“More food?” asks Douglas. He is a whole and complete skeleton again, much to Katare’s obvious annoyance.

“No, you already ate over two decades worth of emergency rations. You do not need to eat more food.”

“Food,” nods the skeleton enthusiastically, ignoring every single word in her reply except for the last one. Douglas looks around again, still not too sure what he feels about this new place. The food is pretty good, if a bit bland, but it helped him regenerate his bones like nothing else. Other than that, Douglas doesn’t really think a lot of this place.

He is, he curiously finds, still of out sorts. There had been an awful lot of darkness, after all. The sheer amount of nothingness that had been all around him was pretty bad at first. At the very least, it had allowed him to get to grip with everything that’d happened.

From the first step he had ever taken, freshly reanimated by some necromancer, to his teleportation into outer space, to the slow crawl through a spaceship fragment. The treck through the spaceship had been interesting to revisit for the first couple of dozen times. So many things make sense now that he’s had the time to think about them like a hundred times.

Then the planet where Katare’s position of unreliable sidekick had been replaced by Evot. And then he had found the two slimy things that make so much sense. So much sense. Just a few words and those two understood every single message and meaning he had meant, along with a lot that he had not thought of yet.

And now he is sitting on top of soft cushions, inside a small cramped space, some weird music playing all around him. And KAtare is back!

Well, Douglas thinks she is that odd human from back then. He isn’t completely sure, but he thinks he recognizes some things about her. She had a nose, and this person has a nose. Same with eyes, eyebrows, deep lines carved across the entire face in an oddly appealing way. Her eyes are rotating disks, and Douglas thinks that Katare had those too. He is not sure about the eyebrows, but at least Douglas recognizes the lines and eyes.

And the hair! Katare had changing hair, that is something he knows for sure. Something about blonde and black hair. This new person’s hair changes every second, patches of starlight and invisibility flowing through the fine threads.

“Stop eating the couch and listen to me already!”

Unable to blink, Douglas settles for sheepishly looking up at Katare. Blue eyes, circular rotating rings forming a rather hypnotic sight look at him in a rather stern manner. “Couch?”

“YES! The very cushion you are chewing on so selfishly. It’s worth more than many a spaceship. As my funds are limited at the moment, I would like to request that you refrain from eating my Flarxian Hyper-Cashmere.”

“Okay.”

“So, as I was saying, I need you to get serious for a moment. We are in big trouble, and unless we do something drastic, we are all going to die.”

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

“No,” vocalizes Douglas while idly rubbing the badge stuck in the middle of his forehead. He does wonder where his horn has gone. And the rest of his skull armor. And why his body, in general, feels so light. Something about the whiteness of his bones is oddly appealing, but he feels like he’d really appreciate either dull redness or shiny metal. He’d really like some answers to those questions.

“The Order is after me now, which is not great. I tried everything I could think of, but there are some things money can’t buy. Not like that’s a possibility for me at the moment anyway. Stop eating the couch, and don’t rip that fabric. I can buy a garden planet’s yearly output for the price of that pillow. Drop it.”

The realizations that he might be able to get a massive amount of food for the pillow, he stuffs it into his chest cavity.

“And because the Order is after me, or at least their counter-intelligence agency is, they are now also after you! So we’ve just got to cooperate, else we both will end up dead.”

“Okay.”

“It’s good that you agree. This means that at the very least you’re not dumb enough to be a total lost cause. I also might have pissed off a few planetary militaries, but that’s such a minor annoyance in comparison to the ORder, that it’s nearly sad. Still, the saddest part is that even those small fries are too much for us to cope with at the moment. That’s why I went to get you, and that’s why I want you to help me rob a museum or two.”

“Okay.”

“Wow, thanks, Douglas! I really thought that you also might have been one of the fake people-” Katare abruptly stops talking as she looks up for the first time in a while. She’d been twiddling her thumbs and looking at the ground, her digits making sparks as they rub against each other, and leaving deep furrows into the metal chair she is sitting on.

Now though, she looks at Douglas with an open mouth. Douglas ignores her and just continues using the wonderfull, wonderfull Stone Moulding spell to slather a new layer of protective metal on his bare bones. Katare watching him work in mute silence as he scoops up hand fulls of the metal bench before plastering it over his sternum.

“Could you stop destroying my ship?”

Something in her voice halts Douglas in his tracks. Instead of continuing his bone-protecting measures, he looks up at her and flinches, dropping the handful of solidified metal.

“Why are you destroying my stuff?”

“I’m destroying your stuff??”

“Yes, You have just committed gross property damage.”

“I have just committed gross property damage?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, but what are you going to do about it.”

“According to law…” The exact wording completely fails Douglas. His memory is pretty good, and he is sure that Evot told him this precise law a couple of times, but he just can’t recall it at the moment.

“What law, Douglas?”

“Evot?”

“Who is Evot, Douglas?”

“Grey things?”

“What are grey things, Douglas?”

Douglas decides to shut up.

“You do not appreciate the gravity of this situation, do you? It seems like I will first have to impress upon you the gravity of this situation, don’t I?”

For some reason, Douglas feels like he is very much not in charge of this situation. “Yes?”

“Good. Then you can start repaying the damage you have done to my property by listening to what I have to say. You need to understand that I am in deep shit. And now, due to association, you are in deep shit. So you will understand and then you will help me, alright?”

“Okay,” replies Douglas in a mousey tone.

“Good, then let’s start at the beginning! After you hadn’t prevented my head from freezing over, after you’d forced us into the shitty homebrew of a boat, my daddy came for me! That should have been happy news, right? Well, that changed when I found out that dad had been putting me in cloned bodies, right? So after that, I think I went a bit mad. Not sure how, but anyway. When I woke up, I was a brain in a jar!”

Douglas knows enough about the part of the populace that identifies as female by this time to nod occasionally as Katare goes on a very long rant.