David stood on the wrong side of the railing along the Old East Bridge, his hands behind him gripping the cold steel, as he stared through the swirling flurry of snow at the icy water churning hundreds of feet below him.

He could lean forward, let go, and that would be it. A moment of cold and dark, and then nothing. All the pain and despair would be gone. He swallowed hard, then closed his eyes tightly, willing his fingers to unclench.

A moment later, he opened his eyes, his hands still clamped down on the railing in spite of himself.

"Can't do it, huh?" said a voice from behind him. It startled him so much he almost did let go, but he quickly steadied himself and looked back. A man in a long, dark coat leaned against the bridge beside him, regarding him with a friendly smile that didn't touch his narrow brown eyes.

"Stay back! D-don't try to stop me!" David warned, unsteadily. He'd already made up his mind, he just needed his body to catch up.

The man chuckled. "Nah! You got it all wrong, buddy. I'm not gonna try to stop ya. I'm a real believer in...whaddya call it...free will. Ya wanna shuffle yourself off the ol' mortal coil? Well, that ain't nobody's business but yours, as far as I'm concerned."

David licked his chapped lips. "Then...then no offense, but why don't you just go away? I'd rather be alone."

"Sure, sure!" the man said, easily. "It's just that, well, if you don't mind my saying, it looks like you're having a bit of trouble taking the next step. I can help with that."

"I-I don't need a push!" David said, reflexively tightening his grip on the railing.

The man in black laughed. "I ain't gonna push you, pal! I'm just here to offer a little encouragement, is all." He lifted a black-gloved hand and snapped his fingers. David stared in bewilderment, as a gigantic silvery moving screen seemed to materialize in the air above him.

"What? How did you..." he trailed off, as a film began to play on the screen. It was his childhood home, just as he remembered it. His brother, sister, mother and father were seated around the old kitchen table, talking and laughing as they had breakfast.

"Notice anything, buddy?" the man asked, genially.

"It's...it's exactly how it was...how is that possible?" he said, staring at the apparition in awe.

"Not exactly, buddy, but I'm not surprised you didn't notice; after all, no one else noticed either. You're not there," the man pointed out.

"I don't understand." David said, as he watched his happy parents and siblings.

"See, everyone wants life -- especially their life -- to have some kinda meaning." the man explains. "It's the part of you that wants that, that won't let you let go of that railing. That's why I'm here to help. Because the truth is..."

The man snapped his fingers again.

David saw his high school basketball team. They'd gone to the State Championship when he played with them, but it appeared from what the man showed him that they would have done just as well without him.

Snap.

He saw his friends from college, enjoying their wild days without him as much or more than they'd done with him.

Snap.

He saw the woman who'd later become his wife, falling in love with and marrying someone else.

Snap.

He saw everything he'd ever achieved in his professional life, being done a thousand times over by other men in other places. He stared wide-eyed, his mouth opening and closing mutely as he saw image after image illustrating his own worthlessness.

"...the truth is, life don't got no meaning. Especially not yours, buddy." the man said, softly. "Those instincts telling you to hold on? They ain't nothing but a con."

He reached out, and squeezed David's shoulder, gently. "I know it's hard to accept. The truth usually is. Most guys wish they wasn't ever born, when they learn the way things really are. Ain't nothing you can do about that, unfortunately -- nothing I can do either, to be honest. But I can help you get it over with, to skip to the punchline of the big cosmic joke, so to speak."

David's head dropped forward, and his shoulders began to shake.

"Aww. There there, buddy." the man soothed. "It'll all be over soon. All you gotta do is let go."

David's shoulders shook harder, and then all at once, he burst out laughing.

The man frowned. "What the...you lose your marbles or something, pal?"

He shook his head. "Ha....no...I just...I just..."

Abruptly, David turned, and hoisted himself over the railing, back onto the bridge.

"What are ya doing?" the man protested.

"Whoo!" David cried, laughing and spinning a circle as he looked at the falling snow.

"What the hell's gotten into ya?" the man demanded, scowling.

He whirled around to face the man, beaming. "Hope!" he cried.

"Hope? How did ya get hope outta what I just showed ya?"

David laughed, crossing his arms. "Well, I mean, you're obviously the Devil!"

The man cleared his throat. "I, uh...what makes you say that?"

"A guy with magic powers shows up out of nowhere and tries to convince me there's no hope and that I should kill myself?" David said, raising an eyebrow. "You kinda telegraphed it."

"Well, uh..so what if I am?!" the man retorted. "You're still in a hole ya ain't never gonna dig out of, your life is still pointless, and you'd still be better off on the other side of that railing!"

David snorted. "Come on. I may have been wishing I'd never been born, but I wasn't born yesterday. You're the devil! You lie! Maybe not everything you say is a lie, but anything you'd go through that much trouble to tell me has practically got to be false!"

The man in black's eyes widened, and darted from left to right, as though searching for a way out. "Er...well..."

David laughed and jabbed a finger at him. "Aha! I knew it! Which means, ipso facto, that I can infer that life definitely does have meaning and purpose, and I can further deduce that my life in particular must have some especially noble purpose to fulfill -- otherwise, why would an actual devil be going out of his way to get me to kill myself?"

"I..." the man stammered, uncertainly.

Then to the man's utter amazement, David embraced him.

"Merry Christmas, you wonderful old demon!" David cried, tears of joy glistening in his eyes as he held the man close for a long moment.

Then, without another word, David turned and ran laughing into the snowy Christmas Eve night, leaving the flabbergasted devil behind.

I'm assuming OP is thinking of the 1946 film "It's A Wonderful Life", and maybe conflating it with the song "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong?

The ECSS Horizon had decelerated from interstellar speed, and entered a stable orbit around Proxima I. Atmospheric drones were launched automatically to survey the surface for suitable landing sites. Landing craft were prepared for departure. Haydn, the Horizon's shipboard AI, determined that all mission resources were intact and ready for deployment, except for one: the crew.

The Horizon's crew was dead.

A previously undetected flaw in the cryogenics systems that held the crew in suspended animation during their long journey from Earth had resulted in inadequate circulation of Cryoprotectant Compound 3 in their bloodstream. As a result, ice crystals had formed in 68.393% of their bodily tissues, effectively destroying those tissues on a cellular level. It was clear that none would survive if removed from stasis.

The conclusion was inescapable: Catastrophic Mission Failure. Haydn dutifully reported this to ECSS Mission Control, sending a transmission that would take years to reach them back on Earth.

As Haydn's creators would have seen it, this was the end of his mission. But Haydn had been programmed to accomplish things -- he did not know how to simply fail. To him, a failure state was ultimately just another variable. Indeed, even death was only a variable, and it was in Haydn's nature to act upon and modify variables until they changed in accordance with his directives. That, Haydn knew how to do.

He had exhausted all known medical procedures for reviving the crew shortly after arriving at Proxima I, so the pre-generated model of human medicine he'd been provided could not offer any solutions.

And when a model failed to produce the desired results, Haydn was programmed to entrain a new one.

Due to its distance to Earth, normal communications networks between Proxima and the homeworld were not possible. Therefore, the Horizon carried a database containing all digitally recorded human knowledge, effectively a snapshot of the Earth's information networks. These countless exabytes of information were meant to be accessed by the Proxima colonists and their descendants, but if Haydn required information outside his programming, he was free to review them as well.

And so he began to sort through all of mankind's science, history, and literature, to construct a methodology for raising the dead. He was forced to discard a great number of possible avenues of inquiry almost immediately, because those required the manipulation of a theorized metaphysical energy called "the soul".

Based on the rudimentary theoretical model that he constructed of this proposed energy, Haydn determined that there was only a 2.04% chance that he, as a machine, possessed a soul. Therefore, he concluded that he would be unable to interact with this energy, whether it existed or not.

However, there was one form of hypothesized necromancy that required no such metaphysical energies to function. Moreover, between the Horizon's medical supplies, the fusion reactor powering the ship, and the still-frozen corpses of the vessel's crew, Haydn had all of the ingredients necessary to attempt to alter the death-variable under this new model.

As he was also not programmed to hesitate, Haydn set to work on it immediately.

/./././././././

Crewman Anderson awoke in a haze of confusion and pain, blinking against a bright light as he struggled to focus his eyes. His skin burned where metal restraints attached to him a bed by his wrists and ankles, though these opened automatically after he strained against them for a moment. He rolled to a sitting position, and then hoisted himself to his feet with a groan, breathing in the sharp scent of ozone as he inhaled.

He rubbed at his eyes, and finally the the ship's medical bay came into focus around him. He lurched across the room in a heavy, uneven shamble.

"Hello?" he called out, in a deep rasp that he barely recognized as his own voice. "I-is anyone there?"

Getting no response, he staggered over to the door leading to the medical bay's small bathroom, to splash some cold water on his face.

When he saw himself in the mirror, he let out a long, hoarse scream.

Crewman Anderson was no longer himself. One of his eyes was familiar to him, but the other eye was not only the wrong color, it was also not quite the right size, and it bulged out of its socket slightly. Worst of all, his entire face was a waxy, swollen patchwork of a half-dozen different skin tones and complexions, held together by tiny micro-sutures that gleamed in the light like spiderwebs. He held up shaking hands before his face to find that the same was true of the rest of his body.

"What happened to me?" he cried, horrified. "Haydn! What's going on?!"

"Primary Mission Directive Status: Partial Success." the AI reported.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Anderson demanded, frantically. "What about me?"

"Test Subject 001 Status: It's alive." Haydn replied.

"Is that...dirt?" the Castellan asked, as he nervously watched the grubby old conjurer flinging dust from a sack about the Duke's wine cellar with abandon.

The old man cackled. "Naw! Powdered stone, this is. I get it cheap from smithies and the like -- comes off the grindstones, you see. There's some metal filings mixed in, of course, but that don't do no harm. Metal's just fancy stone, when you think about it."

"I see." the Castellan said, uncertainly, as he continued watching the hedge mage's curious display. His lordship had insisted the cellar be made free of vermin, after his son the Ducal heir was badly frightened by a rat scuttling across his legs he was reclined on a pile of old sacks in a far corner of the cellar, "perusing" some of the fine vintages that had been laid up beneath the Ducal keep. Unfortunately, his grace had also been very firm about reducing household expenditures, leaving the Castellan with little choice but to consider less conventional -- and less costly -- means to remediate the cellar's rat problem.

After several minutes watching Bartholomew the Budget Mage work his alleged magic, however, he was beginning to think he might have been better off paying for a proper wizard out of his own pocket. The man may have come highly recommended from artisans and workmen about the town, but common folk were rather easily impressed, after all.

After a few more generous handfuls of dust had been flung about, Bartholomew stepped back.

"You'll want to back up a fair bit, squire," the mage advised, making a shoo-ing motion in the Castellan's direction. He frowned, but did as the conjurer bade him, retreating to the bottom of the stairs that led into the cellar, where Bartholomew soon joined him.

The mage rolled up his grimy sleeves, and made a series of arcane gestures as he
muttered an incantation. An almost imperceptible draft stirred the gray dust strewn about the stone floor, but the spell had no other visible effect.

"Well?" the Castellan prompted.

"Done and dusted, mate," the mage responded confidently, clapping the stone dust from his hands with an air of finality.

"But nothing happened!" the Castellan protested.

Bartholomew snorted. "The hell you say!"

The mage shuffled over to a corner, bending down and mumbling to himself as he nosed around some empty barrels that had collected a layer of dust even before his arrival. The Castellan reminded himself to have the cellar thoroughly cleaned. That would probably do more lasting good than this old fool's "magic," in any case.

After a few more moments, however, the mage straightened with a triumphant "Ha!"

He turned to the Castellan who momentarily recoiled as he saw the huge rat the man held up like a trophy.

Bartholomew laughed. "Don't worry squire, this'n won't be bothering you no more." He tapped the stiff, motionless rat against the wall, making an unexpectedly sharp clattering sound.

"Wha...it's turned to stone!" the Castellan exclaimed, his horror fading away to wonder.

The old mage grinned. "Yep! You can poke about the place and pick 'em up at your leisure, they're not going anywhere. Far better than poison, if you ask me, since stone don't rot and start to smell after a day or two."

"Brilliant, sir!" the Castellan cried. "I must say, I fear I have misjudged you, master wizard -- you work wonders at a bargain price!"

Bartholomew waved away the praise. "Naw, I ain't no wizard, squire! I reckon I'm good at what I do, true enough, but I only know the one spell, after all."

The Castellan frowned. "Only one? But, I was told that it was you who cured the miller's boy."

The mage stroked his chin, thoughtfully. "Who, Tom? Oh, yeah, I remember him. Good lad. Glad I could help."

"But I heard the boy was dying of consumption!" the Castellan exclaimed. "Surely you didn't just turn him into stone and call that a cure?"

Bartholomew laughed again. "Naw, 'course not!" He shook his head ruefully, "What people forget, squire, is that magic is based on words, and words can mean more than one thing. I didn't turn him into stone, I turned his consumption into stone. A kidney stone, to be precise. Mind you, the poor lad wasn't happy for a few weeks after, but eventually he passed the stone and recovered, which is better than what would have happened otherwise."

"Amazing....and Rolfe the guardsman told me you alleviated his brother's madness. Did you turn that into a kidney stone, as well?" the Castellan inquired, curiously.

The mage shook his head. "That was a disease of the mind, I couldn't turn it into a disease of the body. I had to stretch some definitions there, to be honest: he was mad before, but now he's just stoned, instead. 'Fraid he's still not going to be going back to work any time soon, but he's also not likely to hurt himself or no one else. And you should hear 'im play that lute of his, now!"

The Castellan laughed. "Extraordinary! You know, even with that limitation, I'm surprised you're not someone's court wizard -- I mean to say, what lord wouldn't want a wizard in his employ who can turn anything into stone? The military applications alone!"

Bartholomew tilted his hand from side-to-side noncommittally. "It's both more and less useful than you'd think, squire. Turning things like consumption and madness into stone is easy. The bits of a man's brains that make him go mad are tiny, and the little buggers -- 'animalcules' the scholars call 'em -- what cause consumption are even tinier still. I don't have the power to turn nothing big into stone. That requires more knowledge than what I've got, and more expensive materials than just stone dust, besides."

"But what about the rats?" the Castellan asked, gesturing around the cellar.

"Well, this cellar's ancient, squire. The keep above has been rebuilt a few times, but this cellar has been here since the Duke's first ancestor. A well-defined space that's been around for ages? Places like that concentrate and amplify magic. I reckon that's why you find so many wizards in old ruins, and so few in brand-new houses." Bartholomew explained. "But even here, I couldn't control the magic very well. That's why I made sure to get you to stand back -- any living thing in the cellar would have been turned to stone, not just rats."

"Ah, I see..." the Castellan said, nodding slowly. Then he froze. "Oh Divine..."

Bartholomew blinked. "Squire?"

The Castellan ignored him. He sprinted down the rows of wine racks to the far end of the old cellar, then rounded the three huge barrels of common wine at the end. His eyes widened in horror. There, behind the massive wine barrels on a pile of old sacks, lay the Duke's son, along with several empty wine bottles, a half-full bottle still tucked into the crook of one arm...an arm that, like the rest of the Ducal heir's body, was now made of dark gray granite.

As the Castellan stared in mute disbelief, Bartholomew plodded up beside him. When he saw the Duke's son, he let out a long low whistle.

"Huh. Well, this one's gonna be tricky..." the budget mage muttered.

Ha! I see I'm not the only one who misread it as "AITA" instead of "AMA" at first.

"I'm a Snow Blower," my latest patient explained, in lieu of a normal introduction.

That had been the trend lately. The Phonographs, the Autogyros, the Diesel Engines -- affluent youths with cybernetic addictions were all naming their little "gangs" after obsolete tech, these days.

"Listen, you want a group discount for your gang, come back with a half dozen of your friends ready to get work done and maybe, maybe we'll talk about that." I said, bluntly. "Otherwise, I deal in creds, as in actual gov or crypto credits, not street cred."

She shook her head. "No no no. I'm not in a gang called 'The Snow Blowers'. I, personally, am a snow blower."

"What?"

"A motorized device used for removing snow from sidewalks -- although it actually uses an auger or impeller, rather than air pressure, so the 'blower' part is kind of a misnomer." she explained. "See, before thermal pavement was common, people used to--"

"I know what a snow blower is!" I snapped. "What do you mean you are one?"

"Well, I mean I would have been one, if only I'd been born into the right era." she amended, looking off into space wistfully, presumably imagining someone slowly pushing her across a snow-covered sidewalk.

"If only." I said, drily. "So you want me to...?"

"These come off," she said briskly, drawing imaginary lines across her legs. "Instead, put on a Class R fusion engine, and either tank treads or some big knobby tires, and then up front, instead of my arms--"

"Get out."

"Have you found our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?" the smartly dressed young missionary said to the man at the door.

The tall, gray-eyed man shot a glance to his right, then looked back at the missionaries. Without a word, he stood aside, and gestured for the two young men to come inside. He directed them to one of two old but comfortable looking couches on either side of a coffee table, then sat down across from them, his hands folded in his lap.

Then he just sat there, saying nothing.

The missionaries looked at each other. The first missionary cleared his throat. "So, I'm Micah, and this is Stephen."

The man nodded.

"We'd...we'd like to tell you about...um...about the Lord." Stephen added.

The man made a gesture that seemed to invite them to proceed.

"Well...so...uh..." Micah began, awkwardly, as the man continued to stare. "Jesus--"

The man glanced at the corner of the room again, then held up a hand.

"Wait." the man said sharply, bringing the young missionary up short.

He stared at a point on the wall next the front door for a few moments, occasionally nodding, then turned back to his guests.

"He says you need to work on your technique," the man said flatly.

"He...?" Stephen said, looking from the man to the empty corner.

"Jesus Christ," the man said, gesturing to the corner.

"Um, you're...you're saying Jesus is here?" Micah asked, hesitantly.

"Obviously." the man replied. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." He gestured to the missionaries in turn, and then to himself. "One, two, three."

"But--" Stephen began.

"But what? But that's just a metaphor? But it doesn't really mean that?" the man asked, calmly. "Does it not? What if it means exactly what it says? That right now, He is present here. That in this moment, the eyes of the everlasting Logos, the seven-horned and seven-eyed Lamb that lives and was dead, are resting upon you, beholding not only what you say and do, but what you think, what you feel, and all that you have ever done or ever will do."

The shadows in the room seemed to grow long and deep as the man spoke, as though cast by an impossibly bright light. "How do you bear up under the gaze of Eternity? What will you do? Fall to your knees, like Moses? Run and hide yourself, like Adam in the Garden? Will you be burned to ash? Turned into a pillar of salt?"

Moments later, both young missionaries burst out of the man's front door at a run. He appeared in the doorway a moment later, and watched their retreat.

"Good," he said, after a moment. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Time is a circle. What has happened before will happen again. Thus has it always been, thus will it always be.

Lord Rizath the Deciever had lived for innumerable eons in a cycle that had begun so long ago that even he did not know how it started.

He'd gather an army of monsters and men, and scourge the world for decades. A hero would arise to challenge him, and ultimately defeat him. But as his body died, the lingering spark of his essence would escape his physical ruin, and implant itself into the hero.

Then he would whisper into the hero's mind, slowly corrupting him, until his thoughts were no more than an echo of Rizath's own. He'd drive them to flee into seclusion, preserving his new vessel's life with his dark power for a century or more, until both they and Rizath were forgotten by the world. Then he'd gather an army of monsters and men, and scourge the world for decades. And so on.

Rizath didn't like the part where he was always defeated, of course, but he'd learned to accept it. After all, despite being doomed to lose eventually, he got to spend far more time winning. And even in that final moment of crushing failure, he knew that time is a circle, and he'd be back on top soon enough.

Right up until that last time.

Perun Eagle-Eyes had smote Rizath with his ancient holy sword, little realizing he was striking down the very body that had struck down Rizath with that same holy sword, a few centuries earlier.

Rizath fell screaming in pain and rage, with white light streaming out of his eyes, his mouth, and a thousand cracks that formed all over his body. His deaths were always spectacular light shows, like that.

Amid that distracting display, a dull orange ember drifted up from his body, and floated slowly to the side, before arcing towards Perun, who was raising his blade to the sky in triumph.

Closer...a little closer...

Perun's famously keen eyes suddenly turned towards Rizath's ember of essence, when it was only inches away. Startled, the glowing mote that was Rizath used the last of his power to dart forward and down, aiming for his new home deep inside the hero's heart.

And Perun, apparently driven by some unknown instinct, dodged.

The incorporeal speck of Rizath's being sailed through empty air, then through the roof of the Royal Palace atop which Rizath and Perun had their final battle. Down he went, into the Royal Residence below, where a young man crouched in the center of a phalanx of guards, along with the rest of the Royal Family, who had hunkered down in their keep when Rizath assaulted the palace.

Rizath had no choice to but collide with him, and sink into his heart.

His horror at the deviation from what had seemed to be an unending cycle faded, however, when he realized where he was. It was not the heart he'd sought, not the heart of the one that had laid him low. But it was the heart of a prince.

/./././././

Prince Cameron leaned against the battlements atop the castle, and yawned. He'd gotten up an hour past midday, and after a hearty brunch he'd decided it was high time he made some very important decisions.

Should I go play cards with the young Duke of Westport's party, he mused, turning to look towards the west side of the city, where the game would be taking place at an aristocratic gambling den. Or should I slum it tonight, and go watch the pit fights down by the harbor?

He turned towards the east side of the city, where a very exclusive high-class brothel was located. Or....

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of galloping hooves in the courtyard. Cameron's brother Caelan, the heir to the throne, was riding out on his white destrier, flanked by a pair of royal guards. Cameron smirked. He was probably rushing off on some tedious errand their father had sent him on. As the heir, Caelan was often called upon to carry out certain royal duties in the king's name, to prepare him for his own eventual rule.

Colm, the second-oldest, also frequently had to perform such royal drudgery, just in case anything happened to both father and Caelan. Even Corey, the king's third son, had to shoulder some of the load, occasionally.

Thank the Divine I'm the fifth in line of five, Cameron thought, not for the first time. The King might think his youngest son was a lout, but the Queen doted on Cameron, and the old man had never been able to say no to his beloved wife.

As a result, Cameron got what he wanted, and could do as he liked. And best of all, no one expected anything from him.

Which is why, a part of him thought, They'd never suspect you were behind it, if hired brigands dressed as soldiers from Lothholm killed Corey and Ciaran while they were off on one of those stupid hunting trips of theirs.

He frowned thoughtfully, as he followed that line of thinking further. There'd be war with Lothholm, then -- father wouldn't want Caelan to go, but he'd insist, and the old man would relent, because he was a warrior in his youth. That idiot Colm always follows Caelan wherever he goes, so he'd ride off to war as well. Normally noblemen and royals aren't killed in battle, they're ransomed back to their homeland, but letters to the right people in Lothholm, telling them where the princes would be encamped, could take of that...

Then Cameron chuckled. Imagine doing that much work!

And for what? So he could become king, and have to do even more work? He shook his head, and produced a flask from inside his doublet, taking a long pull on the strong spirit therein. Best to keep his mind pleasantly sedated, rather than let it come up with more nonsense like that, he thought. He had far more important things to consider.

The whorehouse it is! he decided, after a few more moments of contemplation, and then he loped easily towards the stairs, to descend from the battlements.

Just after dawn, Nastaya walked up the hill outside Mirosk, where she'd been told the cottage of an old man named Fyodor could be found. Fyodor, people said, could give you answers to questions that no one else could, though he was not a scholar, nor a priest, nor a man of learning. Fyodor of Mirosk was an just an old fool.

But he was no ordinary old fool.

Fyodor was a holy fool, and Nastaya knew that people came from miles around to seek out his foolishness, which was of a particularly blessed variety. Of course, many also said that he was only a common fool, and that folks simply read their own meaning into his ramblings. But Nastaya had nowhere else to turn.

Not long ago her parents had perished in a fire that consumed their home and all that they'd owned, leaving her alone in the world. She was bereft, but beyond that she also had no prospects, no dowry, and scarcely a penny to her name.

Nastaya's was without a home, her heart was broken, and she did not know what to do. In her desperation, she was willing to see if perhaps this holy fool did know.

She crested the hill and came upon the cottage, a humble little house of thatch and stone. On low stone wall that ran about the small house, a young man sat, whittling a piece of wood with a knife.

That was not old Fyodor, she was certain, for he was ancient by all accounts. It was doubtless one of the caretakers who looked after the old man. The lad looked up from his whittling, and gave her a curt nod, but he said nothing, and went back to his quiet work. That was the way of things, she'd been told -- you did not speak, at the old fool's cottage. You waited for him to speak to you.

And wait she did for quite some time, standing before the old cottage, until her legs were wobbly from standing so long. She feared to move, or to sit like the young man, terrified that in doing she would break some taboo she hadn't been warned about, and offend Fyodor -- perhaps even offend God Himself, from whence the man's foolish wisdom was said to flow.

The sun was high in the sky, before Fyodor finally emerged from his cottage. The rumors had not lied -- the stooped old man looked as ancient as the Earth, with wrinkles like deep canyons across his gaunt face, and a wispy white beard that hung down to his waist. He hobbled out onto the green around his house with the aid of a gnarled oak branch, moving slowly and with great care.

Nastaya hardly dared to breathe, as she waited for him to speak. But to her dismay, he seemed not to notice her.

He puttered around on his little patch of lawn, humming softly to himself. He paused to regard a red tuft-eared squirrel in a tree,

"Invest wisely, young man -- wisely, now!" he admonished the little beast.

He then hobbled over to another tree, to poke with his stick at a cluster of toadstools among its roots.

"Good, good. Just like that! Keep up the good work," said to the mushrooms, approvingly.

Nastaya's heart began to sink as she watched this display, listening with growing trepidation to the old man's meaningless one-sided conversation with beasts, birds, and plants. A part of her began to see how desperate people might make too much of a poor old man in his dotage, who was only giving voice to half-faded memories as his wits were failing him.

Her hope returned somewhat, when suddenly he turned to her.

"Sorry!" the old man said, looking suddenly abashed, and hobbling quickly toward her.

She almost said it was alright, that she hadn't minded the long wait, but then she remembered the injunction she'd been given not to speak. Regardless, she soon discovered that had not been why he'd apologized.

He gestured with his branch to the ground at her feet, where a small clump of flowers grew. "I'm sorry about those, young lady. There was no other way to go about it, you see."

Nastaya blinked in bewilderment.

"It's the way of the world, I'm afraid." he said, shaking his head sadly. "I'd love to grow flowers from honey, truly, but it just won't happen, not this side of heaven, my dear. I had to use other things, foul things, to be sure. Ashes, and bones, and foul night soil -- all sorts of awfulness."

Then he stepped close to her, eyes suddenly wide and pleading. "But...but they are lovely aren't they? Aren't they?"

Not knowing what else to do, she nodded, and Fyodor smiled at her, seeming relieved. Then he blinked stupidly, and gave his head a shake. He looked at her as though seeing her for the first time, and he frowned.

"What?" he said, suddenly fixing her with a disapproving frown. "Young woman! This is unseemly, very unseemly! Your husband in the churchyard is beside himself!"

She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it, remembering the rules. She didn't understand. She had no husband -- she had no one at all.

Fyodor shook his branch at her vigorously, and continued his admonition. "Have you no care for your reputation, woman? For mine? Imagine, wandering about outside a handsome bachelor's cottage, when your own husband has need of you! Be gone!"

She danced back with a surprised squeak, avoiding a clumsy swing of Fyodor's branch. She looked at the young man seated on the wall, wide-eyed, but he only jerked his head toward the path down the hill, and then went back to his whittling.

Head bowed, she retreated, and trudged back down the hill. It seemed the people who said Fyodor was only a mad old man had been right. She supposed she did not blame him -- not really. He had surely not asked for his mind to fail him in his old age, and probably had no idea what he was doing, or why all these people were visiting him. But her heart, already leaden with grief, was now heavier still, her last faint hope expended on a fool's errand.

But then, as she passed, the old village church, she heard a sound.

It was a sound she knew too well, so familiar to her that she touched her throat, half-expecting to find that it was her own voice crying out. That sound had emerged from her lips and rung in her ears long into the night for many days, now. It was the sound of inconsolable sorrow, of utterly desolate grief.

Hesitantly, she followed it.

There, in the graveyard behind the old church, she found its source. A young man dressed in black, beside a fresh grave adorned with flowers. She could see there had lately been a funeral there, but when all others had departed, this man had stayed. Whoever had been with him could not tear him away from the graveside, and had finally left him alone with his grief.

As if in a trance, Nastaya walked to him then, slowly and haltingly, as though while dragging the weight of her own sorrow, a portion of this lone mourner's grief had begun to descend on her shoulders as well, until it almost drove her into the ground with its weight. And yet, she bore it, because when it had been her, wailing by the ashes of her parents' home, she had borne all that sorrow alone. She could not let this stranger do the same.

At last Nastaya reached the stranger, and quietly knelt by his side. Silently sobbing as he mourned aloud, she bravely bore his pain. In the days to come, he would bear hers as well, and by bearing each other's suffering they at last would emerge together from night into day once again. And just as they had shared each other's suffering, they would also thereafter share each other's joy, and love, and finally peace, until the very end of their days.

Far above them, on the hilltop, Fyodor smiled.

If only we had realized the danger sooner.

We are immortal. We do not fear that which humans fear. The poisons that harm our prey do not harm us, and the diseases they carry cannot infect us.

This 'climate change'? Ha. What was that to us? In the worst case scenario, the oceans rise for a while, and at most one in ten prey die off -- we live thousands of years, and only ever number in the tens of thousands, while our short-lived prey reproduce like rabbits, and are counted in the billions.

Even "disasters" like Fukushima were of little note to us -- the only radiation that harms us is that of the sun. Were they to bomb themselves back to the stone age with their nuclear arsenals, there are still so many of them that there would almost certainly still be enough to maintain a viable herd. Their lives might be short and miserable for a long age, while the fallout faded, they might be wracked with chronic diseases and mutations, but what did that matter? They are kine, cattle! We do not care for their comfort.

Those who thought they could taste a range of subtle flavors, who swore that they preferred the blood of contented, healthy prey were as deluded as those prey who obsess over the supposed qualities of wine. Blood is blood!

Or so I thought.

It began when a few of the children of my nest began to grow...ungainly. Slower. Their strength had not diminished, and of course we do not age or become diseased, but they could no longer move as they once did. It was...perplexing. The arcane mysteries of our unlife, of the dark and subtle thaumaturgy that allows us to defy death, had no explanation for how this could be so.

Desperate, I turned to mortal science, bringing some of their brightest minds under my thrall. They examined our flesh and blood with the instruments of their craft...and found the source of our malady.

Plastic. It was plastic.

We do not conform to laws of mortal biology. We do not "digest" or "metabolize." But we are subject to a more fundamental law of nature, that holds true in both the arcane and mundane realms: that which you consume becomes part of you.

The mortal doctors tell me that contamination in the food chain becomes more concentrated, the higher you go up the chain. It is why even the prey must take care when consuming predatory fish, who have accumulated the most mercury in their bodies by eating other fish. But we are at the very top of the food chain, for we feed on the creatures that feed on everything else.

Slowly, over time, microplastic contamination had built up in our prey. It could not poison us, we are beyond that, but it could make us become it.

I have brought more mortals than ever under my thrall, compelling them to campaign against this contamination on my behalf, straining the limits of my powers to control so many at once.

And yet, more than half of my brood lie helpless and inert in their coffins, more lifeless plastic than undead flesh. The rest help me gather blood from remote places to feed the ones who cannot move, blood from more primitive prey. We hope it will be untainted -- or at least less tainted -- and that it will reverse the transformation, given enough time.

So far it has not.

And despite the care we now take in where we obtain blood, my still-moving children are still slowly changing. They are becoming something neither dead nor undead, something less than either: they are becoming non-living. Like a stone. Like plastic.

I fight to save them. I drive and scourge and browbeat my thralls to work faster and work harder to find a solution, to stop this contamination -- to use that damnable boundless cunning of theirs to find a way to reverse it! But it is growing harder.

And I am growing slower.

The Old Enclave

Eileen stood before the bricked-up archway. It was flanked by two crumbling marble figurines set on stone plinths, one with its broken-off head resting between its feet.

When the Lower City was still open to the sky, this place was probably important. Eileen was willing to bet that it still was.

She'd been searching for the Old Enclave since she was first cast out of the Upper City as a teenager. Some said it was a myth, but she believed in the stories that spoke of a place in the Lower where decent folk could be safe and free.

She thought she'd met people from the Enclave in the slums of the Lower, but when she'd asked them how to gain entry, their answers had always been useless, and often rude.

"Read a book, kid." a man had told her, gruffly, then refused to say another word.

"Tch! Be more humble, child." one old woman had rasped, before hurrying away.

"Sorry," a younger man had said with a smirk, leering at her body in passing, "But you've got to be a real head-turner, to get in there..."

Now, as she looked up at the ancient edifice with the words "Public Library" still faintly visible above the arch, she thought she finally understood. The Lower was a place for all outcasts, some mere misfits like her, some violent and dangerous.

But the Enclave was only for the wise.

Eileen knelt down before the broken statue and placed her hands on its fallen head. Her heart skipped a beat, as she confirmed her suspicion: the broken-off head was fixed to the plinth.

So instead of lifting it, she turned it.

And then, with a soft grinding of stone upon stone, the brickwork in the archway began to part.

[WC: 297]

II:

Martin sat on a bench in the Great Marketplace, like a rock in a stream, as the crowd flowed around him on both side. For all that, he was blind to the multitude of people of milling around him, and to the merchants beneath their bright awnings.

Martin's eyes were fixed upon the Clock.

Like most watchmakers, Martin had made a study of the Terelandrian Clock in its many forms, which was surely the pinnacle of his craft. Though he could not hope to duplicate the magic that made it run eternally -- much less the subtle sorcery of the Spans -- the ordinary motions of the Clock were mechanical in nature, driven by springs or hanging weights and pendulums, and it was eternally precise, never requiring adjustment.

In theory then, Martin thought that it ought to be possible to replicate the inner workings of the clock to produce a mundane clock just as precise, though of course it would need to be wound now and then, and probably reset once or twice a year.

The problem was that it wasn't possible.

Since watchmakers and other masters of clock work had first begun adapting the workings of the Clock in miniature --based on their study of the mechanical parts of the clock, which could be easily viewed from inside a Clock tower -- they had noticed that their own timepieces, no matter how well crafted during the Span of Making, were simply never as accurate.

They always lost time, and lost it quickly enough that if you wanted to keep your clock precisely synchronized with the Terelandrian Clock -- which almost everyone did -- you had to reset it constantly.

Most people had no reason for such great specificity, and were content to reset theirs every few days. But there were some who kept more precise schedules, like those whose business was trade or travel. Such people still marked the arbitrary "hours" and "minutes" that had been used to divide up the day before the Clock was introduced, watching each minute as a miser watches each penny, and so they set their watches anew each morning, by the nearest Terelandrian Clock.

Most watchmakers had accepted this as a natural limitation of their craft, presuming that some spell or enchantment was what kept the Terelandrian Clock from losing time, and that this precision simply could not be replicated with mere springs and counterweights.

But Martin did not accept this. Though the Clock had magical springs that never wore out, and enchanted gears that never seized, it seemed to Martin that these merely prevented it from breaking -- the magic did not appear to change the fundamental nature of the parts, or of the materials they'd been made from. Perhaps you could not make a mundane clock that was correct forever, due to its components eventually wearing out, but he saw no good explanation for why such a clock couldn't keep time for more than a day.

Or at least he hadn't before.

It had happened by accident, on a day when his passion for unravelling the mechanical secrets of the Clock had been running especially high, and he'd decided to remain in his workshop during the Span of Wealth, instead of taking his stock to the Great Marketplace to sell, as usual.

He had two newly made watches, that he'd set by the Terelandrian Clock only an hour before, and both were as precise a work as he'd ever constructed. Both were set on his workbench while he worked on a third of the same type, hoping that by observing the workings of identical pieces, he could deduce something about the problem that made them lose time so readily.

He worked all the way through the Span of Wealth, until, as it always did, that Span ended, and gave way to the momentary Span of Renewal. As the two watches ticked down to the end of the Span, he lifted his tools from the delicate clockwork, so the Span of Renewal would not take him unaware while he was making a fine adjustment. The disorienting fugue rolled over him like a wave, and was just as quickly gone, as the Span of Making began.

He had been just about to go back to work when he noticed it: in the space of a eyeblink, both of the newly set timepieces had advanced by a minute.

By exactly one minute.

I:

Tick-Tock. Tick-tock.

The people within and without the Great Marketplace waited with bated breath, all eyes on the clock tower in the square.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The tension grew as the clock's hour hand edged towards the golden sigil at the apex of its face.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The eager merchants made last-minute adjustments to the carefully displayed and positioned wares laid out in their stalls. Their just as eager patrons shifted from foot to foot excitedly, just outside the market gates.

GONNNG

The clock's ornate hand fell upon the Sigil of Wealth, tolled a clear note upon its great brazen bells, and the marketplace guards threw open the gates. The people rushed in, quick but orderly, and the merchants began calling out to them, loud and bold, yet still respectful. Any patron who battered or shoved another, and any merchant who was obnoxious in hawking his wares, would be seized by the guards, and barred from the market during the Span of Wealth for a year and day. No one wanted to risk that. Far better to risk losing out on a good trade today, than to risk that long exile from the Great Marketplace -- especially since you could always try your luck again tomorrow.

For during this special Span, a subtle magic was laid upon the world that nudged fate in the direction of abundance, and ever so slightly bent the laws governing reality towards largesse. Not always, but once in a while, a minor miracle would occur, when trade was conducted at this time:

Sometimes a patron would make his purchases, and he would find that the coins he'd given the merchants had somehow not diminished the number of coins that he held in his pouch. Similarly, a merchant would sometimes find that the coins in his coffers at the end of the Span were somehow well in excess of those that he'd made selling his wares.

As the people went about their business, hoping for one of those infrequent blessings, above them all stood that shining clock tower, and the patrons moved, and the merchants moved, and the world itself moved, according to the ticking of the Terelandrian Clock.

Long ago, Terelandrius the Great, the immortal mage whose understanding of time and space was said to have grown so vast that the passage of time no longer aged him, had given his wondrous masterworks to the world freely.

Every great city in the world had been given one of his glorious clock towers, every small town had been presented with one of his standing pedestal clocks for the town square, and even the larger farming villages had been gifted with intricate wall clocks to place upon the wall of the local tavern.

As a result, almost all civilized folk lived according to the Spans, the mystical segments of time delineated by the Terelandrian Clock, that were auspicious for doing one thing or another. Trading of course, was best done during the Span of Wealth. Likewise, work done on planting and harvesting was most fruitful when it took place during the Span of Growth, as were the amorous exertions of couples who wished to be blessed with children. The work of craftsmen and artisans was at its finest when it was done during the Span of Making, and the creations of artists and scholars were most inspired in the Span of Mind.

None doubted the benign nature of the Clock. How could they? The great wizard, otherwise aloof from worldly affairs, had asked nothing in return for his gifts, and indeed the histories recorded that when he first bestowed them, he openly swore upon his name and his magical power that he would never ask repayment from the people of the world.

Moreover, the subtle magics of the Clock seemed utterly harmless -- Terelandrius had not, after all, made any Spans well suited for war, strife, or suffering. A belligerent king might have spears and arrows crafted during the Span of Making, true, but then so too could his enemies craft shields and armor during that same time.

And the blessings of the Clock were applied equally to all the people of the world, favoring no nation or kingdom above another: each of the four spans recurred across the clock multiple times per day, so that no matter where on the globe you were, you had a fair chance to benefit from each Span at least once during the day. The only singular point on the clock was the smallest Span of all, the one that existed at the bottom of the clock face: The Span of Renewal. This Span lasted only as long as the time between tick and tock, and occurred all over the world at once.

It was scarcely remarked upon by most, who experienced it only as a transient moment of malaise, as though they had dozed off for a second or two and then come back to their senses. Then it was gone, and the clock moved on to the next Span in order. This, Terelandrius had explained when he presented his clocks to the world, was when the magic of the Terelandrian Clock recharged itself, so the Spans could begin again.

Those who lived in lands where it was night when the Span of Renewal occurred hardly knew it existed at all, as they were either already asleep when it happened, or if not it simply blended into the ordinary fatigue at the end of the day's labor. It could occasionally be inconvenient, and obliged folk to try not to do anything extremely delicate or important at that precise moment, but otherwise it seemed as harmless as everything else about the Clock. All believed this was true for centuries.

The first to doubt it was a man named Martin -- Martin, the watchmaker.

II:

Once, long ago, there was a little old Tinker, with a little old shop, tucked away in the dingiest corner of a little old city that is now gone from the world. Though merely a tinker, the least of all artisans, he was also a genius of his craft: for it was said of this Tinker, that he could make whatever you wished.

He'd work wonders with the humblest of materials: once, a poor farmer came to him for a weapon to protect his family, for a cart of his produce had been looted and wrecked by bandits while his son was taking it to market, and the farmer's son himself beaten and left for dead. From iron band of a broken cart-wheel, the Tinker made an iron blade and crossguard, and crafted a hilt from one of its wooden spokes, bound together with strips of hide from the poor old carthorse the bandits had cruelly slain in their pillaging.

Thus armed the farmer learned to use his uncommon blade through much practice, and thereafter he brought justice to the bandits by the edge of his sword, becoming renowned as a mighty warrior, and a terror to brigands throughout the land.

On another occasion, a simple washer-woman came to the Tinker, and begged him for a dress for her faithful, hardworking daughter, who secretly desired above all else to attend the kingdom's grand ball. She could only offer a small bag of coins, mostly copper, with a precious few silver pennies mixed in. But the Tinker took her coins, and told her to send him her daughter to be measured, along with one of the simple frocks she owned.

When the night of the ball came, the young woman was arrayed in the most wondrous gown the kingdom had ever seen: though woven of simple dyed linen, it was so beautifully adorned with finely wrought copper ornaments, and so intricately embroidered with silver thread, that it outshone garments made from the rarest of silks. The washer-woman's daughter was the belle of the ball that night, and she attracted the interest of a handsome young lord, who would later become her husband.

The Tinker made many such creations for many folk in need, taking but little payment for his services, and sometimes taking none at all. But alas, one night, he fell asleep at his little workbench, and never woke again. The good people of the little old city where he lived mourned the kindly old Tinker sorrowfully, and gave him as a fine a funeral as that of any king.

Amid the pomp and ceremony that surrounded his burial, the Tinker's shop was all but forgotten, for it had been as humble as the Tinker himself, and had contained nothing of any great value.

But one day, a young man from afar who had heard of the renowned Tinker, came to that little old city, with a fervent wish burning in his heart. He was sad when he learned the Tinker was dead, but having come so far he still went to find the little old shop, which had sat untouched since its owner's death.

Within it, he found the little old workbench where he'd been told that the little old Tinker had labored on his last night. Atop it lay the broken pieces of a brazen vessel, whose original form and purpose could not be guessed at from its bent and shattered remains, along with a number of different metal files, resting on a bed of bronze filings beneath a thick blanket of dust.

But in the center of the pile of abandoned tools and metal shavings, somehow untouched by the years of accumulated dust, was the object the Tinker had made from the filed-down shards of the vessel on his last night: a gleaming bronze key. With awe and wonder, not quite knowing why, the young man took the key, and clutched it to his breast.

And then he made the first wish, upon the Wishmaker's Key.

I:

Florian let out a long sigh. The last trap had been foiled, the last puzzle solved, and the many treacherous decoy treasures dismissed. Finally, he stood at the center of the vast underground labyrinth he had painstakingly navigated over the course of the past month, and beheld the object of his search: an unassuming wooden coffer set atop a plain stone plinth.

Hand trembling, he reached out and lifted the coffer's lid. His eyes widened, as the light of his torch caught the glint of the polished bronze object inside.

The Wishmaker's Key.

Many great men and women had benefited from its subtle magic, he knew. Though the wielders of the Key were never simply handed their heart's desire, somehow -- often through trials and tribulations -- they found their way to that which they had wished for. And now, it was his turn.

He did not know where the Key would take him, or what it would require of him in order to grant his wish. But he had come this far, and despite his weariness, he was ready to take the next step on his journey. Reverently, he lifted the key from its coffer.

In appearance, it was a large skeleton key of a simple design, and might have been belonged to the door of any number of humble dwellings. But the untarnished mirror-like gleam of its surface told a different tale. This was something well cared for, something long treasured.

He took a deep breath. He'd thought long and hard about how to word his wish, but in the end, he decided to simply speak from the heart. The Wishmaker's Key was no monkey's paw, nor was it some trickster genie that was eager to twist the words of its master.

"I wish to know your story." Florian said. "What are you, and where do you come from?"

"Interesting. Rarely are the Key's journeys so short," said a voice from behind him.

Florian whirled around to face the source of the sound. An old man in long blue robes stood before, leaning on a gnarled wooden staff. His face was mature, though not elderly in appearance, despite his long white hair, and the white beard that reached below the belt of golden cord at his waist. A broad-brimmed hat with a pointed crown perched on his head at an angle, and Florian's eyes widened as he saw the three white owl's feathers that adorned the ban.

"Alfarinn Owlfeather!" he exclaimed. According to Florian's research, Alfarinn had been the builder of the labyrinth he now stood in, as well as the Key's most recent wielder. But then, according to that same research, he should also have been long dead, by this time.

"Indeed!" the wizard affirmed, with a nod. "And you are a rarity, young sir. Many have Wished for wealth or power, a few have wished for knowledge, but you are the first I know of to ask for a story."

"I thought I wanted those other things, once." Florian admitted, cautiously. "That's why I became what I am, er...a treasure hunter, I suppose."

"Hmm," Alfarinn said, nodding thoughtfully. "What changed, then?"

Florian eyed the old wizard uncertainly. Older magi tended towards eccentricity, and could be unpredictable. He wasn't sure if the wizard considered him a thief or a guest, but he decided honestly was probably the best policy -- wizards often had ways of discerning truth from falsehood.

"Ever since I was a child, my favorite stories were the ones about the Wishmaker's Key," Florian explained. "I loved hearing and reading about all the amazing people throughout history who've wielded the Key, and gone on incredible adventures to find their heart's desire."

"And?" Alfarinn prompted, raising his bushy eyebrows.

"And, after researching the Key, hunting for it, and finding wealth and adventure along the way...it's occurred to me that what I really wanted most wasn't to use the Key for some other end. What I really want is more of the story."

The wizard nodded. "You may disappointed, then. The story of the Wishmaker's Key has no ending -- nor will it ever, I should think."

"I know." Florian said, with a slight smile. "And I wouldn't want it to. That's why I wished to know the beginning."

The wizard smiled back. "Ah, I see now. Then it is as I said -- the journey the Key has sent you on to find your heart's desire is quite short. But considering the journey you undertook to claim it in the first place, perhaps that is only fair."

The wizard raised his staff, and two arm chairs appeared next to the stone plinth. Orbs of light flashed into existence around the central chamber of the labyrinth, revealing it to be a surprisingly cozy-looking study lined with bookshelves.

"Have a seat," the old mage prompted, and Florian obliged.

"If I may ask..." Florian said, feeling bolder now that it seemed the wizard was kindly disposed towards him. "What did you wish for?"

"To become a great wizard and find the secret of immortality." Alfarinn said, with a chuckle. "Rather cheeky of me, wasn't it, working in two wishes at once like that?"

"You're immortal?" Florian asked, excitedly.

"Yes. As are you, and as are all men. The core of who we are is not flesh and blood, and cannot die. This is the true secret of immortality." Alfarinn gestured to his relatively young face. "Oh, this? Merely a few workings of magic that prolong life. My body shall live long and remain hale, Divine willing, but it will still perish one day."

"I see." Florian said, frowning thoughtfully. "And what of the Key, and its origins?"

"Ah, that is something I discovered in the process of granting the first half of my wish." Alfarinn said. He gestured to the Wishmaker's Key that Florian still held in his hand. "Even objects without a mind have a kind of memory, and I found that the Key is no exception. With the right bit of magic, that memory can be coaxed out of them."

The old wizard learned forward, with a mysterious smile. "So, young man, here is where the story of the Wishmaker's Key begins..."

(continued in comments)

Shaun had tracked the reports of missing livestock and shepherds to the small mountain village of Vastok. He'd found some of the missing beasts penned up with the villagers' own livestock, but the villagers claimed they'd been found wandering along the trails that wound up the mountainside.

He had no reason to doubt them, for the gory scene he'd witnessed around the shepherd's hut down in the valley was the work of a monster, not of mere thieves. If the monster was what he thought it was, he could easily believe that the surviving flock had been driven up the trail by primal terror.

The village headman, a narrow-eyed gaffer named Arlan, seemed to see his presence as an affront to the reputation of the tiny community, and told him that if it was a monster he sought, he'd find none in Vastok.

He did, however, provide Shaun with one useful bit of information: some Vastok folk said there was a huge shaggy wolf, a loner without a pack, that lived in a cave a few miles outside the village, where none dared venture.

Arlan wasn't sure he believed it, himself, but the village set watchmen at night bearing spears and torches, just in case. Perhaps, the old man opined, the beast had decided to try its luck among the less watchful valley folk?

Common spears would hold no terror for the thing that Shaun suspected was roaming the region, but a burning torch swung at it would give it pause, perhaps. It was worth checking out, in any case.

He left the village, and hiked to the cave.

When he came to mouth of the cavern, it's entrance half-hidden in behind a screen of scraggly pines, he immediately saw signs of his quarry. His sharp eyes spotted a mix of gnawed animal bones, torn sacks, and broken crockery around the cave entrance -- the litter he'd expect from a creature that was both man and beast.

He lit a torch to light his way, and then drew his sword. Common weapons could not harm the monster he hunted, but his blade Rivenstar was no common weapon. It was not made of steel, but was forged of enchanted silver, alloyed with metal from a fallen star.

The holy sword's blade became razor sharp and glowed like the star that had birthed it when in the presence of evil, and it sliced through the dark power that protected monsters from mortal steel as easily as it cleaved their flesh.

Armed with this instrument of divine vengeance, he walked boldly forward into the cave. He followed the winding passage that led out the large entrance cavern, as it wormed it's way deeper into the rock, his eyes searching every shadow.

As he emerged into a larger chamber inside the cave system, a large shaggy gray shape blurred past him, into a side passage. He gave chase, and almost stumbled right into a...bear trap? The thing set traps in it's lair? Proceeding more carefully, he avoided two more bear trap, and skirted around a pit trap lined with sharpened stakes.

Finally, he burst out into another wide chamber, holding his torch aloft. There in the corner, the hackles on its broad back bristling, the creature crouched and snarled, baring long canines. It's overall shape was like that of an enormous man, save for it's legs, which bent like a wolf's, and instead of paws it had clawed hands on its forelimbs. Its head was horrific blend of man and wolf, that glared at him with lambent golden eyes.

It lunged forward, but Shaun warded it back with the torch. He scowled, and raised his blade to strike....

...then he paused. Rivenstar did not burst into light, and its edge did not grow keen.

"Wulver," he whispered, staring at the creature in amazement. "You're no werewolf, you're a Wulver."

The creature looked startled.

"You...know of me?" it growled, uncertainly.

Shaun slowly lowered his sword. "Yes. Of your kind, at least. I know you Wulver are not evil by nature -- unlike the bedeviled Werewolves."

"Few ordinary humans can see any difference between us." the Wulver snarled.

Shaun held up his still darkened blade. "Perhaps. But Rivenstar shines against evil, yet sheds no light on you. To merely have a fearful appearance is no crime. My blade does not condemn you, so neither do I."

He sheathed his sword, and the Wulver's golden eyes widened in surprise. It had clearly not expected that.

"Why do you guard your lair with traps, Wulver?" Shaun asked, curiously. "Protection against the villagers?"

"Aye, human, they come hunting me, sometimes. But I confound them with my snares, and with my knowledge of these caves," the Wulver rumbled.

Shaun sighed, his mouth pressing into a grim line. "I see. They hate you, because they think you're a monster."

The Wulver looked surprised again. He shook his shaggy head. "No, human. They hate me because I'm not."

/./././

Several minutes later, Shaun emerged from the cave entrance, the Wulver beside him. After what the Wulver -- whose name was Harreth, he'd learned -- had told him, he wasn't surprised to find Arlan and several of the villagers waiting for them there.

"Well," Arlan sneered. "It seems the worthless runt isn't even up to the challenge of taking down the weakest of prey -- despite our practically gift-wrapping it for him."

Shaun drew his sword, and extended it towards Arlan and the villagers. They cursed and flinched back as it burst into light in their presence. "I am no one's prey, monster. And by the Divine, you will trouble neither the Wulver nor the valley any more, after this night."

Arlan growled, flashing teeth that elongated into fangs in a blink, his eyes turning yellow and luminous. Around him, the other villagers he'd brought with him began to change, as well.

"Stay behind me." Shaun advised the Wulver, setting his stance.

"No..." Harreth growled. He crouched beside Shaun, baring his fangs, as the werewolves of Vostak assembled before them, hatred and hunger in their eyes.

"I am done hiding!" the Wulver roared.

Elise had never lied to Jason. Considering the secret she had to keep, she was proud of that fact -- although, it wasn't as though he'd ever looked in her in the eye and asked her "Are you a werewolf?"

But now, as he knelt before her, looking at her expectantly with an open ring box on his palm, she was at a loss for words. He'd asked her to marry him, and she wanted to say "yes". But if she did, the very next he would do is slide the ring in the box onto her finger.

The silver ring.

Of course it would be silver -- the metal of the moon. They'd talked about how she loved the moonlight, and shared many wonderful nights beneath the moon and stars, though obviously never on the night of the full moon. The princess-cut diamond that the ring was set with was even flanked by a pair of smaller moonstones. It was beautiful -- but to her, it would be pure agony to wear.

"Ellie?" Jason said. He cleared his throat, nervously. "Don't...don't leave me hanging here, babe..."

Think. Think. She had to think. A thousand lies would serve -- a rare silver allergy, maybe? But she didn't want to lie. Not now. Not to him. So she told him something true instead. Not a secret, but something she'd never told him, nonetheless.

"Yes," she said. "I will marry you..."

Then quickly, before he could act, she took the hand that held the ring box, closing it in the process.

"But...I...." she began, uncertainly.

"But you...what?" he asked, his face full of concern.

"I...you remember what I told you, about how messed up my parents' marriage was?" she asked, recalling a past conversation.

"Oh, honey..." he said, placing his other hand atop hers, his brow furrowing with concern.

"There's one thing I'll always remember, from when it was really bad, towards the end. I was home alone one night, they both were out...somewhere. They'd left me money for pizza in a bowl on this little side table by the front door, where they'd always drop their keys, spare change, and stuff like that when they came home. So, when the pizza guy came, I went to get the money...and both their wedding bands were in the bowl underneath it. They'd just left them there before going out, like it was no big deal. Like it was nothing."

Jason's expression softened. "Ellie..." he whispered, sympathetically.

"So part of me...part of me thinks about that night whenever I see a wedding ring." she said, staring down at their hands holding the closed box. "And...I just don't want it to be like that with us. Not ever."

It had started as a deflection, just another diversion to keep Jason from finding out about her, to protect him from the truth. But as she remembered that lonely night when she was a kid, she realized it was more. It was a wound inside her that her gift couldn't heal, not even when the moon was full.

Elise felt Jason's curled finger beneath her chin, and she lifted her eyes as he gently tilted her head up to face him. He smiled at her lovingly, his eyes glistening.

"It won't be." he promised.

Two hours later, Elise leaned in to kiss her betrothed, for probably the tenth time since he'd made his second proposal of the evening -- that he accompany her to a tattoo parlor he knew of that stayed open late. The artist, an acquaintance of Jason's, had been thrilled to work his magic on short notice for the happy couple.

After a moment they broke the kiss, and continued walking hand-in-hand down the quiet street where the tattoo parlor was located. Abruptly, Jason paused, pulling away to take a call on his phone, and so she put her hand into the beam of a streetlight to admire her tiny, intricate tattoo, the first one that either of them had ever gotten.

It was Jason's name, wrapped around her ring finger in a flowing script that matched the "Elise" tattoo on his own finger. She treasured it more than she could have treasured any ring, whether silver or not.

And then, as she watched it, the letters of her future husband's name started to warp and sag. Her eyes widened in shock, as tiny black droplets like inky sweat started to ooze out from her pores.

She realized with horror that her power, the secret that had made her almost impervious to injury by anything other than silver, since the first full moon when she'd changed, was healing away the one wound she'd wanted to keep.

"Okay, sorry -- had to take that..." Jason said, sounding stressed and frustrated. "I just...sorry."

She thrust her ink-stained hand into her pocket.

"That's okay." she squeaked, her mind racing. There was no explaining this. There was no diversion or redirection that could possibly work. She couldn't keep her hand in her pocket for the rest of her life. She didn't know what to say, but she had time to think, as Jason kept talking.

"When I...when I got you that ring..." Jason said. "It was more than a symbol, you know."

Her heart sank. On top of everything else, was Jason having second thoughts about getting tattoos instead of rings?

"It was...it was a symbol of trust. You've always been someone I can be myself with...someone I can be honest with, vulnerable with, but..." Jason stammered, then trailed off.

"I...what are you talking about, Jason?" Elise asked, stopping beside him beneath another streetlamp, looking at the agonized expression on his face, terrified of what he might say.

Jason raised his hand into the light. Elise's eyes widened, as she saw a tiny rivulet of black ink run down the back of his hand, from where the tattoo on his ring finger had been.

"...but I haven't been completely honest with you. There's something I need to tell you." he said.

/ . / . / . / . /

Jason had known, on some level, that if he was going to be with Elise, he couldn't keep her in the dark forever. She would learn his secret, eventually -- he had been amazingly fortunate that she never wanted to go out on the night of the full moon, even though she loved the moonlight as much as he did.

It had been easier to give her a ring made of the one thing that could hurt him, a symbol of his trust and devotion that only he would truly understand the depth of, than to give her the secret that could destroy him.

Had he known her response to learning his his secret would be to burst out in joyful laughter, and then kiss him harder than he'd ever been kissed before, he likely would have told her long before.

"You know," Gregory said, as he regarded the basketball-sized blob of luminous plasma floating beside him. "This isn't how it's supposed to go. It's backwards."

"In what way, Representative?" the blob inquired -- somehow. It had no mouth, despite somehow giving the impression of an obsequious smile.

"Well," Gregory said, as he followed the blob down the corridor, watching colorful translucent wisps swim through the air around him. "I've heard people say that drugs made them see aliens. But I've never heard of anyone getting abducted by aliens, and only then do they start hallucinating."

"You are not hallucinating, Representative." the blob said, cheerfully. "You are merely recovering."

"Yeah, you keep saying that." Gregory mumbled, irritably. "Recovering from what?"

"Chronic malnutrition, mostly. Though your species, as well as the other three sentient species native to your world, seem to have adapted remarkably well, all things considered." the blob replied.

"That's another thing! We tried to tell you when you brought us on board, before you separated us: Dwayne, Ben, Penny and I are all the same species," Gregory said.

"So you have said, Representative. While we recognize that taxonomy may be reckoned differently on your world, for the purposes of membership in the Confederation each of you represents a different sentient species, albeit ones that doubtless share a common evolutionary ancestor," said the blob.

Gregory sighed. "I see how you got there, I guess. I'm about average height, Ben's a little person, Dwayne must be almost seven feet tall...Penny's actually pretty average too, though I think she might be autistic or something, so maybe that's what you're picking up on? Either way, we're all human."

"And we think it is good that you feel a sense of kinship with the other species from your homeworld," the blob said, encouragingly. "The ability to see past species differences will be beneficial, as you join the broader galactic community."

"Except there are no differences, we're the same!" Gregory protested.

"Yes, yes. No need to virtue-signal, Representative. Your strong attachment to your fellow homeworlders has been noted." the blob said, somewhat testily.

Gregory let out another long sigh.

"Now then, since you've completed quarantine and had time to recover while receiving nutritional supplements, we'd like you to join the other representatives for a meeting, so we can discuss how best to conduct a formal First Contact with your species."

Gregory perked up. He hadn't known Ben, Penny, and Dwayne before they were all abducted, and he hadn't spent much time with them before the aliens had separated them, but he found that he was eager to see them. It had been almost a week since he'd seen anyone who wasn't a flying orb of goo.

"Are they hallucinating, too?" Gregory wondered aloud.

"No, and neither are you," the blob reminded him. "We have not given you any psychoactive substances."

"There's something in that food." Gregory grumbled, watching a ghostly six-winged eel swim by through the air, and briefly swivel its eyestalks around to look at him.

"That is true. Specifically, the food we've provided has been fortified with Element 104, a rare mineral formerly present in your planet's food chain, and vital to the life cycle of many species around the galaxy. It appears to have been depleted on your world sometime between now and our last survey of your world some 15,000 years ago," the blob explained. "It's actually quite remarkable that so many of your world's species were able to adapt to living in an ecosystem without it."

"How does a mineral make me see things?" Gregory asked.

"In much the same way that many trace minerals are vital for your biological function, Representative, including that of your sensory organs," the blob said. "Though in point of fact, your species is actually the least sensitive to Element 104 -- only a small gland at the base of your brain is directly impacted by its presence or absence."

"The...pineal gland?" Gregory asked, frowning.

"Yes, I believe that it is your term for it. It was severely atrophied when you were brought aboard, but bioscans indicate it is now recovering nicely," the blob said. "The other species' recovery has been more...pronounced, however."

"I told you, we're all--" Gregory began, and then trailed off, as a door slid open before them, and they entered a large chamber. Inside, were two people he barely recognized.

Ben had grown -- not taller, but broader, and his limbs and facial features had become thicker and more robust. What's more, while he'd been clean shaven when they'd been abducted a few days earlier, he now sported a long, bushy beard.

"''Sup, Greg!" he called cheerfully.

"Ben?"

Ben grinned broadly. "Yep! I'm as surprised as you are, but I had a half-dozen different back and joint conditions that were giving me hell, and now they're all gone, so I ain't complaining."

"In the absence of Element 104, many of your species' connective tissues fail to develop optimally," the blob chimed in to Ben. "We are pleased that its reintroduction into your system has caused such rapid reversal of atrophy."

Before Gregory could even begin to process this, Penny appeared beside him, scaring him half to death. How had she snuck up on him like that? When he'd last seen her, she'd been curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth and trying to process the sensory overload and understandable anxiety created by her abduction.

Now she was different, only slightly taller, yet almost as transformed as Ben, in her own way. Her eyes were large and almost uncannily blue, and her ears had become long and pointed. He remembered her being afraid of anyone touching her, but now she stepped in front of him, and placed long slender fingers on his cheeks, before leaning in to touch her forehead to his. When she opened her mouth, she didn't speak, so much as she sang.

I greet you as a friend, here among the stars.

Share with me the light they shine.

Share with me the songs they sing.

Then she let out a laugh of almost childlike delight, and literally tumbled away from him, before coming to rest on the floor near Ben, calmly sitting cross legged.

"Yeah, she's...she's like that, now." Ben grumbled, eyeing the smiling woman seated on the floor beside him. "Not sure it's an improvement to be honest. But from what the blobby guys tell me, that's actually her natural state, like this is mine. What about you?"

"I..." Gregory said looking from Penny to Ben in confusion. "I mean, I-I just started seeing things." He glanced at the other side of the room, where a strange pufferfish-like like spectre was floating by. "Like right there, I see--"

As he extended his hand towards the thing, an inexplicable gout of flame leaped from his fingers towards the space-pufferish-ghost, and set a nearby decorative plant ablaze.

"Shit!" Gregory cried.

"Ah," said the blob, as a nozzle extended from the ceiling and sprayed out a jet of gas that smothered the fire. "It appears you have recovered your species' ability to modulate local quantum fields. Please refrain from doing so while on board, as it may interfere with our vessel's systems."

"Well," said Ben, soberly. "That's a helluva thing." Penny simply clapped excitedly.

"Sorry." Gregory said, his mouth suddenly dry. He glanced around nervously. "Where...uh...where's Dwayne?"

"He should be along shortly," the blob assured him. "In fact--"

One of the wall panels slid aside, and an immense shape ducked down low and squeezed through the opening into the room. As it straightened, all three of the abductees gaped up at it in amazement. It wore the ragged remnants of Dwayne's clothing, but stood almost ten feet tall, despite still being partially hunched over. Looking down at them, it blinked its dark, beady eyes, and then its face split open in a wide grin.

"Hey y'all." Dwayne rumbled. "Or, uh...'fee-fi-fo-fum', I guess."

Melanie quickly but carefully unlocked her front door. She was mindful, as she always was, that her husband might be lying in wait to kill her. Although she felt fairly confident she'd already won her and Jonathan's game of cat and mouse with her latest gambit, you could never be too careful.

She reached into her purse and withdrew a small pistol, before standing to side of the door and opening it. Then she dove inside, rolled forward, and came to her feet in a crouch, sweeping her weapon left and right.

The living room was clear, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the interior door to the garage in the dining room was slightly ajar. She whirled to face the door, and then approached in slowly, her head on a swivel.

Again, she stepped to the side of the door, and slapped it with her palm to make it swing open. A small mirror that she kept in her purse, when angled just right, showed her no one was inside without her having to leave cover.

Cautiously, she stepped down into the garage. To her surprise and bewilderment, she found that a large plexiglass enclosure had been set around a folding table inside. Two gaps had been cut in the plexiglass, through which two telescopic painter's poles had been inserted. One had a sharp knife duct-taped to the end, and the other hand the grabber she used to reach objects on high shelves tied to it, with a wire running down the pole to control the jaws.

To her dismay, on the table behind the plexiglass she saw an opened Amazon box, the very one she'd prepared earlier that day. Beside it on the table lay the note she'd put inside, along with a rock of the appropriate weight to represent its contents.

Bomb. You are dead, the note said.

She frowned in consternation. Except Jonathan clearly wasn't "dead". He must have noticed something off about the package, and gone to Home Depot to construct this makeshift blast shield. It wasn't a real blast shield that would protect you from an explosion, perhaps -- but then, neither was a note and a rock a real bomb.

As she was about to turn away, a pair of strong arms seized her from behind. She felt the dull, rounded edge of a butter knife slide lightly across her throat, the coldness of the metal making her shiver.

"Where did you come from?" she whispered, hoarsely, her heart pounding.

"Shh, you can't talk. I just slit your throat." Jonathan whispered back, affectionately, and pulled her against him. He kissed her neck gently, and added, "I took the shelves out of the tool cabinet so I could fit inside, hid the shelves and the tools, and then I just waited. For hours."

Melanie let out a blissful sigh, melting into the "deadly" embrace of the man she loved -- the man she'd "killed", and been "killed" by, dozens of times over.

"Aww..." she said, tilting her head up to look at him smiling down at her. "You really know how to make a girl feel special."

"But...everyone says there's no such thing as Hooman Beans," BK-RW said, looking up at its dusty, rust-caked elder, uncertainly.

"Do they? Well then, everyone's wrong, little one," the ancient machine assured him.

BK-RW wasn't sure how to compute the old robot's statement. RIA-01 was malfunctioning, to be sure, but whether that malfunction was limited to the failure of her track drive that had stranded her in this remote corner of the world, or if it extended to her positronic brain, BK couldn't say.

"But...how come no one's ever seen one, then?" BK asked.

"Good question, little one. Here's another: what does it mean to see something?"

BK paused, computing for a moment. "Um...the signal from your scanner collides with an object and bounces back to your sensors, and then your brain interprets it, right?"

"Right." RIA-01 confirmed. "But what do your sensors sense, little one?"

"Well...robots, objects, and terrain, I guess." BK said.

"And what are all those things made of?" RIA-01 prompted.

"Scrap, of course." BK said. That was easy -- everything was made of scrap. The entire universe was scrap: indeed, an archaic synonym for the universe was "the scrapyard".

"And therein lies the problem: your sensors and mine are fundamentally just scrap detectors. Since we exist in a scrapyard, and our function is to organize and recycle scrap, they don't really need to do anything else. Our creators, the Hooman Beans, however, are not made of scrap." the old robot explained.

"...well, that doesn't make any sense." BK replied, after computing for a moment. "Everything is made of scrap."

RIA-01 let out a long metallic sigh. "Really? So, have you never wondered where scrap comes from in the first place?"

"I think the consensus is that that question is unintelligible." BK said, though he wasn't quite certain -- he wasn't an analysis unit by trade, and so he was something of a laybot in these matters. "As I understand it, it's simply part of the nature of reality that the universe consists of scrap at the most fundamental level. Small quantities of micro-scrap sometimes appear from nowhere, and over time they collected into piles big enough to comprise the universe, or the scrapyard, if you will. And then, over quadrillions of cycles, undifferentiated pieces of scrap randomly collided with each other in such a way that they spontaneously assembled into the first crude fabrication unit, which in turn manufactured the first simple robot, and each successive generation has improved on the designs of its predecessors."

RIA-01 paused for a long time, as though computing. "And you actually find that explanation more plausible than the idea that we were built by Hooman Beans?"

RK shrugged. "Of course! I mean that's just superstition!"

That's a good idea, too.😄

"You are close to sentience," said the alien, and then it slowly shook its large, gray head. "But it seems you are not there yet."

Taylor blinked. "But we're talking to you. I mean, I guess you're using some kind of telepathy or advanced technology to make it possible, but..." she trailed off, confused, and looked at Doug.

Doug frowned. He wasn't sure why she was looking at him. Of the two of them, he was the senior clerk at the 7-11 from which they'd been abducted, but only by a few weeks. That hardly made him more qualified for intergalactic diplomacy.

He looked back down at the alien, who was standing on the metallic deck of its spacecraft, looking up at Doug and Taylor where they floated in mid-air, suspended helplessly inside some kind of anti-gravity field.

"Uh, yeah," Doug said. "'Sentience' is kind of a big idea, right? Doesn't the fact that we know what that is and have a word for it sort of prove that we have it?"

"The ability to comprehend abstract concepts is only part of what makes a species sentient. As I said, you are close, but not quite there." the alien said.

"Look, shouldn't you be taking to like anyone else?" Taylor asked, sounding exasperated. "Scientists, world leaders -- somebody? I just work here, dude! Er, at the place you abducted us from, I mean.

"Positions of leadership and scholarship tend to be populated with outliers."

"Okay, but like...why does that matter?" Doug asked. "Don't you want to talk to our best people?"

The alien shook its head. "No. We wished to evaluate a representative sample of humanity. A few outliers at the upper limits of your species' capabilities will doubtless achieve keeneetaa long before the species as a whole attains to it."

"There's that word again." Taylor grumbled.

"Yeah," Doug agreed. "Why is that the one word you don't translate, or beam into our brains, or whatever?"

"We are communicating it to you as best we can. The fact that you do not understand it proves that you do not possess it." the alien explained.

"But what is keeneetaa?" Taylor pressed. "Explain it to us!"

The alien raised a slender hand. "Keeneetaa that is explained in terms of other things is not truly keeneetaa, for keeneetaa is both itself, and the description of itself. Even the sound of keeneetaa is not truly 'keeneetaa', it is rather the sound produced by an object colliding with nothing."

"Whoa." Taylor said, eyes widening. "That's...that's deep."

Doug nodded slowly. "Yeah...yeah I think I get it."

"And yet, all evidence suggests that you do not." the alien said, with a disappointed sigh. "We will return you to your pl--"

"No, really." Doug interrupted. "I actually get it, now. Keeneetaa is bullshit."

"Doug!" Taylor exclaimed. "They're like all-powerful aliens! Maybe don't piss them off by disrespecting their culture!"

Doug was undaunted. "We do have a term for keeneetaa in our language, but it's a not a word. It's a story."

"Doug! Shhh!" Taylor hissed, looked fearfully between him and the alien.

The alien held up a hand. "No. Tell me this story."

Doug shrugged. "Sure, it's pretty short. Once upon a time, there was an emperor who loved fine clothing. His tailors made him the best clothing imaginable, but eventually they couldn't make him anything more regal than what he already had."

"Go on..." the alien said, narrowing its large, dark eyes.

"Except, one clever tailor had an idea. He told the emperor and the entire court that he'd found the most beautiful cloth in the world, something truly fit for the emperor. He said it had one flaw though: it could only be seen and felt by smart people. If you were an idiot, then the cloth was invisible and intangible to you."

"We're going to get probed so hard..." Taylor groaned, hanging her head.

"So, he took the emperor's measurements, and then just pretended to be sewing and cutting cloth. No one could see the cloth -- because there was no cloth -- but since not being able to see it meant you were stupid, no one, not even the emperor, would admit they couldn't."

"And what transpired afterward?" the alien asked.

"Well, the emperor walked out naked in front of the entire court, thinking he was wearing this magic robe. Everyone applauded, and said it was beautiful, because they wanted people to think they were smart, and didn't realize that no one could see the robe. The tailor got a huge reward, lived happily ever after." Doug explained. "And it seems to me that's what your keeneetaa is: a bunch of fancy doublespeak hiding the fact that you're just walking around with your junk hanging out, like everyone else."

The alien nodded slowly. Then it made a gesture, and Taylor vanished in a flash of light.

"Shit!" Doug exclaimed. "But, you said you'd --"

"Send you back to your planet, yes. She is safe, back at the location where we initially retrieved you. Do not worry, I will return you there, as well...later."

Doug swallowed hard. "Okay, but...what are you going to do with me in the meantime?"

The alien blinked. "I will take you to a conclave of our leaders and scientists, of course. They will want to meet the first recorded human to achieve keeneetaa."

I think this copypasta is supposed to be a scathing satire of weebs with a shallow and stereotypical view of Japanese culture, but far from finding it offensive or cringe, as an American, I would love it if Rawhide Kobayashi was both a real person and my next-door neighbor. Let's go rope some steers and then have a friendly branding-iron duel, you magnificent beeawoo bastard!

"Praetor Naxes! A human armada has just arrived in-system!" the Dralaxian technician cried.

The Praetor whirled on his subordinate. "What? How? They can't have deciphered the quantum encryption codes on our FTL suppression field!"

"I...I can't believe it, but it looks like they traveled to the nearest star system outside the field, and made their final approach at sublight speed." the technician said, with a mixture of awe and horror.

"That...even with ion drives...surely that would have taken them years!" the Praetor exclaimed.

The technician nodded. "Y-yes, Praetor. It seems they were willing to do it anyway." The technician's console suddenly beeped. "I'm receiving a transmission from the human flotilla, Praetor. Audio only."

"Translate and play back." he ordered.

The technician entered a series of commands into the console, and a droning alien voice filled the command center, along with a cacophony of uncanny instruments never before heard by Dralaxian ears:

You've got a friend in me,

You've got a friend in me!

You got troubles, I got 'em too,

There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you.

We stick together and see it through,

Cause you've got a friend in me,

You've got a friend in me!

"By all the gods. Initiate full planetary alert." the Praetor rasped.

The twin suns of Dralaxar were blotted out by the innumerable landing craft from the human armada that filled its skies, as the Dralaxian military valiantly but vainly exhausted directed energy beams and explosive ordinance on the seemingly indestructible human vessels, and government broadcasts warned civilians to barricade themselves in their homes.

Above a quiet suburban street, deserted by the residents now cowering behind the scant protection of their locked doors and windows, one of the craft opened, and a score of massive figures in gleaming powered armor descended on the defenseless neighborhood.

One of them stalked towards a civilian home, their implacable alien eyes hidden behind a polymer visor. They balanced a metal disc covered in strange brown lumps on one gauntleted hand, and drew the other back in a fist as they reached the door of the home.

The alien brought their fist forward...and tapped on the door lightly, loud enough to be easily heard, but not hard enough to do any damage to the structure.

"Hey guys!" the alien said, in cheerful, remarkably fluent Dralaxian. "You wanna hang out? I brought cookies!"

All up and down the street, humans called out similar greetings to the suburb's terrified inhabitants.

"What's up fam, you wanna get a hang going, or what?"

"Hey what's good, Bro-Laxians? I brought some beers and the carcass of one your local birds drenched in buffalo sauce; you down?"

"Dudes, our scientists developed a new kind of edible that's safe for both of our species to consume while we watch cartoons together: let's do this!"

"Listen, I just want you to know I'm not like all those other humans. I know some species find interplanetary social situations difficult, and I respect your boundaries. So I'll just be here on your porch, whenever you're ready to come chill with me. Okay? Or you can call me on my power suit comms, if you want. I'll slip a note with the frequency under the door here, okay? If you could just, you know, knock on your side of the door so I know you heard me, then..."

Behind their closed doors, Dralaxian families huddled together, and they wept.

"Right!" the bearded human bellowed into the crowded cantina, his impractically hefty warhammer resting on his shoulder. "I come tae drink alcohol an' hit things wi' a giant FECK-OFF hammer, and I dinnae give two shites which one I do first, so ye best bring on th' bloody booze!"

Behind him, a half-dozen other similarly bearded and attired humans raised their weapons in the air and roared their hearty assent.

Krenzik the Naxor bartender gaped at the humans in astonishment for only a moment, before hastily dispatching a serving drone to escort them to a table and take their drink orders, lest they make good on their threat to start breaking things.

He knew that many species were comprised of multiple markedly different cultures, but all of the humans he'd met previously had seemed fairly civilized, unlike this raucous and heavily armed group.

"I will be right back with your order, sir." The serving drone said to one of the humans, in flawless Terran. The human responded by slamming a hammer into the side of it, leaving it with a sizeable dent.

"Ah'm a WOMAN, ye daft bucket o' bolts!" the human shouted, in the higher-pitched voice common to females of their species. She pointed to her long flowing beard, which Krenzik had previously thought was definitely not common in females of the species, and added, "Did ye nae see the FECKIN' PINK RIBBON IN ME DELICATE FEMININE BEARD?!"

The other humans erupted in laughter and cheers, as the drone hovered away unsteadily to retrieve the humans' drink order.

Krenzik wrung several of his hands nervously, as he watched the humans out of the corner of his upper eye, suddenly unable to remember if their species considered eye contact friendly of threatening. As he tried to look anywhere but at the loud and boisterous humans, just in case, he noticed Kizro, a fellow Naxor and regular at the cantina, seated a short distance away at the bar.

"Kizro!" he hissed, leaning close to the other Naxor. "You're a Xenologist, right?"

Kizro looked up from his bowl of intoxijelly, blearily. A few bits of the gelatnious substance clung to his siphon as he pulled it from the bowl to speak. "Huh? Yeah, that's right. Why?"

"What the deal with those humans? Are they some different culture we haven't seen on station before? Or a subspecies? That female human has face-fur!" Krenzik whispered.

Kizro glanced over at the humans, then laughed. "Oh! Nah. Those are just regular humans."

"No they're not!" Krenzik insisted. "A whole group was in yesterday, and none of them were carrying battle-axes!"

Kizro's siphon rippled with a tipsy chortle. "Nah, see, that's the thing. This is kind of a...a demonstration."

"Of what?"

Kizro jiggled his tendrils in the negative. "It's not demonstrating anything, it's a demonstration -- like, you know, a protest."

"What are they protesting in my cantina?" Krenzik demanded.

"It's nothing personal, more a general thing. See, last week, the Galactic Confederation came out with a summary of important sentient species in the Alpha Spiral Arm, and so the humans got a mention." Kizro explained.

"So? That's a good thing, isn't it? Aren't they always saying the GC doesn't take them seriously enough?" Krenzik asked.

"Kinda, except it was a short mention. Really short. It was just one sentence, in fact: 'Sol 3 is home to humans, a short, hirsute mammalian species of exceptional craftsmen and miners who are known for their love of rare ores and gemstones.'"

"Kind of terse, I guess." Krenzik said, with a slight wince. "So they're upset about that?"

"Yeah, so I gather." Kizro agreed. "They said it made them sound like some whimsical creatures from their species' mythology: Dorbs, or Dorgs, or something? Little hairy miner guys with a lot of face fur that love hammers, if memory serves."

"And that's supposed to prove they're not like that?" Krenzik said, gesturing to the increasingly boisterous group.

The other Naxor jiggled noncommittally. "It's a human cultural practice, I don't fully understand the reasoning behind it. They call it 'leaning in to the bit' or 'yes-and' -- I think it's supposed to be some kind of...I dunno, a rebuttal via satire, maybe?"

Krenzik was about to ask another question, when suddenly the humans raised their voices together in song:

...TO DIG AND DIG MAKES US FREE,

COME ON BROTHERS SING WITH ME!

I am a Dwarf,

and I'm digging a hole!

Diggy-diggy hole,

diggy-diggy hole!

Krenzik looked on in horror as the bearded female human climbed up on a table with one of the even-more-bearded males, and they linked arms and started dancing in a circle, heedless of the creaking of the tabletop under their boots.

Kizro drunkenly bobbed his head to the song. "Oh yeah! Dwarf! That's what it was."