Let me be honest with you from the jump — I have always been a pervert.
Not in the creepy, hiding-in-bushes, restraining-order kind of way. More in the way that if you gave me a free afternoon and no supervision, I would absolutely find something I shouldn't be doing. Monica — my girlfriend of three years, beautiful, patient, criminally underappreciated by me — would probably agree with that assessment. She'd say it with that flat, tired look she got whenever I came home twenty minutes later than expected, the one that said she already knew, she just hadn't decided if she cared yet.
She deserved better. I knew that. I just didn't do anything about it.
That was my particular brand of sin — not malicious, just weak. The kind of man who means well in theory and fumbles it in practice. I had a decent job, a decent apartment, a decent girl, and somehow that wasn't enough to keep me from noticing that Sandra from next door had started answering the door in her robe after her divorce came through.
Sandra. Single mother. Two kids at her sister's every other weekend. The kind of woman who laughed too loud and smelled like warm vanilla and didn't ask questions about where this was going.
Monica was working late.
I told myself it was just once. It is always just once, in the beginning.
I remember it exactly — the way Sandra's robe hit the floor, the lamp still on, the sound of the rain against her window competing with the sound of everything else. I remember the headboard. I remember thinking, distantly, that I should feel worse about this. I remember the particular rhythm of it, building and building, her voice going higher, my hands braced against—
Poof.
That's the last thing I remember from Earth. Not the finish. Not the walk of shame back to my apartment. Not Monica's face. Just the word that my brain supplied in the white, blinding moment before everything went dark.
Poof.
—
The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Not bad, exactly. Just wrong. The way a dream smells wrong sometimes — like the idea of a smell rather than an actual one. Clean and sharp and faintly electric, like the air before a thunderstorm except the storm never came.
I opened my eyes.
The ground beneath my feet was slick and faintly luminescent, that particular shade of neon green that exists nowhere in nature on Earth. It had the texture of wet glass. I took one step and nearly went down immediately, arms pinwheeling, dignity already taking heavy casualties.
The sky — if it was a sky — was the same impossible green. Not a nice green. Not forest green or sage or any of the greens that humans have looked at and decided to name after pleasant things. This was the green of something radioactive. Of a warning label. Of the inside of a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
The clouds, though. The clouds were pink.
Soft, almost pretty. Like cotton candy at a carnival, just sitting there above the wrong-green sky as if they hadn't gotten the memo about the general aesthetic.
I looked down at myself.
I was wearing a suit. Grey, slightly oversized, the kind of suit a man wears to a job interview at a company he's not sure he wants to work for. I had no memory of putting it on. There was a laptop bag slung over my shoulder — black, corporate, utterly mundane — and I had absolutely no memory of that either.
I touched my face. Stubble. My stubble. Same jaw, same hands, same body I'd been occupying for thirty-one years. At least whatever this was hadn't shipped me into someone else's skin.
"Ubi jus li fumi."
I spun around so fast I nearly ate the neon floor again.
He was tall. Seven-two at minimum, built like someone had taken a human skeleton and stretched it the way a child stretches putty — elongated, thin-limbed, wrong in the proportions. His shoulders were broad in the way that made no structural sense given how narrow everything else was. He had no clothes on, which I clocked and immediately tried to un-clock, and his skin was the same neon green as the ground, slightly slimy-looking, catching the strange non-light of this place in a way that made my stomach turn.
His face was toad-like. That's the only word. Bulging eyes, wide flat nose, a mouth that was too wide for his face. Six fingers on each hand, extended toward me in what I could only assume was a gesture of greeting, though it looked more like something reaching out of a nightmare.
I took a step back.
Then the beeping started.
It came from inside my head — not a sound exactly, more like pressure, like a frequency, like the thing that happens behind your eyes when a screen is too bright. It built for three seconds and then detonated into clarity:
[ TRANSMIGRATION COMPLETE. LANGUAGE MATRIX ACTIVATED. ]
And just like that, the words the green man had said rearranged themselves in my head into something I understood:
"You look lost. Are you okay?"
I stared at him.
He stared back, head tilted, six fingers still extended, expression — insofar as a toad-faced alien could have an expression — patient and mildly concerned.
"Where the hell am I?" I said.
The beeping again. Shorter this time, a quick pulse:
[ YOU ARE IN THE ALIEN KINGDOM OF PANDORA. CLASSIFICATION: INTER-DIMENSIONAL TRANSIT ZONE. POPULATION: NON-HUMAN. ]
I let that sit for a moment.
Non-human. Right. That tracked, given the evidence.
Before I could process anything further, a sound cut through the strange stillness — a low hum, building from somewhere above and to my left. I looked up. A saucer. Actual, unironic, flying saucer, grey and smooth and egg-shaped, hovering about twenty feet off the ground before it descended with a precision that suggested whoever was driving it had done this a thousand times. It landed beside me with a soft sound like a sigh.
The glass shell cracked open and another green man climbed out. Same general build as the first — tall, stretched, broad-shouldered, bare-footed, toes that were round and slightly bulbous, like cocktail sausages arranged in a row. His eyes were blue in their sockets, which somehow made him look slightly less nightmarish than the first one. Slightly.
He looked at me with an expression I was starting to recognize as the alien equivalent of professional warmth — the expression of a man who greets strange visitors for a living and has learned to make it look genuine.
The beep:
[ TRANSLATION: "Welcome, visitor. I am to transport you to the palace. The king will be very pleased to receive you." ]
The palace.
I almost laughed. An hour ago — or what felt like an hour ago — I had been a man with a lease, a mid-range laptop, a girlfriend I was actively betraying, and absolutely zero destiny. Now I was apparently expected at a palace.
I looked at the saucer. I looked at the two green men. I looked at the neon floor and the neon sky and the cotton candy clouds.
I got in the saucer.
What was the alternative.