Interlude

“Incoming Lost, Manager Allbrig,” the program named ELLA said.

“I’m on it,” Allbrig said. He swiveled his chair and checked the monitors. The Lost entered Frillish land space. Allbrig squinted at the monitor as the Lost finished materializing.

Even though he was a manager, his innards went cold at what the screen showed him, and he clutched his stomach at the discomfort. The screen identified exactly who and what had arrived in Frillin, and the stomach ache grew worse.

“Contact Fiona,” Allbrig said, “We’ve got an anomaly.”

“Yes?” Fiona said after ELLA had gotten through to her, “What’s going on, Kevin?”

“Anomalous entry,” Allbrig said.

“Kevin, you need to cut it out with the official speech.”

“We have a single entry with two Lost, one of which is an infant.”

“Ok, you can take out all the more dangerous features in the area, and monitor the Lost’s behaviour. A baby doesn’t mean we’re going to stop screening them.”

“Done.” He also made sure that the pair would have an easy food source, an extra kindness.

“Now, I need your help, actually. I was just about to call you.”

“What?”

“We’ve got another anomaly in sector G, and it’s not an anomalous entry. This human is acting like a psycho.”

“But then how do I monitor sector F--”

“You deactivated all the dangerous features, they’ll be fine--and we need your help now. You can check in after we’ve got this figured out. Have ELLA set to notify you if anything crazy happens.”

“Ok.”

Manager Allbrig used his back tentacles to finish programming ELLA, and took a transport to Sector G’s office area.

He hoped the human woman and the baby would be okay. He knew how hard it was leaving home all of a sudden.