"This is my boomstick."

- Army of Darkness

"WASTED"

- Grand Theft Auto

The cerebralizer's internal monitors suddenly brightened with an intense X-ray view of Panther's and Violet's brains exploding inside of their skulls like a pair of dazzling supernovas. The fuzzy red globs of pixels dimmed down and dissolved into smaller and smaller globs after the job was done.

Panther crumpled over on her back with her leather tail between her legs. The final nervous signals shooting through Violet's body made her knees clumsily buckle into a pigeon-toed stance before gravity brought her flopping belly-first to the floor. The rest of the Phantom Thieves hadn't even noticed the girls' quick deaths. They were busy fighting dinosaurs shaped like furniture or robotic clowns or something.

Panther's and Kasumi's heads were still encased in Execution Domes when they collapsed. Emperor R4-M35E5 hovered in the air ten feet above them. With a roughly spherical body made of tangled wires and flickering circuits, he looked like what would happen if someone tried to build a Pain Elemental out of pinball machine parts.

The Shadows would've been lucky if they managed to catch just one of the Phantom Thieves in their cranial snare. Ann and Kasumi had been reckless enough, ditzy enough, or both to let the Emperor grasp both of their minds for double destruction. Now if anyone called the girls airheads, they wouldn't be far from the truth.

The devices encasing their heads were made of black metal and covered with the same patchwork of neon circuitry as the hovering Emperor. The annihilation of their cerebral cortexes had begun with strategically and painfully targeting the weakest blood vessels in the brain tissue until it became structurally compromised. As an added convenience, the outside surface of the helmets were illuminated with bright digital arrows that showed which direction pressure was being applied to each wearer's brain as she screamed. The big pop came when a concentrated surge of electricity crushed their fragile grey matter the same way a bug gets crushed under a shoe. When the lethal intercourse between cerebrums and electronics was over, the arrows turned bright green and changed to a simple message that said ALL CLEAR! The elaborate helmets would have given Ann and Kasumi a cool Daft Punk-esque aesthetic if wearing them didn't destroy their brains.

The helmets came off once the heroines went down. With the way they looked, it probably would have been better if the helmets stayed on. Panther's and Violet's faces were frozen in crazed expressions with their eyes rolled in opposite directions, their teeth snaring in lopsided grins, and their tongues hanging out. Their rolled-back eyes started sinking deeper into their heads now that the nerve clusters that used to hold them in place had turned into soup. The pulverized ruins of their brains trickled out of their ears, their noses, and the corners of their eyelids. Dark red puddles slowly formed under their heads.

The floating Shadow opened what looked like a battery compartment on his body and showered Ann's and Kasumi's heads with flickering black liquid. It helped wash away some of the unsightliness, but now their faces were covered with squirming aquatic worms made of living electrical cables. Their heads rocked limply on the ground as the creatures burrowed through their ears and into their now-empty skulls. The worms made a new nest out of Phantom Thieves' craniums, drinking up the leftover pulp from their brain tissue and devouring their eyes as they sank into their sockets.

The cybernetic creatures bundled together into two roughly brain-shaped colonies inside their spacious new homes. They soldered themselves to their hosts' spinal stems to resume all of the vital functions of their bodies.

Panther and Violet slowly shuffled back to their feet despite having no minds of their own. They lifted their heads, brushed the blood-drenched hair off their masks, and blinked. The new eyes that came wired to their prosthetic brains looked like black glass marbles with glowing icy blue irises.

The intense headaches created by the Shadow's attack were gone. There was nothing left in their heads capable of feeling pain. At least Violet would never have to worry about going through another identity crisis. Now she knew exactly who she was: A re-cerebriated Shadow thrall completely controlled by her tyrannical master.

Violet playfully glanced toward Panther and smirked. Panther glanced back at Violet and purred. Coordinating with her bug-brained partner, the cat burglar curled her lower lip under her incisors and whistled to get the attention of the other Phantom Thieves.

Joker's team stopped what they were doing and turned their heads toward a pretty amazing sight. Ann was posed with one arm raised high above her head and her whip coiled over her hip. Kasumi twirled on one foot with her toes in Ann's raised palm. They both snickered with confidence while the other Thieves watched. Their original minds may have been obliterated, but their bodies retained all of their superhuman strengths and reflexes.

Ann flung her arm forward and threw Kasumi by her ankle as if she were as light as a baseball. Violet soared through the air toward Joker's team with her rapier drawn and a sinister gleam in her artificial eyes. Her ferocious feline partner closely charged behind her ready to claw the team to pieces.

Author's note: I guess you could say they're the type of gals who really let things go to their heads.

Author's other note: I tried to go with a slight Ancient Egyptian motif with the villain in this one. It's supposed to be evocative of how they'd remove your brain with little hooks as part of the mummification process. I also thought about revisiting my Depraved Futaba character from my earlier fics. In that scenario, one of her critters nabs Ann and Kasumi's brains and she uses the actual Necronomicon (because her UFO thingie is called the Necronomicon) to resurrect them as her zombies. But I only thought about that for a little bit before I decided to go with an original villain.