“Give ‘em here,” said Patton. “Bigger hands.”

Happy to surrender the task, I lifted Pickles over my lap, which was tough with my wrists barely mobile, and set them down between us. I edged them toward Patton with a finger, while he simultaneously tried to reach them. Eventually, they came to rest at a point of limbo between us, a quarter inch from anyone’s fingertips in snack food purgatory. Taunting us.

Patton lurched toward them only to gag himself on a restraint.

The strand of whatever that ran across my lap pressed painfully against my bladder. Distraction over other things had blunted the sensation, but now it was coming through full strength. This was going to be a problem.⁶⁷ “Hey!” I cried out to no one. “I need to pee!”

Our tethers released, with each of the strands melting back into the walls. Simultaneously, however, the places where my body contacted the floor and wall softened, and I was absorbed into the structure of the scull itself. Struggling only made it worse – as if we were in quicksand – and I was soon embedded. Same with Patton. Only my face, top of my legs and arms above the wrist remained above the surface. More dim lights.

“It’s carbonite!” Patton squealed.

“Not a real thing,” I grunted, still hopelessly squirming.

The ceiling appeared to bow at the center and the material gathered into bulge. Then it drew long, stretching toward the floor, forming an eel-like appendage.

“What is that?” squealed Patton.

The head of the eel descended and a bead of blue light shone from its tapered tip, first onto the jar of pickles, also embedded in the floor, then directly onto my crotch.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” Arms hobbled, I flippered my hands at it. “Stop that.”

“Oh, no!” cried Patton. “It’s trying to get your dick, man!”

The eyeless eel looked me in the face, then traced up over my belly and chest, coming to rest just inches from my nose. The blue light began to pulse. Slowly, quickly, slowly, quickly, slowly–

65 International Watch Company – Boring name, exciting watches – You should trademark that.

66 As opposed to the tardigrade limit, which is closer to sixteen-thousand g’s. Those microscopic abominations were built for survival – At what point do brains undergo liquefaction? Asking for a friend.

67 Interestingly, bladder size has little effect on duration of urination. Most animals take twenty-one seconds to relieve themselves. A beagle will take the same amount of time to pee as an elephant, who carries a five-gallon bladder – Now I have to pee even worse! Ahhhhhhh! – Me too! Aaaahhhhh!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Vortu. The Chime. The Vortu. The Chime. Two independent sources of impending death. One local, one galactic. Even with the very real possibility of her own impending death by the local one, Naecia’s mind was distracted by the Earth man, who according to his now-empty cell was called “Ben”. It was Ben who threatened the lives of everyone she cared about, namely her mother and brother back on Drev, because he didn’t understand the world-ending potential of the object he would soon be tasked to find.