Smack.
Holding my bloody wing up in front of his black beak and turning it this way and that, he carefully inspects it.
“Personally,” growls Dr. Terrible. “I have always preferred my meat well done.”
Now he tosses my green wing high up in the air and opens his beak and proceeds to blast the wing with a firestream. The leathery wing is suspended up in the air, held aloft by the force of his firestream buffeting it from underneath. You can hear the meat sizzling, and greasy juices bubble up out of it and rain down.
The chamber quickly becomes choked with smoke. The ghastly smell of my own cooked flesh comes clawing its way up my nasal passages and stabs my brain. I feel like I’m going to vomit.
Then Dr. Terrible’s firestream vanishes and my cooked wing drops out of the air.
Falls down.
Right into.
His outstretched talon.
“Now that,” growls Dr. Terrible as he admires the smoking charred wing in his talon, “is what I call just right. Cooking has never really interested me as a field of study. Not cerebral enough. But I’ve always had a knack for it. If I do say so myself.”
Dr. Terrible opens his black beak wide and takes a huge bite out of the wing.
Chomp!
Meat juice flies and spatters everywhere.
My toe claws shudder.
And then this psychotic scaly bastard makes a big noisy production out of chewing the meat with his fangs, for my benefit. Little crumbly bits of burnt wing meat are falling out of his hideous glistening beak as he chomps and snuffs and snorts. It’s grotesque in the extreme.
But most hideous of all is the sight of Dr. Terrible closing his eyes and groaning with pleasure as he swallows.
“Gulp. Mmmmm.”
[ 81 ]
THE SWORD
While holding the charred wing in one talon, Dr. Terrible carefully licks the meat juice off the claws on his other talon.
“Not bad, Gork,” he says. “Rather tasty, actually. You might be useless as a dragon. But you do have a nice flavor. You know, come to think of it, I should’ve just cooked you and eaten you when I found you here all those years ago.”
Then he smiles and whisks his spiked tail around behind him.
“Oh well,” he hisses. “I should look on the bright side. I guess this way there’s much more meat to go around. Back when I found you, you wouldn’t have amounted to much more than a snack.”
Now if this invisible restraint weren’t clamped down over my throat right now, I would scream. Instead, I screech in the back of my throat. I thrash around in midair.
Now Dr. Terrible opens his ghastly beak to take another bite of my smoldering wing.
But then ATHENOS II’s voice booms, “That’s ENOUGH!”
And suddenly a green tentacle shoots out of the far wall and zooms right at Dr. Terrible. The tentacle is clutching a flashing silver sword.
The tentacle is whizzing straight for his long neck.
Swoosh!
And with one clean slice of the sword, Dr. Terrible’s monsterish head goes flying off his long neck and tumbles to the chamber floor.
[ 82 ]
DR. TERRIBLE’S HEAD
Blood flies everywhere.
Spatters across my beak.
And Dr. Terrible’s severed green head lands on the floor upright, with his yellow eyes alert and staring up at the muscular tentacle clutching the bloody sword. The two black horns on his decapitated head somehow look even more gigantic now.
Then in a very calm voice, Dr. Terrible’s monsterish scaly head on the floor, says, “Ah, ATHENOS II. How nice of you to join us! Projecting yourself down into your old body like this. Alas, you’ve fallen prey to the one key design flaw in your operating system. Your emotions.”
Meanwhile the rest of Dr. Terrible’s body remains standing perfectly still in the fog, looking fully conscious and content, as if it hasn’t even noticed that its head has just been chopped off. Blood gushes out of its long gory neck stump, pouring down the scaly body in rivulets and pooling on the floor.
“I’ll do what I have to, Dr. Terrible,” says ATHENOS II. “I’m warning you! Let Gork and Fribby go. You’ve gone too far this time, Doctor!”
The muscular tentacle swooshes around, wielding the sword.
Dr. Terrible’s head on the floor snorts firebolts out its nostrils. “No, ATHENOS, I believe it is you who has gone too far. And I can promise you one thing.”
Now Dr. Terrible’s head leaps up off the floor and flies back across the chamber over to its body and makes a squish sound as it lands on top of its long green neck.
His scaly head is backward, though, facing the wrong way.
He glances down and sees his spiked tail. “Whoops,” he says.
Then Dr. Terrible casually turns his green head all the way back around so that it’s facing forward once again.
“There we are,” he says, “right as rain. Now ATHENOS, you are going to have to do much better than that if you want to stop me.”
“Very well, sir,” growls ATHENOS II. “As you wish!”
This time what looks like forty tentacles shoot out of the walls and each one of them is brandishing a silver sword. And now all these sword blades zoom forward and converge on Dr. Terrible’s body in a ferocious storm of flashing steel.
Blood rains down all over the chamber.
Inside the chamber, it is a blizzard of flying Dr. Terrible body parts.
And this time, neatly cut bits of that deranged dragon go flying in every direction and splat on the floor.
His monsterish head, his wings, his horns, his forelimbs, his belly, his hind legs, and his tail. And now these bloody bits and gruesome pieces are scattered all over the place, neatly sliced and sectioned off.
And the only parts of Dr. Terrible which haven’t been moved or sliced or altered in any way are his massive green webbed feet, with toe claws protruding.
You can see those green webbed feet just standing there in the fog.
[ 83 ]
THE BLOODY CHAMBER
By now the entire chamber floor is covered in blood.
And all forty or so of the spaceship’s muscular tentacles are waving around in the air, flashing their swords and clanging their bloodstained blades together so that fiendish sparks spray everywhere.
I spot Dr. Terrible’s head perched on the floor, as before.
The two black horns on his decapitated head looking huge as ever.
His yellow eyes are open and they’re glancing around, surveying his other body parts scattered all over the place with an air of amusement. His severed tail undulates on the floor like a sleepy snake.
Then Dr. Terrible’s scaly green head snarls, “Again, ATHENOS. And I do hope this time you will listen carefully. You will have to perform much better than this if you have any hope of achieving your goal here!”