Page 69 of Roping Her Alien Ranchers

These beings could traverse the stars, but they couldn’t handle basic domestic Earth tasks.

25

TAMMY

A fight to the death… with a vacuum.

“This is a formidable opponent!” Vantor grunted, still struggling to win against the heavy, old Hoover.

“Oh for—” I lunged across the kitchen, my bare feet slipping slightly on egg white as I made my way to the vacuum cleaner. “You’re supposed to be the defensive genius!”

I dropped to my knees beside Vantor, reached around the vacuum’s body, and yanked the plug from the wall socket. The machine gave one last defiant whine before dying, its death grip on Vantor’s tentacle finally relaxing.

Vantor stared at the plug in my hand with what could only be described as embarrassment mixed with awe. “A kill switch,” he muttered. “Tactical oversight.”

“It’s not an enemy combatant,” I explained, carefully helping him extract his tentacle from the roller brush. The appendage was clearly tender, its usual vibrant color slightly dulled where the brush had caught it. “It’s a vacuum cleaner. It sucks up dirt. You don’t fight with it; you control it.”

I demonstrated by holding the handle properly, making a short sweeping motion before setting it aside. “See? Not a weapon.”

Vantor’s expression was so serious that I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “I have underestimated Earth technology,” he said gravely, examining his injured appendage. “It will not happen again.”

A crash from behind me announced that Kalith had dropped something else. I spun around to find him standing amid a growing pile of coffee maker parts, his expression shifting between determination and despair. The grounds had settled over everything like a fine dark dust, including Kalith himself, giving him the appearance of having been caught in some bizarre coffee sandstorm.

“The caffeine extraction system is more complex than initially assessed,” he admitted, holding up what I recognized as the heating element, now bent at an angle that couldn’t possibly be functional. “But I am confident that with additional time and resources⁠—”

“Fix it,” I interrupted, my voice taking on an edge that surprised even me. My red hair had fallen across my face, and I blew it away with an exasperated huff. “I don’t care how, but you better fix my coffee pot or your ‘come in peace’ is going to become ‘leave in pieces.’”

His eyes widened at my tone, and for a moment, I caught a glimpse of what might have been genuine alarm rippling across his skin in waves of green. Then he nodded quickly, tentacles moving with renewed purpose among the scattered components.

I turned my attention to Cyro, who was still meticulously sorting through the egg mess, separating shell fragments from the gooey mixture with intense focus. His human disguise was mostly in place, though occasional flashes of purple iridescence shimmered across his forearms as he worked.

“You,” I said, pointing at him with what I hoped was intimidating authority. “Pick out all the shells—now! And then find a way to make those eggs edible.”

He blinked at me, those metallic eyes catching the light. “The protein denaturation process has already begun due to exposure to air. Cooking at this stage will⁠—”

“I don’t need a scientific paper,” I cut him off. “I need breakfast!”

I stepped back, surveying the state of my beautiful new kitchen—now a war zone of coffee grounds, egg slime, and alien confusion. The countertops that had gleamed so impressively just minutes ago were now covered in a fine layer of dark grounds that crunched underfoot. Egg dripped slowly from the edge of the island, forming a viscous puddle on the pristine tile. The vacuum lay on its side like a vanquished foe, still holding strands of purplish tentacle fiber in its brush.

And in the midst of it all stood three powerful beings from beyond the stars, looking for all the world like scolded children caught in the cookie jar. Their human disguises flickered and rippled under stress, hints of their true forms showing through—a tentacle here, a flash of otherworldly color there, eyes that occasionally revealed double lids or pupils that contracted vertically instead of in circles.

My brand-new kitchen was a disaster zone, breakfast was nowhere in sight, and I was standing in the middle of it all in my mismatched pajamas with no coffee in my system. By all rights, I should have been furious.

Instead, I felt something dangerously close to affection blooming beneath my exasperation. These impossible beings had transformed my kitchen overnight as a gesture of... what? Gratitude? Friendship? Whatever it was, they’d done it because they cared, and now they were trying—however catastrophically—to take care of me.

God help me, it was actually kind of sweet.

“You’re all hopeless,” I sighed, pushing my hair back from my face. “Completely hopeless.”

I grabbed a mixing bowl from one of the new cabinets—at least they’d put things back in roughly the right places—and began scraping the least-shelly egg mixture into it. If I could salvage enough of Cyro’s “perfectly crack a calcium carbonate, crystalline ellipsoid” experiment, I might be able to make something resembling scrambled eggs. The coffee grounds crunched beneath my bare feet as I moved around the kitchen, a sound that made me wince with each step. The beautiful new floor, covered in breakfast shrapnel before I’d even had a chance to properly appreciate it.

“You missed a fragment,” Cyro observed, pointing to a nearly microscopic piece of eggshell in the mixture. He leaned in with scientific intensity, his silver eyes narrowed as he extracted the offending shard with surgical precision. “The calcium carbonate structure would create an unpleasant textural contrast with the protein coagulation.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, whisking the eggs with more vigor than necessary. Behind me, I could hear Kalith’s continued tinkering with the coffee maker, punctuated by occasional mutters in what I assumed was his native language—sounds like water bubbling through strange pipes.

Vantor had retreated to the corner, nursing his injured tentacle while keeping a suspicious eye on the now-dormant vacuum cleaner. The appendage was slowly retracting back into his human disguise, though it twitched occasionally as if still remembering its trauma.

As I turned to the stove—at least they hadn’t dismantled that yet—I caught the three aliens exchanging glances over my head. Cyro leaned toward the others, his voice dropping to what he probably thought was a whisper but was actually perfectly audible.