
backed away from the two blondes' booth, hurriedly tripping her way down
the street and nearly getting jumped by the vendor behind the next stand.
"Caskets!" Undertaker bellowed
gruffly. "Caskets, funeral pyres, do-it-yourself embalming kits!"
"Eh, how lovely, but no
thanks," Lita rolled her eyes, adjusting the hood of her cloak and beginning
to walk away.
"Hey! Are you disrespecting
me there, son?" Taker barked after her. "Because I demand your respect!
I am the big dog, and this is my yard, and when you disrespect me, you're
shitting all over my yard, is that clear? Respect me! R-E-S-P-E-C-T!"
"I wasn't dissing you,"
Lita quickly assured him, before the older man could show off his Aretha
Franklin impression. "In fact, to show how much I respect you, I'll, er,
send over the next person I know that dies, all right? Kay, bye!" And she
quickly ran away as fast as she could, failing to look where she was going
in her hurry and nearly bowling over Molly Holly hanging around a booth
near the one Shane and Spanky were sitting on.
"Aw, you must be hungry,"
Lita cooed to the shorter woman, causing her to frown and reply, "Actually,
not really, but--" Lita reached over and stole an entire honey-glazed ham
from the stand, shoving it into Molly's face.
"Here you go," she said,
smiling sweetly.
Back on top of their little
canvas roof, Shane was still watching in disgust as Spanky stuffed his
face, when he conveniently happened to glance over in Lita's direction.
A dopey look came over his features, and he sighed dreamily, "Wow." From
behind him, Shawn Michaels in a white Cupid diaper and feathered wings
(hey, he is the Heartbreak Kid, you know!) was lowered on
cables, bow and quiver on his back. Shawn fidgeted around in embarrassment,
but finally notched an arrow, shooting it straight into Shane's butt to
symbolize that he'd fallen in love.
"Ow! Holy agony--my superheroic
behind!" Shane hollered, hands flying toward his sore area and yanking
at the arrow stuck there. Spanky finally stopped slurping up melon, glancing
over at his buddy and asking, "Uh, you okay?" Shane coughed and cleared
his throat, trying to look as dignified as possible even as his face turned
beet red from the embarrassment of having had an arrow stuck in his butt.
"Of course I am!" he snapped
hotly. His eyes wandered back to the object of his affections down on the
street, and a spaced-off, silly smile returned to his face as he sighed,
"Can't you see this superhero's in love?"
"Uh..." Spanky's eyes followed
Shane's lovestruck gaze, settling on the figure who'd stolen his little
superheroic heart and then widening in surprise. "But...but that's Molly!"
"Hmm..." Shane sighed dreamily,
his dopey smile widening.
"Uh, I'm not all that familiar
with the whole script and everything, but even I know that you're
kind of supposed to fall for the princess?" Spanky reminded him,
his voice rising an octave with each word until it became a nasal little
squeak. Shane turned around to glare at him, and Spanky sighed and grumbled,
"But then again, what do I know? I'm a just monkey. Chirp chirp." And he
returned to his melon.
Below, Lita had plopped down
the ham in Molly's lap and shooed her off, saying dramatically while raising
a fist to emphasize her solemn oath, "Now run along, because as God is
my witness, as God is my witness, you're never going to be hungry again!"
"So long as it'll take me
away from you," Molly muttered to herself, starting to scurry off, despite
Shane's loud protests and groans of heartbreak only a few feet above her.
Lita started to leave as well, having been attracted by the King's puppies
booth (they're real puppies, as in the ones that bark and lick your face!),
when suddenly the vendor from whom she'd taken the ham appeared out of
nowhere and grabbed her wrist.
"You know you have to pay
for that, now holla if you hear me, my hot freak!" Scott Steiner foamed.
Lita leaned back, mystified, and uttered that strange new word as if she'd
never heard it before in her life.
"Holla? Is that your pitiful
attempt at Spanish, compadre?" she started to smirk, then suddenly remembered
her original line and mumbled, "Oh, yeah, and pay? What's that?" Steiner
looked enraged.
"No one steals from Freakzilla,
Big Poppa Pump, the Big Bad Booty Daddy," he roared. Lita lost track somewhere
along his long string of nicknames, and started to wander, off, when Steiner
reached over and grabbed her again, pinning her down and saying, "Now you
will have to be punished!" He reached over to his awful sharp-looking broadsword
while restraining Lita's wrist against the side of his stand...and then
passed it and instead pressed the Play button on the stereo next to it.
"Just A Gigolo" started blaring over the speakers, and Steiner started
bopping and grinding, his massive mounds of steroid-pumped "muscles" wriggling
along with him.
"I'm just a gigolo/And everywhere
I go..." he sang along, ear-gratingly off-key, as he did his little striptease,
much to Lita's horror.
"Wah! Make him stop! Cut
my hand off instead! Do something! Just don't make me watch Steiner strip!
This is cruel and unusual punishment!" she wailed in dismay.
On top of Kidman's stand,
Spanky prodded Shane and suggested, "Uh, you might want to swoop in and
save her, you know?" Shane sighed, weeping melodramatically, "How can I,
when my heart has broken into pieces with the departure of the beautiful
and virtuous--Holy indecent exposure! That is obscene! I really
do have to save her!" And he whooshed down onto the street, just in time
before Steiner was about to take his pants off and Lita was about to have
a stroke.
"Holy obscenity, Citizen,"
Shane intervened, one hand cautiously hovering in front of his eyes as
he scrambled over to the duo with Spanky at his heels. "Excuse me while
I sound rude, but what the hell do you think you're doing here...BIATCH?!"
Steiner leaned back, releasing his grasp on Lita and wriggling back into
his shirt as he started to explain, "She stole a whole ham from my booth;
I had to punish her for it." Shane nodded wisely, pretending to take notes
on a little Green Lantern pad as he listened along.
"Hmm, well, to that I have
only one thing to say," he intoned seriously after Steiner was finished
explaining. The larger man gave him a suspicious look, and Shane whipped
his arm to point at a spot behind Steiner's back while yelling, "Hey, look
over there!" Steiner turned around, squinting his eyes and surveying the
booths behind him, while Shane took the time to grab a near-blind Lita
and run off with her, Spanky hopping after them and clutching his tail
to his chest to prevent tripping over it.
"Huh, where? I don't see
anything," Steiner mumbled, then turned and saw three telltale little dust
trails where Shane, Lita, and Spanky had once stood. "Hey! Come back here,
my freaks! Don't you guys want to see Mr. Pee Wee, the Little Poppa Pump?"
We cue over to a rickety
old door that has a poster taped to it reading "O'Haire's Evil Secret Lab
Hideout" in bold, red letters. As the door ominously creaks open, we see
Jericho running around on a bizarre-looking contraption made of giant wooden
gears that would have fit right in with a mad scientist movie. As an evil-looking
storm began brewing at the top of the machine, Jericho running below started
to huff and puff, "Why am I the one who's running? I don't need
to lose weight, and with no due respect, you're the one who weighs
more, Your Mighty Rottenness!"
"And you're the one in the
parrot suit, so suck it up and keep running," O'Haire snapped, taking Sultan
Kurt's precious gold medals and sticking them on the contraption. Jericho
whined some more but obediently sped up, as above the storm started crackling
and sizzling with the arrival of the medals, before shooting a lightning
bolt right into Jericho's tail. O'Haire narrowed his eyes and critically
examined the picture that had now appeared on an hourglass attached to
the contraption, while in the background Jericho ran around, frantically
trying to put out the fire on his butt.
"Ah, I see, so that's
my diamond in the sky--er, in the rough--who can enter the Cave of Wonders,"
he murmured throatily to himself, intently observing a picture of Shane
attempting to revive Lita by giving her superheroic mouth-to-mouth.
"Ah! Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
ah!" Jericho wailed, still running around and with smoke beginning to float
up from his burning tail, as on O'Haire's magic hourglass, Lita suddenly
recovered from the trauma of seeing Steiner pulling a Marky Mark and slapped
the taste right out of Shane's mouth for sexual harassment.
"Holy ingratitude!" the
superhero's voice whined in a tiny, squeaky voice from the hourglass. "I
resuscitate you and you slap me to show your thanks? Wassupwitdat?!"
As Lita realized what had actually happened and sheepishly began to apologize,
O'Haire thoughtfully stroked his goatee and growled, "Hmm...let's have
the babooons--er, guards--extend an invitation to our little Diamond Cutter--er,
diamond in the rough--shall we?"
"Ah! My perfect, gorgeous
ass! Put it out! Put it out!" Jericho wailed, still running around with
his scorching tail and finally diving into his pool of hairspray to try
and put the fire out.
BOOM!!!
Jericho and O'Haire emerged from the explosion, their faces blackened
with soot and their fried hair sticking straight up as though they'd been
electrocuted.
"Jericho, my useless, worthless
sidekick," O'Haire growled in a dangerously low voice, "never again
try to put out fires in a pool of highly flammable chemical, unless you
want that beak of yours shoved straight up where the sun don't shine--and
this time, I am telling you something you don't
already know!"
Over on the other side of
AhWWEbah, Lita was pressing a pack of ice to Shane's cheek to try and ease
the swelling from her slap.
"Er, sorry about that,"
the redhead mumbled sheepishly, dabbing at his face with the ice while
Shane sniffled but tried to put on a brave face.
"Eh, no pwobed," he mumbled
thickly, trying to work out the word "problem" but unable to pronounce
it too well with his swollen cheek. Lita cast her look guiltily onto the
ground, trying to find some other topic of conversation other than her
slapping him.
"So, uh, I wanted to thank
you for saving me back there," she finally stammered awkwardly. "You know,
before I turned into a permanent mental vegetable from the trauma."
"Bwuh-dah-duff-blah-gah,"
Shane mumbled, still unable to talk from the swelling. Lita cringed, knowing
she was the cause of this, and did her best to begin a more one-sided conversation
as she started to rapidly babble while glancing at her ratty surroundings,
"So, this is where you live, huh?" Her gaze swept over the dusty floors
and walls, the meager and very broken furniture, the raggedy curtains,
the various boxes of Chinese and pizza takeout scattered everywhere, the
insanely huge collection of comic books stuffed in every corner, the lifesize
cardboard cutout of Linda Carter as Wonder Woman, and several bottles of
monkey medicine with a pack of disposable needles lying in a corner underneath
a film of cobwebs--a total pigsty. In other words, the typical bachelor's
pad.
"It's, uh, very nice," she
lied, trying to sound as polite as possible. By some miracle, Shane had
suddenly regained his speech, and as his swelling started to go down, he
poked his chest out proudly and bragged, "It is, isn't it? And it's all
ours--him and me live here together."
"Him?" Lita wondered if
he'd gotten some sort of superhero's-alter-ego complex from reading too
many comics. Shane, fortunately, pointed to Spanky, and said, "Let me introduce
you. This is Spank the Monkey, but we all call him Spanky for short."
"How charming," Lita muttered
under her breath. Shane crossed over to Spanky and took the second melon
that he was about to dig into, posing with it as though preparing to throw
a football and them hurling it at Lita and nearly taking her nose out with
it.
"Oops, sorry," he apologized,
while Spanky's chin started quivering and he looked as though he were about
to cry at the loss of his melon.
"It could have been worse,"
Lita mumbled, catching the melon and tucking it into her lap. "I could
have been married right now--that's what my father's forcing me to do if
I go back."
"Holy injustice," Shane
agreed. "I think that's just--Spanky!" Lita whipped around, looking confused
that he should think her being forced to marry was just spanky and wondering
whether he'd just tossed a sexual slur at her, when she realized that a
certain little blonde monkey had been hanging by his tail and was trying
to carefully lodge the melon from her lap. Spanky grinned sheepishly at
being caught, opening his mouth to flash some Crest-worthy white teeth.
"Here you are!"
Lita leaned back in shock, dropping the melon to the floor and wondering,
"Did that monkey just talk?" Spanky was actually looking down at all the
scattered pieces of broken melon, his jaw wobbling and his eyes watering
over at the thought of so much waste, while Lita and Shane finally realized
that the one who'd spoken wasn't Spanky but rather, Nathan Jones.
"C'mon, let's move for the
kill, m' mates!" he bellowed. Shelton and Charlie followed reluctantly,
scratching their heads while Charlie mumbled, "Yeah, we'll do that," while
Shelton added under his breath, "So long as you don't call us your mates!"
The two looked at each other, then shuddered at the particular thought
of being Nathan's prison bitches, before dutifully obeying and running
up the stairs after their head cheese.
"Great, just great. My idiotic
crybaby of a "father" must have sent these losers," Lita was griping, when
she felt a tug on her arm. Shane was holding out his hand, Spanky ahead
of him, and was asking melodramatically, "Do you trust me?" Then, without
waiting for a response, he grabbed her arm and jumped...
...All the three feet that
it took for them to touch solid ground. As the trio straightened up and
dusted themselves off, Lita turned to Shane and socked him accusingly in
the arm, demanding, "You made such a big deal over jumping three lousy
feet?!" While Shane scratched his hair sheepishly and puttered around
for an answer, the three palace guards were peering over the edge of the
building toward them.
"C'mon, mateys, after them!"
Nathan ordered. Charlie and Shelton held back, and Charlie whimpered, "But...but...but
we're scared of heights! Wah!" As Nathan growled in frustration, below
Shane was pulling on Lita's hand and declaring, "And away we go! Holy escapes!"
And they would have escaped, too, had Shane not run straight into
a pole right then, bounced off backwards, and slammed into the building,
shaking it and causing the three guards to topple off, Charlie and Shelton
shrieking and clinging to each other all three feet of the way down. Nathan
reached over and grabbed Shane by the collar, roughly hauling him in.
"Gotcha!" the giant Aussie
declared triumphantly.
"No you don't," Lita seethed
angrily, taking hold of Shane's arm and trying to wrench him out of Nathan's
grasp.
"Says who?" the behemoth
sneered. Lita scowled, before angrily flipping back the hood of her cloak
to reveal her tiara.
"Says the princess of AhWWEbah
(somehow that doesn't sound very effective)," she informed him smugly.
The palace guards stopped laughing, while Spanky gasped, "The princess?!"
for both him and Shane, who was still out cold and in the dark about Lita
being the princess.
"Uh, we'd love to stay around
and chat and let this little green worm go," Charlie explained nervously.
"But these are Mr. O'Haire's orders, and he's kind of higher on the pecking
order than you, unless you've got your, um, "father" backing you up."
"Yeah, go whine to him,"
Shelton suggested so very helpfully. Lita's eyes narrowed.
"Oh, I will," she seethed.
*Coming up next: Lita gives O'Haire a piece of her mind, Spanky busts Shane out of the dungeon like the good little monkey sidekick that he is, plus O'Haire dons a really crappy disguise to try and sucker Shane into going into the RVD-Cave of (Herbal! ~_^) Wonders to fetch his magic lamp.*