Roxanne had been afraid that getting out of the Evil Jetboat and onto dry land without blowing their cover would be a non-trivial task, possibly involving clambering out from under a dock, but it turned out to be easy. Just north of the wedding district were several unused piers that had once served as loading points for now-empty warehouses. They simply tied up at one and unloaded. Then Minion pulled a remote from somewhere in his mechanism and engaged the stealth mode. Working street lamps were in short supply, so Minion, after he tucked away the remote, produced a flashlight that shone red. A red flashlight beam is less noticeable, Megamind explained. Humans tend to assume it's the taillight of a distant vehicle, so they don't pay much attention to it. The blue alien was in his tuxedoed disguise, but demonstrated that he could selectively shut down part of it to get at his ray gun. He walked ahead, carrying the guitar in its case and with the gun at the ready, while Minion, also in disguise, brought up the rear, carrying the amp and lighting their way. She strolled between the two of them, towing her little suitcase on its wheels, with the wedding outfit in the Macy's bag in her other hand.

As soon as they came to the better-lit part of town, the flashlight and the gun were tucked away and they joined the Saturday night crowd, which included several couples already in traditional wedding garb. Roxanne was wondering how her alien groom was going to manage the blood test (she was sure he'd manage it somehow) but it turned out that, in Indiana, only the bride's blood is deemed to be in need of testing.

There was a long line at the county clerk's office. Saturday night seemed to be a popular time for elopements. While they waited, they studied the brochures of chapels from the rack in the lobby. In addition to the typical white-with-roses Chapel of Love (three Justices of the Peace, no waiting) there was a Traditional Christian Chapel with a stained glass window, a Nature Chapel in a rooftop garden which could become a Jewish chapel on request, and even a Leather Chapel attached to a local BDSM dungeon. Megamind was so fascinated with that last option that Roxanne agreed, just out of curiosity, to go and have a look at it, even though a brochure titled "Your Simple Wedding" was at the top of her stack. During this discussion, Minion excused himself and waited with the luggage next to a bench. He got out the guitar, attached headphones and quietly practiced until they finished at the clerk's window.

The Bound In Darkness Dungeon and The Leather Chapel were in one of the older industrial buildings, with bare brick, wooden beams and black iron fittings providing atmosphere the moment they stepped inside. A cheerful middle-aged doorman of uncertain race, wearing black leather trousers and shirt, stood by the elevator. He explained that the chapel was upstairs, that (like the dungeon) there was a no-alcohol policy and that, if they wanted to check out the dungeon, voyeurism was allowed and accepted, but they would be charged the regular entrance fee (about double the price of a first-run movie ticket) even if all they did was look. He added that the crowd was generally friendly and accepting and there were people who would be happy to answer any questions they had. "Simple curiosity is tolerated and indulged," was how he put it. Roxanne and Megamind were both curious, but Minion was uncomfortable and urged them upstairs to the chapel.

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, they were met by an older woman with long, flowing, obviously dyed red hair in a long, flowing, obviously genuine glove leather gown. Behind her were curtains, also of black leather, hiding the rest of the room. Light came from wall sconces on either side of the elevator door, with straight, pale necks made in imitation of candles, topped by flame-shaped light bulbs that flickered a little for a closer resemblance to actual flames. "Hi," she said. "My name is Patricia Grogan. I'm an ordained minister with the Church of All Worlds. What can I do for you this evening?"

All three visitors stood stock still for a moment with the same question in their minds: Did she say Church of All Worlds?!

Minion was the first to recover."I thought the Church of All Worlds was fictional."

The Reverend Grogan didn't seem surprised at the question. "The founders of my church were inspired by the fictional church. I have brochures that will tell you the whole story if you're interested."

That brought the other two back to reality. "We'd like to find out more," Roxanne said, "but that's not why we're here." She glanced at her disguised fiancé.

"Yes." Megamind picked up the thread. "We intend to get married tonight and we thought this chapel might be an interesting place to do it. Can we have a look?"

"Certainly. Right this way." The Reverend Grogan held the curtain open and they stepped inside. The chapel was cavernous, with a ceiling three stories high. They could hardly see it because the only lighting came from more of the imitation candle sconces. The walls were either granite blocks or some sort of fake stone. There were more black leather curtains at intervals along the walls. The floor also looked like stone but it felt, walking on it, like regular vinyl flooring. To their right, wooden folding chairs with black leather seats were stacked. Roxanne guessed that the place could hold fifty people. To their left was a raised dais with a podium, an altar with a black cloth, a small stereo and a tall cabinet. Directly opposite them, a carpet was rolled up.

"The size of the space is flexible," said their guide as they stepped out into the room, gazing around. "We can curtain off one section to create a more intimate space, or you can use it all, for the same price. We also have some costume items available for rent, and a small library of alternative wedding plan books you can consult." Her voice echoed a little.

"I like it," Megamind stage-whispered. Then in a more normal voice, he added, "It's not literally cold and damp, but it's got that quality to it. What do you think, Roxanne?"

"Not as bad as I thought," she replied. "I was afraid there were going to be, I don't know, torture racks or something."

"No, those are all downstairs," responded the Reverend Grogan. "It is possible to rent one and have it hauled up here, but that has to be arranged in advance."

"Can the altar cloth be another color?" the bride asked.

"We have several selections right back here," the clergywoman replied, and led the way to their left and through another door on the same wall as the elevator. It led to a smaller room with a rack of clothes on hangers, more cabinets and a desk that held several books and a computer with a large screen, with three chairs around it. The ersatz redhead led the way to the desk, where she sat down, woke up the screen and clicked through a few layers until a grid of photos came up, all of the same altar from the same angle but with different colored cloths. "What would you like to see?"

Roxanne settled into a chair and pointed to a robin's egg blue one. It enlarged to fill the screen. The lighter coloring around the edges turned out to be printed clouds. She turned to the other chair, but Megamind wasn't in it. He had only gotten as far as the clothes rack and was now wearing a hip-length black leather cloak with an irregular hem and a fur collar, preening in front of a mirror, while Minion looked on and encouraged him.

"John," she said, finding that she didn't like using his human name but not knowing what else to call him in this situation. He turned suddenly with a manic grin on his shapeshifted face.

"Oh! Roxanne! What do you think?" He spread his arms a little to make the cloak stand out. The fur collar framed the jewel in his shirt collar perfectly, and its irregular edges, clearly the untrimmed original hide edges, made him look like some barbarian prince.

"It looks good," she said. "I'm in favor of renting it. Now come and look at altar cloths." There were several with what the Reverend Grogan called sky themes. The groom liked the one printed with photos of storm clouds, mostly in shades of gray with plentiful lightning bolts, while the bride preferred a dark blue one with stars, suns and crescent moons with faces, drawn in the style of a 19th-century Mother Goose book. They both changed their minds when they saw the last one, black with a starfield printed on it, with the Milky Way Galaxy, as seen from Earth, around the edge, with the constellations outlined in blue.

Then Megamind pulled Roxanne back to the clothes rack to try on a white leather shawl, artfully cut and shaped, creating a quality of timeless beauty. She almost felt it would make her modern wedding dress look ridiculous. But he cajoled her into trying everything on, and when she saw herself in the mirror, she realized that it looked too good to not wear.

Then Minion weighed in with an opinion. "Sir, the cloak is very cool, but it makes your head look too small. Here." He held out a broad-brimmed black hat, like a riverboat gambler would wear in a Western, but of leather. Megamind looked at it as if he'd never imagined wearing such a thing (which he probably hadn't).

"Are you sure, M- Ronnie?"

"Just try it, sir." Megamind made no move to take the hat.

"Why that one?" Roxanne asked.

"It's sophisticated," said the blond figure with Minion's voice coming out. "But it's also kind of... frontier-y."

"Oh, I see where you're going with this." Now the disguised Megamind took the hat. He turned it in his hands, studying it, not sure how to put it on.

Roxanne stepped up. "Let me," she said, taking it from him, and put it on his head. He turned to the mirror.

"Hm. It does... kind of... work. And now I have this strange desire for a hand-rolled cigarette."

"You don't smoke, sir."

"Not to smoke, just to hold. And a little black pencil mustache." He mimed holding a cigarette with one hand, stroking his upper lip with the other. "And gloves. Ronnie, why didn't I bring gloves?"

"If you wear gloves, the ring won't fit."

"Oh. Right."

"So what do you say, hon?" Roxanne asked. "Do we get married here or do we go on to one of the other chapels?"

"Oh, I don't see how we can find a chapel with a higher coolness factor than this one."

"Let me bring up our standard contract," said the Reverend Grogan. "And then we'll outline a ceremony."

While she clicked through menus, Megamind pulled out one of the books on the desk and began studying it. In a moment, he looked up. "It says here that there are ceremonies for more than two people. Can you do that?"

"The only legal wedding I can perform is between two people of opposite sexes, but I can also perform non-binding ceremonies for three or more. Why?" Megamind, still wearing his first hat ever, was looking at Minion.

"Don't even think about it, sir. Normally, I go along with whatever you want, but not this." Megamind responded with an indignant frown. It would have looked thunderous on his real face, but on the disguise its power was muted. There was a moment of stand-off.

Then the smaller alien spoke. "Reverend Grogan, might the three of us speak privately for a few moments?"

"Sure. If you can leave the rental things on the rack, there's a small private room right through here."

Once they were rid of the extra leather, the clergywoman led them back out into the chapel, through a door behind a curtain behind the podium and into a very small room with too much furniture in it. The three of them filled it up. "I'll be on the computer when you're ready." She closed the door and was gone.

The two aliens immediately began to scrutinize the walls, ceiling and furniture.

"What are you looking for?" asked Roxanne.

"Cameras," they replied, almost in unison. After another minute, they pronounced the place clean, touched their wrists and resumed their normal appearances.

Megamind was the first to speak. "All right, Minion. Just what is the difficulty here?"

"It's Ms. Ritchi, sir. No offense," he glanced over at her, "but I think she's gonna bail. I think she'll end up getting cold feet and we'll lift off without her."

"And therefore you don't want to engage in any sort of binding ritual, but you'd let me go through with it."

"It would make you happy for a little while, sir, and then when she bailed, you'd be disgusted with her whole species. It would make it easier to leave Earth behind."

"Minion?" Roxanne asked. "What would it take for you to believe that I mean it about coming with you?"

"Since her willingness to marry me doesn't seem to be enough for you," added Megamind.

"I don't know," the fish began. "I think... doing the hard parts. Mainly, learning the language. It's really different from English, a lot more than an Earth language."

Roxanne, besides having sharp observation skills, also had a very good memory, and she had been training both from the time she knew she wanted to be a reporter, in fifth grade. Reporting on international politics, she had developed a technique for dealing with the problem of foreigners talking with each other in their own language when they didn't want the Americans around them to understand: she was able to memorize the sounds of what they said, repeat it into a transcriber, then feed the text from the transcriber into a translator. It wasn't perfect, but it would give her the gist of what had been said. She had gotten more than one scoop that way. Now she used the same technique. She called to mind the fish narrator of the interstellar message, remembering the sounds it made as it spoke, and began to repeat them. The language had a click sound in it, and a gulp, and a sort of squishing sound, and the vowels slid all over the place, but she managed it as far as the first pause in the speech. Her two listeners looked amazed.

"That was... pretty close," Minion admitted.

"Now say 'Vit o[squish] Amnang öu,'" Megamind requested eagarly.

"What does it mean?" she asked. "It means 'I love you, Megamind.'"

"So your name is in it?"

"Yes."

"So do you mind telling me which part it is, or were you expecting me to marry you without knowing your real name?"

Minion snickered.

"Come to think of it, why don't you both tell me what your names are in your own language, since where we're going, that's what everyone will be using?"

"Okay," said the fish. "I'm Ilu Menang."

"And I," said Megamind with a little flourishing hand gesture, "am Ilu Amnang."

"And vit o[squish] Amnang öu,'" she said. The blue alien beamed all over his face, stepped closer and put an arm around her waist. "And is it the same word whether it's romantic love or family love?"

"Vit o[squish] Roxanne öu," Megamind replied with his face next to her ear. "And for family love, you'd replace 'vit' with '[click]at'."

"So [Click]at o[squish] Menang öu." She looked at Minion as she said it, holding out her hand.

The fish smiled hesitantly. "[Click]at o[squish] Roxanne öu," he finally replied, taking her small human hand in his large steel one. "You know, I think this might work out after all."

###

Roxanne stood outside the leather curtain in her bridal costume, rented white leather shawl included, holding the bouquet, which Megamind had carried in dehydrated form. It was composed entirely of bird of paradise flowers. She didn't ask why he had chosen that particular flower; it had to be because of the spiky look of the petals. She heard her cue, "Here Comes the Bride" on solo electric guitar, and slipped in. Because it was only the three of them plus the clergywoman, they had opted to curtain off the dais and hold the wedding in the smaller room thus created. Inside it, the two disguised aliens waited, Megamind in what she couldn't help thinking of as his Zorro costume in front of the alter, Minion off to one side, playing the guitar. She walked with a slow, natural dignity, but she was still standing beside her fiancé well before the short tune was over. Minion stepped up just behind them, his guitar still slung, the cord trailing back to the amp.

"Roxanne, Amnang and Menang;" began the Reverend Grogan. "The future is coming. It's mostly unknown, especially the far future, the decades to come. That's what makes it an adventure. It will almost certainly include joy and wonder, disappointment and sorrow, satisfaction and frustration, boredom and total surprise. There's a lot you can't control. In the long run, you don't know where you're going to end up living, who your neighbors will be, what work you will do, how long you'll remain able-bodied and in good health, or how long you will live. But now, at this moment, you are here to make a choice about one aspect of your future: to choose to be together, to treat each other lovingly, to trust and be trustworthy, to stand by each other and look first to your well-being as a family, before your interests as individuals. This is what makes a partnership into something more than an emotional bonding: that it can call forth qualities of considerateness, generosity and even sacrifice when the situation calls for it. Partnership provides the partners with a point of stability in the chaos of life. Your partners can catch you when you fall, support you when you face difficulties, celebrate your successes, commiserate in your failures, and point out your follies, hopefully before you actually act on them. Shared joy is doubled, shared grief is halved, and those who stand together are always stronger than those who try to stand alone. Therefore, speak your vows, and claim the gift of partnership."

Roxanne spoke first. "Amnang," she said, looking at her beloved. "You're not the kind of man my mother wanted for a son-in-law. Boy, are you not. But you're the kind I want for a husband: bold, creative, brilliant, secretly a softie, and almost as handsome as you think you are. Being with you is going to be the most amazing adventure anybody could ever have, and I'm grateful to be on it. Therefore I choose you, now and for life."

"Roxanne," the groom replied. "Being adopted in America has given me many things, good and bad. In many ways, it's been a difficult path, but all the unpleasantness is canceled out by its most wondrous gift: having you in my life. From the moment I first saw you, I have secretly longed for you, hardly daring to hope that you would return my feelings. Your presence here, today, beside me, is the sweetest and most miraculous event of my time on Earth, and wherever I go, your love will remain the lodestone to which I will always be drawn. Therefore I choose you, for life. Er, and now." He gritted his teeth at his flub, but like any experienced showman, he knew that when a flub has happened and there's no calling it back, the only thing to do is move on. Along with Roxanne, he turned to Minion.

"Amnang and Roxanne," the fish began. "I gotta be honest. I didn't think this would ever happen. I still think it's gonna take an awful lot of work. But I also think it'll be worth it, and I want you to know that I'm behind you all the way. So, to show you I mean it..." he paused to reach into a pocket in the disguise that was an access point into one of the compartments in his gorilla suit. Pulling out a jeweler's box, he opened it and held it between them, saying, "I give you these to give to each other." They each pulled a ring out of the box, held it in their right hands and held out their left hands with the fingers spread. "With this ring, I thee wed," they said simultaneously, sliding the rings onto the appropriate fingers.

"Then by the authority vested in me by the Church of All Worlds and the State of Indiana, I now pronounce you husband and wife." Without further prompting, they kissed while Minion played the traditional closing tune. They kept kissing as long as the music lasted, and he decided to draw out the last few notes, with a little vibrato work. They finally broke off, thoroughly out of breath, during the concluding reverb.