Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Well, this was interesting, but definitely not the right place to hide, Penny decided. She needed to get out of here fast before the same tentacles that had ripped away the toupee and used it as a bizarre hairy garnish decided she was some kind of new ingredient too.
She had been standing there, frozen to the spot while the tentacles flowed all around her. Now, she began to back slowly away. The door was right behind her—all she had to do was push through it and—
But just at that moment, someone opened the door and rang a bell. Then they shoved in a large box of what looked like some kind of fruit or vegetable. Whichever it was, it was about a meter long and it had green and purple vertical stripes running the length of it. Penny almost tripped over the box since it was shoved almost into her calves.
“Oh!” she gasped, barely keeping herself from falling “ass over teakettle” as her mom would have said. Somehow, she managed to keep her balance.
But it might have been better if she had fallen to the floor. Because the next minute, one of the longer, thicker tentacles had curled around her waist and Penny found herself lifted into the air and swooping towards the chopping block where another long tentacle, which was curled around the sharpest, biggest cleaver she had ever seen, awaited her.
Fifteen
“No!” Penny shrieked, as the second tentacle raised the cleaver and the first one positioned her on the vast chopping block, which still had traces of the black and white toupee on it. “No, please—you’re making a mistake! I’m not food!”
“You will be in a minute if we don’t get you out of here,” a voice from the door said.
Looking around wildly, Penny saw the triple-breasted woman she’d seen when she had first entered the Lucky Lounge, standing just inside the kitchen door.
“Bubba!” the woman shouted, clearly talking to the bulbous octopus being in the center of the vast room. “Hey, Bubba—stop!”
But her words didn’t seem to have any effect. The cleaver was rising over Penny’s neck and in the next minute, she was going to be decapitated. As it came whistling down, Penny’s thoughts were a blur.
Oh God, don’t let it end this way! Please—I don’t want to die!
But the triple-breasted woman wasn’t giving up. She grabbed a huge frying pan from a rack on the wall and threw it with all her might at the purple octopus chef.
The three little eyes, which had been half-lidded in a sleepy stupor, suddenly popped open. Even better, all of the tentacles froze in mid-motion. Penny swallowed hard—the clever was bare inches from her throat.
That’s a girl you’ve got there, not a new ingredient,” the triple-breasted woman bawled at the octo-chef. “Put her down, you big idiot!”
She pointed at Penny, who was still frozen in place with the thick, muscular tentacle wrapped around her arms and waist and the cleaver hovering right above her throat.
The octo-chef stared stupidly at her for a moment, then the tentacle holding the cleaver retreated and the one wrapped around her waist lifted Penny and deposited her beside the triple-breasted woman with a thump.
“Oh thank God! Thank God!” Penny babbled, clutching at the woman. She felt weak with relief—so weak she thought she might faint. “Please, I have to get out of here!”
“Take it easy, little sister.” The woman looped an arm around her waist and helped Penny out of the kitchen. “Sorry about that,” she said, once they were in the hallway again. “Bubba’s actually really smart—well, for a multi-pod, anyway. But most of his smarts are in his arms.”
“They are?” Penny asked. She still felt dazed.
“Well, sure. Everybody knows seventy-five percent of a multi-pod’s intelligence is located in the arms,” the woman said. “They all have little brains of their own—located in the base of each arm, you know?”
“Uh, sure.” Penny nodded. “Sorry, I’ve never seen a, uh, multi-pod before,” she added.
“Well, now you have,” the woman smiled cheerfully. “Thank goodness I heard you screaming in there or it would have been the last thing you saw, too!” She shook her head, her long pink hair swishing against her bare shoulders. “You’d think that big dumb idiot would learn a lesson after he diced up our best pot boy last week and put him in the nardik stew.”
“He did? So I’m not the first one that happened to?” Penny was aghast.
“Honey, you’re not even the fifth person it’s happened to,” the woman confided. “Why do you think the sous chefs just ring the bell and push the ingredients into the kitchen instead of going in themselves? Nobody wants to be next to get made into varda pie or whatever the special of the day is. I’m Shurla, by the way,” she added.
“Oh, I’m Penelope. But my friends call me Penny,” Penny said automatically.