Fred’s Unfortunate Phone Call
When Fred Levitts from Earth found an advertisement for Vega’s bar tending school and decided to call them, he thought he was making a wise decision. The advertisement was plain and simple. All it said was the school’s title followed by “My school is out of this world!” and a phone number. Unfortunately for him, the advertisement was also literal- Vega is a near sighted Bolaptoid with a nasty temper from the Avarix Galaxy.
The phone call that Fred had placed cost Vega 267,000 krumets in interstellar distance charges (which is quite a lot in case you’re not familiar with interstellar distance charges or krumets). Though Vega had a decent idea of how his number somehow ended up in the hands of Fred, he lied and said he didn’t and then complained for hours on end to a Customer Service Representative. Verizon Universe wouldn’t budge on the issue.
How Vega’s number ended up on Earth was actually half Vega’s fault and half chance. A couple years earlier, in a desperate attempt to meet the demands of his growing customer base, he ripped open random interstellar hyperspace holes and dumped numerous advertisements for his school into each of them. It just so happened that one opened up into the Milky Way Galaxy, an advertisement was caught in the Earth’s gravitational pull, and fell eventually into the hands of Fred.
After Vega reluctantly paid his phone bill on his Alturian Visa Card (the third best card in the universe), he made a trip through hyperspace to find the man that cost him so much money. Three Earth days later, Fred found himself face to face with Vega inside his home, which was a monument to all space exploration, movies, and novels. He knew the entire Klingon language, had watched every Star Trek episode known to mankind and had secret plans for building his own enterprise. For Halloween, even though he was thirty-six, he dressed up as Captain Kirk and went trick or treating. Quite clearly to every human, Fred was in love with space, but meeting a seven foot 300 pound Bolaptoid, which looks like a cross between a slug, a dog, and a millipede, was not Fred’s idea of fun.
Held at gun point by an unregistered Bolaptoid Death Ray, model X7R43, Fred was forced to leave everything behind and pay off the debt he unknowingly caused.
Vega’s Bar is located on the planet Vandragoth, a once thriving tourist destination but now desolate waste basket for the rest of the Avarix Galaxy. Farriages, also known as Heapers in common slang, collect garbage from central places on the other planets and dump it on Vandragoth’s barren, sweltering landscape.
Nobody wants to live on Vandragoth, which is the closest planet to the galaxy’s three suns. Each sun has recently been placed by the Soleare Company, which specializes in creating suns, to cast perpetual sunlight across many of Avarix’s planets allowing companies to dump their garbage whenever they want. This also makes Vandragoth hotter than the planet Hell. The Avarix Galaxy is home to no race but houses many. For example, Asranon, which is the fourth planet down the line, is covered in swamps and muddy water; where the Dollopians have settled after their home planet was eaten by a swarm of Zeebles.
After the shock of being the only human within a billion light years of his home wore off, Fred got to work immediately learning his new profession. He uses a mini computer that tells him everything there is to know about bar-tending. For instance, if you were to look up how to make a Tardaran Comet Tail, it would tell you how to make each drink and what its effect would be, and in this case the drink would make you feel as if you were attacked by a swarm of killer bees, which was quite a pleasurable thing to the Tardarans among others. It would also tell you what race would like that particular drink, what time of day you should serve it, what a good chaser for the drink would be, and finally how many times on average the drink would be ordered in a day, week, month and year. It also did this with the other 3,784 drinks he was supposed to learn.
Very quickly he memorized all the ingredients in the most common drinks, like a Vevarian Haze or a Lymhon Tentacle, which would either make one feel like they were made out of bricks or clouds respectively. A couple of the more uncommon drinks he makes are Parasite Defecators and Brick Faces, neither of which would be very polite to explain.
After his two week training was over, Vega decided to pay Fred 200 krumets an hour, which is a very low wage for any galactic bartender. Fred never sees any of it and he doesn’t expect to, but he doesn’t care as he feels the benefits of his job are amazing. He only works two hours in Vandragoth time a day (one Vandragoth hour is the equivalent to six Earth hours), opportunities to meet new people are always present, and the job has awesome health and vision benefits. Plus he gets a free room right above the bar.
He has fallen in love with his job, and often when Fred reflects back to his previous life he realizes that this is exactly what he had been looking for all along.
