Pack of Lies
"Bet you can't work yourself out of this mystery!" laughed Officer Laura Palmhair as she hooked Flint Paper to a lie detector mechanism in a room somewhere beneath the Brixton Police Department. Bernard sat whimpering in a chair on the room's sidelines, sipping a vial of genetically modified Gatorade he concocted himself.
Flint sat patiently betwixt the machine's countless cords and buzzers like a chiseled Buddha that reeked of sex, whiskey, Lucky Strikes, and gunfire. "I have strength in numbers," he spoke calmly. "In the next room, I have the lovely Ms. Klytemnestra Reid ready to swoon to my aid at any given minute once your chromosome-drunk brother takes his banana-beating paws off her, and in this here room, I have my faithful young ward Bernard—and you."
Officer Laura guffawed as she viciously peered down the device which housed Flint. With a paradoxically manicured and callused hand, she flicked a switch which activated her masterpiece, the world's most powerful lie detector. "This baby has no margin of error," she snickered. "Unlike you! So while you sit in legal purgatory, I will ask you these questions two."
"Fine. I have nothing to lose. No 'real' job prospects, no family…"
Right as he spoke the word "family," Flint suffered the most intense electric shock imaginable as blinking lights of seventeen hues flooded his corneas.
"So you have a family," said Laura as she pulled up a manila folder labeled "Flintward J. Paper" and began to flip through its contents. "No surviving parents though, as they both died in a flight from Seattle to the Bermuda Triangle. No surviving siblings either, as your sister was horribly mutilated by a disembodied tentacle after playing what she assumed was the LOOM soundtrack and your brother was devoured by a beast within the Great Sphinx of Giza. Interesting family history, to say the least. But it says here you also have a living son named Brock Paper. Tell me about him."
Sensing the threat of additional electric shocks from every corner, Flint allowed himself to speak the truth.
"Brock is twenty-three years and old and he and I have nothing in common. He lives up in San Narciso with his mother, where he fancies himself a beatnik poet."
"A beatnik, eh? What has he written?" asked Laura.
"Uh…Venetian Blinds was his last novel," admitted Flint.
"A silly sort of name for a serious text, don't you think?"
"Well, he is legally blind, and his mother is in fact of Italian descent (though technically Sicilian as opposed to Venetian). In fact, she typed the entire book for him while he recited it to her, lousy spoiled brat of a mama's boy. Should have learned Braille."
"That's a cruel way to speak about your one and only son. I'm glad your ex had the heart to raise him in an environment away from your influence," said Laura.
"Yeah, well, you police chimps might be better off as bonobos," said Flint. "You should fight us with love instead of war."
"Why, you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking…Neanderthal!" yelled Officer Laura. "And don't get me started on bonobos, you have no idea how many research essays I had to write on those little bastards while I was studying anthropology."
"Wait, you had academic pursuits besides criminal studies?" asked Flint.
Laura shed a tear. "I had high hopes of becoming the Jane Goodall of bonobo research, Flint. I was a very promising student, with a full scholarship to Brixton Anthropology School, but I got expelled during my first semester for performing tests on the bonobos which weren't yet approved by the school's official regulations. And that's the real reason why I've been such a stickler for punishment to you, Bernie, and everyone else this entire time. Because I failed to follow the rules myself, and it ruined both my career opportunities and the future of bonobo life as we know it."
"That's really something," said Flint, every bit as moved as Laura by her revelations. "That makes my estrangement from Brock seem so…petty." Feeling a tad guilty for making Laura an emotional wreck, he decided to change the subject. "What made you choose anthropology in the first place?"
"Indiana Jones," she said, beginning to chuckle through her former tears. "When I started at Brixton Community College, they didn't have an archaeology department, so I had to choose the next best thing, which was anthropology."
"Funny, while I truthfully never saw you as an Indiana Jones type, in the past you have drawn comparisons in my mind to Sophia Hapgood, Indy's love interest in the LucasArts adventure game The Fate of Atlantis. She's technically an archaeologist as well, but she's also very New Age in her interests and works as a professional psychic on the side."
"Screw New Age philosophy and psychic shit," snapped Laura. "Indy saves Atlantis…what kind of hogwash is that? Might work for a DuckTales episode, but that saga is the brainchild of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg! Surely they deserve better! I mean, Indy saving Atlantis makes Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sound like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Next you're going to tell me that the villains once again are Nazis who face supernatural punishment for their meddling!"
"Laura, you don't get it!" growled Flint. "Indy and Sophia may be polar opposites, but it is only when Indy combines his unapologetically rough-and-tumble approach to archaeology with Sophia's psychic premonitions that they are able to save the fate of Atlantis from the National Socialist menace! In this way, my freelance detective agency is completely compatible with your legitimate police department!"
"Great thinking, Indy!" said Laura, proceeding to finally untie Flint from the lie detector. "There's only one caveat…it's not my police department. You'll have to influence a lot of other officers, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and the chief with your Lucasfilm logic, and I don't even think you'll be able to convince my brother."
As soon as she spoke his name, Sergeant Nick Palmhair walked into the chamber. "Big surprise," he said sarcastically, "Ms. Reid is the owner of a Hart so lonely he paid her for sexual favors." Ms. Reid stumbled behind him, attempting to escape, before he promptly tazed her.
"And what in the world did you do with the other hostage, Richard Alton Weinstein?" asked Laura.
"Who's Richard Alton Weinstein?" asked Nick. He turned around to see the crazy old man he had forgotten grinning like a schoolboy while clutching a vial filled with a radioactive green liquid.
"I have in my very hands a vial of Reptilian seed! When properly ignited, this stuff will blow me out of this prison chamber and take me on a one-way flight to the Reptilians' home planet!"
"No!" yelled Bernard, breaking his silence for the first time in a good thirty minutes as he proceeded to run up to the old man. "That chemical is a dangerous combination of uranium, gunpowder, gasoline, and nitroglycerine! If you add anything else to that formula, everything within a five mile radius will go kablooie!" While Bernard was running, his untied shoelace grappled on to one of the lie detector's many cords on the ground, where his entire body instantly collapsed. The impact of his fall caused not only his vial of Gatorade but Richard Alton Weinstein's vial of supposed "Reptilian seed" to shatter into approximately 1,138 glass shards, and the liquids to combine before his eyes.
At that point a tremendous explosion took Brixton Police Department by force, transplanting it to...
The Reptilian House
"It's happened!" shrieked Reptilian Regina. "It's happened!"
"What happened?" asked Reptilian Rex. He adjusted his spectacles and gasped at the sight before him. An entire Earthling police station had crashed landed onto his planet like a flying saucer. "Oh jeez, I bet it's that blasted cowgirl again." He brandished a slimy megaphone and began to screech into it. "Your boyfriend's corpse is in the ocean, now go back to the Earth from which you came!"
"No, I think it's that Weinstein creep who's been stalking us," said Regina. "See? This is what happens when any of us pollinates another planet. You may think none of them have the brains to ignite our seed, but you're oh so wrong, Rex."
Flint Paper was the first to exit the police station, a sizable shotgun in his hands. "Don't anybody move. If one of you even tries to probe me, I'm going to pummel you like a dog does to a rabbit."
"Why would you want to pummel us?" asked Regina. "You need our help to get back to Earth. My Repty sense tells me you have no means of escape from here—nothing on you but 1,138 Earth yen, which is equivalent to eleven Earth dollars and thirty-eight Earth cents. Don't you think dogs and rabbits can be friendly to one another?"
"Why, yes, yes they can," said Flint, recalling his old neighbors Sam and Max. "I must remember I live in a world where purple meteorites and disembodied tentacles have the will to take on the world."
"Where the sky and the world of the dead can be opened and men can be turned into swans," said Regina. "Where two-headed squirrels run amok on the Earth's Pacific Northwest."
"Where hordes of ghosts can be busted by a mere drop of sarsaparilla in a way that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis could never fathom," added Rex.
"Where common household plants can actually be named 'Chuck,'" said Bernard, joining Flint outside the police station.
"Uh, yes, Bernie, they can," said Flint. "Now how do we get off this planet?"
"Rex, send a signal so that the rest of the survivors can evacuate this vessel," said Regina to her equally scaly husband. Rex complied, and Sergeant Nick and Officer Laura Palmhair walked onto Reptilian soil.
"That's it for survivors?" roared Flint. "Hundreds of innocent police officers have been killed! And even worse, my sweet Ms. Reid has joined her Hart in Heaven! Eh, I bet they're happy together."
"And it looks like we can also say goodbye to Mr. Weinstein, and good riddance since he got us into this mess in the first place," said Bernard. "Now let's get our hineys back to Earth!"
"Not so fast," said Sergeant Nick, as he and his sister ran up to Flint and Bernard. "You're going to pay for these damages, Flint. My family spent generations making Brixton Police Department what it was, and even though my kid sister would have rather frolicked in the fields with horny apes, the Palmhair legacy is a proud one."
"We have a spare police department we can lend you, Sergeant Palmhair," said Regina. The Reptilian Queen pointed in the direction of a magnificent platinum skyscraper that would surprisingly have fit smoothly in the ruins of the old PD. "It will only cost you eleven dollars and thirty-eight cents including shipment to Earth, and we'll even throw in a free detective agency complete with music journalism!"
"I have exactly that much money," Flint awkwardly told Sergeant Nick, finally putting his shotgun away in his roomy pants. Never doubt the benefits of going commando, thought Flint.
"Never!" spat Sergeant Nick. "I will not stoop to allowing a so-called 'detective agency' work within my walls! No Palmhair has ever viewed freelance work as an acceptable alternative to the police force, and no Palmhair ever will!"
"I accept it," said Officer Laura, prodding her fist in her brother's chest. "Let the poor guys have their agency. You don't even know Flint and Bernie!"
Sergeant Nick stammered. "L-Laura, what are you doing? Don't make me taze you!"
"We don't want any trouble," said Reptilian Rex, but Nick was already trotting toward the aliens, caressing his tazer in glee. "Sergeant Nick Palmhair, please put down your tazer, or we will resort to…"
"Oh, grow a spine, Rex!" snapped Reptilian Regina. She promptly picked up a scaly, slimy weapon with which she fired lasers into Nick's stomach, causing him to collapse onto the soil in sheer pain. From his stomach emerged a baker's dozen of Reptilian infants, singing a medley of "The Merry Go Round Broke Down" and "Merrily We Roll Along" in unison.
Now that Sergeant Nick's pains of childbirth were keeping him from making further threats, Reptilians Rex and Regina walked Flint, Laura, and Bernard into the gleaming new police department, complete with detective agency, and bid them adieu as they launched the edifice back to Brixton City.
"Can't I at least have my old police department back?" asked Sergeant Nick. Reptilian Regina shot a condescending smile at him and extinguished the old Brixton PD with another blast from her weapon.
Epilogue
Flint admired his new detective agency, which had all the necessary equipment to resume his freelance work. It had seemed like years since his last pummeling, and he desired further experience within music journalism as well. He went over to check on Bernard, who was agape at how many rare chemicals the new police department's laboratory housed.
"That was some day we had, wasn't it, Flint?" asked Bernard, admiring a nearby plutonium rod.
"Some day?" laughed Flint. "Why, it hasn't even begun, Bernie!"
"Oh, there you are," said Laura. For the first time since her brief fling with Flint, she was clad in something other than her uncomfortable police uniform—a kinky police uniform. "Flint, are you ready for the fuzz and the vigilantes to really combine?"
"I knew you'd come to your senses, Laura!" exclaimed Flint. "But first, just let me make a quick call to my son Brock."
"Aw, you're finally interested in getting back in touch with your family," said Laura. "But just wait until Nick comes back here—we're going to have thirteen Reptilian nephews' mouths to feed!"
Flint's mouth dropped. "Lucky there's a family guy," he muttered, and followed Laura into her bedroom for some escape from the thought.
