The Great Galactic Score!

17

17

Friss posed. Stood with his feet apart, one arm across his chest, the elbow of the other resting upon it, the hand rubbing his chin in thought, Friss scowled, furrowed his brow, raised one of those eyebrows, tilted his head and then raised his chin as though he had suddenly caught the scent of something he couldn't quite recognise. He then stared into the distance, spoiled only by Reagatcher tossing a bowl of soup on the floor and cursing all children.

"This is fine." The other residents of the retirement planet had begun to find weapons from various hiding places and Friss took little notice, apart from stealing one rather nasty looking rifle from a pair of arthritic hands as the one called Doris tottered by. "I planned for this. Well, not this exactly. Well, not anything near to this, but I have plans. Plans can be adjusted. Here. Hold this."

Friss slipped the strap of the rifle over his head with one hand as he held off Doris with his other. Once the rifle was secure against his back, he pulled something from his pocket. It looked squelchy and vaguely organic. Like a ball of moss with huge eyes and no other discernible features. He held out the moss to Demi and she absolutely refused to touch it, the eyes of the moss-thing staring at her, looking as though the little creature were about to erupt in tears.

"I'm not touching that." She stepped back and, for good measure, stepped back again, but Friss matched her steps, shaking the moss creature at her. "Whatever it is, it's going to be horrible."

"No it's not." Friss removed his hand from Doris' forehead, stepped to the side and the old warrior woman fell face first upon the plush carpet. With a move so fast, Demi almost didn't see it, Friss grabbed Demi's hand, slapping the moss creature into her palm. "Lodka! Testing transport Meep! Now, Demi, poke one eye for regular transport, both for emergency transport and squeeze the entire Meep for 'Get me the hell out of here before I die!' transport. Okay? Good. Find Bognrd. Bring him home. Lodka, send Demi to Tonbush's ship. Pronto."

As Friss spoke, he poked first one eye of the moss creature that he had called a 'transport Meep'. When his finger poked the eye, the creature made a pained, sorrowful 'meep' sound. Then he poked both eyes and the creature meeped even more loudly and more pathetically. Then he squeezed the entire creature and it screamed a meep that almost made Demi feel sorry for it. Actually, no almost. She wanted to free the Meep from this cruel life.

"Wait! Send me to Tonbush's ship?" Demi began to panic at what Friss suggested. "And find Bognrd? Why me? How am I supposed to ...?"

Friss had stepped back, grinning and waving and the last thing Demi saw before everything became really weird, was Lap, carrying the donkey under one incredibly thin arm and Reagatcher under the other, the former warlord's legs kicking frantically in the air. That wasn't the weird part.

The weird part came when everything appeared to condense into a tiny little hole, into which she found herself being sucked into like milkshake through a straw. The entire retirement facility, Friss, Lap, Reagatcher and the prone Doris, among all the other people, simply disappeared. Everything became a murky brown colour and Demi felt as though she were moving, though her legs felt as though she had stood in cement for far too long.

When the murky brown colour, of wherever it was she found herself, started to become a spiral and then a blaze of light, she popped back into reality like toothpaste being squirted from a tube and she decided she was never going to squeeze a toothpaste tube ever again. When her eyes became adjusted to the light of her surroundings, she could tell she was no longer on the retirement planet. She had emerged ... elsewhere.

An elsewhere that was surprisingly cramped but, she noted, incredibly clean. Were it not for the severely restricted height of the corridor she had arrived into, she would have classed this as something more akin to what she actually expected of space ships. All clean, straight lines, white walls with shining, flashing panels that gave out information about things that Demi had no understanding of whatsoever. It looked efficient. It looked professional and not at all like the squalid conditions Zapasnoy had become, nor like the faintly stomach-turning, flesh-like appearance of Lodka.