Probably nothing. And even if we did escape, then what? We were in the middle of the ocean in the middle of winter, and I still didn’t have pants.
“Careful of what?” Donut asked from the other room.
“These people aren’t our friends,” I said, coming back into the room. I took a banana from the fruit basket, peeled it, and took a bite. “Don’t forget that.”
I attempted to put the rest of the fruit and the basket into my inventory, but my menus weren’t working at all.
There was no garbage can in the room. An oversight. I tossed the peel on the counter.
“Do you want this cat food?” I asked, sniffing it.
“Are you crazy?” Donut said. “And get it all over my face?”
There was a little bag sitting behind the bowl of wet cat food. Purrfect Cat Treats. They had done their research. I picked up the bag and shook it. Donut was on the counter a half a second later. “Okay, but just one.”
I took an apple and bit down as Donut ate her fifth treat. The apple suddenly reminded me of the dead, naked form of Rebecca W. I put it back in the basket, no longer hungry.
“Carl,” Donut said as she crunched down on another treat. “Out there with all the punching and the grunting and the disgusting, exploding goblins. That is your world.” She made a motion with her paw, indicating this room. “This is mine. I know this might be difficult for you to understand, but I have been doing this my entire life. Every cat show I have ever done is an interview. I was bred for this. Let me do my thing.”
“You didn’t talk before,” I said. “And having a judge stick her finger up your ass is not the same thing as being interviewed for a television show.”
“I have never had anybody ever stick anything up there, thank you very much. Really, Carl. Don’t be so crude. This is why I’m to do the talking.”
“Okay, you two,” Lexis said, coming into the room. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t be surly. You can be surly sometimes,” Donut whispered as we lined up outside the door.
A small ping emanated from Lexis’s tablet. The door irised open.
“Go,” Lexis said, putting her hand on my back, pushing. “Smile and wave. Smile and wave!”
I was propelled out of the room, Donut walking in front of me with her tail swishing back and forth as we moved from the small room onto a giant, brightly-lit set.
I was momentarily blinded as we stepped out. And even though we hadn’t really moved off the surface, I was briefly overwhelmed. I am seeing something from another world. Holy shit.
I heard the audience before I saw them. They were going berserk. Hoots, hollers, and animal-like trills filled the room, shaking the floor. I realized, belatedly, that I had stopped. Donut, seeing I had stopped, also paused, but she made it took like it was on purpose. She circled, sat down halfway between the door and the couch, and she rolled on her side, hopping up onto her feet, and swishing her tail. Her armored skirt poofed out with a little jingle as she hopped. The cheers got louder.
I used the moment to look about the room. It was just as Lexis had described. It was a black stage with a space-themed nebula background. The colorful, spinning cloud of blue and red space dust and the dots of distant stars filled the back wall. Odette’s desk was, well, a desk. It sat next to a couch identical to the one in the waiting room. “The green room,” Donut had called it, even though it was blue. The set could’ve been from any earth talk show, with a couple of glaring differences.
There were no visible cameras. The lights seemed to come out of nowhere, appearing and disappearing without any sort of physical source.
The audience was mostly in shadow. It was a large room, with seats and something else—viewing pods of some sort—stretching up in a stadium pattern. I watched as some of the audience members vanished, flickered, and reappeared. The crowd was a shadowy sea of aliens of all types. Humans, pig-headed orcs similar to the ones we’d just killed, and eagle-headed creatures like Mordecai’s true form. Bug-eyed, expressionless gray aliens. Tentacled things. Dozens of others, too many to take in. The viewing pods were filled with murky water, and I caught sight of what might’ve been a kua-tin, though much thinner than the image in the door carving.
And then there was Odette.
Looking upon the woman, it was difficult for my brain to put it all together. I kept thinking what the fuck? What the fucking fuck, over and over. Part crab, part praying mantis, part centerfold for Juggz magazine’s “Freaks of Nature” issue. I just stared, not able to tell if I was looking at one creature. Or two. Or five.
But then she moved, and something clicked in my brain, allowing it all to come together.
Odette was a naked crab-taur wearing a bug mask.
The lower body of the woman was entirely crab. Black and red with a lumpy shell and multiple, chitinous legs. The shape and makeup of the shell was that of a king crab, but the size of a brown bear. Her body seemed completely separate from the rest of her form. The legs crowded one another, unable to tuck themselves underneath the desk. The legs seemed to twitch on their own accord. Malevolent, ready to strike. Her triangular bug head was black with mirrored, compound eyes the size of footballs. Twin antennae spread from her head with a span over at least six feet, as wide as the crab body.
But the oddest part of this woman was her torso.
Her naked, ebony body, from her stomach to her neck was that of a plus-sized, human model who had bribed a third-world plastic surgeon into enhancing her breasts well beyond anything that could ever be considered natural. Or sexy. Or anything other than what-the-fuck. The colossal breasts sat atop the table like a pair of pigs suckling against their mother. Her nipples faced downward, her areolas absurdly oversized, even on the massive breasts, each the size of a DirectTV satellite dish.
There was no conceivable way, even as big as she was, that her body could sustain those ginormous breasts without her back breaking like a twig.
Jesus. No wonder this show is so damn popular.
Donut looked up at me, her yellow eyes pleading for me to move.
I took a deep breath, plastered a smile on my face, and I waved. Then I walked toward the couch.
Odette calmed the crowd as we settled down. She waved her human-like arms at everyone to be quiet. She had long, fake nails that curved like claws. They were painted blue, matching the couch. Her body moved oddly, rising up and down as the crab body readjusted itself. She raised herself up as we sat, making it so her chest didn’t block the audience’s view of her praying mantis head.
They’d placed a large pillow on the seat so Donut could sit atop it. The cat jumped up and sat straight.
“Welcome, welcome,” Odette said, her voice surprisingly feminine, though she sounded older than I expected. “Your majesty, it is a pleasure to have you here.”
“Thank you so much, Odette,” Donut said. “The pleasure is all ours. Carl and I have both been looking forward to meeting you. When I first heard about you, I couldn’t stop thinking, I really want to get on that couch and meet her.” Donut turned to face the crowd. Her voice had gone up a pitch, sounding nothing like her regular speaking voice. “And meet all of you guys. I dare say, what a great-looking audience. I’d much rather be here than with those filthy goblins. How’s everybody doing tonight?”
The couch vibrated with the sound of the crowd’s pleasure.
“You enjoying the show?” Donut asked.
Again, screams.