“No … Beep-boop … Mr. Wolfgang! Why!”

  I peel my crusty eyes open, drifting awake to booping and squealing mixed with radio static.

  “Beeeep-boooop. Beeee. Kshhh.”

  Is Roger … crying?

  The cacophony of lament goes on.

  “Hey… tin can… buddy.” I have to force out the words like I’m chewing overcooked steak. All I can move freely are my eyes. My mouth is stiff, but it’s got some give. My tendrils are rock solid. “Quit blubbering.”

  “Mr. Wolfgang!” chirps Roger. “You’re alive!”

  “You think they’d … get rid of me … that easily?” I force a smirk, lips as stiff as leather. “I’m Jack Wolfgang.”

  “I did what I could to tend to your wound.”

  “Thanks … buddy. Can’t … move.”

  “After analyzing your vitals, I found that you were injected with a paralysis venom. I could not even find a pulse while you were unconscious.”

  “I wouldn’t know … where to look … either.”

  “I have calculated the precise compounds needed to produce a serum to counteract the venom, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  “Antidote?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “But, I can not make it.”

  “Transmutation?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  “Hand me … crystarium.”

  “Right away, Mr. Wolfgang!”

  As long as I can think, I can use these psychic powers, right?

  Roger stretches out one of his extendo-arms. Reaching past a wandering .357 Magnum, he grabs a piece of crystarium, reels it in, then puts it on a tendril.

  The mineral starts floating away.

  He puts it back.

  It floats away.

  He puts it back.

  “Hold it there!”

  “Oh. Of course, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  “Let me … focus.”

  I shut my eyes. Picture a glass phial, simple, clean. I gather my focus and push the psychic energy down the tendril holding the crystarium. I feel my limbs again. All of them. Not in a good way.

  “Gaaah!” Pain erupts, a hot, electric spasm. Tendrils twitch like dying snakes.

  “Mr. Wolfgang! Are you okay?”

  “Hurts.”

  “Get over it.”

  “What?”

  “Suck it up, buttercup.”

  “You’re getting … too big … for … your britches … tin can!”

  “You are just weak. Like a girl. A little girl.”

  When I get my feeling back… Wait. He’s trying to goad me. He’s trying to rustle my jimmies so I can do this. What a guy!

  I’m still shutting him off.

  I try again.

  “Raaagh!” I cry out as my spaghetti body surges with hot, electric pain.

  “Keep going … pussy!”

  “Roger!”

  “Sorry.”

  I try again. This time, after gathering the psychic energy, I hold back. I send a trace amount of energy to the limb. As it moves out from my center, I pay attention to its journey.

  It’s like someone dammed up the river. I can only send a trickle of energy through here. I’ll have to weave around all of these blockages.

  As my focus trickles through my limb, avoiding the blockages, they begin to fade. Painlessly. Movement is being restored. Feeling starts to return. Energy begins to flow.

  “Mr. Wolfgang! It is working!”

  I wrap my tendril around the glowing crystal. I feel its form change in my grasp.

  “Done?” I ask.

  “Yes, it is done, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  “How … make … serum?”

  Roger reaches for another rock of crystarium.

  “Well…”

  He starts telling me all the chemistry. I don’t catch a word of it, but as he’s beeping and booping, an idea comes to mind.

  “Forget it. New … plan.”

  “What?”

  “Too … complicated.”

  “Oh?”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I wave the tendril holding the glass bottle in front of his face.

  “New … plan.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You … wait.”

  I take a deep space breath. I gather my focus again. I take a small piece, and I send it around my body, trickling it through the blockages. The task is tedious, but what else am I going to do? Sit here and learn chemistry? That’s not how I get by.

  Slowly, the energy inside me flows more freely. Then, I notice: there’s a foul sludge leaking out of my mouth, floating up into the void.

  Roger sticks a finger in it.

  Beep boop beep!

  “The venom, Mr. Wolfgang! It is leaving your body!”

  Hach! Pttt!

  I spit and spit, trying to get the horrendous taste out of my mouth before I start wretching.

  “Roger. You’ve got to be quiet. I’m trying to focus here.”

  “You can speak easy, Mr. Wolfgang!”

  “That’s not what ‘speak easy’ means. And that other word you used. Don’t say that.”

  “Is it not short for pusillanimous, meaning coward?”

  “Huh? No. No, I’ve never heard that.”

  “In some dialects, does it not just mean cat?”

  “Yeah, but … It’s also a name for something inappropriate.”

  “Oh? Let me search my dictionary again.”

  Beep boop.

  “Look, just don’t—”

  “It means vagina. What is that?”

  “Roger! Stop it!”

  Beep boop.

  “A vagina is—”

  Beeeep!

  I throw my weak tendrils around the tin can and wrestle him quiet.

  “We don’t say that!”

  “Why, Mr. Wolfgang?”

  “Because it’s vulgar, and we’re gentlemen, not perverts!”

  “What is a pervert?”

  “Stop learning new words!”

  [ THAT’S HOW I GET BY. ]

  My head goes light and my stomach queasy.

  “It’s still not all out of my system yet, Roger. Let me take a moment to finish recovering.”

  “That is a good idea, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  Patting myself down, I feel around for the entry point from that monstrous stinger.

  Nothing here. Must have healed up while I was sleeping.

  “How long was I out, Roger?”

  “You lacked consciousness for four hours and thirty-two minutes, Mr. Wolfgang.”

  “That’s not long at all.”

  “Across the span of space and time: no.”

  “And yet, my wound is gone. Does my yog body heal real fast or something?”

  “Yes. Commonly, the yog heal exceptionally fast while undergoing sleep cycles.”

  “You think any of those things are just sleeping?”

  “It could be. I had not calculated that possibility.”

  “We’d better clean up these bodies then.”

  “The most effective method would be to begin devouring them.”

  “What?”

  “If you eat the corpses of your defeated enemies, you will gain small portions of their power. You will become larger and more capable as a yog.”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “Why not? It is entirely rational to seek power for your survival.”

  “That sounds like something a monster would do, Roger. Despite appearances, I’m not a monster. I’m a man. Mean don’t eat eldritch nightmares.”

  “What do men eat?”

  “Meat. Fruits. Vegetables… Whiskey. Cigarettes. Speaking of…” I reach for a piece of crystarium. Breaking off a piece, I transmute myself a cigarette. Holding it between my eldritch lips, I light a small flame off the mineral and hold it to the cigarette.

  “The yog we slew are made of meat.”

  “Not the kind I’m looking for,” I say in a puff of smoke. “Beef. Pork. Chicken. That kind of meat. Not monster meat.”

  “How will you grow more powerful, then, Mr. Wolfgang?”

  “What do I need to be more powerful for? I just need to get my body back.”

  “There are many horrible things within the universe, and as you search for a way to regain your human form, you will certainly encounter them. They will want to eat you and take your power.”

  I remember Sgt. Sigrid and her team, their battle against relentless waves of terrible things.

  “You’ve got a point. I’m sure I’ll think of something.” I take another drag from the cigarette. “I know: we’ll build a gym under the café.”

  “You mean a gymnasium? For exercise.”

  “Call it a gym. But yeah. I’ll teach you to lift some weights. That’ll make me stronger, right?”

  “My calculations are inconclusive, but I suspect it could be possible.”

  “What? Monsters don’t get stronger from working out?”

  “I have no data on such a method. Nothing for or against.”

  “Well, we’ll have to experiment and find out then. That’s what you do when you don’t know something. You try.”

  “Could not hurt.”

  “That’s the spirit. Alright, let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  “How should we dispose of the corpses if you are not going to eat them, Mr. Wolfgang?”

  “We’re just gonna chuck’em.”

  “Chuck them?”

  “Hurl’em.”

  “Hurl them?”

  “Throw them way off into the void of space.”

  “Oh. Might I make a suggestion instead?”

  “Go for it.”

  “You could continue practicing your psychic powers by incinerating the bodies with your mind.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Say, we used a lot of our crystarium making all these guns. Can we recycle them? Maybe we could recycle these bug-eyed freaks, too.”

  “No. Once crystarium is transmuted, you can not transmute it again. We will just need to find more.”

  “Alright. Incineration it is.”

  [ WORK, WORK.]

  Shlooping around the asteroid field, we gather more crystarium and incinerate the bat-wasp-mantis corpses until there are none left to find.

  At this point, I’m exhausted, but I know we can’t stop. We have to keep working. We can’t waste any time. Our survival depends on this. I’m not going to die as a tentacle monster. I’ll die a man. I’ll be put in a grave, buried in the ground, but space won’t claim this purple flesh.

  We start with building what Roger calls a monitor. At first, each part takes hours as he describes them again and again. I do my best to imagine what he’s talking about, but I was never much of a tinkerer, much less a technology wiz. Through plenty of labor, plenty of tiring trial and error, we piece together a working screen.

  Then, Roger plugs into it and starts showing me other, more complicated parts. I begin to wonder if it wouldn’t have just been easier to go with my gut and guess on all the specifications for the café.

  But I want this cozy little haunt to be perfect, a real work of art, something I’m proud to call mine, something I’m proud to share with all the wacky, wandering aliens. The peaceful ones, at least.

  So, we take no shortcuts. We do everything right. A circuit here. A fuse there. RAM. Battery. Cooling. Motherboard. Touch panels. Sensors. Validators. Oscillators. Consolators. Demonstrators.

  As Roger continues to guide me through the process, the knowledge comes to me, quick as a viper. I stop learning what these things are; I start remembering. Like finding old, forgotten trinkets in a dusty attic. Soon, I’m making suggestions. I’m coming up with ideas that will improve performance, realizing that the files stored in Roger’s memory banks are outdated. Primitive, even.

  How can I remember technology I could never imagine?

  Beats me.

  We stop now and then so I can take a quick nap and recharge my psychic energy. Roger says this would be faster if I had some food. I don’t need it. I just need to work. I can’t stop. I won’t stop. We have to get this completed.

  Like I said: our lives depend on it.