Sliced Bread 2: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

"Man," I said, scrolling through data, "I can't believe how many times aliens have come to Earth. There must be ten pages of this stuff."

Ingrid was reading over my shoulder. "I remember that one," she said, pointing. "The giant rabbit assassin. He was trying to kill some guy up in Canada. I saw it on the news."

"The ones your mother saw were humanoid, green-skinned, and had tails, right? Did I miss anything?"

"She said they also had a kind of a mane."

"Okay," I said, scrolling some more. "I think I saw something like that." I clicked on the next-page link.

An explosion sounded far above our heads and the building shook a little. We looked at each other uneasily.

"You know what's weird about all these?" I said, pointing at the incident summaries. "They're all from since the late '80s."

"Why's that weird?"

"Why should all these aliens only decide to come visit once there's a such thing as superheroes? They've only been around since the '80s too."

"I don't know," she said. But she wasn't really interested.

"Wait a minute. Here we go. Check it out." There was an item from three years ago about Manxcat encountering a group of green, tailed humanoids skulking around an industrial neighborhood.

"That's them!" she said, punching me in the arm again.

"I know. Quit it." I typed and clicked and sorted and searched some more. It was too bad we couldn't just ask Manxcat about them.

Eventually I was able to click on a name and bring a dossier up on screen, and said, "There. That's our guy." Ingrid leaned forward.

His name was Archie Fehnruller. Petty criminal. He was mixed up in Manxcat's thing with the aliens in some way that the summary didn't make clear, and disappeared right after that. Reappeared three weeks ago. The dossier also included a list of his usual hangouts and habits.

"Then let's go get him," Ingrid said.

"Out there?" I said as another explosion vibrated the building.