The doleful-looking Augusta slowly reached up and punched some buttons on a wall console. The large picture window instantaneously shifted from a live view of a beach at Waikiki to a picture of the Matterhorn, then to a scene of the New York City skyline. The room around her was lavishly furnished, with a leather couch and chairs, various exotic potted plants, and a large-screen video device that could intercept and display TV signals from Earth and a hundred other worlds. The refrigerator-like cooling unit was stocked with the finest foods. It was a situation most Earth celebrities would gladly sacrifice appendages to obtain—the only catch, she could never leave.
She had been a prisoner for two weeks, awaiting the Time Council's punishment for her crimes. Not only had she used an illegal time travel device, but she had also used her magical powers to manipulate a Time Enforcer into aiding and abetting her. She continued to insist that she had only wanted to save lives (lives which she herself had placed in danger), but the Council was unwilling to consider mitigating circumstances.
An automatic door slid open, and three alien creatures stepped into the spacious apartment/cell. Each of them had green skin, red pinpoint eyes, and a distended, swaying nose, and wore a uniform of shimmering golden fabric with several star-shaped badges indicating rank. She recognized one of them immediately—it was Time Enforcer Grobblitz, also known to her as Dr. Rick Portinari, with whom she had fallen in love on Earth. Her heart dutifully skipped a beat, as she hadn't seen him for several days. Her affection for him transcended the physical, and she cared as much for his alien form as for his human form. On this occasion, Grobblitz's expression was apologetic, as far as she could discern from his otherworldly features.
The Time Enforcer stood stiffly before her, his two companions becoming motionless behind him. "The Council has reached a decision," Grobblitz announced officiously. "You are hereby sentenced to be surgically stripped of your powers. This sentence is to be carried out immediately. Once this is done, you will be returned to your home planet and granted your freedom."
The words sent a chill through Augusta's body. The fact that the other two aliens were drawing strange medical devices from the compartments on their belts didn't help.
"You can't do this to me, Rick," said the rabbit woman, her tone one of desperation. "You know what happened to my duplicate after she underwent the procedure. I don't want to stop loving you. Please ask the Council to reconsider."
"The decision is final," Grobblitz replied coldly. "I'm sorry, Augusta."
Terror gripped her as the other two aliens advanced on her, raising their surgical devices. In a matter of seconds she would become unconscious, then awake as a different woman, robbed of her magical gift and her feelings for Portinari. The prospect of such an existence filled her mind with revulsion, and she panicked. She wanted a way out...any way out...
"Not another step!" she shrieked, holding out her palms and glowering at the three aliens. "You know what I'm capable of. Now tell the Council to reverse its decision."
Grobblitz only shook his head condescendingly, and his two companions lunged forward in an attempt to seize Augusta by the arms. Overpowered by fear, she lashed out at her attackers with the only effective weapon at her disposal—her magic.
The two alien medics blinked and sputtered as they underwent a transformation which they couldn't understand or describe. No longer could they dream of harming another living being, even a condemned prisoner. Their minds would only entertain thoughts of peace and goodwill. They stepped back from Augusta and looked over her with their beady eyes, as if making sure she hadn't been hurt.
To Grobblitz' alarm, the whites of the rabbit woman's eyes had turned a pale shade of red.
"Augusta...you didn't..." stammered the horrified Time Enforcer.
As the woman's lips twisted into a devilish grin, the red tinge in her eyes grew redder, and a halo of darkness gathered around her, Grobblitz realized that his worst nightmare was coming to pass. Although he hadn't been affected personally, it was evident that Augusta was draining the essence of evil from his fellow spacemen, and absorbing it into her own being. She had to be stopped. At any cost.
"Kill her!" he reluctantly commanded the two medics, but they only looked at him with innocent confusion.
It fell upon him to destroy the woman he loved. Fighting back the anguish, he snatched from his belt an object resembling a piece of molded plastic with a muzzle, handle, and trigger. Pointing the business end at Augusta, who by now was shrouded in swirling darkness, he closed his eyes and squeezed with his finger.
Her eyes laser-red, her smile malicious, her blond hair waving about as if magnetically charged, Augusta extended a hand and caught the glowing bolt of deadly energy as it flew from Grobblitz' weapon. It melted into nothing in her grasp. She then gestured at the ray gun and it blinked out of existence, leaving the Time Enforcer's hand empty.
The howling darkness expanded and encompassed him, and he found himself unable to move or look away from the demonic-looking rabbit woman. The pair of aliens who had accompanied him were no longer visible. After what seemed like an eternity, but was actually much longer, the veil of darkness evaporated. Grobblitz was still on his feet in the same position as before. So was Augusta, but her prisoner uniform had been replaced by a robe of pure blackness, and her eyes glowed like tiny red suns. The cell and its furnishings were undamaged, but where the alien medics had stood, their uniforms and devices lay in a heap on the floor.
Uncertainly rooted Grobblitz' feet to the spot as Augusta's blazing eyes pierced him. "I should kill you, too," she uttered in a voice that echoed throughout the enclosed space, "but I'd rather watch you suffer."
----
"She vaporized every living soul on the planet, except for me," recounted Grobblitz, whose voice was heard via speakerphone by the duplicate Augusta Winslow and the horde of friends and acquaintances who had gathered at her apartment in the aftermath of the alien's news appearance. "By the time I managed to send a distress signal to the Alliance, she had made it to the planet Vorg, four hundred light-years away. I received transmissions from them about entire continents breaking up and sinking into the ocean, and then nothing. It didn't stop there. Global insanity on Calliopeia, people mutating into giant insects on Drbzklpt III. The Alliance fleet engaged her near the planet Schmellifant, but she reduced them all to space dust. I studied her trajectory and determined that she would likely reach Earth in about two weeks. So I gathered some equipment and traveled here through one of the portals, hoping to develop some sort of defense against her within that space of time."
All present were astonished and horrified by the alien's story. "Poor Augusta," Maria Harris lamented. "Lost out there in the galaxy, destroying one planet after another, unable to stop herself. Can anything else go wrong with her life?"
"I can't believe that's all it took to push her over the edge," the other Augusta mused. "Now I'm glad my powers are gone."
"Wonderful," grumbled Dudley/Beat. "Two weeks until the end of the world, and I have to spend them as a boy."
"Did you bring a time travel device with you?" asked April Murphy. "Can you go back in time and prevent this from happening?"
"I tried," came Grobblitz' voice. "I warned my past self not to enforce the Council's sentence, but when I returned to the present, nothing had changed."
"Weird," said Alan, who had for the moment forgotten about Tegan's disappearance. "Maybe she's so powerful, time has no effect on her."
"We'll have to leave the planet," said George somberly. "What else can we do?"
"The Alliance has the means to move the inhabitants of Earth to other suitable worlds," said Grobblitz. "However, the Earth governments will have to agree to the evacuation. Judging from what I've seen of your political process, that will probably take more than two weeks."
"I'm not going anywhere," said Sue Ellen with determination. "This is my planet. If she wants it, she'll have to fight me for it."
"My flight from Washington leaves in the morning," Grobblitz concluded. "We can continue our conversation when I arrive in Elwood tomorrow."
The call ended, and the grownups and kids in the apartment started murmuring to each other. "I tried to tell you Augusta was dangerous," Fern chided April. To the Augusta duplicate she added, "No offense."
"None taken," said the blond rabbit woman.
"Where's the Bunny League when you really need them?" Buster remarked to Prunella.
"The Bunny League wouldn't be much help against someone with that much power," the rat girl replied. "Even if they were real."
Having said that, she started to ruminate on an idea that had suddenly flashed into her mind.
As the solemn-faced kids exited Augusta's apartment, Arthur followed Francine up the stairs to her place. Her father was absent and her mother was taking a nap, so the pair enjoyed a bit of privacy, which they used to discuss the fate of planet Earth.
"I'll bet you're thinking the same thing I'm thinking," said Francine.
"What's that?" Arthur wondered.
The monkey girl opened her mouth to answer, but a knock at the door stopped her. Answering it, she saw two almost identical girls standing on the welcome mat—Sue Ellen and April. "Can we come in?" the cat girls asked in eerie unison.
"Uh, sure," Francine answered. As the pair walked past her into the apartment, she muttered under her breath, "I'll never get used to this."
Sue Ellen and April were even wearing the same green dress, although in different sizes. To the eyes of Arthur and Francine they appeared to be a ten-year-old girl and an enlarged, almost thirteen-year-old clone of her. It was truly bizarre.
"What can we do for you?" Francine asked the cat girls once they had all taken seats.
"Are you forgetting something, Francine?" was Sue Ellen's response. "I know everything you know."
"So do I," April added.
"What's your point?" asked Francine warily.
"We have the same idea for stopping Augusta that you and Arthur have," Sue Ellen claimed.
"What's that?"
"Fight magic with magic," said April. "The unicorns. Greta."
Francine gave Arthur a blank stare, as if to admit that her thunder had been stolen.
"Greta may not want to talk to you after what you did to her," Sue Ellen pointed out. "But she has nothing against me and April."
"Hmm, you're right," Arthur agreed.
"The only way to contact Greta is through Fern's computer," said Francine. "Let's pay her a visit."
----
Author's note: If you were an Arthur character and the end of the world was coming, what would you do with the remaining time? I would like to hear your ideas. In the form of reviews, of course.