And then she was back on Earth, in the darkness, lying in rubble with a new friend. The “friend” was a large brown spider thing that looked very much like a stuffed toy. It said its name was Tuffy, for values of “said.” The best Mimi had ever been able to explain is that knowledge appeared in her head as if she had always had it.

Mimi had then gotten up and gone to the light. The light, Klieg lights in fact, had been set up at the base studying the brand new Chen Anomaly. Mimi’s brief period in some otherwhere had taken most of that day and it was nearly midnight when she stumbled into a group that was taking a break from studying the enigmatic black globe that was Ray Chen’s final legacy. Among those present was William Weaver, Ph.D., who at the time had no idea of the wonders he was about to experience. Already worried about potential biological contamination a deputy sheriff, against Weaver’s advice, had attempted to relieve Mimi of her new friend. Tuffy had extended two of his ten legs, extended or extruded some claws and zapped the deputy with what was later suspected to be about four thousand volts of electricity.

After that, nobody tried to take Tuffy away from Mimi. Even her school had allowed the alien “friend” — the word “pet” was never used — to attend with her.

During his investigation of the Anomaly, Weaver had experienced some very strange events. One of them was either a vivid hallucination or a period of time outside the universe, a place that had no definition of “real” for anyone, even the most out-there physicist. In that time of untime he had either met other “Tuffys” or had hallucinated them. However, some of the revelations that had come from the sojourn indicated to him that Tuffys were real, for values of “real,” and that the being that rode on Mimi’s shoulder was from that unplace. In fact, there was an argument he occasionally had with himself as to whether Tuffy was, in fact, God, or at least some reasonable approximation.