Explorer Minion meets the uncomfortable feeling of Scout Minion's super hard, super sharp, super fast fist impacting his skull, shattering his head immediately as his body slips out of Invasion Minion's suddenly permissive grip. Scout leaps on him, jabbing her fists into his mortal wreckage at light speed.
Invasion Minion watches it happen. He's not above resolving disputes, but he's even more interested in seeing how the others handle it.
"Scout! Holy ****! Calm down!" Navigator Minion shouts as a few of the Shard Team Minions rush up to stop her.
"You gone psycho, girl?" Operator Prime Minion hisses.
"I'll thank him for the rest later…" Scout Minion scoffs as she struggles against their grips. She's pulled away from the convulsing, broken form, a manic expression of surprise plastered on his face.
Invasion Minion looks down at the carnage, shaking his head and gesturing for one of the crew to clean it up.
"Well, it was kind of dumb of him," he notes to Scout, gesturing for the squad mates to release her.
"Yeah," she says. The moment she's let go, she immediately sends a razor-sharp heel into Explorer Minion's shin, breaking it instantly and causing another flush of glowing white infusia to spray along the bricks.
"Dumb and traitorous," she scoffs. "Maybe I could forgive that, but dumb, traitorous, and full of yourself like a Knight? What a joke."
Operator Extreme Minion steps up with a powerful-looking magical apparatus glowing with the power of the contained shard of Ohrine's mind. "Sir, collection complete," she says with a slim-eyed nod.
Invasion Minion nods back. "Let's get out of here." The group turns to leave.
Scout Minion Clears her throat as she sees the object of her ire dragged away. "So…"
Invasion pauses, and nods as he keeps pace with her. "So?"
"So how did you guys get here so fast?" Scout Minion asks, mulling it over in her head. The whole place should have been filled with misdirection and traps. "We didn't even explain how it worked."
"We figured it out," Invasion Minion replies. "After all, the Shard QRF is trained, prepared, and equipped to go anywhere within ten minutes."
Scout emits a quick snicker as she gives a playful smack to the bucket holding the unconscious, torn-to-pieces Explorer Minion, certain to be recomposed in hours, if not minutes, and facing judgment soon after.
"I gotta say, Poppi knows how to run it."
Invasion Minion's slanted eyes slim a little more. "In fact, he didn't even know."
Scout glances over. "What?"
"I let him know once the transmission cut out that we were going," he glances aside. "I didn't say anything about the predicament you were in. I think he's going to be very happy to hear about the Shard, though. He hates these things," he says, glancing back at the apparatus held by Operator Extreme Minion, a massive fellow with a face so cold it could only be brightened up by the fires of hell.
"Okay, sure," Scout says, pausing before continuing with a bit of confusion on her face. "But in ten minutes, there was a lot for you guys to go through. How did you figure it out? There was a method to get here, right? A secret passageway?"
Invasion Minion nods. "We figured it out."
"Alright then," Scout laughs, "You 'figured it out.' You don't have to say that you're just that much smarter than us, do you?"
Invasion Minion jostles his head about in thought, his stubby, sharp antennae waving in balanced symmetry. "Hmm. We can just say… that when you have insight into a threat, you begin seeing everything about the threat as if it were everywhere all at once. You start to notice patterns that weren't there but had always existed. Power like that, Scout, is not limited simply by intellect. It is also informed by learning and focus."
She sighs, and in reply he smiles gently. "One could say it's a matter of perspective," Invasion Minion adds with a sage tone.
Scout Minion hums and squints at them, then hums a little more, squinting some more as Invasion Minion turns his head away. "We may have gotten a little assistance from-"
"Mime Minion," Scout answers, causing Invasion Minion's antennae to flick straight up.
"How… remarkably perceptive of you-"
"I don't get it," she cuts in over him, rubbing her face.
"What do you mean you don't get it?" Invasion Minion asks, as a few of the other operator minions chuckle at his answer.
She has a reputation to maintain, but as she's usually the one putting her neck on the line for all these new and poorly-analyzed adventures, it's hard to blame her that she can get taken by surprise. Almost anyone would have missed it, and she's just now realizing she's "missed it" several times throughout this assignment.
"It's quite simple. We met him outside of the facility, and he wrote us a little note with his notebook."
Scout Minion pauses to a dead halt, and her gaze trails down to the floor.
"What's the matter?" Invasion Minion asks.
"He was in there… with us," Scout Minion says.
Invasion gives a real smile, something that shows genuine satisfaction rather than a political appeal to one's emotions.
"Oh, he was?" Invasion Minion asks, so lightly it's almost as though the question were an answer, and Scout doesn't quite pick up on it. She shakes her head.
"I mean, obviously he was showing us the way through and making all these things and showing us…" She flicks her gaze around, and all of a sudden, she can feel him nearby.
She looks forward and sees him just waiting, doing silly little mimicries, as if he's trying to do some birdwatching with invisible binoculars. He steps out from behind a tree and waves at them as they emerge from the massive building
Scout Minion just stares, figuring it out—or at least another small sliver of it.
"I didn't feel you in here at all," she admits at last. "Did you… even go inside?"
Mime Minion hurriedly points out an invisible bird far in the distance and hands her the binoculars. She looks at him for a moment, and very slowly, processes the answer in her mind.
"Come on, dude. I get that the realms of the body and the mind are interconnected, but you're not gonna leave me hangin' on this, are you?" she asks again. "How the hell did you do it?"
Mime Minion simply adjusts the invisible binoculars for her, and points up again at the empty branch. She sighs, nods, and gives him a gentle pat on the back.
"…I guess you could imagine just about anything when the magic lets you," she says wistfully, raising the invisible binoculars to her eyes and looking at a very beautiful toucan… that is also invisible.
"Nice find," she adds with a gentle smile. Mime Minion smiles back, and they head back to the Towerne.
End of Tale One