Jeremiah Tolbert

Chuck Wendig has been doing these Flash Friday writ­ing prompts on his blog, and I’ve decided that so long as I can spare the time, I am going to join in and write on them.  This one is prob­a­bly dan­ger­ously close to fan­fic, but oh well! Maybe you’ll get a laugh.  This week’s prompt was a pho­to­graph with the title ‘The Lady and the Swordsman.‘

Angela arrived at Terry’s Halloween party unfash­ion­ably late.  Fashionable had expired an hour ear­lier.  Most of the booze had run out and those inclined to do so had already stag­gered off with a part­ner for an evening of regret-​​filled drunken grop­ing.  She had kind of been hop­ing to make an evening’s worth of mis­takes with Terry, but he was nowhere to be seen.

She hated show­ing up so late.  Usually, the only peo­ple left were the dreaded Deep Conversationalists.  Rather than attend­ing par­ties just to enjoy the com­pany of strangers and get­ting soused, those deviants took con­ver­sa­tion beyond the sur­face top­ics and into deep phi­los­o­phy, or worse, pol­i­tics.   Angela had dated a Deep Conversationalist for a week in col­lege.  He’d even wanted to wax rhetor­i­cally in bed. During sex.

Angela sur­veyed the liv­ing room; a knot of peo­ple had gath­ered in close, masks dis­carded, whis­per­ing and wav­ing hands–definitely DCs to be avoided.  There was one party goer who wasn’t in a deep argu­ment about some TV show can­celed in the 90s or argu­ing why Republicans (no, Democrats) ate babies.

He or she was dressed oddly, and stood apart from the oth­ers, next to a flimsy enter­tain­ment cen­ter stacked high with red plas­tic cups.  He or she wore a fenc­ing mask, a light pink blouse, and baggy pants.  His skin was pale as printer paper, where it peeked through, and… some­thing was off.

Angela groaned.  “I’m not on the clock…” she muttered.

The per­son in the fenc­ing mask wasn’t human; the limbs were too long and too spindly, for one.  Then there was the tail; long and sin­u­ous, twitch­ing side to side.  The tail was a dead giveaway.

What was it about Halloween that made aliens let their guard down?  Yes, every­one wore a cos­tume, but mostly rub­ber masks and slutty nurses’ out­fits.  The tail was some­thing not even a Hollywood spe­cial effects wiz­ard would be able to fake.  And any­way, most peo­ple kept their cos­tume to a theme.  What did the fenc­ing sword and mask have to do with a tail?  It should have gone as a big cat or some­thing.  That might have been passable.

It had a very, very con­vinc­ing cos­tume that it wore every other day of the year.  State-​​of-​​the-​​art cyber­netic suit, prob­a­bly bulky enough to give the impres­sion of some­one who lifts a lot of weights.  Maybe a lit­tle pudge around the mid­dle to account for the cool­ing sys­tems.  The ones who breathed some­thing other than Earth air tended to appear pretty obese, to account for their life sup­port sys­tems. Alien tech­nol­ogy could make tanks of chlo­rine gas only so small.

Admittedly, she was in no posi­tion to judge.  She’d cob­bled her cos­tume together from back-​​of-​​the-​​closet junk.  A Good Will fur coat made from an indis­tin­guish­able ani­mal (Angela feared it might be some­thing domes­tic), and a Mardi Gras mask made of cheap glit­ter, plas­tic, and feath­ers.    She had intended to pick up some­thing from one of the sea­sonal cos­tume shops that appeared in empty store­fronts overnight like a mag­i­cal junk shop in a Twilight Zone episode. But Sagittarius had kept her late to fill out inci­dent reports, prob­a­bly because he had no life to speak of out­side of the job, and by the time she escaped, the stores were all closed.

Damn him.  Couldn’t she just let this one go?  Just once?  She imag­ined Sagittarius’s voice admon­ish­ing her.  Angela, there is no “off the clock” in our line of work.

She sighed and crossed the room to stand next to what­ever it was.  She picked up one of the plas­tic cups and sniffed.  There had been some decent booze in the place earlier.

“Hi there,” she said, pre­tend­ing to just now notice the thing that had prac­ti­cally jumped and waved at her when she’d arrived–it stood out so much. “Looks like I missed most of the fun.”

The crea­ture gave the clos­est approx­i­ma­tion to a shrug it could man­age given its phys­i­ol­ogy.  It said noth­ing.  So much for the con­ver­sa­tional gam­bit. She flashed her badge.

“I’m with  B.E.T.A.  You’re doing a pretty bad job of blend­ing and I’m going to have to–” The lit­tle bas­tard drew and poked her hard in the eye with its fenc­ing sword. Thankfully, it had one of those metal balls on the tip, but it still hurt like a bitch and made her see gray geo­met­ric pat­terns.  It wad­dled for the door.   She caught up with it at the front door.  This time, she was ready, and when it stabbed at her, she grabbed the sword and yanked it away.

The door opened and a large, impos­ing man dressed as Robin Hood and wear­ing a dark red mask blocked the way.  Angela sighed. “Excuse me sir, my friend and I were just leav­ing.” She tried to slip past, but he didn’t move.  Just great. The lit­tle one had backup.  She fell into a fight­ing stance and–

The large man chuck­led in a dis­tinc­tive and imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able way.

“Sagittarius?” She stared open-​​mouthed at her boss. She’d never seen him wear­ing any­thing beyond a lab coat or a haz­mat suit. “This was another one of your damned tests?”

“I told you, there’s no ‘off the clock’ in our line of work.”

“How’d I do?” the lit­tle alien asked through the mesh of his mask.  Judging from his accent, he was from the Crab Nebula. He was prob­a­bly one of her boss’s lab assistants.

“You look ridicu­lous,” Angela snapped. She pulled tita­nium cuffs from her purse, slapped one on the alien’s tail and the other around her boss’s wrist.

“You two have fun. There has to be some­thing in this place I can use to kill brain cells.” She pushed the alien out the door, slammed it shut, dead bolted it for good mea­sure, and headed for the kitchen.  She had a good feel­ing about the kitchen.

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