***Nathan Glover, NSA Agent***

Nathan Glover considered himself an optimist. He tended to look on the positive side of things for the most part.

Other people saw a dangerous-as-hell assignment babysitting a literal monster capable of ripping his head off, given free reign by bureaucrats who didn’t care how many people got fed to the meatgrinder as long as they got results.

Well, Nate saw that too.

But he also saw this as a historic, life-defining opportunity to physically interact with an actual, honest-to-god E.T., wearing the body of a former drug-dealer like a meat-suit.

Right now, Nate was walking alongside the monster, and nothing about her screamed ‘alien!’, aside from the toothy grin that pushed the boundaries of how many teeth a normal person could show at any one time.

In fact, she was quite a bit shorter than him. A delicate build with perky tits and a nice curvy bubble butt under all those tats. If she weren’t an E.T… Nate caught himself, then averted his eyes before he was disemboweled. It doesn’t matter how dangerous a monster is if it has boobs, he thought sourly. Men will consistently underestimate it.

He’d gone over her cover story and not only typed up a bio, but used the resources at his disposal to make Dr. Carol Cain a ‘real’ person, with a PHD from Yale on Xenoanthropology, glowing recommendations from other professors that the department kept on tap for cover stories like these.

Xenoanthropology was a good fit for Carol. First, it related directly to interrogating the host of E.T.s they had at their disposal. Second, as more of a ‘soft’ science that was almost entirely theoretical, and only a half-step away from cryptozoology, none of their highly trained staff would have a lot of direct association with those kooks.

And last, because Carol was an alien, when she inevitably ‘figured out’ the alien’s language or used their cultural values against them, nobody would think too hard about it. The rest of the team were more directly responsible for the hard research like blood tests, gene sequencing, and reverse engineering the alien tech.

All of which was constantly being ripped off the team’s hard-drives and acted upon at a separate location in case Carol went berserk again.

Part of him wished he hadn’t watched those videos, as they turned the stomach. The optimist was glad he knew exactly how dangerous his subject was.

Fingers crossed.

Nate and ‘Carol’ walked into the room where the new team had gathered. They were on a catwalk, placing them high above the four hundred or so technicians who had been gathered at the last second to staff the site. It was a grand, narcissistic gesture that both literally and figuratively placed her above her team.

Nate’s eyes wandered to the spot where he’d seen a massive pool of blood on the security cams only forty-eight hours before.

The clean-up crew did good work.

“Greetings!” Carol said, her arms spread wide, about to introduce herself using Nate’s carefully crafted backstory. “I am your new overlord, Kar’el! Butcher of the Dinamor stretch, conqueror of Laboratory C-6!”

Carol gave him a wink.

Nate slapped his forehead. He’d pulled two all-nighters to make Carol’s backstory, and she just pissed it away in seconds.

There was a low murmur of whispering among the confused scientists.

“You’re all ‘smart’ people. You probably noticed that every single one of you is a new hire with no immediate family. You might suspicious as to why the people who are not the best in their field, simply the most disposable, have been hired and gathered here in one spot! Well, wonder no further! Your government flooded your predecessors with nerve gas!”

The whispering stopped, the entire audience watching in stunned silence.

“Now, I imagine you’re all about to shit your pants in terror, but before you decide to bitch out and try to quit, let me tell you what your predecessors died for:”

She clicked the button on Nate’s pre-planned slideshow, lighting up the back of the white room with moving projections. A carefully selected clipshow of all the times the E.T.s had tried to escape or resisted arrest with their strange technology, using all the best quality video with the most ideal lighting.

“Magic!”

“This is not a trick, this is not CG. These people are actually using their own blood as weapons, summoning fire, exhibiting superhuman strength. The works. This is a power that ignores the laws of physics, and could destabilize the world as we know it, usher in an era of warfare that makes the atomic bomb obsolete.”

“Or it could be used to create a utopia where no one needs for anything.” she added as an afterthought. Carol shrugged. “I’ve never seen it play out that way, but what do I know? I’m just an immortal Outsider that’s seen the rise and fall of entire planets.”

“Long story short. You were chosen because the idiot powers that be think you are the most disposable. Their casual disregard for your safety has given you the opportunity to become America’s, no…the Earth’s first Alia.

“I will provide you with all the instruction and information you need to become truly powerful. Whether you surrender that power to rich old twats who didn’t earn it, or use it to mold your world according to your desires, I have no stake in it. I simply don’t care.

“What I do care about is getting a ride back to my planet in time for my ward’s first birthday, and since I’m bound not to dabble in the arts, sending me home will be your job.”

“Did I miss anything, Nate?”

Nate shook his head, holding his temples. “Nope, you nailed it.”

“Oh right,” Carol continued speaking in bored monotone. “Honor and glory and shit to my summoner, what’s-his-face, who you technically work for now.”

Nate spotted a hand raised. It was a man, slightly taller and slightly more handsome for an egghead. King among nerds, Nate supposed, and confident enough to be the first one to ask a stupid question.

Don’t do it, dude. Nate thought, wincing internally.

“You there,” Carol said, pointing. “Question?”

“Yeah, are you fucking around with us? Magic isn’t -”

He didn’t finish his sentence as Carol flipped off the catwalk, wrenching a steel safety rail off the platform as she did. When she landed, she was approximately a foot taller, bony protrusions poking out from her skull and body, creating a sort of armor.

“Ack!” King of the Nerds let out a strangled cry as Carol grabbed him by the neck and dragged him over to a nearby metal desk while the scientists scattered like mice.

Nate’s guts tensed up as he prepared to call in the cavalry. He had the authority to stop this stupid experiment at any time, and while he was willing to accept a couple deaths, one in less than five minutes was unacceptable.

Carol then exercised more restraint than he’d seen in the security footage.

She held the man’s neck to the desk bolted into the floor, then bent the steel pipe around it, locking him in a humiliating position on the floor.

“Listen up!” Carol spoke, her voice thrumming with inhuman energy that cut through the whimpering of scared scientists. “Everybody gets one stupid decision. This jackass kindly volunteered to demonstrate the consequences of strike one.”

They watched her silently, their eyes round with fear.

“Now humans, do you want real power. Or do you wanna go home to your throne of pizza boxes and mountain dew?”

Nate noticed the subtle shift in their gaze, from fear, to curiosity, and then greed.

For a brief moment, he considered what might happen if this experiment succeeded too well.

***

Mr. Fluffybottom signalled him before he heard the screams.

Danger!

Tom dropped his work and rushed toward the sound of alarm, gawking along with everyone else at Vol, who was leaned up against a wall, a deep laceration along the side of his face.

Mr. Fluffybottom was standing nearby, relaying the sequence of events directly to Tom’s mind.

Vol walked up behind Nema in the crowded gazebo and made to hack into her neck with an iron blade. Mr. Fluffybottom flicked the shaman away with his weaponized tail before he had time to consider the optics.

Vol had waited until the exact moment that everyone was turned away, Even Nema. The only thing they saw was Vol flying away from Mr. Fluffybottom, who had turned violent for no particular reason.

Somehow the knife had vanished in the confusion, and even if it hadn’t, people were allowed to carry knives.

“I thought that thing lacked a will of it’s own!” one of the nearby hunters said, sizing up Mr. Fluffybottom with a scowl.

Tom, being a foot taller than everyone was able to see everyone’s face. He could make out the mood souring towards Mr. Fluffybottom, and by extention, Tom, curdling into chunks of misplaced anger.

Ah crap. A double reverse frame up. Vol was, like Kevin Spacey, willing to put some bandaids on his nipples.

What does he expect me to do in response to this? Tom thought, desperately trying to figure out the best way to do damage control. If he defended Mr. Fluffybottom and things turned sour, it could be really bad. If he threw Mr. Fluffybottom under the bus, he might be able to limit the damage, but he would be admitting his magic was imperfect, and Mr. Fluffybottom wouldn’t be around to protect him from Vol’s next move.

While Tom was thinking, his silence spoke volumes. Before the crowd got too agitated, Vol climbed back to his feet, the bloody gash across his face no longer bleeding.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Vol said, tapping his wound, which seemed to be frozen in time, not bleeding or stretching, held in place by seemingly nothing. “I’ve got enough control over my well that this isn’t a problem. I’m sure I simply startled the beast. There must be a little makset left in it, after all. The beasts are notoriously skittish. It was lucky it was an adult and not a child.”

A double reverse frame-up with a good-guy gambit! Tom thought, keeping his thunderous emotions off his face. Everyone knew Vol was an asshole, but opinions are fluid. The shaman had recently put a great deal of effort into taking care of his own personal hygene and re-establishing himself as a solid citizen.

It must have been in preparation for shifting public opinion.

Vol had defended Mr. Fluffybottom to the casual observer, while subtly pointing suspicion at Mr. fluffybottom’s animal body, creating a doubt that would linger a lot longer than simply blaming him for the incident.

By claiming he’d startled the beast, he had put the idea that someone else could just as easily have been the target.

You ASSHOLE! Tom thought, watching it come down as inevitably as dominoes. Maybe, MAYBE if Tom had immediately put a shit-eating grin on his face and played off the attack and congratulated Vol on being tough, made up a lie about Mr. Fluffybottom’s reaction being a restraining order on Nema’s behalf, he could have redirected public sentiment back on Vol.

Tom was smart, but he wasn’t always fast with people. The window for co-opting the good-guy gambit closed just before Tom figured out exactly the right move.

Damn, he thought, watching as parents took their children’s hands and steered them away from the creature of bones and leather they’d been gleefully riding not an hour ago.

It was a gradual downhill slide from there.

The villagers still came to Tom for repairing objects and occasional healing, but the idle chatter that they used to enjoy seemed to dry up around Tom, and nobody used Mr. Fluffybottom as cheap labor anymore, forbidding their children from playing on or around the animated skeleton.

How on Orsoth did VOL of all people convince them Tom was the bad guy?

Tom found out a few weeks later when they banished him.