. A wolf howls in the background. 
Once upon a midnight dreary...
OK, so it wasn't that dreary. It was quite nice actually. There was a nice full moon, clean crisp air. It could be quite romantic actually. Oh, and it was closer to 10 PM than midnight.
Our story begins in the offices of IBM. A deadline approaches to release the next version of Sametime. Programmers are staying late trying to get that last bit of code working and bug-free, but a couple are overheard talking out in the hall as they leave for the night.
"Xavier, would you come to my place a-... for dinner tonight?"
An earsplitting silence falls on the normally loud late night office chatter . A wolf howls in the background.
The speaker, Novella 
, isn't the most popular of
employees. In fact, she might be considered the LEAST popular.
She has a tint of green about her skin and an odd hairdo. Most people
prefer to keep 15 feet of personal space whenever she's around. X
Chang 
, your typical well-rounded, popular,
blue-blooded-American snob-jock, on the other hand, has been known to tease her about her
strange hairstyle, calling it 'hat hair of the damned'. (OK, so 'Chang' isn't exactly a blue-blood name,
which makes him all the more eager to 'prove' himself.)
The silence stretches into minutes as the office waits expectantly for X Chang to turn her down with some taunt or other.
"Sure, I'd love to join you for dinner, Novella, my green queen"... This will be great gossip about where that green freak lives, he thinks.
Later that night, they arrive at Novella's small cabin in the mountains.
Such a calm pastoral setting, surrounded by a field of green(?!) flowers.
X Chang thinks to himself. But soon the serenity ends as Novella unexpectedly turns off the
lights 
.
Novella dons her hat, chanting archaic syllables as a crystal ball jumps to
life.
A slow grin spreads across her face as she looks up at X Chang, only making her features appear more distorted, rather than making her appear happy.
"I just wanted to make sure we would be undisturbed while I'm cooking.."
Only too late does he realize that he is
to be the main course. As X Chang glances outside to freedom, he sees a
butterfly flying over the meadow of green (??!) flowers, followed by darkness. Why can I still see the flowers this late at night?
As she gazes in her crystal ball, Novella observes: Paque Manne and his wife (Mrs Paque Manne), are out for a late night mountain drive in their SUV. The Mannes are a pair of yuppies in the wrong decade (who grew moderately wealthy after modeling for mIRC's logo and a few arcade games in the 80's). Fortunately, they are a ways away, giving Novella enough time for a nice relaxing dinner and maybe some apple pie and ice cream afterwards with a touch of sherry perhaps?
[...]
X Chang, now having partaken in dinner, finds himself in a predicament... he is
now rather of the ghostly persuasion. As he floats free of the cabin, just at
that moment, the Mannes drive by. Feeling the call of some uncontrollable urge,
they stop the car and start chasing him through the field
of green (?!!!) flowers. 
[...]
X Chang, now having partaken in the wrong end of two dinners decides it's time to look into something more relaxing, like cherry farming, and leaves our story forever.
Wiping her lips and looking around in the dark night, Mrs. Paque Manne says
"honey, look a the green flowers" (?!!!!) "There are so
many of them. Aren't they beautiful? We should build a home up here
to raise Junior. See the sign over there, it's the
international symbol of greetings 
They want us
to stay here."
"Greetings? I thought that was the symbol for 'Rendezvous'"
"No dear, 'Rendezvous' was renamed 'Bonjour', which is French for 'Hello'". (Go ahead, *GROAN*, you know you want to.)
Something is rather odd... The surface of the flowers seems...
...seems...
...to be moving!
The petals on each flower 
start curling down, thickening out and slimming down as if filling a water balloon.
Eyes appear. Fangs drop down from the underside of the flower head. Suddenly the Mannes are surrounded by glowing green
spiders! The color of the field shifts around the Mannes as they are swarmed with thousands of
eight-legged poison delivery systems.
Attempting to save his own life, Paque flees, only to trip over a barrel.
As he is swarmed, Paque looks at the barrel and thinks You know, that isn't
the symbol for 'bonjour' at all. From this angle it's actually the symbol for 'cursed
biohazard'. 
As Paque's flesh-stripped skull rolls across the ground 
,
his last sight is of a beautiful butterfly, hearing a faint squeak
behind the butterfly.
Novella, having watched the chase as X Chang left her house, and knowing the
authorities will be interested in her place soon, buries the Mannes along with
what's left of X Chang 
in her private little graveyard. 
Looking closely she finds a couple of freshly empty graves. Probably just zombies. They seem to increase proportionately with the effects of toxic waste, but they know better than to bother me by now.
Glancing up she spies a butterfly as it flies over to the next valley where her nearest neighbor ('call me Frank') lives. At the edge of her perception she hears the flap of leathery wings. She smiles to herself remembering curses long past.
The butterfly looks down on a running woman. Perhaps out for an evening jog
...or...
... running for her life! 
Closely following the running woman is Frankenstein's Creature, who is in turn followed by an angry mob with pitchforks and torches 
.
We know where that story leads, with the death of a poor helpless green guy who just wants to be loved by the running woman and perhaps get an upgrade for his right arm.
He's not who this story is interested in, but as our eyes glance over the crowd, we see
at the back of the crowd, one of the pitchfork wielding mob appears to have a
tail... and be of the reddish persuasion. and his forehead has two more points
than most. 
If you asked one of the other villagers, they might tell you "Oh, he's Bob.
He's a nice guy. I hear he's the president of one of those .com companies with
the funny names." 
(Little would the villager know
that Bob's company dumps cursed toxic waste in the neighboring valley. The kind
of cursed waste that can only result from billions of children shackled to
keyboards replying whenever someone enters a 'search phrase')
Glancing up, he spots a butterfly and an evil grin slowly spreads over his face..
A squeak is heard...
and another...
getting closer...
Black as the night itself, the bat closes in on his helpless victim. No eye can detect him for he blends in to the background. The ultimate camouflage helps him be the ultimate hunter.
Baring fangs, flying in on leathery wings, the butterfly is helpless before his predator and is snapped up and consumed faster than you can say 'oops I did it again'.
However...
Slowly the effects of consuming a cursed butterfly 
that has spent its life in
a toxic waste dump takes its toll on the bat... 
a strange thing starts to
happen. His pores begin to emit a faint glow as the butterfly's body becomes
part of the bat's. His cloak of stealth ruined, eventually the bat will die of
starvation.
...or he would have if the earth hadn't been destroyed by Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
A few weeks later, dentarthurdent is at Magrathea, watching as the planet
factory gets back into production 
. Oddly enough,
Earth mark II is orange instead of blue 
and carved
into a glacier below an image of Slartibartfast are letters that only Arthur and Trillian
know how to read: