Grebok’s mouth was dry—all the moisture had gone to his palms, which were slick with sweat. He sat on a bench outside the women’s restroom (part of the one Intergalactic Rest Stop in all the Storyverse), feet tapping a staccato beat. He pulled a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his ragged-hem pants.
It looked to be from a notebook. Yellow lined. Crinkly. In the dead center was a dark red heart, so red it was rusty (rusty because it had been dabbed onto the page with a finger smeared in the blood of Grebok’s foes—in particular, a cormorant-headed mob boss from the Foetid Rests of Planet Murkburg who was trying to buy and sell people’s unique stories on the bleakest and blackest of bleak black markets, the Mackerel Mercado).
Beneath the heart, Grebok had written, I HEART YOU VERRY MUCH.
“Very has one ‘r’,’ Lord Chuckles said, having come out of the ladies’ room, eating a tiny sandwich of cucumber and watercress. He smelled of rose hips.
Grebok coughed loudly, as if to cover up… something. He wasn’t even sure what. He crumpled the paper and thrust it back into his pants pocket.
“I’ll take that under advisement.” He cleared his throat. His eyes swooned with dizzy, idiot’s hope. “Is she in there?”
“R.T.?” Chuckles asked. He shook his head, offered an unhelpful laugh. “No. We’ve been here for like, two weeks, man. I’m growing a beard on top of my beard. If she was in there, she’d be drowned in the sink by now. But, fuck me sideways with a canoe oar, you should really go into the chicks’ bathroom. They have chaise lounges instead of toilets, right? A little man with a dragon’s tail and a butler’s tux wanders around in there with a silver tray, and he’s serving these little stupid sandwiches—holy shit, they’re delicious. What the crap is watercress? I don’t even know, but my mouth is excited! Plus, viola music, these little artisanal soaps, and a distant golden bay where seagulls orbit and the sun is forever setting. Women know how to treat themselves.”
“So, she’s not in there.”
Chuckles blinked. “Yeah, no. I’m starting to think she’s not coming back for us.”
“I’m sure she’ll be back. She’s probably off… doing ‘woman things.’ Buying purses. Crying at a romantic movie, maybe. Smelling scented candles.”
“R.T. doesn’t strike me as the girly type but… yeah, okay. If you say so.” He sat next to Grebok, drumming his fingertips atop the sword belted and sheathed at his hip. “So, you going to give her that little piece of paper?”
Grebok swallowed a hard knot. Sweat beaded on his brow. “What piece of paper?”
“The one you just had in your hands! With the heart and the message. I forget what it said. I fade in and out. Something about, I Want To Sex Your Space Vents?”
“No. What? No! Shut up. I don’t even know what that piece of paper was. I… I found it. Under the vending machine over there, where Gunther is standing. It was stuck to some gum, and I went to get it, and then this little rat snatched it up, and I followed the rat by climbing under the vending machine, and together we tumbled into a… a bottomless pit, except it had a bottom, and at the bottom was a clan of ancient unicorns, and they were having a trial, a trial against a criminal among their kind, and, uhhh—“
“You’re not the best liar.”
Grebok sighed. “I know. I overreach.”
“You go too far.”
“I should keep it simple.”
“Right. K-I-S-S. Keep it simple, shithead.”
Grebok thought about kissing R.T., and stared off at nothing. He wondered if her lips tasted like stardust, or chrome, or peaches.
That wasn’t keeping it simple at all, though, was it?
Stupid.
•••
Gunther was over by the vending machine. His arm was crammed up the exit vent. It had been that way for about six days, now. His tummy rumbled. His fingers waggled, tickling the papery bottom of a chocolate Flix Bar hanging in the coils.
“I want you,” he rasped, cheek pressed to the glass. On a lark, he licked the glass. It did not taste of chocolate, which disappointed Gunther deeply.
The yellow wrapper of the candy bar—with its green cartoon alien doing a jaunty dance next to the colorful, provocative logo—taunted him.
“Please enter my mouth,” he pleaded. “I desire your nougat.”
“That’s gay,” Sparky said, strolling over. “You desire nougat in your mouth. Heh!”
“That’s not nice to gay people,” Gunther murmured against the glass of the machine.
“I like gay people fine,” Sparky said. “You, though, not so much.”
“I guess that’s okay, then.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” the giant weasel said. He reached up with a wide paw, and tilted the machine forward by an inch with his tremendous Wonder Weasel strength. The Flix Bar unmoored from the coil and fell into Gunther’s pale grip.
“Oh, mercy of mercies!” Gunther rescued the chocolate bar, his moon face beaming, his eyes alive and full of joyful lights. His fingers—nimble, one of the few things about him that was, since most of his life he worked as a perfectly functional office temp—easily disrobed the candy bar and thrust it toward his grinning maw.
“Holy crap!” Sparky yelled. “A spider!”
Gunther screamed, and the candy bar fell from his grip. Sparky caught the Flix Bar in a furry fist, and then threw the whole thing in his mouth. Chew, chew, chew.
A lone tear crawled down Gunther’s cheek. “Candy. Gone. You used me.”
“I use you the same way a monkey uses a stick in an anthole. You’re my tool.”
Gunther swung a clumsy open palm at Sparky. Sparky caught it, then headbutted Gunther. The two fell to the floor, kicking and biting.
•••
“Look at those two,” Lord Chuckles said. “Playing a game of grab-ass. Good for them. I like it when they get along.”
Grebok said nothing.
Lord Chuckles knew the score. His pal was moping. Grebok was a romantic. Despite the Neanderthal exterior, the dark hair framing his dark face, and his kill-first-ask-questions-never approach, he was a big gooey soft-hearted love-monkey. Maudlin and mawkish, a romantic’s heart in the body of a death-dealing Miradorian hero-thug.
Chuckles didn’t truck with that kind of sentimentality. Eff that noise in its cee-essing, bee-effing ay, that’s what he always said. Sure, maybe one day he’d find a nice lady, settle down in a grand palace somewhere, have a litter of squalling blonde-headed uber-babies. He’d like to find a no-nonsense gal, one that maybe knows how to swing a blade. Until then, though, it was pretty much an endless line of loveless days and prostitute-addled nights. Yes, he was the Avatar of Good from the backwater planet of Moritania (speaking of which, I should probably go back there, make sure they don’t need me for something, he thought), but he didn’t let a pesky thing like being the Pinnacle of All Morality get in his way of purchasing the services of a hooker now and again. It was in an ethical gray area. He liked those areas. Hell, he lived in those areas.
“You know what we need?” Chuckles said, hoping to buck up his buddy. “We need to wantonly murder some evil. We just need to find some bad people, and punch them until they turn into library paste.”
“That’d be good,” Grebok said quietly. “But R.T. was our ride.”
“Yeah,” Chuckles said. “Shit.”
Let’s be clear. Sometimes, fortune favors the bold. Other times, it favors the lazy.
Now, it favored the lazy.
From the vents above the head, from under the bathroom doors, and out from the vending machines, a wispy black cloud drifted.
It didn’t take long for the cloud to drift into the shape of a tall, thin, cowled creature with two bright pinprick eyes—Lord of the Lemmings.
His cloak shifted with the eternity of rodents living within the living enigma’s becloaked body.
“I have work for you,” the Lemming Lord hissed. “The Sun sent me.”
“At least he’s making sense,” Chuckles said in aside to Grebok as Gunther and Sparky came running up.
“Dollars and cents,” Lord of the Lemmings said. “Victims and vents. Robots and dents. Pop stars and tents. Infinite torment and revolutionary dissent!”
“That was short-lived,” Grebok growled. “What’s the job, weirdo?”
“You two—“ The Lemming Lord pointed a pointy finger at the Avatar and the Keykeeper. “Pirates. You two—“ Pointy pointed pointing at the Geek and the Weasel. “Well, I don’t care what you do.”
“We don’t have a ride,” Chuckles said.
Grebok tried to keep it together. “R.T.’s off… doing lady spaceship things.”
“I can help, fiddle-dee-foo.” The Lord of the Lemmings swept his arms in a cruciform gesture, opening his black cloak wide. A yawning, velvety nothing gaped.
Then, a shape emerged. No bigger than a football.
A small rodent tumbled out, slick and wet as if having wriggled free from a horse’s birth canal.
It wore a helmet and atop that helmet sat a little gyroscope. The gyroscope turned lazily, beeping and booping.
“Teleportation Lemming,” the Lemming Lord said with a proud chuff. The freak had a billion-plus rodents living in his body: lemmings of all shapes, sizes and functions.
(One might say that within him was contained an infinity.)
The lemming chirruped and squeaked.
Then, a flash of light.
The heroes were gone.
The Lemming Lord remained, however. He held up his wrist, and gazed into the fancy Infi-Net watch that his new friends had given him.
On the little touchscreen, a Persian cat’s face peered out from within a pixilated pillowcase.
“Infinity is in motion,” he said.
The cat mrowled in response.
