“Well, I still don’t understand how you guys got here,” Arthur was saying.
Now, most men are not really inclined to sit on their basement stairs and converse with a bunch of Sugar Plum Fairies, but Arthur was a pragmatist. Their presence meant one of two things: either he was quite mad, or his house was infested with fairies. And since he didn’t feel quite mad, he decided to assume that the latter was the case.
“I keep telling you: we came here by inter-dimensional quadrature,” snapped Bluebell. “Open your ears, fathead!”
“That’s no way to speak to our host,” said Purpletone placatingly.
“Host, schmost!” snapped Bluebell. “If he was our host, he’d set us free. He’s our captor.”
“I didn’t capture you,” noted Arthur mildly. “I came down here and found you all stuck to the floor.”
“That’s because some of the Pepsi you stored leaked all over the floor,” said Bluebell. “What kind of fiend stores defective pop bottles in his basement, anyway?”
“You could at least have carpeted the place,” added Silverthorne. “It’s not only sticky, it’s cold.”
“Now set us free so we can take our grim and terrible vengeance,” continued Bluebell.
“On me?” asked Arthur.
“You are an insignificant spear carrier in the pageant of our lives,” said Royal Blue. “We have a higher calling.”
“Right, man,” chimed in Inkspot. “You let us free, maybe we don’t mess you up, you dig?”
“It seems to me that if I don’t let you free you won’t mess me up, either,” said Arthur.
“You see?” said Indigo furiously. “I tole you and I tole you: you can’t trust Gringos!”
“If you don’t like Gringos, why did you choose my basement?” asked Arthur.
“Well, uh, we didn’t exactly choose it,” said Royal Blue uneasily.
“Then how did you get here?”
“By inter-dimensional quadrature, dummy!” said Bluebell, who finally succeeded in removing his feet from his shoes, only to have them stick onto the floor right next to the empty shoes.
“So you keep saying,” answered Arthur. “But it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“So it’s my fault that you’re a scientific illiterate?” demanded Bluebell, grabbing his left foot and giving it a mighty tug to no avail.
“Try explaining it another way,” suggested Arthur, as Bluebell made another unsuccessful attempt to move his feet.
“Let me try,” said Silverthorne. He turned his head so that he was facing Arthur. “We activated the McLennon/Whittaker Space-Time Displacement Theorem, but we didn’t take the Helmhiser Variables or the Kobernykov Uncertainty Principle into account.” He paused. “There. Does that help?”
“Not very much,” admitted Arthur.
“What difference does it make?” said Royal Blue. “We’re here, and that’s all that matters.”
“I’m still not clear why you’re here at all,” persisted Arthur.
“It’s a matter of racial pride,” answered Royal Blue with some dignity.
Arthur scratched his head. “You’re proud of being stuck to the floor of my basement?”
“No, of course not,” said old Silverthorne irritably. “We’re here to defend our honor.”
“How?”
“We’ve mapped out a campaign of pillage and destruction and vengeance,” explained Royal Blue. “The entire world will tremble before us. Strong men will swoon, women and children will hide behind locked doors, even animals will scurry to get out of our path.”
“A bunch of Sugar Plum Fairies who can’t even get their feet unstuck from the floor?” said Arthur with a chuckle.
“Don’t underestimate us,” said Bluebell in his falsetto voice. “We Sugar Plum Fairies are tough dudes. We are capable of terrorizing entire communities.” He grimaced. “Or we would be, if we could just get our feet free.”
“And the seven of you are the advance guard?”
“What advance guard? We’re the entire invasion force.”
“An invasion force of just seven Sugar Plum Fairies?” repeated Arthur.
“Didn’t you ever see The Magnificent Seven?” asked Royal Blue. “Yul Brynner didn’t need more than seven gunslingers to tame that Mexican town.”
“And Toshiro Mifune only needed seven swordsmen in The Seven Samurai,” chimed in Bluebell.
“Seven is obviously a mystical number of great spiritual power,” said Purpletone.
“Besides, no one else would come,” added Silverthorne.
“Has anyone thought to point out that you’re neither seven swordsmen nor seven gunfighters?” asked Arthur. “You happen to be seven undersized, potbellied, and totally helpless fairies.”
“Hey, baby,” said Inkspot. “We may be small, but we’re wiry.”
“Yeah,” added Indigo. “We sleet some throats, watch some feelthy videos, and then we go home.”
“If we can figure out how to get there,” added Silverthorne.
“We tried invading the world your way and look where it got us,” said Bluebell irritably. “On the way home, we’ll take the second star to the right.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” protested Purpletone.
“Yeah?” shot back Bluebell. “How would you do it?”
“Simple. You close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and say ‘There’s no place like home,’” answered Purpletone. “Any fool knows that.”
“Who are you calling a fool?” demanded Bluebell.
“Uh … I don’t want to intrude on your argument,” put in Arthur, “but I have a feeling that both of you are the victims of false doctrine.”
“Okay, wise guy!” squeaked Bluebell. “How would you do it?”
Arthur shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest notion where you came from.”
“From Sugar Plum Fairyland, of course! How dumb can you be?”
“Oh, I can be pretty dumb at times,” conceded Arthur. “But I’ve never been dumb enough to get stuck to the floor of a basement in a strange world with no knowledge of how to get home.”
“All right,” admitted Bluebell grudgingly. “So we got a little problem here. Don’t make a federal case out of it.”
“Be sure and tell me when you have a big problem,” said Arthur. “The mind boggles.”
“You stop making fun of us, Gringo,” said Indigo, “or we’re gonna add you to the list.”
“The list of people you plan to kill?”
“You got it, hombre.”
“Just out of curiosity, how long is this list?” asked Arthur.
“Well,” said Royal Blue, “so far, at a rough count, an estimate, so to speak, it comes to three.”
“Who are they?” asked Arthur curiously.
“Number One on our hit list is Walt Disney,” said Royal Blue firmly.
“And the other two?”
“That choreographer—what was his name—oh, yeah: Balanchine. And the Russian composer, Tchaikovsky.”
“What did they ever do to you?” asked Arthur.
“They made us laughing stocks,” said Bluebell. “Disney made us cute and cuddly in Fantasia, and Balanchine had us dancing on our tippy-toes in The Nutcracker. How are we expected to discipline our kids with an image like that? Our women giggle at us when they should be swooning. Our children talk back to us. Our enemies pay absolutely no attention when we lay siege to their cities.” The little fairy paused for breath. “We warned that Russkie what would happen if he didn’t change it to the ‘March of the Sugar Plum Fairy.’ Now we’re going to make him pay!”