Things Are Getting Strange, I'm Starting To Worry

Open Season on the X-Files, By Hedonism

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"Scully! Help me here! I got one of 'em!"

Scully swept her ridiculously inefficient torch with a laser-tight beam to Mulder. He was on the floor in the big warehouse which was used to store objects-with-spooky-silhouettes-when-hit-with-tight-beam-torches, having rugby tackled a little grey creature, that was now squirming furiously in his grip.

"Take it's picture!"

Scully, wordless with her amazement but professional right to instinct, took out her polaroid.

"No film, Mulder! Or flash! Or power! Lens is broken!"

"Hey, what a surprise! And I watched you check it before we came in. Well I got the handcuffs on it now, but I know something will happen before I can haul it out into public view! We've gotta expose this thing! Over six hundred thousand, nine hundred and thirty one episodes, we gotta be lucky this time!"

As he grappled the fiercely squirming alien, Scully took the video camera and swept it onto the alien.

"Mulder! I... can't... focus! And my hand keeps wobbling about! The view's become black and white and grainy! And according to this, the alien has got… wires… puppet strings!"

"Damn Roswell effect yet again!"

Suddenly he pulled his gun and shot the menacing shadow. A lit cigarette, sniper rifle and alien disposal baggie hit the floor. Someone crawled away, coughing asthmatically.

"Hah, that only happened about ninety times so far!", shouted Mulder maniacally.

The alien suddenly looked smug at them and looked up. So did the agents. Spooky lights lit up the sky. The roof of the warehouse ripped free and a massive computer graphics spaceship was up there. It's purpose was obviously to rescue the alien so it would not become living proof that might endanger future (or repeated previous) episodes.

"Yessss!" shrieked Mulder with girlish triumph. He headbutted the alien just as it was starting to float upwards.

"We passed hundreds of people when we came in here! Look, the spaceship is huge! It's not just a blurry crappy picture! We've done it Mulder, we've shown that aliens really exist!"

There was a woosh. Hey, actually it was just an airplane passing directly overhead.

"I don't care! I still have the alien. And as I'm covering him completely now, _you_ won't be able to kill him or make him dissapear without also losing the lead character!"

"Hey!" shouted Scully.

"Get lots of normal people in to see this, Scully! No sinister weirdoes, no emotionless people, no-one who smokes, and definitely no-one in a suit!"

There was a strange, uncomfortable thump, that shivered through all existence. Even Mulder was quietened as he felt the awful truth, the sole, undeniable truth, the truth he sought, slip into his mind. That the alien rescuers, that the Smoking Bloke, that the men in black and the other infinite variety of thwarters of the truth were all just individual components of one really, truly universal conspiracy – reality itself didn't want Mulder to succeed in revealing any of the mysteries that it pitted him against every episode. The structure of the whole program had a conscious mind, and this mind was pondering the awful possibility that if the alien was discovered, and it's high-tec gadgetry revealed, the next episode of X-Files would have to become a silly Star Trek rip-off as civilisation leapt into the spaceage.

As the alien slipped free of the handcuffs and grasped it's equivalent of a cyanide pill, Mulder punched it and forced it's spindly arms back to it's sides. Then a sudden space virus struck and threatened to knock him out, but he shook it off. Then a werewolf tried to creep in and delicately kill the alien without damaging Mulder, but Scully shot it anyway. A vampire appeared and tried the same thing. Then so did a fungus man. Scully wheeled around and fought with her own gun hand as her tattoo told her to 'killl the aaaalieeennn, kiiilll theee alllieeennn...'

"Hold in, Scully, I can hear normal people coming! I'll never be beaten, Reality! You made me so that no matter what stupid things I see I'll never go mad and never give up! Hah, now you will pay for all that manipulation! Everyone must find out the truth! Scully, get your Starfleet uniform ironed, I'm gonna take this plot into the future!"

By Hedonism