Pel pulled onto the road and set us on course. Minutes later, I looked up, having saw-heard the telltale whine of an approaching flower-ship. With my second eyes, I was even able to determine just how quickly the ship was moving toward us.

Pel looked at the rear and side-view mirrors, clearly having heard it, too, but she didn't let it deter her, and kept on driving as if nothing had changed.

Then, I finally caught sight of it. The ship was abnormally close to the ground, and getting closer with each second. The blue jets at its back sputtered, sending out smoke in a wobbling trail.

The craft swooshed by and quickly zipped out of view behind some distant hills.

For a second, I held my breath—not that I needed to breathe.

The ship did not rise back up again. It must have crashed, but not explosively, as I hadn't seen any clouds mushroom up from behind the hills.

It took a couple more minutes for Pel to reach the turn off to the refueling station.

The station was classic new-old style. From a distance, it looked like a tub of ice-cream done up like those two-color white mints. Thin red and blue neon lights ran around the building's roof. A swell-looking finial jutted up from the middle of the roof like a shark's fin, and was emblazoned with the station's brand name: Quick-n-Go, with the G done as a stylized arrow. An overhang extended from the building's center to provide shade for drivers looking to refuel their vehicles' hydrogen fuel cells. The building itself was the standard minimart, fully automated. The lights were still on, though that wasn't surprising. Charging and refueling stations always had their own solar power supply.

I slithered off the car as Pel pulled up by one of the refueling tanks. She slid the windows down.

"Genneth, what was that?"

"Exactly what it looked like," I said. "One of their ships just crashed."

"I didn't see an explosion," Jules said.

"Neither did I."

"Are we gonna investigate, Dad?" Rayph asked.

"I think—"

—But then I stopped as I heard something topple onto the ground.

I turned, following the sound's ripples back to their source.

I stuck out one of my hands. "Shh!"

The crash had come from the minimart, whose doors, I now realized, were wide open.

I glanced back at the car. Pel had gotten out and onto her feet; her head stuck up over the roof. "What—"

I waved my claws, motioning them to stay put. "Stay here," I said, barely above a whisper. "I think there's something inside the mini-mart."

As I slowly slithered across the pavement toward the door, I found myself desperately hoping that it was a zombie or some other fungal abomination that was waiting for me inside it; y'know, something simple and manageable.

Gosh, my life had gotten weird. "May you live in interesting times" really was a curse.

But I could mourn the lost normality later. Right now, I needed to be Heroic Dad Genneth, not Chronically Depressed Genneth.

I had to bend down to fit through the double doors. At first glance, the store looked surprisingly pristine. Everything was neat and tidy, and all the products were in the proper place. The refrigerators and freezers hummed in peaceful approval.

There.

One of the racks near the back of the store had fallen over.

I slithered past the entrance and down the rightmost aisle.

Unfortunately, here, I screwed up, and in more than one way!

Mistake number one: lifting my neck up and back to put it into a more comfortable posture. This caused me to bang my head against the ceiling. The impact's thump jostled the conical light fixtures hanging nearby.

Mistake number two: turning onto the aisle while my tail was still in the doorway. Because of this, I sort of bashed into the side of the entrance, flinging boxes of various products onto the floor in an impressive crash. Also, I broke the door.

Finally, mistake number three was that mistakes one and two made a heck of a lot of noise, bidding the elements of stealth and surprise a fond farewell.

Then the interloper stepped into view.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

At first, I stared, shell-shocked, but then I sighed. After all this time, fate was still finding new ways to surprise me.

Exhibit A: the interloper was one of the hummingbird people.

I muttered under my breath. "Shut the front door…"

Gosh, it was eerie to see it in the flesh. It was a magnificent creature, cute as heck, yet also very different from what I'd seen in the dead city in the Lantor incursion.

The hummingbird was a little over three feet tall and, except for its head, was covered in smooth, silver armor. With one look, I could tell that its armor was more advanced than anything DAISHU had ever made, or ever would. Lighter portions of smooth gray material covered the hummingbird in between the armored plating. The same gray material enveloped its wings, yet I could still make out its individual feathers pressing beneath it. Circuit-like figurations shimmered on the armor's surface as it caught the light from one of the fixtures overhead. The missing helmet was shaped like a polygonal distortion of its head's silhouette, with an obtrusion in front to accommodate its beak. The hummingbird held the helmet under its arm.

And its head… its face…

It was like a hummingbird's, but… more. There was an almost human expressiveness in the taut base where its beak met its head. Its eyes were deep and dark, and—if the width of the pupils was any indicator—wide in shock. The feathers were iridescent green on the back of its head, with browns on the side. Angel's breath, the feathers were so beautiful, I would have sworn they were CGI.

When this creature moved and twitched, it was like watching a jewel that had come to life. The lower half of its face was white and slightly fluffy, both of which continued down the exposed portion of its neck, speckled through with a duller green. The pattern reminded me of a female hummingbird's coloration.

Did that mean this "it" was a "she"?

&alon was clearly in the process of "saving" this female hummingbird person. Patches of her neck feathers had fallen away, revealing dark fungal lightning spreading beneath her pale, mottled skin. Bits of black ooze and spores daubed around her nostrils at the base of her beak.

She stepped forward.

She held something in her other hand: a Hummingbright brand multipurpose knife, easily identifiable as such by the company's trademarked logo, which was prominently displayed on the red-lacquered sides of the knife's handle. The company logo was none other than Lassedicy's sacred hummingbird. That's when I made the connection: the hummingbird-person was surrounded by Hummingbright products. She must have been gawking at them, wondering why they showed a creature that was so similar to herself, yet so very different.

Out of force of habit, I made the Bond-sign.

The hummingbird dropped her helmet and staggered back. Her dainty, silver-sheathed feet's claws clacked on the minimart's vinyl floor.

I stuck my hand out in a "stop" gesture.

"Wait, please, I—"

She tweeted something high-pitched and expressive. It was obviously a language, and I couldn't understand a word of it.

Then, dropping her helmet, she reached around to her side and pulled one of the silver plated sections off her hip. The piece of machinery transformed in her grasp, humming and whizzing, extruding components this way and that.

Fricassee me!

It was some kind of gun!

She fired her weapon at me as she hovered off the ground. Her wings thrummed like miniature helicopter blades, melted into blurs.

I briefly slowed time to crawl, watching the shots emerge from her weapon.

No, not emerge: coalesce.

The weapon didn't fire bullets, but rather some kind of blob of intensely bright light.

Fudge, I think she had a plasma rifle.

It even went pew! pew!

The plasma bursts flashed as they hit me, and flibbertigibbet, did they hurt! The pain was searing, like tongues of fire rasping my scales. Sparking aftershock rippled out from the impact points, turning my muscles sluggish and numb. I tried slithering back, but my body didn't respond properly.

Had she shot my pressure points, or something?

Swinging my arm, I pressed my hand on one of the product racks and pushed, shoving myself back while knocking the rack to the floor.

The hummingbird fired again, blasting smoldering, red-hot holes into the metal rack.

I wriggled backwards, toward the door.

My attacker stuck her arm through a gasp in the collapsing rack and, in the same swift motion, pulled her weapon's trigger. A plasma bolt blossomed at the tip of the rifle, only for it to whisk over to her hand, where it swirled about, coalesced, and then lengthened into a spear.

A plasma spear.

She charged at me with a high pitched chirp. She swung her plasma spear in a downward slash, cleaving through the product rack, which toppled to the floor on either side of her. Bits of superheated metal dripped onto the vinyl.

She rushed at me, wings a-burr.

Slowing time, I wove up a forcefield, nice, thick and bouncy. (I admit, I felt somewhat confident.) I spread the plexus wide, enough to cover the breadth of the minimart. I pointed the forcefield's vectors at her, so that her attacks would just be redirected right back at her.

As she struck the forcefield with her spear, her blow bounced back, knocking the spear from her hand.

Through the slowed time, the hummingbird's expression tightened; a transparent second eyelid slid over her eye. With a twitch of her wrist, the plasma spear reversed direction and flew back into her hand.

I noticed the air around the tip of her spear had begun to quiver. Thickening my wyrmsight, I saw that she'd wrapped the spear's tip in a kind of plexus I'd never seen before. It was nearly colorless, and looked like gauze or freshly shorn wool.

Then she lunged forward and stabbed my forcefield with her spear, breaking through it with ease.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was like her spear was water and my forcefield was oil. The gauze-energy she'd wrapped around its tip seemed to overwrite my barrier's blue and gold threads. Fractures spread through my weave.

I tried to pull away, but I was too slow, and couldn't dodge, I could only turn.

Her spear dug into my right arm. One of my dopplegenneths had been watching, and did me the favor of wiping out my ability to perceive pain at just the right moment, so that the whole limb went numb after a brief, terrible heat, which was good, because my attacker then yanked the spear out, ripping apart the muscles of my upper arm.

Gosh, that looked like it would really hurt.

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