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Bo wants to go bowling on her birthday. She hasn’t been bowling since she left Mayberry, or Mooseknee, or whatever nauseatingly wholesome place it was where she grew up, and she’s feeling nostalgic.
Kenzi, despite a vague but persistent foreboding of doom, takes charge and manages—mainly through increasingly desperate promises of free booze and yummy birthday cake at the Dal afterwards—to get the Happy Sunshine Gang to agree to come along for the…fun.
They make a grand entrance at the Penny Lanes Bowling Alley—much to the uneasy startlement of the other bowlers, who aren’t used to seeing that much black leather and eyeliner in a bowling alley and aren’t sure if they’ve been invaded by a gay biker gang or a death metal band.
Their confusion only intensifies when Kenzi, wearing her most outrageous goth outfit and kickass platform boots, does a little dance and shouts, “Oh yeah, Bo-Bo and her bitches be in the house! Par-tay at the bowling alley! We gonna rock this place!”
The spectacle of Vex standing next to her, holding a cluster of party balloons, glowering and looking a little like a goth Pennywise the Clown, absolutely does not help clarify matters.
Logistical problems begin straight away, as trying to get the gang to settle down and focus long enough to actually bowl is like herding cats.
Vex immediately storms the snack bar to harangue and terrorize the attendants in a futile quest for some kind of booze besides lite beer in a paper cup. Tamsin finally gets tired of listening to him whine about having to bowl sober and grudgingly shares her flask of whiskey with him just to get him to shut up.
Hale makes a beeline for a group of tittering young lovelies who are holding a bachelorette party at the bowling alley (I know, right!?). He has to be rescued by his friends after the women mistake him for the male stripper they’d hired and start pelting him with Loonies and chanting “Strip! Strip!”
Kenzi has a huge, dramatic meltdown over having to wear ugly rented bowling shoes, and only resigns herself to the humiliation after Bo calls her a bratty diva and accuses her of trying to ruin Bo’s birthday. Kenzi huffs and pouts out of principle for a few minutes, until she realizes that the bowling shoes are actually far more comfortable than most of her usual footwear.
Once they finally start a game, most of them try to cheat.
Bo, who doesn’t bowl anywhere near as well as she imagined, tries using her Succubus powers of persuasion on Lauren—who declined to bowl but agreed to be the scorekeeper because nobody else is any good at math—to get her to change Bo’s scores. But Lauren has been filling in the scoreboxes with one of her solvent-proof-ink lab pens instead of a pencil and the attempt to cheat is just too blatantly obvious to get away with.
Hale, who consistently has a hilariously bad ball release, tries to use his Siren whistle to redirect what started off as a gutter ball, but he overcorrects and sends the ball into the opposite gutter. Nobody calls him out because they realize he’s likely to beat himself if they just leave him to it.
Vex, unable to manipulate his own balls, uses his Mesmer power to mess up everyone else’s aim until Kenzi catches him at it and threatens to stomp on his hands with her ugly red bowling shoes.
“Ah, don’t get your panties in a bunch, Judy Garland,” Vex sneers, fingering the holes in his bowling ball in a frankly obscene way.
“Ha, joke’s on him, I’m not wearing panties,” Kenzi mutters to Dyson, who promptly drops a bowling ball on his foot.
Up to this point Dyson has been rolling strike after strike, possibly because he’s been bowling since back when he learned some Elizabethan cutthroat version of lawn bowling from Kit Marlowe or some shit like that. Or, more likely, because he’s naturally athletic and pathologically competitive. But now his score goes down dramatically because he keeps trying to look up Kenzi’s skirt. It doesn’t occur to him yet that this might be Kenzi’s way of sabotaging his game, the fibbing little cheater. (He’ll discover later that she’s totally wearing panties.)
Tamsin turns out to be a surprisingly competent bowler, especially after a few shots of whiskey, and has no need to cheat—much to everyone’s relief, because nobody wants to be subjected to her scary Valkyrie skull face if she starts losing. Though Vex has a close call when he can’t resist humming the “Ride of the Valkyries” just before she releases her ball, resulting in an unfortunate split. Luckily for him she’s not sure which of the bastards did it and decides not to cause a scene. For now, anyway.
Bo finally lucks out and bowls a strike and shouts, “Whoo! Yeah, baby! Hole in one!” Her celebratory bump and grind attracts every eye in the bowling alley.
“Bo, stop twerking, you’re gonna cause a riot,” Kenzi hisses.
Just then, an ominous rumble shakes the floor. “Oops, did I do that?” Bo says.
The lane in front of them explodes into splinters, and a writhing, humping ball of furry creatures bursts out of the gaping hole in the floor.
“What in the literal fuck is that?!” Bo gasps.
“They’re plot bunnies,“ Dyson says darkly. “We need to destroy them all, now, or they’ll just keep multiplying. Hale, use your Siren powers to get this place cleared of human witnesses, then cover the exits. Vex, help him. The rest of you, with me. Let’s kill us some bunnies!”
Bo draws two daggers from some unimaginable hiding spot in her skintight leather trousers and wades into the middle of the bunny orgy, while Dyson shifts into his awesome wolf form and savagely shreds any bunnies that try to escape the whirlwind of Bo’s fury.
Tamsin finally gets to deploy her scary Valkyrie skull face, which admittedly isn’t as effective on bunnies as it is on people, but it at least makes the bunnies lose all their self-confidence and stop fucking.
Kenzi, heedless of the damage deposit on her rented bowling shoes, begins punting bunnies right and left, screaming, “Sidekick? I’ll show you a sidekick!”
Even Lauren helps, throwing her lab coat over one of the bunnies and beating it to death with a bowling pin, all while wearing an enigmatic smile.
When all the plot bunnies have been annihilated Dyson and Hale call a Fae cleanup crew to deal with the hair-raising carnage, then write up a cover story describing the incident as a hallucination-causing gas leak and subsequent explosion. Really, it’s amazing what humans will believe. A little willing suspension of disbelief goes a long way, for sure.
**********
Later that evening the gang regroups at the Dal for birthday cake—devil’s food, Bo’s favorite “because vanilla is soooo boring!”—and the opening of presents. Which consist mostly of sex toys, weapons, and sex toys that can double as weapons in a pinch. Also, a Precious Moments figurine from Lauren that makes everyone go “Awwwww.”
Monumental, epic amounts of alcohol are consumed. (Seriously, how do these people even still have livers?)
“This has been the best birthday ever!” Bo drunkenly proclaims. “You guys are the fucking best! We should totally form a bowling league!”
Everyone nods and smiles unenthusiastically before raising a toast to the birthday girl. Let Bo enjoy her fantasy, at least for tonight.
Nobody except for a concerned-looking Trick notices the pair of bedraggled-looking surviving plot bunnies fucking in the shadows under the pool table.