Part Fifty-Two
Bunsen seemed oblivious to the sight of an enormous scaly amphibious thing gulping down a young Whatnot lawyer, but Beaker cried out in terror, eyes bulging. Bunsen swung around in his swivel chair, his shoulders slowly receding from his ears. “Beaker! How many times have I said this? I can’t concentrate when you’re screaming like that!”
The frantic carrot-topped scientist jabbed his fingers at the screen as the green thing lumbered out-of-frame. “Meeeee! Mee mo mo mo mee meemee mo mo!”
“Well, no, I don’t recall us agreeing on a ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ animatronic,” Bunsen said, puzzled. He turned to view the monitor showing an empty lobby. “Beaker, you’re imagining things again!” He frowned at his assistant’s gaping jaw. “How many of those little packets of candy corn have you had tonight? You know one of them has enough sugar to send a hamster into a diabetic coma!”
Beaker, flustered, scanned through the remaining camera views. A disturbing number of them had mysteriously stopped working. Honeydew tapped one of the readouts, which seemed to have flatlined. “Now would you look at that! It would appear that somehow we’ve stopped transmitting over the TV station! Tsk, tsk...well, we must shoulder on until they’ve fixed it, I suppose. Is the online signal at least going out?”
Beaker looked at their web-TV streaming signal. “Mou mo meer,” he assured Bunsen, but then worriedly flicked through all the cameras. The ones which still worked showed empty hallways and silent rooms. He quickly checked the sensor gauges; oddly, every single one of them seemed to be moving downward or toward the lobby, although even in the corridors, stairs, or rooms which should have been transmitting a live camera feed back to base, Beaker could see only gloom. He tweaked up the master sound feed for all the mics, and heard only wind...and an odd rustling. “Mee mo mee meep meep!” he exclaimed, shivering.
“Really, Beakie, it’s supposed to look abandoned and spooky! Now let me get back to the task of scaring the pants off those of our friends who actually wear...them...” Bunsen scratched his head, scanning through all his scare-control monitors. He took off his glasses, polished them briefly with Muppet Labs Cleanse-o-Wipes, and reset them above his right-angled nose. “That’s very strange...I don’t seem to be able to pinpoint exactly where our comrades in terror are right this instant...do you see any of them, Beaker?”
“Mo,” Beaker whispered, suddenly feeling very alone.
Bunsen scooted over, peering at the sensor-tracker. “Oh, you sillyfoam! Look, there’s Kermit and Piggy and...Lew?” Well, perhaps our little spookhouse has split up and rearranged some of the groups. Bunsen checked the monitor for the lobby, where that bunch of Muppets registered, but saw absolutely nothing. “That can’t be right! Beaker, what have you done to the location calibration? That’s supposed to be GPS-specific within two-tenths of a meter!” Beaker meeped a protest, gesturing wildly at all the equipment. Puzzled, Bunsen looked at all of it, then reached for the camera joystick. “Well, perhaps the focus is simply a bit off...there...let’s just...Ah! There we are! See? I told you to stop fidgeting so much, you’d knock the settings out of...align...ment...”
He trailed off, staring. Beaker’s hair stood up straight, and he let out a long gasp. On the monitor, the lobby camera now tilted almost straight down, two enormous pillbugs with antlers and some kind of bright green-glowing millipede crawled steadily toward the hidden office, orange sensor dots visible on their backs. Beaker let out a shriek, leaping to his feet.
“Oh heavens! Not deerbugs! Oh heavens! Those things terrified me as a young boy,” Bunsen confessed. When Beaker stared at him, Bunsen wrung his hands. “And they still do! Beakie! Quick! Block the door!”
Agreeing wholefeltedly, Beaker grabbed one of the server racks, straining to move it. Even with wheels under it, the wobbling tower of electronics creaked only an inch toward the door. “Ack! No, no, here, the desk!” Bunsen cried, making no move himself to help as Beaker got behind the heavy pine furniture and grunted and shoved and slowly pushed it across the crowded office to the sliding panel which separated them from the crawling horrors outside. He wedged it in such a way that the panel wouldn’t open, and backed off, panting.
Bunsen checked the sensor gauge. “Oh, my dear Uncle Mellon! They’re everywhere!” He rapidly jockeyed one after another of the working cameras to show bugs of all species, few identifiable, wearing sensors which had been taken from the frighteningly absent Muppets. All of them seemed to be heading the scientists’ way. “Beaker! Why didn’t you tell me this building was infested with overgrown insects!”
Before he could recall how to work his jaw to get a meep out in his own defense, Beaker heard a scratching sound at the panel door. Quivering, he backed away, suddenly realizing that millipede had some fearsome-looking jaws. Biology had never been his area of interest, but hadn’t he read somewhere that ordinary millipedes traveled through roots and dirt by...by chewing their way through? “Mohhhhh,” he groaned, grabbing one of the servers to steady himself. It wobbled alarmingly, but then Bunsen snapped at him.
“Beaker, keep track of these things! I’m going to try to rig up an electromagnetic high-frequency drone signal to drive them off!” Now that actually sounded practical. With a fierce nod and a meep, Beaker hastened back to his chair and checked the positions of every single blinking light on a wide-range scan of the fear-o-sensors. Honeydew’s sausage-like fingers moved more nimbly than Beaker had ever seen before, dancing across a keyboard as he attempted to figure out a way to switch the mics set in every room and hallway to transmit rather than receive, and simultaneously calculated the exact hertz needed to repel the advancing bugs. “Let’s see, if I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow so, and then set all emitters to four-hundred-and-fifty-three cycles per second, that might just—“
“Meeeee!” Beaker cut him off, reading aloud a group of the sensor readings. “Mee mo mo moo meep meemers!”
“You’re reading it wrong,” Bunsen said, irritated. “Those creepy-crawlies are certainly closer than ten meters on the other side of that door, Beaker!”
Beaker gestured impatiently; no, not THOSE! The signal he was looking at, a large glob of several sensors grouped and moving almost as one, steadily advanced closer and closer to them from a slightly different direction. “Mate meemers!”
“Just let me get this signal working, and they’ll all go away!” Bunsen said, trying to return his focus to their only salvation through science, but Beaker, in growing panic, kept reading off the sensor tracking.
“Mebben meemers! Meex meemers!”
“Not helping!” Bunsen complained.
“Mibe meemers!...Mour meemers!”
“If I can just...ah! There! Got the mics all responding! Now to transmit the high-pitched frequency which should jam all their ucky little antennae worse than the JFK on a holiday weekend...”
“Moo meemers!” Beaker cried. Bunsen, about to turn the knobs all to eleven and overwhelm all the buggy senses outside, paused, confused.
“Two meters?” he repeated. “That can’t be right!”
“Moo meemers...moon meemer...” Beaker gasped, as the blinking dots all converged on the center of the scanner.
Bunsen protested, “But – that’s inside the room!”
Nothing stirred around them. The same thought hitting the scientists as one, both of them slowly turned their eyes upward.
The slavering, twitching horde of enormous, many-legged things and slimy slugs spread out from the old chimney flue on the ceiling. There was a space of a single second when they all just stared at each other...and then the bugs dropped, filling the tiny office with Muppety screams...and the powerful crash of the server rack tower falling over.
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“Well well what have we here?”
Snookie froze. Constanza jerked her head back to see a grinning, furry horned monster striding confidently toward them. He grabbed a novelty apron from a stagefrackle, dropping the neck of it over his own thick throat without missing a beat. Carl chuckled. “Looks like our pie filling was trying to walk out the back door! All right, you two, fun’s over...for you!” The audience roared with laughter, watching all this on the screen over the show’s set while Carl wrangled the two hapless Muppets behind the scenes. “I never cared much for four-and-twenty blackbirds; they’re so bony...but you two have lots of chewy foam to nosh on!”
Snookie wasn’t planning on resisting, conditioned from years of such abuse...but then he looked at the blue-felted, pink-splotched girl struggling like a wildcat in Carl’s other hand, and something deep within him snapped. He pulled back a foot and kicked Carl in the stomach as hard as he could, making the startled monster drop him. Instead of running, Snookie raised trembling yellow fists. “Put her down, you drooling deviant!” he barked, sounding more aggressive than he felt.
Carl blinked huge round eyes at him. “Seriously?”
“Y-yes! You let her go right this instant or I’ll...I’ll...”
Five stagefrackles tackled him. Carl tittered. “You’ll wind up back in the pie anyway. C’mon blueberry, time to join your loverboy!” He hauled Constanza toward the massive pie crust, ignoring her attempts to swing herself free; when she tried to bite his fingers, he swatted her nearly unconscious. “Stop that! Well folks, hope you like your pumpkin pie with a little bite to it, heh heh!” He grinned, tossing the floppy Whatnot into the pie alongside a still-struggling Snookie Blyer. “Here’s the spice ta go with you, sugar!” he crooned, and grinned at the sound of his audience howling with mirth.
“Carl, I am begging you, don’t do this,” Snookie wheezed, trying to breathe around the rain of cinnamon the monster was now grating fresh over the restrained Muppets. “At least – at least let her go! You said you weren’t going to eat your sous-chef!” Carl simply grinned wider, moving on to a nutmeg the size of a football and using his No.-thirty-seven heavy-duty grater from Grillems-Groanmoana.
“Sorry Snookums...but I hear our boss is very fond of pumpkin Muppet pie, and you know me, always the brown-noser!” Carl chortled. He paused to rub his enormous schnozz. “Well, pink-noser, anyway, but you get the idea!” He gestured to the Frackles, and four of them, straining, trundled over a huge cauldron of raw mashed pumpkins, rinds chunked into the mix. “Now for the actual vegetable part...Ya know, I’m a Muppavore at heart, but Mom always did say to eat my veggies. When you cook ‘em like this, that’s too tasty to say no, isn’t it?” he appealed, and the audience let out whoops and catcalls and suggestions for honey instead of brown sugar.
Constanza choked and spat, and weakly raised a hand to block the ton of smashed pumpkin glopping onto her. Angrily, Snookie tried to fight free of the monsters holding him down in the crust, only to wind up pulling one of them in under the filling while weighed down too much to move himself. Carl giggled. “Whoopsie! Eh, well, I don’t guess a little extra fur will ruin the taste that much!” The audience laughed, and Carl grabbed the top crust like a thick blanket and pulled it over the protesting pie filling. “Sweet dreams, guys! Hope they’re extra good, ‘cause they’ll be the last ones you ever have! Next up, the oven, and after that... Oh, I’m sorry, did I say this was a pumpkin pie? I should’ve said...mincemeat!”
He pointed happily at the ceiling. Through a vent in the crust, Snookie could just make out some sort of contraption lowering from the ceiling. It had numerous wicked blades, and on cue, they whirred into life, snicking and snarking around one another so closely that it was clear nothing which came under them would remain in one piece for long...or twenty pieces, for that matter. Snookie tried to scream, but the pumpkin rind stuffed in his mouth only allowed a gurgle. Carl grinned at the backstage camera. “Now back to the fun upstairs, but stay tuned, folks! You won’t wanna miss this tasting kitchen!”
No, no, frog no, get me out, get me OUT, Snookie cried in his head, struggling uselessly. Beside him in the dark pie, he could hear and feel Constanza’s fight for life as she too slowly submerged further in the goopy, sticky pumpkin innards. He gasped, gulped, wished the girl dying with him to have a happy afterlife as he was pretty sure they weren’t going to wind up in the same place – and then the dough lifted from his face, and he took a deep, groaning breath. He blinked up at a grim-faced gray-green monster.
“You still alive?” Carl muttered.
Snookie glared at him, unable to remove the stringy goop from his right eyelid. “Sorry to disappoint,” he snapped. He heard Constanza choking, and turned to her, but couldn’t raise his arms out of the muck. “Constanza!” he said, heard her gurbled response, and frantically tried to reach her.
Carl plunged both paws into the pie and lifted the girl from the sucking sweetness. He whacked her once between the shoulderblades, and she coughed up a stem, and then took a long breath of real air. Relieved, Snookie subsisted, sinking again, his nose and eyes barely above the filling, cinnamon making his eyes water. At least she’ll stay alive. Maybe she’ll think well of me...maybe that’ll make some kind of difference when I get to wherever I’m going... To his shock, Carl dropped Constanza on the floor outside the crust and grabbed him, hefting him with a grunt out of the sticky goop. When Snookie hit the floor, he gaped at the monster, dumbfounded further by what Carl did next. Two stagefrackles had been watching all this in confusion; Carl grabbed one each in his broad paws and stuffed them under the filling so fast they never had a chance to squeak a protest. He turned to the remaining Frackles standing nearest the pie. Their eyes widened, and they skittered backward, but with a sudden lunge Carl snatched them up and stuffed them in the pie as well. He stood a moment, looking from the startled Muppets to the squirming pie goop, squinting one eye shut as he judged relative mass.
“H-hey, what are you doing?” gulped the goblin who was serving as stage left assistant manager. “You can’t do that! It was supposed to be a Muppet pie!” He made the mistake of stepping closer.
Carl stuffed him down his throat faster than a cute little puppy, and whirled, looking for any other witnesses. The camerafrackle had abandoned his post backstage to watch around the corner, where the big screen over the late-night talk show set showed a round-headed bald Muppet and a skinny screaming one being pinched, bitten, trussed up and dragged up the walls by a horde of mutant bugs. The Frackle laughed along with the audience. Carl nodded, turning back to Snookie and Constanza. “Simplistic morons. Okay, listen hard, you two, ‘cause I’m only gonna say this once: run.”
Snookie stared at him. A piece of pumpkin slid down his round nose and glopped on his shoe. Constanza froze only a second, then grabbed Snookie’s hand. “Move it!”
“But...but...” Snookie looked at a scowling, anxious Carl, then at the pie where a blob of orange stuff moved; muffled noises came from under the filling.
“Are you a freaking foamhead?” Constanza hissed. “Don’t make me slap you into your senses!”
Snookie looked at all of them – Carl, girl, pie – once more before shutting his mouth and taking to his heels. The two orange-coated Muppets quickly vanished through the studio’s back exit. With a sigh, Carl gently smoothed the top crust down over the struggling filling, and opened the giant oven. “Hey, you! Are you being paid to watch the show or film it?” he snarled at the camerafrackle, who hastily took up his post once more and aimed the lens at Carl. With a grin more cheerful than the monster felt right now, he shoved the pie into the oven. “In we go! Set at four-hundred-degrees for a quick bake – that really retains more of the natural juices, ya know – and in,” he checked the backstage clock, “about eighteen minutes, it’s pie for everyone! Bone appetite!” Carl quipped, and slammed the oven door with a flourish. He signaled a cut to the camerafrackle, and his neck slumped.
Drat. I really wanted to know how he’d taste with fresh nutmeg, too...ah well. At least this way he’ll be around for the eating again, someday, somewhere... He felt a sniffle trying to come out his thick nose, and wiped it with his apron. He walked to the edge of the set, and gazed out upon the multitudes hooting and jeering at the monsteriffic commercials now showing. THEY won’t even be able to tell the difference! And when the pie’s all sliced to bitty bits, the camera won’t, either... Carl sighed again, feeling nostalgic for the good ol’ days when he could prepare Snookums boiled, Snookums fried, Snookums sautéed with raw garlic cloves, Snookums glazed with honey and whiskey...
On the overhead screen, a monster with walrus tusks and tiny pink eyes wolfed down a hamsterburger, as the announcer proclaimed it was “preferred two to one by monsters who could taste anything other than raw sewage” over gerbil Ruebens. Carl snorted.
“Philistines,” he grumbled, and slung his apron aside so hard it thwapped a small goblin right off the set.
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Pew couldn’t see the action as well as he would’ve liked, but he could definitely hear everything. With the side of his head pressed against the thin three-paneled screen separating the taping equipment from the lush bedroom set of ‘I Married a Monster!’, he quivered in excitement at the next crash which sounded.
Gustav whined plaintively, “Aw, sweetie, mushkins, you don’t have to play hard-to-get anymore, the cameras are off!”
“Zat’s what zey sink,” Pew mumbled, toothy snout all agrin. What amazing ratings zis weel garnier when we show it on ze pay-per-view! he thought happily.
“For the last time,” the red-furred, feline monster yowled, “You are hideous and I do not want to be absorbed!”
The blob squelched around the other side of the king-sized bed, ducking too slowly to avoid being hit by the remains of the ceramic pot which had held a decorative fake palm. Gustar blinked, and gradually began sucking the shards into his pliable, jellylike form. “But that’s the only way we can be together forever!” he argued. “Isn’t that what true love is all about?”
“No!” Gina shouted, bounding across the bed when a psuedopod swiped at her. The blob had managed to hug her earlier, and her fur was still coated with the slimy stuff; it had taken every ounce of strength she possessed in the grip of absolute panic to free herself. Winning the bride-challenge had proved to be a very bad idea, as her claws had gone right through the blob harmlessly, and then he’d begun trying to engulf her in earnest. Should’ve taken my chances with one of the creeps in the audience! She looked around worriedly. The door she’d been dumped through to this elaborate bedroom was locked behind her, but she hadn’t explored all of the room yet. Seeing movement behind a decorative screen in one corner, she leaped for it.
Gustar shot upward, trying to intercept her. With a squeal of fright, Gina wrenched herself sideways midair, managing somehow to land on her feet. She didn’t get a second to catch her breath despite aching ribs; the blob rippled toward her relentlessly. She jumped atop a large entertainment center, knocking off some brass knickknacks. The blob winced when they pounded what should have been his head, but then she saw the objects sinking slowly into him, tiny bubbles forming around the metal as the acidic interior of the monster began dissolving them. She shuddered. “Look, go find some other blob to make you happy! I don’t want to meld with you!”
Gustar seemed unhappy. “But I already did that,” he moped, surging against the shelves like a tide of Jell-o, unable to climb. “I already am all the other blobs!”
“Oh god,” Gina gulped. She looked around again, desperate for some escape route, and this time saw that skanky host crouched behind the panels, listening in. Her pupils narrowed, and she aimed her next jump for him. Pew screeched when she caught him squarely atop his hunched back.
“You!” Gina hissed, claws bared an inch from the monster’s nose. “Get me out of here!”
Pew recovered immediately, his smelly arms going around her middle. “Hah hah! Ah knew zhou would not be able to resist mah charms!”
Gustar knocked over the paneled screen, dismayed at seeing the show host hugging his prize. “Awww, hey, no fair! Pew, you said I won her! Go get your own Susan!”
Pew chuckled; Gina moved to swing the idiot between herself and Gustar. “Ah, mon frere, what can ah say? Ah have always had a soft spot for ze lovely leetle kittehs!” He leered at her. “And a not-zo-soft spot, heh heh heh...”
“Ugh!” Gina braced her feet and shoved hard. Pew, surprised, careened into Gustar. Blob and blind monster flailed angrily at one another, and it was hard to tell which of them looked more ridiculous, with ragged limbs sticking pell-mell out of a wobbling round gelatin. “Go to ****, both of you!” She bolted for the door she spotted at the back of the room, pausing only a second when she saw monitors and mixing boards tracking all the action in the wrecked bedroom. He was FILMING this? Ugh, ugh, ugh! Disgusted, she looked back once. Pew had managed to find his cane and was attempting to whack Gustar over the head with it; although Gustar frowned and tried to suck Pew inside him farther, the cane kept hitting the brass knickknacks and bouncing off them back out of the blob. Disgusting freaks! But as her hand closed over the doorknob, she shuddered. Reddish fur still covered her head to toe, and the image the mirror in the bedroom had shown her minutes ago had been nothing short of horrible. Have to get out of here, find that creepy doctor, demand an antidote! No way could she allow her Newsie to ever know what had happened here; better if she could work out a solution on her own, and escape this awful dungeon complex, and only then— She yanked open the door.
A baffled-looking, tall-headed Muppet in the scraps of a lab coat stood on the other side...and right beside him, in a silly green coverall, stood the short, yellow-felted love of her life.
Gina slammed the door.
She stood still, panting, panicked. Behind her, Gustar was gaining the upper...appendage...against Pew, and surging forward like a wave of processed offal in a compost factory. The ragged monster cursed and thwacked randomly with his cane, but was dragged slowly along as the blob headed for Gina, triumph in his gooey eyes. Gina took a deep breath, put one hand up to shield her face, and opened the door again.
“Excuse me, I thought this was—“ Van Neuter began timidly.
“’Scuse me,” Gina mumbled, trying to shoulder past him. A hand caught her wrist. She turned swiftly, about to claw the doctor out of reflex, her mind in too much anguish to think about anything but escape from the whole terrible situation, but the hand didn’t belong to the vet. Soft-scratchy yellow felt rubbed against her fuzzy wrist. Gina choked up, unable to meet the searching gaze behind hornrimmed specs.
“There you go,” Van Neuter said amiably. “That’s her. Well! Mission accomplished! I’ll just be on my—erk!”
“Stay put,” Newsie growled at him. The reporter stared at Gina; humiliated, she looked away, out of breath, feeling angry tears trying to start. His gruff voice turned hesitant: “Gina...? Is that...is that really...”
“I couldn’t stop it,” she groaned. “Newsie, I tried! They...they did something to me...I couldn’t stop them...I tried...” She heaved a breath, fighting not to burst into furious sobs. Helplessness and fury at what had been done to her overwhelmed her; shame competed with a burning outrage. “You shouldn’t be here!”
Baffled, alarmed, he looked her up and down. “Wha...I...oh, Gina...”
She felt his hands gently take hers, and curled her fingers inward, hating the claws, the whole hideous change. How can he even look at me now? He HATES monsters, and I’m...I’m...oh, god, this is so wrong! She did start crying then, turning her head away.
“Oh, Gina,” Newsie whispered, horrified. “What have they done to you?”
Van Neuter heard a low rumble underfoot. Nervously he glanced into the studio, where a strange mix of blob and monster seemed to be heading for the corridor, legs kicking and a pirate hat bobbing atop a roiling mass of jelly. “How strange,” the vet mused aloud. “I wonder if he can actually digest something that stinky?” Deciding perhaps it would be best to wait until the meal had been absorbed and the blob felt too full to consider him as a second course, Van Neuter shut the door and turned the bolt on the outside.
Suddenly sharp claws appeared under his chin, grazing his skinny throat, and a sharp pain in his still-trapped hand made him realize the nerves there had not, in fact, gone completely dead yet. “Yowch! Hey, what’s the big—“
“Fix this!” the red-furred feline thing snarled.
“This is your fault!” the Newsman yelled.
Van Neuter looked from a pair of narrowed gray, catlike eyes to a scowl so deep the eyes were almost hidden behind thick glasses, and backed away slowly. “Oh, uh, well, heh heh, what...what seems to be the issue? Does she need a bath?”
“Don’t look, sweetie,” the cat-thing growled. “This is going to get bloody.”
“Not until he fixes you,” Newsie corrected, wedging his shorter body between Van Neuter and his girl.
The vet offered a hesitant smile. “Oh! Well, sure! I wouldn’t have thought you’d want that, she being your girlfriend and all, but certainly I can perform a—“
“Bloody,” Gina snarled, her claws piercing the vet’s felt around his bobbing Henson’s apple. “Very bloody.”
Another rumble sounded, and this time Van Neuter felt the ground of the tunnel tremble. Newsie said, worried, “Your necklace!”
Gina growled low, shaking her head. “They took it off. Idiots.”
“Turn her back the way she was!” Newsie ordered Van Neuter, poking his mousetrap-enclosed fingers, making the vet yelp. “And fast, or you’re going to be dealing with more chaos than even you can handle!”
“Why does everyone assume I enjoy chaos?” Van Neuter complained. “Just because I thought Jeff Goldblum looked rather smart in black leather pants, that doesn’t mean I—“
With a crunch, a chunk of the rock ceiling fell on the vet’s head. His eyes rolled up, his legs crumpled down, and the Muppet became a limp pile of lab-coated foam on the rough floor.
Gina grimaced. “D—it! Now what?” She saw her Newsman gazing unhappily at her, and winced. “Newsie...I’m sorry... You...you should just get out of here! The whole place is probably going to come down now...our energies are combining dangerously again, without the necklace holding it back; and I’m a freak, and I can’t even bear for you to look at me like this, and...and...” She gulped. “Just go! You shouldn’t even be down here, it’s not safe! Just get out while you can!”
But his arms wrapped around her; startled, she froze. “I love you,” he said, his voice deep and thick with emotion. “You’re...you’re my girl, no matter what! I came down here to rescue you, and that’s what I’m going to do!”
Gina shook her head, unable to stop the tears flowing now. She wanted so badly to hug him back, but with her arms all fuzzy...the claws...no, no! She choked out, “I can’t...can’t be with you like this. I just can’t. I’m hideous! And if this creep can’t fix it, I...I... Just go, my love!” Another threatening shudder from the floor made them both grab one another for balance, but she tried to push him away when it passed. “Just go!”
To her shock, her Newsman stood on tiptoe, took her cheeks in his hands, and pulled her into a deep kiss. Groaning, Gina sank to her knees, aching for his touch more than she was repulsed by how she now felt. “Oh Newsie,” she sighed, her eyes closed, both relieved and dismayed at the feel of his soft fingers stroking the tears from her cheeks. “What are we going to do?”
The Newsman gazed at his beloved, hating her grief, wanting more than anything to be able to make everything better. So many times she’d been there for him, comforting him, strengthening his will and his confidence – why now, when she needed him, was he so powerless? If only I’d gone into chemistry, or become a doctor, or...or... He grabbed her shoulders tight, startled, when a louder quake swept through the corridor. Gina pressed her face against his shoulder, too ashamed to look at him. He clasped her to him, his own anguish as great, feeling like a horrible failure for not having the skills to...to...
Newsie looked up at the quivering ceiling. Even the glow-worms were trying to crawl away from the epicenter of what seemed like a nasty fault zone. Energy! Yes! He forced himself to organize his thoughts, wondering if he needed an actual news feed to pull it off properly. He unlocked the studio door and swung it open. The blobby thing he’d glimpsed earlier was nowhere in sight; apparently the quake now constantly shaking the whole corridor had driven it to seek safer quarters. Newsie took Gina’s hand in his, tugging her up and after him. “Come on! In here!” he barked; confused as much by the authoritative tone in her Muppet’s voice as by his intent, she stumbled along with him. Newsie spotted what he’d been hoping for, grabbed one of the mics sticking out of a potted plant in the bedroom set, and turned to face a wall camera with a steady power indicator showing it was recording. He took a deep breath, mustered as much steadiness as he could manage in his voice, and began the most important story of his life.
“Here is a Muppet News Flash! All around the MMN broadcasting complex, unstable geological and biochemical conditions have caused an irreversible change in some of the female monsters!” He glanced at a surprised Gina, holding onto the wall by the door as the whole room shook dangerously, dust and small pebbles sifting from the ceiling. “All of the ladies who had taken part on the recent monster ‘Bachelor’ ripoff –“
“I Married a Monster,” Gina supplied, hope firing in those pretty eyes.
Newsie nodded, gruffly repeating the odious title. “—Have all experienced an unexpected transformation back to the species they previously were! This reversion naturally makes them all completely unsuitable for any show on MMN, and all will be returning to the surface and to whatever home they left!” Realizing she might suddenly disappear, he hastily added, “Except for Gina Broucek, who was last seen once again a natural woman and in the company of her partner, the Muppet Newsman. Stay tuned for more on this breaking Halloween story of unusual transformations!”
With a fearsome crumbling sound, the ceiling gave way, rock and dirt spewing over the bedroom set. Newsie covered his head with one hand and ran for it, linking his arm through Gina’s as he went. They ran until the shaking stopped, and finally halted, out of breath and leaning against one another. Newsie tried to squint up at his beloved, but couldn’t make out her features in the near-darkness of the collapsed hallway. He found his flashlight, and with a trembling hand slowly lifted the light to her face.
She was heaving for breath, coughing at the dust swirling thickly in the close air, and her hair was mussed and tangled falling over her shoulders. Dust coated her skin and the skimpy, frilly babydoll dress she still wore, but the light picked up some of the freckles over her cheeks and nose, and her eyes didn’t slit closed when she winced and put up a slender-fingered hand to block the beam. With a choked cry of relief, Newsie flung his arms around her.
“Agh! Newsie...? Are you...” Gina paused, noticing her hands. She stared at them, then grabbed the flashlight from him and shone it up and down her body, from bare toes to barely-concealed cleavage. “Oh Newsie!” she gasped, hugging him tight, lifting his feet from the floor to kiss him. “Oh my love – my sweetie – you did it! You did it! I love you so much!”
He kissed back fervently, his vision blurred, not caring. He could feel her soft, smooth skin just fine. Eventually, panting, both slumped against the wall, holding one another tight. “We...we should get out of here,” Newsie suggested.
Gina agreed, and released him enough for him to pull off his glasses and find a relatively clean section of her skirt to wipe them free of dust and tear-streaks. “Just a sec,” she said breathlessly, “I want to check something.”
Puzzled, he followed her, keeping hold of her hand, as she returned to the cave-in and rolled aside a few small stones with her feet. “Did you lose something?” Newsie asked.
“Just a thought...” Gina uncovered a pale felt hand. “Aha. Help me dig him out.”
Newsie was deeply tempted to just leave the vet buried under a half-ton of rock, but realized the Muppety thing to do would be to turn him over to the proper authorities, and reluctantly knelt to assist his love in freeing the unconscious Van Neuter. However, what he found when they dragged him loose was enough to make him forget how to speak. “He...wha...huh?”
Gina grinned. “It did work both ways!” She turned that wicked gleam of a gray eye to Newsie. “I wished for him to experience what I’ve been going through.”
“Oh.” That seemed perfectly fair. However, the vet didn’t look so much like a monster as... Newsie peered at him from a few different angles. “Is that a raccoon?”
“No...I think that’s a ‘possum,” Gina replied.
Van Neuter groaned, slowly sitting up. “Oooh my aching noggin! What happened?”
Remembering the term Dr Honeydew had used, Newsie replied, and Gina chimed in: “A manifestational psychokinetic transformative energy event!”
The vet blinked tiny black eyes at them, his small pointed ears perked and whiskers twitching. “A what? Oh don’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing!” He levered himself to unsteady feet, dusting off his rags feebly as though they were still legitimate clothing. “Fine, you’ve got your girl back, and—“ He stopped, staring at Gina. “Oh dear. She’s reversed! This is terrible! Wait, just let me get my serum recalculated and I’ll...” He trailed off, staring at his hands. Grayish fur now coated the backs of them, and slowly he lifted them to his face, then patted his cheeks. “Oh no. Oh no! What have you done to me!”
“But...why an opossum?” Newsie wondered.
“An opossum! Where? I hate those filthy creatures!” Van Neuter cried, whirling to look around.
“Oh,” Newsie murmured, nodding.
“I thought he hated rats,” Gina said, frowning.
“No, I have learned to love my little rodent friends! But an opossum is a filthy, thieving, germ-carrying little marsupial! Oh! Oh! What have you done to me!” Van Neuter moaned, his hands slapping his face all over and then jerking away as he felt the thick fur and shrunken state of his formerly tall and wobbly head. “I can’t live like this! Oh this is hideous! Aaaaaaaaaggghhh!” Shrieking, he bowled past them, running wildly down the open end of the hall, smacking into the walls in his fright as his new tail tried to curl around his legs.
Newsie looked up at Gina again. She had a dark, deeply satisfied smile on her face. He hugged her, and she turned those soft gray eyes on him, and stroked his hair gently. Newsie sighed, his whole face upturned in a wide smile. “Okay,” she murmured, and kissed the top of his head, heedless of the dust in his hair. “Now we can go.”
Newsie sobered, turning his eyes to the ceiling. Somewhere above, his friends were still in danger...who knows what awful things they might be suffering, this very second? He swallowed hard. “Gina...we have to stop this. All of it. The monsters are going to...”
“Yeah. Doorway to heck and the big boss becoming the monster to end all monsters, I heard,” she replied, turning serious as well. She gazed tenderly at him. “I love you, my Aloysius.”
“And I love you,” he gulped. “T-together?”
She smiled. “Together.”
Arm in arm, they headed for whatever exit they could find which led up.
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