"Long ago, in a galaxy far far away..." is a good way to start a story, unless of course the story is being told to the police, and it's about why you just stole a vehicle out of the There Buggy Museum.   Not believing what I had spied in the rear-view mirror, I turned around to look behind us to see an entire fleet of police squad cars in hot pursuit -- and they were quickly gaining on us.  As they approached, we could more easily hear their sirens wailing in the distance and getting louder by the second.

"Go faster, Hatch!" I blurted out.   "We've got company!"  This exclamation prompted Hatch to re-adjust his rear-view mirror away from the position where Raven could look at herself in it, swallow nervously, and accelerate the Monster TUV.  As we picked up speed, we had to hold on to the frame of the TUV to keep from being jostled about while we skimmed across the bumpy desert sand and bounced off a few small rocks spread out over the desolate, dry landscape.  We rounded a corner just as two police helicopters popped up from behind a sand dune in front of us, and followed us from above.  Their rotor blades thumped rapidly, causing vibrations deep within our bodies as they came closer.

"OMG!  Is that a missile?!" Raven screamed after whipping her head around to see one of the helicopters firing at us.

"No, that's a rocket," I explained to her.  These guys weren't messing around.  At this point, I wasn't even entirely sure that Neckro wanted his Monster TUV back -- I think he just wanted to have us taken down out of spite.  I hoped those were paint rockets and not real rockets.

"Are you sure that's not a missile?   That looks like a missile to me," she argued.  "Look, it has a warhead and fins and whatnot."

I turned back around to get a closer look as it sailed through the desert sky heading right for us.  "No, that's clearly a rocket.  It's got a--"

I was rudely interrupted by Hatch swerving to the left and nearly bringing the TUV onto its two left wheels as the paint rocket struck the ground to our right and exploded violently into a huge mess of splattering paint.   The resulting concussion threw up a cloud of sand, paint, and dust all around us, throwing the TUV all the way onto its side.  Extremely shaken, we regained our bearings as the cloud of sand settled around us.  Our TUV was now laying sideways in the sand, we were hanging from our seatbelts, we and the TUV were all covered in dripping yellow paint, and the police cruisers swarmed around us, cutting off their sirens when they came to a stop.  Above us, the two police gunships hovered overhead to ensure there was no escaping this predicament.

"What happens now?!" Raven asked, starting to get hysterical.

"I don't know, but the last time I was arrested, it was for clogging up a public toilet," I answered, trying to remember what all exactly happened during that incident.

In vain, Hatch applied pressure to the accelerator, causing the TUV to spin slowly and helplessly around in a circle on its side.   "They haven't caught us yet!" he cried out.  The cops disembarked their squad cars and just sort of stood there, watching us do donuts in the sand like that.

"You gonna get out, or what?" one of the police officers asked over the thumping of the helicopters overhead.

"No," Raven replied back just in time as she rotated away from his view while the TUV spun slowly around.  When she came back around to where he was at, she added, "Bite me."

"Okay, shoot'em!" he called out to the rest of his force.  In one sweeping motion, the entire group of policemen whipped out their semi-automatic paintguns and pointed them directly at us.

"Wait, wait, wait!" I screamed.   Hatch stopped the TUV although he still held onto the tiny chance that his little side donut maneuver could somehow lead to our escape.  Perhaps if it caused us to burrow into the ground, I suppose.

Our group reluctantly unfastened the seatbelts and dropped down to the ground as the police officers came to handcuff us, place us under arrest, and read us our rights.  They packed us each into separate squad cars and drove us away to the local jail, where they in-processed us and threw us in the slammer.   I tried to use one of the Get Out of Jail Free cards from Monopoly I kept on me at all times in case something like this should happen, but it turns out they are only any good in Monopoly.  They had given us one phone call, but they chose Raven to make the phone call and she used it to check her voicemail, so we were pretty much screwed after that.  It was at this point I was wishing I had actually shown up to work more often, so Geea would actually realize something was wrong if I didn't show up the next morning.  

After a few hours of listening to Hatch's rendition of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", Neckro came by to visit us in jail.   He asked us what possessed us to break into his museum and steal a TUV.  I insisted that we knew nothing about it and had no idea what he was talking about.

"Look, I saw you guys inside my museum, get into that TUV, smash out through the glass dome, and try to get away," he declared.

"That wasn't us," I calmly said.   "What museum?"

"Quit playing stupid, Rick, I have audio tape of you guys being there, with the engine noises digitally filtered out.  They're clearly your voices..." Neckro admitted, pulling out a portable tape recorder and pressing play:

"Did it ever occur to you that he probably dropped these inside the domes from his inventory?"

"I'm gonna drop YOU inside the dome from my inventory."

"What was that?"

I grinned sheepishly at Hatch, who was giving me a look meaner than I got that one time I was at a wedding and the preacher said "you may now kiss the bride" and I didn't realize he was only speaking to the groom.  I turned back to address Neckro from behind the iron bars separating us from him and his police escort and said, "That could have been altered, that doesn't prove anything."

"Oh yeah?  Well I have a video recording of you all breaking in and stealing that TUV!" Neckro declared.  He motioned for someone to wheel in a small TV/VCR cart, and then pressed play on the remote.   The video clearly showed our group rummaging around in the museum, hot-wiring the TUV, and stealing it by busting out through the side of the dome.  They had even caught me smiling and waving at the camera.

I swallowed nervously.  "That doesn't prove anything either... that could have been any guy with a blue nose and two friends!" I argued back.

Neckro reached into his jacket and pulled out a neatly folded stack of papers.  He unfolded them and held them out for all of us to see.  "Then how do you explain THIS?!" he demanded.  On the front page of the paperwork, "RICK, RAVEN, & HATCH'S SECRET PLAN TO STEAL A MONSTER TUV FROM NECKRO'S MUSEUM" was headlined in bold, black letters, along with all of the assorted blueprints, maps, diagrams, and notes we used to conduct our total failure of an operation, all signed by us at the bottom next to our thumbprints for authenticity.   "Found in one of your backpacks after you were arrested." 

We all stood there awkwardly for several moments, blinking a few times.  "Okaaaaaaay... you got us there," I confessed, after I couldn't think up another excuse.  I tried to explain to him that this was all just a big misunderstanding, and that in reality I was writing an article trying to expose some of the shortcomings of his museum's security so that he would be compelled to patch up the holes.  I assured him that The Voice would pay for any damages and inconveniences incurred by my slight indiscretion.  He called up my boss to verify the entire story, and because I'm awesome, Geea backed me up and used all the advertising revenue earned by The Voice for pimping out Ciao Bella Designs to pay off Neckro and to post our bail.

And that is basically the story of why I work without pay for The Voice. 

The end.