A Bad Idea 1

“Your Honor, in my defense,” Anne muttered to herself, using a laser blade to saw the corpse’s leg off, “the victim surprised me while I was working on science. If you’d been working on a plasma blaster, and someone had surprised you, isn’t it possible you would have shot them in the face? You know, accidentally?”

The work was slow-going, since the corpse was some dumb-ass vigilante with super-tough skin. His name was ‘The Exxterminator,’ and he was about as dumb as the name made him sound. Really, Anne should have gotten an award for shooting him in the face.

She continued muttering to an imaginary judge because it amused her, or perhaps because she was crazy. “You wouldn’t have been working on a plasma blaster? That’s a good argument, but I think it speaks less to your innocence and more to a lack of the intelligence which is required to work with plasma.”

The laser began grinding through The Exxterminator’s bone. If it’d been normal human bone this wouldn’t take so long. But he was an alien — Renflaxxxian, to be precise — whose bones were tougher than normal, because the gravity was three times as strong on Renflaxxx as it was on Earth.

Unfortunately, she’d been working on her plasma blaster in the bedroom, which meant that she was now sawing up a corpse in her bedroom. As if she didn’t have trouble falling asleep.

The laser saw sputtered a bit, when it got past the bone. Anne held her arms steady.

Why would this dilettante come after me? Anne asked herself.

A million thoughts exploded in her head. She could’ve inadvertently pissed him off during one of her many attempts to take over Boca Raton. Or maybe he was after a piece of her technology. Someone could’ve sent him here, or he could’ve just been patrolling the area, looking for some bad guy to beat up.

Did someone send him here to kill me? Anne asked herself.

She wiped some sweat off her forehead, trying to think of who could possibly want her dead.

She shrugged, shaking her head. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

The leg had been severed, so she moved towards an arm.

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