Agatha Agnes watched the glimmering high rises of New Los Angeles from her front porch. The ever-present sound of sirens drifted faintly in the breeze. Green, earthly smells mingled with damp pavement, the remainder of yesterday's rain. Dark forms zipped about the glowing skyscrapers like gnats, preparing for their big New Years invasion.
Creak. The rocking chair creaked peacefully, back and forth. Agatha stroked the cool metal device on her lap. Across the street, a familiar grouch glared at her through his blinds. Old Man Mercury, she called him. Another washed up has-been from an earlier era. Like Agatha, he'd chosen to retire peacefully, minding his own business in the suburbs of the big city.
Agatha gestured rudely. The nosy man sneered, then withdrew.
"Twat," Agatha murmured. She squinted into the darkness. "Hmm." She tapped her glasses with an old, gnarled finger. The glasses perched on her nose flashed bright pink. "That's better."
The standard white-picked fence around Agatha's yard took on a soft pink glow. So did the neatly-trimmed hedge, the shiny mailbox, and the cat-shaped alien lurking around the edges of her shrubbery.
Agatha smiled meanly. She shifted the device in her lap and looked toward the stars. Normally, it was impossible to make out constellations above the city. But Agatha was nothing if nor thorough. Thanks to her patented Totally Old Lady Glasses (TM), she could see the milky way as if it were etched into her retinas with a laser beam. A pink, slightly radioactive beam that smelled faintly of burnt eyelashes.
Her eyelashes were on fire. She pinched them firmly after removing the glasses.
Oh, dear. The goblins must have tinkered with it, despite her explicit instructions to avoid it. Naughty, naughty. They'd be on toxic waste disposal duty tomorrow. Or not. Can't have our dear student dissolve before his first day of school. Not even the Association would let that one slide.
She adjusted her settings, then cautiously placed the glasses upon her nose. The pink afterimages remained, but this time, her eyelashes were spared.
Above, a star flashed.
Agatha squinted. Blast these eyes. She could just barely make out the light. It might have been her imagination, but it seemed to be growing larger. Smaller, then bigger, then bigger again.
Agatha took that as the signal she'd been waiting for. She lifted the metal device from her lap to her shoulder. Casually, she sighted the barrel of the weapon in the general direction of her gate. Her finger alighted upon the trigger. In one smooth motion, she turned, aimed, and fired.
BZZZZZZT.
She scowled at the smoking body of the not-dead cat-thing that had been creeping up on her. For its part, the striped orange tabby inspected the gaping hole in its belly with utter disbelief. Its eyes grew saucer-wide as Agatha readied the blaster for another go.
"YOWWWWWW!"
BZZZZZZT.
"Stay still, dammit!"
BZZZZZZT.
~30 seconds later~
Agatha scowled at the smoking pits dotting her yard. The shapeshifting cat-alien was nowhere to be seen. Plus, her favorite potted plant was now half a meter shorter than it was a minute ago.
She grunted, shoulders hunched. She slowly backed to the front door, opened it, and squeezed her way inside. She waited by the half-open door for her visitor to land. "Ah. Almost forgot." She reached into the breast pocket of her cat-print Totally Old Lady Dress (TM) and pulled out a chocolate chip cookie.
She inspected it. After a terse moment, she nodded. The thing was a little crumbly, and it smelled faintly of old lady, but it would do.
After all, what snot-nosed brat didn't like a good old-fashioned chocolate chip cookie? It was the perfect housewarming gift. And once her mind-controlling implant had crawled its way inside his noggin, Agatha would demand he turn around and saunter back to whatever parallel universe he'd come from.
Assuming he sticks the landing, the old woman thought.
Agatha pondered that for a moment. She'd never had to clean up human bits before. Not personally. The Suburban Mother of NLA (SMONLA) wouldn't stand for it -- an old lonely woman liked Agatha, clean up dead person bits? They'd have a member of The Disposal Company on the phone quicker than you could say "immigrant".
Oh, yes. They wouldn't like the look of a spacecraft at all. Nevermind that it was one of their spacecrafts. The situation just had "illegal alien" written all over it. Agatha would have to be sideways about it, scuttle about the topic until they stopped caring about the spacecraft more than their beauty sleep.
The ticking cat-shaped clock in the foyer meowed, signaling midnight.
Agatha tapped her foot impatiently. Who knew how long the blasted craft would take to land? "Aw, hell with it," the woman muttered. She cradled her blaster under her armpit and stomped upstairs, where a very comfortable bed awaited her. The neighbors' screams would wake her when the child arrived.
--
BOOM!!
Agatha flailed awake. She yanked off her cat-print night cap. The stairs creaked as she took them one at a time, careful to avoid the shard if broken picture frames that had fallen during the explosion.
Agatha rushed outside to a night packed with the baying of dogs and the wails of small children. Smack-dab in the middle of her front lawn, a bullet-shaped pod lay amidst a smoking ruin. Crushed gopher skeletons lay about the wreckage of her manicured grass, which was perfectly alright with Agatha -- she'd been trying (and failing) to poison them for weeks.
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"Bah."
She scanned the street, absently patting her nightgown to ensure it hadn't hiked up during her rush downstairs. A familiar trio of women was marching toward her front gate. Agatha's eyes narrowed. She grumbled. But she reached into a pocket and pulled out a couple of eyedroppers, plonking fat, salty drops into her eyes until they watered fiercely.
The figures poked their heads through the front gate. One looked left, the other right, and the last directly at the smoking hunk of metal lodged in Agatha's front lawn.
"That's not regulation," said one.
"Strictly prohibited," said another.
"Well, I think it looks quite nice," said the third.
All three heads swiveled toward Agatha, the watery-eyed woman wringing her hands on the front porch of her quiet home. A cat-print nightgown flapped about her ankles. Her bare, veiny feet stood out in the light of the porch. She peered pitifully through her glasses at the women.
"Hello? Is someone there," Agatha warbled, careful to keep the annoyance from her tone.
The trio exchanged meaningful glances. The shortest of them, a portly woman by the name of Mrs. Trundle, bustled across the lawn. Mrs. Trundle had tossed on a bright yellow sundress and a pair of matching heels. She clutched Agatha's fingers, clucking like a mother hen, frizzy read hair bobbing with frenetic energy.
"Oh, you poor thing. I'm sure you were just minding your own business when that horrible, erm," she spared a curious glance at the spacecraft, "thing blasted into your lawn. Why, you must have been frightened!"
Agatha cleared her throat. "Yes, I-"
"Well, we can't have that, can we Ms. Agnes? You can be sure as sidewalk I'll have Security here tomorrow morning. My husband hasn't gotten off the couch in weeks. Weeks! A little friendly neighborly love will do him good, I'm sure." Mrs. Trundle scowled at at invisible Mr. Trundle.
"Oh, that would be-"
"Yes, yes. I don't suppose you have any idea what it is?" The woman nodded meaningfully to the spacecraft.
The hair on the back of Agatha's neck stood on end. Behind the redheaded women's easy smile, she could sense two pairs of eyes scanning her from head-to-toe. Measuring. Weighing. Calculating, inch-by-regulated-inch, exactly how conducive Agatha's removal from the neighborhood might be to restoring order to Neighborhood 32.
"I don't," Agatha said, firmly. She added, "Maybe it's one of those MAD inventions my grandson keeps talking about? I hear the Academy is taking applications this month."
Something flashed behind the eyes of the readhead. "Yes," she grumbled, lips turning downward. Her eyes drifted to the craft. "In fact, that is exactly what I was afraid of. Naughty schoolchildren, experimenting with so-called "mad science". Why, back in my mother's day, their was nothing mad about it!" Her red curls rustled. A faint hiss echoed through the night.
She sighed. Her lips curled into a sympathetic smile. "We'll get this all sorted out tomorrow morning, Ms. Agnes. You'll see." She patted Agatha's hands like a doctor might pet a befuddled house pet.
Agatha feigned a look of disappointment. "Not tonight?"
The ranking SMOLNA member straightened. She shook a finger. "Now now, Ms. Agnes. We are representatives of the whole neighborhood. You can't expect us to play favorites, can you?"
Agatha's eyebrow twitched. "I suppose not."
A couple more consoling pats later, the trio reunited, They exchanged whispered conversation, glancing unsubtly at Agatha and the craft. As they left, the tallest "dropped" a flyer onto the intact part of Agatha's lawn.
Agatha walked over. She bent, grunting as her knees cracked. "Gods above," she muttered. The flyer was a page torn from the Neighborhood 32 Rules and Regulations Handbook. It detailed proper lawn maintenance. One section, circled helpfully in red pen, even suggested where one might install a regulation-approved gazebo to ward off light rain.
Agatha very much doubted a gazebo would have survived the spacecraft eating up her lawn.
The old woman sniffed. She wandered to the apparatus. Perfectly smooth, the metal capsule showed no sign of entrance or exit. No cockpit was visible. For a moment, she wondered it it really was a student admissions project gone wrong -- perhaps this had nothing to do with the foreign exchange student scheduled to arrive this week.
Then an invisible door in the contraption slid open. A cloud of steam burst through the opening, and a bald figure followed suit, coughing and wheezing.
"Good heavens." Agatha stepped back, neatly avoiding the flailing figure. The boy, a short young man sporting glasses and a tacky red-and-green backpack with a Spiderman logo, tripped over a rock and faceplanted.
He groaned. "Laaaaand."
Agatha suppressed a snort. "Oh, you poor, poor dearie. Here." She pulled him up by his backpack with a strength not normally possessed by little old women. Not that the boy was in any fit state to notice.
His clothes looked soaked. He shivered in the cold night air. Half-dozen bruises blossomed around the boy's skull.
The teeniest, tiniest bit of motherly concern threatened to blossom in Agatha's chest. She crushed it with typical ease.
Agatha offered the soaked boy a light pat. "You'll be right as rain, soon enough." She fished out a cookie from her nightgown. "Here, eat this. It's chocolate-chip, you're favorite."
The boy blinked up at her, woozy. "How'd you know chocolate chip is my favorite?"
"You're a growing boy, dearie. It's something of a given." It was almost too easy, playing the part of a concerned old woman. Agatha had lots of time to practice. It helped that she'd adopted a trio of mischievous goblins to wrangle. Gave her something to practice fussing over.
"Okay." He took the cookie. The tips of his fingers were blue. Really, that just wasn't right.
And now Agatha was annoyed. Who the hells had built that spacecraft, anyway? Shoddy design, that's what it was. Every MAD worth their salt could build a device that destroyed everything but the passenger inside it. Whomever had built the monstrosity leaking steam onto her carefully cultivated yard deserved to be treated to an application of Agatha's Untreated and Totally Untestable Regenerative Waste Treatment(TM).
She fumed in the privacy of her head, vowing revenge on the faceless imbecile in charge of the NLA High School Study Abroad program. She noticed the boy watching her, and she coughed politely, gesturing to the cookie.
The boy sniffed it. "Smells like old lady."
"No need to be rude, dearie."
He shrugged and took a small nibble. His eyes widened. "Mmm." Crumbs tumbled from the side of his mouth. He opened his mouth wide, presumably to stuff the entire thing down his throat. In the reflection of the vehicle, Agatha caught sight of a familiar form. She yanked the boy aside, just in time.
"YOWWW!"
The alien-cat flew where the boy's head had been. It's jaws distended like a snake's, prehensile tentacles wriggling where its teeth should be. They snatched at the boy as they trailed past. It tumbled through the door of the vehicle.
The door slammed shut on its own, trapping the beast inside.
Agatha clapped gleefully. "And that's what you get for eating my petunias!" She noticed the boy staring, open-mouthed. "What? Alien-cat got you're tongue? I have a treatment for that, sweetie, don't you worry."
The boy blinked. Light glanced off his smooth, almost-polished noggin. "I think I need a nap," he announced.
Agatha noted the absent cookie and smiled gleefully. "Oh, that's fine, that's fine. Here, come in, come in." She ushered the tired boy inside. He could sleep in one of the goblins' rooms until his mind was nice and pliable. It wouldn't take more than a week, surely. Until then, the boy could either help with the chores or stay out of the way.
By tomorrow afternoon, the craft would be gone from her yard and her peaceful life as an retired Totally Old Lady(TM) could resume.
"What's your name again?" the boy said, voice thin with weariness. "I forgot."
Agatha glanced at the boy leaning heavily on her shoulder. He really wasn't any taller than her. Strange, for a high schooler. Perhaps everyone his parallel universe was underdeveloped? She would have to get around to studying spatial-temporal anomalies one of these days.
"Folks call me Agatha, dearie. But you can call me Ms. Agnes."
"I'm Timmy. Timmy Truth."