“So…” Mari frowned. “What do we do now?” I mean, since we’ve sort of… tied up the girl…

“Um…” David stared down at the girl. “So, um, what are you doing here?”

There was an explosion of words. Incomprehensible words.

“I… That’s not English,” Mari said. She stared. “But it… sort of sounds… French?”

“How do you know French?” David asked.

“I don’t, but I have a lot of French Sci-fi and Horror. I like to listen to it in the original French with subtitles.

“Okay…” David said. “So she’s a… French exchange student?” The girl started yelling at them.

“Hey!” Mari said. “Shh-shhh!!!” She put her finger to her mouth. “Don’t yell, you might um…” Get a cop curious enough to rescue you? “No, wait, you shot at us!”

The girl stopped yelling but started motioning at the table with her head, staying some other stuff that made no sense.

“Mari?”

“It sounds like French, but I don’t know French! Why can’t she be Japanese?!” The girl kept moving her head, getting more and more agitated.

“I dunno, but…” David walked over to the table and frowned, looking around at the stuff on it. “There’s…”

“Be careful!” Mari hissed. “It could be a trap.”

“She’s still tied up,” David said. He pulled out a dimly glowing crystal. “This?”

The girl shook her head. David nodded and pulled out a few more of the big cartridge-style things for her ray gun. “Not these?”

The girl shook her head again. Finally, David pulled out what looked like a medallion, a single gleaming crystal set into it. She frantically nodded her head.

“Is she gonna turn us into lizards?” Mari asked, raising her neutralizer. “If you try, I will zap you…”

“She’s trembling, Mari, put it down,” David said.

“But Davi—”

“Look, we came in here.” David gestured at Mari. “Let’s see what she is going to do.” He put the medallion down, and the girl rolled her head frantically. “You want me to put on you?” He lifted it up, and then put its ribbon over the girl’s head.

The crystal started to glow.

“Shit!” Mari said. It’s going to vaporize us, it’s going to…

The girl started spouting off gibberish, but… Suddenly Mari heard another voice, one that sort of resonated over her own words.

“Are you going to kill me?”

Wait, how is she speaking… Mari stared at the girl then realized that she was still speaking her incomprehensible language. “Wait, how is it that you don’t… you’re still…”

“What!?” the bound girl snarled. “I’m talking, and it’s not my fault that you savages don’t have translation pendants! Do you know how long I had to hide by your people until it could understand your language?”

“Understand—how, it’s Google Translate?”

“I…” She frowned. “No. Now, what are you going to do to me?” The girl scooted back from them, her teeth bared.

“You?” Mari asked. “What about us? You shot at us!”

“You snuck into my camp!”

“It’s not your camp, it’s somebody else’s prop—”

David cut Mari off with a sharp whistle. “Yeah, you know, generally, people don’t shoot first.”

“You were hiding!”

“I—” Mari closed her mouth, paused, frowned. “I do not have an answer to that.”

David looked around and shook his head. “Look, if you promise not to shoot us, we’ll untie you. We didn’t expect to find um, someone like you.”

“A girl,” Mari supplied. “We were sort of thinking something else, maybe a…” She paused. “You know, if we’d found something really nasty, we’d probably be dead now. We did not think this through.”

“Why should I promise anything? You kidnapped me!”

“What?” Mari stared. “We’re going to untie you—”

“Not now, then!” She stared at them. “You’ve been hunting me, haven’t you?”

“Um, no?” Mari said. “We didn’t even know you were around.”

“Then why did you follow me?!”

“Because we picked up higher aetheric levels around that refrigerator, and it led us to you!” Mari said. “And why were you wrecking refrigerators?”

“It… the cold box?” The girl tilted her head. “I was curious. It… how did it keep the contents cold? I tried to analyze it, but there was nothing in it, just machinery…”

“Duh, that’s how a refrigerator works.” Mari stared down at her. “Where are you from?”

“Not here,” David said. “You said we kidnapped you. Why?”

“You were there!” she said. “I was at my family’s lab, and then there was a breach, a huge breach. And then you were there, and I had to cut you free…”

Mari stared. “You. You were the person at the school.

“Yes… School, that was what it was?”

“You couldn’t read?” David asked.

The girl looked up at him. “I’m not answering any more questions until I get untied.”

Mari looked at David. David looked at Mari. Then he bent down and started undoing the rope. Mari stepped back, holding her neutralizer.

If you try anything, I’m going to give you such a sunburn.

The girl shrugged out of the rope and got up. She was shorter than Mari. Then she stared at Mari’s neutralizer and raised her hands.

“Mari…” David sighed. “Put the tool that won’t hurt even hurt her down.”

“It did something!”

“It broke the matrix.” The girl stared at the neutralizer. “I didn’t know you had tools that could do that. I didn’t know that you had tools that could manipulate aether at all.”

“It’s a neutralizer,” Mari said. She paused and frowned. “Wait, matrix?”

“Aetheric matrix,” the girl said.

“You call it the same thing we do?”

“What? No. The translator… learns… assimilates? Anyway, you’re hearing your term for it.”

Mari glanced at David. “A universal translator?” She stared at the girl. “Cool, but what if the name doesn’t have anything in common like you know… I want you to go on Twitter?”

The girl sighed, folding her arms. “Then it merely gives me the nonsense word you just used.”

“And social media triumphs again,” Mari said. “So, what’s your name?”

“What’s yours?”

“I’m Mari, and this is David.”

“Selva,” the girl said. “Now what are you going to do?”

“Um…” Mari looked at David.

He looked back at her, then turned to Selva. “You were working in a lab, where?”

“Avariana, my father was working on learning why breaches were once again occurring with greater frequency and if there was a chance of another dying time.” She stared at the two. “And that was when you pulled me into your world, this… strange place.”

“What’s so strange about it?” Mari asked.

“Have you seen the sky?” Selva asked.

“What’s… wrong with it?” Mari asked.

“What isn’t,” Selva muttered. “And again, I want to know what you’re going to do!”

Mari stared at David, David looked back at her. “Have you, um… ever actually eaten at a restaurant?”

From David’s look, he hadn’t expected Mari to say that.

“At home, all the time.” She stared up at Mari. “Here? Never.”

“Well, then!” Mari said. “We can have a polite conversation without people getting shot or tied up, and we can do it over dinner!”

Selva stared at her, looked over at David, then back to Mari. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. After all, do you want to stay here?”

“Madhouse, I’ve landed in a madhouse. You break into my camp, tie me up, and now you want to eat dinner with me?”

“Well, we could—”

“Try it, and I will rip your arms off.” Selva glared at her.

“Look,” David said. “Why not? We untied you, and if you want us to go to our car first, we can. That way, if you want to leave… well, you can. But I’ve got a question.”

“Yes?”

“Have you been trying to get back home?”

“Yes.” Her voice was frigid.

“And how much success have you had?”

Selva didn’t meet their eyes.

David nodded. “So, why not? We’ll wait. We’re parked by the entrance in the drainage ditch.”

Selva didn’t say anything as David chivvied Mari to the hole, the two lowering themselves down into the tunnel.

“David, what if she leaves?” She could come back for us, and she…

David shook his head. “It’s not like we have the right to hold her prisoner, Mari. What are we going to do, hand her to the cops?”

“We could tell Wilma or Antonio…”

“We could,” David agreed. “And if it was just them, I would, but what about everyone else. They don’t even like us. I want to know something more before we go talking to them and…” He grinned at Mari. “I don’t want to be stopped by the cops with a tied up girl in the back seat.”

“That could be a problem,” Mari said.

By the time they got to the car, Mari expected that Selva had probably taken off in the other direction. And she’ll pop up just when I’m in the shower, like some slasher movie. Or maybe just…

“Oh, there she is,” David said.

“You’re kidding!” Mari said, staring out the window of David’s car. Down at the bottom of the canal, a small figure with a knapsack was trudging up to the car.

Stopping by the driver’s side, she stared at David. “This doesn’t use aetheric technology, either.”

“Nope.”

“Is that why it smells so strange?”

“Probably.” Mari stared at her. “You’ve never heard of a gasoline engine?”

“No,” the girl shook her head. “I don’t have any choice but to trust you. But be aware that everything I have is here-there’s nothing left in the room you saw, and I’ll be going somewhere else.”

“Gotcha,” David told the girl. He got out, pausing as she stepped back, one hand dropping to her gun. Mari noticed the big dagger on her hip, very nearly a short-sword.

“Here you go,” he said. “Rear seat. That way, you’re behind us, and we can’t do anything to you.”

Selva got into the car, looking around with deep suspicion. “Very well,” she said.

“So…” Mari frowned. “A place where we can talk… Mike’s Italian Grotto!” she snapped out. “It’s always halfway deserted this time of the night.” She grinned. “Get into the back booth, and nobody is even going to see us!”

“Is Mike Italian? What’s an Italian?” Selva asked.

“Um, no, and Italy is a place, but we’re going to eat Italian food,” Mari said.

“Very well.” Selva leaned back, fiddling with her belt before she attached it. “Since I was brought here, `I have only eaten food out of tins. So I will try this…Italian food.”

“Great!” Mari said. We’re trying to woo the alien with good food… or at least make her forget we sort of mugged her.