"Analyze me?" Taubitha said with disgust as she beheld the stumpy, purple alien standing before her.

"Oh, please don't get any wrong ideas here," said Lloyd with a sad tone. "I swear, everyone has reacted in the very same way each time. It's just a safety measure. Takes, what, half a second?"

Taubitha swallowed air anxiously. "Very well."

Lloyd walked up to a wall and tickled it with his grotesque hand. Suddenly, out of the wall shot a long, white claw arm that glowed with a beam of green light. It swiveled over to greet Taubitha.

"Great, great. Okay, now just step forward a tad," Lloyd commanded.

Taubitha groaned and complied. Then, with a number of clicks and whirrs the claw arm danced around the air immediately in front of her. It spouted out a couple of loud boops and beeps as well as some disorienting flashes of light from its center as it spun clockwise around her countenance, and then in a dazzling flash it concluded with a vibrant burst of prismatic aberrations. Once this bit was over with, Lloyd gestured for Taubitha to stand aside as the arm stretched over and performed the same short process for Princess.

"Now, that wasn't too bad, was it?" said Lloyd with a pained smile that revealed sickening, green feelers that seemed to be his species' answer to teeth. "Of course not, just a little bit of harmless analysis. Now then, if you will allow me, I'll just transfer the data from my machine directly into my system and process your results. I do appreciate your compliance, it is deathly important to me that I gain as full an understanding as possible of all those entities who find themselves stumbling upon and as thus beholding my awesome mothership, the powers of which will one day hold your entire world under my dominion! BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!"

Before Taubitha could rightly respond, Lloyd grinned awfully and scuttled off to a small side door that she hadn't noticed before. As the door slid shut, a faint burst of blue light shined between its cracks. Soon after the door popped open, and the whole room smelled distinctly of soured yogurt.

"Well, well, well. Aren't you something else?"

Taubitha smiled and flapped her enormous wings with cheer on hearing this, accidentally knocking over one of Lloyd's floor lamps. However, her smiled quickly soured - much like the aforementioned yogurt odor pervading the area - when Lloyd walked right past her and instead greeted her fony with the utmost respect and reverence.

"Now this, thing creature is immensely powerful. Indeed, I think it might even have the potential to become half as powerful as I am, some day! It could probably end this world on its own, at that point. Of course, it still has a bit of a ways to go."

"Like, oh my gods, I'm so glad you like my fony!" said Taubitha as she pushed her way back in front Lloyd. "Her name is Princess."

"Aha! The Princess... of Darkness! HAHAHAHA! How delightfully evil!" Lloyd slapped what could've accounted for his knee with yet another evil cackle.

"NO," replied Taubitha with wide, angry eyes. "Just Princess. Not a Princess of anything, really. Other than, like, my heart because oh my gods I just love her so much!!" Taubitha hugged Princess' disinterested face for effect.

"Hmmm... very well," replied Lloyd with an unhealthy dose of skepticism in his tone. "Regardless, it's great to meet you both. Really, I mean it. Now, er, why the hell are you here and why exactly were you beholding my mothership in the first place?"

Taubitha looked at Princess, whose face she was still hugging quite tightly. All her fony did was huff in response.

"Look, you puny little tauman. I don't care how powerful your pet might become, or indeed how important you think you are - oftentimes the taumans who find themselves scurrying over to my mothership seem to think they're very important - I will fucking destroy you in half a godsdamned instant if I get even a hint of a feeling like you're a threat to me. It's by the grace of the gods that you're even still alive, and it's entirely due to my own good nature despite my status as an evil overlord. So if you don't watch your attitude around me, well, you might not be watching anything else, ever again!"

Taubitha shivered, and with that, a small pendant tumbled out of her tattered tunic pocket. And she was in that moment kicking herself internally so hard that it was if her mind had octuplets. Taubitha tried to scramble and retrieve it before it was too late, for she knew in an instant what it was, but she'd barely moved a muscle before Lloyd interrupted her.

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"OH! You're in the Order of Ahw Gizer?"

Taubitha froze, her eyes wide and her mouth open wider. "Uh... I... uhh..."

"Don't worry about it!" replied Lloyd with a jovial tone. "Why, I know plenty of members of the Order. See, I'm an honorary member for all the wretched skullduggery I've thusly enacted!" Lloyd held out a matching pendant that indeed listed him as an honorary member for, indeed as well, wretched skullduggery.

"Oh my gods, that's... great?" said Taubitha doubtfully.

"Yea, yea, I've got another Order guy in here somewhere, too. I think he's in the smoking room."

"You have, like, a smoking room on your mothership?"

"I'm an evil space alien, Taubitha. Of course I have a smoking room on my mothership."

----------------------------------------

Taubitha leaned back and puffed lightly - and yet, still, she coughed. "Oh my gods. This is strong."

"Yes, well, that's one of the finest stogies in all of Nomachiato!" replied none other than the Mayor of Gifflenberg with a good natured chuckle. He sipped his whiskey and smiled through his mechanical mouth. "Delicious with liquor, too."

"So, like, not to be ignorant, but you can actually taste all that?" Taubitha asked.

"Don't worry, I get that all the time," replied the Mayor. "But yes, Gharlique are indeed able to taste through our mechanical exoskeletons. Transistors and processors in our bodies deliver impulses based on the composition of whatever it is we consume up to our slime molds, which then process the stimuli into flavors. It's honestly not all that different from how the tauman body works, although it is different in that we use an outside mechanical structure to process such stimuli as opposed to a biological form that grows as we age. Of course, the odd bit about that is that even the youngest of Gharlique are ready to be fitted with a full sized exoskeleton almost immediately. We don't get a long childhood, that much is for certain - and as such, we often get accused of staying immature forever!"

As if on cue, Lloyd sat down in a beautiful leather armchair while puffing on yet another stogie and immediately sounded off a large whoopee cushion. "UGH! Stop pulling shit like that, Mayor. Might I remind you that I will destroy your entire world?!"

"Sure you will, Lloyd. Sure you will," said the Mayor with a chuckle. Then, he took a puff and looked to Taubitha. "So, how'd you get into the Order?"

Taubitha quickly divulged the story of the gnomes and the knights, and got more than a couple laughs out of both the Gharlique and the alien. Then, the conversation shifted to the subject that she'd been really hoping to avid completely.

"So, who'd they have you kill?" the Mayor asked expectantly. "Or did they put you on the queue?"

Taubitha frowned and stared at the spotless, white floor - which generally clashed with all the leather accoutrements of the smoking room.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," replied the Mayor with a good natured smile. "Why, I remember when they first said to me, Mayor - well, they didn't say that, they called me by my actual name of course, but still. They said, Mayor, we know exactly who we want you to kill. There's this tauman, name is Jimothy War Magerson Senior, who wants to start a rival secret society. He was going to call them the... the... oh, what was it? He wanted to call it the Society of Ohw Chiesh, I think it was. He'd already gotten about ten or so folks together, and most of them were influential people that wanted to be in a secret society but didn't want to go around killing their enemies for initiation purposes. Of course, we of the Order of Ahw Gizer knew immediately that this was an empty promise - it is a well-respected principle of secret societies that as they grow, they become more and more exclusive, until indeed the only way to join them is to start killing people. But that's beside the point, even if the Society of Ohw Chiesh realized such things, they were still a threat to the Order. With that, I got out my mayorly baseball bat - er, well, I wasn't a mayor yet, so I got out my normal baseball bat - and I whacked the guy off. It was a pretty sorry display, too - brains everywhere. Before I killed him, he told me that his son was going to avenge him, so I did what any good member of the Order would do and immediately found his son. Then, I invited his son to join the Order of Ahw Gizer - that's how we do it, generally. I put him on the kill queue but I don't know if I ever even had him kill anybody, I felt so bad for him. I felt bad, but I sure as hell never told him that I whacked off his dad."

Princess snorted.

"What?" asked the Mayor. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No, Mayor, not at all," interjected Lloyd before Taubitha could reply.

"Anyways..." The Mayor looked at Taubitha and puffed a cloud of smoke into her face. "Doesn't that smell delicious?"

Taubitha hacked and wheezed. Her eyes watered as she responded. "Oh my gods, yes."

"Great." The Mayor nodded and smiled. "So? Who did you whack off in the name of the Order?"

"I, uh, haven't whacked anybody off yet," said Taubitha as she bit her lip. "See, that's what I was on my way to do when I ran into this mothership."

"Oh, so the truth comes out!" said Lloyd with a sinister cackle.

"Yes..." sighed Taubitha. "But, well, you probably won't know the person I've gotten assigned to kill. Her name is Kahli."

"Shut the fuck up," said Lloyd. "Kahli the stone elemental Kahli?"

"Oh, the one with the big foot?" replied the Mayor.

"Yes," said Taubitha. "That Kahli."

Lloyd smiled and started slow clapping. "Well, isn't this just excellent. I think you stumbled upon the right mothership, Taubitha, because everyone in this room has a vested interest in destroying that pesky little tauman for good."

Taubitha finally started to feel a tad more confident. Her wings perked up as a result, and knocked over a large, wooden plant tauman statue. "Seriously? Like, oh my gods, you want to help me kill her?"

"Fuck yes we do," said the Mayor. "She brought New Curr to Gifflenberg. Scourge of Gharlique everywhere. It's going to assassinate my reputation, so it's only fair I help assassinate her."

Lloyd rubbed his slithery, alien hands together with a giggling glee. "Perfect. This is going to be perfect. Hah. Hah. HAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAAAAA!"