Chapter 4

Quizbar.

…

A planet located in the Bwalap possibility mapping, Furloo zone, Gwen-Elembic supercluster, Lakatian galaxy, Cannitian outer spiral, Tuwip system, fourth planet from their star.

Development level: Special (see notes).

Government Type: Thearchy.

Notes:

The planet Quizbar is a unique case. It currently holds the third-place record for the planet which has resisted liberation efforts the longest.

Second place being the curious case of the planet of the Clamoring Snudders, a race of perpetually cheerful and talkative beetles who had the odd habit of, within a minute of engaging in conversation with another sentient being, invariably steering the talk to a mysterious “catalog”. As in: “A bit chilly, isn’t it? You should take a look in the catalog and buy yourself a nice sweater”, or “Voting sounds nice, but have you taken a look at the catalog?”, or “I’m sorry to hear about the death of your mother. I think you can find something in our catalog to console you!” When asked to see the catalog, however, they’d become very agitated and start screaming at the sky about needing advice from corporate.

It took American scientists years before they eventually figured out that the Snudders were not fully sentient. Rather, they were an organic advertising campaign devised by an ancient civilization which appeared to have forgotten about them. There were defunct colony ships buried deep beneath the surface of their planet, programmed with self-replicating industrial systems, and the Snudders themselves reproduced very quickly. It was surmised that the owners of “the catalog”, whoever they might have been, had intended to populate the entire universe with these tireless brand ambassadors. They had vanished before their plans could be carried out, and now Infinity America was left with the question of what to do with their discarded living billboards.

An attempt was made to fiddle with their genetics to free them from their compulsion and bestow upon them some manner of true intelligence. Tragically, this only resulted in an extinction event as the Snudders began throwing themselves off buildings while shouting about their warranty being violated, resulting in history’s first recorded case of mass suicide via promotional slogan. This is the origin of that classic American maxim: “Count your beetles before poking genes with needles.”

First place, of course, belonged to the inhabitants of Rygar Oontz, who, whenever liberation teams dropped by, pretended very hard not to be home.

But back to Quizbar. The Quizbarlings are a race of very graceful and beautiful humanoids. Of course, the humanoids of Infinity America are equally graceful and beautiful, thanks to genetic engineering and other technological glow-ups (unless they’re deliberately ugly as part of, say, an art exhibition). But this is just the problem: Somehow the Quizbarlings have achieved this global level of stunning good looks while having technological accomplishments that barely surpass the Neolithic.

And that’s not all. Their planet is remarkable for the homogeneity of its temperate climate. Globally, spring is an eruption of green, full of refreshing rains, their summer beaches are obscenely beautiful, in autumn the foliage simply can’t be beat, and winters are so perfect that they invented the concept of the ski lodge thousands of years ahead of schedule.

In each of these improbably excellent seasons the Quizbarlings find themselves with plenty of leisure time, because the environment provides almost everything they need. In fact, nature on Quizbar is quite suspiciously convenient for the locals. A local species known as the blunderhog sweats barbecue sauce and has a life cycle that culminates in laying itself politely upon a grill. Giga-Gourds seem to exist entirely so that they can be hollowed out and made into houses, complete with root systems that form indoor plumbing. And despite this, the best science teams can detect no sign of divine interference or modifications being made to the local flora or fauna. All of this beauty and abundance evolved naturally.

Apparently.

The Quizbarlings have their own explanations for this. They assign credit to their god, The Radiant One, whose worship constitutes the one and only religion on the planet. Usually, civilizations with a global conformity of religion indicates a very bloody and oppressive history that you could get a documentary out of, maybe even milk a series, but in this case, the Quizbarlings all just sort of generally agree that worship of The Radiant One makes good sense and they don’t really have much dispute about how the worship is to be done. This is probably helped by the fact that The Radiant One is actually real, and around to clear up any confusion.

Real gods are, of course, nothing new. Whether or not actual divinity exists in a universe is merely a function of that universe’s position along the magic axis in possibility space. Along one end you’ll find your mostly mundane universes, the ones where the only magic to be found is done with cards, or when you’re lying back on a picnic blanket with your sweetheart looking up at the stars and the music hits just right. Far enough along the other end and you’ll find universes where civilizations are dominated by lunatic wizards who can summon black holes if they sneeze too hard.

The strange thing is that Quizbar is located within a universe as mundane as they come. Now, it’s not unheard of for gods to pop over to a mundane reality to impress the rubes there, maybe form a cult or two. But they rarely stick around for long, since their divine energy gets leeched into the environment and their powers inevitably diminish. Before long they have to go back to their own realities, leaving behind religions where the priests nervously cover up for their god’s increasingly obvious absence. The general sentiment is that this is rude but hilarious, and the subject is the driving plot point of several intergalactically successful comedy films, such as “Dude, Where’s My God?”, “Me, Myself and the Gaping Void of Meaning,” and the heretically raunchy “I Will Keep You In My Heart (And Also Several Of My Orifices).”

It is for this reason that religions based around the notions of godhood are seen as generally silly and largely inferior to those based around more grounded concepts, like an interstellar quest to find a soda recipe.

But The Radiant One (TRO, for short) has, according to the Quizbarlings, been with them for tens of thousands of years, and as far as anyone can figure they’re telling the truth. At first, it would seem the obvious explanation is that old standby: TRO is simply a mortal who’s conned a planet into worshiping him. But measuring instruments have detected divine energy emanating from his home planet, so it seems he’s a legitimate god. And there is also the fact that he’s perfectly capable of performing miracles.

This was discovered when the first supply ship landed on the planet’s surface. Given that the Quizbarlings seemed like the responsible sort, liberation teams had decided to import some assault rifles to introduce them to the joys of gun ownership. Upon cracking open the crates, however, they found that the guns had somehow been replaced by an apologetic note explaining that such weapons were not allowed. When confronted about this, TRO clarified that the weapons weren’t gone, merely moved, and the liberation team could have them back if they liked.

He then teleported the ships in orbit halfway across the universe. The team was safe, thankfully, and to be fair, that is where the guns were.

Which cuts right to the heart of the problem: liberation. Military intervention is right out, since it seems likely that The Radiant One has the capacity to simply blink away any invasion fleet. This does not matter much, since the situation doesn’t call for it: The Quizbarlings are pacifistic and generally welcoming to the liberation teams, and TRO isn’t even opposed to the idea of elections. It’s just that nobody wants to run against him.

And in a troubling new development, relations with the locals have deteriorated. The most recent liberation team sent to the planet’s surface has simply vanished without a trace, though the locals insist they are alive and safe. Nevertheless, it was this state of affairs that led President M. Cormander to declare a new emergency effort…

Olyrean snorted and awoke to a fuzzy, unfamiliar sight that she eventually realized was her own carpet. There was a funny droning sound and something was tugging at her hair. She peeled her face from the floor to find one of her little robot vacuums chewing on it.

“Hey!” she groaned, swatting it away. This was more difficult than it should have been, and it took several attempts before her hand managed to brush clumsily across its plastic shell. “You’re supposed to eat crumbs and such, not my hair!”

The little robot emitted an offended series of boops and shot her a reproachful look. “But miss, I was eating crumbs,” it said.

Frowning, Olyrean ran her fingers through her hair and a small shower of crumbs tumbled down onto the floor. She wondered how they might have gotten there, until she spotted what appeared to be the sad remains of a slice of lemon-meringue cake that she had apparently decided, at some point last night, to use as a pillow.

“I suppose you were,” she muttered as the vacuum scuttled after the mess.

Why had she been sleeping on the floor? Memories began to come back to her, winking in and out, like fish in a fountain poking their curious faces to the surface only to vanish into the depths once they figure out the jerk standing over them is only interested in feeding the ducks. She had been out drinking last night, she remembered. Moyom and Libby had insisted upon it, in celebration of her new job. Though to call what she had done ‘drinking’ was an understatement. ‘Flooding’ was perhaps the more appropriate descriptor.

Things had started out reasonably enough, with a nice dinner at a quaint little Looloobian restaurant. But she must have had a few too many cocktails with her bowl of Looloobian jumping slurp-noodles, because afterward Moyom had convinced her to actually go up into the Accident, into the gigantic sphere for the very first time. Once there, Olyrean had found that drinking heavily had been necessary to maintain her courage, and it had only spiraled from there.

The embarrassing memories came to her now, the ones her brain had somehow known to hold onto even in her drunken state, as if saying to itself ‘Ah, she’ll really hate this one.’ Now it showed her a humiliating highlight reel: Moyom and Libby dragging her to a bar, where the two of them belted karaoke in front of an audience of uninterested spiders (karaoke being an ancient and highly curious American ritual that involved humiliating yourself in front of a crowd of strangers by singing badly). Then a memory of visiting a scuba gear shop and the proprietor kicking them out because she was getting too excited. Then a memory of her standing in the middle of a fountain, screaming at the fish that the bread was for the ducks (she had no bread).

Staggering to her feet, she blearily looked about her living room. It was an utter mess. Apparently, they had decided to keep the party going once they had gotten back. There was the half-devoured remains of a lemon-meringue cake on her coffee table that, by the looks of it, they had been tearing into with their bare hands. Her sofa was upside down for some reason. She peered beneath it to find Moyom sleeping there, wrapped in a half-complete cocoon.

The vacuum darted off to the closet with a full belly, off to vomit its contents into the disposal. Strangely, the droning sound Olyrean had awoken to didn’t disappear. She frowned. If it wasn’t the vacuum making that noise, then what? Fumbling her way to the kitchen and succeeding on her third attempt, Olyrean dug through her unfamiliar cabinets for a moment or two before she remembered she had a robot for this sort of thing.

“Baxter!” she called.

Baxter tromped into the kitchen. “Yes, mistress?”

“A glass of water, please. And then coffee. And then some breakfast.”

“Of course, miss.”

Olyrean rested her chin on her hand and watched as Baxter made his way around the kitchen. There was something a bit different about him, she thought. Something that should be quite obvious, but her fuzzy mind had trouble teasing the mystery apart.

Ah, of course, she thought. He’s mostly naked.

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This took a moment to sink in before she yelped and flew from her stool to pull the curtains closed.

Baxter gave her a wry look. “You know, mistress, you can just give a verbal command and they’ll shut automatically.”

“Yes, please do!” the curtains said. “It hurts when you close us manually. It hurts so much!”

Olyrean struggled to keep her voice low, since she didn’t want to wake Moyom up. “What are you wearing?” she finally managed to choke out.

It was a bit of a silly question. She could see very well what he was wearing, and the answer was “barely anything at all”. More specifically, his outfit looked to be a French maid’s dress that had been dragged through a fetish shop and then been attacked by a swarm of scissors. It left very little of his better-than-perfect sun-elf artificial shell to the imagination.

“You asked me to put this on, miss,” Baxter said, raising an eyebrow. “Do you not remember? You and Miss Moyom and Miss Libby put in some drone-orders last night for new outfits for me. You seemed rather excited at the time.”

Olyrean gulped, then looked away. “No, I don’t…”

“In fact,” Baxter went on, mercilessly flat and dry, “You, specifically, ordered some outfits that were quite a bit more risqué than the ones Miss Libby and Miss Moyom suggested. As I recall, you had some choice words in the matter.”

Baxter opened his mouth wide, and a recording of her own voice played back to her. She could hear Libby and Moyom giggling in the background. “You shee, Backshter,” said the recording, “When you wear thish one, I’ll be able to tell how big your–”

“Enough!” Olyrean shouted. “Just go…put on some normal clothes!” She jabbed her finger down the hall to her bedroom, then grimaced. “And what is that damned droning noise?!”

“It’s the device on your wrist,” said Baxter, heading back down the hallway. “Mistress.”

I don’t wear a device on my wrist, Olyrean thought, and was startled to find herself proven wrong. It was a small, featureless silver loop, like a bracelet. A small holo-screen hovered over it, displaying a greenish-blue looking planet. Holding it to her ear, she could hear a faint voiceover, in the in the sort of calm drone narrators used when they really, truly did not care if the person listening actually absorbed any of what they were saying:

“The strange thing is that Quizbar is located within a universe as mundane as they come…”

She remembered now. Veezeebub and Tordle had given her this as she left the SPECTRA offices. Not that they had actually bothered to reveal themselves from the shadows, oh no. They had a little bumble-drone fly it to her in the lobby, and had told her little more than “You may find this useful.” She had ignored it until everyone else had passed out last night. Fiddling with it had quickly revealed she had no idea how the controls worked, and the device hadn’t come with any instructions. But she had (miraculously, given her drunken state) managed to pull up an entry on Quizbar, the planet she was meant to help liberate. She must have fallen asleep with the voiceover on loop.

Olyrean listened to the words for a few moments, then tried to turn it off. Unfortunately she still had no idea how to work the holo controls. Fumbling at her wrist and making pinching motions in the air, she didn’t manage to turn it off, but did finally succeed in turning the volume all the way down.

Quizbar. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it. In fact, she wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that she was already being sent to liberate a planet. Liberation teams were a prestigious assignment, and hardly something she felt she should be assigned to as an inexperienced junior operative. Well, more than likely she wasn’t going to do much; she’d be paired up with some senior agent and probably mostly do his busywork. She wondered when she’d meet them. SPECTRA hadn’t given her any sort of mission schedule yet.

From somewhere in her living room came a dry, skittering sound, and then Moyom was pulling herself out from beneath her couch, brushing away wisps of silk from her carapace. “Please, I am the sorrow,” her translator said for her as Olyrean helped her up. “I have dishonored your butt receptacle.”

“Don’t worry so much about it,” Olyrean told her. “Baxter will clean it. Would you like some coffee?”

As soon as she said this, she realized she didn’t know if Moyom’s biology was compatible with caffeine, but her friend clasped her grabbers together in delight. “Give me the black juice. Soak my hemolymph with it!”

“Well, he’ll have it out soon.” Moyom began to preen herself, running her mandibles over her carapace and antennae. It reminded her of how grimy she felt. She deeply regretted sleeping on the floor. “I’m going to grab a shower. Unless you’d like one first?.”

“I feast,” Moyom replied, lapping a suspicious stain from her elbow, “on the carapace remains of splendorous celebration.”

Olyrean took that as a no. She left for her bedroom to fetch a towel.

There was a lizard on her bed.

It was large, nearly as long as she was tall, and was sprawled out in an utterly undignified manner, sunning its belly in the light from the window. It appeared to be asleep. Its tail, long and whiplike, tickled the glass. If she had come across this sight a year ago, she probably would have run screaming from the room. She took a peculiar sort of pride in the fact that her reaction was as subdued as it was.

“Why is there a giant lizard in my bed?” she asked no one in particular.

The lizard opened one slitted, yellow eye and rolled over.

“Because you invited me into it,” it said.

Olyrean shouted. The lizard, startled, also shouted. This surprised Olyrean in turn, and she shouted again. Not to be outdone, the lizard then shouted, leapt up, thrashed with the sheets, and then scuttled onto the wall, where it hung upside-down and glaring at her in a distinctly haughty manner. A frill around its neck ballooned outward like a leathery umbrella and it hissed.

Meanwhile, Olyrean had grabbed one of the blankets off the edge of the bed and was swatting at it. A heavy blanket did not make the most effective weapon, but she figured it was better than being unarmed. She disproved this by attempting to swing at the lizard and mostly blinding herself as the blanket fell onto her face.

“Who are you?!” she yelled, struggling to disentangle herself.

The lizard darted away until he was curled up on a corner of the ceiling. “Watch it with that, will you?” it snapped as one of her confused flailing limbs very nearly brushed him. “My tail pops right off, you know. Regrowing it will take weeks.”

Olyrean finally managed to free herself and, feeling betrayed by it, flung the blanket across the room. “You’ll need to regrow more than your tail if you don’t tell me who you are!”

She had thought this a very tough-sounding sort of threat and was a bit disappointed when the lizard merely rolled his eyes at her. “I’m Korak,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

Olyrean opened her mouth to say ‘Of course not’, but before the words could make their way out, her mind, in a fit of malevolence, decided to release some more humiliating memories. Her teeth clacked as her jaw slammed shut.

She remembered being in the karaoke bar with Moyom, and Libby. She remembered spotting this lizard across the bar and giggling over her cocktail (a glowing-pink concoction served in a fluted glass that the bartender had called a Singing Flamingo, and indeed the liquid had hummed, which Olyrean thought was a concerning thing for a cocktail to be doing but she had drunk it anyway) while they argued amongst themselves over whether they thought he was cute or not. Moyom insisted that he was, which, seeing as how she was an insectoid, didn’t make much sense. Libby had agreed, which made even less sense. Olyrean had thought they had a point, which made the least sense of all, especially to herself.

He had been drinking alone, so they had lured him over by sending him cocktails, compliments of their table. He told them he was out drinking to celebrate a new job, as well, and the reason he was alone was because upon quitting his old one he had told all his colleagues to take a flying leap out the nearest docking port. That had seemed very funny, at the time. It was a miracle she could recall all this, since she could also remember ordering a whole choir’s worth of Singing Flamingos.

After that, things grew fuzzy. She remembered complimenting his hide. His scales had a particular luster, an interesting pattern of blue and yellow striping. At some point she had been left alone with him at the table, and she had been slurring and giggling at him and invited him to go frolicking with her. And apparently, though she did not remember it, he had come home with her and Moyom and Libby.

And now he was in her bed. Olyrean didn’t think of herself as the kind of girl who went picking up strange aliens for casual flings, but she had all these very worrying foggy memories of thinking this lizard was very charming and attractive. Still, she would not have guessed that all it would take was half a bar’s worth for her to start considering lizards.

“We didn’t, um, get up to any funny business, did we?” she asked dubiously.

Korak clambered down from the ceiling. His frill folded back into a dignified collar around his neck as he gave her the sort of look that she normally associated with the haughtiest of cats or fashion magazine editors. Not that she knew any fashion magazine editors, but an elvish upbringing gave her a knack for sniffing out self-importance, and she could tell which professions required a generous helping of it at a glance. This lizard, she knew instinctively, held itself in very high regard. “Lady,” he said, “I don’t even think our parts are compatible.”

Olyrean heaved a sigh of relief that the lizard was clearly offended by. He really wasn’t a bad-looking lizard, as far as these things went. He just didn’t seem so attractive in that way, at least not without a dozen cocktails tap-dancing on her judgment centers.

“Besides,” continued the lizard, “I thought you were using him for that.”

He nodded behind her. Olyrean spun around to find Baxter, still in his mortifyingly threadbare outfit, rummaging through the small closet where his clothes were kept.

Baxter hung his head. “I do whatever my mistress orders me to do,” he said woefully.

“No,” Olyrean insisted loudly. She realized that Korak was looking into the closet, which was now packed with brand new and even more scandalous outfits–leather harnesses, frills and lingerie, a wetsuit–with an air of amused interest. “Look, you still haven’t explained why you were in my bed.”

“You told me I could use it,” said the lizard. “You invited me back here last night with Libby and your bug-friend there. We drank some more and watched some holo-films. But then you females started getting real handsy with your robot, and I figured it was time for me to go to bed. Mammalian mating rituals are always a little gross.”

“I told you, I didn’t–”

“Not like my species.” Korak waved away her protests with a disinterested claw. “We’re much more practical. Economical. Anyway, you insisted I was too drunk to call up a bubble-car, and you were probably right. I need to bask, though. It’s the cold-blooded thing. You told me to take your bed, since the window in your room had a good view of the sun.” He rubbed the scales on his stomach with some satisfaction. “I have to admit you were right. Very good solar access, though I don’t know if I’d like to live all the way out here on the edge to get it. Plus there’s the truckers.”

Olyrean glanced out the window. There, in the vast and endless glory of starry space, an Interdimensional Cola cargo ship was passing close by the window. The Buuglubian pilot was waving vigorously and staring hard with a dozen yellow eyes. Olyrean realized she was standing in full view of space with a naked lizard-man on one side of her and a mostly-naked robot on the other.

“Oh, will you fuck off,” she shouted at the pilot, yanking the curtains closed.

“Hey, ow,” said the curtains.

Korak, in the meantime, had with no apparent sense of embarrassment begun pulling on a business suit which lay neatly folded on her night table. He pressed a button somewhere in his lapel and the creases smoothed themselves out. “Well, thanks for the drinks and the good time, and the use of your bed, um…Molly-ran, right?”

“Olyrean,” she corrected.

“Of course.” A glowing blue holo-screen appeared in front of his eyes with a stream of numbers flitting across it, and at once all of his attention was on that. “I wish I could stay a bit longer, but I’ve really got to get to work,” he said as he buttoned up his jacket and slid a neat black briefcase out from beneath her bed. “First day on a new job, and you know how it is. I probably can’t afford to start coming in late for another month or so. Your wrist is glowing.”

Olyrean discovered that he was correct. At some point since she had muted the Quizbar video, the silver bracelet she wore had begun to project another holo-screen, this one with a blinking “INCOMING MESSAGE” icon that pulsed impatiently. She watched with alarm as the holo-screen faded from an irritated orange to a deep sputtering red.

“Shit,” she said, fiddling with it. She swiped a finger over the bracelet’s surface and suddenly the droning voice of Veezeebub filled her room.

“Pick up pick up pick up pick up pick up pick up pick up–”

“Yes, yes, I’m here,” she shouted, turning about as Korak glanced towards her curiously. “Look, I have company here, so–”

If Veezeebub was angered by the fact that he had been kept on hold for so long, he gave no indication. “We are aware of the company,” he said, somewhat alarmingly. “It is irrelevant. You are to report immediately.”

“So soon?” Olyrean tried to keep the panic from her voice. Veezeebub and Tordle had told her they’d call her when they needed her, and to expect a call at any time–but she hadn’t expected a call the very next morning. Which, she supposed, was her fault.

“Yes, so soon,” said Veezeebub in a tone that made it perfectly clear he knew what she was thinking, and that yes, it really was on her for not expecting this. “It is time for you to meet your team.”