D. A. V. E.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a wet blanket. I like adventure and I'm always curious about the world. I sky dive, I climb and I just started taking parkour lessons for crying out loud!

But I hate parties!

I hate all that pressure and I hate the fact that every Friday night I end up standing next to someone's trash can, holding an empty Solo cup and listening to conversations about the neighborhood chic, produce and restaurants.

It was Friday again and it looked like, after a long time of successfully dodging that ordeal, I had to attend a vintage retro party at my friend Calvin’s place. I knew I could just scrap it but enduring the temporary stress of yet another dreary shindig seemed more manageable than the everlasting reproach I could have faced from my old friend later on.

And that would be the pressure part...

***

“Excuse me!”

A woman with Hedi Lamarr's face stood right in front of me.

“Hi, I'm Gregory. You can call me Greg…”, I said awkwardly.

I shifted my Solo cup from right to left hand expecting a handshake. The music was very loud. One more thing I never understood about parties. If every party turns into a babble fest, why the loud music? Why are people willing to tear their larynx apart only to make a point about produce at a local farmers' market?

“Could you just…?”

The woman looked through me with a trace of impatience. I realized I was blocking her way to the trash can.

“Of course! Sorry…”

I let her squeeze past me so she could throw out her nearly empty Solo cup.

"That's recycling!", a young man with suspenders protested.

She ignored it.

Some of her wine droplets spilled on my pants. Fortunately, they were dark brown "vintage retro" corduroys.

I really needed to pee!

***

“I apologize for earlier...”, I heard a voice behind me in line to the bathroom. The woman with Hedi Lamarr's face was right behind me!

"These crowded parties always throw me off kilter. I never feel like myself…", she added.

"Don’t mention it! House parties, huh? Don't you think those cups should be used as vomit buckets?”

She laughed.

"I'm Nadia," she held out her right hand. “Greg…? Do I remember correctly?”

“Good memory! Sadly I don't have a knack for names but on a good day I might even remember my own!”

She laughed again.

“Don't worry about it!”, she said. “Merciful Lord! Is this person asleep in there? I'm literally falling to pieces...”

She barely finished her sentence when a large, bearded guy came out, drunk as a fish.

“You go ahead! I'm not that desperate yet…”, I offered even though my bladder was just about ready to burst.

“You are very kind, Greg!”

She disappeared into the bathroom.

I waited.

“Next, please!”, she said playfully few minutes later. Her face seemed a bit brighter and more refreshed and… it looked like she had changed her dress from golden satin to dark red silk with long black gloves covering her forearms. I thought it was a bit weird, but I knew that some people liked to change outfits at parties.

***

I must have peed for at least five minutes straight. It's amazing how much fluid one human bladder can hold! When I left the bathroom, Nadia was gone.

I grabbed another Solo cup and filled it with tap water just to keep my hands busy. Some realtor next to me just started talking about a new luxury condo development in town. I moved from the kitchen to the living room where a lively conversation about the newly opened Thai restaurant was about to unfold.

“There you are!” Nadia waved at me from across the room. This time she was wearing a sparkling blue dress and her hair was pinned up.

“Nadia! I thought you’d left already…”

“Without saying goodbye first? How could I!”, she replied teasingly, “Besides, I just got a swell idea... Since this party isn’t really happening, how about you and me find something more suitable? What do you think?”

I squeezed my now empty Solo cup with pretend rage, a gesture that seemed a lot funnier in my head…

“You mean crash the party across the street?”, I asked.

“Now we're talking! Do you know how to crash a party?”

“I must admit I haven’t had a chance so far…”

 “It's quite simple. You just walk in like a prince and if someone bothers you, you just say 'I'm with Dave’…”

“Who is Dave?”, I asked.

“Exactly!” She interlaced her hands and looked at me as if desperately trying to find at least one brain cell inside of my thick skull.

I relaxed my eyebrows. Now I got it! The name is so common that finding at least one Dave in a crowd of several dozen people is stunningly likely.

“Very clever! I’m in!”, I said.

“Let me change first!”, Nadia said before she disappeared into the bathroom again, only to emerge in a green velvet dress this time.

“How many of these can she fit in that little purse?”, I wondered.

“Shall we?” She slipped her hand under my elbow.

Calvin was just in the middle of a heated discussion about the superiority of European wines over the Californian ones so I just waved him good bye. He seemed pleased seeing me leave with a girl. He's been pestering me about being single since my divorce two years ago.

***

The house across the street pulsed with lively rhythmic beats spun out by an actual DJ. The inside seemed somehow larger than the outside. Tardis came to my mind but I made sure to keep such observations to myself ever since high school.

LED lighting, projections and laser displays gave the room an otherworldly, sophisticated aura. There was a sign over the entrance that read “Scrambler Party“. ”Now that’s a theme I can work with”, I thought, “It’s vague enough to prevent the guests from losing their marbles over what to wear!”

The guests seemed relaxed. Some of them danced, others were making out. No babbling. Not a single Solo cup in sight. It almost seemed like an alternate reality!

“Let’s blend in. It should be fine…”, said Nadia.

I glanced at my wine stained "vintage retro" corduroys. At least my deep blue suit jacket looked presentable.

“Sure! Piece of cake!”

***

“Hold on just a second!”

A deep voice thundered behind us. It belonged to a guy whose arms were larger and more muscular than my legs used to be during my mountain biking phase.

“And you are?” He was holding a clipboard.

“We're with Dave?”, I said with the confidence of a jelly fish, though I knew by then it might have been a bad idea after all.

The bouncer's face suddenly dropped. He turned towards the DJ and made a slit throat gesture. The music stopped. The silence was deafening. Everyone stared at me and my new companion. Some guests stood up and left in a hurry.

“My mistake, madam, sir!”

The bouncer seemed to have shrunk to about half his original size.

“Please follow me…”

He took us to a room in the back. Three men sat inside. One of them was wearing a trilby hat, the other two gave off an undefined thug-bodyguard vibe.

“People from... Dave…”, the bouncer announced our presence. The men straightened up like startled meerkats.

“H... how’s… that!”, the trilby stuttered. “But… but… Dave made it clear there would be no trouble if we just held on to the… Is this really a good time to... We‘ve just had it done and we’ve barely celebrated...”

There was nothing else left to do but go with the flow of this horrid misunderstanding, and it seemed like Nadia was already on it. She leaned over their table like a praying mantis.

“Don't screw around, boy!”, she hissed at the trilby. “If Dave decides to do this now, it means WHAT!”

She cupped her ear in the palm of her hand.

“It means we have to do what Dave says…”, the trilby replied humbly.

“Very good!”, Nadia said. “Now, if you please…”

Trilby tilted his head towards the bouncer. A few moments later the giant handed me a large brown leather bag of what I assumed had to be either cash or drugs.

“Jesus! There must be at least half a million in here!” I thought judging by the weight and volume.

I pulled myself together.

“Let it be a lesson to you fellows”, I said naively. “Don't mess with Dave!”

The men were too scared to notice how poor my bluff was.

The bouncer walked us out the door politely.

***

“Keep walking. Someone may be following us!”, Nadia said.

“What's happening! Do you know these people?”, I turned to her for explanation.

“You're kidding, right? We both crashed this party without knowing what to expect, remember?”

“Right, right, forgive me... I'm just impressed with the improv you pulled off back there…"

"I knew these drama classes I took in school were worth something!", she joked.

"Who the hell is this Dave guy, I wonder?”

“Some big wig in this part of town is my guess…”, she said.

“What are we going to do now?”, I was at a loss.

“Just keep the bag safe… and don't touch it for now...”, said Nadia, “...don't worry, I trust you.”

We stashed the bag in my hallway closet. She stayed for the night. For some reason she was reluctant to undress in front of me and asked me to lend her my bathrobe. I didn't make a big deal out of it. "It's between her and her shrink", I thought.

***

Two days passed since I parted my ways with Nadia. I was beginning to worry and I would lie if I said I didn't miss her.

Then my phone rang...

“Nadia, thanks God!”, I answered with relief.

“Heard you got something that doesn't belong to you”, said a raspy voice on the other side. “Now we will give you a choice: either return it to us or your shapeshifter lady friend dies!”

“Shapeshifter...? What's that supposed to mean! Who is this?”

“Make your best guess!”, said the voice.

“Dave?”, I replied after a long pause.

“Very good! Now listen carefully…”

***

I parked my car in an empty parking lot outside of an abandoned amusement park. I took out the bag and waited. This time I couldn’t help my curiosity so I unzipped it and looked inside.

My legs got soft…

Newspapers!

There were old newspapers in the bag instead of money or drugs, and before I could do anything about it, a black limousine had already pulled up next to me!

Nadia got out first. Some thug with a large burn scar covering half of his face held her by the forearm. He was wearing dark brown corduroy pants and a deep blue uniform jacket. An older woman wearing a green dress of the kind Nadia wore on the night of the Scrambler party pointed some strange device at me.

I wasn't sure if Dave was in the limo.

“Got it?”, asked the thug.

"Let my friend go!"

I handed him the bag. He let go of Nadia and threw the bag into the limousine without even looking inside. It was a very fortunate oversight on his part!

Nadia was now wearing a black blouse and blue jeans.

“Quick! Get in the car!”, I said with a rushed whisper.

I started the car slowly, but as soon as we turned the corner I pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

“There were newspapers in the bag, Nadia! What's all this shapeshifter business? Who the hell are you?”, I asked Nadia without slowing down. I glanced in the rear view mirror. The limo was right behind us. They knew!

“Shit!”

“Just drive! I'll explain everything”, said Nadia.

I made a few unexpected turns and entered a one-way street from the wrong side. The thing about limos is that they are not too spry when it comes to sudden turns.

It worked.

Nadia was now wearing a purple sweater and a green skirt. At this point, I was just too high on adrenaline to care.

“Greg?”, said Nadia after some time of driving through a quiet countryside, “I'm not really human…”.

She paused to check my reaction.

“It's not much of a news for me at this point", I said, "Is Dave a shapeshifter too?”

“Dave is not a person.”, she said. “It's a dangerous inter-dimensional organization. Dimensional Annexations and Void Executions (D. A. V. E.) is its full name. That party we crashed was just one of the portals into their world… D. A. V. E. planned to take over your dimension by using The Scrambler - a newly constructed device meant to disrupt the boundaries between worlds and turn your dimension into a quantum soup.”

There were too many questions crowding my mind at the moment so I focused on the shapeshifter part for now...

“Does that mean I don't even know what you really look like?”

“Yes, but if it makes you feel any better, neither do I. As shapeshifters, we can take any shape and appearance, but the concept of an 'original form' is foreign to us.”, she explained.

“ So… your current appearance is just…”

“My choice… And because it's my choice it really does represent who I am. One day I just decided that my look should be based on a human I greatly admired and so...”

“Let me guess... Hedy Lamarr?”, I blurted.

“Very good!"

"But you still do shape shift...", I observed.

"Yes. We must change our form cyclically when we are in our awakened state, otherwise our cellular structure loses its integrity. My changes in appearance have a lot to do with the fact that I love human outfits.”

“I’ve noticed…”

She smiled and just for my benefit changed into a black dress from the Edwardian period complete with a feathered hat, large enough to distract me from driving.

I sneezed.

“So, what about the bag? Where are the contents?”, I asked.

“All I knew was that people from D. A. V. E. were after the brown bag and I knew they would catch up with us eventually. Your landlord fixing the window leak at your place yesterday? That was me... I switched the contents of the bag before you could suspect anything. I deliberately made it easy for D. A. V. E. to capture me after I hid The Scrambler in a safe place. When they interrogated me, I told them where the bag was and I didn't even have to lie...”

“I see… Good job on that repair by the way!”, I said.

"My pleasure!".

Silence…

“So… since we met at that party I was merely a pawn in your game, was I?”

“Your game, Greg! Please understand! The stakes are very high in this one!

If D. A. V. E. got their hands on The Scrambler, it wouldn't bode well for all life in your dimension. I had to intercept them before that fool in a trilby could figure out what was up. He knew that D. A. V. E. would send their people to fetch the device eventually but it wasn’t going to be so soon. We were fortunate he was stupid enough to believe we worked for D. A. V. E."

“But why me?”, I asked.

“Well... I needed an accomplice and a decoy, someone who can do well under pressure, someone who can’t stand boredom. When I saw you back there standing next to that sad trash can… Besides, you were dressed for the job...”

“I see... Brown corduroys with blue suit jacket. What are the chances!”

"Turn here!"

She pointed in the general direction of a meadow by the side of the road.

“Go straight this way!”

I turned and drove about five hundred yards into the soft grass.

“Stop!”

She got out of the car. A strange glowing object was sticking out of the bushes nearby. It must have been The Scrambler.

“Thank you Greg, you’ve been a great help. I hope we can meet again under more pleasant circumstances…”, Nadia said.

She took a small gizmo out of the pocket of what now appeared to be green cargo pants and pushed a few buttons.

I raised my index finger and took a breath.

“Oh, and… don’t worry about D. A. V. E.!”, she cut me off before I could say anything.

“They won’t be much of a threat to you now. They can't survive in this dimension for too long and once I take away The Scrambler, they will just…”

Sudden whooshing sound and a bright flash of light ate her last words.

Nadia teleported out along with The Scrambler.

***

Another Friday, another party. Here I am standing next to yet another trash can, holding yet another empty Solo cup, listening to conversations about neighborhood chic, restaurants and produce. Only now it's different because now I'm on a look out for the woman with Hedi Lamarr's face. I know she will be back.