"That's far enough," Explorer Minion says.
Mime Minion ignores him and instead steps up to the feathered skull.
"Ah, here for the fight then, eh?" Explorer Minion says with a scoff. "Very well. Die!"
Navigator Minion screams a warning as a massive, invisible boulder slams down from just a foot above Mime Minion, manifesting instantly and projecting down at a speed akin to a meteor impacting a planet, but it stops instantly.
Mime Minion's outstretched pinky finger makes contact with the rock, and he sets it off sideways as if it were cardboard.
Explorer Minion stares in stupefaction. "What?" he mumbles as the power of the shard alights once more.
"Holy crap, dude!" Scout says, "did you just try to crush Mime Minio-"
"Do not be fooled. There must be some flaw in his armor. If you cannot destroy the body, destroy the mind," Explorer Minion says out loud in a surprisingly apt display of abstract thinking.
He immediately imagines an impregnable cube of pure darkness descending over Mime Minion—something that blocks out all sound, all sight, all senses, and its a thing that's locked perfectly to the geographical location of Mime Minion at all times.
"Have a go at that," Explorer Minion cackles as he turns box holding Mime Minion up into the air. "Now, what to do with it?"
"Something took control of 'Stache!" Navigator Minion shouts.
Before Explorer Minion can react, Scout uses the seam in the box that Mime Minion made to escape just in time for Explorer Minion to revisualize it. She begins running, but she can feel a much, much larger box set over the entire place. She's slowing down.
"Run, you idiot! Get help!" Navigator Minion shouts at the top of his lungs as his box darkens to pure black. "Get out of here and contact the others! We need the shard te—"
Just before a containing box is set over her, she imagines a device that resets her speed, no matter what's placed over her, and this gives her seconds of freedom before Explorer Minion counter imagines a box that nullifies the effects of her imagined tools entirely.
"Silly girl, stop resisting!" he says as Scout begins levitating helplessly. Explorer Minion twirls his moustache as he approaches her. "I suppose I could reconsider offering you a place in my new celestial hierarchy," he explains with a twisted smile. "But first, I need to hear you beg for it."
Scout Minion takes a moment to reassert her position within the cube, regaining eye contact. She takes a deep breath before unleashing something absolutely unpublishable.
There are a lot of bad words out there in the verses, and she's heard most of them.
Explorer Minion flinches back. "Wh-what in blazes are you on about?!"
Next Scout drops the seventh most crude and destructive word in the common lexicon, a term that's not publishable under any rules or jurisdictions, even the most literary ones. This particular word refers to the breeding status of a vague alien species from another dimension. It sounds cool when said in anger, doubling the effect of her fury.
"Ah, very well then," Explorer Minion says, as Navigator Minion barely recovers, pushing with all his visualizing might out of his blackened prison.
"Scout, the Q word? Really?"
"Really," Scout says, her gaze not lifting off Explorer Minion.
"And with the hard X. What would they say?"
"They're all extinct, Nav. Shut up," Scout snaps, beginning to tremble.
"Anyways," she continues, visualizing hard to turn towards Explorer Minion. "I, and the universe, have room for only one master, and it's not going to be you."
The now floating Explorer Minion twitches his eye. "Really? Not me? Why not? Now that I have all this power, what's the meaning of it? What's the purpose of anything else? Do you really care so much about that blowhard overlord that you deny something like this?"
He gestures dramatically, causing a super cool cosmic explosion in the higher regions of the room, invisible to anyone without their special visualized glasses.
"Leadership is not based on power, moron," she says. "It's based on character. Everyone knows that you can have as much authority and magic as you want, but if you're a jerk, it doesn't matter, does it?"
"Ironic," Explorer Minion says with a sly grin, "considering you follow that Overlord so tightly, as if you're tied around his little finger."
Scout laughs as she tries to fight through the box enclosing around her. "You've just been terrified of him this whole time, I feel for you, bub."
"Oh?" he scoffs, his hand motioning around new stars and planets as his body becomes akin to that of a Greek god.
She nods. "He's much more than that," Scout Minion replies. "He's the kind of guy who would look at someone like me…" She pauses, glancing at her own reflection in the dark cube engulfing her. Her eyes flicker in shock, but she keeps her cool. "It's something you're just not going to have if you're freaking out about being great all the time. Greatness doesn't come from those things."
Explorer Minion laughs haughtily, like a king addressing a peasant. "Goodness, my dear. Do you have any sense of scope? All the history books will speak of this day, when I became the greatest life form to exist, and no one could stop me. In just a day, I went from… 'Stache'…" He makes bitter quotations with his hands. "To this!... I'll need a new name."
"I don't think you're going to be remembered the way you expect to be," Scout Minion shoots back. "After all, you're more relevant as a minion to him than as an unstoppable overlord by yourself."
Explorer Minion leans down on his massive, muscular thighs with a laugh. "You foolish girl! What kind of nonsense are you on about? Your relationship to someone doesn't matter if they can't stop me!"
Scout Minion suddenly looks a little more relaxed. "Well, maybe you're right," she concedes. "But he's also the kind of person who would look at Mime Minion and say, 'Hey, you're important too," she notes.
"Ah, taken quite a liking to our little invalid, have we?" Explorer Minion says with a superior squint. "Now, why would you be so fond of your only hope, I wonder?"
He looks back at the dark cube he placed over Mime Minion.
…But he feels it too. He squints again, his antennae flickering. For some reason, he's been seeing Mime Minion so often that he never thought to ponder it. He can't feel Mime Minion, and he couldn't as far back as he can remember.
"…What?" he says quietly.
Abruptly, he flicks his hand aside and lifts the magic darkness of his envisioned cube around Mime Minion.
There's no one there.
He stares, stupefied for a moment. "I don't get it... I visualized a cube that couldn't be escaped and couldn't be altered, even by unalterable material-altering concepts!?"
Suddenly, Explorer Minion jolts. "Worry not. I'll find him while you finish with these two," the Shard itself says, breathing as if from all directions.
Explorer Minion jerks back again in surprise. "Oh, well, actually, yes, I suppose that makes sense now that I am in charge!"
"Of course you are," the Shard replies. "After all, I do need something to cling to when we leave. Time to let my scales shine!"
"Shine away, shard of mine!" Explorer Minion encourages as the room begins to light up from unknown sources.
"You won't get away with this bullshit," Scout Minion says as she continues to visualize a way out of her predicament.
The skull relic transforms. It resembles a dragon kin at one moment, but at other times, it's more like a drake, a family, a wyvern, or a snake. It's beautiful to behold, lighting up the room in its glory as the ceiling seems to expand out into spaces impossible for the room to contain.
But suddenly, it's placed inside an invisible box, folding neatly into the confines as a bright red bow's tied around it into a pretty little bow.
"Wh-what is this?!" the shard shouts, glowing furiously as Explorer Minion turns to assist. He lays his mighty grip on the box, but it doesn't budge an inch.
"The blazes? This is the strength that can tear worlds apart! How is it impossible for me to open a stupid box?" Explorer Minion exclaims, just as he becomes aware of the uncomfortable feeling of slowly lowering to the ground. His muscles atrophy, his figure returns to the cute rotund body of a regular minion of The High Overlord, and he can no longer feel the weight of the shard's power.
As his little feet tap down, he glances behind and sees Navigator Minion and Scout Minion pulling quickly from their confines. Explorer Minion gawks at them both, judges their expressions—especially Scout Minion's—and begins running off as fast as he can.
He's caught, however, unable to move by the unseen hand of a figure in the dark. This is a real hand, unimagined. He should have seen it coming, but in his frenzy, he didn't notice the retinue of figures walking into the chamber.
Scout sighs as she watches Explorer Minion squirm under the authoritative grip of a certain second-in-charge. "…Sir," she says half-heartedly.
Invasion Minion, short, but with the certain je ne sais quoi of a true conqueror, holds Explorer Minion firmly by the neck. "We heard enough. Barely," he says, parsing out what happened as a few buff operator minions conduct a quick sweep of the room.
"We have this handled," Scout says, winning an indignant look from Navigator Minion.
Invasion shrugs. "Either way, if there's a shard…"
"The Shard Team comes out. That's how it goes," Scout interjects. "That's protocol."
"Now then," Invasion says, walking up to the shard of Ohrine floating neatly in its box. He looks over at it for a moment like a petri dish holding some kind of disease. "Outstanding," he says, with a rare, deflated tone.
"This can't be… how did it fail?!" Explorer Minion protests.
"You don't need to understand," Invasion Minion replies. "In fact, I'd prefer you didn't. If knowledge causes you to do evil, then be stupid and good instead, or at least stupid and innocent."
"Unhand me this instant you pompous tea-guzzling ruffian! You've lost your mind!" Explorer Minion shouts, just as Scout Minion looms over him from behind. Even though Explorer Minion's shard-granted power has disappeared, Scout Minion pulls her strength from somewhere else—a disgusted fury that something like him would ever attempt to do something like that to her and get away with it for even a second.
"That's my line," Scout Minion says with a cold tone as she cracks her ether-bound knuckles.