Chapter Text
To start off with, it was a Thursday. And Thursday meant laundry day.
Minion, all seven-foot faux-furred robot gorilla body of him, almost audibly sang Ozzy Osbourne's ‘Crazy Train' to himself in the echoing depths of the Evil Lair as he carried his third large basket full of this week’s soiled linens to the laundry facility just behind the alligator pen. Somewhat distracted by his paying attention to separating enamel paint stained items from those befouled by axle grease and used crankcase oil, he almost tossed Megamind’s longest held and still treasured possession into the washing machine.
The only reason he paused was because the formerly constant pale blue light of Sir’s childhood binkie was flickering and blinking, apparently at random.
“Well now, that’s odd", Minion noted aloud, holding the small piece of extraterrestrial technology up to get a better look at with one hand, the other stroking his head-tank in puzzlement on what would have been equivalent to a human chin. “It’s never done that before…”, the alien piscoid muttered, observing the suspicious irregular pulses of azure luminosity with a fishy critical eye.
A long moment of observation passed in silence, laundry forgotten.
The binkie went dark. Utterly inert.
And after a brief pause, began flickering and blinking again. Almost as if it were…
“A SIGNAL!”, Minion yelped in alarm, fumbling the almost indestructible object in his mechanical hands as he backpedalled away from the washing machine, the realization crashing into his mind.
Semi-prehensile metallic feet clattering on the cement floor, Minion scrambled back the way he’d come, leaping the winding staircase two and three steps at a time, ricocheting off the steel fire door frame hard enough to bend it and prevent the door from closing properly, sprinting pell-mell along the hall and up the rickety scaffolding steps to the satellite communications gear in the replica astronomical observatory dome, frantically attaching signal leads to the flickering binkie with shaking hands.
“Come on, come on, come on", he pleaded as the second-hand electronics imported from Romania hummed to life, drawing power from the building mains, warming up their circuits. Switches were flipped, dials adjusted, relays thrown, and banks of cathode ray monitors brought online as the Evil Lair computers shook the dust off their operating algorithms and ran a few test calculations in preparation, flexing their ethereal digital muscles.
Anxiously flicking back and forth in his head-tank, Minion activated a handful of cryptographic programs, linking them to rapid sorting calculation matrices and several linguistic databases, at least one of which had been developed by Marc Okrand, all while re-aligning the satellite tracking and communications dishes to pick up the source of the transmission, confirming to himself that it was indeed of extraterrestrial origin.
The re-alignment of the satellite dishes had not gone unnoticed deeper in the Evil Lair…
“Minion! What happened to Gilligan?!”
“The idiot gets rescued. Eventually", Minion muttered under his breath, studying the monitors as he began to decipher the message encoded in the binkie's sequence of flashes.
Irate red-eyed-monster-fuzzy-slipper clad footsteps flop-clapped their way up the steps of the scaffolding steps to the faux observatory, just as the first analysis of the message resolved itself on the largest of the displays.
‘ARRIVAL IMMANENT’
Megamind, incredibly handsome criminal mastermind of all villainy in Metro City stood there in his third least hole-y vintage heavy metal rock band tee-shirt and baggy cotton fleece track pants, cinched tightly at the waist, staring up at the gigantic display screen in astonished curiosity. “What in Evil Heaven does that mean?”
On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge as office blocks, silent as birds. They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing.
The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them, which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years.
Minion turned to look at his overlord, black eyes wide with worry. “They’re coming.”
*-*-*
Frowning at her watch as she checked the time yet again, Roxanne Ritchi, intrepid and generally unflappable reporter for Metro City’s Channel 8 television news, wondered just exactly how exactly her so-called ‘professional’ cameraman Hal Stewart had managed to leave not only his allotment of blank video-cassettes at the studio, but also two fully charged battery packs for his shoulder-mounted field video camera.
Hal had taken the broadcast van, assuring her as he drove off that he’d be back in time for them to do her latest piece as soon as he picked up the tapes and batteries, leaving her to stand on the sidewalk with an only slightly useless microphone in her hand, next to the expansive shallow reflecting pool between City Hall and the museum.
High overhead, the yellow machines began to descend, gathering speed as they fell.
Roxanne began to pace, five steps one way, turn and stomp five paces back to where she started, going over what she was going to say to Mister Hal Stewart in her mind, reciting the litany of his blunders, careless mistakes, and if she had to be honest, his creepy overly personal behaviour.
An incredibly large, razor-edged black shadow flitted over the length of the city block long plaza, casting the entire neighborhood into momentary gloom, completely blocking out the brilliant sunlight like an eclipse on fast forward, causing Roxanne to glance up in growing annoyance.
It took the usually observant reporter a moment to notice that the crowd of fans and curious onlookers which frequently gathered to watch as she broadcast her live reports was now running around in apparent panic, pointing up at the sky. What those people were pointing at were huge yellow somethings screaming through the clouds. Impossibly huge yellow somethings.
Confused, startled, Roxanne stepped backward, off the sidewalk curb, stumbling, sprawling in an ungainly tangle on her backside, mildly scraping one elbow, and definitely tearing and staining her best scarlet sheath dress, eyes wide in astonishment as she stared up into the sky. “What the hell’s that?!!”
Whatever it was raced across the sky in its monstrous yellowness, tore the sky apart with mind-boggling noise and leaped off into the distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your ears six feet into your skull.
Another one followed and did exactly the same thing only louder.
It’s difficult to say what exactly the people on the surface of the planet were doing now, because they really didn’t know what they were doing themselves. None of it made a lot of sense – running into buildings, running out of buildings, howling noiselessly at the incredible noise. All around the world, city streets exploded with people, cars skidded into each other as the noise fell on them and then rolled off like a tsunami over the hills and valleys, deserts and oceans, seeming to flatten everything it hit.
Stunned, shocked at the incredible implication of what she was witnessing, Roxanne clambered back to her feet, wobbling on unsteady legs as she stood upright.
A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything, it was worse than the noise. For a while nothing happened.
The great ships hung in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
And still nothing happened.
*-*-*
“Oh, this is bad”, Minion stated the incredibly obvious. “This is really, really bad.”
Megamind swallowed nervously, blinking. He never could quite get the hang of Thursdays. “Code: How bad, Minion?”
“On a scale of one to ten, Sir?”, the loyal hench-fish inquired, staring at the immense sunflower-hued spaceship that hovered motionless miles above Metro City.
“Yes.”
“Code: About a fifty-seven, Sir.”
*-*-*
There was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every stereo, every radio, every television, cassette recorder, compact disc player, boom-box, cell-phone, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.
Every tin can, every dustbin, garbage can and dumpster, every car, van, pick-up or SUV, every wineglass or window, every sheet of rusty metal or corrugated metal roofing, every panel of aluminum siding or stainless steel sheathing became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board.
Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sonic reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built.
But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message.
“People of Earth, your attention, please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep. Around the world, sound engineers and recording industry technicians knew they would never be able to achieve this level of perfection.
“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”
The PA died away.
*-*-*
“This is completely intolerable!”, Megamind howled as he and Minion pelted down the rickety scaffolding steps to the ground floor and garage. “A hostile alien battlefleet appears in the sky and I don’t have a thing to wear! This is your fault, Minion!”
The Evil Lair's swarm of brain-bots swirled and shoaled in confusion, unsure what they should do, defend or attack.
“What’s the plan, Sir?”
“Plan?! What plan?!”, the azure supervillain snapped, leaping into the saddle of his hover-bike, kick-starting the powerful radial engine to life, spooling up the anti-grav pods to full lift capacity as the forward thruster caught and ignited. “All I’m going to do is try to save Miss Ritchi! Get on!”
The rolling shutter garage door had barely lifted high enough to allow the occupied hover-bike to roar through the opening in a cloud of dust and scraps of paper, followed closely by the swarm of brain-bots. Minion gasped, ducking just in time to avoid having his head-tank receive nothing more than a glancing scrape that jarred the pseudo-ichthyoid, who was annoyed that it was going to take hours to buff the blemish out of the crystalline material.
Megamind viciously twisted the throttle, giving the howling engine every last erg of energy to convert into speed and height, closing in on the locator signal of the homing beacon he’d placed in the heel of Miss Ritchi’s shoe.
Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of Earth. The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they were iron filings on a sheet of stiff card and a magnet was moving beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to.
Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said:
“There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”
The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off across the land. The huge ships turned in the sky with easy power. On the underside of each ship a hatch opened, an empty black square.
By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, identified the correct wavelength and broadcast a message back to the Vogon ships, pleading on behalf of the planet Earth. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was…annoyed. It said:
“What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams!”
Roxanne Ritchi blinked, offended to her core. She’d just paid off the mortgage on her apartment.
She didn’t know what to do. Running was obviously pointless, screaming and crying would achieve exactly nothing. The single greatest event in human history, the biggest scoop of her life, and in a little under two minutes, nothing would matter ever again. The mic she had been clutching like a talisman fell to the pavement from nerveless fingers.
“Well…shit”, Roxanne deadpanned, shrugging expressively one last time to no-one at all.
The Vogon ships rose higher into the sky, gaining altitude. Light poured out of the hatches.
A roaring filled her ears. This was it. The end. Oblivion.
“MISS RITCHI!!”
Roxanne turned, wondering who would be calling her name. A fleeting glimpse of too-bright light gleaming off blue skin, an impression of spiky dark faux fur, and then impact driving the breath out of her lungs, stunning her as the ground, as the streets and buildings of Metro City, fell away from her.
“I don’t know," said the voice over the PA, “apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.” It cut off.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.