Ballad of the Physics Police
Chapter 70: The Killing Joke
"What are you doing, Raven?" Robin asked as he followed his dark friend to the roof of the Tower.
"You've been acting way weird ever since Noel left," Beast Boy agreed. "I thought you were over the locking yourself in your room phase."
"I want to know where he is, Gar. I sense that he's in danger." Raven lifted a hand, and the magic sands she'd gathered twirled around making a huge alchemy circle on the room of the tower.. Then she took out a small vile with a green liquid in it., and drank it.
The taste was bitter, but it would enhance her magic enough to travel between Universes. "I've been doing some research. The ancients new of these Physics Police," she said, holding out an old book with the P-Squared symbol on it, along with many words in a language neither Tim nor Gar could read.
"I have to go." She sat down in the middle of the circle, and chanted, "Azarath Metrion Zinthos…Carazon Rakashas Dedere…Vaserix Endirium Celenai… Celenai, Celenai!"
The portal to the realm called Celenai opened in the sky, and light shot from the roof of the tower all the way to the clouds. "I'll be back soon," Raven said. Then she disappeared through the portal.
0000
The last of the wounded heroes were beamed into LRR, and the girls breathed a sigh of relief. They looked around. In addition to Dende and Tekli, there was a multitude of Starcraft Medics running around, healing where they could. And with the wave of new wounded, GoChibi defied PP regulations again, and beamed in more. Again, all the same, which began to puzzle Omi.
Sure, in Starcraft, some crummy old game her dad had tried to make her play, all the medics were the same. But that had more to do with the technological constraints than anything. It didn't mean that in the actual Starcraft Universe, that all the medics were the same person. Did it?
She walked over to where GoChibi was beaming in Medics from Universe G4-SC-3494-BW. She paid attention; GoChibi slid a certain bar and then pressed the touch screen when she found a medic, then hit "Energize"…
And Omi immediately saw the problem. "GOCHIBI" she blurted. "Have you been getting all your medics that way?"
"What way?"
"By sliding the Fourth Dimension bar?"
"Yes, I think. I've slid it both ways, to help in diversity."
Omi sweatdropped. "Did it ever occur to you in your pursuit of diversity that ALL THE MEDICS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME!"
GoChibi looked up from her computer and saw that Omi indeed was speaking the truth. "Um…"
"That means you've been getting the SAME PERSON from different minutes of the same day in her life!"
"Oops…"
Chibi Ryoko walked over. "Um, doesn't that create a paradox?" she asked.
"Not as long as we beam them all back to the instant they left... And as long as none of them die."
Ryoko gave a derisive chuckle. "With Agony around, that is easier said than done."
"OK. No problem," Omi said. "GoChibi, just use your Silver Imperium Plot Device—I mean Crystal,--Silver Imperium Crystal to send them all back to their own time when they are done."
"But Mom said never to use it except in a major emergency, and that I would know an emergence when I saw one. This doesn't seem like an emergency."
"Just use it!"
"No. Not unless Mom says I can."
"If you haven't noticed, your mother is sort of unconscious right now!" Omi said, pointing to the bed where the medics were tending to her.
"I'll ask her when she wakes up," GoChibi said defiantly.
Omi started to protest, but was cut off when Celeste, in the viewing section of the LRR, screamed Erik's name loudly…
0000
Vengeance dashed at Agony, both blades drawn. He attacked with previously unseen ferocity. He dived next two her and rolled diagonally, switching directions as he rose and stabbing Evil's Bane and Redemption at her stomach. She dodged this, and struck back with a blast that looked like a combination of red fire and sound waves, and knocked Vengeance on his back.
The blades still caused Agony pleasure, but she could absorb the pain of neither, and her dark healing power was disrupted by a cut from Evil's Bane—but only temporarily. Which meant he'd have to land a killing strike with it for it to work.
"Erik," she purred. "Why don't you just stop this mad crusade and die before I have to hurt you again? Though, I'd probably enjoy that."
Vengeance looked at her intensely, not even shivering as he looked into her eyes. "Agony," he said, "I will NEVER stop until you are dead—or until you scatter my atoms across the Universes!" He plunged Evil's Bane into her thy, and brought Redemption around in an arcing slice, but Agony's head jerked back at an impossible angle and the blade missed it. She opened her mouth and black fire arced out and coated Erik's coat, which he threw off, revealing his muscle body and cyborg arm.
"I am the Princess of Xarxagas, Purveyor of Anguish! Herald of Destruction! You will be mine again, Lover, or you will cease to exist!"
With that declaration, Agony's body writhed, and a pulse of power knocked Vengeance away, and the tendrils of the crimson aura that had formed around her plunged through the walls of the SERAI chamber, digging through durasteel and adamantium, all the way into the offices and cantinas, the Wall-Marts and Bucky's Mega Music Stores, the dorms and apartments.
And it killed everything it touched. "Don't you get it, Christopher. Erik. Damien. Ravensky? Nothing you can possibly do…"
Suddenly, before Erik could react to her using his full name, the energy tendrils reached the limit Agony had designated and discharged, causing massive explosions throughout the PP HQ, and the ground rumbled, forcing Erik to dive to it or get knocked down.
Hundreds of thousands died in horror, gone in an instant, and their souls dragged into the hell pit of Agony's heart. She squealed—yes, squealed—in pleasure as the pain and fear rushed into her. She LOVED it.
"…will stop me. You may slow me down. You may inconvenience me. But I SURVIVE." For the first time, Erik noticed even the scar on her face—the one he had made before finishing her off before, was gone. Because she stole Ecks' body, he realized.
Erik swore at her and lunged again, swinging the blades, hoping to score a hit somewhere vital. No such luck. Agony flicked a wrist, and a dark red beam destroyed the floor, slicing through hit on its way to Erik, where it consumed him.
When it cleared only ash remained…
0000
"Did you get him?" Celeste blurted. The LRR had narrowly been missed by Agony's assault on the base, and Omi's quick thinking had—hopefully—managed to get Erik out and drop some ashes in.
"We got him!" GoChibi smiled. Relief washed over Celeste like Niagara Falls.
"Oh, thank God!"
Erik staggered into the teleporter control room, confused briefly, then angry for an instant, then finally thankful. He said nothing, but let GoChibi speak.
"Thanks to Omi, you're alive and Agony thinks your dead. You can surprise her now."
Erik glared at the girl. "No," he said. "Agony would know if I had been killed. I'd be hers right now. She knows I survived, even if she doesn't know how."
"Guys," Celeste called. "I think you should take a look at this!"
0000
"Guys. Give me your energy," Goku demanded.
"Father, are you sure?" Gohan asked. "Maybe we should fight together."
"No. This is not a request. I demand you all give me your energy."
"Father," Gohan said somberly.
"Goku-san?" Trunks flashed Super Saiyan and reached out his hands. "How much?"
"As much as you can spare," he said quietly.
Agony stood, watching this whole thing rather amused. This would make the fight more interesting. And without Erik there, no Saiyan could hurt her.
"Kakarrot." Vegeta sighed. "Always the hero."
Goku smiled, as the three poured energy into him. Vegeta joined his son as a Super Saiyan and Gohan transformed with his mystic upgrade.
Goku glanced back. "You too, Yamucha. It would honor Kuririn's death."
"I've not seen you this serious in a long time, Goku," the aging human said. He began to spare what chi he had, dumping it into Goku…
When Vegeta finished, he had two words: "Kill her!"
"Thank you, guys." Goku said. Suddenly, the teleportation beams surrounded Gohan, Yamucha, and Vegeta, and the weakened fighters were whisked to safety. Goku unleashed his rage, throwing his head back, he transformed into a Super Saiyan, and then went beyond that, to the upper levels.
He broke into a Super Saiyan Four transformation, but did not stop there. His power kept rising, fueled by his unbridled contempt for Agony. And it snapped. Goku did not know what snapped, but something did. The combined evil of Agony's being, and the pain of loosing his best friend Kuririn… again—it was just too much for him. All the death, and her unabashed glee, taking pleasure in it all. Such was Agony's 'life.'
He could stand no more. His mouth opened in a scream of inner pain as his rage reached equilibrium with is power, and red fur grew and in a blur gained a silver hue. The pupil and iris became solid teal, and his black hair lightened to match his fur, shimmering in the light of his massive ki aura.
Super Saiyan Five. A level even Agony was unfamiliar with. Mostly because this author is very good at Dei ex Machinis, where as Agony's traditional author tends to drag things out for eons.
"What's this? The monkey people have a new model for me to muck around with?" Agony laughed. "Well, then, Son Goku. Shall we dance?"
"No." Goku said quietly. "No warm up. Just me, destroying you!" Goku blasted from where he was to Agony so fast, that instant transmission would have been slower, and smashed an elbow into her knocking her backwards shattering he ribs. She darted upward, hurling Kienzan at him, and finishing with a linear beam of dark fire.
Goku narrowed his eyes, and a burst of chi destroyed both disc attacks and halting the fire as though it were nothing. This managed to shock even Agony. But that didn't last long, when Goku, appeared on both sides of her simultaneously some how, kicking her back and forth so hard and fast she didn't know if he was using multiform or just moving at super speed. With a burst of black power, Agony halted herself and, forming a sword from her dark power, slashed at Goku.
She missed, and gasped as she realized that Goku was now on the other side of the SERAI chamber. "No…" She hadn't seen him put his fingers to his forehead—which meant he'd done it with NORMAL MOTION.
Angry, Agony did what she normally did to blow of steam: She killed people. Agony hurled ballistic packets of various kinds of energy through the holes her tendrils had made earlier. More people died. More souls and essences became hers. "Wow, that one was spicy," she commented as somebody named 'Zaphod Beeblebrox' entered her dark heart.
She had nearly reached the power she had possessed when she had first come to Goku's world, he mused. And he did so with a preternatural calm…
Goku silently whispered a prayer to Lord Enma for the dead, and then looked at Agony. He knew that his chi would only pleasure her if it weren't born of love. He had no love left—but there was one more way that Goku could destroy her: complete disintegration of every atom in her body.
And he smirked now, knowing that even with her "god mode" boost, he had more than enough power.
"Agony. You've murdered your last victim. Not one more soul will enter your vile prison!"
Somewhere, in Agony's black heart, she feared that Goku's words were somehow prophetic. But she did not let it show. "Big words from the monkey boy."
0000
"What!" Phil blurted as he, Noel, and Ralph entered the LRR. "How does Agony know Goku? I thought she did not remember anything that happened because of the time shift."
"You don't know?" Erik gasped. "What happened after I reset time? All I know is that she somehow remembers the alternate timeline. And she visited that Earth a second time… and someone named Buffy Summers was there too. I thought you had a file on her!"
"Most of it is blotted out because it's fan fiction and fan fiction is not supposed to be real."
"Fiction?" Erik grew angry. "You think my life, my seemingly endless struggle against Agony is some hack's fantasy!" Erik grew really angry.
"I'll explain later." Phil said. "Now we have to destroy Agony!" Phil glanced back at Noel and Ralph. "You guys ready?"
"As I will ever be," Noel sighed. He really wanted to go home. But sometimes, to be a hero, one had to do things one did not want to do.
"You think you can destroy Agony?" Erik asked skeptically.
"Not without your help," Phil said.
"Right."
0000
Goku, now an SSJ5, cupped his hands. Agony was weak. He was strong, he thought. Technically, Agony wasn't weak, but she was compared to him in this state. He realized it burned chi far too fast to be used for long, so he decided to act. No more letting Agony survive. She did not, after all, deserve to be human.
She didn't even deserve to exist.
"OBLIVION KAMEHAMEHA!" Goku shouted. His voice reverberated through the damaged, failing SERAI room, and he unleashed the largest Kamehameha wave in the history of all the multiverse. It consumed the entire room, and instantly shorted it out. The spatial distortion that the SERAI made possible ended, and suddenly, the two mortal enemies were in very close quarters…
Agony fought back, knowing the attack would vaporize her, knowing that it had no love and, if she were not vaporized, that she would survive. Her faint aura exploded off her and converted into blackish red energy, lashing out and eating, as it appeared, the wave Goku had launched. But Goku's beam prevailed, and the darts of energy scattered away from the brilliant silver blue. One hit Goku right between the pectoral muscles, but he barely even felt it…
KRAKOW!
VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The entire physics police building began to rumble, the Oblivion Kamehameha shaking the continent-sized building to its very foundation. Phil and Ralph stumbled and fell, Noel had to use the Shimmer to hold himself to the ground. Erik shrugged it off.
"That felt like Son Goku," Phil said.
"Did you say Goku?" Noel realized.
"Yeah."
"As in THE Goku… from Dragon Ball Z?"
"What is Dragon Ball Z?" Erik asked.
"NEVER MIND," Phil insisted. "Egad. If you think about such things as fiction being real, you open yourself to all kinds of disturbing questions of your existence."
"Maybe we should get Agony to do that," Erik said humorlessly.
The statement hanged in the air…
0000
The gambit had worked. Agony was nothing but a skeleton, but sacrificing most of her epidermal flesh in order to make an energy buffer around her had succeeded, and though the attack had torn all the flesh off her bones, she lived. So did Goku, but that wouldn't last long.
"Ta, Ta," she said to Goku, and phased through the ceiling of the now small room.
"What!" Goku blurted. "Come back here!" He tried to pursue but was unable to take more than a few steps before reverting back to a level one Super Saiyan…
Which was a big mistake, as the gash the dart had carved between his pectoral muscles, which was sealed off by their increased mass in SSJ5 state, opened. And blood began to leak out profusely, it's viscosity removed by Goku's body heat during the Kamehameha…
Thankfully, Omi saw this and beamed him to the medical bay.
0000
With most of the base seemingly evacuated, Agony was having a rather hard time finding new people to slay. She had been randomly altering her life signs to avoid detection, however, and had remembered, or perhaps rediscovered, how to sever the link she had with Erik, so he could not track her that way…
And if nobody knew where she was, then how did they know where not to be to avoid her?
Perhaps the whole base had been evacuated. Oh well, she could always find one of those nice portals and end up with a whole new universe to play with. Oddly, stealing souls seemed a bit more appealing than it had the day Erik had seemingly killed her.
Suddenly, a familiar ping erupted behind her. The sound she knew too well. The sound of Erik's mechanical hand making a fist around a weapon. How many times she had heard it!
"Good evening, Erik," she crowed. "I knew you weren't dead."
Erik smirked, bitterly. "I've watched this fight, Agony. Love. It still hurts you. And yet my Redemption sword does not."
Agony shrugged. "I guess I just got used to… YOUR LOVE," she laughed, knowing how much her laugh angered him, and how much that implying that he loved her infuriated him.
"Go away," Erik growled, drawing both Redemption and Evil's Bane again.
"I'm hurt, really….NOT." Agony, forgoing the flight abilities she'd gained, dashed forward, creating a giant scythe of death out of nothing, and swinging it down at Erik. He blocked with Redemption and ran Evil's Bane across her stomach; she jumped back, recoiling from the oddly paradoxical pain. "ARGH!" Agony's outstretched hands unleashed a flurry of crimson and black energy darts, which Erik dodged away from. He leaped at her, and cut with both blades in an X shape, but she avoided them by blurring backwards.
She kicked him in the groin, and then across the room, her foot becoming a spike and driving into Erik's gut and exploding through his back, severing his spine just below the diaphragm.
Blood ran from the wound, but the Vengeance in him kept going. He crawled, even on the wounded stomach, across the floor by his arms only, to where he had dropped his swords. He reached for Evil's Bane, but before his hand could get there, a red bolt of lighting crackled against it. It was deflected, of course, but it prevented Erik from touching his weapon.
"Do I have to do this the hard way?" Agony complained. She kicked Erik in the face, sending him sliding across the ground and drawing more blood from his mouth. She picked up Evil's Bane in her hands, and snapped it in two.
Erik eyed the broken sword, then Agony. And despite his own pain, he crawled towards her again. Leaving a trail of blood on the ground. "Not rest… until you die!"
"You foolish, man. Erik. GIVE UP! No matter what you pull out of you proverbial butt at the last minute, I can always trump. You thought the sword killed me, but it really only HELPED me. It helped me get HERE. Where I can kill the most powerful beings in the multiverse time and time again."
"Not if anything to say about it have I," Ralph said. "Azarath Metrion Zinthos!" Having the psychic spell he had read about once but never felt the occasion to use lashed out and slammed into Agony with dark navy energy, and she staggered back.
Agony blinked.
"What ever that was," she laughed, "That felt good." Red lighting crackled from her fingertips and blasted Ralph back; in all his years, he had never felt such pain. "Now fry, little copper man!" Agony laughed with glee. The only thing she enjoyed more than her own pain was the pain of others.
0000
Vengeance reached for the sword. Not the hilt, you idiot. It's worthless. The broken blade…
Erik's thoughts were becoming incoherent from blood loss. The only one he could even hear anymore was this: Kill Agony.
Ralph jumped up and flipped backwards, and in a motion too fast for Erik's blurred vision to track, Phil jumped in as an SSJ2. Only his hair was only blond at the roots. Which would have confused Erik a lot more had he been less delirious.
After pounding into Agony's face a few times, Phil backed off and shot an improved Kamehameha at her, which only stunned her. She darted forward. "Violence is like nectar to me! Why do you continue to…"
Two things happened at once, then. Erik picked up the broken tip of Evil's Bane and hurled it through the air, aiming right towards Agony's head.
And, Phil shot a beam at her foot to stop her momentum.
She jumped to avoid the beam, ever so slightly… causing Erik's aim to fail ever so slightly…
The blade that would have cut into Agony's brain sliced into her upper back, just above where the nerves that send impulses to ones arm lie.
Agony arched an eyebrow. That was unexpected. She fell to the ground, and just lay there, unable to move her arms or legs, and unable to get the knife from her back. Unable to even stand.
Phil blasted her through the nearest window out onto a balcony…
0000
"You think you've won because I can't move?" Agony yelled. "THINK AGAIN!"
With barely any effort, a huge wave of fire and heat exploded from Agony's mouth knocking in the building and pinning Phil, Ralph, and Erik painfully to the wall. The building started to collapse around them, and somehow, despite the melted metal, when it was over, they were all still alive.
Including Agony.
Ralph staggered forward, even as Agony began working out a way to get the sword out of her back, despite the fact that the Nth metal of which it was made disturbed her magics.
Curse them, and their luck. How she despised them all. She swore at them, and any time one of them moved, a burst of fire from her mouth would knock them back. "This isn't funny!" she barked, and went into another series of curses. Then she spat up an egg.
"I should have remembered killing the Namek," she chuckled. "Thank Xarxagas for the Namekian reproductive cycle." The egg hatched into a grotesque chibi version of Agony, which ran around behind her and pulled the blade out. Then Agony, stood, picked her offspring up, and ate it.
"Now…" who's next? Agony started to say.
"Now …" what? Ralph started to wince.
"Now…" would be a good time to do something before we all die. Erik tried to groan out.
But what was actually heard, came from Phil, and sounded something like, "NOW, NOEL!"
Just as Agony stepped into room from the balcony, Savior dived from below the floor, bursting through and wrapping Agony up in a cocoon of Shimmer, but before he could get a strand into her ear, she lashed out, and cut the white rope… causing Noel to feel immense pain.
He spoke to Agony words unbecoming of a superhero. She shrugged them off; after all, she was used to it.
Grabbing a handful of the Shimmer, Agony began to torture, Noel, plucking the strands with sharp fingernails like the strings on a cello, playing his talent in a dark ballad.
Savior, to his credit, gritted his teeth and took the torment gracefully, which served to annoy Agony slightly. "Well, your really not much fun," she hissed. "Scream little boy; I can FEEL how much this white goo pains you."
"HEART!" Ma-Ti materialized, aiming his ring at Agony. And in another burst of light and the smell of ozone, Tsukino Usagi materialized as well. "MOON PRISM POWER… MAKE UP!" she yelled.
Suddenly, the girl Usagi was replaced by the Soldier of Love and Justice: Sailor Moon! "In the name of the Moon, I will punish you, Agony!"
"Belgium!" Phil swore. "We're screwed."
Moon jumped over Agony's head and kicked her, Agony still unable to move because of the Heart Ring sending waves of goodness and love into her. She barked, jumping at Ma-Ti through the pain, and slashing at him. He dived back but not before she grazed the ring with her dark blade.
The psychic backlash knocked Ma-Ti on his butt, and almost unconscious. Agony turned her attention to Sailor Moon. "Moon Heart Effervescence!" Usagi twirled around and launched a stream of hearts at Agony, which sliced into her flesh, leaving deep gashes.
Agony swore at Usagi in several languages and dived at her, kicking her magic wand out of her hand. "You want love and justice?" she snarled. "LOOK FOR IT IN HELL!"
And with that, she crushed Usagi's neck, not bothering to absorb the soul of the Soldier of Love as her life's blood rushed out and Usagi crumpled to the ground, dead. Blood pooled around her.
"FRACKING BELGIUM!" Phil swore. It was over. He and Ralph were pinned to a wall, Erik was bleeding to death, and Ma-Ti was scared out of his wits. And Noel was trying to put out the fire on his pain receptors.
"Or just Far, Far Away," Ralph corrected. He jerked his arm off the wall, the tiny metal shards that pinned it there tearing his flesh. He pulled out the gun containing the darts containing the love potion, and fired it, three, four five darts. Two missed, one Agony vaporized, not knowing what it was, and two hit her, one in the neck, and the other in the temple.
"What's this? You're so desperate you resort to tranquilizing me?" Agony's voice was full of contempt now, but always with her trademark lust hovering below the surface…
"It's a love potion!" Phil stated confidently. "It should paralyze you."
Agony burst into a fit of laughter, which she found really painful, because of the wound Usagi had made in her stomach, so she quit really quickly—which made the PP really happy, as her laugh was really unnerving. "You think a POTION of 'LOVE' will work against me?" She opened her eyes for the first since starting her laughing tirade, mildly surprised to see Noel in her face lashing with Shimmer lines. She lashed back, cutting a few and causing Noel more pain, which she drank up in euphoria.
"Love is a choice," she said. "Not a substance. Though I can't help but love this kid, here." Agony glared down at Savior and began picking at his Shimmer strands again, one at a time, pulling them tight and slicing. Jolts of pain wracked Savior's body again and again, and though it was evident he was suffering, he woudl not give Agony the benefit of a scream.
"Come on boy! Sing. I can feel how much this hurts!"
"Yeah." Savior spat. "And..." involuntary tears flowed from both eyes as he bit out one of his old standbys. "Pain... is weakness... leaving... the body!" A Shimmer-coated fist lanced out into Agony's face with the last word, knocking the demonic woman back. Of course, the pain it caused was soothing to her. But the kid hadn't screamed in pain--he'd just been defying her. All too much like Erik for her tastes.
Raising a clawed hand, Agony snarled. "You know how that quote ends, don't you, kid? 'Agony is what remains!'"
With shout of glee she plunged her clawed hand forward, into Savior's neck and through the back...
Or, at least, that's what she'd meant to do... But she found herself unable to go any farther, suddenly... Her entire body had just locked up. Her face, though still bloody and, her eyes, though still full of lust, changed. They were somehow softer, suddenly. Conflicted. And the way she looked at Noel said everything.
Savior facevaulted. This couldn't be right...
"Is this... love?" Agony muttered, clearly suffering the purest form of anguish she had ever suffered. The potion must have... triggered something...
Noel tried to make some sort of objection, but could not. Oddly, Agony just froze in place, her muscles twitching randomly.
"What's going on?" Ralph asked.
"It's working! Noel, she's in love with you; the choice to love you is hurting her, so she is weary of making it; but she saw you first thing after the love… Yeah. Just do the plan."
Noel, feeling extremely filthy, restrained Agony in another body cocoon, and slipped a tiny strand of Shimmer into Agony's ear, then flung another strand across the hall into Ralph's. The Shimmer itself protested, wanting to reatreat into Noel's body and sleep off the trauma it had just undergone. Noel had to force it to do his bidding.
"Do it!" Savior said, "She is starting to squirm! I think the effects are wearing off!"
"Here goes nothing!" Phil said.
Ralph cast a spell that made him deaf for the next thirty seconds.
Phil took a deep breath.
Agony burst from the cocoon, slicing it down the middle and causing Noel immense pain.
The Shimmer writhed, protesting that it had to return to it's home, inside Noel's nerves. But Savior held on, forcing it to stay. The Shimmer did not leave her brain!
Then, Phil spoke.
"Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!"
The word gersput seemed to echo through the air, repeating itself numerous times…
Then the sound waves crossed the room, into Agony's ears, where the Shimmer plug in her brain translated them…
And Agony began to laugh. But this time, it was not a cruel laugh. It was not a laugh of arrogance. It was a laugh of pure, unbridled JOY. Perhaps it was the first Agony had ever felt outside of causing pain. And she did not stop laughing, though it hurt her physically. Light exploded in beams from her eyes, then from her mouth, and eventually, light burst from every pore in her dark body, till she was like a walking blob of light, with a dark skeleton underneath…
Laughing.
"It's working!" Phil said with glee. He looked over and saw that Erik had lost a lot of blood, and was unconscious. He glanced at Ralph who cast a healing spell. The wound closed, but the blood loss still weakened the vigilante…
"It isn't working," Savior informed them, staggering away, his eyes soaked from the pain of having the Shimmer cut so much. He slumped against a wall, the Shimmer retreating into him to rest. Forever, it hoped.
Agony still stood, within the consuming light, her energy working over time to heal her body. But the damage the sweet pain of laughter did to her body, she could not undo fast enough. It was consuming her, but slowly…
And with all the souls she had absorbed, it might be TOO slowly.
Suddenly, one last whiff of ozone brought GoChibi into the fateful hallway. "Mommy!" she blurted, dashing to the dead body of Usagi, lying in a growing pool of blood. "Mommy!" GoChibi began to cry, the Saiyan in her wanting to fight with pride, the Senshi in her wanted to fight for love. And justice. "Mom. Please, I don't want you to go! We need you! It's a big... emergency."
And suddenly she knew what to do. Removing the Silver Imperium Crystal, she closed he eyes and held it over her mother…
Agony continued to laugh.
0000
"OMIGOSH! OMIGOSH!" yelled Omi. "She is using the Silver Imperium Plot-Device. She is using the Silver Imperium Plot-Device…!" Omi's face went from elation to chagrin. "But she's using it for the wrong REASON!" she said, glancing back at the medics, all the same woman from different parts of her life.
Ironically, the fact that time caught up with the medics and that and they shared many memories, the medics worked with supernatural precision, healing even better than Dende and Tekli could.
Ryoko would never let her hear the end of it…
"You were saying?" she kept mocking…
0000
In a pulse of light, Usagi leapt to her feet, twirling in a massive glow from the Crystal. Sailor Moon was back! Tendrils shot out from the healing light, blasting the suffering Agony backwards, and into the sky. It began to rain…
No. It wasn't rain. It was blood. Even in horrible anguish, the sweet pain of laughter, Agony's power still existed, and still affected the world. The ground, countless miles below, erupted into fire…
And the group was beginning to think it was time to add the sweetest pain of all: Love.
"I think I know the problem," said Sailor Moon.
"I think I do to," Erik agreed, suddenly more hopeful than he had been in a long time.
"Love, or joy alone only hurt her…" Usagi smiled.
"But love and joy together will obliterate her.."
Ma-Ti smirked, his fear smashed to bits by the new hope. "Then let our powers combine!" He drew all the love left, all the love he could find in the entire Physics Police base, into his ring. "HEART!" An orange beam lashed out, unlike anything he'd ever seen from his ring before.
"SUPREME TIARA BOOMERANG!" Usagi screamed, infusing it with her love power.
"Holy Light!" Ralph said, casting a spell from a scroll.
And Phil, sucking whatever goodness he had left in him into the chi in his hand, coined an attack on the spot. "Er.. JUSTICE BLAST!" he shouted uncertainly.
Erik stepped forward, holding out Redemption. The blade seemed to melt into an ivory glow around him, and then, he hurled a new attack. "PURITY'S GAVEL!"
A hammer, like Thor's Mjolnir flew out in a twirl of ivory light.
The attacks collided in the air, and in a blur, flashed into a pure love beam of DEATH, and smashed into Agony, her own mirth supplying the Joy. And the effect was like a match on gasoline, like matter and anti matter canceling each other out…
KRAKAVOOOOOOOOM!
A massive explosion of good and evil like what had never been seen by mortal men since the beginning of time resounded through the now darkened skies of the Physics Police Home Universe, and the entire cosmos was lit up…
And within the burning ball of love and joy and goodness, Agony died. Everything within her and without was completely snuffed out, and her skull died. For the first time, not laughing. Not in a scream of ecstasy…
For the first time, Agony died with a muted whimper of suffering. All the souls of the people she'd killed spewed forth, including Kuririn, Ecks, and Superman.
This made Erik very happy…
0000
Sailor Moon caught her returning Tiara, and waved the Crystal over it to make sure Agony hadn't attached herself to it. The blood rain stopped, the fires went out, and Agony's dark all-consuming madness finally left the realm of mortals for good.
Overwhelmed with an ultimate relief, Erik stepped back from the balcony... It was truly, finally, really OVER. No hiding her essence in his sword. No time resets. No banishing her to a desert for a week. Agony was, once and for all, truly gone. He fell back still weak from blood loss, and a single tear of joy ran down from his biological eye.
"Is she?" Phil asked.
Erik smiled. "Yeah. Gone. This time, I believe it's for good."
Ralph and Phil discussed it. Ralph said, "Well. It's over, I think."
Phil wasn't so sure. "What about Savior? He had a direct link to her brain. If she had thought to escape…"
"NOEL!" a new voice suddenly blurted.
This drew puzzled looks from the rest. Noel was pleasantly surprised. "Raven!" The dark woman who Noel called his girlfriend hovered close to the weakened and weary Savior.
The two embraced and hugged, and Ralph felt them through the Force, the love radiating from Raven into every inch of Noel's being; and that love was reciprocated.
If any of Agony had escape into Noel, it was gone now, washed away by the love of his soul mate. "Nah," he said to Phil. "Not a chance in hell."
0000
Two days later, Phil and Ralph sat outside Tenchi's house in FC-1. Usagi and Gohan had taken the girls shopping and given the Physics Police a well-needed break.
"Any word from O'Conners?"
"Yeah. He said that things were going fairly smoothly." A multi-dimensional assortment of scientists had built all the heroes new bodies and their souls had been installed in them, and everyone had their memories quickly erased, except for the Z-Senshi.
That freed the Omni-Dragon Balls (an ancient set from a Namek that had never been ravaged by disaster, with their creator in stasis to prevent him from dying) to be used to revive most of the 1.4 million Physics Police that Agony had killed, along 300,000 of the soldiers she'd slain in Sky Field.
Still, for many reasons, some of the victims here and there could not be revived, and in total, the net loss was about 500,000, with a bit less than half Physics Cops. It was a tragedy the Physics Police HQ would be reeling from for years.
"I heard you received a medal of honor," Ralph said.
"It feels sort of hollow," he said. "So many people died. And Warren is MIA, so I can't even gloat."
Ralph sweatdropped, and Phil removed something from a backpack. "What is that?"
Phil answered. "It is a Happily Ever After potion," he said. "I thought, you know. Maybe Kiyone and me would fall in love a bit faster if I drank this. Sort of a way to apologize for how long I've been gone."
"Weren't chocolates good enough?" Ralph snarked.
Phil sighed, and with reckless abandon, took a swig of the bottle and went to bed.
0000
The next day, in a large field, the girls had finally rounded up all the medics so that Omi could once again beg GoChibi to use the Silver Imperium Plot Device to send them all back to when the belonged.
"I can't. My mom said the Crystal shouldn't be used—OMI, LOOK OUT!"
Omi jerked her head around to see a Boeing 747 hurtling towards the ground, about to land right on top of the field of medics. "There's a Boeing gonna kill all the medics!" Ryoko smiled.
"That's not good!" Omi said. "Shoot it down!"
"We can't shoot it down. It has people on it," GoChibi protested.
"Get rid if it!"
"What should we do?"
The plane swooped down till it was about 75 feet above the medics, when suddenly, a flying DeLorean burst in from nowhere, and a young man aimed a small beam out the window, that shrunk the plane and pulled it into the car. "Paradox averted, Doc," he said, and then the car was gone.
"That was close," Omi sighed in relief.
"Falling anvils!" Chibi Ryoko screamed, and pointed up at the sky. Anvils were falling from it towards the medics, just as the girl had said.
"What the…?" Omi trailed off. She dashed over and hovered above the medics, and started blasting anvils from the sky. The other girls joined her, destroying the anvils that fell, and eventually the pianos that joined them.
"I demand to know," GoChibi said, "what sick and twisted personality is responsible for this! Anvils don't just rain down on medics!"
Up in the sky, on a magic cloud, Loki continued to turn a crank on a machine—a machine that spewed out anvils and pianos. He laughed. "This is so much more fun than that stupid bet." Loki laughed, and laughed some more.
0000
The next day, Phil awoke, surprised to find that he was a woman. Alarmed, Phil checked the bed and then the whole room for sources of water and found none. She dashed to the mirror, and looked into it. As if all those dreams about Universe Abortions and some vague thing about The Monitor erasing his mind weren't' bad enough, now her Jusenkyo curse was activating dry… How was that possible?
Then, deep within her, a terrible thought formed inside her mind.
She dashed towards the Masaki household, and when she got there, she landed quickly outside and dashed into the house. Someone obviously felt her land, because when she landed, Tenchi was rushing out the door. "Phil! You have to get in here, quick!"
"What's going on?"
Phil followed Tenchi inside, where Ayeka, Mihoshi, and Sasami greeted her.
And then she saw what was happening. Kiyone stood at the far end of the hall, green hair combed. Extremely handsome, Phil thought…
Kiyone was now male…
"Phil?" he blurted. "What is going on here?"
Phil thought briefly about the implications of this ordeal, threw back his head and angrily screamed, "CHALTAAAAAAAAAAAAB!"
Well, that is the end. I've had some positive and some negative feedback. If you liked it, drop me a line and say so. If you didn't, tell me why and I'll take it into account next time I try and write something involving these characters. Until then, good day!