How to Lose Friends and Irritate People

Che Miranda had a philosophy, and it was this: don't worry about it.

Throughout the multiverse this philosophy had been put forth many times, usually by people on drugs. But on his home planet of Aguedo, known to travelers as the Skinny Lesbian planet for its overwhelmingly female population, it was a revolutionary thought. The native borrosans had evolved from something timid and highly edible. They lived fast, died fast and were fastly digested. Growing opposable thumbs had changed their world but not their outlook on life.

They knew aliens were slow, though it was no longer polite to say so. Che had met his first a few weeks ago and stealing from them had been an exercise in dark humor. It was a deadly game, as even he could not dodge a laser. But he didn't have to, when they took so long to pull the trigger.

The universe was brimming full of rules to be broken. He might just even discover some new ones and have the pleasure of being the first to walk all over them.

Che had set his sights on Arrivrealm and spent the long weeks of travel learning how to talk and act slow. Now, he parked in the wilderness outside a city and waltzed in. Thankfully, there were doors--wide open and apparently for show--otherwise he might not have known he had. The change was primarily one of coloration and population. Everything was so organic yet so organized, it looked like God had dropped acid and started seeing music.

Che, after giving it some consideration, decided that the city was Classical as performed by a Jazz ensemble.

Stranger still were the people. They weren't just foreign to him but to each other--some furred, some scaled, some multi-tentacled. When you see something that looks like it came from a sci-fi horror flick, you don't expect it to be a person, to be smarter and more civilized than you.

Che smiled.

The pixie-looking thing with six wings and two tails would act like Paloma, he decided at random. Timid and deferential unless you got him talking about his hobbies, at which point he became a torrent of facts and opinion. The unpleasant shimmering underwater slitherer would be like Rica, moody and dramatic but very generous. Or perhaps that was the beige and feathered thing talking to what seemed to be a lamppost--

There was a horrible screech of metal followed by an even more horrible thump, which shook Che in his whole body and made him confused as to whether his heart were beating or just shaking. The great door of the city lay twisted on the ground, and a figure strode atop it with perfect dramatic timing.

He's good, thought Che, confirming with a swift look around that everyone's eyes, no matter how numerous or faceted, were focused there.

"Kunai," said the man, cloak swirling around him, "Round them up."

After that, it all rather went to hell.

"You're so cute!" gushed Fox.

Bear responded to this with the long suffering sigh of, well, any of Fox's friends. He was normally twice Fox’s height and six times his weight, a person with some gravity. But for some reason he’d switched his stature for a tiny, pudgy body that looked a lot like a stuffed animal Fox'd had as a child.

"Sooooo cute," said Fox, "Can I pick you up?"

"NO."

Fox choked, coughed and laughed. "Your voice is still scary."

Bear returned to his work, and Fox gave himself a moment to recover from his excitement and suppress the urge to pick up his friend and cuddle him. "But why'd you do it? You hate transmogrifying. You've never even gotten rid of that scar of yours, which is kind of perversely vain, you know."

Fox was convinced Bear kept the scar to scare people off. Instead, he'd started a of fad. Some sort of cosmic sense of irony insured that the asocial inventor was incredibly popular. The more Bear walked away from people, the faster they came running after him.

Bear said, "You're calling me vain?"

"I have two tails," said Fox, heading off Bear's train of thought, "Look, I can wag them independently of each other."

Bear nodded at this as though it were something of great consideration, then returned to his work.

"You haven't said why." said Fox. Like a child, he had no attention span except for subjects you wanted dropped immediately.

"I want to be left alone." Bear said.

He said it often enough, but the tone ... Fox’s brow creased as he tried to pick up any signals his friend might cast off. Bear was as unreadable as ever.

Fox's voice, when it returned, was uncharacteristically soft and hesitant. "Bear, as an inventor, you have to accept that sometimes people will use your creations in ways you never intended."

Bear turned to him this time with glacial purpose. His gaze was piercing. That was the thing; when you didn't have too little of Bear's attention, you had far too much of it. "What happened?"

"Y ... You don't know?" Fox stumbled for a way to start. "'Cause of the multinet, everyone knows we're here. And because of the transmogrification, aliens just blend in with everyone else. We're getting a flood of them, and one of them..." Fox hesitated.

Bear waited, staring.

"...one of them's crazy or something. He's taken over Hermes. All the officials are freaking out, they're locking down the city at noon. Should keep them out, but what do we do with the ones already here? Bear?

…Bear?"

The little blue dot ran into the wilds. Behind him, the rarely-used, near-transparent shields flipped on, blocking any retreat. He had a map in his head from a long ago geography lesson and a prototype strapped to his back.

Before, only the barely tangible had been able to pass from one dimension to another, quarks and photons and rumor. The prototype broke those rules, connecting to a pocket dimension and a filing system. It was nothing compared to what Bear was aiming for--the same way the multinet was just a stepping stone--but it had its uses.

Bear withdrew a small hovercraft from it and continued, turning on the wireless.

"--as been locked down until further notice. Authorities wish to determine whether there are any aliens within the city before taking offensive measures. So far, our only information on the aliens describes them as 'like a magician and a ninja.'"

Bear raised an eyebrow at the report, but kept on. There was very little else said that he hadn't heard, mostly speculation and fear. Eventually they reported his departure in tones of hysteria, and he turned the wireless off.

He was left alone after that, the only sound the quiet hum of the hovercraft growing ever louder in his ears. The sun had set and risen, and he had not yet slept. It crept over the horizon, dying the land red as he reached Hermes.

He stopped, turned off the craft, put it away. The silence buzzed in his ears; his steps made no sound as he approached. He never left Athena, the city being a world of its own, but he was sure Hermes had not looked like this. The buildings were twisted. Strange scorch marks ran along many of them. Odd lights danced within, more disturbing than even the red coat left by the sun.

Bear was almost within the city walls when he noticed the man. Standing atop a tower like a gargoyle, coat tails flying in the wind, his shadowed eyes seemed to focus on the tiny figure of Bear far below him. Bear froze, yet the figure leaned further, tensed, as though to pounce.

"Kunai!"

He was gone. He had glanced over his shoulder and vanished from the building like a cast shadow. Bear sat heavily with a sigh of relief.

"Looking for a hero's grave, are we?"

Bear bolted upright, head whipping around, long ears trailing. He'HHd come down here--

But this man wasn't wearing a coat. He was wearing a suspicious smile and a suspicious black outfit, leaving only his arms and face bare. He was brown and fuzzy with slightly long ears and an elongated look. He had the brightest smile Bear had ever seen. It went ting.

Bear furrowed his brow. "Are you one of these invaders?"

The stranger tried to look innocent. "Me?"

"Yes, you." Bear had not spent much of his life around other people, but he was certain there was something off about this one.

"Just trying to help." He had an odd accent, that was it. "Name of Che. That," He gestured up where the unknown figure had stood, "was the ninja. The magician's inside."

Bear narrowed his eyes. "You believe that?"

"I'm the one who made the report. The wand and the pointy star things are a dead giveaway. See that?"

This time he was waving at the giant metal gates of Hermes, many times the size of either observer. They were for show, and now they were lying bent and warped on the ground.

"The ninja boy moved that single-handedly." said Che, "Can you do that?"

"Yes. With a lever."

Che closed his eyes and shook his head, still grinning. "As a fellow smart arse I appreciate the sentiment, but--"

Bear didn't bother waiting to hear the rest of it. It was his responsibility. That was the beginning and the end of it. If these aliens were dangerous, then that was just another strike against him.

Inside, it was worse than he'd hoped and better than he'd imagined. There were many hostages behind some sort of bars Bear didn't recognize, enough to be the entire population of the town. There were no wounded that Bear could see. Were they just that easily overpowered? It was hard to believe.

To Bear's left was the "ninja" in heavy clothing and sunglasses. Bear wasn't up on the genre, but he was fairly sure ninjas weren't supposed to have white shocks of hair or wear long red-brown trench coats. Beside him, a bald man with strange markings on his face brooded on a impromptu throne. He surveyed his hostages with distaste.

"Do I really need so many hostages?" He turned to the ninja. "Couldn't you have killed some of them?"

The ninja cocked his head to the side.

"Let me rephrase that." The magician pointed to the cowering masses. "Kunai? Kill."

The boy's soft and curious airs disappeared, and he leapt forward on all fours towards the crowd. It was such a sudden change that he was half way to them before they began to scream and pull away, squashing those behind them. They were still screaming for a moment longer, having missed the cry to halt and Kunai's sudden stop.

Bear held one paw to the attacker's nose, eyebrows down, expression disapproving. His shout, deep and authoritative, had made Kunai scramble to avoid crashing into him. Frozen with his eyes on Bear's, Kunai was thawing back into a questioning state--What is this bunny-bear thing?

He sniffed him.

"Stay." said Bear, trying not to sound surprised.

The magician rubbed at his temples in a long-suffering manner. "Kunai, you only take orders from me, remember?"

Kunai stared over his shoulder at him.

"Come here, let's go over this one more time."

Watching the magician explain the basics of us verses them, Bear realized he had very little time in which to turn this situation around. He was, at least, between the aggressors and the hostages, which was both very good and very bad. A quick mental check of his pocket universe revealed nothing helpful for dissuading invaders. Were he his old, larger self, he might have at least threatened to sit on them until they behaved. But physical threats were never his forte.

The explanation ceased, and Kunai turned to him again. It had been only a few seconds, but Bear was the fastest thinking creature on the planet. He had his plan.

He remained right where he was while Kunai charged forward to kill him. The timing was important, and the boy was fast. Kunai was a yard away from him, and Bear went to turn--

Then a feeling of great acceleration, of being topsy-turvy, of confusion. When it subsided, he was somewhere entirely new in space, in someone's arms. He looked up into the fuzzy chin of the man "just trying to help".

"You've completely ruined my plan," said Bear.

"Shush," Che was peering around the edge of a pillar, presumably at the attackers. "I'm sorry, I did what?"

"I had him right where I wanted him."

"Did you now? Suicidal, are we? I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise." Che's grin was caustic now, or so Bear guessed. It took some effort to decipher the moods of someone who smiled like a shark all the time. "At what point does the army get here?"

"Army?"

"Air force? Police?" Che turned from his watch in order to survey Bear with what was probably a disbelieving expression. "Boy scouts?"

Bear blinked at him. The police were very useful--many of them recognized Fox by attitude if not by sight, and would show him the way home. They weren't lost, however.

Che brought his eyebrows into a scowl even as his voice remained amused. "You know, there's such a thing as being too civilized."

There was a deadly swish behind them. Bear likened it, in that second moment of vast acceleration, to the strange hiss of an experiment about to blow up in one's face. When they stopped they were across the street from the collapsing pillar. Plaster clouds billowed around the pale Kunai, with his one arm through the offending pillar and unfazed as it crumbled around him. His eyes, somewhere behind those reflecting lenses, were on them. Bear knew for a certainty that it was the pillar that they had just been standing behind, that had Che not moved it was their heads that would be crushed in, or their middles pierced by that fist.

Bear said, "He is strong."

Che laughed. "It's nice to be right."

They could hear the magician shouting in the background, although their attention was closer at hand. Kunai charged forward, and Che side-stepped him like a matador teasing a bull. Kunai bounded off a wall and lunged back, but Che was already somewhere else. All the jerking around was making Bear ill, but he could hardly complain. Within a matter of a few minutes he was endangered and saved more than he had been in the entirety of the rest of his life.

It would be nice if they stayed still long enough for him to save the day, but unlikely.

"Forget this farce," said the magician. It had only been a few frenzied minutes, but perhaps Che's laughing attitude had got on his nerves--his tattooed fists were clenched to the point of shaking. One of them reached within the breast pocket of his robes, drew back his arm, and revealed a handful of nothing.

"Misplaced something, have we?" said Che. He was teetering a stick between his fingers, his grin turned predatory again.

"How did--" He shook himself. "Kunai! Get my wand!"

"That's right," Che dropped Bear for the moment, leaned back, pitched, followed through. The stick disappeared over the buildings. "Fetch!"

Kunai's noisy departure faded into silence. Bear was left floundering by the exchange, but he welcomed the chance to steady his mind, his stomach and his nerves. Che and the usurper were sizing each other like cowboys at noon, judging the happy medium between looking cool for the longest time possible and not being shot. The caged locals were noisily holding their breath.

Bear had his feet again and, ignored by all, was walking steadily towards the makeshift throne. It was better that he had been interrupted, perhaps. It was handy, even, that he was too small to be accounted.

The magician broke the silence with a sneer. "That's just a focusing device."

"Oh good," said Che, "I was hoping to see the trick where you pull a rabbit out of a hat. Although--" He hesitated; thoughts of rabbits must have brought Bear back to mind. Without Che's voice for cover, Bear felt suddenly exposed. He pulled the prototype off of his back and threw it over-arm at the magician with the awkwardness of a child. But he was close enough; the man disappeared as it hit him, and it fell noiselessly onto the throne.

Che gaped. "What was that?"

"I filed him," said Bear, retrieving his device.

"You did what?" Che examined the little figure with a bit more deference. "That must be one of your great civilization's little gadgets, then?"

"Yes," said Bear, "Not that you're one of those invaders."

Che coughed to cover a laugh. "Naturally. And that was excellently done. How very happy for you. I'll send you a note with my therapy..."

A shadow descended over Che, and he looked up, quite slowly for him, at the expressionless ninja with the stick in his mouth. He was fast, yes, but Kunai was right behind him.

"...bills. Of course."

Bear took a deep breath. "Kunai, behave! Come here!"

Kunai looked between Che and Bear exactly the way a dog does when its owner calls it away from a squirrel.

Bear deepened his already bass voice. "Kunai..."

That did it. Kunai bent, jumped, twisted in the air more times than ought to be physically possible and landed on his feet in front of Bear, proffering the wand. Bear accepted it with good grace.

"Very impressive," said Che, waltzing back to them. "For your next trick, you'll find a way to let those people out?"

Bear nodded. But he was more worried about the magician; he would be fine in there, but the place had no lights and wasn't made for living things. Best to get him to a proper cell as soon as one could be made.

Bear waddled to the nearest telecom, Kunai following at his heels. Che watched with mild interest, his smile having withdrawn to just the corners of his mouth now that there was no danger about. It was short work to reassure the public; he said he had taken care of it, and that was all. When he turned aside, he found Che's smile absent for the first time since meeting him.

"You're Bear Schwarts... Schwartzs... Bear UnpronounceableLastName?"

Bear nodded.

"You don't look like your picture."

He waved it off, not wanting to explain. "The camera adds..."

"...600 pounds?" Che was grinning again.

Bear ignored him in favor of getting on with things. He found a place for the magician, got the people released and requested they keep silent about the body switch (which would give him a few weeks at most.) Throughout it all, Kunai followed him. Che was following as well, but in a causal, 'leaning against a wall in the background' way, in a 'turn around and find him gone' way. Bear got the same feeling he did from his minimal exposure to small children. He expected to turn back and find something broken and Che suspiciously absent.

The stories of the townspeople were all the same. They had been herded like sheep, stray lambs tossed in by Kunai, landing lightly. They seemed strangely unafraid of him now that he was tagging after Bear, so Bear requested an extra act of discretion.

"Are you serious?" Che had reappeared once again. "He nearly killed you."

"That so?"

Kunai peered at Bear over the edge of his sunglasses, exposing huge red eyes.

"Have you noticed his coat is the exact color of dried blood?" Che looked him over with disdain. "Why is that, do you think?"

Bear hardened his gaze. "I'm expecting you to keep quiet as well."

"Fine, fine, who am I to question?" Che grumbled, losing his smile momentarily. "Though it would be a shame for the world's greatest genius to wake up--make that not wake up--with his throat cut. That is what ninjas do, you know. They're assassins."

"Then he's a very poor one." He left it at that.

Having found out the magician's name, Bear wrote up an edited version of events and sent it off to the news.

"Not much of a villain if you don't learn his name until afterwards," said Che.

Che seemed to know a lot about being a villain, Bear thought. But he edited that out as well.

It was several weeks later that Bear finished his next invention. To an extent it was just a matter of putting his last two inventions together. He had been working on the various intricate problems all at once, setting each aside as it blocked him and approaching another with a solution worked out by the outer rim of his intellect in the meantime. It had all come to a head, and Bear felt ... not proud, pride being an unknown. Done. Complete. The endless, foaming sea of his intellect cooling to a simmer.

Simmering with the question of what he should attempt next, of course, but simmering nonetheless.

Kunai was doing well, he reflected, now that he had time to do so. The boy had not said a word or even made a noise. Rueben--the magician--said he'd cast a curse or a spell or something that made him mute, made him obedient, suppressed his mind. He refused to lift it.

It made no sense. 'Magic' was just a word for that which you do not yet understand. Granted, that made it the perfect word for whatever had happened to Kunai. Fox had looked him over and couldn't explain it, nor could Fox understand his physiology. Kunai had sat patiently through all the tests, but nothing had come of it.

Bear checked to make sure Kunai was eating (while completely forgetting to eat something himself) and started the safety tests.

Che watched all this with interest. He was fairly sure that Bear had no idea he was here, despite his high-tech gadgetry. Bear liked his privacy, and that left loopholes in his security.

Bear did know Che was still around in general, because Che popped up now and then to ask him what he'd been doing. Granted, Che had seen what Bear was doing, but watching Bear granted you no epiphanies. It was like seeing any master at work; every step of the process unfolded before you, yet at the end, you had no idea what had just happened or how to reproduce it. That was what made Che believe he was dealing with The Bear Schwartzsfend. That and finding out about transmogrification.

Che entertained himself for a moment by thinking of what would become of his home should they be able to change bodies at will. His mind flashed to certain people whose painful or merely inconvenient lives would be made easier. Everyone would become beautiful, of course. Then things would just return to normal. People would forget about beauty and have different standards. There had to be problems that would arise (there always were) but he was having trouble guessing at them. There was the total inability to tell anyone's gender. Che had been confused by the total lack of females until he'd realized they simply didn't use gender pronouns. It made no sense to, when gender was that fluid. At the moment, Bear himself was naked and completely genderless, which was ... strange.

Such a technology would completely change the world, although it was nothing of note here. Arrivrealm was filled with fairy tale solutions. It was amazing people could live in it. No, it was incomprehensible. As with Bear, you looked at them without blinking yet you understood nothing.

Che dropped that line of thought as too frustrating and focused instead on Kunai. It seemed Bear was right about him, so far at least; he acted completely harmless. But Che had amended Kunai's mental status from canine to feline: cute, but untrustworthy. You never could tell when a cat would decide you were a mouse. The things were crazy; the kind of crazy that purposefully ran head-first into walls, that tried to insert itself up your nose while you slept, that chased creatures ten times its size and got them to run away. Cat crazy.

Worse, Kunai knew he was here. Every once in a while he tilted his head around in Che's direction, made an expression as though flicking an invisible ear, then got bored and turned back to chasing his toys. It was unsettling.

He was easily distracted, at least, and did not seem to know that Che was trespassing. Since there was little else to observe (even Bear had fallen asleep on pillowed arms,) Che left via the roof. It was a route he was surprised no one took, since much of the population had wings and all of them had hovercraft. Perhaps it was simply unthinkable for them to try the back way.

Che swung his legs out over the ledge, not bothering to hide himself. No one would look; no one would care if they saw. Athena was a big, wobbly city, full of buildings and people but full of space as well. Bear's laboratory was a comfortingly rectangular block in a city of half-melted constructions. The buildings looked like they had grown, like hives or trees or even tumors. They were covered with what looked like graffiti, except that apparently it was supposed to be there. And, everywhere, odd bits of technology that Che hesitated to touch, even after seeing them in use. The phones had been easy enough to figure out, but he didn't want to attract attention with his ignorance. If it were possible to stand out in a city full of critters with wings and tails and scales, of all sizes.

Che wondered vaguely what they did when they wanted to have children. Transmogrified back to their original forms, presumably. What would happen if they didn't? It was all very strange. And there was no one to ask these questions.

The bizarre aesthetics and creatures fit together, Che had to admit. If he unfocused his eyes and let the strangeness blur away, it was nice. Balanced, perhaps, was the word. Like a painting.

With clear eyes, however, it gave him the heebie jeebies. Perhaps he should just turn around and take the two week trip back to Aguedo. No. He definitely should.

But he wouldn't. He was far too stubborn to turn back after having come this far and seen this much, even as his instincts screamed to run.

As a borrosan, his instincts were always screaming to run. As a person, he had long ago learned to ignore them.

The tests completed without a hitch. That didn't mean Bear was satisfied. He scanned the results for anything even slightly unexpected, but found nothing. He would have to do real trials, send robots flying into the ether and back again a few thousand times, before he would trust it with a living soul. That soul would be himself, of course.

He turned to give the machine another once over, only to face a large gap where it once was.

Bear's mind, which had been quietly buzzing like a distant hive, roared back into force in an angry swarm.

"Kunai?" The boy was there, dropping an empty can of tuna into the trash and bolting to attention. "What happened?"

Kunai looked at him blankly. Bear sighed and reached for his prototype--also missing, he now noted. A quick inventory found nothing else gone, but no clues either. Several lines of thoughts winked into nothingness in Bear's mind before he turned slowly to Kunai.

"You can find the person who took them, can't you?"

Kunai cocked his head, nodded and picked him up. Being carried by Kunai wasn't the shock-and-stop bumper car ride that was being carried by Che. It was more of a rollercoaster. They were quickly on the roof and hopping from building to building--a dangerous game, since few of Athena's buildings were flat. But Kunai never slipped nor acknowledged gravity or the laws of physics, so soon they were outside the city. A few more bounds took them to a ship. Something that was probably a ship, in any case. It didn't look like anything from Arrivrealm, but rather like sailing ships of fairy tales. Kunai was on the deck with one leap.

He didn't make any sound as he landed, but Che turned around nonetheless, smiling with recognition, the prototype strapped to his right wrist.

"Bear! I wasn't expecting you," Che narrowed his eyes at Kunai. "What does he do, follow me around when I'm not looking?"

Kunai was already walking past him, and Bear chose not to respond. Within, he found his machine duct-taped to the floor.

"Quite impressive," said Che behind them, "It's even compatible with the ship."

Bear didn't bother pointing out that he had built it to be that way. Figuring that out had been one of the major humps of getting the multinet up.

"Return it." said Bear.

"I think not," said Che, "Possession is nine tenths of the law, you know."

Bear stared at him. "No, it isn't. Stealing things and calling them your own is the complete opposite of the law."

"How about, 'all property is theft'? I must admit, I never did understand that one," said Che, "Nonetheless, unless you wish to be very far away from here very fast, I'd suggest you leave."

Bear crossed his arms.

"Only, the thing is, I've sort of already asked the computer to take off, it's just booting u--"

It turned out that Bear's multiverse jumper worked perfectly. Che, Bear and Kunai became the first people aside from magicians stuffed into pockets to see a universe other than their own. Gazing out at it, Bear decided who Che reminded him of--Whizgig, that guy from college, one of those pranksters who was constantly inventing useless or annoying things for the fun of it. Whizgig, though, at least had the decency to dislike and distrust Bear in return. Che smiled and disembarked as though it had not occurred to him that Bear might turn the ship around and go back without him.

He wouldn't. The problem with morality was that it cut off so many of your options. Instead, Bear followed, trying his hand for the first time in his life at debate and persuasion. He had other options, of course, but he felt--as he always did--that there was only one way to behave, and he followed it.