“Do you guys see anything?” Jonathan whispered into his headset.

“There!” Andrew said.

Jonathan strained to see Andrew across the warehouse. The fake fog swirled in the red strobe lights, literally clouding his view. “Where? I can’t see where you’re pointing!”

“Twelve o’clock! I mean, my twelve, your six!”

Turning around, Jonathan watched as someone—or something—cut through the crowd, knocking over robots. Even in piles on the dance floor, Warren’s creations continued to sway and gyrate.

If the intruder turned out to be Andrew and Warren pulling another prank on him, Jonathan was going to be so pissed. Maybe not pissed enough to actually confront them, but he would definitely consider turning the shrink ray on their nearly completed LEGO Death Star. That would show them. He was tired of being ganged up on. He was tired of being scared all the time.

Lugging the shrink ray, Jonathan hurried back the way he came. He apologized under his breath to the fallen party-bots as the trailing extension cord snaked over their bodies.

A blond girl in a white tank top was sitting on the security table. In one hand, she held the Gandalf staff. In the other was a jagged crystal Jonathan didn’t recognize as part of the Trio’s inventory. It looked like Kryptonite, glowing so strongly that it cast green light on the girl’s fingertips. None of the robots had ever attempted to pick up any of the artifacts before. This was a bad time for them to start.

“Hey,” he said, straining to keep hold of the shrink ray as he switched it from his right side to his left. “Put those down. They’re important.”

The blond girl cocked her head, looking at him shrewdly through narrowed green eyes.

“Oh,” she said, tone flat with disdain. She twisted the Kryptonite crystal into the top of the Gandalf staff, fashioning together the gaudiest and most canon-clashing accessory Jonathan had ever seen. “You must be the nerd.”

Jonathan blinked in surprise. Only the most advanced of Warren’s robots had the ability to talk—programming them was wildly time-consuming. In building an entire crowd of party-bots, the Trio’s main concern had been in creating a variety of heights and hair colors for believability on-screen.

“I didn’t think we brought any of the T-1000s with us,” Jonathan said into the headset.

“We didn’t,” Andrew whimpered.

“Shoot her!” Warren roared.

Jonathan pulled the trigger. A jet of blue-white light crackled out of the bowl of the shrink ray. The blond girl hopped down from the table and kicked, her leg coming up in an arc that knocked the gun—and Jonathan—aside. As Jonathan fell, the sizzle of shrinking light blasted through the crowd, exploding through party-bots. On the snacks table, the Chex mix erupted, raining down pretzels and rice cereal.

Before Jonathan could regain his balance, the shrink ray’s light continued to burn, eating through the Books of Ascension, the stolen podium, and, finally, Warren. One moment Warren was speaking in Latin. The next, the blue-white light hit him square in the chest, lighting his new half-scorpion skeleton from within. He didn’t have time to react before his body burst. Gore and goo splattered in every direction.