3 - It came from beyond the grave.

It is still Wednesday afternoon, this happens on the moon because the lunar day is 28 sidereal days. This is how the saying "a month of Sundays" came about. The alternative, "a month of Wedesday afternoons" lacked the required karmic impact. However, the weekend is still over two sidereal months away.

Getting drunk on a Friday night is potentially a lethal bender, especially if they are drinking Grimley's Stoat Lubricant. The only beer that burns. (Indeed it burns so well it is frequently substituted for Manliance Navy Grog, issued with a drinking fork.) This is a problem on the moon where the lower gravity means that brewing beer is extremely dangerous due to the lower vapour pressure. Fortunately, they also brewed Grimley's Loon Moon actually on the moon and kept it pressurized with pure oxygen for bigger explosions.

Doctor DickLogic admired his reflection in the mirror. Quite why there was a mirror was anyone's guess. They didn't even have a bathroom in the greenhouse, just the giant gnome shower. "Science!" He declared manlificently, "Science is meant to be done scientifically, with a big breasted assistant who looks good in a lab coat. Instead, what do I get?"

"Yes well, my breasts are at the cleaners. Sorry okay?" She looked out of a window and tried to clean it, the grime was on the outside though. She did, however, look good in a lab coat.

"Is this supposed to be a comedy?" Doctor DickLogic noted that Daisy Jones looked good in a lab coat and said as much. It didn't help to alienate the mad cutie, especially not this one.

"Don't think so," she answered, "otherwise I'd have something on under my lab coat." At least it was nice and warm, seeing as it was a greenhouse. On the moon. On a Wednesday afternoon. The shades were doing their job and the solar panels were charging the mighty Leyden Jars of Holy Moly. They now had a big sign next to them declaring that touching them was bad. "What are we going to do today?"

"Apple pie!"

"What? We're going to science an apple pie? Bake one?" She asked, they had a rudimentary kitchen and a converted turbo laser made an awesome microwave. Any more than ten seconds and whatever you were cooking was plasma. A full minute to fusion and ten seconds after that was the apocalypse. Not so great in conventional oven mode due to the cookware ablating. Turbo lasers were touchy like that. "Have you seen our script? Only that sounds like it might be dangerous." Something attracted her attention, motion where there should be none.

Daisy Jones looked out of one of the windows. Due to a chronic lack of planning, only the greenhouse where the mad science lived was now in Clavius Crater not far from New Eboracum. It contained only the most rudimentary living facilities from the era of the garden gnomes. Fortunately none of the gnomes had survived, they had been pretty scary. Doctor DickLogic had had to invent some serious weed killer to deal with that menace. Hence the turbo lasers. The greenhouse had a lot of windows too something to do with it being a greenhouse, and no easy way to clean them. This was a problem. If the house had been circular, they could have put it in the centre of the greenhouse it was that large.

Equally fortunately, the entire greenhouse and conservatory was airtight, having been designed by Doctor DickLogic based on a dream he had had. It consisted of three somewhat circular lobes closely attached to the Primal Inventatorium which he used for inventing and thinking powerful thoughts. Manly powerful thoughts, enough to make his gorgeous lolly assistant, the inimical Daisy Jones drool, pants or no through two partitions, if they had had them. The greenery wasn't very effective at counteracting that much manliness in a contained area but she wasn't going to complain.

Lobe One, the primal lobe and slightly oval in shape due to some unplanned science one day. In a previous life it had faced the house. It was the entrance and communal living space, formerly the giant garden gnomes, now theirs. It contained a raised floor with the kitchen and dining area. The airlock to outside, storage and the shower below that on the mezzanine and the Leyden Jars of Holy Moly in explosion proofed quasi-basement. The shower used to be used to fertilise the gnomes but had been filled with water from the rain tanks and the hand pump could be used to get the desired effect. Just outside Lobe One were two flower patches, the garage with chrysanthemums on the right and the roses with the outhouse on the left and the shed a bit further around, next to Lobe two. If the house had come along, they could have had a proper water closet, however the house was not vacuum proof like the greenhouse so it was just as well it was somewhere else.

The other two smaller lobes were Lobe two, his lobe, the manliest of man caves, guarded by a fluffy blue unicorn toy that hated her. In there was a bed and a monster under the bed that had at least twenty different death rays and an uneasy truce with Metric. And Lobe three, the her lobe, where she kept her locker and a hammock. And five lab coats, three needed washing. Metric guarded her hammock when she was not in it, and sometimes when she was. Whenever Daisy was dreaming of being crushed by a metric furry bulldozer, it was Metric.

The locker was special. It was Daisy Jones' Locker and it was bigger on the inside than the outside. It was also painted a nice shade of light blue to protect it from Science Officers.

The Primal Inventatorium was large. It had to be. Doctor DickLogic did not do small inventions just like Daisy Jones never said "size isn't everything." Bigger was by definition bigger, better was optional but it was in the same section of the dictionary so it must be true. Buffer? It was hard to be more buff than Doctor DickLogic, he was chiseled to perfection. It had palm trees too, but they weren't inventions, the machine that hulked in the middle was, surrounded by the moat of surrounding and the toolboxes of happiness. All the tools were imperial, especially the five twoths.

The machine hulked magnificently. It could not hulk manlificently as machines per se did not have gender. It was also painted in jungle camouflage to help it blend in with the trees and hide from the neighbours. There were large doors, now sealed, should they need to move it out to the launch pad. Sadly that had remained on Earth.

On the moon, moon dust was a problem. This sort of went with the territory and the fact it didn't rain much. Certainly not the sort of rain that would keep the moon dust down. It was far too happy floating around after the slightest impact, picking up the light and settling on practically anything. As a result made it seem like the whole outside of the combined greenhouse, conservatory and inventatorium was some sort of deranged mutant Easter egg. The somewhat flowery decorations on the top were not actually turbo lasers. They were twin-turbo lasers and an astonishingly effective pigeon deterrent. Not a single pigeon had unloaded on the greenhouse since chapter one, which was just as well because moon pigeons would be fearsome.

"Doctor, something is moving in the garden."

"Not now Jones, I'm busy." The doctor's feet waved from a hatch in the side of the great machine. "Which side is it coming from? Roses or Chrysanthemums?"

"Sort of Rose by shed."

"Not the robots?"

"They are still on the charger." Daisy waved in the general direction of the Leyden Jars. "More like Shed by Outhouse now."

"Ah, from beyond the grave."

"Doctor, not now, I need to go to the toilet!" Daisy complained. The outhouse was no fun at the best of times, but now there was something from beyond the grave out there too.

"Have you seen my five twoths?"

"No, you last had it when you were in the green hatch. No, the other green one, no, up and left, the ultra-green one." Daisy tried to wipe the window and see out more clearly. "windows need cleaning." Daisy Jones crossed her legs, it didn't help at all. "I will borrow your rocket blunderbuss."

"Enjoy."

"Darling Doctor DickLogic, I am going to the toilet. The only way I would enjoy it is if you hold my hand. Oh, and there's something moving out there too. And we forgot to get one of those space candles that runs on electricity for the outhouse too. Soon it will be night!" In about four earth days. Lunar days were distressingly long. "the roses might die." She added optimistically.

"All right, all right. I'm coming. Remember this, four flubba frogs for three free flanges." Doctor DickLogic extracted himself from the machine. This machine was the reason they were here and he really needed to fix it. Missing two bridge nights at the local was inexcusable as it was. But three, consecutively? He checked his omnispace suit, it bulged and creaked as it struggled to contain so much manliness without a cape. It was, of course, a lovely shade of silver and blue. Completely unlike Daisy Jones' completely transparent one. "Ready?"

She handed him the rocket blunderbuss. It was just like a perfectly normal blunderbuss only even more dangerous. It fired rockets. Mostly in the direction it was pointing. Subject to a poisson distribution. "Ready!" She tucked her bunny ears in the special slots in her helmet as they stepped into the airlock. So, she was going on an epic trip to water the flowers, accompanied by about two hundred pounds of testosterone in manlificent form. So what, he was holding her hand too. Even better, there was no one else to dilute the sheer raging manliness, it was all for her! And maybe whatever that creature was. She could feel it through two layers of space suit!

"Creature first, water the flowers second." Doctor DickLogic grunted manfully, moving her to stand on his right since he was left-handed in this chapter. "Roses don't look too good." He attached something to the ear tab on her helmet as the airlock depressurized. She was amazed when she could hear his voice in the vacuum of space.

The roses did indeed not look too rosy, being in a vacuum, covered in moon dust and no one had watered them for days. They glared angrily at Daisy Jones, their arch-nemesis. The new one, the old one, the neighbour's dog had stopped bothering them ever since the sudden change from air to vacuum.

Daisy Jones ignored the roses' ire. They rounded the shed and looked at the terrible state of the garden, moon dust all over it. Strange paw prints in the dust. "I believe, Jones, that that is your creature." Doctor DickLogic grunted manfully, albeit significantly attenuated by the vacuum and the new thing on her helmet. "I didn't know poodles could breathe vacuum."

It was the neighbour's poodle, it too wasn't looking too rosy, being a poodle. It had inflated grotesquely due to the lack of air pressure keeping it poodle shaped and as a result was more ball with dinky limbs than pooch with an annoying bark. The limbs whirled furiously as it tried to attack Daisy Jones. Catching on things more by accident than design and propelling it towards them like some sort of rabid bouncy ball. Presumably it was barking at her, it usually did that. It was fully capable of barking continuously for an entire weekend and excreting its own mass in poodly presents at the same time. Dame Two-part Epoxy's Awesome Caramels only worked for a few hours on that fiend.

"Fore!" Daisy kicked it as hard as she could. There was no love lost for this hell poodle, the owner was a libertard who firmly believed in not my garden, not my problem. The poodle had spent it's every waking hour barking at Daisy and leaving poodly presents everywhere too. She was reminded of a film that hadn't been made yet. "In space, no one can hear you bark."

The poodle, assuming it could still be called that, sailed high into the black sky. Barking silently all the way. As they had not yet been on the moon long enough to atrophy from lack of gravity, her kick which would typically have had the wretched hell poodle biting her welly off instead sent it howling (silently in brackets) into the distance. Maybe it was barking, it was hard to tell as it made so little noise.

"Good shot, I think it's going to hit the rocks about where Madam Chunderbutt lives." Doctor DickLogic grunted. Neither of them liked Madam Chunderbutt she was the village gossip and was probably even now stirring up trouble back in the village. "I miss her." They stood in the shade of the shed. The shed shade, and watched the beautiful ballistic trajectory undiluted by friction, air pollution or trees.

And now, it is time for an unscheduled and lengthy digression into village life in the village of Grimley-with-T! The only village in the Grater Republic of the North Riding with a "T!" in its name, the other village having sunk under mysterious circumstances surrounding Queen Victoria's centenary jubilee. Starting with the name, originally the hamlet had been Grimley-under-sheep after an infamous incident in the late seventeenth century where it became a hamlet due to the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the village church, but they had changed that after Lord Grimley became famous for his two head sheep (now with twice as much wool and self-cooking mutton).

Despite stories to the contrary, they did not invent Yorkshire Pudding, Yorkshire Terriers or that joke about people from the Grater Empire of West Riding speaking funny. The total population of the village is roughly two platoons, half of which are mad scientists, the other half being their buxom assistants. A third half also lived in the hamlet purely as a buffer to stop them disasembling the Church (again) despite it never being fully reconstructed. As of the 128th year of Queen Victoria the current sheriff of the village is Alice Dee, reformed belly dancer and suspected robot overlord. The village pub serves grog with a fork.

Within the village are numerous characters and plot devices that are so unusual that they should be in real life. One such is Madam Chunderbutt, famous for being able to hold two conversations at the same time while standing and causing chairs to collapse from boredom when not.

"Seriously?" Daisy asked, "which part, the endless wittering, the herbicidal halitosis or that scarf?"

"All of her, especially that scarf."

"Why?"

"Entertainment value."

The dog exploded.

"Curses, micrometeorites!" Doctor DickLogic cursed manlificently. He still followed through with the original plan though, accompanying Daisy Jones to the outhouse and standing in the shade of its roof as she went in. "Need help?"

Daisy Jones nearly said yes. Please help me use the dunny before I swoon. "I'm good. There might be more poodles." Check the waist seal, unlatch, drop the bottom half and sit down. Do the safety strap. The top of the door was all broken from the one time she'd forgotten than. It even had a strain gauge now. "Please can we get a water closet? One false move out here and I could be inside out!" This actually worried her too. She stared at the strain gauge as she sorted herself out and fixed her suit. Having ones privates in a vacuum was mildly unpleasant, but not serious. "Finished. Six hundred foot pounds!" She emerged and found herself hugged as all over the garden little craters appeared in the dust. "Darling!" This was her dream come true, except for the minor inconveniencies like space suits, vacuum and thousands of micro meteorites bashing the living daylights out of everything.

The roses exploded in bursts of colour under the barrage. They didn't look too rosy about it either. Exploding like that took all they had and then some.

Doctor DickLogic put Daisy Jones down in the shelter of the armoured dunny roof and ensconced himself in the littlest room. "Whatever happened to the Doris Schmodly calendar?"

"The Metric Cat has it." They had a cat, a big fluffy grey thing that was some curious combination of killing machine bent on genocide and furball. It was called Metric. It was so metric that it weighed ten kilogrammes and couldn't be weighed on the imperial scale at all. Also, it appeared the cat had good taste, that was the Doris Schmodly radial engines calendar.

"I have nothing to read." Doctor DickLogic lamented as they waited for the micro meteor storm to finish. He was finished long before it.

"Remember to flush," Daisy chimed cheerfully. She had just discovered one of the dubious benefits of the space suit, nowhere for bottom burps to escape. "I don't think this is going to stop. I'll get the space brolly."

The wheelbarrow nearby made an adequate shield as she carried it over her head the twenty or so paces to the entrance. Putting it down she pushed it out into the storm to watch it collect dents and little rocks. Hanging next to the door were two space brollies. Her rainbow coloured one and his much larger, much manlier ultra-gamp. "Can you hear me?"

"Of course. It's radio." Doctor DickLogic startled as the ultra-gamp punched a hole in the door. "you should be more careful. Any harder and it would have gone through the back of the dunny too." He pulled it out and opened it. Things zinged inaudibly off the space brolly and he sauntered back to the entrance.

Daisy Jones wrote her new score on the board, noting with satisfaction that she held the top three places with a significant margin. This was one area where women excelled and men just couldn't compete. Admittedly the four thousand foot pounds of thrust event was not one she cared to remember and she had never made curry like that since.

They went inside and as soon as the indicator turned to a little green bunny, took off their helmets. "Please can we go metric, pretty please?" Daisy Jones asked nicely, trying to look as cute as was possible wearing a transparent space suit and not a lot else. Fluffy ears, fluffy tail, blue hair.

Doctor DickLogic was not immune to the wiles of the unfair sex. They were unfair for a treason and even that wasn't beyond them. Perhaps he could leverage this to his advantage though, she seemed genuinely desperate to go metric. "Only if you wear clothes in all situations which call for clothes to be worn."

"Yes, yes, of course." Daisy Jones was that desperate. But how was she going to get a water closet too?

"The machine is entirely Imperial, as soon as I've fixed it and we get back... Where are we going to get an Imperial Cat?"

"Tea? We have lots of biscuits. Four flubba frogs for three free flanges." She remembered as she put on her apron, filling the kettle and turning it on and off again. This being a Doctor DickLogic invention it could and would boil itself dry in three seconds, at least it had a safety and didn't go beyond dry steam at six hundred and fifty centigrade, or cherry red. Not like the previous one at all, that had vapourised itself and condensed on all the windows.

"Oh, yes, yes right."

"That was entirely unlike you darling something bothering you?"

"The monster. Poodles should not be able to survive in the vacuum of space."

"Why not, space goats can."

"They're basically plasma though, the vacuum of space is the only place they can survive. When not eating space ships." Doctor DickLogic got a tray and selected some flubba frogs from his jar. Four for each of the three flanges. "Keep the apron on, it suits you." fluffy blue bunny tail notwithstanding.

"I was going to put my old labcoat on and clean the framistat." Daisy countered. The apron only protected her front bits from hot water. The lab coat was ablative armour.

"It's on the fritz again?"

"Cat fur and framistats are a poor match," Daisy lamented, sitting on his lap and warming her hands on her tea. "You should visit New Eboracum. I met a god. And found a rather nice coffee shop with coffee from places no one has ever heard of. Barsoom for one."

"I am sure Edgar Rice Burroughs must be crying in his mausoleum about now."

"He might still be alive."

Doctor DickLogic plucked something from Daisy Jones' lab coat pocket, such manliness in close proximity! "The First Church of the Martian Space Llama?"

"Some zeeb was giving them out in the car park."

"You went out in your lab coat?"

"The alternative being my space suit, which is completely transparent and hides nothing. I mean, it's not like I have lots to hide but still... I put my lab coat over the top of it."

"Oh, I don't know, small, perfectly packaged and unreasonably dangerous." The doctor mused, "if creatures on the moon are six times bigger because gravity is one sixth. That would mean that creatures in space would asymptotically approach infinite size."

"You scientist, me housewife." Daisy Jones chimed, rescuing the brochure and discovering that the cult of the space llama had built their temple deep in the Valles Marineris just so they could build their combined effigy somewhere safe from the white apes, banths and over inimical life. The air pressure was just too high for them down there. Apparently their sacred animal was a llama, what a surprise. "Your theory sort of accounts for space goats, but they aren't infinite in size."

"What's the largest space goat you've ever seen?" Doctor DickLogic had a manly mug of tea (the less said about the illustration the better) and gingernuts, all that he needed for life to be perfect was for Daisy Jones to sit still, and wear something more than just a lab coat that she never buttoned up. But mostly, sit still. He was in danger of spilling his tea.

"Cosmic Bob surely. The Hive Collective will have legends of a space goat eating a main sequence star."

"Sounds like a legend. Space goats are basically sentient plasma. Correction. Ornery sentient plasma. I think eating a sun would be tricky. Certainly it would be messy and exciting."

"Like my cooking."

"Far worse surely."

"Freow." Daisy Jones found herself restrained, she was going to need a cold shower and a book on astro hydrodynamics if she wasn't careful. Maybe even two.