I would just like to accredit some of the ideas my mind had dug up to having read some seriously good stories, which have obviously stuck like glue to my subconscious mind as I didn't even realise until last night the similarities that have appeared here to them! I hope I didn't cut it too close to the mark, my apologies.

Anyway, on with the story. It's all very kind of spur of the moment writing, so i'm not exactly saying it's going to be my best work. But I hope you enjoy it anyway, even if it's more than a little in the realm of odd.


Chapter 2.

Even by intergalactic standards his own species was tall. The average male Martian mouse stood at six feet eleven inches high, which put him personally at the short end of the scale for his kind. Vinnie was only six foot five, which wasn't far off the average human male. But it was way below the giant alien beings that currently surrounded him.

They were so big they were easily able to see over their massive machine, and as they led him down the length of the room he spotted several heads peering at him from the other side - which really did make him feel quite uncomfortable.

Bearing the hallmark anthro-type facial structure, with forward-facing complex eyes, they weren't so much remarkable for their strangeness as for their sheer ugliness. It might have just been his perspective – i.e. looking up at their towering forms – but aside from a shock of shimmering tresses that reached down in an extended mane from their crown to their hips, their wrinkled, grey skin, white eyes, and two pairs of pointed ears, coupled with an extremely pungent odour... Well it made him think of a character from a TV show Charley liked to watch from time to time, some dude called 'Spock', only about a million years older. And far less hygienic. The aliens smelled and looked worse even than the most disgusting of Plutarkian specimens, including the infamous Loogey Brothers.

Despite the resemblance to something that had died crawling out of an old folk's home, their lofty stature actually made them extremely intimidating to behold. Not that it had stopped many a mouse from valiantly trying to fight back, though, with the old mantra 'the bigger they are, the harder they fall' playing a large part in their enthusiasm to just keep shooting, even if it didn't seem to make a blind bit of difference.

Once one of them had hold of you, there simply was no point in struggling. Even their loose grasp on his arms was more than adequate to stop him trying to escape; their strength and speed, height and intellect vastly outweighed his own. He felt dwarfed by their presence. He felt tiny, and insignificant. And helpless. Vinnie imagined that many of the smaller animals on his home planet, and on Earth, must have felt something similar when they had been grabbed and picked up by them, except that mouse (and human) skin wasn't exactly impervious to teeth and claws. He felt so powerless right now he might as well have been a lab rat in a cage, he thought numbly.

It certainly didn't help that he didn't know what they were going to do with him.


"And don't forget to brush your teeth, Vincent! That's twice a day, not month, you hear me?"

"Yeah I hear you sweetheart" a now distant voice replied, "And don't you forget to b..."

"VINNIE NOT ANOTHER WORD!"

"Jeez bro, too much information."

"Sorry Charley-ma'am, we'll make sure he does his teeth... and teach him a lesson or two on how to talk proper to a lady."

The sound of a thud, and a yell, confirmed that Modo was already doing just as he promised.

Despite the downpour of tears on her cheeks she couldn't help but smile at that. Her guys never stopped being what they were, and it reassured her a little. Charley had been fretting all weekend about whether or not the bros would change somehow once they got home, reverting to their near-chauvinistic, macho, freedom fighting personas and forgetting all about her in the process.

Their last words as the bright light of the transporter consumed them relieved some of that angst. And gave her something else to look forward to. Next time she saw Vinnie van Wham she would take great pleasure in grabbing hold of his nether regions, and making her point well and truly clear that it was not o.k. to go blurting out other people's private matters to all within earshot.

Charley dried her eyes on her shirt sleeve, and giggling slightly at the reaction to their reunion the white mouse would have, stepped well back of the stolen Plutarkian invention. They had installed the device in the yard behind the Last Change Garage, and programmed into it a sixty second countdown to the self-destruct that would start after it had shut off. If there was a major problem Charley would be able to override it, otherwise she would stand back and watch her only tangible link to the red planet disintegrate before her eyes. They had made quite sure it would be unrecognisable, and unsalvageable, afterwards. It was then to be buried in concrete just to make sure that no humans, nor a certain Plutarkian, were able to find or use it ever again.

"Three... two... one..." the woman counted out loud, slipping on a pair of industrial ear defenders on as she did so.

This is it, here we go. Guys I really hope you made it out the other side.

She had been hoping for some sort of hidden surprise when it went, like fireworks, or a drum roll, or something. Something that one of the guys might have found amusing to sneak into the sequence just because she had insisted that the noise, and thus local disturbance, be kept to a minimum. When the explosion came it was almost disappointing. In the end it wasn't so much of a bang as a soft pop.

A few minutes later the smouldering remains of the transporter hissed and crackled before finally withering under the foam of the extinguisher. Charley swallowed hard, and allowed herself a moment to gather her thoughts. There was no point in moping around now, she decided; she just had to get on with things and keep herself busy, and cross off the tasks on her very long to-do list one by one, much like she would be the days on her calendar. Two months they had said. All she had to do was be ready.


He was still struggling to understand them. Somewhere inside his mind there were voices, of a sort, each coming up with alternative versions of what he could hear. It was as if his brain couldn't decide which language to translate to, though so far he had had a miss-mash of Native mouse, Pan-Martian, English and even the odd word of Southern rat all rolled into one chaotic mess of a sentence. On their own he would have deciphered the words, easily, but together in a single string they made no sense at all.

Vinnie had been told that it would take time for it to settle down, for the tech they had put inside him to fully integrate with his brain and begin functioning efficiently. Or at least that's what he had finally figured out from the jumble his ears had first picked up, and that had taken several hours and a colossal headache to achieve.

The effort of understanding them wasn't the only contributing factor to the massive pain in his temple. Their actual voices weren't all that pleasant to listen to; it was like an old record being played backwards with strawberry preserve sticking into the grooves. Crackling, squeaking, whining, with deep notes throbbing in the background, and higher ones dancing around on the surface of a badly tuned melody. It was significantly worse than some of the Earth heavy metal vocals he and his bros had actually enjoyed once.

Now they were talking to him again, and as much as he wanted to block out the awful din he knew he had to pay attention. One of the other aspects of this new language-detecting and deciphering ability given to him was that it could store the un-translated speech and decode it later. Or so they said. All he had to do was listen now, and later on the tech would sit there whirring away until it found a way to explain to him the garble of words in his mind.

Not that it would exactly wait; it was already processing what they were saying, and by now he was feeling overloaded with four or five different translations of one particular word they kept on repeating. And he still hadn't actually come to understand what that word was.

Vinnie desperately wished he could just ask them to slow down a bit, and give him time to work it all out. To stop what they were doing and listen to him for a change. To not do the horrific thing that they were about to do to him. Not that he was quite sure what that was, yet, but having just walked a good ninety feet up the length of the immensely elongate room, and having seen on his way to his 'port' the other half dozen or so mice already in their respective places, he had a fair idea of how he was going to end up. But he couldn't ask his alien captors anything, no matter how much he wanted to. He just had to lie there and wait and hope it wasn't going to be as bad as it looked like it was. The other mice he had seen hadn't exactly appeared comfortable.

How many of his kind that were in here right at this moment in time he didn't know. The machine had repeating units every few feet or so, which given the distance it extended before him gave him an estimate of fifty or so spaces on either side. Enough spots, therefore, for around one hundred of his fellow mice to be placed in.

His port, like all the rest, had a short table-like platform sticking out of the side, and a multitude of other devices surrounding it. Vinnie's tired brain had tried putting his own words to the objects he could see, and aside from the table that he was currently prostrate upon, he had come up with restraints (that was easy, they were holding him down), stirrups (something Charley had explained to him one day after they caught her watching some kind of reality TV show: 'Undercover Midwives' or something), a ventilator and a vital-signs monitor (medical dramas), and lots and lots of tubes.

There were plenty of other things he couldn't name, even with them giving him a very detailed explanation of the equipment he was being hooked up to. They seemed to enjoy this aspect of their work, he decided, because the more they spoke the more nervous he felt, and they must have noticed this because they pressed on even more animatedly with their spiel when he had grimaced in response.

Jeez don't they ever shut up?

It had also struck the bewildered mouse that not even Karbunkle had possessed anything quite so sophisticated as this mind-bogglingly mammoth set-up. These alien beings were far more advanced than just about any species he had ever heard of. Whoever these were they were not in any database he, or any of his kind, had ever had access to, and he wondered if anyone who knew about them had even survived long enough to record their existence. It was doubtful. Vinnie suspected that anyone who happened upon these particular aliens were probably long gone themselves.