Space Needle

Captain Automaton: A noir mystery comic about a vigilante robot detective fighting a corrupt government! Romance! Gunfights! Cliches! 

Here’s a little poster I made for it. The quality didn’t come out as good as I thought (Illustrator likes to make it a little grainy and weird, if anyone has any tips to make it all a bit more crisp, please let me know! It’d be greatly appreciated.), but I’m still proud of it.

"Robert"

$Gholaat was shaken awake by the shuddering of the entire motel's galactic island. Strange, he thought, that a ship large enough to unsettle a rock like this would have any business in this reach of space. He sat up, flipped his robotic legs around the edge of the bed, stood, and walked over to the window. Even as he was pulling the curtains to the side, he came to sudden realization. Still, he continued to peer through the fogged glass, if not for anything but horrific confirmation. They had managed to find him, no less than within a single night. He bounded across the motel room floor, hitting the bathroom within three strides. He shoved his souvineer pen, his toothbrush, and a few bottles of complimentary shampoo into his storage compartment. He stole another peek out of the window. A pair of aliens were stepping out of a big, black, petrol-tanker-like ship, which was covered with a mixture of grease, coal, and ash. They carried large, destructively annihilating laser rifles. The alien hunters immediately approached the stairs connected to the balcony which led to all the upstairs rooms, including his. He would not have long to make his escape. He slowly opened the door and tumbled, as quietly as possible, metal body tinkling against the floor as a whisper. He crawled desparately, hiding behind a "Bubbly Cream" vending machine, pulling his foot into the little nook as the alien hunters took the last step. At that moment, Gholaat's heavy motel door had finished its small outward arc from being pushed open, and was only inches from settling back into it's painted steel frame. Like an exhausted rubber band, it was racing for the relief of complete equilibrium. CLANG-CHK ... The hunters looked towards his door, looked at each other, looked back at his door, lifted their weapons, and started rapidly firing in that general sort of direction. Frazzled patrons opened their own doors, sticking out their heads and squinting into the green-white lights, before being obliterated into piles of sticky red or gooey green death, squeaky screams rarely making it out of their mouths and oral ports. The hunters continued to pepper the motel doors, windows, and walls with laserfire. Black, smoldering craters were like scars on the already-dotted skin of an oily pubescent teenager.

$Machineries hummed. Water trickled from the depths of the floating city. Winds lazily padded across the clouds in a silent back-and-forth sort of dance. The red sun peeked over the fuzzy horizon, as war broke out in the purple morning light of the Delucian skies. "Pop. Pop. Pop. Boom." Qe-Khr awoke suddenly. His popcorn popper was turned on. "Flewhp. flewhp-flewhp." Qe-Khr slid from the Qe-Khr-Shaped indention in the zofuh, flipped on the little limp on the kaffahtabel, and shuffled to the kichen. "Tsehw-tsehw-tsehw." Qe-Khr had never heard his popcorn popper make these kinds of noises before. He found it somewhat unnerving. "Pht-thew. Pht-thew. Pht-thew." He glanced out of his apartment's little kichen porthole, and noted that he had never seen quite so many foreign spaceships. He also noted that he had never seen quite so many concentrated laserblasts, or quite so many spaceships being disintegrated. Ashen dust breezed along on gusts of lazy wind. Qe-Khr curiously observed as the black cloudy reminants of foreign starships, and, presumably, their inhabitants, covered the usually-insurmountable red glow of the Delucian sun.

$"We've lost communications with Legion Commander Beta Beta Alpha, Sir." "What is his progress in the invasion?" "He was in charge over the invasion of the city they call Seattle. He took their needle... You know he has his little traditions.. It appears he was taking it back to Feelus, when we lost his ship's signal." "Costly little traditions, those are. Extremely costly this time, it seems. Where do you suppose he has gone?" "You know Beta Beta Alpha better than I, High Commander. However, I do know that, if he wanted to, he is very capable of disabling the tracking. But I also know that he is loyal, or else he would not have made it to the rank of Legion Commander." "Have we recieved any messages from him that were sent before we lost communication?" "No, sir." "Begin scanning for his emergency beacon, and scan the immediate area around Feelus -3. Gholaat may simply have a problem with transmission, or, on a less optimistic note, he may be in serious trouble."

$The cab driver was, for lack of a better term, a ghost. The author wishes he could give a better description, but he can't. The driver was a ghost, and that was that. Gholaat found it a tad unnerving to have a ghost driving him places. The cab driver was not much more than a three-dimensional shadow. He was nearly transparent, and dead. The driver's voice was a small, windy whisper, which could not be heard over the careful hum of the Relativity Drive, so they both remained silent. Gholaat dug the almond from his storage compartment, and held it up in the dim light. He could find nothing special about it. As far as Gholaat could tell, it was just an almond. There was no inscriptions, no coloration except its uniform brown, and certainly no signs of royalty whatsoever. No crest. No markings. Disinterested, Gholaat placed it back into his storage compartment, and shut the drawer.

$As much as Gholaat was utterly suprised that his first terrible ship had somehow taken him the distance from Rapidar to the little Motel, he was even more suprised that this second terrible ship, seemingly on the brink of shattering into a fine dust, had gotten him all the way back into the Sol System. Jupiter loomed in the distance. Unfortunately, it did not seem like it would be getting him much farther, as the ship was losing parts and pieces at an almost consistant rate, leaving behind them a silver trail of glisteningly oily stars. Asteroids the size of small hamburgers pelted the hull of the little ship. The poor cluster of metal and dirt cruised lazily. Occasionally, it would groan a silent groan, ready to give up completely. In a novel, one student might call something like that (groans and the like) foreshadowing. Another might recognize it as the author setting into motion events which will soon advance the plot. As far as Gholaat was concerned, it was not so much foreshadowing or plot as it was trouble. The little ship took a quick, sharp breath of air (or at least what might have been air had they been in any sort of atmosphere), gazed longingly out toward the parts of the universe it had never gotten the chance to explore, and let go. The ship might have collapsed, again, had they been within any sort of atmosphere or gravitational pull, but here in space, it simply dissipated, leaving Gholaat floating, helplessly helpless, in the sea. Gholaat suddenly began to drown, or feel as though he was drowning. An annoying fizzling feeling washed over and through his exoskeleton. With his eyes shut tightly, he became very dizzy, and he could not seem to catch his breath. Almost as quickly as it had begun, it had stopped, and he opened his three eyes to find that he was now sitting on the floor of some sort of sandwich shoppe.

$*Fun Fact: contrary to the already-unpopular belief, the Moon Landing was not faked. However, the Mars Landing, was. *** The golden brown hills of Mars rolled like a rippling vat of caramel. The sky, normally a soft pink, was instead a grey yellow, like the sky of the Earth after a particularly bad storm. The expansive caramel plains, which covered the entire planet, were only rarely interrupted with specks of populous silver cities, and the tiny spiderweb strands of dirt trails which connected those cities. However, the current set of rolling caramel plains that the author would like to dedicate your attention to were also interrupted by a small, smoldering grey speck. This small, smoldering grey speck was actually more of a small, smoldering grey-but-slightly-orange speck, in the fact that it was mostly molten metal, blanketed in a coat of ash, surrounded by charred grass, and hot rock. Gholaat awoke. He shifted, sitting himself up and sending some dusty ash tumbling down his mechanical body. He looked around, a bit dazed. The sun was high in the sickly sky. A yellow chrome city gleamed in the distance. Gholaat stood up. For the moment, he had forgotten how he had arrived there. He'd forgotten who he'd been running from, and forgotten that he had been running at all. He had, quite delightfully, forgotten the reason his taxi cab had fallen from the sky, and, to what would have most certainly been his relief, he had forgotten the fall itself. In fact, he had completely forgotten even the sensation of falling, which only served to make it a bit more suprising when he clattered onto the ground, making his metaloid arms clack with his metaloid waist, and giving Gholaat another good thump on his already bruised head. He looked down, or rather, west, which, relative to the way his robotic body was currently sprawled out upon the ground, was for him, down. Though he wasn't quite able to put together what had happened, he quickly decided, correctly, that his metal legs had buckled. The author, however, is very much able to put together what happened, and will tell the audience that, during the crash landing of the taxi, the friction of such a landing caused the metals of both Gholaat's cab and Gholaat's cyborg body parts to heat exponentially, successfully vaporizing most of the taxi, and at least successfully compromising the metals of his cybernetic prosthetics. In any way one might put it, Gholaat was now laying on the ground, wishing he were dead. *** Gholaat crawled. The molten bits of severed metal that constituted his cybernetic legs were cooling into sharp edges, which cut into the brown Martian earth and left two jagged trenches behind him as he pulled himself along. The glistening Martian city still stood upon the horizon, taunting him by seemingly taking a step back every time he managed to pull himself a few feet forward. *** On one's first landfall upon Mars, the Martian terrain might be misconstrued as beautiful. Not that anyone could be blamed for coming to such a wrong conclusion. With it's yellow-pink hydrogen skies, it's rolling caramel hills, and it's cities, like sparkling diamonds, embedded in a pure golden orb, even the most scrutinizingly dilligent of critics could mistake it for a piece of rather large, finely crafted jewelry. In truth, Mars was drab. The chromic cities clung like empty cicada shells to the hardened ground. Aside from the Martians themselves, organic life found Mars nauseating. Gholaat, given all he had been through already, found this appropriate. *** The particular city towards which Gholaat was slowly making his way would have been seen as beautiful in any other atmosphere. On Mars, in the Martian atmosphere, it shown as vomit-coloured chrome, reflecting the ugly yellow skies. It was shaped like a drop of water which had fallen from the giant rain of a giant storm. An iron crown of spires rose where the droplet hit the ocean of the dead, grassy plains. The Martians found this city very beautiful. Who could blame them? *** Gholaat scraped along, pulling himself onto a rough concrete road. His bloody arrival into the teasing city was barely awarded any amount of attention more than perhaps an ant gives to the rises and falls of the stock market *** The average Martian is much like the average German, in two respects. One: They would very much enjoy having a separate planet away from other life in the Sol System. The Martians simply already enjoy this luxury. The Germans do not. Yet. And two: The average Martian does not care about the personal life of any other average Martian, and usually is not keen on interfering. If you wanted to be crawling down the street with your prosthetic legs bashed or broken, they wouldn't ask questions. If you wished to drag yourself bloody and bruised down the cobblestone pavement, they wouldn't give a second glance. Mars finds itself completely devoid of hospitals, emergency services, and educational facilities, and finds preventable deaths statistically rampant.

$"Sir, we've located Legion Commander Beta Beta Alpha's Battle Freighter." "Where?" "The Delucian System. Rapidar. Located via emergency beacon. The ship has been almost completely destroyed, and the human 'Space Needle' is no more than a fray of twisted wire." "Have you sent the analysts? Was there a malfunction, perhaps, in the mass distribution subjected to the Relativity Drive?" "No sir. They propose the ship to have been forced from the sky." "And what came of the crew?" "Many were, naturally, vaporized upon entry into the Rapidarian atmosphere. However, the analysts have reason to believe that survivors of the wreck were artificially vaporized, shortly after terrestrial contact, by the attackers who brought down the ship." "What do you mean, 'artificially vaporized'?" "Some form of disintegration. The molecular patterns suggest UBMB's." "So all the signs seem to point to the Delucians, wouldn't you say?" "Yes sir" "Do we have a status report on the remains of Gholaat?" "None found, sir." "Lieutenant, alert the squadrons, and pull the Legion Commanders from the Earth Invasion. Set our destination for Delucia. If Gholaat is alive, his military knowledge makes him of utmost importance. This is very obviously an act of war by the Utter-Butter Delucians, and they may very well have already taken Gholaat as prisoner."

$The aluminum bronze satellite glistened and twinkled softly, its little diodes and outcroppings catching the sunlight, glistering as the whole mass slowly tilted and spun. It stood out from the other sixty-three satellites in two unique ways. It had not been here since the awkward sort of spark and explosion which caused the creation of the entire universe, ergo the Milky Way Galaxy, ergo the Solar system, ergo Jupiter. It had neither been somewhat haphazardly thrown into the planet's gravitational pull by a meteor shower or tumbling passing, like a few others of the moons. No, it was man-made. It had circled the sphere of Jupiter for almost four years, sending detailed pictures back to Earth. It had not been spinning. It had been completely stabilized, taking clear, still-shot, blurry, detailed photographs of the Jovian Atmosphere. That is, until it was bumped, ever-so-slightly, by a loose exhaust gasket. It was now slowly (but very fairly quickly in the grand scale of time) tumbling into the reach of Jupiter's larger, dark tendrils of gravity, and into it's deadly embrace. Although manufactured by humans, the satellite was rightfully scared. Aside from occassional glimpses of the familiar gas-scape of Jupiter, it did not recognize what it saw. It panicked. Small thrusters shot off, eagerly attempting to stabilize the large bulk, but to no avail. The Hand of the Giant had grasped it. And this, this was a new, almost familiar sensation. Heat. The satellite enjoyed it. It reminded it of Earth. It was comforting. The blackish mass that the satellite had shortly, recently developed an unusual fondness of was quickly turning into a more marmalade color, which blended nicely with the still-occassional glimpses of a suddenly much closer Jovian gas-scape. The heat was burning higher and higher, and another ticklish sensation was beginning to take hold, this one more dazzlingly odd, yet still amazingly comfortable to feel. The satellite liked it. It almost seemed that the tawny marmalade and familiar gases were flickering faster, but the satellite couldn't particularly figure out why, mostly because it had been built to observe, and leave the why to other, smarter beings. And suddenly, inertia stopped, as if to tease. The camera once again pointed directly at Jupiter, this time revealing it's deeps and depths. Metallic-hydrogen diamonds sparkled like stars in the dark underworld. The heat was now unbearably cozy, and the satellite realized that the other joyfully delicious sensation was, in fact, atmospheric pressure. Nearly immediately, the satellite collapsed inward. Had it been built with a mouth, it would have let off a high-pitched ecstatic sigh into the hydrogen-helium atmosphere. Within minutes (subatomic particles in the grand scale of time), the satellite had crinkled into a tiny aluminum-bronze ball. The atmosphere was growing colder and darker, but the camera could no longer see. Within an hour (a speck of dust in the grand scale of time) came the solitary clink of metal meeting solidified hydrogen/helium core. The blocky sphere of metal components was shrouded in black, as it was pressed into molten solid on the extraterrestrial surface of the mostly-gaseous Jupiter.

$Teleportation, if you must know, creates a bubbly, drowning sensation, which lasts for maybe a minute after the teleportation experience. Species dependent, it is a sensation which is found almost as equally enjoyable in certain species as it is unenjoyable in other species. For the Feelusian Brain Worms of Feelus -3, it is utterly unenjoyable. For the Bounty Hunters, it is a way of life. *** Monty's Subs is a quaint sandwich shop located in the quiet sector of the small F-Ring of Saturn. It is accessable via a one-way teleporter, located billions of kilometres away in the vast, almost-emptiness of space. For more reasonable patrons, it is also accessable via the front door. The space around the shop is littered with a collection of rock, dust, ice, and classic spaceships. The shop itself is usually littered with the strange and hungry inhabitants of relative space. *** After picking himself up from the hardwood floor, Gholaat clambered onto one of the bar stools. It's electromagnetic stabilizers wobbled under his weight, but steadied quickly. He looked cautiously around the room, studying the many different peoples which crowded it. Tall men with fins and gills from Europa, forms which could hardly be called men because they were nothing more than clouds of loosely-bound hyperintelligent gas particles, and even a few of the weird, pink, two-eyed beings that he recognized as the species of the planet Earth, the very planet which had caused all this trouble in the first place. "What'll you have today, my friend?" Gholaat turned back to face the voice, who, the author notes, bore a striking resemblance to Michael J. Fox. "I guess, ah... whatever the special is today, please." "Right away, my friend." Now, of course, Gholaat was thirsty. He'd assumed that this was a bar, and so, whatever the special happened to be, he assumed it would be refreshing. Naturally, he was surprised when the bartender began assembling a sandwich from behind a previously-unnoticed sneeze-guard. He watched as the man assembled various white bits, red bits and purple bits on top of a slice of sourdough, and topped it off with another slice. He picked his creation up, set it on a plate, and slid it across the bar to Gholaat. "One Hammond Chė Sandwich." Gholaat took a bite of the sandwich as the bartender made his way to help another hungry customer. Between bites, he continued to glance around, this time noticing the structure and decor instead of the lifeforms bouncing and moving among it all. He looked at a big window panel at the front of the restaurant, emblazoned with the letters zduZ z'ytnoM. For a moment he wondered what the letters meant, but soon realized that he was looking at them from the inside, and that they said Monty's Subs. He gazed beyond the letters at a vast yellow planet with colorful rings, one that he recognized, no less, as one he'd already passed in his attempt to return to his race. "Excuse me. Monty?" The bartender looked up at him from the bit of sneeze-guard that he was polishing. "Oh, I'm not Monty, kid. I'm just the guy Monty pays to run his shop, while Monty's at home counting his fat stacks of credits. What can I help you with?" "How far is Earth from here?" "Earth? Well, it's only a billion miles away this time of year. But hey, what's a guy like you going to Earth for? There's nothing but dirt and capitalists there. You ought to head to one of those party moons orbiting Jupiter. I hear Io has some pretty sweet casinos. They don't call it Sin Planet for nothing..." "ahh, no sir. I was just looking to catch up with the High Council of my race. We had an invasion going on there on Earth when my legion got separated from the rest. Say, you wouldn't happen to have a ship I could borrow, would you? Or a comm-unit that I could call a taxi from?" The bartender motioned to a large neon sign which said PayComm. Gholaat thanked him, and took another bite of his sandwich. "What do you know of the planet Earth?" Gholaat turned towards this new, slimey voice, but did not respond, because he did not know the answer, and didn't even comprehend the question. He frankly did not speak the language that the voice spoke. The being from which the voice flowed was sitting in the stool directly next to him. The being had two arms, and two legs. It had two eyes, one mouth, many wrinkles on it's old face, and a cylindrical glass dome atop its head, which revealed his naked pink brain. He also had a trunk, which sprung from his brow, and hung down until it was level with his chin. His voice was sleek like sharpened steel, yet wavered, as if uncertain of the words it spoke. But still, Gholaat understood very little of what the man said. Every so often, Gholaat could recognize the word "Almond," which the man said in conjunction with waggling an actual almond in front of Gholaat's face. He found the emphasis odd, but figured there was some importance to the almond that he wasn't quite picking up on. He decided the man was insane, and that maybe he shouldn't worry about it. A certain look came over the man's face. His eyes became concerned, and then filled with realization. "You speak Feelusian, don't you?" Gholaat understood. "Yes." "Do you know who I am?" "No." "Do you know what an almond is?" "Yes." "Good." Gholaat wished the man would slow down, so that he could get a word in edgewise, or better yet, that the man would stop talking to him at all. "This is the king of the Almonds." The man continued to waggle the almond in Gholaat's face every time he mentioned it. The only difference was that this time, Gholaat understood the context, and he was now certain that the man was completely bonkers.

$The spire of the city reached terribly into the vomit sky. Gholaat scraped painfully across the concrete of the road, wincing and gritting his teeth. The gray was encapsulating. Engulfing. Each building gleamed the same dull chrome, and each martian wore the same dull expression. As Gholaat drug himself along, he spotted a single lot which, instead of the standard mirrored glow, was lacklustered by a terrible corrosion. It was unkempt and filled with beat-up spaceships. It was dirty and old, and looked utterly out of place next to the shiny and clean Martian Metropolis A sign hung above the lot. Rorm's Used Cruisers As he pulled himself inside, Gholaat was happy to find that the ground in the lot was dirt, which did not wear on his already-bruised skin. A man sat at a chair under a portable awning, reading a book. When he heard Gholaat slither in, he looked up from his book with a look of surprise. He obviously was not expecting any customers. "Are you the dealer on this lot?" Gholaat had to crane his neck to see the man, who bowed slightly in accommodation. "Yes, sir. That'd be me. They call me Slimey Rorm. What brings you in on this fine Gronday?" "I'm in need of a ship that'll get me to Earth." "No can do, my friend." "What do you mean, 'no can do'? You sell ships, don't you?" "Yes, but I sell used ships." Rorm said it so matter-of-fact-ly, Gholaat got the impression that he was suddenly supposed to come to some sort of understanding with Rorm, but Gholaat still didn't know what the hell Rorm was talking about. "I'm afraid that doesn't answer my question. Aren't these spaceships?" "Yes, but they're used," he repeated. "They'd never make it out of the atmosphere. Most of them wouldn't even make it into the next city over." "How could you possibly manage to stay in business?" "I don't." Rorm leaned over a little closer towards the ground, and began to speak to Gholaat in a quiet voice. "But I can let you in on a little secret while you're here..." Gholaat wasn't exactly sure he could trust the word of someone called 'Slimey Rorm', but he also didn't have many options. "What might that be?" "These guys, these martian people, they're too polite. Every single one of them pays their taxes. Every single one of them follows the rules." "What's that got to do with anything?" "Don't you get it? They don't have any need for law enforcement, because nobody breaks the law, and they don't have a clue what to do when someone does. I haven't paid my taxes in four smyears, and nobody has done anything about it. They don't know what to do! You go into a grocery store and try to pay for your groceries with a paper clip, they can't do a damn thing, because nobody does it." "Why do you keep up with this used car lot, then, if you get everything you want for free?" "It's the family business. I was the first one in four generations to take the company off our homeworld. And, of course, of all the planets in the galaxy I could have chosen, I pick the one where nobody leaves. I only hang out at this lot because hanging out at lots is all I've ever done. Nobody interesting on this planet, anyways..." "So what you're telling me is that there's no way to get off this damn rock?" "Not that I know of, or I would have already left." "Rorm, you would not believe my luck with ships these days."

$Splimbo trotted out to his little v6 Blakker Cosmos, digging for his little keys in his little pockets. He looked around. He looked at the beautiful circle of Saturn, and he looked at the lovely array of stars and nebulas. Splimbo sighed. Much like humans have done with the blue wonder of their sky, and much like the Utter-Butter have done with their own purple wonderments of both their sky and their gaseous planetary surface, space travelling regulars, such as Splimbo Ta'lek, have grown accustomed to the vast enormity and endless possibility of Outer Space. They've taken it for granted. In such, Splimbo had not sighed out of sheer amazement in being a witness of the glory of space. No, he had sighed because he'd finally found his keys in his pocket. The sandwich shop door slammed shut. Two lanky grey beings were walking towards him. He turned and noticed the grey beings. There was a tall one, and there was a slightly taller one. They were both equally menacing, and they were both walking towards him. He turned back to face the Cosmos. He looked down at his keys, picking for the one which would open his ship's driver-side door. He glanced back over his shoulder. He was hoping to see whether the menacing aliens were still heading his way, but he'd glanced too quickly, and managed to capture nothing but a blurred image where he could roughly make out a few brightly colored blobs. He looked over his shoulder again, this time for a longer interval. He did not get a chance to turn back to his ship, as a hand grabbed his shoulder and forced the rest of his body around. This time, his vision was filled with a tall grey blob, and a slightly taller grey blob. The hand pushed him to where his back was against his ship, making him stumble a bit, and causing the ship to give a small wobble. His vision focused on a view he had, frankly, been expecting. The two black aliens stood before him. In a strange tongue he hardly understood, which sounded like every language mixed into one, they were asking him questions. Since we are currently up close with the aliens for the moment, the author will use this opportunity to give you some insight into what the aliens looked like, and what they were asking questions about. The tall alien was muscular and lean. Had this tall alien ever visited Earth, he might have been compared to a high school track runner, shortly before he was forceably taken to Area 51 and cut into many different tall pieces. His chest was covered by a metal chestplate, and his thighs and waist covered by a pair of bicycle shorts, which, as is standard for bicycle shorts, revealed much more of himself than he would have preferred. His arms were bare, showing off his pale grey skin. His head was wrapped in fabric, and his eyes were covered by a pair of red goggles. He looked altogether emotionless. His comrade looked almost exactly the same, except that he was slightly taller, and would have instead been compared to the gangly freak in high school which everyone made fun of. The language which they spoke, which sounded like every language mixed into one, was, in fact, every language mixed into one. It was the standard language for intergalactic interrogation, because it was guarenteed that every being in the galaxy would be able to, very poorly, understand it. Splimbo, who spoke Basic Galactic, was able to decipher the jumbled Basic that he heard, mixed in with languages like Western Feelucian, and Eastern Greek. The tall alien was looking Splimbo in the eyes, asking him questions like "where has he gone?" and "what did you give him?" The taller one looked at him silently and indifferently. Splimbo, who was aware that these beings were not going to be doing anything good for his new Feelucian friend, was being fairly uncooperative, and he could tell that the aliens were getting a little pissed, not by their emotions, but by their very deliberate movements, and the way they looked at each other a bit more often than a few minutes before. The taller alien unholstered his UBMB, and held the end of the barrel to Splimbo's chest. Splimbo was very familiar with this form of motivation, and decided to humor them with the information they wanted. "Listen, my friends," Splimbo said. "I think this will answer your questions." The taller one loosened his grip on the UBMB, obviously relieved that they were getting somewhere. "I do not speak much Feelucian, but we were able to communicate through the little Feelucian I knew, and the little Basic that he knew." The tall one loosened his own grip on Splimbo's shoulder, not because he was relieved, but so he could reach into his pocket and pull out a paper tablet and a cheap little souvineer Space Needle pen. He scribbled the pen on the tablet, and looked up, listening, pen at the ready. Splimbo told them about the sandwich that Gholaat had eaten, and how he had seemed like he was running from something, which made sense in hindsight. They had chatted. Mostly, it had been Splimbo chatting. Gholaat had just sort of looked at him, which Splimbo first attributed to stupidity, later realizing that Gholaat simply didn't speak Basic Galactic. The two aliens looked at him intently. This did not answer their questions at all, but Splimbo was getting there, though he was in no hurry. The tight grip onto the UBMB returned. Splimbo got the message. "Listen, boys. He didn't say much. When we started speaking the same language, he mentioned something about having to go back to some planet called Earth. All I gave him was an almond, and that's it. Seriously. Now please. He's probably already halfway to Earth by now. It might not even be worth going after him." The tall one finished writing his notes, and looked at the taller one. The taller one looked back, tilting his head to the side. They looked at Splimbo simultaneously. "Why an almond?" the taller one asked in his deep, jumbled voice. "It's a long story." Wrong Answer The tall one quickly gripped both of Splimbo's shoulders, making Splimbo jump in surprise. In what seemed almost like a continuation of the same movement, the taller one aimed his Laser Rifle-O-Matic's muzzle under Splimbo's chin, into his jaw. Splimbo jerked forcefully, but he was unable to stop the taller one from pulling the trigger. Within seconds, Splimbo Ta'lek was nothing more than a splatter of organic goo and ash in the parking lot of a certain sandwich shop in the F Ring of Saturn, except for a few reminants of his shoulders, which the tall grey alien was wiping from his hands onto his bicycle shorts. The grey aliens stood next to each other, surveying the sandwich shop. Usually, when they left places, they left them in ruins. This time, they weren't really feeling it. And so the sandwich shop stood.