"Do you want to take down the sun with me?" The Great Rider asked.

Warlord of Terror shook his head. "No. I'd rather watch it burn every skyscraper to the ground."

"But if the city goes, you'll go with it."

"Then let it be! This city has no place for me! If it takes the flaming sun to defeat you after all these years, I say bring the end of Mysticity, raze it to the dirt!"

"Fine then," The Great Rider said, and called her noble steed--Caulidaisy the winged cow--with a piercing whistle. "We shall fight on our own, to our last breath!"

Rider and Caulidaisy took to the air, her sword lifted high to the orange sky, his wings unfurled. Warlord continued staring from the rooftop of the bulbous skyscraper, bleeding from a scrape on his cheek. "Those fools," he said. "Thinking they can stop the overheating sun."

It'd all happened when Warlord teamed up with a rogue engineer, and they'd planned to ruin every floaty scooter in the city, then quickly melt the streets to tar and ruin all the other traffic--culminated by them selling floaty scooters at an inflated price to get rich, allowing them to topple Mysticity's government and rule the whole land.

They'd succeeded at trashing all the floaty scooters in the city. But then the rogue engineer's heat ray shot at the sky instead, striking the sun rather than the streets. It'd overheated the sun, blasting the whole planet with deadly rays--

"No way!" the director shouted, banging her mechanical fists on her chair and making it bounce. "That's not how stars work."

The writers and actors seated around the rest of the circle--in non-bouncing chairs, just hard plastic ones--all looked up at her.

"What do you mean, that's now how stars work?" Mbix asked.

"You can't just overheat a star! Unless you're pouring thousands of planet-sized amounts of matter into it, nothing's going to drastically change the heat a star gives off."

"What about when it reaches old age and swells into a red giant?" the actor playing the rogue engineer asked.

The director glowered at him under her glasses. "Did your magic ray age that star by a couple million years?"

"Uh--well, it's not my magic ray, it's my character's. So I wouldn't know."

One of the writers cleared their throat. "I was kind of imagining the star like a light bulb, and Fel Daren's ray super charged it with energy."

"My character's name is Fel Daren?" the actor playing the engineer muttered.

"I remember," another writer said, "discussing in the writer's room how we wanted to portray the star. A light bulb, or perhaps a fire, is something we agreed made sense."

The director sighed. Then sighed again, louder. No one in the circle moved.

"That's not how stars work!" the director yelled, and half the writers jumped.

"So what I'm hearing is," one of the assistant directors said, "we need to rework how the star gets super-heated for the episode finale to make sense."

"Or pick something that's not a star." The director threw her hands in disgust, and they landed on the carpet. "Can't it be an alien ship? Or a force field generating heat?"

"An alien ship?" one of the writers asked. "How does that make any more sense than--"

"Forget I said that," the director said, hands slowly wriggling back toward her.

Ekso sighed, donut crumbs on her t-shirt. "We have to get rid of the star? But I was looking forward to learning if The Great Rider and Caulidaisy could survive in outer space."

The writer to her left coughed. "Well..."

Ekso stared. "Well, what?"

"Nothing. Nothing."

Mbix elbowed Ekso. "I think that means no."

"What?"

The writer's face turned red. "I mean, we could...workshop it again?"

"What?" Ekso exclaimed. "You were going to kill me in space?"