Chapter 10

Normally, at this hour, Natasha Romanov would be at home, making herself some herbal tea and then crying into the cup poetically. Unless she was at a party or something. Or maybe she would be studying in the library, crying over a book of electropoetic diagrams, not out of sadness, but out of frustration that she couldn't remember which stanzas had ohms and which had farads. Unless she was at a party in a library.

It was a new experience for Natasha to feel so powerful and so daring, as she stalked through the streets, hearing a pelican crow, knowing nothing of conventions or wizardry. The last time something this exciting had happened was when a guy talked to her at a party and they got engaged, which had happened seven times over the summer, actually. Such domestic thoughts were clouded from her brain by HELL BREAKER, just as it increased her bust below her push-up leather brassiere, because face it, after chapters hearing about what was stuck in Mike Gravel's beard, isn't that a much better image to be reading about?

As she climbed the steps to the hotel where the Democratic convention was being held, she saw four people lining the steps, only one of them wasn't a person in the biological way. They were Mike Gravel, Michelle, Tim Duncan and Handsome Dan, who wasn't really that handsome anymore, as the servo mechanisms that were meant to warmly emote instead made him look like he had fallen to the bottom of the uncanny valley, hitched a ride in the uncanny boxcar of an uncanny railroad, and then hopped off and spent a week sleeping underneath an uncanny bridge while eating boiled boots that he fished out of the creek, on the correct belief that boots don't have any feelings. Handsome Dan still had feelings, but they were not the feelings that we saw and heard, at least not on the surface. His hair was still perfect.

Natasha raised the sword above her head, ready to bring it down!

Tim Duncan didn't want to dent another one of his oaken staffs, so he just told her to set the sword down. She wouldn't have listened to him, but instead, her eyes fastened on to Handsome Dan. She could understand his pain, it was much like hers, besides she had never been a robot. Her possession of the cursed blade HELL BREAKER let her know that he was a sentient being with thoughts, even though she couldn't read those thoughts.

Mike Gravel finally took note of what was going on, and looked over at Natasha. And she looked at him, and whispered in his ear a question. They were far away, so it was a stage whisper, and everyone there could hear, but you (the reader) can not, because you are not on stage.

“OF COURSE SO. I THOUGHT OF EVERYTHING!” Mike Gravel answered, and Natasha smiled. When Handsome Dan saw her, he felt at ease. Her earrings were the exact same shade of blue that the room he had been constructed in was, and he felt a sense of warmth and maternal care that he had been deprived of in his brief, hectic career as Manchurian-Candidate-would-be-evil-robot-overlord. They hugged and the three people watching clapped, although honestly, by this time, they were getting a little tired.

And they all rode off into the sunrise, only instead of riding, they were sitting still.

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