At the club, Christina danced to all the songs, even those she didn’t like. Warren, on the other hand, danced only to those that had a good beat and sultry lyrics, because they were the easiest to dance to, and he had no chance of embarrassing himself as he would if he overshot his abilities.

After three drinks, the bartender told Christina she couldn’t have any more, even though she knew she wasn’t anywhere near drunk, and she only needed a few more apple-tinis to really let lose and have a good time. After three years’ worth of underage fraternity keggers and a sense of daring that led her to drink all sorts of concoctions, Christina had a stomach made a steel, and very little could really let her get carried away.

Warren, however, chose not to drink more than a single beer that night, not because he had any ethical concerns about the alcohol, but because he wanted to get laid that night, and didn’t want to risk accidental impotence due to inebriation.

The pair solved each other’s problems, because Christina was willing to put out and Warren was willing to buy her another drink. As she sipped a daiquiri, which Warren had bought her because it was about a dollar cheaper than the apple-tinis, he smiled and shouted over Notorious B.I.G.’s lyrics, “Good song.”

“What?”

“Good song!” he repeated. “Do you want to dance?”

“Yes, I would,” Christina answered, feeling wonderfully woozy already.

“I’ll buy you another drink after this song,” Warren assured her, although he had no intention of doing so. He wasn’t only concerned about his own impotence, he also wanted to prevent Christina from drinking so much that she couldn’t stay conscious long enough for him to do his thing. After the song, if she asked for another drink, he’d try to angle her toward his home instead.

During the pulsing beat of the song, Christina pressed herself against Warren and gyrated with the music, thumping her body against his until he felt that he could take no more without getting her back to his place. Slipping his hands around her stomach and rubbing it, Warren wanted to whisper something sweet in her ear, but he knew he wouldn’t be heard. Instead, he shouted, “You look great.”

“Thanks,” Christina yelled in return.

“What’s your name?” Warren called.

“Bree,” she lied.

“I’m Warren,” he said, telling the truth.

After the song, Warren didn’t even need to fight her requests for alcohol; she’d already forgotten his earlier promise. Instead, she kissed him sloppily and pulled him toward the men’s room, but Warren pried her off him. “Let’s go to my place,” he suggested.

“All right,” Christina replied, acting a little drunker than she really felt so that Warren wouldn’t think she was sluttish by going to bed with him after only having known him for about ten minutes. She laughed a little too loudly and slurred her words maybe a bit too obviously so that he wouldn’t think ill of her supposedly alcohol-soaked self.

When they reached his apartment, Warren showed Christina to his bedroom, where they wasted little time in undressing one another before tumbling into bed. There, they had meaningless but passionate sex.

Afterward, they lay together, and Warren panted, “That was great, Bree.”

Momentarily forgetting that she’d told him a fake name, Christina felt offended and prepared to complain of his lack of manners, then she remembered that she was supposed to be Bree, and allowed her wasted hormones and the effect of the alcohol finally take control. Warm in the bed, she fell asleep, and Warren followed a few seconds later.

While they dreamt, glowing, pulsing lights began to flash outside, filling the bedroom with their sickly yellow light. An alien spacecraft careened from the upper limits of the atmosphere, where a pregnant mother alien with six tentacles and even more matured eggs ready to be laid swelling in her stomach.

The alien mother had, over the course of the last several weeks, managed to steer her ship far off-course as she grew more and more lost. She’d meant to make a pilgrimage to Planet 47 to receive a blessing for her unborn children before they were laid, but after getting turned around in an unplanned gravity well and taking a long detour around a recently super-nova-ed star that would soon be a black hole, the mother was now thoroughly lost.

At least earth’s gravity and atmosphere were more or less within bounds of the mother’s necessities, which was absolutely important now that her due date, hour, and minute grew ever nearer. If she could only manage to land in time, everything would be all right.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. During the most crucial part of the landing sequence, when the mother had to monitor her controls especially closely to stop from driving the ship in a vicious nosedive toward the planet, pain shot through her equivalent of an abdomen, and the mother doubled over in pain, leaving her ship unattended.

The ship careened through space, streaking through the sky like a shooting star until, like the meteors that were the true cause of that phenomenon, it hit the earth, burning through grass and dirt and rock and shaking the entire city block before it finally came to its final rest in Warren’s backyard.

Started awake by the sound, not to mention the way his bed violently shook, Warren squeezed Christina closer to him and demanded, “What was that?”

Half-asleep and unaware of what she even said, Christina answered, “That was you and me, baby. We made the earth shake. You really are that good, Warren.”

Convinced by the lie, Warren kissed Christina’s ear, sighed, “Thanks, Bree,” and promptly fell asleep again.

All up and down the block, single sleepers and married couples and little children and partying teenagers all woke up or turned off the late-night TV or turned down their music or began to cry, then had similar conversations or assured themselves it had to be nothing or just patted their pillows and rolled over before forgetting the earth-shaking moment.

Meanwhile, the mother panted and gasped and thanked her ancestors that she’d survived the violent crash. She was unlikely to live much longer, as she knew she bled too much from her head and one of her tentacles had been ripped clean off her body, but her eggs still throbbed inside, demanding life, and if she only found a suitable location to lay them, she could trust that they could live their own life on this planet after she was gone.

Bleeding, pained, and prepared to give birth any moment, the mother dragged herself toward the emergency hatch of her ship. The door was bashed in and pressed closed by the heavy dirt that lay atop it, but when she mustered all her strength to push while she dug out with her remaining healthy tentacles, the mother was able to make her escape, and drag her bloodied, bruised, battered, and dirty body up through the earth and into the fresh air above.

Warren’s house lay before her, and the alien, recognizing the ground beneath her as too warm to bury her eggs in, particularly after her burning spaceship had burrowed into it, entered the home, hoping she’d find an appropriately cool space there.

She found what she sought in the strange white box that towered above her in the room Warren knew as the kitchen. Prying the door open with her tentacles, she even found a slot where eggs already resided, safe and cool. Those eggs were white and dead, while her purple eggs kicked for life in her womb. Determining the slot the safest place and risking that her own eggs wouldn’t end up as dead as the others in there, the mother lay them.

After closing the door in order to preserve the precious coolness, the mother knew she didn’t have much time left. With her last remaining ounce of strength, she dragged herself across the counter-top, then threw herself off it, only to land on a mound of soft paper and banana peels. There, comforted by the soft compost around her, the mother died.

When he awoke four hours later, Warren hugged Christina and kissed her ear. The nuzzle startled her awake, and with a moan, Christina sighed, “I don’t want to go to class this morning.”

“So don’t,” Warren replied. “I’ll make you an omelet.”

“That sounds nice,” Christina sighed while Warren climbed out of bed and strode into the kitchen.

The cold tile floor froze his feet, and Warren ran to the refrigerator, which had a rug on the floor before it. He pulled the door open to discover the disgusting-looking purple eggs. He wondered how long ago they had gone bad in order to become so discolored. He lifted one to sniff at it, then jumped when a new voice called, “You need help?

He looked up to see Christina standing in his kitchen, naked. Distracted by the sight of her ample breasts, he rose from his crouching position, the purple eggs still clutched in his hand. Breaking them open against a counter-top, he opened the purple-red goo into a frying pan and began to stir up scrambled eggs for the girl.

When Warren set the dish before Christina, she curled her nose and asked, “Why is it all purple like that?”

“It’s just the weird eggs,” Warren answered dismissively, sitting down across from her with his own plate of eggs.

“These are good,” Christina observed, for despite their rubbery texture and excessive saltiness, they had an unusual, almost unearthly spice that she’d never tasted before, and she rather liked it. “Where’d you get them?”

“That’s a secret,” Warren chirped to hide the fact that he didn’t know where the eggs had actually come from. How drunk could he have actually been to not remember buying those mysterious eggs. “That’s all of them, too. There’s no more.”

“Oh, too bad,” sighed, Christina, who had already finished her entire plateful of eggs. “Hey, let me help you with the dishes, all right?”

“Forget about it,” Warren replied, playing the gentlemen. “I can handle it.”

“You’re sweet,” Christina sighed, and feeling maybe a bit caffeinated (somehow) from the eggs and touched by Warren’s kindness, she added, “My name’s Christina, by the way.”

Without wanting to sound accusatory, and certain that she was playing games, Warren replied, “No, it’s not. You’re Bree.”

“No, I’m Christina,” she corrected him. She didn’t want to tell him that while she’d considered him good enough to sleep with, she hadn’t thought him good enough to know her real name until that morning. Instead, she lied, “Bree is my stage name.”

“Oh,” Warren replied. “That’s pretty.”

“I’m going to be sick,” Christina responded, because the other-worldly eggs had finally interacted with her all-too-terrestrial stomach, and it was creating unexpected consequences. Without another word, she rose from the kitchen table and ran into the bathroom, where she proceeded to vomit into the toilet.

Meanwhile, Warren had his own negative reaction to the eggs, and he too vomited. Since he couldn’t make it to the bathroom, though, he hunched over the trashcan and emptied his stomach’s contents over the body of a dead alien mother, who Warren still hadn’t seen.

When she was finished, Christina wiped her mouth with the back of her arm and spat in the sink to be rid of the bitter taste in her mouth. Her stomach still roiled with nausea, and she wondered what exactly had been wrong with those eggs. As her stomach turned inside-out again, she glared at her reflection, and blasted a hole in the wall as laser shot out her eyes.

The wall between the kitchen and the bathroom dissolved, leaving Warren to glare in disgust at the mess he’d made, then to peer at Christina who was suddenly visible again. As lasers shot unbidden from her eyes, she lifted a hand to shield her face, and a shield of energy rose between the pair.

When the fireworks had finished, Christina grinned, and asked, “Did you see that?”

“Yeah, I did,” Warren replied, astonished at his new-found alien powers, and curious where they’d come from. “What was all that?”

“Don’t you get it?” Christina demanded, her eyes widening with astonishment. “We’re super heroes!”