December 18th, 2009
Materialising just within the pull of Earth’s gravity, the Admiral ordered that all power be cut. With the engines silenced, the ship became a dead weight, hurtling downwards.
This sudden shock may not even have registered in the vast clicking brain networks of Yulicron, but the impostor was startled, and that was all the Admiral needed.
At the last split-second before impact, the vessel disappeared again into hyperspace, stationary within time, to a location just beyond Yulicron’s current reach – but the Admiral’s precise position had been calculated and fixed by Patch, just as precisely as Duddles had promised.
As the ship dissolved around him, Santa Claus remained and dropped safely to the ground right in front of the target.
Putting all his fears behind him, the Admiral snatched the impostor off its jagged little feet, and beamed back aboard the ship with it.
It was to be brought before me, and its fate decided. Our usual preference, when a villain who has tried to ruin Christmas is caught and brought under our control, is to show mercy and to forgive them. This time, it would be our own outrage which would have to be caught and controlled. The impostor’s stark opposition to everything we have worked for was apparent in its every act and motive. We still don’t know what was in those chocolates it was feeding them, but it caused them to take its lies for truth. To their eternal credit, and as living proof of the power of good over evil, they had begun to spot discrepancies between what it was telling them and what was really happening around them.
They are now free of its spell. Counter-chocolates were dispensed on the ground, and soon all would be well. Santa Claus was here, and he was going to fix everything.
Of course, at this point, nobody knew where the real Spirit of Christmas was being held.