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Volume 01, Story 2
Chino and Homeboy are walking home in the dark arguing over a wad of crumpled bills. Homeboy wants it counted again; Chino’s counted it four hundred fucking times already. Then a pillar of white light drops on them out of the sky and pins them there like a bad idea finally catching up. They do what anybody would do: hit their knees, lace their hands behind their heads, and start ratting each other out. Homeboy swears it wasn’t him. Chino says bullshit, he saw him do it, and can he get a plea bargain because he’s hungry. Then the light swallows them both, and the next thing they know they’re strapped face-down on cold metal gurneys in an alien medical bay with their asses in the air, negotiating over whose culo gets probed first. “Simon! Put it in his culo first! He’s already used to it!” The laughter that comes through the door isn’t alien. It’s Uncle Rob, who set the whole abduction up because he told them it’d be funny, and it was. He even smacks Chino’s exposed ass on the way out.
Turns out Rob’s got a working relationship with these people. Hasn’t earned his own ship yet. He still owes them discoveries, and it’s getting harder to deliver since humans keep fucking the planet in the ass. But he’s got the run of the place, and he walks the boys through it door by door like a man showing off a house he doesn’t pay for. That door’s cloning experiments. That one’s where they watch the people and other aliens they capture fuck each other, strictly for research, like National Geographic. (Asked why the aliens don’t just come down and help Earth, Rob’s answer is Independence Day: they’d end up on a table, face down and ass up, getting anal probed, “if we don’t obliterate them to kingdom come.“) And in the room past that, a huddle of aliens and Rob’s loyal Mexicans are bent over a table covered in beer coasters that Homeboy recognizes on sight as Uncle Rob’s time machine. He reaches in and turns one coaster ninety degrees. Every alien in the room nods. Rob throws them out and tells them to go explore and not fuck with anything. “Don’t fuck with anything!!!” Two chrome hallways later, Homeboy’s got his face pressed to a window looking at rows of hydroponic weed glowing blue and purple under alien light, and neither one of these idiots is walking away from that.
They get in, an alien chick in a short skirt takes Chino’s hand and puts it on the invisible hand panel, because neither English nor Homeboy’s Spanish does anything to the door (“Computer, open the fucking door, please?” … “Orale, computadora, habre la pinche puerta.” “No seas guey! That’s Spanish, not Alien, fucker.”). They light up, and the alien weed does something Earth weed has never done. Chino can suddenly hear Homeboy’s thoughts, which is less a superpower than a sentence. Homeboy turns invisible, decides nakey is good and nakey is free, and goes full gremlin through the ship: knocking things out of aliens’ hands, jabbing fingers in ears, tripping the crew. Then he finds the bridge, parks his invisible ass in an unattended chair, and starts pressing buttons, then more buttons, then all of them. Elsewhere on the ship, Uncle Rob and the aliens are drunk and belting out bar songs in front of his makeshift Time Portal, a tower of beer boxes and cans that one of them keeps yanking the start lever on. It is never going to work. The Flux Capacitor got sucked into the Time Vortex and could be sitting in the Fourth or Fifth Dimension for all Rob knows. By the time the alarms are screaming and the consoles are catching fire, Chino is under a space blanket with the alien wondering if this is how Captain Kirk felt all the time (“Aye Papi”), and Uncle Rob is storming onto a burning bridge, grabbing a naked Homeboy by the balls, and demanding to know what he did.
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The answer is everything. Rob’s response to a starship going up in flames is handing out plastic bags. “Quick! Get as much bud as you can. Don’t be careful.” “Seeds and stems too?” “Especially seeds and stems.” “Now, stuff them in your pants.” “Won’t the aliens use their tech to find the bags?” “You’re right. Let’s stuff them up your ass.” The alien security team seizes the whole crew anyway and hauls them to the bridge, where the Alien Captain is chewing out Chino’s lover for dereliction of duty, and keeps saying he. Then the big screen lights up with the security footage, in terrible angle and worse clarity, and the room puts it together at the same moment Chino does: the alien chick is a dude. “What do you mean he?” The Captain’s verdict, translated by Rob: they’re the most fucktarded humans ever abducted from Earth, and if it weren’t for all the help Rob’s been giving the aliens, they’d have shot the lot of them out an airlock already. Which is exactly what happens next: a trash demonstration, then the boys shoved inside, screaming apologies (“It’s not our fault we’re stupid!” “We were high on weed!”), until the vacuum spits them right back onto the bridge and the whole room, aliens and Mexicans included, howls with laughter. (“I think I peed myself.“) In the transporter room, Rob gives the Captain his word he’ll get that Flux Capacitor back as soon as he can, and they’re beamed home.
Back on Uncle Rob’s couch, joints in one hand and beers in the other, Rob lays out the plan for the alien weed: he’s going to study it, figure out what kind of superpowers he can get, and become a super villain. Can the boys be super heroes? “No. You can be my henchmen.” “You mean flunkies?” “Yep.” And Chino, still stuck on the one detail that matters, closes out the night the only way he can: “What do you mean he?”
Featuring Chino, Homeboy, Uncle Rob, Aenwyn, Alien Captain, Hairy Alien, Grey Alien, Electronic Pad Alien, Tinkering Alien, Bridge Console Alien, Alien Crew.
Read the full story in The Adventures of Chino & Homeboy, Volume 01