The city proper was a realm for the planet’s most numerous subspecies, known as “Standards” – sufficiently humanoid that an Earthling like me could walk among them. At least that was what I hoped to do… with help from the substantial makeup kit that my other new friend, Sully, carried with her at all times.

“We’ll have to change your skin tone and put some box-corners on your ears,” she commented while applying putties and sprays “Oh! And let’s give you a nice goatee beard to cover up that awful chin.”

I stopped myself from blurting: “What’s wrong with my chin?” Even with nano translators tuned to the local language, I had to assume there would be, well, exaggerations. So I quashed any impulse to take offense.

Besides, she had a gentle touch… and was by far the most attractive corpse I had ever met.

Sully even made a few alterations to my Alliance uniform, sewing some of the rips and tears from my battle with local lycanthropes, the night before, then adding a few clever touches to make my clothes resemble normal street attire. Moulder, pacing nearby, grumbled that she was putting in far too much effort.

“It’s not as if he’ll really blend in. Have you forgotten we’ll be with him?”

Moulder had just finished puttying his own face, but only in a very dark room would anybody fail to note a missing chunk of skull, perhaps the very injury that brought him to this place. To his second phase of “life.”

“Oh, hush,” Sully responded. “Don’t you want the flavor of a good deed to carry with you, as memory and mind fade away?”

Moulder muttered some more. But of course, this merely confirmed something that I’ve long observed during my voyages aboard the Clever Gamble. For all of its apparent malignity, the universe also overflows with kindness and skill.

Anyway, I just have to believe it. A character flaw, I suppose. They only pick optimists to serve as human advisors aboard demmie-crewed ships.

Anyone else would probably go insane.

Our day began with a hurried search of the big park where my crewmates and I had slurried down to this planet, only a day before. I held out little hope of finding the Nozzle intact. After all, I couldn’t see the Hose. A careful scan of the sky showed no blue, shimmering line leading upward to the heavens. Still, I had to check. If our ship had been destroyed, the Nozzle-reconstructor should still be there… along with a tangled coil of fallen tubing that would trail ever westward, falling from space to snarl trees, power cables, and clotheslines across half a continent.

The nozzle was gone. No sign of it in the park. And, in a sense, that was encouraging! So, the Gamble hadn’t been destroyed in a flash. There must have been time to at least begin hauling in the slurry hose.