By
wyvern337
Artie kept looking around
apprehensively as he walked up to the door of the house. He couldn’t be too careful, what with those
aliens around. They were always showing
up where and when he least expected it, always…taking him places and…doing
things to him… He rang the doorbell
and quickly took a step back from the door.
No, you couldn’t be too careful…
The door to the house was
answered by a teenage girl in a miniskirt and midriff-baring top, her brown
hair worn in a pair of braided pigtails and a vaguely nervous look on her face.
“Pizza!” called Artie by way of greetings. The girl flinched at the volume and
enthusiasm with which he said it. “Are
you…” Artie looked at the card in his hand.
“Stacy Rowe?”
“Uhm,
yes,” the girl agreed, a little skittishly.
“I’d ordered a low-fat cheeseless deluxe?”
“Right here, and with eight
minutes to spare!” said Artie. “I
would’ve gotten here a few minutes sooner except for those darn aliens!”
Stacy’s already large eyes
grew huge. “Aliens?” she squeaked.
Artie cast a furtive glance
back over his shoulder. “Yeah, they’re
everywhere these days! They keep kidnapping me, and – and experimenting on me! They almost got me again on my way over here!”
Stacy gasped and put her
hands to her mouth. “Experimenting on you? What do you mean?”
she asked in a frightened voice.
“Well, there’s the probe, of
course,” began Artie.
Stacy’s reply to this was a
squeak.
“But that’s not unusual, they
do that to everybody they catch,” he
continued.
Stacy began gasping, started
to hyperventilate. Artie, seeming not to
notice, began warming to his subject.
“The worst, though, is when they take your skin,” he continued.
“Your…skin?!” echoed Stacy, looking as if she weren’t sure whether to
faint or be sick.
“Yeah,” replied Artie. “They take your real skin, and replace it with a synthetic skin that shrinks around
your body – especially your head – when it gets wet.”
“Oh God…Oh God,” said Stacy,
shaking like a leaf.
“And then sometimes they wear
your old skin themselves,” said
Artie, “so they can infiltrate and move among humans undetected.”
“Wearing human skins to pass
as human?” said Stacy, in a suddenly – eerily,
in light of her reactions up to this point – calm voice.
“Yup,” said Artie, apparently
so into his narrative that the change didn’t even register.
“You mean something like this?” asked Stacy. She suddenly began to scratch – no, to claw at the underside of her chin with
her fingernails. In a moment the skin
beneath her jaw line had torn loose and begun to peel away. She pulled out and up at it, the skin peeling
back…revealing the scaly green skin beneath…
“Nghyaa-a-aa!” cried Artie, dropping the pizza box on the front porch in front
of Stacy. “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
he added as he fled headlong back down the walkway in front of the Rowe house
and into the darkness, towards the dubious safety of his delivery vehicle.
When the figure in the
doorway managed to stop laughing long enough to do anything else, it bent down
and picked up the pizza box, then backed into the house and closed the
door. Stacy, pinky-beige human “skin”
dangling loosely around her jaw and chin, the green reptilian skin showing
through from underneath, kept alternating between getting a grip on herself and
fits of incapacitatingly intense giggles. She eventually managed to set the pizza box
on the kitchen table and retreat to her room, where she sat down in front of
her makeup mirror.
“Oh Artie, you’re so naïve!” she said to her
reflection. She then went about the
business of methodically removing the latex prosthetics from the lower half of
her face. She’d picked up the hobby about
six months ago, first drawn to it by the skills she’d learned with more
conventional cosmetics in the Fashion Club.
Of course, she hadn’t told any of her friends about her new
interest…Sandi would ridicule it, which as someone just starting out Stacy
figured she didn’t need. Tiffany wouldn’t understand…did Tiffany
understand anything anymore, Stacy
wondered to herself. What’d happened to
Tiffany since sophomore year, anyway? And Quinn…well…as fond as Stacy had
always been of the Fashion Club’s Vice-President, she’d finally had to admit to
herself that, well, Quinn just never was
going to be the friend Stacy had wanted and hoped for earlier-on.
So, after this new…hobby…had
recommended itself to her, she’d ended up perusing specialty publications and
websites, ordering supplies with her babysitting money, and spending long
solitary hours practicing in front of her makeup mirror in her room. Tonight had been the first real test of how her skills were progressing, and she’d been impressed with
the results, to say the least. Of
course, the town paranoiac had been almost too
easy a target…Stacy realized with a pang of guilt that he’d fled gibbering into
the night before she’d had a chance to pay him.
Oh well, she thought, she’d just have to drop the money by the Pizza
King tomorrow and hope there’d been no harm done. Given the reaction she’d been able to elicit
tonight, though, maybe that dream she’d recently begun nurturing of a career in
film make-up special effects wasn’t so crazy after all…
La-la-LA-la-la
Disclaimers: Daria and all ancillary characters are the
property of MTV/Viacom; I just borrow them occasionally, for strictly
non-profit purposes.