"Fight them, Prunella!" bellowed Frink, gripping the transmitter to the point it might snap. "You didn't come this far to fail now!"
Every young heart in the room welled up with despair. The unicorn sphere waved in and out of view on the screen before them, mere inches away yet unattainable. "She'll never get free!" exclaimed Muffy. "They're too strong!"
"It's all over," George mourned quietly.
In the Hilton conference room, Arlos von Horstein glared condescendingly at the furious rat girl as she grunted and writhed. The hands of two unicorns held her upper arms firmly in place, not budging in the slightest.
"Perhaps you think this is a child's plaything," said the unicorn, cradling the sphere protectively in his fingers. "On the contrary. It's an extremely valuable, and extremely fragile, family heirloom--the one possession I hope to take with me when I leave this miserable planet."
Prunella, her strength failing, could only gape hopelessly. The stillness of the TV image prompted Sue to ask, "What do we do now, Dr. Frink?"
"I wish to glavin I knew," replied the scientist, consternation visible through his thick glasses.
Arthur, defying the uncertainty that held him back, approached the smock-clad man. "Professor Frink, I have an idea," he stated. "I didn't want to say anything before, because it could be dangerous."
"Speak, boy," Frink snapped hastily. "We need all the ideas we can get."
As Arthur and Frink consulted together, Arlos motioned for his unicorn comrades to set Prunella free. "Go find your daddy now," he said patronizingly, "and ask him to buy you a shiny bauble of your own."
The rat girl glared at him as she tried to rub the soreness out of her arm muscles. "You...you stupid unicorn," she grumbled loudly. "What makes you think everybody wants to kill you?"
Her petulance elicited a grin from Arlos. "Take a look around you, girl," was his reply. "Everybody does want to kill us."
The orb in his hand glowed briefly, and all at once, the situation changed.
The Thrag who had escorted Prunella plucked the laser pistol from its belt, lifted it, and aimed at the spot between Arlos' eyes. "Kill the unicorns," it droned.
Before Arlos had a chance to be surprised, a bolt of energy blazed through his skull, scrambling his brain. He wobbled and fell forward, abandoning the sphere to the influence of gravity. As it struck the carpet and bounced off, Prunella saw her chance.
Every helmeted alien in the conference room, as if possessed, began to fire wildly at the unicorns, who tried their best to evade the deadly bolts. "It's working," said Arthur in awe. "The sphere turned them against each other."
"I don't understand," said Francine.
"It's simple," Arthur explained. "When he said, 'The humans hate us and want to kill us,' only the humans were taken over. But when Prunella tricked him into saying, 'Everybody wants to kill us,' the aliens were affected as well."
His friends stared, sighing with amazement. "Good thinking, Arthur," said Alan. "They should call you The Brain instead of me."
"There's just one drawback," said Frink, his spectacles fixed on the TV screen. "The unicorns are getting picked off at an alarming rate--and Prunella can't seem to destroy the sphere!"
The scene in the conference room was even more terrible than before. Nearly two dozen unicorns littered the carpet, as the surviving ones fled in terror through the exit doors, dogged at every step by the relentless Thrags. Prunella, for her part, repeatedly heaved the sphere against the nearest wall, but only succeeded in denting the wallpaper. Not even a crack appeared in the seemingly indestructible object, even when she resorted to leaping up and down on top of it.
"Omigosh," exclaimed D.W. "They'll kill all the unicorns!"
"And it's my fault," said Arthur dolefully.
"This is the fate they chose," said Frink. Speaking into the microphone, he ordered, "Prunella, try the elevator!"
Every eye in the room followed Prunella's perspective as she raced to a nearby elevator, pressed the Up button, stepped inside, and waited for the floor indicator to reach the top. At last the doors slid open, revealing to the girl a choice of two corridors, each with a darkened window at the end. The path to the left looked shorter, so she hurried in that direction, occasionally catching a glimpse of a strange-looking alien resting in one of the suites. Not bothering to see if the window could be manually opened, she pushed aside the drapes, reared back, and hurled the sphere with all her strength.
The disorderly noise of broken, falling glass hit her ears, and the unicorn sphere plunged toward the pavement forty stories below.
to be continued