The AIM facility, a loose collection of bubble pods, appeared in the air over Tombo, carried in a cool blast of Tunguska air. Inside, a bevy of anthropomorphized animals, a woman in white and one shrieking spell-ghost felt gravity catch them.

Howard the Duck cursed as he felt the building begin to tumble. He grabbed twin handfuls of the Beast of Berlin’s fur and said, “What the hell is going on?”

“Emergency shunt,” the ape snarled, swimming through the air towards a control panel. “We’re being pink-slipped!”

“Fired? Inconceivable!” the Scarlet Beetle squawked.

“I do not think that word means what you think it means, to quote Mandy Patinkin,” the White Rabbit said. She looked at the Strawberry Man. “Do something!”

“I-I-I-I-” the Strawberry Man said, hovering helplessly. His insane energy was gone, as if it had never been. He was thinner somehow, stretched at the molecules, and dancing on the edge on nonexistence. This was not part of the prophecy. Not the way things should go.

“Figures. Disc always skips right at the good part,” Howard said. He looked back at the Beast. “How do we get out of this?”

“I’m thinking. We should have already exploded-”

“Imploded!” the Scarlet Beetle said.

“Does it matter right now?” Howard said.

“Depends on whether you care how your remains are strewn across the known universe,” the Beast said. “Regardless, something has gone wrong.”

“Which means?”

“We won’t die swiftly, in a flash of light, but instead will plummet to the earth, trapped screaming inside a ball of steel where, upon impact, we will be reduced to nigh-formless jelly.”

“Right.” Howard closed his eyes for a second, then opened them. “Who can fly?”

“Moo.” The Hellcow flapped its hooves.

“Really? Cape’s not just for show then?”

“Moo!”

“Fine. Do the flappity-flap thing and grab the bunny,” Howard said, shoving the White Rabbit towards the Hellcow. He looked at the Beast and the Beetle. “Two out of the way. Can we open this tin can up?”

“Of course! But why?” the Beetle said, arms crossed. “How do you hope to escape?”

“This is a secret base isn’t it? Don’t you have jetpacks or something in here?” Howard flapped his arms and spun in a circle. “Rocket sleds? Escape pods?”

“I-” the Beetle began. He looked at the Beast. “Do we?”

“Yes, but-”

“Great! Let’s the rest of us get to them!”

“One question,” the Beast said. Howard gave him a gimlet eye.

“What?”

“Can you pilot Mandroid armor?”

---

Tombo stirred. The ground shook.

Bev stepped out from around the bar, gun held by her side. Shaun dropped the unconscious Cataphract he’d been pummeling and stepped to her side. Outside, more Cataphracts awaited. Mandroids, as well. And MODOCs-Mobile Organisms Designed Only for Combat-aplenty. All to apprehend one Jewish American Princess, one Hell-forged handgun, and one Mindless mockery of manhood.

Bev whistled.

“Surrender. Please,” the lead Mandroid said.

“I just wanted to call a cab,” Bev said. “And not get shot at. Is that so wrong?”

“Ms. Switzer, if you’ll come with us, this whole thing can be explained. Just put down the-ah-gun? Is that a gun?-and come with us-”

Shaun’s eye flared. The Mandroid stepped back, raising his energy gauntlet. “Call it off, Ms. Switzer.”

“Sorry champ, he’s a rebel without a cause,” she said, tapping her hip with the gun. “And I recognize you guys from the television news. All that yellow armor and the cyborgs and such. You guys are Hydra, right?”

“AIM, actually,” a Cataphract said.

“There’s a difference?”

“Seriously?” The Cataphract looked at the Mandroid, then back at Bev. “Really. Seriously?”

“What? Did I hit a nerve?”

“Do we look like Nazis?”

“AIM are Nazis?”

“Hydra are Nazis!” the Cataphract said, his energy sword sizzling as he stabbed at the air. “We’re AIM!”

“Communists?”

“Scientists!” the Cataphract said.

“I’m Jewish, actually,” another Cataphract said.

“But you blew up that bar,” Bev said. The Cataphract nodded.

“With science!”

“As opposed to Hydra, who blow things up with the power of National Socialism?” Bev said, fingers to her lips.

“Yes! No,” the Cataphract slumped. “Wait. Gary?” He looked at the Mandroid.

“I’m Sandra, Tom,” the Mandroid said.

“I’m not Tom. I’m Carl.” The Cataphract sounded insulted.

“Why do you sound insulted?” another Cataphract, presumably Tom, said. “Would it be so bad, being me?”

“You have a gun for a face!”

“I still have feelings!”

“Damn it Carl,” Sandra the wo-Mandroid said. “Stop picking on Tom!”

“Gary-”

“Sandra, damn it!”

“Sorry, you all look alike!”

“What, you think all Asians look alike-”

“I’m black,” another Mandroid said.

“Stay out of this Gary! This is between me and Carl!” Sandra said.

“It’s the armor! You all look like eggs with legs!” Carl said, looking around desperately.

“I can’t help my bodyshape!” a third Mandroid yelled.

“Phyllis, I didn’t mean-I was just saying-”

“Misogynist!” Sandra said.

“Oh just shut up-” Carl looked around. “Crap. Where’d they go?”

As one, the group turned. Shaun was running slowly past them, Bev carried over one flat shoulder. She waved. Tom, the Cataphract with a gun for a face, waved back. Carl hit him.

“Would somebody please go after them?”

---

The dark, thumping heart of Tombo.

“We have really got to organize a corporate retreat,” the business suit, known to his associates as Smith-6, said. “I mean honestly. That’s-”

“Normal workplace tension. Nothing to worry about,” a technician said. “Buncha crybabies.”

“Tom?”

“Yeah. It’s not like he was great looking before, right? Think he’d be happy.”

“Still. Gun-face.”

“Plasma arc, actually.”

“What’s it do?”

“Shoots plasma. In an arc.”

“So…a gun then.” Smith-6 loosened his tie. “This is why I’m glad I’m a clone.” He ran his hands through his hair and spun on one heel. Behind him seventeen mirrors, positioned according to the lost H’Naggai Prophecies, sat in the center of a modified Carnacki Pentagram. Lasers bounced between mirrors, and a coruscating gamma-flow field contained the whole set-up. And, at the center of it all, crouched in a web of criss-crossing lasers, the Red Rajah.

“How are you feeling?” Smith-6 said.

“Release me! The LOVE craves freedom!”

“Momentarily, minutely,” Smith-6 said. “When we say, how we say. Is that so wrong?”

“You cannot control LOVE!”

“We’re AIM. We develop intelligent suns before breakfast and convince them to commit suicide by lunch. There’s very little we can’t do, my friend.” Smith-6 fiddled with his tie and frowned. “See, this is how it’s going to go. We’re going to capture your friend-Ms. Switzer, I mean-and then we’re going to threaten her with involuntary bodily modification if you don’t do what we want. Crude, but I’m betting there’s enough alien loose in that magic ghost brain of yours to ride to cooperation station, am I right?”

“Release me and feel my LOVE,” the Rajah said, pressing against the mystic barrier which held him.

“If only my lawyer were here,” Smith-6 said. “If that’s not grounds for a sexual harrassment suit right there, I-” He stopped, then turned to the technician. “Did that science facility ever land?”

“What science facility?”

---

“I never thought I’d die this way,” Garko the Man-Frog said, watching as Howard aimed the Gauss rifle he’d found among the tumbling debris. The weapon was the size of a canoe paddle and as wide as the fowl that held it. It could cut through titanium like butter and made adamantium molecules dance nervously. Trust AIM to leave it laying around where anyone could get to it. “I figured something with a highway and a truck. Maybe a particularly persistent French chef-”

“You’re awfully maudlin for a nigh-indestructible amphibian,” Howard said, trying to aim while spinning in the air. “Help me aim this.”

“Why?”

“We need to get out of here before this thing hits the ground, so I’m making a door,” Howard said. “How the hell do you fire this thing?”

“Push the red button!” the Scarlet Beetle said, swimming towards them. “It’s always the red button!”

“This is a bad idea,” the Beast of Berlin said from within a suit of Mandroid armor that had seen better days. “This model hasn’t seen an engineer’s touch in decades. I’m not even sure the thrusters work!”

“Good time to find out then,” Howard said. He looked at the Hellcow. “You know what to do?”

“Moo.”

“You better.”

“Such concern,” the White Rabbit said. “One would almost think you’ve grown attached to me, Ducky-”

“Don’t call me that!” Howard snapped. “You don’t get to call me that.” He spun, glaring at the Strawberry Man, who was floating nearby, eyes unfocused, mouth hanging open. He looked empty and almost nonexistent. “Somebody grab that.”

Garko obligingly wrapped his long arms around the homonoculous. Froggy lips wrinkled away from froggy teeth. “He feels like a wet trashbag. What has happened to him?”

“He’s a magic spell,” Howard said. “Only someone cut off the magic and now the spell is fading.” He looked around. “We ready?”

“Moo!”

“Boom-shaka-lacka,” Howard said, pulling the trigger.

The wall exploded and the sky reached in and pulled the guts out of the tumbling facility, taking every living thing inside with it.

---

“Whoa!” the technician said.

“What? What?” Smith-6 said, leaning over the man’s work station.

“Massive energy surge above us!”

“The Tunguska facility?” Smith-6 said. The technician shook his head.

“Maybe, but it should have imploded, not-Geez!”

“What now?”

“It’s heading right for us!” The technician slapped a button on his console. Alarms began to blare. “Citizens of Tombo! Brace for impact!”

“Citizens-there’s just us here!” Smith-6 looked around, as the other technicians gripped the edges of their workstations with their best Star Trek poses. “What are you doing? We’ve got enough shielding to hold off the Celestials!”

“We live here, we’re citizens,” the technician said. “This is home and no one is going to take it away!”

“You’re from a cloning facility in Burbank!”

“Impact in T-minus 6 seconds-”

“Craaaap!” Smith-6 was flustered. He looked around desperately, then grabbed the technician and closed his eyes. He wondered if any of the other Smiths had to deal with days like this.

A chuckle caused his eyes to pop open. He turned. The Red Rajah floated in his prison, seated on the air in an upside down lotus position.

“You find this funny?”

“Don’t you?”

---

“Is that a town down there?” the White Rabbit said, hanging from the talons of a bovine bat.

“Mooeep,” the Hellcow said.

“Delightful! Let us land, my fine blood-sucking bovine bernadeth, and see what there is to see!” The White Rabbit clapped her hands gleefully.

“Meeoop!”

“What? What is-” The White Rabbit twisted in the bat-cow’s talons. The sun was rising over the distant mountains. “Oh. Oh my.” The Hellcow spun, wings whipping around as the first of the solar rays clawed at her supernatural flesh and dove towards the town below.

For their part, the rest of the group clung to the Mandroid being piloted by the Beast. Howard, crouching on the armored suit’s shoulders. The Beetle, clinging to Howard’s shoulders. And Garko, holding on to a tangle of wires that extended from the decommisioned suit’s internal workings.

“We need to get out from under the wreckage!” Howard said, shouting into the open helmet. The Beast snarled wordlessly and fumbled with the controls. Howard looked up, eyes widening slightly as he took in the rate that the remains of the facility were plumeting towards them. He shook the helmet. “Serpentine, Sheldon! Serpentine!”

“It’s hard enough to drive this thing without you shaking my telemetry all over the place!” the Beast snarled. “Backseat driver!”

“Communist!”

“And proud of it!” the Beast roared. He yanked on a control stick and the armor did an abrupt barrel roll, swinging sideways, avoiding a chunk of debris. The Hellcow flapped past, circling the armor, the White Rabbit clinging to the creature’s talons for dear life.

“Look out! Look out!” she shrilled as the bat-cow flapped past the others frantically. Howard looked up again, knowing he was going to regret it.

“Oh son of a-”

The facility groaned as it cut through the air, hurtling towards the town below. The Town, for its part, wondered about the keening whistle of the facility’s passage, and cracked open one massive eye.

Tombo blinked and the Tunguska facility hit it dead in the eye, exploding into burning pinwheels that scattered for miles.

Tombo raised a hand made of North Street and rubbed its face. As awakenings went, it was a rude one. And Tombo was not a morning person.

Tombo sat up and roared.
…
See? Just like we promised.