Being invisible to the human naked eye was troubling to the Zornax, who had endured a difficult podhood and an even worse bairnhood on the planet Lanceanus. Without rends, lomans or tuntrymen, the Zornax had eventually drifted over to the twelve and thirteenth dimensions of the city of Contadorius, and had spent his eons on his Campagnolo-equipped Bianchi seeking out races and playing moonshot basketball. It had been lonely. Indeed, it had been so terrible for him that at one point his intellect had degraded past the point of zero knowledge into the realm of negative knowledge, a state rarely recovered from, as, obviously, one would not know how. If it hadn't been for the ministrations of a lost loman with faulty zargon capacitor he might have devolved far enough to be in thrall to the Shimano factor, a dangerous state of infatuation with fishing equipment from which few recover.

The Continuum-Fabulator only worked between worlds or universes. It was useless for intra-planetary travel. And the valves were leaky, anyway, so the Zornax resigned himself to being stuck on Earth for the time being. But being invisible was no picnic. Nor was the dinner of Belgian tourists he'd recently eaten rather half-heartedly. He was in a fix. He needed to get to Veneto to pay his respects to Tullio Campagnolo as quickly as possible. Because Campagnolo gave the Zornax meaning, and, no matter how many universes he had been to, meaning was still the ultimate mystery to be apprehended while never being apprehended. An existential dilemma, to be sure, but one that was, er, meaningful. Except on the planet Xbaan. The Xbaanians played a game called “golf,” and were the laughingstock of 47 million galaxies. They were weird.

Invisible. Putrid smell. No money. No air miles. No contacts. No bike! The Zornax was stuck in Toronto without a hope of getting to Italy. But worst of all, the cyto-titanium motion receptors suggested that he had only about 37 more crion-eons to live in the strange oxygen-rich atmosphere on earth. Granted, he didn’t know how to translate that into Earth time, but it could be anywhere from 37 nano-seconds to 37 centuries. Which was more likely? He could not tell.

Sitting there at the foot of the CN Tower, the Zornax scooped up another handful of tourists and chewed on them forlornly, pausing only to spit out the New Yorkers, whose rancid flavour was not to his taste. Ruminating on his conundrum wasn’t getting the Zornax anywhere, so he tried non-ruminating for a while, to see if that would help. But it was no use. No ideas came to mind or capacitor.

Then suddenly a member of the RCMP, proud in his red uniform and sitting on the sort of horse that made women swoon, poked through the fog of invisibility and pointed a pistol at the Zornax.

“Hey, you there…you’ve gotta stop making tourists disappear, it’s not very polite, eh?” the Mountie said. To which the Zornax replied, in Japanese: “I thought you RCMP types didn’t have any jurisdiction in Ontario?”

The Mountie couldn’t speak Japanese, but he was a sensitive type, and suspected, correctly, that the Zornax was challenging his jurisdiction. “Yeah, we don’t do policing in the province, per se, but we still work on federal investigations here. And sometimes we ride horses here because they look pretty. But eating tourists, which is what you’ve been doing, isn’t strictly a provincial matter, only. It’s a crime under any jurisdiction.”

The Zornax had to admit that the Mountie was right, and said so in Lithuanian before eating him. He sighed. How would he ever get to Italy?