As school began on Wednesday morning, the kids were moderately concerned about the Earth-shaking cataclysm the alien had predicted. It was still two days away, however, so they saw a possibility that things might change, or that a solution might be found. Two days was, after all, a long time for a grade-schooler.
Relieved to have the unicorns out of their hair, Arthur and Francine were discussing the situation and the alien's long-shot plan to save humanity.
"Hey, maybe you could play 'Nearer My God to Thee' on the piano while Earth is blowing up," Francine suggested.
"Great idea," said Arthur. "But let's include the whole quartet. It'll be our final concert."
"There's one thing I don't get," Francine reflected. "The Sentinels said that the time had come, but the alien says it won't be until Friday."
"Hmm," Arthur mused. "Maybe the unicorns live in a different time zone."
Mrs. Krantz called the class to order, and her first item of business was to introduce a new pupil. "This is Zeke England," she announced, gesturing toward a formally-dressed anthro-Pomeranian lad who stood at the front of the room with his eyes lowered. "Zeke is joining our class today. Say hello to Zeke, everyone."
"Hi, Zeke," intoned the students.
"Yo, Zeke!" was Van's friendly greeting.
The pom boy spoke quietly, as if fearing to offend. "My name's Zeke, and I'm living with the Chanels. The government thinks my parents aren't good enough to raise me. This is my first time in a public school. I like to read, and I like to work in the garden. Call upon the name of Jesus, and you shall be saved. Thank you."
As Zeke stepped forward toward his desk, an unexpected and astonishing thing happened.
An intensely brilliant light poured through the windows, causing the kids to squint and shield their eyes. It was accompanied by a wave of powerful heat.
"Duck and cover!" cried the alarmed teacher. The kids, not having heard the phrase before, weren't sure what to do.
The bizarre phenomenon lasted for almost a second, and then the light rapidly faded. The temperature in the room returned to normal before long, but surprisingly, it was starting to get darker outside.
Mrs. Krantz stared through the windows in awe, as did the students. It was morning, the sky was cloudless, yet it looked like dusk had already come. "Follow me, kids," the moose woman ordered.
The school quickly emptied itself, as all the teachers and students gathered outside to examine their altered world. Where the sun had previously stood in the eastern sky, there was a larger, less brilliant disc. It was an odd feeling, as if they were all being held after school until dark.
"It's, like, a big gigantic cloud of dust," Rattles theorized.
"It's a nuclear war," Muffy imagined.
"It's a terrorist attack," was Emily's explanation.
"It's the day of judgment," Zeke proclaimed. "The sun shall cease from shining, and the stars shall fall from the sky."
Only the smartest of them suspected the truth, and that included Alan. "The sun's gone nova," he told Prunella.
"You mean...it blew up?" was the rat girl's response.
"Yes." Alan lowered his head as if frightened to look into the sky. "In a matter of hours we'll be baked alive by the radiation."
"Why didn't we hear an explosion?" asked Prunella.
"Sound doesn't travel through space," Alan explained, "and there are 93 million miles of space between the sun and the Earth."
"Then this is it," said Prunella solemnly. "Dark Augusta has won. We didn't even get to see her."
"It's too late to save Earth," Alan acknowledged, "but we may still have a chance of taking her down with us. Let's see what Portinari has to say."
Working together, he and Prunella rallied a group of friends and led them toward Augusta's apartment, where the alien had established his workplace. The sidewalks and streets were unusually crowded, as all had left their homes to witness the drastic changes to the surrounding universe.
Augusta and Portinari seemed to be expecting the children as they arrived. "Come in," the scaly green alien invited them. His instruments, scattered over two desks, displayed various images and symbols that the kids couldn't begin to understand.
"Is it true?" Prunella asked earnestly. "Has the sun gone nova?"
"It's true," Portinari acknowledged, his small red eyes brimming with the Kron equivalent of sadness. "Dark Augusta appeared to me just before it happened. Apparently she got tired of destroying planets that had been evacuated by the Alliance, so she decided to skip directly to Earth. She'll be here in fifteen minutes—she wants to watch us die."
"That should be entertaining," Alan remarked. "The radiation will boil our blood and make our flesh fall off our bones."
"Cool," said Buster. Sue Ellen glowered at him. "Uh, I mean, not cool."
Muffy stepped forward and turned to face her friends. "Listen, everyone. I know I've done some really mean, really insensitive things over the years, and I want to take this opportunity to apologize."
"And I want to use this opportunity to tell Binky what I really think of him," said George. "He's a...a...a big, dumb, stupid doofus."
"Oh, man," said Binky sarcastically. "It must have been torture, keeping that bottled up inside of you all these years."
"There's no time for idle chatter," said Portinari. "We must prepare ourselves for the final confrontation."
Fern shrugged. "What's the point? We're all going to die."
"Then we'll die fighting," said the alien.
"Where will the final confrontation be?" asked Arthur.
"Wherever I am, when she arrives," Portinari replied. "I'd prefer a wide-open, empty place, where there's no one around to be hurt."
"The soccer field at the school," Francine suggested.
"Good idea." The alien Time Enforcer surveyed the mob of kids. "Prunella, go get your portal, or whatever it is, and meet us there. The rest of you...well, you're dead if you go home, so you meet us there too."
Not one of them went home; they were all excited to witness the fateful battle that would decide the fate of Earth.
Portinari armed himself with a portable time-travel device and an energy weapon, and went to the soccer field.
Augusta placed the magical green stone in her purse, and headed for the soccer field.
Alan helped Prunella lift up the wooden frame she had constructed, and they carried it to the soccer field.
Francine stuck the unicorn horn in one of her back pockets, and joined the others at the soccer field.
A band of young friends congregated at the soccer field, including Muffy, George, Binky, Sue Ellen, Fern, April, Odette, and a few curious tagalongs. They had few words to exchange, but all were pleased that they would be allowed to watch a spectacular conflict before they met their doom.
Prunella sat in a lotus position next to the portal, doing her best to achieve a meditative state. Alan stood by her, hoping and praying that her plan would succeed without going too far and making things worse for the world. Yet what could be worse than the sun blowing up?
Portinari, or Grobblitz as he was known to his vanquished fellow Kron, positioned himself in the center of the soccer field, and gazed into the sky. Augusta stood a few yards behind him, a purse strapped over her shoulder. Several minutes passed.
It happened without warning. A rabbit woman was suddenly there, similar in appearance to Augusta except for the shocking redness of her eyes and the pure blackness of her hair and raiment. She seemed to have faded in from nowhere.
All the kids held their breaths.
Dark Augusta spoke in a chilling voice that echoed across the field. "You haven't suffered enough, Rick," she said, taking a step closer to the alien. "After I'm done on Earth, I'm going to take you with me to another planet, and make you watch while I destroy its inhabitants. Then another planet. Then another. Once I've destroyed every populated planet in the universe, I'll finally destroy you."
Horrified by her twin's sadistic evil, Augusta quickly reached into her purse and drew out the green stone. She had lost her Wicasta powers, but she still possessed the alchemist's knack for wielding the magic inherent in common substances. This she attempted to do, pointing the stone at Dark Augusta in hopes of calling forth her submerged good side.
The red-eyed woman didn't even have to look in her direction. The stone exploded violently into fragments, some of which struck Augusta in the face, causing her to cry out in pain. As she collapsed to her knees, dropping her purse, the kids in the crowd rushed to her aid against their better judgment.
Without the stone, thought Portinari, what hope was left?
"What else you got?" asked Dark Augusta playfully.
"Now!" Alan shouted to Prunella.
"Spiritus Mundi," uttered the rat girl.
The space inside the frame started to glow again, and Pickles the Pomeranian ascended from the midst of the eldritch light. "Prunella?" she blurted out, startled. "What are you..."
"Don't argue," Alan interrupted her. "This is your chance. Defeat Dark Augusta, and the world is yours."
"What's wrong with the sun?" asked Pickles, looking upward.
"JUST GO!" Alan barked at her.
With a shock wave that sent him and Prunella stumbling backwards, two more figures burst out of the portal and landed nimbly between Portinari and Dark Augusta. One was a tall, pale man in a robe and hood; the other was an ancient-looking woman with wild hair, dressed in skins.
The tall man, Lord Moldywart, extended his wand toward the planet-killing rabbit woman. "Nevada palabra!" he intoned.
A streak of mystical energy flew from the wand, encompassing Dark Augusta and making her scream in fear and pain. While she was distracted, the wild-haired woman, Morgan le Fay, waved her hands and recited an incantation. It appeared to the gathered kids as if Dark Augusta's body was being pulled apart in every direction. The evil woman writhed and shrieked, struggling to fend off the destructive magical forces.
A few seconds later the air around her became clear again, although she was visibly shaken by the attack. Moldywart and le Fay prepared to let loose another volley, only to suddenly dissolve into piles of dust by a flick of Dark Augusta's finger.
"ATTACK!" bellowed Pickles.
The earth trembled around the portal. The sky exploded above it. Dozens, if not hundreds, of figures materialized in the air. Many of them were characters the kids recognized—superheroes, monsters, magical beasts.
Portinari quickly helped Augusta to her feet, snatched up her purse, and led her to the edge of the field where the kids were assembled. The battle began in earnest. The beings from Spiritus Mundi threw themselves against Dark Augusta with all their might. Weakened by the assault of Moldywart and le Fay, she could only disintegrate a few of them before they fell upon her, bombarding her with powerful blows and deadly spells. She countered with one devastating death wave after another, but for every foe she annihilated, two took its place. Soon the very earth beneath them began to give way, and a crater grew.
A gargoyle's curse stiffened her skin, but she easily deflected it back at the creature, turning it to stone. Philo the Phriendly Phantom tried to enter her body and seize control of her limbs, but she effortlessly exorcised him. A fierce dragon belched fire, which hammered at the magical invulnerability shield she had generated around herself. With a bat of her eyelash, she caused the beast to turn into ice and break up. The soccer field became littered with the pulverized remains of scores of imaginary heroes and villains who had died for their leader, Pickles.
In the midst of the chaos, Dark Augusta sensed something new—a voice inside her head. "I am Martian Bunny," it spoke. "You are in my power. You must surrender."
Her will to fight weakened, but remained at a level that allowed her to reach out and crush the mind that had attempted to invade her own. A green rabbit man in a spandex costume fell from the Spiritus Mundi ranks, clutching his head.
But the Bunny League wasn't defeated yet. Amazon Bunny charged, wrapping her lasso around the witch. Dark Augusta felt a strange compulsion to stop resisting, accompanied by repeated mace-poundings by Hawk Bunny. As she felt control slipping away, she summoned all her evil energies and fired mental bolts at the two superbunnies, placing them under her hypnotic power. Fast Bunny raced in super-speed circles around Dark Augusta, siphoning off her air supply, but the mind-controlled Hawk Bunny knocked him out cold with a mace blow. Bionic Bunny was pulled out of the sky by Amazon Bunny's lasso before he could land a single punch.
Yet there were more superheroes, and more mythological creatures. The snake-haired Medusa yanked off her veil for Dark Augusta to see; her ugliness matched the legends, but her power to turn all who gazed upon her into stone proved to be a second-rate, easily countered trick. Circe struck next, casting a spell that would have left any lesser foe squealing and rooting in the mud. It occurred to Dark Augusta that she didn't need to fight alone. Reaching into the minds of the opposing goddesses, she twisted their thoughts to serve her purposes. Faced with one woman who could transform them into pigs, and another whose face literally froze admirers in their tracks, the hordes of Spiritus Mundi had to plan their attacks more carefully. It was an incredible battle, the kids thought, well worth the price of admission (death). Yet it appeared to be a hopeless one, as more and more imaginary characters were magically brainwashed into serving Dark Augusta.
At a supposedly safe distance from the soccer field, Francine looked up at Augusta, who was still picking stone fragments from her face. The rabbit woman looked down at her and sighed dejectedly. "She's winning," she lamented. "The stone was our only hope of stopping her."
"Don't you have another stone?" Arthur asked her.
Augusta shook her head. "We only had time to make one."
This, thought Francine, might be the perfect opportunity to use the last wish remaining in the unicorn horn.
Drawing the horn from her pocket, she held it in front of her and said, "I wish I had another stone exactly like Augusta's."
Nothing happened.
"Uh, I think you can only make wishes that affect you," Arthur reminded her.
"Oh, right." Francine lowered the horn and fell into deep thought.
"Remember when D.W. wished to be a unicorn?" said Arthur. "First she wished to have a unicorn, but it didn't work."
He didn't know it, but his words had given Francine a terrible, fateful idea.
She looked up at the sun, which had expanded in size threefold since the nova burst. She knew she had to do it. Her sacrifice would be painless, unlike being deep-fried by solar radiation.
She turned to the aardvark boy. "Arthur," she said softly, "I love you."
Then she kissed him on the lips. For the last time.
Raising the horn, she said, "I wish tobe a stone exactly like Augusta's."
"NO!" cried Arthur, but it was too late...
----
to be continued