Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.

PART II

CHAPTER TWO

WICKED WEST vs. DEATH

A swirl of green smoke coalesced into a slightly dizzy Wicked Witch. After getting her bearings, Zelena brushed leaves from her clothes, looked around -and frowned.

She had not appeared in the Enchanted Forest as she'd expected to - though, to be fair, she could have appeared anywhere Emma Swan or that pirate were thinking of if they'd fallen into the time portal ahead of her... though she'd been fairly certain that they had not.

Had some other townie been bailing hay in the barn and taken her to wherever the hell this was... other than Fremont Street and Fly's Photographic Studio?

"Tombstone," a brassy alto boomed from behind.

Zelena spun, haplessly planting a pointy boot in a pile of horse manure before facing a tall, curvy, ebony-skinned woman dressed in a boobsy black cloak with hot pink press-on nails that matched extensions in long, dark hair that protruded from beneath a black cowboy hat adorned with a band of small white bones.

0"Who are you?" Zelena demanded, clenching her hands, ready to unleash green death if necessary. "Are you the idiot who fell into my portal and brought us to... to... where the hell is Tombstone anyway?"

The woman snorted. "For making jokes about famous Westerns, honey child, you've done a lousy job at your homework. Tombstone is in Arizona and it's Wednesday, October 26, 1881 at..." She glanced toward a dusty clock tower, "two fifty-nine in the afternoon. We're about to see if Wicked always wins... or if I do."

The clock chimed and the woman grinned, "Guess that clock's a little fast."

Before Zelena could ask further questions, two groups of men were converging on them in the narrow lot, all with pistols at their hips, one of them wearing a shiny star. The self-proclaimed Wicked Witch put on her best fake smile in an attempt to charm the men, but they didn't seem to notice her or her annoying companion.

"Yeah, they can't see us."

The two groups of men were now only about six feet apart when the lot of them suddenly drew their weapons and started firing. Zelena shrieked in surprise, darting out of the way, uncertain if being invisible would protect her against the projectiles.

It didn't.

In the cacophony of bullets tearing through human flesh, there was a ping of a round ricocheting off the shiny metal star followed by a sharp pain in the redhead's chest. As the thirty second gunfight came to an end, the two parties retreating with their dead and wounded as quickly as they had arrived, their unseen victim looked down in shock at the blood smeared on her pale hand from the hole in her chest.

"That... that's not how this was supposed to go," Zelena complained in a whiny, petulant tone.

"Doesn't matter," the strange woman smiled cruelly. "I always get my woman in the end. Wicked's got nothing on Death, honey child. Mavet always wins."

It was with an utterly confused look upon her face that the Wicked Witch's eyes became vacant and she crumpled to the horse-turd-covered ground, doing a proper face plant right into a fresh pile.

Smirking, the Grim Reaper declared, "And you dead."

There was no reason to see that one into the After Life, to purgatory to decide her fate. She'd had a reservation in Hell for quite some time and Azreal would no doubt be greeting her soul momentarily and showing her to eternal damnation... which, if Mavet had to take a guess, would look a lot like a shitty one room apartment in Manhattan, married to an adulterous doofus, and stuck in the form of his wife living out her life cleaning toilets for bellow minimum wage.

Smirking to herself, the Angel of Death wiggled her fingers, vanishing the body of the Wicked Witch, to the dismay of the gathering horse flies, and then she sashayed a few doors down to a saloon where she found Metatron unhappily ordering a sasbarilla.

"Have fun?" he asked.

"So much. How are things in 2013 Storybrooke?"

"Nothing to write home about. The 'rents are concluding their narcissistic name-saking ceremony to pretend like they didn't tell the man they're naming their child after to fuck off in the tone of 'you are not part of this family'. Bloody hypocrites."

"All humans are, honey."

"I just wish the Almighty had put a little more thought into that story before that inane world gained a life of its own. True love based on a single conversation and corpse-kissing... At least She should have written a second draft of that one before poofing it into existence - and then basing an entire world's Savior on the spawn of that shallow mess that's actually the most well-adjusted relationship in that entire magical universe - which isn't saying much."

"Well, you could say that about this world. Humans are just dumb. I've always said, if God had made Eve first, there'd be a lot less fuckery. Giving sentience to some hairy ape with a dick for a brain first was the first bad call our maker ever made - from which all others have followed. Well, that and forbidding us to drink! I don't miss the genitals. All these filthy perverts in here scratching their balls - and either there's a brothel upstairs or this place is owned by a fishmonger."

"I did notice a particular... aroma," agreed Metatron with a wrinkling of his nose while scowling around his foamy beverage before squinting and declaring, "Anyway, the party's over and the pity party is about to begin. Saviors and their self-esteem issues, always needing reassurance that they aren't not perpetual fuck-ups."

"Even though they are?"

"Exactly. I'd better put a stop to it before she falls off the wagon and drowns her sorrows in homemade rum and a three century old ball scratchier. Why do I always get the annoying ones?"

Metatron vanished and Mavet turned her attention to the sexy Hispanic burlesque dancer/whorehouse "matron" flirting with some cowboys.

"Really?" Death groaned as the pretty woman strolled over.

"What?" Serendipity replied. "Who do you think inspired Virgil Earp to become a Deputy U.S. Marshal?"

"Yeah, and he's gonna get shot in the back ending up permanently maimed, one of his brothers will be assassinated in a year, and he'll end up living with his parents while his compulsive gambling pimp baby brother gets all the glory with a flatteringly fictionalized biography that makes him the symbol of American frontier justice."

"Hey, I just inspire them. I'm not responsible for whether that inspiration leads to fame and fortune or maiming and hospice care," the Muse stated before slamming back a shot of tequila. "Who do I look like, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman?"

Mavet snorted. "Well, you could at least inspire those prostitutes to clean their pussies. Magdaline had better hygiene. It smells like Peter's boat up in here."

AN: St. Peter was a fisherman. Vaginosis, get it? Yeah, pretty lame! Serendipty was played by Selma Hyack in Dogma. The infamous shoot-out at the O.K. Corral did not actually take place at the O.K. Corral and really did last only 30 seconds. Zelena's pre-death experience was inspired by the Star Trek episode where Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Checkov were transported by aliens into a fictionalized reproduction of Tombstone in the roles of the good guys. For the purpose of this story, Zelena was transported to the past of "our world" as in the OUAT Earth, before her inglorious demise and face-plant in horse poop... so, technically, October 26, 1881 couldn't have been a Wednesday since "Selfless, Brave, and True" failed to understand how the International Dateline works... or even get the time zone correct for Phuket which made October 23, 2011 a Saturday rather than a Sunday, even though October 23, 1983 was a Sunday which would have been a cool full-circle thing they probably intended before hiring math-challenged assholes.

Next up: Emma acclimates, not very well, to a do-over and what to do with a town full of assholes. She has some anger management issues still to work out