Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer

Somewhere south of Toadsuck, Texas, along a washboard gravel road, a middle aged man was walking his dog, enjoying the cool night air and the effects of cheap grain alcohol. Looking up, he witnessed a glowing object streak across the sky.

“Mmurph,” was his only comment.

The object suddenly veered towards him, taking up a position directly over head. He managed a surprised, if somewhat drawn out, “I’ll tell you what,” prior to being skewered by an intense beam of light and drawn into the strange craft.

Aboard the craft, 1st Lentil Glorp mused as much to himself as to his companion Skizziks, Lentil 2nd class, “Why do we do it?”

Skizzicks rotated his eyestalks in an ‘here we go again’ manner and muttered, “For the chicks I s’pose. Sure as hell isn’t for the money.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Glorp paused to pull his hand out of the confused and somewhat surprised Texan’s ass, “I mean here we are, in a ship that can span galactic distances and we are still conducting anal scans of emergent sentients. Is this all there is to life? I mean what’s the point?”

“For the greater good of the Tranyan Empire?” The traumatized man stared wide eyed as Skizzicks placed a small triangular object on his forearm. The alien waved a purplish glowing wand above the object and it painlessly sank beneath his skin.

“Seriously, do you think the Emperor really gives a shit about these primitives? We write a report, it gets filed, nobody reads it, end of story.” Casually Glorp turned the hapless and mildly terrified Toadsuckian onto his back, grabbed his testicles, squeezed tightly and screamed.

“There has to be something more to life than this,” he said, releasing the testicles in question.

“Well,” Skizzicks began slowly as his brain ponderously engaged, “My gram always said, ‘Good things come to those who wait.’”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. Gram drank a lot.”

“Well let’s finish this up.”

They moved the stunned and quite naked human to a small raised circular pad, sprayed him with a slick greenish blue gel, gave him their equivalent of a thumbs up, which involved several appendages and the release of bodily gasses and returned him in the same manner as they had plucked him away. He arrived at the same time, on the same gravel road, next to the same Blue Tick hound who merely shook his head knowingly.

The now lightly glowing and very naked man watched as the object retreated back into the firmament from whence it came.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit”