Andro stretched his selfie-taking arm and moved it around in circles. He wanted to warm-up his rotator cuff, because stretching one's muscles were an important step in muscle health and one's total well-being. That and he was growing a little impatient at the tardiness of one of his interviewees. He had his camera tripod all decked out and the sun was at a location that didn't blast sunlight into their faces. The clouds rolled in slowly, meaning the sun wouldn't be a problem at all soon, and the grey sky would create a perfect contrast to the blossoming flowers in the bushes behind him. He picked Brant Park as his location for the day because he loved visiting the huge fountain in the center of it.

In the blossoming flowers hovered little bees and three bright-green hummingbirds that were each taking turns seeking a flower to hide behind and being caught by one of the other little birds, a perfectly cute little game of hide-and-seek. Andro was tempted to video his little birds playing hide-and-seek and posting that video instead of the one he had planned.

The bees were all the rage now-a-days, with movies, both documentaries and animated films, popping up here and there in an attempt to gain an awareness of their role in pollination, food-growth, and in the overall ecosystem. His guest youtuber today was a local honey-bee keeper here in Central New York, and she had agreed to shooting a short interview about making honey in a city. He was going to title it, "Urban Bee Kisses".

"Hello, are you Mr. Dantes?" Someone came up behind Andro as his attention had remained on his little birdies. He and his birds all looked up in unison at the lady with bright, golden curls, a sun-hat, and shades. Her outfit was an orange onesie with a big sunflower on her chest. He was surprised to have missed her, though the last time they chatted was with her in her bee-keeping outfit on facetime.

"Ms. Liesel! Apologies for my distracted appearance. Glad to finally meet up in person." Andro stood with grace and shook her hand, then invited her to sit on the bench beside him. They continued to share niceties and Andro adjusted the camera on the tripod in order to begin their interview.

“AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIAIAIAIAIAIIAIIAIAIA!” Zek screamed in undulations and he gunned the engine on his four wheeler and tore through the sidewalks. A chorus of dozens or hundreds of who knows, maybe even thousands of demons responded as they chased.

Zek blasted through the glass window-walls of a corner store, turning the store into a shortcut to save time. Glass bounced off his murder-bucket helmet and trenchcoat and showered down behind him but he was already gone.

He was going to kill Javier for that bad tip! It was supposed to be a dog-fighting competition! Dogs killing each other, like the filthy abominations they were! Good clean fun! But then a dog-man has shown up and systematically started beating people up and rallying all the dogs into a rebellion of some sort and that might’ve been when Zek dropped a car on the dog-man.

Which just made the dog-man some kind of martyr for the Demon Resistance Army and Zek their public enemy number one.

So Zek had scrammed.

“AAAAAHHHHHHHH!” he shrieked in an unusually high pitched voice as he caught sight of the swarm behind him. Think think think, he needed to get away but once the demon dogs had your scent you were a goner!

And then Zek found himself in a park. “AAAAAIIIII!!!!!” he kept screaming as he blew past a bunch of birds and the bees and and man and woman talking about them, the dogs very close behind.

Ms. Liesel droned on and on about frivolous matters at first, about how the bees were required to be kept at a specific temperature at all times, at how sunlight didn't really affect them as much as the humidity in the room, and etc., etc.

Andro  thought about how he could have probably screened more energetic type individuals for this interview, but he did his best to stay energized throughout the encounter, laughing at semi-appropriate times, and oh, definitely laughing when Ms. Liesel tried making a bee bun. Oh how she loved bee puns.

Halfway through the interview, however, Andro began to hear incessent screaming, first coming from an individual and then next coming from scattered groups throughout the park. He thought about ways to cut out the noise later. Maybe he should have brought a wind-microphone so that the sound would have been focused on his and Ms. Liesel's conversation. The wind wasn't nasty, but he could have anticipated the background noise a little better. So he tried his best to stay focused. 

Then whoosh, the noises rocketed straight at them as a man in a four-wheeled vehicle came coming toward them and blew past the very bush that Andro's hummingbirds were fluttering about in. The three little birds flew straight to his shoulders, as the man on the vehicle ran screaming; "“AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIAIAIAIAIAIIAIIAIAIA!” 

Andro had no time to think, as a swarm of dogs came straight for him and his guest. "Bigby, Nike, Raisin, up!" He called out to his bird companions as two of them alighted upon Ms. Liesel's  shoulders and one on his own. The sudden sensation of becoming weightless took over his body.

"Oh dear! What is happening? Th-this is insane!" Ms. Liesel in her bright orange jumpsuit waved her hands in the air as she tried to stabilize herself. There was no need since, luckily, Andro brought his trained birds today just in case of accidents just like these. The wave of dogs hurried now underneath them, but a few lingered behind to bark at the floating man and the floating woman. The dogs seemed especially fond of Ms. Liesel's orange attire.

"Nasty dogs, leave us alone!" Ms. Liesel shrieked and Andro didn't know what to do next. He saw the fountain nearby and a statue.

"Stay calm, no don't flail like that please!" Maybe it would be wise to perch somewhere elevated and quick, as Bigby and Nike weren't looking too hot trying to keep a hold of the frightened Ms. Liesel. As Andro looked around for places to perch he also kept an ear out for the man in the four-wheeler, who seemed to be the cause of this fiasco. His knocked over camera due to the dog stampede laid on the ground. He had something to say to that man, when and if he could find him.

Zek careened around the park, which was already better than the streets because there was so much more room to work with. Granted, the dogs didn’t have obstacles either but Zek could really gun the engine.

“AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!” he caterwauled and he suddenly had to veer off the path to avoid wrecking an ice cream sidewalk vendor. That was holy ground - even the forces of hell-on-his-heels couldn’t make him desecrate that!

But that meant Zek was now charging right at a fountain and he was going way too fast to safely turn. So he formed a ball of golden light and threw it. A split second before he crashed, the fountain vanished in a flash of light and Zek went bumpety-bump over the the crater and bits of pipes in the dirt, which, while not a crash into a concrete fountain, was still more than the four wheeler could handle at those speeds.

Zek hit a pipe and suddenly he, too, was flying, just like that man and the woman in the really tacky orange outfit. “MY EYES!!!!” he screamed as he recoiled, mid-flight, at the sight of her apparel. The four wheeler rolled and crashed and Zek started into a downward trajectory, screaming all the way.

He continued screaming even when, six feet off the ground, he manifested a bouncy house around himself. He struck the floor of the bouncy house, bounced epically into a net, nearly knocking the thing over, and then was rubber-banded right back into the floor to bounce and collide a half-dozen more times, leaving his neck twisted around at a very unnatural angle.

“...ow.”

Ms. Liesel continued to shriek and flail. The veins on her face popped almost as much as the colors on her attire. This crunched a distraught expression onto Andro's face as the two birds holding onto her shoulder could hardly focus with all her flailing and the barking that erupted beneath them the entire time. The dogs, ranging from Pomeranians to Bloodhounds to Chihuahuas swarmed beneath them like flies on a fallen over watermelon slice from a summer picnic table. The brightness of Ms. Liesel's outfit acted like a beacon, a chewtoy hovering over the eager, slobber-filled mouths of the canines.

"Ms. Liesel, do you best to slow down and stay calm. You don't want to fall, do you?"

"I don't want to fall? I'm afraid of heights!! You can't just ask someone who's afraid of heights that they don't want to fall-- Of course I don't want to fall, put me down!" She continued to shriek, and Andro believed he could see tears running down her face. 

Andro thought about dropping her then and right there, not caring whether the dogs would have her as their chew toy, but all the goodness in him prevented him from saying the command to his hummingbirds, of which were growing emotionally exhausted from having to deal with the woman's hysteria and the aura of irritation that Andro was emitting toward them. Thankfully they were close to the fountain, of which they could probably land upon. Ledges above the flowing water could probably withstand their weight.

Just as they floated toward the fountain, however, the fountain disappeared in a bright flash of light and Andro cursed his luck. "Are you serious??!" He told Bigby to keep him still suspended in the air. The info relayed to the other two birds by means of sassy tweets and tweets of encouragement from Bigby.

Just as suddenly as the fountain disappeared, however, a huge bouncy house appeared in their vicinity. The birds could read Andro's sudden shift in attention and fluttered their way towards the roof of the bouncy house. Ms Liesel gave out a big scream as the two of them were tossed into the bouncy house right after a person inside bounced around. He was about to tell his birds to stop, but they already let go as the two adults hurtled on top of the bouncy house, smashing the person inside against the roof of the inflated castle.

A benefit of Zek’s brief foray into rocketry was that his self-propelled flight has quickly put a lot of distance between him and the devil dogs, while also preventing him from leaving a scent trail on the ground.

A downside of Zek’s brief foray into rocketry was the fact that what came up must come down.

That was the part Zek always hated.

He had just one brief moment to contemplate the fact that he was still alive when the sky fell in.

“Ack!” he said as somethings collided with the top of the bouncy house and smashed it right into him, adding insult to lack of injury.

He let out a shocked gasp. “Gasp!” What was that? And why was it not bouncing away? And why was it directly on him? And why was it sooo heavy? And why did he just have a feeling that his fashion senses were about to be extremely offended?!?!?!

Since Zek couldn’t move and he didn’t like being smashed down by inflatable architecture, he called up another golden light in his squished hand and pressed it against the bouncy house. IT suddenly vanished and as Zek fell the three feet to the ground he rolled himself away so he’d be out from under whatever projectiles had lovingly smothered him.

And then the hounds from aitch eee double-toothpicks saw the light and came a’running.

Zek screamed.

“AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIAIAIAIAIA!”

The two of them went frump on the inflatable balloon house, and as soon as they landed, all of Andro's rage crashed in upon him. "I cannot believe this shitshow we're experiencing!" The three of his birds landed upon his head, and flapped their wings as fast as they could to get their human to calm down. Andro turned to Ms. Liesel, but she had already gotten up on her feet and started to leap off the bouncy house, getting the heck out of here or so it seemed.

There was so much action happening right now, Andro was hit by the sudden realization that his early morning coffee in front of the television on his actual day off of work felt like it was soo far away. Instead of coffee, he was on an adrenaline spike brought about by some action-crazed lunatic being chased by dogs. Instead of sitting in front of his television, watching an episode of his favorite daytime show, he felt as if he were part of some crazy action-packed, reality show about how crazy can one's morning get? Instead of taking the day off to record a calm interview about bees, about calm, no-nonsense bees, he was now standing upon a deflating bouncy house with enough air to catch their landing and his interviewee clambering off of said bouncy house to get somewhere away from him and his nonexistent equipment. To say that Andro was pissed would be an understatement.

"How the f*** did everything go so utterly wrong?" The bee-woman didn't even say her goodbye as she stumbled away. Then, to make matters worse, the inflatable house that had allowed him to catch his breath soon disappeared from under him just as the fountain had disappeared earlier. Then appeared the man whose scream was the source of all this nonsense, the man whom if Andro had anyone to blame, and he was one to try and prevent the whole blame game, this man was the man.

As the inflatable house disappeared, Andro landed square on his arse on the grass beneath. A couple moments later he was back up on his feet, hand clutching his hip, hurling himself at the man with the dogs in the distance zooming in closer.

"Bigby, Nike, up!"  He commanded his fluttering little birds to latch onto the shoulders of the man screaming his head off and take up into the sky one more time as the dogs began to gather underneath them again.

"You. Fix this. Now." Andro mustered the sternest dad voice he could muster, and hoped that this man would think twice about running away or squirming, because he continued to tell his hummingbirds to bring them up, up, up and up.

“AAAAAAAAA-errr?”

Suddenly Zek could fly! Or at least his trenchcoat could. Well that was a new feature. He shut up and blinked at the rapidly retreating ground as he flew upwards and onwards and….were those birds that were carrying him?

Zek pulled a piece of bubblegum from a sleeve and popped it in his mouth, letting the wrapper fall to the ground far below. Maybe the dogs would get arrested for littering. Who knew.

He blew a bubble. Yep, he wasn’t dreaming. “Yep, I’m not dreaming,” he informed the birds, who were now his best friends.

Oh, and apparently the birds had kidnapped another person too and the dude was angrily yelling or whatever at him.

Zek blinked owlishly in response. He looked at the man. He twisted his neck around until he was looking behind him and then swiveled it back around. He looked at the man again. Oh, Mr. Angry Pants was talking to him. Zek shrugged and kicked his feet up in midair, crossed his ankles, and stretched his arms behind his head, like he was lying in an invisible hammock. “Sorry, dude, these birds ain’t mine. Although I do have some barbecue sauce if you wanna take care of them yourself.”

Andro began to feel exhaustion coming from his birds, for they had at least held onto people for more than ten minutes now. Andro's time dribbled down. He had to act fast before the both of them went kersploot. Maybe that would have been a good solution for one of them, Andro thought, but then took the thought back. That thought was a little too dark for his tastes.

>>“Sorry, dude, these birds ain’t mine. Although I do have some barbecue sauce if you wanna take care of them yourself.”

Andro almost smacked the dude but that would have been unprofessional and too sincere of him, so with the dogs barking underneath, Andro kept his self composed though his limbs were all but dangly from being weightless for so long. He hoped the man his other birds were carrying didn't grow nauseous as many others had before. 

"Excuse me, but these birds are my birds. If it weren't for my birds you would be down there right now in a mess of dog slobber and possibly busting out in rabies."

Thankfully the dogs below had grown tired of waiting so long for the two floating men, they decided to chase after Ms. Liesel instead, in her bright orange onesie and boring personality. Andro felt that it was safe to give the signal for them to drop. So, with as quickly a pace as the birds brought them into the sky, so just as quickly did they bring them down.

Soon as their feet were square on the ground, Andro reached for the man's wrist in order to drag him in the direction where his fallen-over camera lay.

"I'm Alejandro Dantes, and you are responsible for this dog swarm, ergo, you are responsible for replacing a camera use for my youtube channels." If the man let Andro grab his wrist and drag him toward the camera, that would have been the best option. If he chose another direction, then Andro would have to learn to soothe his growing rage.

This dude was a weird one. He had super-strong birds but….they were broken or something? Because clearly he needed them fixed but couldn’t do that himself? Zek’s eyes widened in understanding. Oh! The dude thought Zek was a veterinarian! Well he did have a bunch of knives and a scalpel on him, but he really didn’t think mid-air surgery was the best option.

He was about to say as much (and maybe have a reason to bill the guy for consulting work) but the guy just kept going and honestly Zek was starting to feel like taking a nap. He shut his eyes and faced the bright blue sky. “No, if it wasn’t for you I’d be in a dumpster enjoying by meatball sandwich and slushie.” He’d really been enjoying the convenience of keeping snack-filled dumpsters in his pocket dimension storage. He had an air mattress in there, too!

But the floating was nice too, although there weren't nearly as many snacks. He blew a large pink bubble and popped it loudly.

And then there was a feeling of descent or something. Zek opened an eye, still not paying attention to anything other guy might’ve said or done, and swiveled his head around to look underneath him. Oh, the ground was closing. But not super fast.

His feet touched down and the guy started raving or spitting or whatever. Zek stopped paying attention after the third syllable. “Alright, Allie, sounds cool! Get well soon, mazel tov, and may the fork be with you!” Then Zek jumped and dropped a red sphere of light at the same time. A second four wheeler appeared underneath him (it had been a steal one get one free special) and he gunned the engine.

Zek held up a hand and gave Allie another bird. “Wish you were hereeeeeeee!” he yelled as he zoomed off.