Beyond the Multiverse

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Bees Knees

"Sorry for the interruption," George smiled down from the screens, "Just a small problem with a strange French man."

Jane stared at Hattie with a concerned gaze. Hattie gazed back doubly so.

This concern was not about Fou Artiste. It was, instead, about the white soldier standing just outside the bakery they were currently standing in.

The soldier let out an irritated groan, and lazily threw a dagger at the bakery, which embedded itself perfectly into the doorknob of the establishment. With another groan, she stretched her arms, cracked her fingers, and begun to march towards Hattie and Jane.

"Do something," Jane told Hattie.

"Does panicking count as 'something?'" Hattie asked.

"Yes," Jane told him, "Yes it does."

Hattie and Jane both started screaming violently, running around inside the bakery, trying desperately to find an exit. They slapped the walls, ripped bread from the shelves and threw custard tarts across the room for no good reason. To say that Hattie was panicking would be an overstatement. Jane was the one freaking out. Hattie just stood in a corner screaming monotonously.

Jane looked over at Hattie with a confused gaze.

"Call that panicking?" She asked, "I'm three steps away from smearing faeces across the walls and bashing my head through the display case."

"I've never really... panicked," Hattie explained, "Or celebrated, or cried, or anything along those lines. I like to remain stable."

"That just sounds boring," Jane told him as she smacked her face into a black forest cake.

A dagger smacked into the glass shopfront and clinked to the ground. Luckily the glass was nearly invincible, so there was no way the assailant was getting in that way.

The toughness of the glass was due to George's hatred of maintenance. The island needed to be maintained occasionally, and during this period, the contestants would be sedated and put in storage until Stratton Island was again fit for use, at which point they would be revived and resume their slaughter. During these periods of repairs, George would run best-bits episodes. 'Best bits episodes,' George explained in his fifth autobiography, 'are a distraction to cover up a dire lack of new ideas.'

Naturally, a majority of this maintenance was of glass windows that were broken, so to minimise the amount of time the maintenance team would take to repair the island, the glass was replaced with a near-indestructible substitute. This was lucky for Jane and Hattie, as their attacker was prevented from launching herself through the window. She could, however, use the door, which was more of a risk at this current point in time.

"For today's mail," George called out, now seated in an armchair next to a temporary fireplace and wearing an ungodly amount of tweed, "We have a letter from Bethany, who writes to us all the way from Amsterdam in universe 11B-779-Alpha."

"We're going to die," Hattie stated.

"Shush," Jane told him, "I want to hear the mail."

"Bethany writes," George continued, adjusting his purely decorative glasses, "'Dear George, I love the show, but I have a quick question I hope you could answer. What about bees?' Well, I agree, Bethany. What about bees?"

There was a loud, reverberating noise from the distance. Jane looked to Hattie. Hattie looked to Jane.

Then there were bees.

An ungodly, horrible, superbly outrageous amount of bees poured through the streets, every inch of outdoor space now filled with millions of devilish insects, carving through the island. Jane and Hattie stared out of the window in horror as the swam encased everything outside, consuming the entire town.