Silence filled the chamber, stretching for unbearable moments. Then, from somewhere within the hidden eldritch spectacle, appeared some scraps of different coloured fabric, some fluffy white stuffing, a small reddish-brown ball of yarn, a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, a hot glue gun, and a sheet of googly eyes. Whatever this insane Lovecraftian horror was it was also clearly an insane craft-loving horror. The unfathomable unseeable entity began fashioning the items into some mysterious new form.

“Leader would definitely have wanted to meet this guy!” The beeish plushie-like thing blurted out.

“It’s poetic how the universe conspired in its cruel and twisted way to bring about this outcome. Fate has a dark sense of humour,” the well-stuffed plush morose magpie stated with background clicks and whistles.

“Oh well, his loss,” the beeish micro furry said aside. Turning back to me it continued, “You have a lot to answer for – not driving on the right side of the road, annihilation of fence, discharging a weapon a prime number of times, running on the road without a license plate – but maybe we will let you off with a warning if you promise not to tell anyone what you think you saw.”

“What the blazing hell? You buggers were just out for a nice bit of cattle mutilation and man-snatching, and you think I’m in the wrong?” I asked before any good sense could come to me of who, or what, I was talking to.

Just then the various crafting tools finished their work. A new human plushie had been made and was held by mysterious means beside the other two. It was a slightly flattened man-shaped plushie that had a passing basic resemblance to me in hair and clothing styles and colourations at least.

Then, like suddenly seeing the picture in a magic eye, the chaos resolved into a tentacled hentai horror. With deliberate care one of the tentacles approached the rear of the innocent untainted me-shaped plushie while another held it wrapped around its middle. The approaching tentacle groped and found a path, powerfully penetrated the plush posterior, making it swell until it was filled to bursting. I suddenly understood what was happening, this was some form of communication, and the message seemed clear.

“Oh crikey! Please don’t probe my date!” I pleaded.

“Ahem, Ahem, Ahem,” the now filled-out man-shaped plush simulacrum tutted after suddenly becoming animated, shooing the terror away. “How interesting! That is, that you were able to tell that we’re not from your time, your present, your ‘date?’ And how unfortunate! That is, that you have asked us directly to leave it.”

“It’s unfortunate for you, that is,” The beeish poké plush sneered. “The deal is off. Reverse psychology would’ve had you telling everyone We’re aliens, but We can’t leave a witness who knows We’re time travellers instead of thinking We’re just average extraterrestrials. Making a path to your local past is meant to be basically impossible, you know!”

Stunned by the turn of events I dumbly asked, “Then how did you do it?”

“We pinched from aliens, of course!” The beeish plush pilferer gloated.

“You were not meant to tell him any of that,” the man-shape-adjacent plushie chided.

“Buzzit!” The beeish plush profaner yelled as an autotuned expletive.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Don’t fret,” the mannish-shaped plushie commiserated. “Our fly-through fresh fast-food plan A – alien abduction – was already spoiled by his remarkably high human intuition. ‘Terrify and release’ isn’t feasible now and would work against our planned cover story.”

“Just as my Gemini horoscope predicted, things didn’t go to plan,” the plush morose magpie Muppet said, again as clicks and whistles came from elsewhere. “However, given that morality is just a social construct, and we exist external to the local pod’s social order, will we execute plan K? You know, the one where we ‘kill’ witnesses?”

“Or are We taking up plan K for ‘kidnapping?’” The plush beeish poacher queried. “We’ve always wanted to write one of those letters with cut-up magazines glued back together. The best part is We will only require one or two fingers to really sell it.”

“While both those ideas have merit, especially the one with scissors and glue, I think we will go with plan K, where K is for ‘kindness,’” the magnificent man-shaped plushie said.

“So, you’re going to let me go?” I asked. “Thank heavens,” I said as a mild non-denominational prayer from a newly agnostic former atheist approaching inevitable death quicker than I’d like, “but, just so you know, I didn’t mean ‘date’ as in ‘the time’, it was ‘arsehole.’”

“By ‘the time it was,’ do you mean the ‘past?’ This is the only path to our past we have so far discovered. And, also, you may call me Karen. Please don’t call me vulgar names like ‘arsehole,’ you siphon-mouth,” the man-shaped plushie, or maybe Karen, said. “But, to answer your question, no, we can’t let you go, you know too much, and we probably really should try to minimise the timelines wibbles and wobbles.”

“Um, are you misunderstanding? And how’s that kind?” I asked, getting worried.

“No, I am ‘Ka-ren,’” the voice behind the man-shaped plushie, Karen, said slowly, sounding out the syllables. “Though I admit, ‘Miss Understanding’ would reflect my great empathy marvellously, but to answer your second question, plan K-is-for-kindness is kind because we will make it look like you were killed. There will be closure, for everyone else. That will be nice, for them. And, of course, you get to live and keep all your fingers, for now, so that’s more pleasant for you too. However, the tides do indeed move in mysterious ways. I don’t know if it’s fate, but I think Leader will be most interested to meet you.”

“You want to take me to your leader?” I asked. “Doesn’t it usually go the other way?”

“Never mind that,” Karen said through the man-shaped plushie. “Ivy, could you please help make our ‘Very Important Prisoner’ a little more comfortable?”

“Our pleasure!” Ivy, apparently, said through the beeish plushie at the same time I felt a sharp pain on the back of my neck like an electric jolt.

Right away I lost feeling in my body. I was both paralysed and immobilised, except for my breathing and presumably my heart. I started to lose consciousness with my vision fading first, but I could still hear for a while. The plushies continued to speak in English – maybe for my semi-conscious benefit, maybe out of habit, or maybe it was an automatic function they forgot to turn off – whatever the reason, I overheard part of their conversation before passing out while still standing.

“Now we need to stage the scene, tell a story, and have anyone who investigates make the conclusions that we want them to. Do either of you have any suggestions?”

“There is already a mountain of physical evidence We need to work with – the primitive hydrocarbon combustion powered ground vehicle, the gravitationally discarded protein byproducts, and traces of firearm discharge – We can keep aliens in the mix, but as a hoax gone dud, not a hoax done good. We’ll take any tools needed from the truck then torch it, plant the spent bullets in the two all-beef patties, bloody the tools, and leave a dripped blood trail or two.”

“The local waterways should be used to seemingly dispose of cadaverous evidence. Coldblooded ancient amphibious predators lurk across this hot dry place, and nature’s violent unpredictability will serve as the perfect alibi for no postmortem and the missing meat. A swift and watertight deception.”

“Excellent ideas, but plan K-is-for-kindness needs something extra to tie it all together, an authentic crop circle! Huntress, you can drag a wooden plank through that field over there in a pattern behind the shuttle, and Ivy, you can use mazer beams and phased-array ultrasonics to plant fake boot prints. I’ll map out the crop circle pattern and boot print locations. I think the crop circle should be decodable as ‘Claude McCook was here…’”