“Happy birthday, Yui!” Mei threw her arms around her big sister from behind, nearly knocking the tin cocktail shaker out of her grasp.

Yui rolled her eyes, turning to her sister. It was hard to even speak to her seriously, considering the blue-haired fireball was dressed as a pink bunny. “You’ve already said that about a hundred times. What’s happy about it? I feel ridiculous! Are you gonna go sell some cocktails or what?”

“Oh, lighten up, little sister!” Ayako gave Yui a gentle punch in the shoulder from behind, even as she bounced a bottle of tequila to cut off the flow from the pour spout. “You just need to lean into it. Besides, you’re so cute!”

Yui whirled, groaning with fire in her eyes as her skirt caught on the corner of her stainless steel well again. “Aya, I swear to all the gods, if you weren’t pregnant, I’d…”

“You’d what?” Ayako smirked, waving her purple finger at her sister. “Look, it’s not our fault you made that dumb bet with Sakura. We’re just trying to have fun with you, Yui. Relax!” She wore an all-black dress with a yellow seashell hung from her neck, and all of her exposed skin had been air-brushed violet. She found it somewhat ironic, portraying the villain from a Disney movie when not four months ago, her youngest sister had embodied its heroine, a little mermaid named Ariel. “Besides, it’s not every day a girl turns thirty. It’s our sacred obligation as your sisters to give you as much shit as humanly possible.”

“I agree, Yui. You should be nicer.” A tall, lanky, raven-haired woman approached the bar, clad in a men’s tuxedo with a long white scarf draped over her shoulders. Most of her hair was hidden in the black top hat she wore, and she looked every bit the part of some wealthy lordling as she cradled a black walking stick with a silver head over her right shoulder. “Don’t you think?”

Yui glowered up at her girlfriend, both for the predicament she now found herself in, and the expected response to it. She set her shaker down, reaching for the hem of the black maid uniform she wore, and dropping into a reluctant curtsey. “Yes, sir.”

“See? Isn’t that better?” Sakura leaned over the bar, pulling Yui down into a kiss. “I know you hate it babe, but I promise, I’ll make it worth it when I get you home.”

Yui snatched her shaker back from the bar counter with a violence that almost swatted it to the floor. “You’d friggin’ better, after making me put up with this shit all night long.” Her head was cowed in humiliation, but she raised it with a deep blush as the head of Sakura’s cane lifted up under her chin.

“Sir.” Sakura giggled brightly.

Yui rolled her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “Oh, fuck y…”

As she spoke, every light in the Phoenix, save the green emergency exit signs, switched off with a loud clack, leaving the room in total darkness. A murmur began to rise from the assembled patrons as they sought their partners - or their drinks - in the pitch-black bar, and wondered what was about to happen.

After nearly ten seconds of disorientation had gone by for the three hundred and change revelers, the speakers shook with a deafening crack of thunder, and small white lights rigged throughout the ceiling of the bar flickered with flashes intended to simulate lightning. The rumble of anticipation grew even as the light blinked out and left the room in darkness again, and a few seconds later, another crash of thunder accompanied a flicker of the ceiling lights, this time with an additional sound: a deep, deafening rumble of a cackle that sounded as if it had echoed straight out of a crack in the ceiling of hell.

The laughter of a demon.

A single, narrow spotlight projected a focused beam of red light at the left side of the stage, revealing Hitomi Uyeno in a red sequined microdress. She wore a red headband with little devil horns, and a red felt tail swished from her backside as she rocked her hips, posing in the spotlight. Against the silence of the instruments and the shadows of the unlit dance floor, she began to sing.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Look out! Look out!”

The crowd roared to life in recognition.

A second red spotlight pierced the darkness to the right side of the stage, bringing Emi Kimoto into focus. She wore an identical devil dress and headband, and she rocked her body to face the middle of the stage as Hitomi had done.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! She’s gonna make you shout!”

Hitomi stalked a few steps toward center stage in her nine-centimeter red heeled boots. The spotlight followed her as she did, leaving the center third of the stage still unlit. The red light glinted off of Ken’s cymbals behind her as she sang.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Beware the flow!”

Emi mirrored her roommate’s movements, creeping to her right toward center stage. She gave the crowd a teasing wink, knowing as well as they did what was concealed in the shadows between the two spotlights. As she sang, more than half of the bar’s patrons joined her in song from the darkness.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Turn off the radio!”

With another peal of thunder that pegged the speakers at their maximum volume, the house lights came up to a level enabling dancing, but the crowd was more focused on the stage as the lights at the back of the stage flickered ever so briefly, unveiling a silhouette standing in the space between Hitomi and Emi.

A silhouette with wings.

As the stage lights came up fully to unveil all seven members of the band that called the Phoenix their home, the crowd went absolutely berzerk. Ranko strode forward between her backup dancers, wearing a pair of skin-tight red leather pants, red platform heels, and a black form-fitting shirt under a matching red leather jacket. Twin braided pigtails dangled behind her shoulders, and a prominent pair of curled horns jutted from the headband that supported her headset microphone. A massive pair of red vinyl wings strapped to her back towered nearly forty centimeters above her head and stretched almost all the way down to her knees. They had been accentuated with rubbery veins of some sort, and made to look like leather. Like the wings of a dragon. Or, in this case, a demon.

The stage was decorated like a graveyard, with several foam tombstones lining the front of the stage. A large black cauldron glowed from within with a green, smoking miasma, and fake cobwebs were splayed over nearly every available surface that was visible from the audience’s perspective.

All four of the instruments behind her came to life - Crash’s electric guitar, Shinji’s bass, Ken’s drums and Jacob’s synthesizer - in an undulating rhythm that was familiar to most of the audience. That left only one instrument to add to Ranko’s song - her own.

“It’s the legendary lyricist, the Phoenix rose, here to shake your body from your hair down to your toes! It starts in your ears and flows down your spine, works its way into your hips until it makes you mine!”

As she began what could only be described as a rap, Emi and Hitomi had both backed away from her, cowering and holding up their hands defensively in mock fear. Ranko turned to Emi, rotating her wrist slowly even as her tongue flashed through the lyrics at over a hundred and sixty beats per minute, and curled her index finger at eye level in the classic come here gesture. Emi straightened and began walking in a robotic shamble toward her, as if all control of her limbs had been lost.

“Oozes down into your heart and it infects your soul until your whole, entire body starts to lose control! ‘Cause the second you start hearing my hypnotic groove…”

Ranko turned to her right, making the same gesture in Hitomi’s direction and summoning her to join her at center stage. Hitomi responded, a zombie-like stride bringing her just outside the radius of Ranko’s wings.

“... you forget how to think, and you can only MOVE!”

At the word move, all three girls hopped from their toes, and their feet returned to the stage in perfect synchronization. In unison, the girls planted their feet, leaning to their left as they popped their hips right, and extending their right arms out with open fingers.

“Don’t be shy! Everyone knows you can’t help but lose it when your system’s overridden by the sound of music! It’s not your fault; nobody can maintain their focus when they’re sucked into the Dragon-style hocus-pocus!”

All three girls turned to their right, shimmying their hips as they bent their knees and lowered themselves toward the stage in the next step of what had become, quite to Ranko’s surprise, the official dance of Demon in Your Radio. Most of the people on the dance floor between the few booths did the same.

“Don’t know why you’re surprised that you’re completely transfixed and absolutely mesmerized by the track that we mixed! I mean…”

A single red spotlight beamed directly at Ranko. “... with Ranko on the mic…”

The light darted to Ranko’s right, just behind Hitomi, at a blonde man in a black leather jacket with a red electric guitar strapped over his shoulder. “Crash strummin’...”

Just as quickly, the light zoomed to the back center of the stage, glaring off of both the twin brass cymbals mounted atop the drum set and the glasses of the young man who manned it.

“... Ken drummin’...”

The spotlight panned right, highlighting a tall man with a bright green mohawk, jamming and swaying with the beat of his own synthesizer. As it did, the second spotlight snapped to life, focusing on another leather-jacketed man with a white bass guitar slung over his chest.

“... Shin and Jacob droppin’ bombs back there? You should’a seen it coming!”

Emi snapped her head to the right, but her eyes stayed looking forward at the crowd as she sang, as if she was trying her best to issue a warning despite being entirely enthralled herself.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Beware the flow!”

Hitomi whipped to face center stage, her ponytail swishing over her right shoulder as she did. Her deeper voice complemented the higher-pitched tune Emi had contributed.

“Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Turn off the radio!”

All three girls turned forward to the crowd and sang the chorus as one as they moved in flawless unison to the right side of the stage, their bodies never ceasing the movements that were echoed by the majority of the revelers in the packed bar.

“You can’t help but dance! There’s no time to rest! There’s a siren on the mic that’s making you possessed! There’s nowhere to hide! Nowhere to go! No escapin’ from the…”

It was the booming bass voice of Shinji Yokota alone, in an ominous tone that rattled the speakers, that descended the scale nearly a full octave in the course of uttering the song’s title.

“... demon in your ra-a-di-o!”

While Hitomi and Emi continued to cycle through the steps of the dance they had popularized and the band extended the musical bridge to create a pause in the lyrics, Ranko strode to the middle of the stage. She waved to the crowd enthusiastically with a bright smile as she addressed her fans directly. “What’s up, Firebirds?! Happy Halloween!”

She shouted over their cheers to continue. “Are we ready to party, Phoenix?!”

The dominant reply was not the wordless cheer she expected, but a two-word response that another verse of her song would soon prompt. “Yes, mistress!” Among the hundreds of voices joining in that assertion was a raven-haired woman just four months Ranko’s senior, who turned toward the stage from the booth to which she had just delivered a shrimp pizza and a pair of sodas. Akane Tendo gazed lovingly at the leather-clad vision that stalked the length of her kingdom on eight-centimeter heels, watching her stop not a meter from the spot where, four months ago, she had become Akane’s wife. Akane spun on the pink glittery wheels of her white roller skates, leaning forward with her left leg to begin her movement back toward the bar. They were quite a pain to work tables in, especially in such a dynamic crowd, but they really completed the adorable pink-and-white carhop ensemble Izumi had made for her.

Ranko laughed at the crowd’s response, shaking her head emphatically. “No, you’re not. Not for this party! Not even close! You know why?”

The question was rhetorical, but Ranko answered it anyway, in time with the beat her four dearest friends were laying down just behind her.

“There’s another verse coming, so I’m back from hell to put your shakin’ butt right back under my spell! There’s a slither in my rhythm, shipped in straight from Hades, heatin’ all the boys up…”

With a sly smirk, Ranko lowered her voice to a whisper into her microphone, holding one of her hands upright to the side of her face, her palm facing away from her mouth as if trying to shield the sound from eavesdroppers.

“... and most of the ladies.”

A predominantly feminine roar came from the dancing masses between Akane’s booths and the twin bars at which three of the couple’s combined six sisters frantically poured drinks for the energetic customers.

“So, don’t call a doctor! Don’t call a priest! You’re a thrall to the rhythm, and can’t be released! All that’s left is to surrender and profess devotion as you’re lyrically commanded to perpetual motion! I’m a psycho on the microphone, vile and evil! With a rhythm this insidious, it’s gotta be illegal!” Over dozens of performances, Ranko had perfected the flow of even the song’s fastest lines to ensure that her words bounced in just the right places, musically guiding the bodies of the revelers below to stay with the music as they danced.

Hana Takahashi, the Phoenix’ matriarch, pushed through the blue saloon doors leading into the main bar from the kitchen with her hip, setting a pair of steaming red plastic baskets of fried food on the service bar for Akane to deliver. She flashed a quick smile up at her youngest daughter commanding the crowd. It would always be Hana’s bar, but Ranko had made it her own in ways that still thrilled the woman who had adopted, in one form or another, each of the six girls that zoomed around the bar making sure their customers had a good time on this Halloween night.

Ranko raised her right hand, wiggling her fingers as if casting some dark spell, and Emi, Hitomi, and more than half of the dancing patrons below raised their arms above their head and let their hands hang limply at the wrists. All of the dancers took two halting steps forward as a mindless horde of thralls that Ranko’s lyrics had commanded them to become.

“As long as you can hear me, then you’re mine for the taking! Now, my devilish revelry’s got your skeleton shakin’! Your muscles take over, your mind’s deactivated as this tricksy singin’ pixie makes you totally captivated. Might as well give in and come to grips with your fate: once you heard the bass drop, it was already too late!”

Hitomi and Emi crossed paths on the stage, Hitomi delivering her line first. “Whoa-oh-oh, uh-oh! Beware the flow!”

Emi gave her roommate a high five as they passed each other, as if tagging herself into the vocal role. “Whoa-oh-oh! Uh-oh! Turn off the radio!”

Again, all three girls snapped their heads forward, wiggling in concert as they sang the chorus together. “You can’t help but dance! There’s no time to rest! There’s a siren on the mic that’s makin’ you possessed! There’s nowhere to hide! Nowhere to go!”

Ranko trailed off for the last line, letting her backup singers and Shinji finish the chorus.

“No escapin’ from the demon in your radio!”

Ranko instead turned her back to the crowd, gulping down air in preparation for the fastest segment of the song. She had to get through fifty-nine notes before the music gave her even a beat to inhale again, and even as a world-class athlete, it was still tough for her.

“You’re not ready for me, boy! I’m strange and exotic! Diabolically, chaotically, hypnotically erotic! Even if you don’t wanna be dancin’, well, you’re forced to be, so cower to my power of seductive sonic sorcery!”

The red-headed, red-clad, red-winged sorceress of sound strode in a model walk forward toward the crowd, leaving Emi and Hitomi to handle the dancing duties while she gasped for air. The pause was just long enough for the crowd to hear Yui curse loudly as the humiliating costume her girlfriend had forced her to wear nearly knocked over a half-empty bottle of rum.

“You know you’re totally enchanted, so give in to my hex! You ain’t gettin’ with me, and so it’s better than sex! Even the wallflowers over there, bored and listless, will be crawling to the floor, screaming out…”

Ranko did not need to utter the final two words of the verse, as Hitomi, Emi, all four members of the band, and nearly every person in the bar did so for her. Included among them were Ranko’s doting wife and all four of the other sisters who called the Phoenix home.

“YES, MISTRESS!”

Dropping back into the dance cadence alongside her backup performers, Ranko grinned mischievously. The undulating rhythm, as every Firebird in the audience knew, was about to stair-step down the musical scale for the final four-line chorus. Their anticipation only grew when it did not, and the roar of the crowd was deafening as Ranko rocketed into the first of the new verses she’d written for tonight’s surprise debut of the Demon in Your Radio live version, which she’d dubbed the Hellfire Cut.

“Every bop I drop’s a hit, because your mistress doesn’t miss. That’s why my beat has moved your feet up to the edge of the abyss! All this drummin’ is summonin’ up my musical minions, bodies rubbin’ in the club I’ve made my personal dominion.”

With Hitomi and Emi both close enough to touch her, Ranko turned to her side, rolling her hips fluidly to the adulation of her captivated crowd. As she did, the lights behind her strobed in red, yellow and orange, visually transforming the little wooden stage into the very depths of hell.

“The irreverent revenant, revvin’ up everyone hearing me. No talisman can challenge the malice of my tyranny! Bringin’ the sickness with a quickness and it’s spreading through the nation, infectin’ you with vitriolic rollicking contagion!”

Ranko crossed her arms over her chest, the scrunching of her shoulders causing her red wings to flap inward and almost surround her. She swayed in silence as Emi carried on the chorus alone.

“You can’t help but dance, there’s no time to rest!”

Snapping her head to her right, Ranko leveled her hand toward Hitomi with a commanding gesture as her other backup singer continued the call and response.

“There’s a siren on the mic that’s making you possessed!”

Emi re-joined her for the third line of the chorus as Ranko completed a lap around the stage, waving toward the ceiling to encourage her revelers to their maximum level of excitement.

“There’s nowhere to hide! Nowhere to go!”

All three girls on stage crouched, resting their left hands on the stage as a peal of thunder cracked through the speakers and the lights at the back of the stage flashed bright. It was Shinji and Crash that finished the chorus on their own headset microphones.

“No escapin’ from the demon in your radio!”

The three women rose, and Ranko stood motionless on the stage as the high-energy dance beat continued from the instruments behind her. She just waited, watching with amusement as the crowd tried to keep up with what was happening. Only once the bar’s fervor reached a fever pitch did she speak again.

“What? You guys seriously think you can handle more?!” Ranko giggled brightly into her headset as the partiers roared back in the affirmative. “Well, alright! You asked for it!”

She waited an extra bar before beginning the next verse, giving the skull-splitting roar time to settle. The band was used to this sort of thing happening, especially with the debut of new lyrics, and they picked up instantly on the need to repeat the few measures of music to let their lead vocalist catch up with it. Her blisteringly-fast rap verse followed to the rapt attention of the bar’s nearly four hundred occupants.

“It’s the verbal infernal, burnin’ you up with the compulsion that drives you to involuntarily bodily convulsion! My silvery delivery is wigglin’ your waistlines. I’m wreckin’ you, injectin’ you with heckin’ sexy bass lines! I’m gonna make you dance until your limbs go limp!”

She smirked, remembering the hours she’d spent poring over just a few pages near the middle of her English dictionary as she worked to craft the alliterative verse.

“Impelling impromptu impetus, like an impudent imp!”

Ranko motioned out to the mostly college-aged crowd with her hands. “Now the masses shake their asses rockin’ under my thrall; I’ve got most of ‘em already, but I’m coming for them ALL!”

There may have been nearly four hundred voices raised in the room, but Akane whooped the loudest in response. The second-year medical student’s chiropractic education had been wearing her ragged, but tonight, no homework, no dreaded upcoming exam and no clinical rotation could dampen her revelry as she watched her lover work the crowd. Izumi winced, rubbing her ear in response to Mei’s shrill shriek just a meter from it behind the service bar. The restrictive yellow princess gown she wore made the act more of a challenge than she cared to admit. Beauty is pain, Izumi reminded herself, as she had frequently done to poor Ranko as she made her baby sister suffer a thousand pinpricks and breath-snatching corset lacings in the fitting of her wedding dress a few months ago.

“I know I didn’t warn ya, so I guess it wasn’t fair to ya to bury you in scary tunes and lyrical hysteria.”

Each of the six rhyming words in the next two lines were spat in a syncopated pattern to help standardize them despite their varying length. Ranko flashed her hands out with each of them, as if they were lyrical punches in a kata of sound.

“My harmonic sonic tonic’s got you enraptured. With my iconic, demonic, stereophonic beat, you’re captured! The commotion I’m hostin’s forcin’ the motion of your vertebra; at least you die smiling when I musically murder ya! You know it isn’t good for you, but still can’t get enough of us! Surrender yourself up unto the sultry singing succubus!”

Akane blushed, laughing at the idea of the girl who was once a borderline misogynistic boy named Ranma Saotome referring to herself as a hellspawn that drew her malicious energy from sex with men. There was undeniably power in her sex appeal, however, and no one knew it better than the woman who had made Ranko Tendo her wife not four months ago.

Ranko stepped back, allowing Hitomi and Emi to carry the chorus without her.

“You can’t help but dance! There’s no time to rest! There’s a siren on the mic that’s makin’ you possessed! There’s nowhere to hide! Nowhere to go!”

The crowd sang the final line along with all seven Dapper Dragons. “No escapin’ from the demon in your radio!”

The music continued with no further vocals, and the crowd began to rumble again. Ranko laughed loudly, shaking her head. “Seriously, guys? You really think you can handle ANOTHER new verse?! Are you joking me right now?!”

The reply came in one voice from just under four hundred mouths. “RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO!”

Ranko snapped her left wrist downward, slipping a black rubber bulb out of her sleeve and into her waiting hand. She squeezed it repeatedly in her hand at her side as she filled her lungs with air for the song’s final lightning-fast verse, and the thin red balloons Izumi had glued to her wings at positions to make them appear as veins coursing through the flaps began to inflate. As the balloons filled with air, they stiffened, their expansion carrying the folded fabric to which they were affixed with them and causing Ranko’s wings to spread.

“RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO!”

The crowd whooped delightedly at the practical effect as Ranko began yet another new verse.

“I’ve got you bad already, but it’s only gonna worsen, ‘cause this final verse is just dispersed when Ranko’s here in person! Now the demon’s out the radio, and up here on the stage! I’ve made you all my pets, and now, this dance floor is your cage!”

Ranko’s backup dancers made loose fists with both hands, shaking them in front of themselves as if rattling invisible prison bars. Ranko, on the other hand, wiggled her fingers on both upturned hands as if summoning a throng of the dead to rise from their graves and join the party.

“Yeah, I’m downright despotic with my melodic possession when my body and my rhyme combine in hellish obsession! With the dying multiplying, you’ll be crying for your mommies once my deliciously malicious pitches turn you into zombies!”

Hitomi, Emi, Crash and Shinji all formed a line, shambling toward Ranko as she waved her hands in the green-hued mist from a fog machine hidden behind one of the speakers, letting the miasma envelop her in mystery and cast her winged silhouette over the whole of the stage.

“I beat out every ghost and ghoul, laid waste to all the liches, for the right to come to Earth and make you all my dancing bitches! Now, I’m the only oni with the tones to shake your bones, because you’re mine to rock forever, and you’re never going home!”

The songstress grinned, remembering the humanities exam she’d helped Akane study for a few weeks back, and the Italian epic the professor had made her read. Never would she have imagined that a reference to a nearly seven-hundred-year-old story would find its way into her lyrics, but then again, she’d long ago stopped trying to enumerate all of the things about her daily life that she could never have fathomed just a year or two ago.

“Abandon all hope; this flow’s a slippery slope, guy.”

She reached into the left pocket of her red leather jacket, withdrawing a signed copy of the Phoenix Rising CD and holding the jewel case up for the crowd.

“So wholly unholy, even my record label’s Yokai!”

Ranko tossed the disc to a random reveler near the front of the stage before waving at the door with the back of her hand dismissively. “Tell the boys lined up outside that we’re about to lock the doors. I’ll claim their souls tomorrow – I’ve already got yours!”

All three women rocketed into the slightly-modified final chorus, singing loudly over the thundering clamor of their mostly-costumed audience.

“You can’t help but dance! There’s no time to rest! There’s a siren on the mic that’s got you possessed! There’s nowhere to hide! Nowhere to go! No escaping from the demon in your radio!”

All four musical instruments behind Ranko fell silent simultaneously, and Ranko raised her upturned right palm toward the crowd, clenching her fingers as if tightly gripping an invisible ball. Hitomi, Emi, and everyone following along with the dance on the floor stiffened with their arms at their sides, looking upward slightly as if their spines had been locked by Ranko’s magic. The songstress sang the song’s final line alone.

“Now that I’ve got you, I ain’t ever gonna let you go! No escaping from the demon in your radio!”

Ranko grinned and gave a coy, impish wink. With a loud clap of thunder, the bar’s lighting all cut off at once and plunged the dance floor back into total darkness. Shinji’s demonic laughter rained down over the raucous crowd as the white ceiling lights flickered their interpretation of lightning, and the partiers’ cheers and applause did not end until the lights came back up to reveal Ranko and her friends waving to them from the stage. In the darkness, Ranko twisted the tiny aluminum knob at the neck of the bulb in her hand, releasing the air from the balloons in her wings and permitting them to contract.

“Whoo! How’s it going, Firebirds?! My name’s Ranko Tendo, and these are my friends: Crash Matsuyama, Shinji Yokota, Ken Hirata, Jake Trimble, Hitomi Uyeno, and Emi Kimoto! We are Ranko and the Dapper Dragons, and we’re so excited to have you here with us at the Phoenix for our second annual Halloween gore-gasm! Let’s get this party started!”

As she raised her fist in the air, the sound of a howling wolf split the air. The sample was followed by eight synthesizer notes that nearly everyone in the bar recognized immediately as the opening to the most iconic Halloween song of all time. Needing no prompting, the cheering crowd stood stiff, raising their shoulders and cocking their heads to the side before Ranko even began the lyrics over the repetitive beat.

“It’s close to midnight, and somethin’ evil’s lurkin’ in the dark! Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart. You try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it. You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes. You’re paralyzed…”

Hitomi and Emi led the crowd in spreading their arms to their sides, turning to the right and advancing forward with shuddering hips as they moved their arms at their waists like swimmers performing a breaststroke.

“‘Cause this is thriller, thriller night, and no one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike! You know it’s thriller, thriller night! You’re fighting for your life inside a killer thriller tonight! Yeah!”

Down on the dance floor, Akane took advantage of the crowd’s more predictable movements to weave through the mass of humanity on her roller skates and pick up another few appetizers. She was tempted to join the famous dance, just to see how effectively she could do it on skates, but thought better of it. The last thing she needed was to wipe out in the short carhop dress and embarrass herself and Ranko both. She tucked a few more straws into the pocket on the front of the white lace-trimmed apron of the waitress outfit, scooping up an armful of chicken tenders and making her way back in the direction of booth eight.

“My lady,” Sakura said with a flourishing bow, tipping her top hat without releasing the mass of hair hidden within it, as she smiled up at Izumi. “How fare you this eve?”

Izzi giggled, bobbing her knees in a quick bow. “I am quite well, good sir, and yourself?”

Sakura grinned, leaning on the side of the service bar. She was careful to leave a clear path for Akane and Mei to reach the bar to collect orders for the endless crush of patrons. “Fuck, this is fun! You girls sure know how to put on a show!”

Izumi blushed a bit, tucking a wisp of her brown hair behind her ear. “Hey, all I do is dress them. Everything you see up there? That’s all Ranko and the boys. And Mei, for the props.” She motioned at her miserable older sister to her left at the main bar. “Enjoying making her suffer?”

“Oh, girl, you have no idea.” Sakura cackled in Yui’s direction, making sure her girlfriend could hear her. “Silly girl thought she could outdrink me. That’ll show her.”

“Still gonna kill you later,” Yui called in response from the main bar as she grumped at the irritating white tulle petticoat under her long-sleeved black dress. “... Sir.”

With a sinister smicker, Sakura slipped behind the main bar, and while most of the crowd was distracted dancing to the song’s penultimate chorus, she slid her hand surreptitiously up the back of Yui’s dress and gave her backside a firm squeeze followed by a swat. “Maybe. But you’re gonna do something else first, birthday girl.”

Yui yelped in surprise before swiveling on her heels and wrapping her arms around her tuxedo-clad lover’s neck. She simpered far more softly than she had behaved at any previous point in her trying evening, her voice taking on a kittenish growl. “Mm. Yes, sir.”

Mei groaned quietly. “I swear, once you move in with us, Sakura, I’m never gonna get to sleep again, am I?”

The tuxedoed woman whirled, shrugging. “We’ll see. Still gotta get the new job. They’re saying the promotion’s almost certain to happen, but I won’t know until my review in a few weeks. So until then, enjoy your peaceful dreams.”

Sakura cleared her throat insistently. “Um, excuse me.” She smirked, reaching out to her side and grabbing Yui by the white ribbon cinching her apron around her back as the blonde set off to pour another cocktail. “Who told you to go anywhere?”

Ranko’s voice had fallen from the girls’ consciousness as they flirted, so they were a bit startled when Shinji’s deep bass began speaking rhythmically over the music.

“The foulest stench is in the air - the funk of forty thousand years - and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver. For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller…”

Ranko waved to the crowd with a bright smile as their adulation died down. “Seriously? You guys aren’t tired yet? Oh, alright. I suppose we can give ya another Halloween classic, huh?” She grinned devilishly. The song was a late addition to the set list after Mei had forced her to sit and watch the campy American movie it had come from just a few days ago. While a lot of the plot seemed pretty goofy to Ranko, she could certainly empathize with the main character, a guy who was doing everything in his power to come off like a girl. It was a cute dance, though, and Ranko enjoyed the ensemble nature of it, giving her bandmates an opportunity to take the spotlight.

Crash stepped forward, playing his guitar in a repetitive solo, and after just a few bars of it, he began to sing into his headset microphone.

“It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll. But listen closely…”

Hitomi strutted up to him, dragging her hand limply down his chest, ending just above his guitar as she added, “Not for very much longer…”

Crash grinned down at the brunette dancing immediately in front of him, in the first row of dancers at the stage’s edge. I know you don’t like other girls having their hands on me, Ukyo, but it’s just the choreography, I promise. He only had a moment to consider it before resuming his singing in a rock scream.

“I’ve got to keep control! I remember doing the Time Warp, drinking those moments when the blackness would hit me, and the void would be calling…”

Hitomi had joined him for the last few words, but then Ranko, Emi, Shinji and Ken joined the chorus as the classical piano voice of Jacob’s synthesizer tinkled down the scales.

“Let’s do the Time Warp again! Let’s do the Time Warp again!”

All four instruments fell quiet, and everyone on stage went still as Ranko stepped forward, hopping once to her left side. She spoke the words rather than sang them. “It’s just a jump to the left…”

The music resumed, led by Ken’s bass drum as all the performers on stage sang the next steps of the instructions coaching the crowd how to perform the signature dance, not that many of them needed the refresher. “... and then a step to the right!”

Against another pause in the music, Ranko gave the next spoken directive. “With your hands on your hips…”

Everyone on stage save Jake and Ken, and most of the partiers on the dance floor, did as she asked. The performers began to form a circle at center stage, all singing the steps together. “You bring your knees in tight! But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insa-a-a-a-a-ane! Let’s do the Time Warp again! Let’s do the Time Warp Again!” The group all exaggeratedly thrust their bodies forward into the center of the circle, waving their hands together before separating and clearing space for Hitomi to begin her character’s solo.

“It’s so dreamy! Oh, fantasy, free me so you can’t see me! No, not at all! In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention, well secluded, I see all!”

Crash grinned, stalking forward and leaning over his guitar as he countered her. “With a bit of a mind flip…”

Hitomi spun on her heel. “You’re into the time slip…”

Again, Crash responded to her line with his own, in an almost spoken gravelly tone. “And nothing can ever be the same.”

Emi darted around him, leaning back against the back of his leather jacket as if she were falling faint. “You’re spaced out on sensation…”

Crash’s rock scream came as Emi threw herself off of his back, as if she had been startled by his outburst. “Like you’re under sedation…”

Again, everyone but Jacob joined into the song’s title line, and this time, most of the crowd did too as they repeated the steps as prescribed in the chorus.

“Let’s do the Time Warp again! Let’s do the Time Warp again!”

Emi skittered forward to center stage on her tiptoes, almost hyperactively, and began to sing in a high-pitched nasal squeak. “Well, I was walking down the street, just havin’ a think, when a snake of a guy gave me an evil wink! He shook-a me up, he took me by surprise! He had a pickup truck and the devil’s eyes! He stared at me, and I felt a change. Time meant nothing; never would again!”

The full ensemble responded, “Let’s do the Time Warp again! Let’s do the Time Warp again!”

With a loud, high-pitched squeal, Emi took center stage alone, throwing herself into what amounted to a tap dancing solo routine that lasted for nearly fifteen seconds. While she did not have tap shoes on, Ariel played an audio sample of it over the music from his mixing board.

With her hands on her hips, Ranko faced the crowd and hopped to her side without musical accompaniment. Again, she spoke the line rather than sang it. “It’s just a jump to the left!”

Emi, Hitomi and Crash all kicked their right legs out and pulled them back as their right hands followed them. They repeated this motion three times as they described it in song: “And then a step to the ri-i-ight!”

Ranko smirked to the dancing crowd, giving them another spoken command that nearly none of them needed. “Put your hands on your hips.”

Her bandmates all complied as they continued the chorus together, carrying the dance through one final cycle. “You bring your knees in tight! But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insa-a-a-a-ane! Let’s do the Time Warp again! Let’s do the Time Warp again!”

With a dying drone, the synthesizer fell silent, and Jacob and Ken both slumped limply in their seats. Crash and Shinji collapsed into each other back-to-back, sliding to a seated position on the stage cradling their guitars. Hitomi and Emi dropped prone like rag dolls to the stage, and Ranko fell to her knees, unable to lay on her back due to the massive wings she still wore. None rose from their worn-out positions until the crowd had finally quieted down.

“YEAH! That’s what I’m talking about, Phoenix!” Ranko whooped, hopping excitedly on the stage as she returned to her feet. As she did, her wings flapped behind her, clapping her on the shoulders. “Oh, hey! As long as I’ve got you all in the cheering mood, there’s something I’d like you all to do for me.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Yui grumbled under her breath as she slid a dirty martini across the bar.

“Everybody, say hey to my big sister Yui behind the bar… it’s her birthday today!” A cheer rose from the crowd as the twin white spotlights swung back to highlight Yui and her ridiculous costume. Sakura, seated across the bar from her, giggled wildly into her Manhattan.

“I’m gonna fucking kill her.”

“Aw, come on, Yui,” Sakura said with a mirthful grin, her empty glass clattering to the polyurethane bar counter. “Not gonna curtsey?”

“You know,” Ranko began with a bit of a giggle in her voice, smiling down at the crowd as the spotlights returned to her. “I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m wildly in love with somebody. They don’t like me to talk about it, but I just can’t help it! After all, I worked hard for it! It wasn’t always easy, though. I had to do a little… convincing. You wanna hear the story?”

The crowd rumbled in anticipation. They’d already gotten the debut of the extended Demon in Your Radio, but a setup like this could only mean the dawning of a new song. They decided to answer her question as true Firebirds often did.

“RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO!”

Akane giggled, swooping her legs to the side on her skates until she could lean forward on her toes to stop herself. Once stabilized, she leaned back against the kitchen wall near where the VIP table would have been on a normal night. No one ordered anything during Ranko’s new songs anyway, and she wanted to see this one. She’d heard Ranko practicing it a little earlier in the week, but she couldn’t wait to see it with the full performance effect. It was already well on its way to becoming one of the singer’s wife’s favorites.

“RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO! RAN-KO!”

Ranko stalked around the black prop cauldron that rested near the back of center stage. It was just over a meter in diameter and a meter high. She traced its rim tauntingly with one finger as she circled it. After completing a full orbit, she flicked her fingers at it as if throwing a pinch of salt into a boiling pot. As she did, a wisp of smoke and a bright green light began to rise from the basin, accompanied by an audio sample of an explosion.

“Alright, then. Let’s see what I can cook up for ya!”