No. She couldn't have seen what she thought she had seen. It was impossible. Darth Maul was a fictional character. His speeder bike could not - would not - be sitting in her front lawn.
She hurled open the door and charged down the stairs. She stopped dead - for there the speeder bike sat, defiantly shattering all of Colken's concepts of reality (which were relatively few in number and quite distorted anyway. After all, she was utterly in love with Syndrome and called Gríma Wormtongue her best friend.)
Colken stared at the bike. If it had had eyeballs, it would have stared back.
Colken continued to stare. What, exactly, was one supposed to do when the speeder bike of one's major movie crush appeared in one's front yard? Should one attempt to ride it? Should one immediately seek the person who owned the bike? And why on earth, or Middle Earth, or Nomanisan, or Coruscant, or wherever, did one have to keep referring to oneself as "one"?
She shook her head angrily, tossing her brown curls back from her face irritably. Well, at least, she attempted to. What she ended up doing was tangling the curls to a greater degree and getting numerous strands of hair stuck in her mouth. She pushed them out of her face in an attempt to look dignified. This attempt also failed miserably. Colken rarely managed to look dignified, especially at one a.m. on a Sunday night when she was supposed to be doing an American Culture Studies paper but had instead spent her entire evening arguing about Darth Maul's soft side. Yeah... Colken had utterly no life, and she lived in a horrendous place known as Hicktown.
No, really! The town was actually called Hicktown! It was a horrible, yet accurate description, of where Colken lived. She liked to call it "the land where she actually thinks his tractor is sexy." She hated that particular Kenny Chesney song, and she hated tractors and large trucks even more.
The vehicle sitting in front of her, however, was, in her humble opinion, sleek and sexy beyond belief - somewhat like its rider, in her mind. She approached the speeder bike with caution, holding out a hand in front her. It looked as though she were afraid of being bitten by a rabid hamster - well, maybe something slightly larger than a hamster, but you get the general idea.
After a few seconds of laboriously reaching out to touch the bike, her fingers actually made contact with it. Colken gave a tiny squeal of fear and scampered back, as though afraid it might bite her hand off. It didn't, although there was a certain aura about it that seemed to state that it definitely wanted to. Ignoring this ominous impression, Colken reached out once more and firmly gripped the handle of Maul's bike. (That sounds really dirty, doesn't it? Ha! Made you look!) It bucked slightly under her touch. Then it was still again.
Colken climbed aboard it and flinched as she waited for it to hurl her free...
Nothing happened.
Feeling surprisingly relieved, she began to bounce on it. This was a mistake. Suddenly, the machine began to spin in large, vertical ovals, up into the air and hurtling down to the ground, like some horrible amusement park ride, over and over again, just the blackish, starry sky and dark green grass and brick house and sky again. It was enough to make anyone vomit. Colken proceeded to do just that, and then, still clinging tightly to the bike, she screamed like a little schoolgirl (which wasn't entirely inaccurate, considering that Colken was, technically, a rather skinny high school girl.)
After many more horrible circles, the thing managed to hurl the screaming fangirl off. (Look at the smooth way the author incorporated the title! Pa-CHING!) Colken went flying and smashed into a large silver maple in her front yard. She slumped, unconscious, against the trunk, and promptly began to have a dream involving a large chicken, a pair of nun chucks, and a gigantic vat of nacho cheese. (This is completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. Feel free to disregard it.)
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Darth Maul chuckled evilly to himself as he watched Mrs. Maul (ach! what a name!) fly off his speeder bike and smash into a tree. BWA HA HA HA HA! he thought. Take that, wanna-be wife! What do you think of my soft side NOW?
Maul proceeded to discover just that by peering into her mind. His own brain filled with an astounding visual - a visual of a gigantic purple chicken with a large cape reading "El Pollo Morado!" waving a pair of nun chucks and dumping boiling hot nacho cheese onto a small, fuzzy, squeaking hamster.
Maul felt deeply confused by this. Did this visual have something to do with him? What did the chicken symbolize? Why was there nacho cheese involved? How in the galaxy did he know what nun chucks were, not to mention hamsters and chickens and nacho cheese?
He pulled out of her mind hurriedly, deciding that it was an extremely scary place for his mind to be wandering alone at night. A giant chicken might leap out any moment and mug his poor little brain of all its loose change, or something like that. If… minds… had… loose… change… what!?
Maul gave up any attempts on explaining Mrs. Maul's way of thinking and walked away from the window, where he had been sitting, controlling the speeder bike. He was planning to leave, but he heard a sudden dinging noise that started him. He whipped out his lightsaber and turned, snarling, to face the noise. He discovered that it was only two new messages appearing on the computer screen.
imatrekkie: Are you still there, mrsmaul?
arwensolowhowearskhaki: hey r u there?
Maul turned away in disgust. He had no desire to talk with these lower humanoids. But then, an idea occurred to him - an extremely evil idea.
Grinning wickedly, Maul turned towards the computer screen and sat down.
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