General Kendra Eppie walked down the dark metallic corridor with a bit of a hunch. His back had been aching and his hot oil treatments kept getting cut short by tender and irresistible love making with his masseuse.

He caught his reflection in the shiny metal wall and straightened up. He watched himself walk, adding a puffed chest and an expression of cruel authority. With the thick curl of fuchsia hair upon his otherwise shining bald head, and his tall lanky frame, this looked put-on and ridiculous. Unhinged perhaps, but not authoritative.

He needed to be as foreboding as possible in front of The Node. As the right hand man of the evil ruler of the known universe, he couldn't afford to show weakness of character or spinal stenosis.

Nobody knew what planet General Eppie hailed from. It was said that he had blown up his own planet, killing billions of his race. He couldn't stand the competition and, as a result, his fragile overblown ego had decided he needed to be the last of his kind. It made him feel special. It made him feel all warm and fuzzy.

As he entered The Node's Great Chamber, he cupped his bony hand over his mouth and nose to check his breath. It smelled of mustard and dandelions. Perfect. He straightened up even more, making himself look extra unnatural and unintentionally strange. Standing this way also made his voice warble as it strained and filtered through his chronic back pain.

The Node had only ever seen and heard him walk and talk in this manner, so he had always assumed it was an odd norm and a trait of Eppie's mysterious race. It wasn't.

"General!" The Node called out in a booming, slightly electronic voice. The exact age of The Node was unknown. The small combed-over head that stuck out of the huge, imposing, black chrome robotic suit of armour looked ancient. He looked like someone's sweet old frail grandpapa sticking his head out of a hematite humanoid military tank.

"Your greatness," Eppie sharply warbled back.

"This is a great day!" The Node beamed. "The bright puce light alarm has finally been set off! Callooh! Callay!"

~~~

Aye dug at the ground around Potto in complete panic. He was running out of time to get off of Tractos. Potto smiled the smile of a child sleep-talking. Aye paused briefly, suddenly remembering that he was on a moon filled with criminals and dangerous ne'er-do-wells.

"Oh wait. You some kinda crazy psycho guy?" He asked.

"I imagine so," beamed Potto. It had been a long time since someone other than Lempshop had asked him a question and he wanted to seem agreeable to his new chum.

"You imagine so? Why are you here?"

"I was going for a stroll."

Deciding that, perhaps, in this situation it really didn't matter, Aye started digging furiously again as he continued asking questions. "No, no, no...what crime did you commit?"

"Ooooh! Nope, can't remember. I imagine it was terrible. It would have to have been, right?"

Aye stopped digging again. "Okay, let's start again. Will you hurt me if I finish digging you out?"

"Hurt you?"

"Yes. Y'know, cut off my thumbs? Skin me alive? Use my skull as a chamber pot?"

"No! I can't imagine why I'd do that. You seem so nice. And I just peed in this sand here."

"Good!" Aye went into wombat-mode and started digging like his life depended on it. Because it really, really did.

Soon Potto could use his wriggling super power to take over. He stood, sand caked onto the blood still damp on his shirt and the urine-soaked front of his trousers. Both of his feet were fast asleep and as Aye dragged him by the arm towards the open hatch of the Shiv, he felt like they were hard, fatty hooves attached directly to his knees.

As he staggered up the ramp the tingling pins and needles started to set in and he dropped, taking a seat right where he was.

"What are you doing?" Aye yelled at that make-a-dog-pee pitch. Time was running out and his situation was making him feel like he was playing with an extreme jack-in-the-box, with a clown of death-by-implosion ready to spring out at any second and swallow them up.

"Gimme a sec, it feels so weird," Potto answered, "Like, I don't know if it hurts or it tickles. Kinda like a gum ache when your tooth is loose. But in your foot. No, no, I don't know if I like this at all."

Aye dragged him the rest of the way by that tuft of white fluff Potto called hair.

Once on the flight deck Aye sat Potto in Captain Stig's old chair and yelled to no-one in particular "Power this baby up! Let's get the hell outta here!"

"Right away, dickhead," the new-improved Knutt sang out as the ship started lifting out of the sand.

Potto sat and stared at Aye still smiling inanely, as Knutt started counting down the seconds until Tractos imploded.

"What are you waiting for?" Aye squealed.

"Oh I dunno. It's just nice to have someone new to talk to," Potto smiled back as his hands started absentmindedly pressing buttons.  The ship started to rise up higher and it abruptly took off upwards towards the atmosphere. "Oh look! Apparently I do know how to pilot a ship! Well that's certainly a relief. So...your name is Dickhead?"

~~~

On board the Velveteen Rabbit, Frappe had dead-lifted Stane off the floor, hoisting him up by his armpits. His armpits didn't like the weight of his body mingling with gravity and let him know through searing tendon-snapping pain. But this wasn't their first tussle. In fact, this was how they spent most holidays.

"You let me down right now!" Stane screeched through this very familiar pain.

"I'm going to kill you, Sa-Sa! If I'm going to be thrown in a brig or in front of a firing squad then I might as well enjoy myself first!" Frappe shot back, lifting Stane higher. The alarm stopped. The bright puce light went out. All was quiet. The sparrow perched on the fire extinguisher scratched at an under-wing itch with its cute little beak.

They both stared at the hushed alarm for a second as it registered in their adrenaline fueled brains. Frappe dropped Stane moments before Stane's rotator cuffs exploded, and ran towards the console. Stane joined him after finally getting up from his upturned-turtle-like struggle on the floor.

"It stopped! It stopped!" Stane hollered as if cheering a hometown sports team. "Ohmagod my arms hurt!"

They watched through the front window. A Shiv ship flew away from the moon as the Imploder hit. Within seconds the moon, Budgher Lempshop and all the rest of Tractos' inhabitants (finally!) were no more.

~~~

At the exact moment Tractos imploded, The Node and General Eppie just happened to be gazing at it through the observation window of the Great Chamber. Neither was expecting this turn of events, but after a moment of shock, The Node softly said, "Well this just keeps getting better, doesn't it?"

The bright puce light had gone out again.

"Could it be? Could it be that it was both found and destroyed all within the same hour?" He rhetorically asked in an audible whisper.

"Tractos? We've known about Tractos for a long time..." Eppie offered in his least condescending tone.

"Not Tractos, you idiot. Something on Tractos. Something I didn't know was on Tractos. Something that could not be detected by any of our scanners until it detected its own demise and sent out a distress signal. Something I have been looking for a very very long time."

They stood in silence (for what seemed like a much longer time for Eppie) before he finally mumbled a low, "And that would be?"

Before The Node could answer, if indeed he had ever intended to answer, the door creaked open, and in meekly hop-walked Eppie's assistant Freckles.

Squambog was a large swampy planet that many different species called home. It was not only Lyme Node's closest inhabited neighbour and ally, but supplied Lyme Node with a plant called a "myspiston", the key ingredient to the highly addictive and popular recreational drug "Pyst".

Not only was it home to Mantis Widows and their unfortunate mates, but to the main Squambogian race called Kancorians. Female Kancorians generally resembled tailless humanoid geckos. Bald heads, humongous lidless eyes, blue striped skin and wall-climbing hands and feet. They were strangely beautiful, but unlike actual geckos, they could occasionally breathe fire and slit a throat in an instant with their dew claws.

Male Kancorians could range from the greater muscles-on-their-muscles green reptilian variety which stood at seven feet tall, to the lesser Kancorians, a more amphibious-looking, muddy brown and warty, small and weak sub-species with wig-looking clay-brown curly hair, which were often called "little toads". Freckles was the latter of these Kancorians. He was a little toad.

"Sir?" He said like a soft burp.

"This better be important," Eppie snapped, instantly apologizing with his eyes.

Freckles looked out the observation window at the sky where Tractos once spun. "Well, as you can see, the prisoner moon of Tractos was accidentally destroyed. We have names of the maintenance crew responsible if you would like to punish them," Freckles reported.

"Punish them?" The Node said. "I think perhaps we should promote them!"

"Also," Freckles said sheepishly, "we have reports of who was aboard that Shiv that escaped the moon before it was destroyed."

"That Shiv that escaped the moon before it was destroyed?" The Node asked. He had been smiling up until now, which was something Eppie had never seen in all his years of service. But this was an elevator of a smile. An elevator going down. By the time it reached the sub-basement of his face The Node's eyes had started bulging. Eppie shuddered. Freckles wasn't paying any attention, and looked up to Eppie, not reading The Node's new mood.

"And sir, you missed your fruit oil treatment this morning. Your back isn't going to get any better if you don't let me--"

"Enough! Later! Out!" Eppie hollered with more professional embarrassment than anger. Freckles hop-walked towards the door with haste.

"Wait!" yelled The Node. "Report! Who was on that ship?"

"Um, uh," Freckles stammered. He wasn't used to The Node addressing him directly. "Our scan, your fantastic-ness, shows a Towerscappian Topher with worker tags named Aye-Aye, notorious human killer James "Weird Jimmy" Flowermorey, and the prisoner ID of the third shows that he is, quite curiously, a colour-changing Quarol called Potto. Perhaps the last of his kind."

"Aren't Towerscape and Quarolode two of the Seventy Lost?" The Node asked calmly.

"Y-yes."

The volume of the following tantrum could be heard, arguably, on both Towerscape and Quarolode, lost or not.