“Sorry about that,” she said, once they were in the hallway again. “Bubba’s actually really smart—well, for a multi-pod, anyway. But most of his smarts are in his arms.”
“They are?” Penny asked. She still felt dazed.
“Well, sure. Everybody knows seventy-five percent of a multi-pod’s intelligence is located in the arms,” the woman said. “They all have little brains of their own—located in the base of each arm, you know?”
“Uh, sure.” Penny nodded. “Sorry, I’ve never seen a, uh, multi-pod before,” she added.
“Well, now you have,” the woman smiled cheerfully. “Thank goodness I heard you screaming in there or it would have been the last thing you saw, too!” She shook her head, her long pink hair swishing against her bare shoulders. “You’d think that big dumb idiot would learn a lesson after he diced up our best pot boy last week and put him in the nardik stew.”
“He did? So I’m not the first one that happened to?” Penny was aghast.
“Honey, you’re not even the fifth person it’s happened to,” the woman confided. “Why do you think the sous chefs just ring the bell and push the ingredients into the kitchen instead of going in themselves? Nobody wants to be next to get made into varda pie or whatever the special of the day is. I’m Shurla, by the way,” she added.
“Oh, I’m Penelope. But my friends call me Penny,” Penny said automatically.
“Well, Penny, I’m glad I happened to come along when I did.” Shurla gave her a friendly smile. “Did you come in here looking for a job? ‘Cause I have to tell you, from one joy-girl to another, you’re doing it wrong. I mean, don’t mistake my meaning—that skin-tight suit you’ve got on is mighty sweet. But if you really want to tempt the males and get the most out of them, you’ve got to show a little skin—you know? She nodded down at her own ample, triple cleavage and winked broadly at Penny.
“I didn’t come looking for a…a job,” Penny protested, when she realized what Shurla meant.
“You didn’t?” Shurla frowned. “What possible other reason would you come in a dump like this, honey?”
“I…I just…” Penny’s throat worked and suddenly her whole story just came pouring out.
“I just wanted to trade a rare brantha hair toupee for an interstellar call back home. See, my ship got parked at the wrong end of the station and my shipmates got stuck in a time-suck—a temporal anomaly, I mean—and then an old lady with two heads led me here and gave me the toupee and told me to trade it for the call but the octo-chef—the multi-pod, I mean—grabbed it and chopped it up and now I don’t have any way to call home or ever get out of here,” she finished.
And burst into tears.
Sixteen
It wasn’t like Penny to cry in front of someone she’d just met—or in front of anyone, for that matter. She preferred to keep her emotional outbursts to herself.
But so much had happened to her that day, from nearly getting caught in the slow-time bubble to almost getting eaten by the Keeper to her strange encounter with Granny Two-two and then the menacing Hybrid V’rex coming after her, that she just felt overwhelmed.
Being grabbed by the purple tentacles of the multi-pod and nearly getting chopped up for stew meat was the final straw—that and realizing that she’d lost her one and only chance of ever getting home.
It was all just too much and Penny couldn’t help breaking down. Luckily, her new friend was understanding.
“Oh, you poor thing!” Shurla exclaimed, putting a comforting arm around Penny’s shaking shoulders. “Come on—let’s go into the ladies room for a minute.”
“Th-that’s what I was t-trying to find when I wound up in the k-k-kitchen,” Penny sobbed, trying to get hold of herself.
“It’s right down here,” Shurla told her. She led Penny past the kitchen, further down the hallway, and they went through another doorway to a room filled with sinks and stalls.
It looked a lot like a public restroom back on Earth, Penny thought. Well, except for the fact that the stall doors were all translucent so you could see right into them. She wondered why they bothered to have stalls at all if they were just going to make them see-through? Also, the toilets inside the stalls looked distinctly strange. They seemed to have spouts sticking out of them, which was weird…
But she was too upset to care much about the strange alien bathroom. She was still too devastated about