"Wait!" Snerdly cried, backpedaling toward the doorway and promptly knocking himself out against the doorframe.

            Bruce frowned. "We don't have the right wine to serve with steak," he informed Fluffy icily. "So you can just forget it."

            Mollie took control of the situation. "Okay, LOOK! SOMEone here is the killer!"

            "But Snerd-dude is like, totally UNdead," Sparki pointed out unnecessarily, "Wouldn't that make it an UNkiller?"

            Craig began to tune a fiddle string with a minute and

delicate YANK. "Obvious..." he muttered, nibbling on a bit of rosin. "Ipso Facto, Quid Pro Quo, Kumquats Oblivious..."

            Fluffy eyed him sharply. "Let's start with you." she said decisively, "Where were YOU at the time of the murder.... ALLEGED murder?" She corrected herself quickly as Sparki drew breath to expostulate.

            Craig looked uncomfortable. "Weeel...." he said, drumming stained fingers on his fiddle case, "I'll tell ye how it was..."

            The others listened, surprised.      

            "It was round aboot the middle o' the night," Craig admitted carefully, "When I heard a strange and bizarre noise ootside my window."

            Fluffy leaned forward in excitement. "What KIND of noise?"

            Craig shrugged. "A wheezing and whining and squealing sort o' noise, squeaky and shrill and loud." He shrugged. “I figured it was some Englishman trying to play the bagpipes. Well I went ootside to find oot what was going on, and that's when I saw it."

            There was a suspenseful silence for all of three seconds, before the band cried in unison (for once!) "WHAT WAS IT?!!!"

Craig gestured dramatically with his fiddle bow, and lowered his voice to a whisper. "An alien space ship."

            Pillow snorted. "Are there any other kind?"

Fluffy shushed her and turned back to Craig, who was still eyeing Snerdly nervously, lest he come to life again.

            Fluffy's expression was intense, as she leaned in close to the fiddler. "Where was the Space ship?"

            Craig crossed his arms across his chest and stared brazenly back at her. "In the car park, where else?"

            Pillow dropped into an armchair and shook her head. "Fluffy, I'm not sure about all of this."

            Slander, leaning comfortably near the door, rolled his eyes. Sparki gestured at them to totally, like, chill. "What happened next, fiddle dude?"

            Craig scratched his head. "Weel, it a' happened kind o' fast after that, but I remember the main hatch opening...and light coming from the ship and lighting up the whole place. There was an alien, at the top o' the ramp, ye ken, and it came out of the ship, and headed towards me."

            "What did it look like?" Slander said, interested after all.

            Craig frowned..."not like a human, not really anyway...sort of shorter and rounder and...and...Red. And when it walked, it...it..."

 The band was hanging on every word.

            "Lunged?"

            "Crawled?"

            "Stalked?"

Craig shrugged. "Well...it waddled."

The band was taken aback.

"Er....did you say waddled?"

            Craig glared defensively at Pillow. "Do you want to hear this or don't ye?"

            Fluffy gestured impatiently at her companions. "What happened next?"

            Craig sighed. "Well it was coming right where I was standin', but just as it reached me, the hatch of the space ship closed, and the lights went out. I was stumbling aboot in the dark..." ("This is different why?" muttered Mollie) "... And tripped over something, and fell smack into the alien. I tried to catch meself with my hands, but caught it instead. At least I did until it jumped in the air and shouted fit to wake the..."  his eye fell once more upon Snerdly  "...er, dead."

Fluffy was fascinated. "What did it say?"

Craig looked back at her sheepishly. "It said.... Uh-Oh."

Slander and Pillow snorted in unison, and Hamish reached for his pipes to see if he could replicate the harmony.

            Sparki was stunned. "Whoa! DUDES, that is EXACTLY what happened to me last night!"

            The others looked up, startled.

            "I was outside totally doing the moon tan thing, ya know, ya know? And when I saw the ship I struggled through the jungle, fought my way through the underbrush, and finally staggered straight to the foot of the mondo long exit ramp thing."

            Mollie shook her head. "Why didn't you just use the sidewalk?"

            Sparki stared back, confused. "Like, where's the fun in that?"

            Fluffy tried to regain control, and was only marginally successful. "So did you see it too?" she demanded.

            Sparki nodded, "Totally did, stake-wielding-on-the-edge vampire-stalker-chick.... Only the alien dude wasn't red at all, it was lime-electric-green."

            Fluffy looked exasperated. "Are you SURE?"

Sparki eyed her narrowly, then flashed a typically bedazzled smile. "Like totally!"

            Hamish set down his pipes and stood up. "I saw the alien too."

            Craig shook his head in disbelief. Sparki grinned again. Tasha stared woefully at her slippers.

            "I was up late the night," Hamish expounded, "An' a braw bricht moonlicht nicht it was..."

            (Mollie reached for a room service menu to clobber him, and Hamish sped up the telling.)

            "I was up watching Braveheart on cable... again... and I heard a noise as well."

            Bruce paled. "Was it the attack cry of an enraged alien creature?"

            Hamish shook his head.  "No, it was Craig, swearing."

            Fluffy waved her hands in the air. "Wait a minute! So you saw the alien too?"

            Hamish nodded ponderously, and pointed his pipes at Craig. "The alien," he said shortly, "Was Yellow".

            With that, pandemonium broke lose, as Sparki, Hamish and Craig argued alien colors to the bitter end.

            Fluffy turned the lights out with a flick of the wall switch, and silence fell upon the room at once, except for a squeal from the doorway, where Snerdly (who was supposed to be undead, or at LEAST unconscious) pinched Pillow on the butt.

            When the lights came back on, everyone was silent.

            "ALL of you are right!" Fluffy said with a grimace, pointing at one and then the others. "Each of you came in contact with a DIFFERENT alien...look at your hands!"  Sure enough, what had appeared to be ink stains on the hands of the band members, was obviously some sort of glowing alien surface substance. Craig's hands were glowing red, Sparki's glowing green, and Hamish's unmistakably Yellow.           

            Fluffy nodded grimly. "There were more than one set of Alien footprints, too."

            Mollie thrust purple stained hands guiltily behind her back. "Ummm... how many sets of footprints would you say there were?"

            Fluffy looked at her expectantly. "There were four."

The others turned to stare at Mollie.

            "Ye said that ye didna spend last night alone..." Hamish glowered, "Have ye any proof?"

            "She does."  Pillow rose from the armchair and opened a copy of the hotel register. "The proof is written here."

            Mollie gulped as Bruce took the register in well-manicured fingers and stared in horror at the page.

            "I guess we know where the fourth alien spent the night..." Slander whistled, as Mollie snatched the book away from Bruce's suddenly nerveless fingers.

            "I can't believe it!" the hairdresser wailed in shocked dismay, "I could have SWORN Tinky Winky was gay!"

            Hamish and Craig choked at this, and had to be pounded on the back by Sparki, who was grinning wildly.

"You mean Snerdly was unkilled by the tele-total-tubbies? That is hysterico-Primo!"

            A sudden sound from outside brought them all to the window, as the alien's mysterious space ship lifted off from the ground and disappeared, leaving a trail of cheesy theme music in it's wake.

            Fluffy closed the register. "Well, now that we have that figured out..." she said brusquely, sharpening Craig's spare fiddle bow into a wooden stake, "It's time to deal with this one."

            The others stared at the doorway where, sure enough, Snerdly had regained consciousness, and was groaning in confusion. 

            Fluffy raised the impromptu stake, flanked by Pillow and Slander, but was stopped by a wail from Tasha.

            "The knife is still in his back! EEEEEEEEEEEEEW!"

            With that, she once again climbed Craig like a flagpole. Losing his balance, Craig stumbled backward onto one of the beds and stayed there, doing nothing to dislodge her.

            Mollie kicked him.   

            Slander held a hand out in front of Fluffy. "Wait! Are you SURE that he's undead?"

            Pillow snorted. "Of COURSE he is! Look at that pasty complexion and those conscienceless eyes!"

            Tasha cocked her head, climbed off Craig, and peered across the room. "He always looks like that."

            Cautiously stepping over Bruce (who was still huddled in a disillusioned heap on the floor) Fluffy approached Snerdly and peered at the knife, then pulled it from his back with a decided YANK. Snerdly jumped, but more or less failed to fall over dead, as they all stared in disbelief at the green piece of plastic that was speared on the tip of the blade.

            "The knife never even touched him!" Hamish breathed. (In relief or disappointment I cannot say.)

            Sparki whistled. "But it sure made credit-kebab out of the old limitless!"

            Mollie swore.

            Craig sighed.

            Tasha joined Bruce on the floor where they wept in companionable dampness.

            Fluffy dropped the stake and headed for the doorway, Pillow and Slander in tow.

            "Well, that answers every question but one" she said, just before turning to go. "NOW what will we do for a season finale!"

"I want you to know" Bruce glared at Snerdly, who was on his hands and knees beside him. "I blame you entirely."

            Hamish glared, and hitched his plaid out of a stream of soapy water Mollie had deliberately sent his way. "Stop yer arguin', it willnae do any good at all." he glowered.

            Tasha peered out from under her fashionable sun hat and adjusted the protective rubber gloves that matched her other accessories. "Huh?"

            Craig sighed, and plunged a scrub brush into a nearby bucket of soapy water. "We're lucky they didna' arrest us," he pointed out, as Bruce gave him A LOOK. "Without the limitless credit card we canna' pay the hotel bill."

            Mollie glared at all of them. "We can't leave until we've worked off what we owe, so GET TO WORK!"

            With that the Neon Lites sighed as one, and went back to scrubbing colorful alien footprints from the sidewalk in front of the car park.