Meanwhile, Aech had pulled up the henchman-activation incantation for the Original 7ven on her HUD. Facing Morris and his band, she read it aloud, prefacing each line of the incantation with a snap of her fingers:
Snap!
“Yo, Stella! If you think I’m afraid of you…”
Snap!
“Grace, if you so much as think I can’t do the do…”
Snap!
“Girl, if you dream I came to jerk around, you better wake up—”
Snap!
“—and release it!”
As soon as Aech finished reciting the final two words of the incantation, Morris Day and the Time sprang into action, launching into a song from the Graffiti Bridge film soundtrack called “Release It.”
Our front man, Morris Day, stepped forward, and a microphone appeared in his hand. He raised it to his lips, tilted his head up at his seven opponents, and spoke.
“What is your main problem?”
The moment he said that, a pair of devil horns grew out of his head, and his eyes turned a dark shade of red. Spikes of red lightning shot from his horns, where they arced up to deflect the purple lightning attacks from above.
Then he unleashed his “Whawk!” attack, which involved him making a deafening birdlike “Wh-ha-ha-hawk!” laughing/shrieking sound, which unleashed a sonic area-of-effect attack that injured all seven incarnations at once.
But what made Morris an even more fearsome opponent was his right-hand man, Jerome “The Mirror Man” Benton, who carried around a large gold-framed vanity mirror that he used to create half a dozen mirror-image clones of Morris, each of whom began to unleash his own Whawk! attack.
The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.
In between his Whawk! attacks, Morris unleashed equally devastating verbal attacks. And for some reason, when the other members of his band repeated what he’d just said, it seemed to power up his verbal sonic attacks and cause them to do even more damage.
Morris would shout, “You can’t battle me, son! You still wet behind the ears!”
And his boys would echo him: “Wet behind the ears!”
Morris Day and the Time were magnificent to behold. But in the end, it wasn’t enough to save them, or us. Because the Princes had just summoned their henchmen too.
Purple Rain Prince summoned his band, the Revolution. They all wore regal outfits with ruffled collars, just like him.
Microphone Gun Prince summoned the New Power Generation. There were a bunch of them, and they were all armed to the teeth, with every kind of instrument.
And then Third Eye Prince summoned his band 3RDEYEGIRL （which, my HUD informed me, was spelled in ALL CAPS）。
All three bands appeared on the ground, encircling us in the arena. They began to attack us from the surface, while six of the Princes continued to attack us from the air.
That was when Aech shouted something to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis about “activating their producing powers.” They smiled and nodded, and then snapped their fingers in unison—instantly summoning two dozen uniformed henchmen of their own:
Janet Jackson and the Rhythm Nation.
When they came marching into the arena, Aech looked like she might pass out.
“Holy shit!” she said. “I can’t believe that worked!”
And then it became an all-out sonic war.
I don’t know exactly what happened next, or how it all went down.
But when the dust settled, all seven members of the Time had been killed, including Morris Day and all of his mirror images. （Purple Rain Prince somehow used his mirror shades to shatter Jerome’s mirror, so he was no longer able to use it to make Morris clones—and that was the beginning of the end, I think.）
But before they died, the Original 7ven managed to take out all three female members of 3RDEYEGIRL, all of the New Power Generation, and every member of the Revolution, except for Wendy and Lisa, whom I managed to take out with blasts from my Cloud Guitar.
Four incarnations of Prince had gone down, but three had managed to survive the onslaught: Microphone Gun, Third Eye, and Mesh-Mask. But all three of them looked badly injured—and extremely angry about it.