The fantastically confusing energy of the afternoon carried on confusingly into the evening. No one had the nerve to comment on it, but it was abundantly clear that something bad was about to happen, and that most of them would determine the specifics only after the fact. Lilly remained hyperfocused and grim; she locked herself in the engine room and left them to fend off for themselves. Through a democratic process, they made the decision to jam the elevator and barricade its door as well for good measure.

“I’ve had too much barricading this week,” Dirk complained, dragging a heavy crate full of metal scrap across the sawdust-covered floor. “I’d say I’ve filled up my early quota of barricading.”

“I don’t think it will even help,” Todd agreed, and rushed in to help Dirk with the box.

Their hands met on top of it, just for the briefest of moments, and it was the strangest thing too. It was far from first time their hands ever touched, and yet it felt as if they had never done it before. They glanced fleetingly at each other; both still had the soft simmering buzz of electricity lingering on their skin. And they both decisively refused to acknowledge it.

“It’s better than nothing,” Dirk carried on as if nothing worthy of note had happened. “Maybe we can cut the power supply to the elevator too?”

“Pass me the pliers, will you?” Lilly asked, extending her hand, and a few seconds later Roger was passing her the heavy metal tool. “This looks worse than I thought,” she tutted as she cracked open another panel. “Way past its warranty, poor thing.”

“You won’t tell me any more then,” Roger said quietly.

“Not now, sorry. Too emotional to multitask on.”

“But we will talk eventually, yes?” He paused for a second, lost in thought. “What I mean is, you’re not going to run away and leave me, are you?”

“Never by choice,” she replied firmly. “And I’ll put up a fight if anyone tries to force me. You know me. I bite.”

“Yes,” he chuckled. “Quite.”

“It was… lonely,” she added, answering a question he’d asked some time ago. “Like I was doing all of it from scratch. On hard mode. But I’ve found people who helped me. A community of people, very kind people. Could relate to some of them really well,” she smiled, remembering something. “Oh, and I learned a bunch of cool stuff from them too. For example, did you know there’s a word for who you are?”

“You mean I’m not the only one?” Roger raised a quizzical eyebrow, understanding immediately what she meant.

“Yeah!” she beamed, distracted from her work for a second, “yeah, it’s called ‘aroace’. Short for aromantic and asexual.”

“Aroace…” Roger repeated. “I like that. Has a nice ring to it.”

“Oh there are rings too, I’ll show you later. I’ll tell you everything, later. I promise. I just need to get these circuits running first…”

She finished those circuits before the rest of the cave-dwellers finished their barricading. She checked every bolt and button, locked the engine room, and left the ship feeling adequately prepared for whatever would come next. Outside of the ship, people were busy moving things around and shouting various words at each other. This was more of a game than an actual task, she gathered, but she reasoned that it wouldn’t hurt either way, so she let them have at it.

The last thing Lilly did before all hell broke loose was to crack open a can of lipton iced tea and pour into it from a flask what was most likely vodka. When Amanda gave her a strange glance, Lilly muttered something about deserving one last long island iced tea cocktail. Amanda nodded and silently returned to stacking crates.

No one could be blamed for failing to prepare properly. They tried very hard and, to be fair, did construct quite an impressive monument around, in front of, and even directly inside of the elevator shaft, so it was quite a pity it didn’t come in useful.

The bosses arrived as expected. They tried the elevator first, of course, like any civilized being would. And similarly, like any self-respecting civilized being, they stopped waiting for the elevator three seconds after they pressed the button. Instead, they just teleported downward.

Every single cave-dweller was waiting for them when they materialized on the sawdust-ridden floor. It was an uncanny feeling; one that made them realize just how pathetic their technology must have looked like to these people, and how helpless they would be in a possible (and, indeed, likely) confrontation. Most of them had seen things stranger than the dreams of BBC creative producers after a round of magic mushrooms. And yet this was The Moment, this was the second they could feel their understanding of the world incinerated right before their very eyes.

All felt a very powerful emotion at that moment. All, including Lilly. Her emotion was exemplified by her rolling her eyes, standing up slowly from her folding chair, the can of iced tea still in her hand, and saying:

“Oh you’ve got teleports now then.”

She ambled casually past the crowd yielding their various weapons, from actual guns to magic wands and golf clubs, and stopped in front of the two menacing figures. They were taller than her, both a deep shade of black except for the heads which were glowing bright white.

“Off with the clown suits,” Lilly urged, taking a sip of her “cocktail”.

The figures did. They removed the helmets first, then undid the suits in one motion.

The suits dropped on the floor with the soft thud of heavy rubber.

You could have expected many things to be under those suits. Little green men? Insects or reptiles or bipedal dolphins of some sort? One of those creatures that was supposed to be in Star Wars but was deemed to complicated to execute even on a decent budget? Well, whatever you expected, it probably wasn’t two perfectly humanoid persons that resembled closely two middle-aged lesbians just off the shooting site of the Great British Bake Off.

But that’s exactly what the removal of the suits revealed.

“Yes, we’ve got teleports, Elid.” One of the figures replied, and the cave was filled with a horrifying static noise. “Technological process did not leave with you.”

“Please not those communicators,” Lilly said, “they don’t conceal anything and the auto-translate is abysmal. Here,” she handed them over a set of devices that looked a bit like a miniature walkman. “One goes in ear, clip to your clothes.”

The two persons obeyed, clipping the things to their identical outfits. They were wearing modern freshly purchased human clothes, but arranged in a manner few humans would come up with - though it would probably get overlooked for two British lesbians.

“Better?” one of the persons asked, and Lilly gave them thumbs up. The voice was now clear and perfectly ordinary, and executed, for some reason, in a generic RP British accent.

“Right,” Lilly beamed, “so you got here after all. Thought it would take you longer, considering the horrific state of the briefing we get about this planet. I definitely had a lot of surprises when I first got here.”

“Actually,” the second one - we’ll call her Sandi for convenience - replied, “we’ve had a leg up. We’ve met this fascinating man called Ford, and he sold us a most wonderful guide, it’s called…”

“Cut to the chase, pal,” Lilly advised, “we’re all busy people here, you especially. Wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s precious time.”

“Ah yes,” the first person - we’ll refer to her as Sue - responded, “let’s get to your very overdue contract, perhaps?”

“Did it have a due date? I haven’t noticed myself,” Lilly shrugged, “was it written in tiny letters in a parallel dimension?”

“It was five local planetary orbital transits,” Sandi explained patiently, “and do you know how long it’s been, Elid, since you were supposed to return with your report? Over fifty local planetary orbital transits. Ten times that long!”

“Sorry I’m just really bad at counting.”

“You’re in charge of sales.”

“Big hiring mistake, but not my fault. Anyway,” Lilly said, pacing casually across the cave, “here’s the deal. Thanks for coming back for me and everything but I’m not coming back. I’ll hand over my report,” she put her hand into her pocket and took out a single USB memory stick, “good luck with this storage device, it’s basically unbreakable but I’ve no idea where you can plug it into. You’ll figure it out. I’ve fixed up the ship as well, so company property is safe. And I assume you got back all of the tech that was missing from it and wiped the people along with it so it’s all good, really.”

“That is definitely a suggestion,” Sue said, “but we have a different one. Our proposal is that you take the report, get into the spaceship, and leave this planet with us to return home and stand corporate trial for your crimes against the company. Also we wipe all of these people as well,” and with that, she took a small cube out of her pocket, placed it down on the ground, and tapped it lightly with her foot. It immediately transformed itself into a small table, on top of which stood two glasses, a bottle of some blue liquid, and a clunky device about the size of a paperback book.

“Pff, crimes?” Lilly chuckled in what she hoped was a casual, nonchalant manner, but came out just a tad too strained, “what crimes?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Sandi told her, “extending your contract tenfold? Harming company property? Completely inappropriate interactions with a class 3 civilization? Revealing patented corporate technology?”

“I didn’t reveal that much…”

“You worked for the local government!”

“Only for a few years! And I only did small things.”

“You provided technological solutions that got them to their main moon,” Sue reminded.

“Oh I only helped a little bit!” retaliated Lilly. “They got most of the way there completely on their own. And a lot of them don’t believe they even did in the first place so honestly? Who cares.”

“You’re going with us,” Sandi asserted, “now.”

“I am not,” she responded, calmly, “and in fact if you keep insisting on it,” she paused to get something out of her pocket, “I will blow that ship the fuck up and then you’re really screwed. That will put you into debt for the rest of your lives.”

“Once again, we have an alternative suggestion,” Sandi told her in the same calm manner, “you and the ship are going back to Krargria or I will fry the brains of every single human in this room, on permanent setting, and tell the board it was you so that you’ll have the privilege of spending the rest of your life in corporate jail.”

Lilly breathed in sharply and closed her eyes for a few seconds. She looked over her shoulder at Roger; his eyes were wide with a mix of excitement, confusion and fear. The rest of the crowd was silent, stunned, watching the interaction unfold. Up until this moment, none of them were taking it seriously. It was a mildly amusing thing happening to someone else before that. But now it was personal; now their lives have been threatened as well, and they were ready to react.

They just needed to figure out how exactly one is supposed to react in a situation so bizarre and ridiculous it would seem too stupid even to a dreaming person. In fact a few of the cave-dwellers have been pinching themselves or trying to push fingers through their palms just to check whether or not they were awake.

“So, um,” Todd spoke up, “this is all… not very interesting, but just to check, you’re aware there’s like a whole bunch of people here, right? And we’re all… sentient, is that the word? We’re intelligent beings. Do we get a say in this?”

“Honestly, Todd,” Dirk said, taking the first cautious step away from the crowd, “I think they do know we are sentient, they just really don’t give a shit.”

“Yeah that would be an accurate assessment,” Lilly smiled her signature forced smile.

“So I just wanted to say that I have a gun,” Farah said, intending to continue the thought, but failing to come up with anything more, “yeah.”

“We have all kinds of things,” Amanda agreed, still keeping her magic wand under her jacket, “and there’s a lot of us.”

“Don’t be silly, little thing,” Sue smiled, “you are all very cute with your sticks, but you pose no threat to us. We have devices that can take out this entire room and reduce it to subatomic particles in seconds. If Elid here did his job properly, you would be trading with us for a tiny bit of this technology, but stars did not align for that to happen, I’m afraid.”

“She,” Lilly said.

“What?”

“The correct form of address for me in this particular society and language is she,” Lilly explained. “They have different pronouns for different genders. Yeah, it took me a while to figure out as well.”

“How peculiar,” Sandi nodded, one eyebrow raised in mild amusement. “Well-well, a nice linguistic quirk to learn before I turn the brains of these people to jelly,” she added, patting the device on the table affectionately, like one pats a very fat rabbit.

“Does anyone here have any idea what the hell is going on?” Dancho asked, then promptly avoided eye contact with one of the bosses who recognized his voice.

“Actually I think I do,” Dirk muttered, getting past the crowd and out into the open space between the people in the spaceship. “Actually,” he continued, now beaming from ear to ear, “I am almost certain, fairly confident, quite sure to definitely ninety if not ninety nine percent convinced that I have indeed solved this whole case.”

“Well?” Todd demanded after Dirk spent half a minute just standing there, smiling.

“Oh you want me to tell you?” Dirk asked. “Yes. Of course. Naturally. So take some sort of seat maybe, cause it may take a while. So, here goes. More than fifty years ago, a spaceship landed on planet Earth…”