Leaning against the back of the bar stool, Shelly filed her already impeccable nails for the fourth time in as many drinks. She had decided to slum for an evening and see exactly how the filthy, ragged poor of the city spent their meaningless and dreadfully unfulfilled lives. Shelly was the kind of person that really had no interest in what anyone else did or cared about, but boredom always prompted innovative concepts of how to spend her future inheritance.
Shelly’s long legs poured provocatively from beneath her blazing red mini-dress. She looked unconcernedly around the stifling bar, in search of someone to entertain herself with for the evening. Her long blonde hair was teased and poofed into an incredible rage, which fit her mood all too well. She still had not had one single offer to dance. To be ignored by everyone was just not acceptable. Being adored, worshiped, and slobbered on were all typical responses in the male species when they saw Shelly. However, tonight, was turning into a real bummer.
The smoke machine was chugging away at full blast along with the disco lights that should have been unplugged eight years earlier. The interior resembled a rather explosive jailbreak. Breathing was next to impossible, and getting laid seemed to be out of the question. The dance floor took up over three-fourths of the entire club, with drunks crowding the rest. Over-crowded and not a single man had bothered to leer at her, let alone even grab a handful of her incredibly impeccable rump. Shelly sighed and scanned the crowd on the dance floor. This night had turned into a complete waste of time and styling gel.
It was time to fight the crowd spread across the dance floor and make her way to the door. No wonder she had never bothered to see what poor people did with their lives. She decided that this rather drab place called ‘Studio 5’ was a real dive. These people let rock stars and even actors into this joint.
While giving a last look for a Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Tonight, her attention was drawn to a graying, nearly bald, one-eyed dwarf spilling his drink on a Roller Derby Queen with which he was doing the Samba. Amazingly this shabbily dressed man peaked her interest. She was never one to reason with interest. Horny and desperate will always peak an interest in people you’d ordinarily not even buy a pencil from.
Shelly found herself slinking over to this minuscule pirate of the night. Approaching in an ever nail conscious manner, she introduced herself to the tiny whirling king of dead dances. He immediately fell to the floor in worship of her impeccable body. To Shelly this was an all too common occurrence. She then stooped to pick her little future heart throb from the floor.
Henry knew when he had seen a good thing, and this thing was... impeccable. He had always been fond of girls that could skate and beat the crap out of most full grown bears, but lust for the wild life could always be put on the back burner for a beautiful blonde with obviously expensive jewelry.
While bending over to pick Henry from the floor, Shelly failed to notice the left hook directed at her also impeccable nose. Simultaneously, the Roller Derby Queen failed to see the dagger which Henry was inserting into her right buttocks.
In the midst of the chaos Henry was maiming with one hand while lifting Shelly’s diamond broach with the other. The Roller Derby Queen’s fist glanced off the side of Shelly’s face as her attention had been drawn to the dagger in her darierre. Silently Shelly slipped into social shock over her slightly bent nostril and slid to the floor beside the wrything Roller Derby Queen.
Henry agilely slipped under the collapsing pair and headed for the nearest exit. Henry suddenly became aware that he had forgotten to be a gentleman about this entire affair. He returned to Shelly, and lifting her gently, kissed her cheek, rifled her purse and dropped her with a thud. When they’re down and unconscious, kick them once to make sure, check their pockets and then split.

**

As Henry slipped under the gyrating elbows and butts across the dance floor, still doing the Samba, he almost turned to look at Shelly lying in a heap on the floor.. Na… It had been a good night. Very profitable. Besides, he could always find another blonde with a great body. Business is business, and business was good tonight. At times it becomes necessary in life to take what comes, when it comes—and when you get it, hawk it.
Shelly awoke to a group crowded around her and the Roller Derby Queen. Luckily, she didn’t have a mirror in viewing distance, or she would have seen the tiny trickle of blood oozing from her left nostril. To top off a completely rotten night she would now have to contend with bent hair and politically incorrect makeup.
Shelly’s nose, along with her ego, were vitiated. Lifting herself up, she swore revenge on the little Latino dancer with the pencil thin mustache who had lifted her diamond broach. Shelly would soon realized that her heart had been boosted. Soon for Shelly could be equivalent to a four year old dog, in dog years.
Shelly did happen to be on top of things on this night. She did soon discover that the broach had disappeared—the very item that barely held the front of her min-dress over her estetically enhanced breasts. No huge loss she thought, it was only seventy carats.
“That little bastard got away?” Shelly was incensed. Not that the loss of material goods ever crossed her mind, but the thought of someone not even responding to her subtle advances went beyond unacceptable behavior.
As Shelly stumbled over her downed attacker, she had the beginnings of an unearthly impression form in her mind. She had been plagued with such visions since an early age. When she was a child, she became the unfortunate victim of an alien implant designed to monitor and alter her behavior. The visions had always been a complete waste. She would have philosophical revelations and then as dawn broke, she’d have completely forgotten them, or, before they had a chance to completely manifest themselves in her concious state, she would run for the bromide.
One small detail that the anthropologists from Omibus had overlooked was the fact that to have a human utilize the implanted gift of future divination for their benefit, the subject had to have an IQ slightly higher than a politician from West Virginia.
As usual, Shelly grabbed a bystander’s drink and poured a packet of bromide into it and swallowed the concoction. Had Shelly not had a fixation with intestinal releases, she would have been enlightened with the revelation that her little love was from the Pleides constellation.

**

The Samba king slipped out into the sweltering late evening heat of the city street. He had been in this same dimly lit bar for so many years he had forgotten what city he was even in. The bright evening streelights temporarily blinded Henry. His first reaction was to look around and ask, “Who in the hell left the lights on again?” No matter, he thought.
A passing physics professor heard his comment and unsuccesfully, tried to explain the concept of passive incandesent lighting in modern society.
Henry couldn’t have cared less. After politely halting and listening to the explanation covering everything from solar eclipse worship, to the molecular structure of a street light, Henry flipped him off and started looking for a pawn shop.
Even though he had adapted well to disco lighting, he knew there would always be something to keep a one-eyed, tequila drinking, degenerate happy—especially with a few bucks in his pocket. He figured on at least a millennium or two of profit from this totally inept planet, occupied by an over-sized race of creatures that called themselves humanoids.
Henry’s odyssey with the human race began when he crashed in Siberia in 806 AD. Since then he had made a rudimentary existence by sticking up people that he could, and kicking the dog-snot out of anything under two feet tall that didn’t bite. He had a preference for bunnies, stuffed animals and very small children. The profit margin sucked, but he did like candy.
He was extremely lucky to have crashed on earth. He had been aiming for the moon and missed it. The tub he was occupying was in such a state of disrepair, that it continually took him where it deemed necessary. Where it felt the need to take him was seldom of mutual agreement. If he had not escaped to this planet, he would have been sentenced to three hundred years of labor on a not too distant planet.
While visiting what we refer to as Venus, he had taken the liberty of writing more than a few bad checks. This few, amounted to roughly three hundred. Paper was cheap. Currency counters existed in the account. The account just happened to be on another planet and belonged to someone else. Given the option to flee justice or sit around and hope not to get hard labor, Henry thought it his civic duty to forego a costly trial and the expense of an extended prison sentence to the already overtaxed general public. So, in doing his fair share, as all good citizens should, he stole a second-hand planet jumper and set off looking for a place in the galaxy to wait for things to cool down.
Henry had been a rather disillusioned little biped carnivore for quite a few hundred years. Since his misfortune of landing on a planet that is run by old men that need help writing down lies and then publicly announcing them, and where certain people feel the need to spend another hour of our audio-visual portion of the day reviewing and then trying to translate the initial lie into layman terms, he had developed an attitude that would rival that of a former speech writer for Nixon.
Survival and ignoring mankind as much as possible was all that had any semblance of importance to Henry. Actually, it came down to turning a large profit, aggravating the human race, trying to drink all the beer on the planet and hopefully someday finding a way off the planet. All in all, he had done more than his fair share. Had the brewing companies known that he had to date consumed 893, 987 kegs of beer, or roughly enough to keep all of China shit-faced for a week, they would have already enshrined his liver.
However, Henry was very pleased to discover the use of pockets on earth. His race had evolved past the point of being so insecure as to have things sewn on your clothes to keep things with you that you didn’t really need and were fearful of leaving them lying around for fear of someone else picking them up and putting them into their own pockets.
Earthlings had found the need to invent something in which to hide things that weren’t theirs to begin with. Eventually, Earthlings found that pockets were also good for taking things out of. This way, you could show someone else the thing you had in your pocket and, unfortunately, they didn’t. Which was usually a gun. Then they would give you what they had in their pockets. It was an excellent way to barter.

**