No, seriously, how badly can two non-temporal-based creatures for Uihjput screw up a simple mission? Not at all, or quite a bit, depending on your take on non-linear time and causality, actually.
“This is not comfortable, I want you to know,” Realst said. “And, to be honest, you’re starting to smell a little.”
“Hey, you don’t hear me complaining about your beak poking into my ribs, do you? Now be quiet, someone might hear you. Corpses don’t talk.”
They fell silent, laying in the drawer that had once contained the body of Marissa Thomas. As Nenipven suspected, the switch had gone off perfectly. The doctor who took the message had left shortly thereafter, and when the Pine Crest funeral home had come to pick up the body, a slightly disheveled intern had helped them load the body into the hearse while a parrot looked on from the upper corner of the room. It reinforced his belief that time was linear, and that you couldn’t change the past, and therefore the future, because whatever you were going to do to try to change the past in the future had already happened in the past because it was going to happen and therefore had. His instructors in college told him he had too simplistic a view of time, and that playing fast and loose with something he didn’t understand completely would get him into trouble. Which, he supposed, it rather had. It’s what had landed him in this job, such as it was.
“How long has it been?” Realst asked. “How long do we have to do this waiting thing? When can we move?”
“It’s been ten minutes, and we have about three days to wait. There are… let me see… twenty-four hours in a day, and sixty minutes in an hour. So, when 432 more iterations of ’10 minutes’ has elapsed, we will be done. Now hush.” Nenipven shifted slightly to try to get Realst’s beak out of his side. “Why don’t you spend the time practicing your transformations? You’re getting pretty sloppy, at the last stop you changed in a Groumpada but still had the tail of a Rennet. You need to hone your visualization skills.”
“There is nothing wrong with my visualization skills, I just… don’t care. I don’t feel the need to ‘blend in’, as you put it. I only do it because it makes you happy,” Realst said. “I’d rather stay in our natural forms.”
“You know what happened to Greshta and Plurb when they did that over on Klotuyrawivnwq. We just can’t take that risk.”
“But they were doing reconnaissance on a non-doomed planet! All the places we go are just about to be sucked into black holes, and time has effectively stopped for them. They simply do not see us, even if they’re given a reprieve. We couldn’t move slow enough to register to them.” He harrumphed and settled back into a more comfortable position, and Nenipven could hear him smoothing his feathers.
“Still, that’s a chance I’m not willing to take. I know you don’t quite have the hang of the concept of time yet, but once we’re done with this you will. And they didn’t spend three days trapped there, they spent three thousand years. I don’t think you can imagine that. I can’t even imagine that. And they couldn’t move or talk to each other, either. So, for the next three days, maybe you can think about that.”
And so they settled back, each to contemplate whatever came to mind, occasionally talking, once they realized that the door muffled sound so completely that as long as they weren’t too loud, no one outside would hear them. The hours passed peaceably enough, and they had both just settle into a comfortable routine when the door was suddenly jerked open.
“We need to move this one, too,” a female voice said. “This bank is on the same circuit. It’s the only body in this set, though.”
The tray was rolled out and they were lifted up and over onto another cold, steel slab. In a few moments they were comfortably settled into another identical refrigerated compartment.
“Now?” Realst asked. “My feathers are getting itchy, it has to be close.”
“Time distortion makes you itch?” Nenipven asked. “It feels tickly, to me. Weird. But to answer your question, no. We have to wait until tonight, and by then we should be able to pop out of here. I think we’ll be able to draw enough power by then. The event will be pretty close.”
“I hope so. I don’t know if there’s any other way we’ll be able to get out of here. At least, not without causing a mess. So by tonight we’ll be back where we started, then?”
“Not quite. But close.”
“Where are we going to hide in the meantime? Why leave before it’s time?”
“We can’t be here when the people come to steal the bodies, silly! They’d certainly notice that we’re not a corpse, and besides, you saw what happened to those bodies. I’m not playing dead and letting them hack me up just so I don’t get caught. I’d rather spend three thousand years stuck on Klotuyrawivnwq.”
“Right. I’d forgotten about that. Okay, tonight it is, and I sure hope you can find a place to hide us until it really is time.” Realst went back to pruning his feathers. He was getting fond of being a parrot.
“We’ll figure something out, I’m sure.”
Realst wasn’t so sure, but they fell silent again and waited. When they heard the now-familiar fuzzy electrical sound of the lights being switched off, they gathered their energy and prepared to make a small hole in the fabric of space to push themselves through.
“Where are you aiming?” Realst asked, just before the energy built to a frenzied pitch.
“Aim? You can aim these jumps?” Nenipven sounded genuinely baffled.
“Please tell me you’re not serious. Please tell me you know where we’re going?” Realst’s voice was losing clarity as they began to slide into a form of matter capable of moving through the rips in space.
“I…” The rest of Nenipven’s response was lost as they were whisked through the tiny hole and dumped unceremoniously on a lawn, right on top of a man putting out the last of his Halloween decorations. There was a sickening crack and the man went limp. His skin, where it was in contact with Nenipven, buzzed and crackled with unspent energy. Nenipven jumped up, but the leg he had been sitting on was mangled and infused with bits of Nichetin particles.
“And just how are you going to fix that?” Realst said testily, fluffing out his feathers.
“I can fix it,” Nenipven said. He rubbed his hands together and held them over the man’s body. It succeeded in removing the Nichetin particles, and also a birthmark the man had on his inner thigh, though neither Realst nor Nenipven was to know this. He prodded the man with his foot, but his head lolled on a very broken neck.
“I think he’s… dead,” Realst said. It was another concept they didn’t really understand, but it wasn’t one you had to understand to know the impact of. “What do we do now?”
Nenipven closed his eyes for a moment, then they sprang open. “It is Halloween. We give out candy. Come, we have time to…” For the first time, they looked around.
“Oh dear,” Realst said.
“Oh, my,” Nenipven said. “Apparently we had more energy than we thought, and brought some of our fellow corpses from the morgue.”
All around the yard were strewn body parts, the real ones from the morgue sinking into their plastic and fiber filled counterparts, the Nichetin particles causing the real body part to displace the non-organic material. Where the fake bits went, they never knew, but a housewife in Australia had the scare of her life when she went into her garage.
“Well. That rather explains that, I suppose,” Realst said. “I’m beginning to warm to your ‘it has to happen because it did happen’ theory.”
“In which case, we must hand out candy this evening after we stash this body and…” He looked around. “That one, the intact one, next to the mummy inside. Let’s get a move on, shall we? I still need to get into costume!”
“It’ll take you half a second to ‘get into costume’,” Realst grumbled. “It’s not like you actually have to put on make-up or change your clothes.”
“That’s really not getting into the spirit of Halloween, Realst,” Nenipven said disapprovingly. “You need to embrace the culture. Really get a feel for things!”
“It’s a dead culture! It’s not going anywhere! That’s why we’re here, to document it for the archives.”
“They could still decide to reverse the termination, they can do that,” Nenipven said stubbornly.
“Do you know how many times they’ve reversed a decision?” Realst asked.
“Er, no,” Nenipven admitted.
“Exactly zero times. Throughout all of creation, nothing has ever been meddled with. Ever. It doesn’t happen. I don’t understand why you can’t get that. Why it’s so hard for you to understand.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Nenipven said stubbornly.
“I give up,” Realst said with a very heavy sigh, especially for a parrot. “Where’s the candy?”
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