Chapter 14: International Maiden of Mystery Part 1

Once upon a time, Sophia Loren and Bella Black were racing through the hallways of the police institute, their velocity's speed faster than could be accounted for in the standard model of physics. Bella Black raised her throat, her breaths pumping. Said breathing apparatus faltered, and she coughed a great deal all the same.

"Are you alright? Let us pause for a moment, for I can feel the ghost of fatigue settling down on my limbs." Sophia Loren panted heavily, in and out. "Now we must rest our weary face."

"Are we almost out of this contraption?" Bella Black whined haltingly, which means pausing every now and then.

"Sometimes," Sophia Loren inspired. "But for now let us be content. I have no idea where we are. My sagging skin has been locked away down here for a life age of the earth, and we must follow our noses. Give them time to smell the air doesn't smell so bad over there."

"I am sorry. Can I hear of your time that you spent here and why?" Bella Black questioned, "You were not always so ugly, were you? There was a time when people looked to you when sex appealing."

Flashback:

There was a time when Sophia Loren had a woman's face, and sweat like meltwater drooled down the backs of all who viewed it. She was like a queen, as beautiful and terrifying as the morning. All despised her worshipfully.

Today she was wearing a lace-up corset underneath a leather dress. The leather warped around her firm caboose and calf region, covering up smooth skin the tinge of tawny malachite. Her lips were placed directly in the center of her face, though displaced downwards so that they were perhaps one quarter of the way up from the chin. Her nose had a certain... je ne sais quoi.

Anyway today she was going out shopping with her husband named Georgi "Paul" Bernadinberg. Said man was a famous magi, which is what they called math people many years hence. It's like in that movie, Little Man Tate, where the kid idolizes this math magician guy. That's what they used to call them. Math Magi.

"Paul," said she, "In what way, directionally, are we heading to get where we want to go? Are we going to Urbane Outfit Sales, which in the distant future may be renamed?"

"No, my eager beaver, tonight we're going somewhere special. Banana Republican."

"That's so romantic. I can't wait 'till I see those chops. Banana Republican sells top of the line shrapnel, or should I say top of the banana tree, ha!"

The men and women all around were leering straight at the pair of lovers. They laughed gregariously at her joke, which was funny.

Many women looked at Georgi "Paul" Bernadinberg's Armanian suit, which swathed his rotund form. He had a pleasant belly that cut away sharply before forming a pair of stretchy legs that reached all the way to the floor. Said legs were adorned with pants, perhaps beige. His eyes, when they were open, were a pleasant blue. He squinted often. Many hairs were not on his head, but wrapped around the side of it. He appeared confused.

"That joke was a good one! It reminds me of a story. Back when I was a child, those everywhere peoples used to put on clothing the strangest way. Some still do! Once you hear the alternative method I'm about to expose, you'll understand why it's a countably better method than the one everyone else uses, and you'll wonder, 'Hey, why didn't anyone else teach me that?'

"First, you must put on the pants. Then, you put on the belt. Then, you wrap your scarf. Have I told you about scarfs? Raise your hand if you're familiar with scarfs. Okay, well you'll learn more about them later..."

Sophia Loren followed his gaze as he trailed off, staring at the huge and large entrance to Banana Republican. Many times along there were three stories with many fancy clothes. Too many fancy clothes, beyond anyone's fathoms. They entered the store place.

Well anyway eventually they got to trying on the clothes they were picked out.

"How do I look, funnybunny?" Sophia Loren did a twirl. The skirt complemented her as it span, the g-force clear in its momentum.

Georgi "Paul" Bernadinberg pulled his arms into their sockets and held said hands in them. His hands grabbed the glasses upon his nose brim and they were removed with amazing speed, a blur of hasty energy unseen by the unbelieving women who followed his actions, eyeing them. The hands rested a bifocular distance away from each other upon his belly ledge.

He squinted, and then ejected, "That depends. I could answer that in several different ways. I'm going to go over them in the specific sense and we can generalize from there.

"Let the number of people in this store be five. Of those five, at least one of them views you the least favorably, and at least one of them is an upper bound on the evaluation of your looks. The sequence by which you applied your clothes is similarly bounded. So we can say that by the general definition of beautiful, that is, Aristotelian beauty, you are the bound of the scale. By any other name, you are a 10. Your sweet abs, though invisible at this stage, can be sensed by the pheromonial nature of your body.

"Now let's approach this from a different direction." The man paused, his eyes squinting. He squinted hard at her, then continued to eject: "Pretend you're confined to an arbitrarily small world, with a set number of people. If we extract a convergent subset of people by Bonzo-Weinerschnitzle method, it is clear that unless the sequence is evil, it will approach a number. That number is you. So you're the hottest damn gal this side of the equatorial bound."

The crowd swooned at her.

End Flashback.

"So you see, it was quite a blow hard when I became such a hideous wench," Sophia Loren concluded, "since until then I was rigorously the best looking woman on the planet. Perfectly sex-symbolic. You could not believe it. But so it was. Alas! I have lost so much! I was so young! Now I am not! The flower of youth fades to be a damsel like me, wilted! Sad! Watch out!"

Bella nodded sublimely, taking note. Is it really wise, then, that I have divorced Edward? He could have made me everlasting, like in that Tuck Everlasting movie where that really hot guy is like, hot forever, even though he's like 100 years old or something. Jacob Black may very well become an old wereman, crinkled and decaying, like this broad.

"Just remember, your man might be good now. But one day he'll disappear. My hubby was trapped somewhere by something, and it will be a while before I reveal the mystery to you. We have yet to become friendlies and our relationship must develop."

The talk had taken them far, but they had at least many miles left to escape.

AN: It's that season again, and God is in the air! Jesus is the reasonable season! Merry "Christ"-mas- keep the "x" out of the Christ, please. Review if it fancies you, now.