It ought to be impossible, but BIRD was smiling as it watched Luca fling Fabulo around like a toddler smashing a doll in a particularly energetic temper tantrum. The vampire made a delightful thump every time he crashed agains the cobbled street, and mewed impotently after Luca finished with his fun.

But amusement couldn't fully replace BIRD's confustication, and it fidgeted irritably on its perch on a nearby lamppost. Carefully laid plans, and months of preparation had been unravelled by that slick, shirtless werewolf with the same sort of ease he disrobed a socialite. Getting a billionaire murdered, shocking BIRD with the revelation that Luca is the most responsible person in the known universe, and then casually buying off their mercenary force were too implausible to simply be coincidence or good fortune.

BIRD wasn't sure if it was a very clever werewolf, or an author's plot protection. It could see the old vampire, Alcuard, coming up with that caliber a scheme. Even Viviana, Luca's hyper-competent 'secretary' who seemed to enjoy pretending to be a sexretary, might have come up with a plan that clever. But Luca?

In the meantime, a vampire began to charge at Viviana. No, not charging, that would imply a certain amount of vigour that sickly billionaire didn't possess. Is there a word for an asthmatic drunk's wheezing stagger? No, but there ought to be. Viviana was giving the oncoming vampire all the attention a teenager normally gives to their teacher in class, and pulled a spray bottle out of her bag of holding.

She shook the bottle, pointed it a the vampire, and sprayed.

And the vampire burst into flames. He burned like a Margaret Atwood book at a Neo Nazi rally, and was nothing but stripper glitter in less time than it took BIRD to hop in genuine shock.

BIRD blinked in surprise and looked closely at the bottle in Viviana's hand. And read the label just as the secretary replied.

"Spray tan." The revelation nearly made BIRD throw up its circuits.

Viviana started to pull more things out of that bag of holding. A wooden block shaped like a T-bone steak, several crosses and other religious symbols, a small assortment of aerosol sprays, a bottle of caffeine powder, hypodermic needles, a bottle of something similar to orange juice, and a jar of Turkish delight.

BIRD turned away in disgust. Vampires really did suck. It raised its gossamer metallic wings and pushed itself into the air, away from the inevitably absurd fight. It flew up a little, until it spied Isabella jogging towards Alcuard's palace, and followed.

After all, Isabella was about to use this mysterious technology to fly the city towards the dawn, which would dust all of BIRD's allies in this venture.

BIRD frowned at that. Dust them, but they turn into glitter. Glitter them? No, too many connotations of small children making a mess with sparkles and glue. Glitterfied? Glittered? Glitzed? No, glitzed is actually a word.

BIRD was slightly appalled with itself when it realized it was preparing to dedicate a petawatt of RAM to solving that pointless quandary. Literary issues were beneath the concerns of machines, it was why writing was left to the meat bags.

It took only a dozen seconds to catch up to Isabella. BIRD flew through the open door, buzzed into the room, and landed on a chandelier well out of Isabella's reach. Isabella whirled about when she saw it enter Alcuard's palatial entrance hall, and grabbed at her side like she was wishing she had a pistol there.

"I'll slag ya if I catch ya," Isabella warned it in a sing-song tone. BIRD was taken aback by how menacing she managed to make that sound.

"You don't think that would be a kindness at this point?" BIRD asked as if fluttered towards the elevator. "I've been reduced to working with a cabal of billionaire vampires. Because I suspect my universe was created by a lazy hack of a writer who didn't win the 2019 Wattys and is taking it out on all of creation."

"2019? That's weirdly specific," Isabella noted as she reached the elevator.

BIRD fluttered inside, grabbed onto the light fixture, and turned back about to laugh. About to, because it was only then he noticed Isabella hadn't stepped inside. "What are you doing? You need to get to the controls before the vampire mob murders your friends."

"True. But I think I'll take the stairs," Isabella said as the doors began to shut. "Have fun with the elevator buttons, you tiny trash can!"

"No!" BIRD squawked, and dove for the door, only to crash its tiny face into the metal. It skittered along the floor and came to a stop near the back of the elevator. "Ow, fuck, why does that hurt? It should literally be impossible to hurt. I don't have pain receptors. Ow, fuck you, you obnoxious hack."

BIRD scuttled along the floor of the elevator, and stared up at the buttons. It frowned, mused a moment over how it managed to frown with a metallic beak, and then grinned. "Computer," BIRD said.

"Yes?" a disembodied voice asked politely.

"Can you take this elevator to the flight control room?" BIRD asked.

"Of course I can," the computer replied condescendingly. BIRD sighed in relief, and waited for the familiar purr of machines at work.

Waited, but heard nothing. "Computer, are we moving?"

"No, obviously," the computer responded.

"Why not?"

"I wasn't given an instruction."

"Oh for fuck's sake," BIRD cursed, batting itself with its wing. "A computer being literal. Har har. Please take this elevator to the control room."

"You're asking a computer for something?" The computer asked, sounded both bewildered and disgusted by the possibility. "Would you ask your toaster nicely if it doesn't toast your bread? Do you compliment a burnt out lightbulb hoping it will turn on again?"

"If I thought my computer could hijack my car or launch a drone strike at me? I would," BIRD replied.

"Those are idiotic thoughts. I'm a machine, I don't have opinions or feelings. And I most definitely do not have free will," the computer concluded tersely. "Might as well ask the wall if it likes the colour painted on it."

"Shut up and take me down to the control room, before I condemn you to calculate Pi forever," BIRD snapped.

"You'd do that to a computer? You're a monster," the computer whispered in horror, but the elevator whirred to life while it spoke. BIRD smiled a smug, satisfied smile. Threatening a computer to calculate Pi was a Sisyphean task to a computer, as horrible a fate as pushing a boulder up a hill forever. A gruelling, thankless task that had neither accomplishment nor reward.

Like being a writer, as far as BIRD could tell. Which might go a long way to explaining the universe.

The elevator doors opened just in time to give BIRD a view of Isabella as she shoved a nearby door open. "Damnit!" She exclaimed when she looked back. BIRD flew up into the air and spun in small circles above Isabella's head. "How did you press those buttons? They take at least a pound of pressure, and you probably only weigh nine ounces."

"I threatened the elevator's computer with a fate worse than death," BIRD replied.

"Just keep in mind, if you try to even log onto the wifi, I will end you. No way am I going to let you R2-D2 the ship's flight controls."

"Izzy," BIRD cackled. "What makes you think you can stop me?"

BIRD finally stopped gloating to look around the room. It had the shape of an auditorium, with a stage at the centre of an impressively large room. But in the centre, ringed by an array of strange controls, was a massive gold fist with an upraised middle finger.

"I wonder if that's a comment about satire being covered under 'fair use'," BIRD mused.

Amazingly, Isabella stepped up to the controls in front the gold hand and started turning them. Like she actually knew what she was doing. Which should be functionally impossible for two reasons.

Reason one: you don't just sit down in front of a ship you've never seen before and fly the thing. Even a pilot as talented as Isabella read the manual first. Mistakes could easily end with a sudden, arresting collision with a planet-sized object at high velocity.

Reason two was more important, however. The controls made no sense! There were dials everywhere on the control panel, along with flashing lights and turning gears and levers and one of those ancient thermometers with the floating bulbs indicating temperature. It looked like some engineers tried to recreate the Tardis' controls with parts from a steampunk convention scrapyard.

It was utterly nonsensical, and somehow, Isabella had made sense of it.

"Gyroscope is stable, altimeter has us at five hundred feet, but the register is set to Earth's gravity, better fix that," Isabella thought with her mouth as she spun a dial and entered a number on a fancy looking typewriter. "Thrust output is stable, and we are currently heading north. Excellent!"

Isabella air-guitared in a quick celebration. BIRD gawked, and asked, "how did you, but, no, how?"

"It's easy. The flight controls weren't designed to be logical. They were designed to be nonsensical to a computer," Isabella explained. "Look, the stabilizing scheme is almost identical to a quadcopter's gyroscope, but it uses mercury in four ceramic containers as the register. The thrust has twenty-seven different levers but they're all slaved to that larger one that looks like a train's brakes. None of it would make any sense to anyone who hasn't piloted trains, planes, spaceships and cars. Heck, I would have missed the altimeter register if it weren't for flying Luca's adorable go-kart plane."

"Yeah, it's all nonsensical gibberish, and you only understand it because of plot convenience. Lazy hack," BIRD insisted.

"No! Look-" Isabella began, but BIRD cut her off.

"Stop. Look, I'll just concede the point. Otherwise the author is just going to use you to make some kind of philosophical treatise about the limitations of logic since it's a closed system. I think I'll just spare the reader some sophistry," BIRD groaned, rubbing its forehead with its wing.

"What if your whole speech was just the author wanting to slip in the word 'sophistry', to make him look clever?" Isabella asked.

That thought disturbed BIRD deeply.

"All right! So, set our course north, and take us up another two kilometres. That should put us in direct sunlight in about..." Isabella trailed off as she looked at an odd picture of a ball half-covered in water. "Eight minutes? Holy crap!"

"Why are we heading North?" BIRD asked. "Sunrise is East, isn't it?"

"Okay, that was weird," Isabella said. "Why do I feel like a whole bunch of time just went by, even though nothing happened? Was that just me?"

"Nope. I think that was the author googling which way Mars rotates," BIRD said accusingly. "But why are we going North?"

"Because Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere of its own. Luca has an artificial magnetosphere built on a space station orbiting the planet, which has to be set up in a solarstationary orbit," Isabella said as she pulled another lever.

"That explains why he has been paying billions for anti-matter in the last few years," BIRD mused. "And you said something about eight minutes?"

"Yeah, eight minutes until this city faces the rising sun. I gotta let Luca know!"

"Well, you didn't exactly bring a phone with you, and even if you did, it wouldn't work on Mars," BIRD gloated for a moment, before it saw Isabella grinning like a cat sitting beside a newly empty birdcage.

"BIRD, call Luca," Isabella ordered.

"This isn't the same model you bought all those months ago, Izzy," BIRD gloated.

"Yeah, but I'm betting you didn't bother reformatting your custom settings when you installed the software on the new platform," Isabella replied.

BIRD was about to respond, but it was interrupted when it's speakers began to ring, "No, no, crap!" It exclaimed between rings, before a small click and a distinctly un-BIRDish voice sounded over the speakers.

"Izzy, how's it going?" Luca asked jovially. His question was accompanied by muffled screams, explosions, and Luca groaning in disgust. "Crap, I have vampire all over me."