The Mayor of Gifflenberg had a lot going on today. After all, a meteor the size of a two story building had slammed into downtown Gifflenberg - and if that wasn't bad enough, a perforation had opened itself up in the middle of town and started unleashing undead beasties all about the area. The Mayor had even heard that a huge, terrible Boner - colloquially short for Bonerender, of course - had been wreaking havoc near an abandoned pornography store.

Naturally, tons of people - hordes, really - wanted a piece of the Mayor's attention. This was, of course, all part of the job description as far as the powerful Gharlique considered it. After all, the Mayor had chosen this life. But that didn't mean he had to suffer through it. He had many resources at his disposal.

Indeed, there were people concerned for his safety - but the Mayor was not among those cherished few, for he was well insulated from all the disasters. Normally, one might picture him being in some sort of musty, underground bunker, hunched over, eating canned meat. However, this was about the opposite of the situation the Mayor presently found himself in.

"So, Mayor, how do you like it, five hundred thousand paces above ground level Gifflenberg?" asked the weird, little alien.

"Oh, Floyd, I absolutely love it," replied the Mayor. It sounded in his crackly voice like he might've been smiling, if the Mayor had been able to - it was, however, impossible not to notice that what his body truly was was instead a large, mechanical orb filled with whirring and clicking gears, with a strange little blobular mold of a creature piloting it behind a glass pane up top where his head might've been.

"It's Lloyd," corrected the alien.

"Oh, I must apologize, Floyd." The Mayor patted Lloyd on the back and took a deep drag of his cigar. "Oh, now that is quite nice. With a bit of an airy smoke-placenta on the finisher, and a lovely ship note."

"Yes, well, speaking of your cigar's 'ship note,' your Mayorliness," Lloyd said with a cough, "My spaceship is, of course, top of the line, premium everything... As you are doubtlessly enjoying presently as you recline in my Arbuckle Signature lounge chair."

"Yes, it is a nice chair Floyd, it's a nice chair." The Mayor knocked some ash off his cigar, spilling it on the chair's armrest.

Four of Lloyd's moist little eyelids twitched with frustration at this. "Look, what I'm trying to say is, please try and have some respect for my ship, here. You're kind of, well... You're stinking up the place, you're messing up my chair, it's just, and I offered you this nice place to stay while the end of the world blows over - bwa hah HAH HAH HAHHHAAA hah - but I feel like you're just not respecting me and it's making me feel bad."

The Mayor raised what looked almost like a dagger, and also a bit like a mechanical eyebrow. "Are you telling me to put out my cigar because it hurts your feelings, Floyd?"

Lloyd nodded.

The Mayor scoffed. "Well, tough luck, buddy. You know, I ought to turn that around on you here for a second. Saying that I'm stinking up the place? That's not the first time I've heard that, Floyd. That's a code phrase for prejudice, Floyd. I swear to Theseosus, Floyd, you really ought to try and be a little more culturally aware. Bigots are always saying that Gharlique smell really strongly, there are people that even like the idea of eating us - of course that's a bit of a holdover from the Curr era depression about five centuries ago, and mostly now is relegated to niche fetsih circles, but still. Were you aware here in Nomachiato that there is a prejudice against Gharlique?"

"What's a Gharlique?"

"You've got to be fucking kidding me, kid," spat the Mayor. He stood up, and the chair made a groaning noise that sounded like a thousand tree branches snapping. "Do I look like a tauman to you?"

Lloyd blinked rapidly, though not all of his eight eyes responded at the same time. "Um, sir, to be honest, I didn't really read up on your planet's history before I came here. I just picked this place, well... I picked it for a couple reasons, to be honest, but the main one was because it was known for being low powered. You know, weak and easy to crush. I didn't really read anything about tauman beings or Gharlique or whatever else kind of fucking things live here."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The Mayor took a deep breath and whipped out his conch shell. He pulled and twisted on a beaded cord a few times and held it to his ear, listening to the cool sound of ocean waves, and then to seagulls, and then to a voice.

"Hauff! Gods, it's so good to hear your voice after this awful alien bastard I've been talking to. He's absolutely insufferable. And you would not believe the things he's saying about my people, about the Gharlique, Hauff."

Lloyd wanted to go off on the Mayor, to stand up to him and assert himself as a world destroyer, but he couldn't. This was, of course, due to certain treaties that Nomachiato's Upper Echelon held with his homeworld which he'd only been privvy to after entering Nomachiato's atmosphere. He still remembered the message, it was burned into his mind like a branding - Now Entering Protected Planetary Region, Activity Limited - the whole thing of course seemed absurd. How was Lloyd supposed to assert his authority and take over a world that was protected by treatise unless he somehow found a way to circumvent bureacracy? And why hadn't anyone told him about this back on his home planet?

Of course Lloyd could imagine what would happen if he went back home without having somehow conquered Nomachiato. He'd gloated, he'd boasted so much, and he was already a disgrace. And this would be the nail in the coffin. If he'd been a fool and a laughing stock before, going home like this would've been lower than rock bottom - and yet had he a choice? Not only was Nomachiato protected - once again, Lloyd didn't even realize it was possible for worlds outside of his intergalactic section to be protected by the same treatise, but hell, what did he know at this point? - but there was Curr all over the place. And of course when he'd voiced this concern to the Mayor, what had the Mayor responded with? A laugh! Laughter about a disease that ate awahy at life itself and replaced it with cool, calm, soulless mathematics... Leaving only room for semi-sentient math entities in its wake, turning every world it touched except for Nomachiato into a sort of zombificated wasteland.

So as the Mayor complained and badmouthed Lloyd, all the while calling him Floyd - which was an affectation that Lloyd was becoming more and more convinced that the Mayor was intentionally performing as opposed to accidentally mispronouncing his name - Lloyd was shifting his focus elsewhere.

Elsewhere was, of course, to a small little, secluded annex wherein he conducted experiments. He sometimes referred to this place as his laboratory. It was covered with warning signs of toxicity and certain death, and had large posters that described safety concerns and best practices for laboratory ediquitte, all of which Lloyd expertlyh ignored as he wore the same rubberized spandex suit that he walked around eveywhere in.

Lloyd's laboratory was filled with all kinds of wild creations, bizarre experiments. There was a big, bubbling beaker that smelled like bubblegum and would immediately switch your consciousness with that of a random newt somewhere in the universe for five seconds. There was a plant that was designed to invade peoples' home planets and feast on house pets. There was a pair of pants that Lloyd called his 'Boogie Blasters' that had a mind - and rhythm - all of their own, and would never stop dancing once you put them on. There were a number of fish, all of which feasted solely on attention. They looked pretty hungry, so Lloyd made sure to look at them for a few seconds until they plumped up nicely.

But all of these strange oddities had nothing to the test tube that floated in the center of the room, and held in it the severed hand of Kahli, that... What was it? That tauman that had been infected with Curr. Sure, it was terrifying to have been trapped in his force field with such a deadly hand, but at the same time, Lloyd had seemingly been spared of a mathematical doom, at least for now. Still, he hadn't been able to identify with any of his sensing mechanisms where on the hand the Curr was coming from, or even what Curr was.

When Lloyd had showed this hand to the Mayor, and told him the story about it, the pompous Gharlique had just laughed at him. Laughed. At Lloyd! Lloyd, would be world conqueror! He could destroy the Mayor in a second with an especially strong exhalation out of one of his nostrils, thanks to Lloyd's amazing [Gust of Snot] [skill]! And yet, he couldn't do anything because of the treatise. Violating that would doom Lloyd to immolation, and would have the affect of siccing his own world's best and strongest after him - and, as he knew all too well, he may have been remarkably strong for people in Nomachiato, but back on his homeworld, he was, if anything, remarkably weak.

So, the only real option Lloyd had was to, somehow, diplomatically convince the Mayor, along with the strange shadow organization he seemed connected to, to allow him to either destroy, enslave, or otherwise establish a dominion or an appearance of dominion over Nomachiato. Which meant he had to let the Mayor do as he wished.

"Hey, Floyd! Floyd, over here, stop looking at that stupid hand for a second!" said the Mayor chuckle. "I've got a friend who wants to ask you something."

Lloyd walked over to greet the Mayor with his best approximation of a fake smile. He took the conch and held it to his head, and what he heard next made him nearly drop the instrument in an instant.