The Power Ballad Plan

Dr. Aris Thorne stared at the smudged whiteboard, a monument to their collective, and frankly, ridiculous, predicament. The scrawl that passed for a plan was a tangled mess of arrows, question marks, and what looked suspiciously like a doodle of a stegosaurus wearing a tiny party hat. Beside him, Rexy Sterling struck a pose, one hand on her hip, the other dramatically sweeping a nonexistent cape.

“Darling Aris,” she purred, her voice resonating with the practiced cadence of a thousand infomercials, “are we absolutely certain this… ‘musical intervention’ is the *only* way to dispatch our theatrical tyrant?”

Thorne grunted, his gaze fixed on a particularly stubborn knot of scribbles. “Malakor is a being of immense, and frankly, baffling, power. Brute force is out. Diplomacy is… well, he’s a sorcerer who turned Piccadilly Circus into a velociraptor nesting ground. I doubt he’s receptive to polite requests.”