Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

29

The robot hand padded around on the dining table like a spider. Or a crab. Or a robot hand. Either way, it creeped Clara out. She took a breath, about to say something, and stopped, resting her mouth on her hand, the elbow resting on the table. She pointed at the hand, again, about to say something and stopped. The hand tap, tap, tapped around as if facing her.

"It reminds me of that old black and white tv series. Or those old movies." She moved to poke the hand with a finger and it jumped back. "So, what are we going to do with Half-ne? It's not going to, like, strangle us during the night, is it?"

"No, I've done a bit of tinkering. It should be quite friendly now." Foston tickled the top of the hand, like petting a cat. The hand seemed to squat a little, raising the wrist section higher. Clara almost thought it purred. "Why Half-ne?

"Well, Hand-ne just sounds like inappropriate touching. And Half-ne sounds a little like Daphne. So ..." She trailed off as the hand turned in a circle several times and plonked itself down in the exact place it had been standing.

"Fair enough. Now, what do we do while we wait for the escape pod to find a suitable landing spot?" He moved to a set of cupboards to the side of the half-circle settee in front of the huge flat-screen tv on the wall. "I'm sure I can find a Scrabble set. There's always a Scrabble set somewhere."

"Actually, I was thinking of using the gym." She had thought about it, then forgot about it, then remembered it again when Foston started talking about Scrabble. She couldn't deal with that. "I saw it, in passing, as I went down to deck three to find the wine cellar."

And what a wine cellar. She cuddled the bottle of French red she had found down there, amongst the rows and rows of bottles for every occasion. What the escape pod lacked in propulsion, it more than made up for in luxury and size.

"You really should use the gym. That stomach and bottom are far too flabby." That wasn't Foston. In fact, it sounded like that terrible impersonation that Clara did of her mother. Clara felt certain she hadn't said it, but she was almost all the way through that bottle of wine.

"Oh, balls." Clara suddenly realised that the words weren't in her head. They were coming from behind her. She span around, bringing the bottle up as a weapon. "Where the hell did you come from?"

Captain Clara stood before Clara, brandishing a silver and gold variation of the death pen. Foston looked over his shoulder, while searching the cupboards, and rolled his eyes before returning to his search, mumbling something about Monopoly. Half-ne seemed to raise a lazy finger then laid down again.

"I found myself in the guest suite on the fourth level when the ship became too damaged to continue the battle. What a coincidence that I was in the escape pod when the ship exploded." Captain Clara wiggled one of her feet, resting back on the stiletto heel, taunting Clara with their cuteness.

"You ran away is what you're saying. I thought a captain was supposed to go down with their ship?" She felt a bit stupid holding a bottle against a death dealing laser pen, turned it the right way up, unscrewed the cap and downed the remaining wine. She burped, defiantly.

"Only the stupid ones." Captain Clara looked at her death pen, shrugged and put it in the pocket of her sequinned war-skirt. "As I don't want to spend the rest of this journey with a pair of dead bodies, I won't kill you."

"How magnanimous of you." Clara hit Captain Clara with the bottle.

Finding some duct tape in the metal working room, Clara tied Captain Clara up so tightly, it would be difficult for the doppelgänger to pout. Then she stole Captain Clara's shoes, replacing them with her own, damaged, third cutest pair that she still had in her increasingly full bag. She took the death pen, too. It was shiny.

Now, sitting at the dining table, her feet up on the surface, Clara admired the shoes, twisting her feet this way and that, the chromium plating glinting in the light of the escape pod interior. They were exquisite. Half-ne had awoken and rubbed up against the shoes before Clara shooed the hand away. It arched its fingers and Clara could swear it hissed at her.

"I couldn't find Scrabble, or Monopoly, but I did find a jigsaw puzzle. Although, I think there may be pieces missing. The lid wasn't secured properly." Foston dropped the jigsaw puzzle box on to the table. He glanced at the unconscious Captain Clara upon the floor. "Was that really necessary?"

Clara said nothing, merely making an elaborate sweep of her hand towards the shoes. While down on the lower decks, she had got herself another few bottles of wine. A jug, found in one of the kitchen cabinets, became a wine glass, even thought there several, more than serviceable, wine glasses in the same cupboard.

"I was thinking about shooting her out in the escape pod's escape pod." A ping stopped her from expanding upon that thought and she tottered over to the microwave, pulling out the freshly popped pop corn, blowing on her fingers from touching the hot bag.

"An escape pod for an escape pod. Marvellous." Foston looked down at the unconscious Captain Clara, admiringly. "What will they think of next?"

"How about every single episode of that sit-com set in New York?" Clara, still not quite used to the height of the stiletto heels, wobbled and swayed her way to the large settee, dropped into the middle of a pile of cushions and switched on the large tv with a remote control.

"Which one?" Foston squinted, not quite trusting Clara's taste.

"All of them. Every single New York based sitcom. Not only that, but every single episode of every tv show. Ever. And movies!" She turned back to Foston, waving her hand, encouraging him to join her. "And the best part is, they'll all be completely new to us, because almost everything in this universe is different from mine! What are the chances that all the jokes are the same?"

Foston leapt over the back of the settee, landing with imperious grace, his feet crossing at the ankle. A few seconds later, Half-ne slunk over Foston's shoulder, turned around in a circle several times and then curled into a finger ball on Foston's chest. Foston stroked a finger, absentmindedly.

"I'd say the chances are about even." He reached over and grabbed a handful of pop corn as he settled back to watch the tv.

"Oh! Sod it! I forgot the wine." She pushed the pop corn bag onto Foston's lap, Half-ne raising a disinterested finger at her. "Do not eat all the pop corn! You do not want to see me when I don't get my share of the pop corn."

Clara jumped from the settee and wavered her way back to the dining table. She picked up the jug of wine, hesitated, then picked up another bottle. With a sudden attack of thinking about others, she groaned to herself and returned to the cupboard with the glasses. She paused. Something seemed different.

She looked in the cupboard. All the glasses seemed to be in their correct places. She took a pair of glasses and looked at the dining table. Everything was as she remembered it. Even that stupid jigsaw that she decided would have to, accidentally, find itself in the incinerator on deck five, sub-section L. That wasn't what was wrong.

She wracked her wine addled brain. Something was missing. She couldn't quite place her finger on it. She ran through everything she could remember, counting them off, silently, with her fingers. She pointed at each thing, just to imprint it all on her mind.

When she reached the torn duct tape laying on the floor, she heard a solid 'thunk' in the direction of the settee and Foston. 'That was it!' She thought. The empty bottle she'd used to hit Captain Clara was missing. Clara found this quite odd.

"Now, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot, don't we?" Captain Clara patted the wine bottle onto the palm of her hand. "Speaking of feet, I'm going to need those shoes back. Or I'll cave in your friend's head."

Clara looked towards Foston, laid, lop-sided and listing, upon the sofa, Half-ne standing on his shoulder making itself look bigger by standing on the tips of its fingers. Clara took a step forward and collapsed. The combination of drunkenness and stupidly tall, stupidly thin heels causing her downfall.

All Clara could now see were her third cutest pair of heels staring at her and she decided, right there, right then, that those heels were nowhere near cute enough to be in the top three.