It was Not a Coffee Plant

Written by Anakin McFly

Gutkaffee
Sometime in the 23rd century
Stardate something-point-something.

The planet Gutkaffee was known to be completely uninhabited, with absolutely no fauna to speak off. Its main flora consisted of an unusually large number of coffee plants – an alien variation of them – that covered almost the entire land surface of the planet, and the beans from these plants produced really great tasting coffee, which led to the name of the planet.

It therefore came as a sort of a shock for the landing crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise to suddenly see a huge brown alien appear out of nowhere and look at them in a hungry sort of way.

It was huge. It was brown. It had teeth. It was hungry. It was not a coffee plant.

“Spock, I thought you said that sensors indicated no life form readings on this planet,” Kirk said, wondering if he had just seen some sort of light ripple above the animal.

The half-Vulcan stared down at his tricorder. “It wasn’t here before,” he said. “It seems it’s not even from this planet.” He paused. “Captain, I think I’ve discovered the source of the temporal opening we spotted earlier. It seems that this creature somehow… came through it. Fascinating.”

Spock walked up a little closer to the rancor, his tricorder flashing pretty lights.

Kirk made a move to try and stop him. “Uh, maybe you shouldn’t…”

In a space of roughly four seconds, the rancor bent down and bit off the tips of Spock’s ears, decided they didn’t taste too good, and spat them out. A moment later, the rancor felt itself hit by the set-to-kill phaser beams of several trigger-happy ensigns, roared, and dropped down dead onto a coffee plant. A bottle of shampoo suddenly fell out of the sky and hit the already unconscious animal on the head.

McCoy activated his communicator. “Scotty, some creature just attacked Spock’s ears,” he said. “We don’t know where it came from, and I don’t think we intend to find out. Get us out of here. A shampoo bottle just fell out of the sky.”

There was the familiar yellowy shimmer of the transporter transporting something, and the rancor’s body vanished.

Everybody blinked.

All of a sudden, there was a ripple in the air and a very large bar of fragrant Elven soap fell out of the sky and knocked McCoy unconscious.

Scotty’s voice came through the communicators. “Sorry for that. I think I locked onto the wrong thing, because there's this huge brown animal with large teeth lying right smack in the middle of the transporter room now. Shall I beam it back?”

“No!” Kirk replied. “Just get us out of here. Bones just got knocked out by this huge bar of soap from the sky.”

To cut a long story short, they all got away safely in the end and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise feasted on rancor meat that day.

Not to mention a lot of coffee.

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