Page 59

Then she plops her ass back down on the seat beside Lily.

“Why aren’t the mice fighting us yet?” The alien warlord, perched somewhere down the table beside the leader gym bro with braces, asks the obvious question.

He then chugs down a whole bottle of banana milkshake with casein in one big, slurpy gulp, introduced by the gym bros, with whom he and many other aliens have since become fast friends.

“They are waiting for us to make the first move,” says Lily the fairy queen, reciting the line she had heard countless times in numerous different movies.

The warlord nods, pleased by her answer.

Even though he and the other leaders of the council don’t exactly understand her role in this, as her status of being the fairy queen has yet to be publicized.

Every turns to look at her, surprised by her vague and mysterious answer. His pretty baby sure is a little smarter now.

Now, this is where we cue in the line that would make readers squirm in disgust: he lengthened like Pinocchio’s nose.

Just kidding, of course. He didn’t.

He’s not that attracted to knowledge.

It would be totally inappropriate in such an official environment.

“And why don’t you just ask Fernando to leave peacefully?” Maltose, the nutcracker guard with his wilted Dali mustache, somehow reads Lily’s mind and recommends what she was just about to do. He is at Gilly the guard’s right, and lined up on his own right side are the five other nutcracker guards with iron wings who make up pretty much the whole Fairyland military.

And though they are the smallest military in pretty much all history, they don’t seem exceptionally good at their job either.

The only perk is that they could flutter short distances with their wings.

Not that much of a help, really.

Every, on Lily’s left, grumbles. “Man, did you think we didn’t try that? I called Ferny twice to cut his shit, and both times, he said ‘nah’. He’s the villain, and he’s proud to be one.”

The warlord turns his baby blue face up from his now-empty banana milkshake shake, and gives them the first truly bright idea of the day. “So we should just spear them all up.”

“Good point, buddy.” Lily gives him a thumbs up. “And what about the little mice?”

“The scientists would deal with it, no?” Every comments from beside her.

One of the biochemist twins turns to him. “Look, we specialize in Sildenafil, not poison.”

Lily frowns, her pouty lips, well, pouting even more. “But taking too much of that can also get your blood pressure high or something. I dunno, I heard an ex of my momma’s say that.”

The biochemist’s twin, another biochemist, answers her next. “You are right, darling. Too much of our product often leads to high blood pressure, which could potentially induce cardiac arrest. Leaving it out around town could lead to deaths in the rodent population. But it could go against animal cruelty laws to poison them so. You should look into simpler alternatives, like arsenic or lead.”

“Cut the chase,” Queeny says, annoyed, “I don’t even understand half of what y’all mean anymore.”

“My lady, the scholar over there meant that too many blue pills give people heart attacks,” Gilly informs her. “And if the mice eat them, they’d die. But that is a heartless thing to do, my lady.”

“Then why are we even thinking about feeding them fucking pills? Blue fucking pills, out of all of them.”

“Yeah, just set up nets like the bitches at my old place used to do.” Lily supports her, giving them pretty much the best idea of the whole council. At that moment, Lily-Philosophy seems as if she is enlightened, like Einstein or that Newton calculus guy or whichever genius scientist in the moment a tree fell onto his head. And he invented gravity, a subject in physics class that made Lily’s high school years many fold more painful than they already were.

Wait, no, not a tree.

Was that a banana?

No, idiot, it was a fucking apple.

Damn, she can’t even remember the basic history of it. How in the world did she even pass the calculation side of the exams?