Richard was still buzzing with energy when he pulled up to the house. The races hadn't wrapped up until close to 9, and he'd stayed a while to chat with the other participants and some of the spectators. He'd expected that Garth might have brought his date home, but the driveway was empty and so was the garage.

Having secured the Camaro in the garage for the night, Richard fumbled for his house key on his way to the front door. He was completely awake and was looking forward to some quiet time to focus, heads down, on the schematics Garth had cooked up for his generator and solar cells. If all went well, they could finish their preparations to launch the FundUp campaign within the week.

He noticed something as he stopped outside the front door and lifted the key to the lock. There was a light on inside his office. It wasn't the lamp, though; it was too green.

His computer screen must have come back on. Huh.

Richard unlocked the door and stepped inside, wiggling his toes inside his shoes in anticipation of kicking them off. Yes, the light was definitely coming from down the hall where his and Garth's offices lay. He bumped the door closed with his hip. As soon as it clicked into place in the frame, the light was extinguished.

With an uneasy feeling, Richard hung his keys on the coat rack by the door. He reached behind him to flip the lock on the door handle, but thought better of it and dropped his hand.

He was being silly. "Garth?"

No answer. Of course there was no answer; Garth was out with his new boyfriend, and Richard was in the house entirely alone. His computer screen had come on, perhaps with an alert, and then had gone to sleep by coincidence as Richard stepped in.

Rolling his eyes at himself, Richard flipped the lock on the door handle. He kicked off his shoes without untying them and, luxuriating in his stocking-footedness, went into the kitchen to grab a beer.

He flipped the lid off the bottle. The uneasy feeling had not departed. He glanced over his shoulder toward the living room and the mouth of the hallway, taking a swig of beer. With that same I'm-definitely-not-creeped-out-right-now easiness, he meandered rather than walked toward the hallway and flipped the lights on.

"Garth? I didn't see a car. I thought you were still out with Kincade." He turned left into his office and flipped on the light.

At first, Richard's brain did not register what he saw.

He had always expected he would have better survival instincts—the ability to assess a situation in an instant and cat-like reflexes so he could react more quickly to a threat than a threat could react to him. Years of giving advice to people in horror movies from the comfort of his couch had suggested this, at least.

Alas.

Richard's legs gave out.

It was not the desired reaction in a potentially life-or-death situation, but it is what happened: he slumped to the floor, raising his hands over his head. "What! What!"

There was a dark-clad figure standing in the center of Richard's office, a figure he had never before seen, a figure that was as still as a statue and staring directly at him without offering any answer to his inquiry.

"What! What!" Richard cried again, scrambling to his feet using the wall behind him for support. "Who the bloody hell are you!"

She—it was a slender silhouette, and the pronoun sprang into Richard's mind without asking permission—backed away from him. "You were not supposed to be in residence!"

Aside from being a stranger, the intruder had a strange accent: not American, not British. As the shock ebbed, Richard noticed that her hair was green and, if he wasn't mistaken, her skin was green, too. Was she wearing some kind of mask?

"What?" he repeated for the fifth time.

She turned away from him, a long braid swinging over her shoulder, and lifted her arm. She was wearing a bracer of some kind. On it, a screen flashed into life.

"Don't you bloody move! I'm phoning the police!" Richard said with much more confidence than he was entitled to based on how his hands were shaking.

She turned. Her eyes in in the murky light of the decades-old fixture were yellow, and the pupils were slitted, like a goat's. Richard stumbled back. She said, "No, Richard Arthur Campbell. You must not phone the police."

Richard's mouth dropped open. "Is this some kind of trick?"

"You must not phone the police," the intruder insisted.

"Okay, some prank of Garth's, no doubt. He's out with his 'boyfriend,' is he, and stages a break-in by some girl in a cat suit and swamp creature mask?" Richard laughed, and, feeling the relief of laughing, he laughed again. "I'm going to kill him. You may think this is hyperbole, but I am actually going to kill him. I will pay you $200 to help me bury his body in the garden." Using his prize money for this high-priority initiative would be well worth it.

She stood looking at him, her strange yellow eyes flicking over him from head to toe. Her nostrils, which lay flat in her face like those of a reptile, flared and then narrowed. It was shortly after Richard noticed her strangely life-like nostrils that he realized her long braid was not a braid; it was a number of tentacles twined together. He realized this because the tentacles unraveled themselves and began to curve upward into the air, like Medusa's snakes. It was an unnervingly life-like detail to expect out of a rubber mask.

"This is not normal," he muttered, but a few of the synapses in his brain had gone down for repairs, and he could not quite bring himself to muster the fear he'd felt a moment before. His mind seemed to be spinning round and round in a real-life reenactment of a browser refresh icon.

"These are not normal circumstances. This I will admit freely. Be assured that I am no danger to you if you cooperate." The woman flexed a fist, and a chilling click sounded as she raised her forearm parallel with the ground, pointing her fist directly at Richard's head.

It was a click not unlike that of a gun.

"However," she continued, "I shall have no choice but to eliminate you if you produce a personal mobile device with the intention of calling the authorities."

Richard slowly raised his hands into the air. His stomach had turned to lead.

"Please do not move. I am equipped with a weapon similar to the 'phaser' with which you may be familiar from the television program, 'Star Trek.' It is a pulsed energy weapon capable of vaporizing your body."

"Okay, I'm not moving," Richard said, covered with a cold sweat. The fact that this could not possibly be happening by any stretch of the imagination did not do much to ease his sizzling nerves. "Look. Not moving."

"My retrieval device has malfunctioned. I require your pass code." Still aiming her fist at Richard's very vulnerable head, she took a few steps toward the desk, moving with the sinuous grace of a cat-suited supervillain. Her weird head-tentacles twitched and then extended toward the screen of Richard's laptop like the whiskers of a cat sniffing a treat. "What is it?"

"What?" Refresh. Refresh.

"I require the pass code for your personal computer, Richard Arthur Campbell."

Richard closed his eyes and sighed. He muttered the pass code, wishing he were dead.

"Please repeat the pass code at a more audible level."

"It's solarpowerstud," Richard said, his voice now crisp with humiliated irritation, "with a dollar sign in place of each S and a 1 instead of an L."

She looked at him with a blank expression. "Please repeat the pass code."

Bloody hell. "It's $o1arpower$tud."

She tilted her head, looking at him curiously now, and slightly lowered the phaser-fist. "Please—"

"Look, do you just want me to type it in for you?"

The tentacles the woman had in place of hair turned toward Richard, as if sensing him. Then, they slowly slid back over her skull and raveled themselves into twist again, like a braid. "Move slowly so that I may be assured you present no danger to my person. Please do not touch your personal mobile device."

Richard kept his hands in the air as he crossed the room. When he got nearer to her, he spared a glance at her face. The texture of the mask she was wearing was damp; the higher points of her face, such as her cheek bones and her brows, glistened in the dingy light. It was the most convincing makeup Richard had ever seen, like something straight out of a horror movie. He shuddered as he leaned over the computer desk. "What do you want?"

"I have come to obtain the schematics for your solar cells, Richard Arthur Campbell."

Turning at once, Richard said, "Wait a—" but his exclamation was cut short when the burglar raised her fist again, along with the strange, raised ridges that passed for her eyebrows. He slowly put up his hands again.

"Do not move abruptly," she said.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Was he crazy, or was there an edge of fear in her voice? She sounded as tense as he was.

"This weapon would vaporize you in one fourth of a second measured in Earth time."

"Earth time? What the—"

A car door slammed outside. The sound of it dashed ice water down Richard's back.

The strange intruder instantly faced in the direction of the sound, her goat-like pupils narrowing and her nostrils flaring. She then glanced back to Richard, perhaps connecting the sound of the car door with the arrival of a resident. "Who is here?"

Richard wasn't sure how to respond. He had often considered getting rid of Garth in a creative way, but he did not want to put him in line to be vaporized.

"Richard!" The front door knob rattled as Garth unlocked it, and Richard heard him clattering in. He sounded like he was not in total control of his faculties, least of all mobility. "Richard, don't worry. Kinney drove. I mean Kinnade. Kinnade. Kincade."

You gormless twat, Richard thought. He glanced at the strange, costumed woman, who was preternaturally still.

Garth was stumbling down the hallway now. A number of possibilities presented themselves to Richard: Tell Garth to go away. Scream for help. Ask the strange burglar to hide in the closet.

None of them seemed very logical, and before he could decide on any one course of action, the door to Richard's office swung inward.

Oh, Garth. 🤦🏻‍♀️ You poor, silly, drunken fool. This can't end well...