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Like a Portmeirion drunk, Trig staggered forward a few steps and looked back at the spot he’d been standing on.

It was a triangular pad, the same as the one in the machine room. No sign of dark matter or glowing blue worms.

Okay, that made sense.

Triangular pads, teleportation, taking him from that place to…wherever this place was.

He touched both his arms, stroking them to make sure they felt like real, physical arms then straightened himself up. Right. Where was this place? A spaceship? Alpha Centauri?

The space immediately surrounding him didn’t give much in the way of clues; two walls hemmed in on both sides, green bits of dust in the air around him.

He tried swatting through them but they refused to scatter.

And they seemed to be emitting some kind of glow too.

Wait, were they particles? Was this a forcefield?

He looked up, checking for transmitters or emitters or whatever device it was that projected a forcefield. Didn’t seem to be anything at the top of the walls, and the ceiling…the unnecessarily high ceiling…was flat and mainly featureless, with only a few crater-like depressions dotted about here and there.

No, wait…lower down the ceiling…was some kind of decoration, a series of lines that may or may not have been scribbles.

Language?

He brought his eyes back to the walls.

More scribbles, some spiral-shaped, others like splattered paint or joined rectangles…if it was a pattern of some kind, it was incredibly complex.

Something touched his arm, making him shiver a little.

‘You okay?’

It was Salvo. She’d stopped patting herself, either winning the battle against the tick army or realising that she was all in one piece after her teleporting experience.

‘We teleported.’

‘Yup.’

‘From one place to another place. Our bodies. Teleported.’

‘Don’t describe it, Trig.’

‘But…’

‘Teleport is okay, but nothing else. My brain’s still adjusting…’

‘Sorry, it’s just…we teleported. It’s insane.’

‘I’m pretty sure we got scanned, too.’

‘Scanned?’

Salvo gestured to the green particles that were still in the teleporting alcove, which was now situated behind Trig. At some point he must have walked through it, though he couldn’t remember doing so.

‘I’m guessing it’s a scanner. That’s what it looks like.’

‘I thought it was a forcefield.’

‘Me too, until I went through it. Now, I think it’s a scanner.’ Salvo shivered suddenly, pulling her arms in tight. ‘It must be a scanner.’

‘Probably for health reasons. Virus detection. Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘You look cold.’

‘Just some delayed reactions…the teleporting….my body catching up with the-…all the atoms fitting back together.’

There was a beeping noise from the far side of the room. Trig looked over and saw one of the patterns on the wall moving…swaying to one side and-

Hang on…that wasn’t a pattern.

‘I think it wants you to move,’ said Salvo.

‘Aliens,’ Trig muttered, holding up an arm to the giant, slender lifeform standing next to a metal bar…a lifeform that looked kind of like a Curly Wurly with a tulip on top.  ‘Hello,’ he tried in English.

‘It doesn’t understand,’ said Salvo, forcibly dragging Trig away from the teleporting alcove by his jacket sleeve.

‘You talked to them?’

‘When I got here…I stumbled out and saw it waving at me…screamed at it…him, it, they…’

Trig swatted away more green dust. ‘They?’

‘Yeah, and they didn’t do anything back so I figured they were human…spoke to them a bit.’

‘You thought that was human?’

‘I don’t know. I might be delirious. Anyway, I tried Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Japanese. Nothing in response.’ She looked over at the alien and half smiled. ‘I don’t even know if they have mouths.’

‘Or heads.’

Salvo opened up to say, ‘nah, those tulip-shaped things where the head of a human would be, that’s their head,’ but then she examined the figure again…or the alien being…and realised Trig could be right.

The tulip part might be the equivalent of hair, while the lower part, the long, latticed stem that looked a bit like a Curly Wurly chocolate bar could be where the face was.

It was impossible to say and there were no questions they could ask to clarify anything. And even if they did know the alien’s language, how would you ask someone where their face was without coming across like a cunt?

As if sensing some of their visitors’ awkwardness, the Curly Wurly alien detached a strip of ‘skin’ from its lattice structure and stretched it out towards a table nearby.

Trig and Salvo both stayed stone still, their arms rigid at the sides like telegraph poles.

‘… … … … … … … …’ emanated from some part of the Curly Wurly alien, a type of melodic whistling sound.

‘Was that speech?’ asked Salvo, her shoulder flinching.

Trig looked over at the table, muttering ‘thank god’ when he saw it was filled with familiar things. Well, semi-familiar. Assuming they were real glasses with real drinkable liquid he was looking at.

‘It sounded like speech,’ continued Salvo, her tone slightly annoyed. ‘Combined with that pointing thing they’re doing…’

‘… … … … … …’ came from the Curly Wurly alien, extending its lattice arm until it was almost touching the table.

‘They want you to drink,’ said a Russian voice behind them.

Salvo turned, way too dramatically considering she had a fairly good idea who it was. And she was right. The Russian woman was stepping off the triangular teleport pad, still nursing her cup of something.

‘We can drink?’ Salvo asked, following the woman over to the table.

‘This one,’ replied the woman, tapping a tall, cylinder-shaped glass half full of red liquid, ‘this one, this one, that one and this one.’

‘We can drink?’ repeated Salvo, forgetting the word for safe.

‘You can, all drinks, if you … … … … … …’

‘What?’

The woman looked over at the Curly Wurly alien and shook her head. Whether or not they understood this human gesture was debatable as their tulip tops trembled slightly in response.

‘What did she say?’ asked Trig, shuffling up next to Salvo’s shoulder.

‘We can drink some, but…I don’t know the rest.’

‘Advanced Russian?’

‘Probably more like Upper Beginner. But she speaks too fast and my vocab is trash. And I’ve just been teleported. Brain’s all scrambled.’

‘Can you ask her to slow down a bit? Use easier words?’

‘I’ve forgotten the word for slow.’

‘Ah.’

‘And she looks annoyed whenever I say what.’

‘Russian face?’

‘Yeah. I’ll try and work my way up to it, when the teleporter effects wear off a bit. Say ‘please speak not fast’ or something.’

Trig nodded, turning back to the drinks table. The edges looked soft and non-metal so he put his hands on them, then leaned forward and examined the glass with allegedly non-deadly red liquid in it.

‘I think it’s safer if we don’t touch any of them,’ said Salvo, pulling at her friend’s sleeve.

‘Aren’t you thirsty?’

‘Not enough to drink alien shit.’

‘I suppose. It is risky.’

‘Very.’

‘Can you ask her again?’

Salvo looked at the Russian, who was now glaring at a glass of pale green liquid, said ‘no’ mentally then ‘in a minute’ with her actual voice box.

Constant Russian was tiring and she needed a break.

Some new input maybe.

She looked around the room, concentrating on the scribbles on the wall. There was no uniformity to them, each scribble seemed to be a different script. Were they scripts? She wasn’t completely sure, but it felt like they were; in a funny way, it reminded her of one of the airports she’d been to, couldn’t remember which one, but they had welcome written in dozens in languages on the wall. Maybe this was the alien version of that.

She glanced at the Curly Wurly alien and was surprised to see the Russian woman communicating with it. With them. Her using Russian, the alien using whatever that whistling noise was. No difficulty whatsoever.

Her arms spasmed again, the fourth time since she’d been teleported.

It could all be a trick, she thought. The scribbles are just scribbles, the drinks are poison, this entire structure is a multi-faceted slave labour camp. And we’re stuck here. Wherever here is.

A background stream of blue-tinted white light swished about in the teleportation alcoves they’d just exited from and, a few seconds later, the two guards who’d assaulted them in the machine room appeared.

‘… … … … …’ the human-looking one said, tapping their red-skinned wrist.

‘… … … … … … … …’ replied the Russian woman, putting her drink on the table and tapping her wrist right back at them.

‘What do we do now?’ Salvo asked, tapping her wrist, too.

Both the aliens and the Russian woman ignored her and carried on with their own conversation. Salvo folded her arms, a little annoyed, and waited for them to stop. Then unfolded her arms when she decided it probably looked rude. Then folded them again when it felt weird to have them hanging pointlessly at her waist.

Trig, meanwhile, was still deliberating over the red liquid. Logically, you wouldn’t beam someone all the way to your moon base or space station or underground lair, or wherever it was, only to poison them in the teleporter room. Unless you did it by accident. But then how would they do that when there was a Russian woman there too?

Making up his mind, he picked up the glass of red and swished it around. A few bubbles popped up on the surface.

‘… … … … … …’ said the Curly Wurly alien, sliding across the floor towards him with…no feet. Just sliding.

‘Okay to drink?’ Trig asked, half tilting the glass to his lips.

‘I wouldn’t,’ replied Salvo, prodding his foot.

‘I’m really thirsty.’

‘It could be…’

‘…poison. I know. But I don’t think it is. I mean, it would be too weird to do that. Bringing us here and just-…’

‘… … to drink,’ shouted the Russian woman from about a metre away. ‘Don’t … … … … … … … die.’

‘Fuck…’

‘What?’

‘She just said die.’

Trig lowered the glass.

‘I didn’t hear the words before it. But she definitely said die.’

‘She said I’m going to die?’

‘No, I mean…she said it’s something to drink, but then she said don’t, something, something, and then die at the end with a sharper tone.’

‘Is there any chance she was saying we won’t die by drinking this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Isn’t there more than a chance?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Isn’t it actually the most likely translation?’

Salvo screwed up her bottom lip, and returned to folding her arms.

‘Okay, I’m going in.’ Trig held the glass to his lips and tilted it. A few drops slid down, then a few more and, when he realised he wasn’t dying, about half the glass. ‘Ah, it’s not bad. Tastes like raspberry.’

‘Really?’

‘Try it.’

Salvo looked at the other glasses on the table, pretended she’d been choosing carefully all along and then took the alleged raspberry juice from Trig.

The other half vanished quickly down her throat.

He was right, it did taste like raspberry.

‘… … … … … go outside,’ said the Russian woman, waving at the two guards as they made their way towards the giant, cathedral-esque door.

Salvo wasn’t sure if it was her own deep-seated desire that caused it, but the door split in half and slid to either side, just as she hoped it would. Finally, some proof that they weren’t trapped, that there was a normal, human way out. She almost did a little cheer in celebration, but managed to contain herself, clenching both fists instead.

‘Okay, answers time,’ she muttered in Cantonese.

‘Ask her where here is,’ said Trig, eyes still on the drinks table. ‘And what those wall scribbles are. And if the stuff we just drank is raspberry.’

‘Wait.’

‘Wah, I nearly forgot. Ask her if Cav’s here too.’

‘Easy questions first.’

‘They are easy questions.’

‘Trig…’

‘Okay, fine. Fine. Proceed as you see fit.’

Salvo nodded as if it was obvious that’s what she should do, and faced the Russian woman again. Only she wasn’t roughly near the drinks table anymore, she was standing in the doorway with her arms stretched out.

‘… … … … …? Come. This way.’

The first part of her sentence sounded like an insult, but Salvo let it go and nudged Trig in the arm. Despite his lack of Russian, he seemed to have a decent idea of what was going on, what they were expected to do, and the two of them headed across the teleporter room towards the Russian woman and the door she seemed to be advertising.

‘… … … … … …’ came from the Curly Wurly alien as they walked by, and not wanting to seem rude, Trig bowed in response.

‘What did they say?’ asked Salvo in Russian, to which the woman laughed and said ‘no, no, no, it … … … … angry.’

‘Angry?’

‘Forget this. You need … … … … … … …’ She put her hands out to stop them both walking past her and out of the room. ‘It is very busy … … …no need… … … … … … with me. Okay?’

Salvo nodded and told Trig they were about to enter somewhere very busy and they should stick close to the woman.

‘Wah, your Russian is really improving.’

‘It’s mostly filling in the gaps. Logic filter.’ She stressed the last word but the insinuation seemed to fly right over Trig’s unruly hair [the teleporter hadn’t affected it one bit].

‘Did she say what this place is?’

‘Nope, just that it’s very busy.’

Trig looked beyond the Russian woman’s arms and observed what he could.

There was a sloped corridor, just like the one near the original portal, and at the end of that another giant cut out that had to be a door. Not quite as giant as this one, but not far off, and with a more curved shape at the top too. More like a mushroom head than an arch.

Interesting. Two doors, two, slightly different designs.

Would that be a constant in this place?

The Russian woman stopped abruptly in front of them, giving them about two tenths of a second to react.

‘What’s wrong with this?’ asked Salvo in sloppy Russian.

She stared at both her hands, said ‘fuck’ in Russian and ran back into the teleport room to pick up her original drink. Saying something to the Curly Wurly alien and wiggling her arm in the air, she hurried again through the doorway and past them towards the end of the corridor.

Trig and Salvo followed, the latter asking, ‘where are we going?’ and getting a fairly pointless, ‘very busy place,’ thrown back.

‘Look at that on the wall,’ said Trig, practically grabbing Salvo’s face and dragging it round. ‘They scrapped the green lighting and went electronic.’

Electronic may not have been the right word, but it did have a vapourwave kind of aesthetic to it. Five, long screens stretched out along the length of the corridor wall, with green neon snakes speeding across, jumping up and then down and back up again, each movement incredibly jarring, like one of those trick cuts from a Segundo de Chomon film.

Apparently, this was the lighting Trig was talking about, but it couldn’t be all of it as the corridor seemed too bright to be lit solely by those snakes.

Salvo looked up for signs of regular, Earth type bulbs on the ceiling, but there was nothing except metal with random divots layered in.

Could it be the metal adding the extra illumination?

If she knew the vocab for any of this stuff, she would’ve asked the Russian woman, but she didn’t – she didn’t even know the word for wall – and it was too late anyway as the blurry door slid across and suddenly they were swamped by aggressive new data.

In this case data meant sporadic beeping noises, strangled speech, signs above doorways written in patterns similar to the scribbles they’d seen in the teleport room, more no legs aliens, more Curly Wurly aliens, things that may have been aliens but looked more like insane antiques, a tentacled thing that seemed to be riding around on an atom stalk, more signs, walls with pulsing dots of various colour and size beaming out light streaks and…

‘Fuck me…’ shouted Trig, just about making himself heard over the din.

‘Aliens,’ muttered Salvo, trying and failing to grab the nearby wall.

‘It’s like Tsuen Wan on acid.’

‘All aliens…’

‘Is that a bar?’

‘Octopus thing, tentacles on their…’

‘Fuck, it is a bar.’

‘I don’t feel well.’

‘Nah, it must be, they’re all drinking, look. Humans…no, humanoids, human-shape guys…whatever they are. I mean, they are human-like, they’ve got faces, arms…’

‘Trig…’

Hearing his name among all the noise, Trig blocked everything out and grabbed Salvo by the arm, steadying her just as she was about to topple over.

‘Fuck, you okay?’

‘Not comfortable.’

‘Okay. Focus on the distance, one thing only,’ he said, repeating the same advice his dad had given him the one time they’d gone somewhere together. Ha, the ferry to Mui Wo, to borrow money from one of his girlfriends. The sixty-two year old with the pet owl. He’d almost forgotten about that.

Something bumped into him and before he could turn and find out who it was, something else hit him. One of the octopus-looking things. It stopped, circled around on one of its atom stalks then rushed off again.

‘Too much…’ mumbled Salvo, putting more weight on him.

‘Yeah…a bit hectic.’

Trig looked around, saw the Russian woman about five metres ahead and pulled Salvo in the same direction while making a beeline for the quieter lane near the outer wall.

‘We’ll stop here a second.’

‘Russian…’

‘She’ll look back and see us, don’t worry.’

Salvo made a sound resembling okay then dropped her head on his shoulder.

Give it a minute, Trig thought, then start moving again.

And in that minute, try to make sense of whatever the fuck all this was.

He scanned the room. No, the concourse, the shopping mall on acid. The dreamscape Thole had been too terrified to paint.

Geography-wise, it wasn’t that bad. A curved walkway, just like the mall in Kwun Tong, or the space station in Star Trek: DS9, with several shops or stores or spaces on the outside lip. Some on the inside too.

The walls were mostly blank, apart from beams, divots, a few electronic banners.

What else?

Not sure, it was hard to see through all the alien bustle. There was another high ceiling above, with an oval farther along that seemed to suggest a second floor.

Was that insanely busy too?

Or was it even worse?

Another mass of alien something scraped past, catching him on the shoulder. He was about to mutter ‘rude fucker’ but there was no time as something else lashed against his neck, something from the wall. He turned to look, to glare, but there was nothing there, almost nothing there…nothing that could’ve whipped his neck like that.

Fuck, this was worse than Zinc Burger on a Saturday.

And his breathing…his heartbeat…

Fuck.

He took a long, deep breath and visualised a mountain.

Then a graveyard.

Then a mountain again.

Okay, better.

Returning to ground level, he noticed that the Russian woman was about twenty metres ahead, apparently oblivious to what had happened to them.

Typical Russians, he thought, having no idea if that statement were true or not but going with it anyway.

‘Salvo…we need to catch up to her.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Yeah, that was my next question.’

‘Sorry, I was overwhelmed, all the noise and…’

‘I know. I’m feeling it a bit too.’

‘Really?’

‘They keep bumping into me, it’s annoying. Like walking through Mong Kok.’

‘This is not Mong Kok.’

‘Yeah…’

‘It’s worse. Much worse.’

Trig patted her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on, we better move. Maybe jog a little if you’ve got the energy.’

‘You think Cav’s here, somewhere?’

‘Huh? That’s what you told me before.’

‘I mean, here, this place.’

‘Let’s just see where this Russian’s taking us first, then figure out the Cav situation later. Okay?’

Salvo nodded, and then nodded again at the pink octopus riding on the atom stalk who had stopped a metre away from them and unfurled two of their tentacles in her direction.

‘… … … … … … … … …’  they said in some kind of sonic pulse language.

Or that’s what Salvo assumed it was. Could’ve been a random noise from one of the spaces nearby. The bar perhaps. If it was a bar. If any of this madness was anything real.

Her arms spasmed again.

Fuck, she thought. It’s just never-ending if sentences. Every image, every room, every single decoration or squiggle on every single wall, every face that could’ve been an object or vice-versa.

What the hell was any of this stuff? And why couldn’t it back the fuck off a little, stop suffocating her?