A collapsing magnetar exhales lavender across the void while, far below in the crooked green tower of Planet Express, the Smelloscope twitches and locks on, sending the professor into a sneezing fit after Zoidberg’s enthusiastic dust-bath in vacuum-bag filth clogs the air; sinuses inflamed beyond endurance, the old man invents a nasal laser on the spot, blows up a melon wearing a fake nose, and drags the crew to the New New Age Faire where incense coils between booths promising chakra alignment and third-eye monocles; there he snaps a blue sapphire in half from a vendor too baked to understand aluminum oxide, installs it, fires the device, and suddenly smells burning nostril hair while Bender pawns a detached hand to a gypsy-bot and Fry gets his face scrubbed clean with borax.
Then the sky begins stealing people. It happens gently at first (two customers waiting at a suicide booth drift upward like released balloons, Ron Whitey ascends mid-convertible cruise, Morbo punches through the newsroom ceiling), and soon the stratosphere thickens with quiet, smiling bodies rising in perfect silence, clothes fluttering down empty while the city’s population counter clicks mercilessly from eighteen million to sixty to fifty-nine as even Scruffy and his beloved Washbucket vanish holding hands.
Inside the suddenly sacred laboratory, lab coats are handed out like vestments, buttons missing (someone ate them), so wire is knotted instead, rocket badges pinned on, and the crew kneels toward MIT looking exactly like the cult they swore to debunk; barricades rise, pianos are shoved against doors, shoelaces tied in desperate love, yet one by one they are plucked away (Leela through an open roof, Amy kidnapped by her own worried family for a park-bench intervention complete with rain-stick chants and a duck-topped Grand Midwife) until the last handful huddle in the dark, starving on coffee-creamer dust while failed experiments litter the floor: trampolines too weak, fusion cannons too strong, bottled tornadoes that refuse to leave their jars. Days blur; beards (fake and real) are worn like penance; the professor finally kneels, bones cracking, and apologizes to the ceiling for calling the Almighty “Magic Space Grandpa” for a century, begging only for food without onions, and a single glowing cheese puff descends on an invisible thread, radioactive orange and impossibly fragrant.
Hope flares; mouths open; the puff is bait. A hook flashes, Fry bites, and rockets skyward minus pants and shoes, reeled through the roof toward a rust-red fishing vessel drifting in the high cold where alien fishermen in oilskins and Gloucester accents measure the professor for chowder, Bender for scrap, Hermes for sushi-grade belly, until red-and-blue lights cut the mist and a Coast Guard cutter glides in; Hermes, tiny phone in hand, recites subsections of the Planetary Fisheries Treaty of 2936 (eighteen-dollar license fee overdue, quota exceeded, juveniles in the hold), and the grumbling fishermen are forced to release their entire catch; thousands of frozen bodies tumble back to Earth in a silent reverse rain, thudding onto streets already littered with torn newspapers whose headlines still wait in vain.
Morning finds the laboratory steaming with thaw; stiff limbs remember gravity, the professor shrugs off his makeshift robe (revealing nothing underneath, to everyone’s horror), slips back into his proper coat, and declares science victorious once more, though when asked if the ordeal has broadened his mind he pauses, looks around at the exhausted, cheese-puff-dusted faces he almost lost, and answers with perfect honesty: no. Outside, the magnetar finishes dying unnoticed, and the sky, for the moment, has stopped taking.
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