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Ebeneezer “Benny” Barns had been laying still for hours, watching a magnificent monstrosity skulk up and down a tree. It looked like a squirrel would, if there was a squirrel that could and had killed a crocodile before fashioning a suit of armor out of its hide. It was a dark, sludgy green, with a random spattering of bright yellow stripes, like an artist had once tried to fend it off with a paintbrush. And it’s massive tail, at once, had both the prehensile grace of a boa and the needle coat of a porcupine.

All of this just to fetch dinner. Not his dinner but somebody’s. He wasn’t here for the tree-creature just for its eggs. From what he heard they tasted like lemons would if lemons weren’t a citrus fruit, which he had a little bit of trouble wrapping his head around. Rumor had it they were highly addictive but he didn’t know of any actual studies--not that he would’ve read them if he did.

Finally, the creature crawled down from its perch on the tree, away from its nest. Probably to go mark its territory. It wasn’t carnivorous as best he could tell, but it was extremely aggressive. Benny waited for it to disappear beyond his line of sight before making his move.

It was at that very moment that he heard the vibration on his wristwatch indicate that there was a mixer storm coming in fifteen minutes. Yeesh. As if the tree-creature wasn’t already scary enough.

The tree thing was gone. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t hear it. And if he acted quickly, he hopefully wouldn’t have to do either. So he took a deep breath, clenched his left hip just above the kneecap and produced his Skyline, a pocket-sized grappling line that could attach to most surfaces by automatically determining the most effective means, in this case, drilling into the wood.

Once he felt the line pull itself taut, he firmly wrapped both of his hands around the Skyline’s characteristically ergonomic handle. Intelligently, the Skyline held his hands back, just as it always did, by swallowing them with an inflatable graphene foam. A fraction of a second later, it tugged him skyward. If it were a stock model, it would’ve required him to vocally confirm that he was ready and met all of the dozen prerequisites for safe operation but in a ballsy, warranty-voiding move he’d manually disabled the safety features.

And so he soared, reeling up into the tree like a fish into a basket, using his momentum to swing under the branch and land safely atop the limb. It was a trivial matter to load up the eggs into his pack, all seven of them. But the hard part would definitely be sprinting back to his ship. If he were a smarter man, he would’ve scattered when he received the warning. But Benny was far too emotionally invested in getting these eggs to market to [i]do the smart thing[/i].

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Next stop: The Thermopylae.