Sliced Bread 2: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

The big problem with making a plan to stick it to Fehnruller and Misty was that we didn't know a damn thing about this planet, didn't speak the language, and nobody around here was on our side. Okay, that's more than one big problem.

"I don't think there's any way around it," I told Ingrid at the end of one long day, as I was curling up on a flattened cardboard box. "We don't have any resources here to draw on. We don't have tools or weapons or a way home. We don't know where the hell we are, or how to find out. We don't know anybody here, or speak their language. It'd probably be pretty easy to, I don't know, cut Fehnruller's throat while he's asleep, but then what?"

"I was thinking about that," Ingrid said. "But you're wrong when you say we don't speak anyone's language. There are two people around whose language we do speak."

Hmm. "So, turn them against each other, is what you mean."

"Yeah. We need to find a way to get one of them to screw over the other in such a way that it gets us home and puts us in a position where we can screw over the one who's left."

"Any idea how?" I asked her.

"Not really. They're both pretty dumb, so that helps. But neither of them really want to hear a whole lot out of us."

"I bet they do," I said. "The whole reason they brought us here is that they're lonely for other humans. They think they just want to shove us around, but really that'll never satisfy them. We have to figure out how to get them talking."

"And what makes them tick," she said, stretching out on a garbage bagful of Misty's imported tampon stockpile.

"You know what else we should start doing?" I asked.

"What?"

"Start trying to learn the damn language. It'd give us such an advantage."

"Yeah," she said, and rolled onto her back. Then she sat up. "C'mon."

"Where we going?"

"Eavesdropping," she said. "We've got to start somewhere."

We tiptoed down the hexagonal hallway to Fehnruller and Misty's bedroom door, where we could hear a conversation. And that was when our plan started taking shape.