Professor Roger Daly had, up until that moment, lived a long, fulfilling, intense life of discovery and dedicated search for knowledge. He had seen many things; he watched the world get significantly better in some ways and abysmally worse in others, and even participated in the first category. He always strove to understand more, but became quite comfortable with the prospect of not knowing. He realized, as a mature, experienced scientist, that some mysteries of the universe would not be resolved - in his lifetime or ever - and learned to co-exist in peace with that notion. He could look a question in the eyes and remain calm in virtually any circumstance... apart from that very moment.

“I say, young lady,” he babbled, watching in bewilderment as Lilly stuffed the music box back into her bag and inserted the key into the door of what looked like an over-sized electric bus, “explain yourself immediately! How in the world did you come in possession of that thing?”

“Roger, please,” she looked briefly at him, genuine distress and concern in her eyes, “just… later! Listen, y’all,” she added, as the door opened and she stepped over the threshold, “I’m sure you have a ton of stupid questions that you’d love to throw at me, but it is vital for you to understand that I have better things to do! Namely, oh fucking hell,” she muttered, and stepped carefully over a chunk of metal resting on the floor, “this. This… mess! I sure hope you didn’t get into the engine room,” she said at the Slavic Mafia.

“We didn’t feel qualified,” Grażyna responded.

“Didn’t stop you from scavenging half of this ship, you rascals.” Lilly wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I swear to Satan, if you took anything even close to important…” she didn’t finish that sentence, which produced an even more impressive effect than any threat could do. “Right. Brilliant. I have maybe a day to patch this up before they will be here. Good thing I can fix literally anything.”

“They?” Dirk asked, but she waved at him to shut up.

“Repairs first, questions later,” she reminded with a fake smile. “Feel free to poke around,” she added, unlocking the trap door that led down into the main part of the spaceship. “Just don’t touch anything. Please.”

The rest of the day had confusing energy, to say the least. Everyone in the cave except Lilly - and there were a lot of them (humans, not quite humans, and pets) tried their best to find a normal activity or conversation topic, and everyone failed miserably, though to various extents.

After their information exchange, Dirk quickly lost interest in either the Rowdy 3 or the Slavic Mafia. Or, to be more precise, he didn’t have much to discuss with the Rowdy and actively avoided the engineers. They all only had one conversation which he used up on explaining language families to Todd.

“If you’re all from Slavic countries, how come you speak English to each other?” Todd asked them, which made Dirk and every single one of the engineers roll their eyes in unison.

“They’re all different languages?” Dancho said.

“Yes, Todd,” Dirk agreed, not angry but disappointed, “they’re all very different languages.”

“We have four here,” Grażyna explained, “Polish, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian.”

“Ah,” Dirk forced a polite smile, “који?”

Milena raised her arm slowly, unsure whether she was willing to step into whatever interaction would follow next.

“Oдакле?” Dirk added, while Todd watched half-confused, half-amazed. “Ја сам из Београда. Првобитно. Вероватно”

“Са косова,” Milena replied, which produced a look of sympathy on Dirk’s phase. “Немој,” she told him immediately. “Well nice talk!”

“Indeed,” Dirk agreed, and stared at Todd until he came up with a polite reason to walk away.

“Well that was… tense,” Todd commented when they retreated back to the other side of the cave. “What did she say?”

“That she’s from a place that was an active war-zone when I was a child, where my people could have very well been murdering her people, or the other way round,” he explained.

“Ah,” Todd said, and did not bring it up again.

While Erwin the cat chased spiders in the cave and the engineers were pouring black tea with lemon for the psychic vampires, Dirk found himself in of the rooms of the spaceship. He found it surprisingly easy to accept that this was indeed a thing for traveling through space he was walking around. He also accepted calmly that several of the people he was now acquainted with were likely aliens, though he hadn’t yet decided which ones.

He did not find the inside of the spaceship tremendously exciting either. Really, Dirk reasoned, it wasn’t much different from a decently sized yacht - except it traveled through the cosmos instead of the sea and probably had technology that humans could not even dream of. He was a bit more interested in the kitchen though, and was tremendously disappointed with the range of snacks that the food-printing machine had to offer.

“Exploring as well, professor?” Dirk asked, noticing Roger on the awkwardly shaped couch at the opposite end of the room.

“Mm?” professor, who was engaged in careful examination of what was either a toaster or an incredibly powerful energy weapon, looked up in confusion. “Oh, yes. Yes. I am exploring.”

“Can I join you?”

“Please do, son,” Roger smiled warmly, moving over to let Dirk sit. “Crazy day. Extraordinary, fantastic day,” he mused. “I always knew there are things in this world I had no idea about. Never thought I’d get to see them though.”

“So your friend Lilly,” Dirk said, shifting the conversation confidently into his own area of interest, “you know her how?”

“Lilly just… showed up in the institute on day,” he shrugged. “Replaced the previous cleaner, Mrs Daniels, after she retired to spend more time with grandkids. Lilly is very good at her job. Yes,” he nodded to himself, “she keeps the institute in order. Since first day, it’s like she knew it in and out already.”

“And she’s smart too, right?” Dirk said. “With your topic, with physics?”

“Lilly attends classes and lectures, she must be a very fast learner. Naturally talented.”

“Did she have access to your things, Roger?” Dirk continued. “She took the music box somehow.”

“Quite mysterious, that,” he shook his head. “Out of all people, never would have thought she would be the one to steal it from me.”

“Well, between you and me, professor,” Dirk told him, “I don’t think she stole it. I think,” he paused, “I am quite sure, actually, that she really is trying to protect you.”

“That’s the thing,” Roger sighed, “I believe that. I just wish she would tell me. What? Why?” he tugged on his ear anxiously. “She’s acting differently, too. Like she is a new person all of a sudden. And I’m seeing… something, in that new person. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. And it’s driving me insane.”

“Me too, prof,” Dirk agreed. “Me too.”

Somewhere on the opposite side of the spaceship in what was either a bathroom or a greenhouse for alien plants, Todd and Amanda were having a very different kind of conversation.

“Catch-up recap?” Todd suggested. “Not much on my side other than two breakups and three reconciliations with Farah.”

“What’s you current status?” Amanda smirked. “Asking for myself.”

“Together.”

“Sure. And where is she right now, exactly?”

“How should I know?” he shrugged. “She’s her own person.”

“That’s the thing,” Amanda replied, “she’s very independent and you’re hella clingy. Don’t shake your head, it’s true!” she laughed. “Remember college? Remember Mellisa Borowski? You picked your subjects exclusively according to what she was taking.”

“That was a long time ago,” Todd dismissed, “I’ve changed a million times since then. Anyway, I’ve already told you about the previous case…”

“…the one with the talking frog?”

“Yeah. So. What have you been up to?”

“This and that,” Amanda smiled with the corner of her mouth, “took part in a bunch of protests. Beat up some neonazis with the guys that one time. Accidentally transported my mind into a parallel dimension through a pararibulitis attack.”

“Pretty typical couple of months then.”

“Yeah, pretty standard. I have this… thing,” she began, then decided mid sentence she didn’t want to talk about it after all. “Doesn’t matter.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then, Todd spoke up.

“So I’m, um,” he stuttered for a few seconds, “I have a, uh, strange question?”

“Please go on, I am intrigued already.”

“Do you think…” he started, changed his mind several times over, then finally blurted out: “Do you think I could be bisexual?”

All Amanda could do in response to that was laugh.

“Sorry! Sorry. I’m just,” she snickered again, “why are you asking me this?”

“I don’t know!” Todd genuinely didn’t know himself, so it was difficult to give any other answer. “We grew up together. You know stuff about me, right?”

“Todd, I mean this as nicely as possible, but you need psychotherapy.”

“Should it concern me that you’re not the only person who told me that?”

They both looked at each other, dead serious, then burst into a laugh simultaneously.

“Well I’m flattered you wanna discuss it with me rather than with yourself,” Amanda responded eventually. “Let’s see then. You were in seventh grade, I was in preschool I think, and I asked you why you had a poster of some alien dude above your bed on the ceiling, and you told me that it was the most amazing human being in history. That was David Bowie. You had a poster of half-naked David Bowie hanging above your bed.”

“I appreciated him for his talent!” Todd replied.

“Okay, alright. What about Colin?”

“Colin was my best friend.”

“You carved Colin’s name into our garden bench and when mum started yelling at you about it, you said that our entire house wasn’t worth a single hair on Colin’s head.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Todd pouted, “he left for a basketball school anyway.”

“And you didn’t leave your bedroom for a week,” Amanda nodded. “You cried for a whole week about that dude.”

“He was my best friend!” Todd repeated.

“Yeah I’m sure that’s what Colin thought as well,” Amanda scoffed. “What, now you’re gonna tell me you didn’t start learning guitar because you had a crush on Mr Henderson?”

“Mr Henderson taught us physics,” Todd protested, “he was my role model!”

“Mr Henderson was really, really gay,” Amanda responded. “I know cause he organized book club for us and he would say things like ‘this novel is pure decadence and chic, it speaks to my Achillean soul’ like, come on.”

“All of that proves nothing,” Todd shrugged, “you pretended to have a boyfriend in 8th grade so?”

“I’ve invented a boyfriend in 8th grade,” Amanda corrected, “so that aunt Molly would leave me alone. All of your stuff was very much not public. The only reason I know all this is because I was a sneaky little shit as a kid, okay? And anyway, what about Dirk?”

“What about him?” Todd frowned.

“You gaze at him longingly like a medieval knight in service to a beautiful prince,” Amanda began, to which Todd produced a very strained, very uncomfortable laugh.

“I gaze at him… how?”

“You heard me,” she smiled cheekily, “you look at him. At his lips when he speaks, at his arms, his collarbones…”

“Now that, that is officially too much.”

“Hey, you’re the one who asked me whether I think you’re bi,” Amanda pointed out. “I’m just giving you the receipts. And like, Todd, seriously? You knew him for how long, seven days? Before you abandoned your entire life and became a government fugitive to go search for him.”

“I was just escaping my previous life,” Todd rationalized immediately, “and also trying to find you.”

“Why did you not call the police on him when he climbed into your window then huh? Checkmate,” she grinned. “You brought him to see me two days after you’ve met. You went on a quest with him like a day after that. You risked your life for him multiple times! And last time you were that spontaneous and devoted for basically a stranger was your senior year of high school when you ran away in the middle of the semester with that girl you had been dating for like a week at that point. And you definitely wanted to sleep with her.”

“I liked Alyson for her personality,” Todd disagreed, then paused. “But yes, I also wanted to sleep with her.”

“Need any more examples?”

“No I’m good,” he replied immediately, then paused for a second. “All this stuff… if it is that obvious to you, how come I’m in my thirties now and still don’t know it?”

“Just takes time to figure stuff out,” she replied, “you didn’t even know you were a man till you were like twenty, so hey. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Fair enough.”

“Dude, basically… don’t ask me whether you think you’re bi,” Amanda concluded, “ask yourself that. Pay attention. Your brain probably knows already. It just hasn’t communicated to your mind yet.”

“Thank you, witch, for psychoanalyzing me, that was very profound.”

“Talk to Farah as well,” she added. “Cause Farah is a really great friend to you, and this actually is something you might ruin after enough breakups.”

“Damn,” Todd smiled warmly, “how did my little sister get smarter and wiser than me? Cause I distinctly remember you pouring a whole plate of jello on your head cause you were pretending to be a slime monster from ghostbusters.”

“I was five,” Amanda said, smiling, “also multiple visions a month does that to you. Increases your wisdom stats.”

“Nerd.”

“Punk!”

“Likewise.”

Soon the conversation fell down a rabbit hole of memories, insults, and bizarre inside jokes, until they were no longer sure what they even started from. For a few happy hours, the things that happened to them didn’t matter, and their circumstances didn’t matter, and the fact that one of the plants in the bathroom and/or greenhouse was currently chewing on the sleeve of Amanda’s leather jacket also didn’t matter. In there, they were kids again. And the rest of it was insignificant details.

The cave was at peace for a brief but memorable hour. The engineers played cards with the psychic vampires, Farah and Roger bonded over instant noodles and their shared love for detective novels, and Amanda tried her best to explain her visions of a cracking universe to Dirk, which didn’t help much with understanding them but made her feel a bit better. For a little while, everything was okay. And then Grażyna got a phonecall.

“Don’t answer,” Varya recommended, but Grażyna did.

“Yes, boss?” she pronounced meekly into the phone, and in one tap of a finger doomed them all.

Lilly was busy being wrapped in a kilometer of wires and trying to poke a hole in a piece of isolating mat with a screwdriver when Grażyna sneaked into the engine room.

“Go away human,” Lilly called out as soon as she heard the noise.

“So the people who have been harassing us for the past few weeks, and demanding we give back everything we ever took from this ship,” she began, “do you happen to know them?”

“Sadly, I do,” Lilly mumbled, taking another stab at the isolating mat.

“So, um,” Grażyna continued, “suppose they were on their way here… would that be good or bad?”

Lilly paused. She removed the screwdriver from the mat. She put it down, removed her safety goggles, and secured all of the undone details. Then screamed, very loudly, into her hands. Just for a little while.

“Call everyone to the common room,” she said, surprisingly calmly, after the scream.

“The one with the food machine?”

“Yes, fucking hell, the one with the food machine! Quick!” she added, untangling herself from the wires. “I will never have peace.”

She did not wait for literally everyone to get to the common room - she didn’t have time for that. She counted Roger, Dirk, and Farah, and decided that was good enough.

“Right,” Lilly said, concentrating all her inner strength on staying as confident and collected as possible, “so I have bad news, then good news, then bad news again. I’ll start in that order cause it won’t make sense in any other order. So. Bad news is that there are two extremely incompetent but very stubborn individuals on your world that want this,” she kicked the wall of the spaceship, “piece of junk and also me, and unfortunately your friends mafia engineers have let them know they can come and get both, so they’re probably on their way already. No,” she shook her head at Roger, “I am not taking questions right now.

“Second, I mean good, I mean the good news is that I only have six or so hours left of work on this thing and then I can either blackmail them with it or just give it to them as is. And second, I mean third, I mean the other bad news is that they’ll probably be here sooner than that. So you’ll need to buy me some time, okay? I don’t care how. Barricade this place, distract them, dress in drag and dance the hula - I don’t care. No, Roger, I am not taking questions…”

“I insist,” he said, lowering his raised arm. “In fact I will not do anything until you answer me…”

“You’re just throwing a tantrum,” Lilly said.

“No, I am demanding some information that I feel entitled to, and…”

“Roger, please,” she began - exhausted, frustrated, and so uninhibited she wasn’t even fully aware of what she was saying, “God, you haven’t changed one single bit since college. You’ve been doing this routine with teachers since forever, overloading them with questions so that they crack and tell you the answer ahead of the task, and it won’t work on me, sorry.” She smirked, for a brief second satisfied with that response.

Then she realized. Then, she looked Roger in the eyes, and he looked in hers, and he no longer needed to ask any questions because suddenly, he saw something in that look. Suddenly, the puzzle pieces in his head arranged, and everything, all of it, became stupidly, devastatingly clear.