My name is Thomas, and I'm an Ood.
Having the head of a squid and being from another planet is unusual in and of itself, but I can also see ghosts.
I live in a space station called the Pico De Gallo, but the station isn't actually Mexican. Humans name spaceships after famous battles, or famous people, but aliens prefer to name space stations after things they can relate to, like Teflon (one of the biggest stations in the known universe) and Mac N' Cheese.
Pico is a smaller station, which is perfect for me and my mysterious talent. I find the larger a place is, the more ghosts I see, and that can be overwhelming, especially since ghosts can't talk, and I can only speak by holding up a glowing orb.
I work as a fry cook at Pico de Gallo grill. The restaurant is styled after 1950's era restaurants, with shiny polished metal framework, red vinyl chairs and bright aqua walls with colored stripes of glowing neon tubing.
The restaurant is known for two things: cheeseburgers, and Nakmar Vigdal, which basically tastes like liver flavored chocolate coated in mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish. Delicious.
I'm the fastest chef in the kitchen, slinging fries and hash browns and narsit as fast as someone can ask for them. You might consider this unusual, due to me having to carry around an orb all the time, but an Ood can actually wrap the connector around his or her neck, and clip it there, so I can still multitask.
A lot of times, my restaurant is busy, especially around four o' clock. But on one particular Friday it wasn't. There had been an asteroid storm outside the station, so my only customers were a big fat blue guy, a one eyed green thing, a pink spider the size of a dog, and a little girl in a space suit.
I always get a motley assortment of customers. Shambling green plant creatures called the Krynoids, crazy fish creatures called the Hath, rhinoceros headed Judoon...
The girl seemed the most unusual that day because I didn't see any parents with her. I would have said something, maybe alerted the authorities, but I've learned from experience that looks can be deceiving. One time I got written up by my boss for reporting a curfew violation on a Slytheen pretending to be a little African boy, so I left the girl alone.
That was, of course, until the Bodachs arrived.
The Ood, as a rule, do not see spirits or ghosts or demons. I heard rumors of one group of Ood seeing Satan on planet Krop Tor, but that's debatable.
Most of the time, we only function as harbingers of doom. In other words, we are the ghosts.
But I have the added gift of seeing other things, things that normal Ood cannot see, such as shadow creatures that thirst for violence and bad taste.
I saw them coming through the front door. One of them, a shadow looking kind of like a massive rat, approached the blue guy, knocking on his head like it were a melon to be tested for ripeness.
It shook its head to its shadowy companions, as if to say, "Hmmm...so-so."
Then it poked at the spider.
This time, it visibly shuddered like it were eating spoiled meatloaf or Ro-Tel queso dip (something that makes most nonhuman races vomit). The other two customers produced similar results.
That was until they examined the girl.
The moment that happened, they all started jumping up and pouncing on her like a kennel of frisky dogs. I immediately got nervous.
When the girl's eyes met mine, they started glowing red.
Deciding this wasn't someone I wanted to confront, I nonchalantly killed a fly with a spatula with my name engraved on the handle, carefully placing it on the glob of whipped topping on the blue guy's Evayva Rievob.
The three second rule originated with Genghis Khan, who believed a bloody steak was still edible after laying for three hours on the floor. The health codes on this space station require an advanced culinary arts degree to navigate, but my manager Niarca told me long ago that folks will be open to cannibalism if you do it with enough care and style. That adage hasn't done me wrong yet.
I range a bell, and Niarca picked up the blue guy's plate.
Niarca is a human Dalek hybrid. She has never told me where she came from, but she said that her parents loved each other very much. Although she can be stern, she's a cute female, and looks great in a waitress uniform. Okay, more than great. But she's twice my age and obsessed with the Beatles, so it was never meant to be.
"Two golden enemas and a greasy dildo," she shouted as she poured a cup of antifreeze and summer coolant for the spider.
A "golden enema" is Fouje and hash browns coated in lard. A "greasy dildo" is exactly what it sounds like, a vibrating rubber "hot dog" rolled in sauerkraut, Honey Bunches of Oats, mayonnaise and Gain laundry detergent, topped with pancake syrup.
The moment after I slapped that mess on a plate, the girl was gone, taking the Bodachs with her. My sixth sense told me I should follow her, so I called to Niarca.
"Hey!" I yelled. "My tentacles feel numb. My rectum hurts. I think I burned my face on the grill."
She rolled her cyclops eye. "Oodie, if you want to go see your girlfriend, just go. I can hold down the fort."
The only other cook in the kitchen ws Ben the Sontaran, a strong and silent type that told you what you were going to eat before you knew you wanted Guxwah scrotum covered in Lays potato chips and Pennzoil. He was terrible at customer service, but Niarca had such charm that she quickly had you convinced that you actually came in for a platter of raw Guxwah scrotum. And Marshmallow Peeps drowning in salsa and tuna juice.
The squatty guy with the bulky armor and large potato shaped head gave me a salute, as if he could manage famously without me, so I left the two to take over, tossing my apron on the green thing's head.
Once outside the cafe, I immediately focused my psychic magnetism, my sixth sense, to track down my target, the Bodachs.
The only other person who knew about the Bodachs was named Todd Dumbass. When he told me about the creatures, and what they were, a shuttlecraft broke through the dome of the space station, flattening him against a poster for Space Saver Compression Bags. After that happened, I told not a soul about them.
I followed the spectral vapor trail of the creatures across a landing, approaching a balcony.
About halfway there, I ran into Arogka, my one true love, the greatest female I've ever known.
She was a Silurian and I was an Ood, but it didn't matter. I loved her, and she loved me. She didn't care that kissing me was like sticking a whole squid in her mouth, and I didn't mind that she tasted like chicken.
Her face was green, smooth and scaly, like a sexy snakeskin boot. Three curving horns came out of her skull, like a triceratops, but cuter. I dreamed of a night when we'd both be married and I could run my hands up that smooth ivory. But that was not to happen. Not then, at least.
On that particular day, I had caught her during her break from the Space Dots ice cream place.
C'mon. It's a space station. What did you expect? Ice cream?
At any rate, she looked radiant in that little brown and pink outfit, like a Neapolitan Sunday with something green and delicious in the middle. Her sinuous reptilian tail seemed to beckon to me, drawing my eyes to hidden places beneath the skirt of her uniform, but I am a religious Ood, so I looked up and gave her a smile, and she smiled back.
"Hello, Oodie," she said. "You on your break too?"
"Something like that," I said.
She waved to a bench. "Then sit down. Let's talk."
I swallowed. "Actually, I'm kind of busy. I just saw a...ghost."
"Wow!" she grinned. "How exciting! You know, Ood. I have a theory about ghosts. I think the afterlife is like boot camp. The Great Drill Sargent goes up and down the rows with a playing card to see if you've shaven really close, and if you have stubble, she makes you do pushups and clean out the latrines."
"What?" I said.
She just shrugged and gave me a smile.
"You don't have facial hair, do you, Arogka?" I asked.
"Not usually," she said. "But would you love me if I did?"
"Probably," I said.
"That's my Ood," she grinned. "Well, don't let me hold you back! Go find your ghost!"
I shrugged and kept walking.
The Bodachs seemed to jump over the edge at the end of the balcony, so I climbed up on the rail and walked vertically down its face.
I can defy gravity because I'm an Ood.
As I walked upside down on the ceiling of the hallway below, I saw John Lennon floating right side up, legs folded in a lotus position.
John Lennon often hangs around me, but I have no idea how to help him cross over. The fact that he slept with Yoko Ono would keep anyone from entering the light.
As I stared at him, my tentacles hanging in my face, the ghostly musician hands me a joint.
I fell for that once. He made fun of me for trying to smoke noncorporeal pot. Ghosts don't talk, so he mocked me by making "ha ha" gestures around his belly.
They say the only way musicians can communicate with the living after death is through music. I tried teaching John to speak to me through an MP3 player and a collection of every Beatles song ever made, but it only resulted in a bunch of nonsense about Maxwell's Strawberry Diamond Plated Blue Meanie.
Unfortunately, his ghostly companion William S. Burroughs has corrupted him. Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded was fond of newspaper cutups and free association, so sound experiments like mine were right up his alley, and likewise the ill fated head Beetle.
As I stared at him, John took a bow of a violin and stuck it through the wound in his back, pretending to play his guts.
I rolled my eyes. This was hardly Zen humor. Of course, his presence here only proved that being "one with everything" will not help you pass on, despite it being good advice for hot dog toppings.
Tired of his sophomoric humor, I walked through him, upside down, in search of the Bodachs.
Their path took me down a maze of corridors, still upside down, and into the spaceship docking bay of Pico De Gallo, where they gathered in a large mob around one of the airlocks, pointing at it several times as if they knew I knew about them.
With a shrug, I hopped down tot he floor and tried to open it.
Although stubborn, I managed to get the doors open quite easily with only a library card, a sonic screwdriver, and replacing fifteen capacitors and microchips inside the mechanism.
Inside, i found a big dark room, the dimensions of which appearing to be twice the width and height that could logically fit in such a place, especially with so many other space vehicles crowding it on all sides.
Although I had never seen a TARDIS, I had heard some rumors that they were actually bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Momentarily, I wondered if I, in fact, had stumbled across one by accident, but that didn't explain why everything was dark, and why, at the far end, I sawn an Ood in a doorway similar to mine, dressed in the same exact clothing I wore.
"Hello! Do you know what this place is?" I heard this other Ood call to me.
I shrugged and said, "Not really."
All of a sudden, I stumbled over a mayonnaise jar and fell into the darkness.