I froze. I remembered yesterday’s encounter with this person. Mandy was dangerous.

“You gonna beat me up?” I asked.

She grinned. “No, that’s for special occasions.” She was maybe five-foot nothing, and her round face was custom-built for smiling. Freckled cheeks. Asian eyes and full lips. Chubby. Curvy. An adorable little thing.

“I’m Owen,” I said helplessly.

Don’t you look at me that way. My human readers will understand. And nonhuman friends: it happens, okay? I don’t like people. At all. And that dislike is very, very well earned. But...well, I ain’t dead.

A cute girl can go right past all of that and turn me into as much of an idiot as anyone. Especially one who judo-flips evildoers and hauls them into the ocean. It’s very difficult to get cooler than that.

She looked at the raft. “Don’t do it until dark. He’ll zap you and bring you back, and that’s if you’re lucky.”

“Yeah,” I said. Scintillating flirtation from me here.

She frowned. “Tall,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She looked annoyed. “Forgot about the tall. Look, you need to know something, maybe it’s something you already know, but you’re just really new. Brand new. The laws here are different, right? Magic? For want of a better word, magic. Harrigan–”

Shouts of alarm rang from the beach. Women sounding the alarm, and that noise went straight into my brain, causing my legs to jolt into action. I was running towards the commotion before I noticed I was doing it. “Guess I gotta go,” I said over my shoulder.

“I guess you do!”

I saw what was causing the shouts. It looked like a sea monster. Or an art project. I ran straight for it.

Sean’s group of unskilled fisherfolk were either fleeing back uphill or standing frozen on the beach. A dark, pointy thing was coming from the water, maybe the size of a refrigerator. It gleamed dully. Brushed metal. Sean ran up, holding one of the ubiquitous white plastic spears.

He shouted at it like a caveman facing some stop-motion monstrosity in an old movie. His foe didn’t move.

As I ran I scooped up a rock; it fit my hand perfectly and had an appropriately sharp point. A murderin’ rock like Cain used on his wuss brother Abel. I splashed into the shallows in front of the metal thing, and I faced Sean.

He peered around me like I was wearing a big hat at a baseball game. Then he looked at me, his tiny eyes widening in surprise. He glanced at murder-stone in my hand.

I didn’t have any catch phrases or taunts. I wanted him to leave the moving metal thing alone. And I think I would have been able to put my rock into that tennis-ball-sized skull of his. I stood there, feet apart in the water. Not much of a plan here. Lacking in phases.

Sean swung his spear at me, not jabbing, just a swing. A cool guy would have caught it in one hand. A less cool guy would have dodged it. I’m neither guy; he struck me in the upper arm, and the aged plastic pipe snapped into splinters. There were shouts and gasps from the spectators.

“Ow,” I said, though I hadn’t felt a thing. Etiquette is important, after all.

Sean was confused and, interestingly, looked like I’d hurt his feelings. His expression flitted from wounded to betrayed, then back to the default setting: nasty.

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I pointed up the hill. “Go get Harrigan,” I said. Then I turned to face the visitor.

It looked like a machine, but it wasn’t, exactly. Its dark metal surface was sculpted in smooth art deco curves, lined with small, neat rows of rivets. Its top formed a single peak like an old-timey

skyscraper, tall and with a needle at the top.

But at its base, in the water, I saw a row of foot-long green and orange spikes fanning out around the base. Legs. They were unmistakably curved, organic, and they moved as the thing rotated in place. Scuttled. It ceased its turn and stopped moving altogether. I felt it inspecting me, though no face was visible.

It was a crab or something similar. And it was wearing the metal building sculpture with all the rivets. Like a hermit crab with its own custom-built shell.

“We’re cool,” I said to it. “No harm done. But you should go.” And I gestured with one hand: shoo.

Shoo, you art project sea monster, begone. I ordered an anime elf girlfriend, DoorDash done messed up.

It rotated until the front end of the thing faced out to sea, then it moved with considerable speed, enough to leave a wake, away from the beach and off towards the horizon.

Nobody had attacked it, and it hadn’t hurt anyone. I realized I had a pretty good reason for what I’d done. Readers, if you find yourself on another planet, and you see something moving that has metal incorporated into it, that thing is either smart or was made by smart people. So don’t annoy your new neighbors by wrecking their art installations.

“Everyone okay?” I asked, watching it leave. I heard a few shaky yeahs. One person, I don’t know who, said “thanks, man.”

As I turned back to the island, I was struck from behind, hard, by an unstoppable mass of bone and sinew. Sean had tackled me.

My rock went flying from my hand. Sean shoved my face into the water, then into the sand, holding me there, shoving me down, down. I couldn’t breathe. I flailed and thrashed, but he was simply too huge, a boulder keeping me in that shallow water, forcing grains of that perfect white sand into my eyes, nose and mouth. The edges of my vision filled with black checkerboards.

Then Sean fell away with a splash. I’d gone limp, lost control of my muscles. It must have happened to Sean as well. Dr. Harrigan had arrived.

I heard his voice faintly through the water. “Hold on a second,” he muttered. “Here we go, Sean, you’re up again, yeah?”

Sean groaned. “I had everything under control–”

“Enough for now,” said Dr. Harrigan in that fast medical disclaimer voice. “Check on Walsh.”

I found myself rotating in the shallows, and my face was just over the water surface. I could breathe, at least. Sean grabbed my ankle, just as Mandy had with Tyler the day before. He hauled me onto dry land. My shirt went up over my chest, and sand got into my shorts.

I didn’t have a panic attack this time. I really had to work at it, though. I could control my breathing, and I concentrated on slowing it down.

“I warned you about this, Doc,” said a woman’s voice. I couldn’t see. Mandy.

Sean dropped my ankle in the sand. Gasps came from the other campers. One voice whispered: yessss!

“Oh,” Sean said.

“Yeah, oh.” Her voice shook as she started running. I heard quick steps, an impact: skin smacking skin.

Sean said: “Uh!” and I felt the ground shake as he hit.

“You’re okay,” said Harrigan absently. I couldn’t see anything; I was unable to move. Harrigan spoke up: “Ms. Nakahara, you’re no longer welcome. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

“Gonna getcha, Doc.” I could feel the sand vibrate, she was running again.

I don’t know what happened. I assume something with that tablet. But I could see Mandy staggering near me, past me, and she stood facing Harrigan in the water. She looked pained, feral, deadly. Strange to see on that round face, that nice-girl face. She was murderous.

And as I watched, the skin of her face, hands and legs became pale, then transparent. She was made of water, a girl-shaped aquarium wearing cheap, wet clothing. A little school of bright blue fish zagged inside the pure, clear sculpture of her head. Her hair, those pigtails and bangs, her eyes and teeth, all were part of the shape making up the glassy mass of walking ocean she’d become. The sun sparkled hotly on Mandy. Her head tracked, turned to face Harrigan.

Her mouth opened, and she spoke with a deeper voice that was losing coherence. “See you tomorrow, Doc.”

“Same bat-time,” Harrigan said cheerfully.

The mass of water that made up her body collapsed and flooded back into the ocean. Her garments floated on the surface.

“Chaos,” said Harrigan. “So much more interesting this time around. Get up, Sean, help me with Walsh.”