After navigating some type of maze, we left the cave and I found myself standing in an open space. The area was nothing like a nice lawn, though. It was a sort of ravine that appeared to be made from gargantuan teeth. However Kintoopian planetary teeth are dispersed and often inclined while the local teeth looked extraordinarily straight and were plopped down all over the place. One of these teeth had so far made me feel like a prisoner. The teeth were pitted with geometrical and seemingly artificial holes, probably made by earthlings. Later I learned they were called “windows”.

I was freaked out by the local buildings too, dude,” Platon said, watching me gawp at the place. “They’re fucking different from the ones in Moscow. But there’s no point in wasting time now. Hurry up! Let’s go! We’re dawdling along like a posse of paraplegics.”

Once again, Platon’s fists were evident and I urged my body to move as fast as possible. As usual I was moving along at eleven-meter hyperbolic jumps. Marissa barely managed to keep up with us. Platon, on the other hand, tore along like a fiveped from Akvayonix.

“Stop bobbing up and down like a kangaroo, dude,” Platon said, pulling my sleeve. “You already come across like a frigging guiri. And now you’re making us look ridiculous!”

I stuck my hands into the pockets of my spacesuit and stopped bouncing around the place. We finally left the narrow ravine and joined a stream of people in a bigger canyon. There were a lot of earthlings there.

“Oh, mother Kintoop!” I thought. “It’s going to be awfully difficult trying to conquer such a crowded nation.”

“Do you remember I told you about Ramblas, dude?” Platon asked. “Here you go!”

“Sorry? I don’t remember any Ramblas,” Fyodor answered.

“Never mind. It’ll drive you up the wall. From now on you’re going to cross it twice a day!”

All the earthlings were in spacesuits. They were moving all over the place, talking, throwing strange things into the air, crying and squeaking. They were different colours and shapes. But the strangest thing was that they pretended to be relaxed. The place looked frighteningly safe.

Fyodor, ignorantly oblivious to anything that was good manners, pulled my hand from out of my pocket and scratched my head.

“All right,” he sighed. “I can’t deny we’re in Spain. Let’s assume I was working with you in Moscow and maybe you invited me here. But how did I end up in the capital?”

“You got your head injured in an accident,” Platon explained. “Badly injured. Obviously you’re still suffering from the consequences…”

Fyodor focused my eyes sharply on Platon.

“There were no neurosurgeons in Siberia skilled enough to operate on your ‘trauma-Diplodocus tumor of the third grade’,” the brute continued. “So… they sent you to the Capital. After the operation, you had to spend some time there in order to recover. You fell in love with a nurse…” Platon made a gesture like he was massaging imaginary protuberances on his chest, and Marisa immediately gave him a smack on his side with her elbow. “So you decided to stay and work in Moscow.”

“Um. And what sort of an accident causes trauma-Diplodocus tumor of the third grade?” Fyodor asked. I let him take control of this complicated discussion.

“You didn’t say much. I guess it was a car crash. You were traveling from Big Protopopovo with your friends…”

“Really?” Marissa exclaimed loudly. The earthlings that were nearby gazed at us for a moment. “You told me he was hit by a UFO.”

“What??” Fyodor and I now cried out. We both remembered the shiny spaceship in the middle of a dark and cold nowhere.

“I wouldn’t have told you that garbage, baby!” Platon flinched.

“You did! That Thursday night. Don’t you remember?”

“Sweetheart, I was totally out of it and obviously just wanted to impress you…”

“Right… And what other rubbish have you been feeding me that you thought might impress me?..”

Their conversation quickly disintegrated into a kind of syndicate squabble of the third level that I often heard on Kintoop and everyone around them faded into oblivion. I lost the ability to reason. I recognized the words but their meaning escaped me. Fyodor was now deep in his own thoughts since being reminded of the UFO incident.

The canyon became very crowded. Earthlings jostled me from every angle. The problem was that they were all crawling on the ground, unable to make use of the vast space of air above them. They impeded my progress, so I dropped behind our fellow travellers who were still arguing.

Fyodor wanted to stop them and ask them more questions, but I quashed his plans. I had a better idea and actually my host didn’t seem to mind. I turned and ran.

My decision scared me. I didn’t know where I was going, or what kind of dangers I might find, but I didn’t trust ‘dumb’ Platon or his side-kick, Marisa.

I trotted back the way I had come from for a while, along the canyon trying to avoid colliding with these, so far, unstudied and hugely unpredictable earthlings. Then I dashed into an adjoining ravine. There were less earthlings and it would be harder to trace me if I kept changing direction.

Fyodor slowed me down to a brisk pace. It looked like my body worked in cycles. It could not support a perpetual stable mechanism. Sometimes it worked harder, but then lapsed into inefficiency.

“What on earth..? How the hell..?” Fyodor mumbled. “Nothing about Moscow, but a UFO…”

I was preoccupied with more important things at the moment. I had just realized that the place was much warmer and lighter than the one where I had landed. If Platon wasn’t lying about the Third planet, I must have moved to another pole within it. Like on Kintoop, they had Dark and Light poles here. I was extremely worried about the lack of Kintoopian agents on this side of the planet. Hadn’t they spread this far yet?

I trudged along the ravine, randomly choosing a direction when the path forked. I was studying every face I met trying to recognize a fellow agent. I thought about using a Kintoopian password when I noticed a strange hairy creature following me.

The earthling was very different from the others. It did not have a spacesuit, but it did have long brownish hair all over its body. It was half the size of me and moved on all fours. Its protruding proboscis had rows of big whitish things and a fat pinkish tongue falling out of it. There was a cord around the creature’s neck with a round, flat object attached to it.

When the earthling saw me gazing at it, it stopped. Then it slowly rose on its hind legs. After a couple of awkward attempts, it seized the round object by its fingerless hands. There were four letters “N”, “E”, “S”, “W” and a red-tipped arrow revolving on its axis on top of the object. When the arrow slowed down it pointed at me.

I realized that I was shivering badly. Something hot was hammering in my temples. My host stepped me backwards. I felt weak in my knees.

“Stop-op! You go with me,” the creature barked. Its eyes were a dim green. Some greenish liquid drooled off his hairy proboscis.

“I’m sane… I’m sane…” Fyodor lamented over and over. “I’m just… tired… Dogs don’t speak!”

I backed away and ran directly into a tooth’s wall.

Did you know?..
        
— Earthlings spend more than 90% of their lives sealed in rotten planetary teeth called “houses”. A third of the time they are almost lifeless and for the remainder they only move their eyes and hands.

— An average sedentary earthling only walks for 1-2% of his lifetime clocking up 1000-3000 steps per day but almost no jumps. Kintoopians, with 87% of our existence in motion, would definitely liven up this stiff planet.