"Oh," said Garth. "I didn't know you had company."
Richard turned to face him, his hands still held aloft. "Garth."
"Hi, Richard. D'you know wine can get you drunk in two glasses?" He giggled. "Because I had four and—who's this, your girlfend? Girlfend?" He scowled, enunciating the next attempt very carefully. "Girlfrrriend?"
The intruder's expression might have been described as a frown, had she had normal facial features. "I am not Richard Arthur Campbell's girl friend."
"I keep telling him to go on Tinder. Richard, I am so. Proud. Of you. It is more than about time. And hi. Hello, wow. Nice to meet you, Tinder Girlfend. What are those?" Garth walked across the room, a hand prematurely outstretched. "Those are the weirdest dreadlocks I ever seen."
"Garth, you bloody lightweight, stop—" Richard said, but he was cut off by the intruder.
"Do not touch me or I shall vaporize you." She leveled her fist at Garth.
Richard's guts had turned into something he was sure would resemble tinned beef stew. "I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm pretty sure she's serious," he said.
"Vaporize," Garth repeated. "All right, here we go." He put his hands up, like Richard.
"There, he's cooperating. But he's also drunk—obviously—so don't ask him to do anything complicated," Richard said. "What next? Wallets?"
"Wallet?" the woman repeated. She frowned. "I have no use for your wallet. Please allow me 45 seconds to access and download the schematics from your device." Her tentacles and her eyes both focused in on Richard's computer screen, and she tapped with one hand while the other fist remained leveled in the men's general direction.
"Richard, schemactics?" Garth stage whispered. "As in solar power sneaky cell schemactics?"
"Garth, shut up."
"Are you giving her our schemantics?"
"She has a gun. I am not giving her the schematics. She is taking them. Because, as you would so charmingly say: 'Murica."
"Those schemantics are going to make us a millionaire. Hey." Garth lowered his hands and advanced toward the intruder. "Just wait a—"
A blast of light shattered the dimness of Richard's office. For an instant, there was the utter absence of sound. Richard's ears began to ring a second later, and he stared at the space where Garth had stood, too shocked to feel anything but surprise.
Then, he became aware of a curl of smoke snaking out of the wall, and, turning his head, he saw a suspiciously Garth-shaped hole in the closet door. Two feet, one of them missing a shoe, protruded from the closet. Richard shot toward the body of his best friend, shrieking his name.
Almost apologetically, the intruder said, "Do not worry, Richard Arthur Campbell. I have not vaporized him, as will be obvious upon inspection. I have simply stunned him. I simply wished to—" a pause— "intimidate you."
"Well fucking done, it worked!" Richard snarled. He began dragging Garth out of the closet. The man's rampant ginger hair stuck out from his skull every which way, and his expression was frozen in a rictus of mild surprise. "Is he going to be all right?"
"It is not advisable to move him. Please allow him to recover where he lies. He will survive, although you may wish to inform him that some bleeding from the orifices is normal." The intruder had returned her attention to Richard's computer. She placed a small, square device on one corner of the keyboard, and all of her tentacley locks were extending toward the device expectantly.
Richard rounded on her, flinging his hands out to the side in anger. In an instantaneous reaction, she leveled her fist at him. Richard raised his hands. "Okay, okay—don't shoot me with your knuckle-gun. You've got the plans, okay? What are you going to do with them, sell them to a rival? We haven't got any, since we haven't even gotten started yet!"
"Rival?" She lowered the gun. "The Chorodonians?"
"I...I've never heard of them, but I always got low marks in geography. Can you—"
The intruder's tentacles were swaying back and forth, the tips stretching outward as if sensing the air around her. "Please. Have you been contacted by the Chorodonians?"
"What? No, of course not. I don't even know where Chorodonia is. Like I said, we don't have any rivals. We haven't even gotten started yet. We've—we've barely..." He stopped himself short of admitting that they had filed for, but not received, a patent for their technology; it would not do to give this tech-stealing loon any leg up.
The tech-stealing loon glanced at Richard's laptop. She seemed to be as impatient for the interaction to be over as Richard. She was definitely on edge, as if he could hope to present any danger to her at all. He'd have to take her off guard, and...
Richard didn't even think. His body jolted into motion with a bravery and an utter lack of survival instincts that would make him nauseous in retrospect. He bounded across the floor and flung his arms out. As he crashed into her, he wrapped his arms around her so that she tumbled to the floor in his full-body embrace. She yelped. Her body beneath his was strangely squishy.
"Let me go!" she demanded. She squirmed in his grasp. Richard couldn't make sense of the way she felt beneath him. Where there had been limbs, there were none. Then there were, in another arrangement. He felt like he was slipping out of reality, like this was some kind of real-life illusion.
He shifted so that he was sitting on her midsection and grappled for hold of her wrists, hoping to keep the fist-guns at bay. "Take off your mask!"
"Let me go!" she demanded, bucking in an attempt to throw him off. The wrists he had been grabbing for were suddenly gone. In his hands, he held nothing but empty sleeves, and then even those were gone, slithering out of his grasp, dissolving.
Richard put steel into his voice to cover his mounting terror. "Take off your tentacle queen mask! It's creeping me out, and I've had it with this practical joke! If it isn't Garth, it's got to be—someone—" He snagged one of the prehensile tentacles that seemed to pass for her hair and began to pull.
She shrieked.
"Take it off!" Richard demanded. "The fun's over!"
"You are causing me pain!" she spat. With a sharp twist, she managed to get a knee up into Richard's groin.
Well. The knee felt solid enough.
Incapacitated, Richard rolled to the side, groaning. Released from his grasp, the intruder scrambled to her feet. There was a disheartening click, and when he glanced up again, he found himself peering into the hollow, beady eyes of the gun she wielded, which appeared to be fused somehow into the actual structure of her hand. These were alarming, awesome, movie-grade special effects. He might almost believe this was real life, if he were a gullible idiot like that.
But one thing Richard was not was a gullible idiot. Nope. Not him. No, sir.
"I am leaving," said the intruder.
"You're not! Un-paralyze my friend!" Richard's voice was strained with pain, both hands hovering just above his delicate bits in a futile effort to soothe or to protect. "I don't care if he can't use his legs, but he bloody well needs his arms or how the hell is he supposed to do dishes?"
Ignoring him, the intruder picked up the device she had set on Richard's laptop, examining it for a moment before slipping it into a pocket on the front of her sleek outfit.
"Listen here. You can't leave him like this. Seriously." Of all the things that had happened that evening, the prospect of being left with a paralyzed Garth was the most frightening.
What if Garth stayed like this?
What if he was seriously hurt?
What if he died?
Richard forced himself to his knees, one hand still over his crotch. "Please. Please, you can't leave him like this."
Something in Richard's tone must have caught her attention, because she turned to look at him, really look at him. "I am sorry to have stunned your companion. He will recover," she repeated. "He requires rest."
"How am I supposed to trust you? Look at him!" Richard cried. "Take the schematics, okay? Fine! But help my friend!"
"There is nothing I can do to hasten his recovery here. I must—"
"Please, you can't just leave him like this!"
The intruder was still and silent for a beat or two. Then, the line of her shoulders relaxed just slightly, as if with a sigh of resignation. "There is nothing I can do to hasten his recovery," she said, "but I can offer you this."
She slid a hand along her collar line, folding back a flap of her clothing. Underneath, fastened to her outfit, was a silver object about the size of a poker chip, but oval rather than round. A series of pinprick lights, concealed until now, blinked along the edge of the object. She removed it from her clothes and held it out to Richard, still on his knees. Richard shrank back.
"It will not harm you," she said. "It is a communication device. Should your friend fail to recover—only should he fail to recover—you may hail me, and I will come with one who can offer aid. Do not open communication unless the circumstances are dire. Do you understand?"
Speechless, Richard opened his hand, and the stranger dropped the device into his palm. The tiny lights along the edge—there were six or seven of them—began to blink in a different pattern, illuminating and going dark in sequence. Then, they all began to blink on and off as one again.
"Do you understand?" she repeated.
"Yeah. Sure. Okay," said Richard. "Call you if it looks like he's going to cark it."
"No. Only if it appears that he will die. But I assure you, he will be fine." The stranger straightened. "If you must hail me, ask for Aialo-El. That is my name. Goodbye."
"Okay, wait just—"
She moved before he could finish his final plea, and she moved like something that didn't exist. Those tentacles shivered and reached toward the door of the room, sensing, wavering, and then the woman's features blurred and stretched and her neck grew longer and her shoulders collapsed and she arced toward the door like a...
Like a big, completely impossible worm.
It was one graceful motion. One moment there was a woman standing before Richard on two legs; in the next, she had leapt toward her escape and landed on the floor already half-out the door, a slithering snake in a suit of clothes that still fit her perfectly. The trailing sleeves of the garment shrank before Richard's eyes and disappeared.
The worm-thing that had been Aialo-El slipped out into the hall without a sound.
A moment later, Richard heard the front door open and close, and the silence that thing had left in its wake was numbing.
Let's all be honest: Garth kind of deserved it for trying to touch somebody's hair without permission. 🤷🏻♀️