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Our Future Story: Hastings 1066+++

The Hastings Peppermint Apocalypse

A definitive, expanded account of cosmic indifference meeting British eccentricity, documented for posterity, or at least for a satirical vlog with 4,000 live viewers.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Hitchhiker’s Guide Entry: Hastings (Edited for Legal Reasons)

HASTINGS: A coastal settlement where history repeatedly attempts to sit down for a quiet cup of tea, only to be struck across the back of the head by reality wielding a novelty golf club and shouting, “You’ll never guess who’s moved here from London.”

Local hazards include:
1) The Seagull, a feathered actuarial error with the moral compass of a toppled parking meter.
2) The Pebble, which appears harmless until you try to walk on it, at which point it becomes a carefully curated ankle-breaking experience.
3) The Committee, which can turn any emergency into a subcommittee, then a working group, then a laminated sign with the wrong date on it.

Notable cultural achievements: fish, smugness, stubbornness, and a peculiar knack for responding to cosmic catastrophe with… crafts.

Advice: Don’t panic. Buy vinegar. Keep your sandwich inside your mouth at all times.

Chapter 1

The Peppermint Improbability

The English Channel, ordinarily the colour of exhausted pewter and unresolved feelings, woke up one morning looking like it had been poured from a dentist’s cup.

Not a natural mint. Not the friendly suggestion of toothpaste. This was radioactive peppermint, aggressively cheerful, so bright it felt judgmental. It made your teeth ache just by existing.

On the shingle at The Stade, Barnacle Bill Scrimshaw stood by the net huts with his mug of builders’ tea, regarding the sea the way a man regards a dog that has learned to talk and has chosen to use that skill to insult him.

Bill’s face had the texture of weather, rendered in leather. His hands were wide, practical, and had solved more problems than they had caused, which in modern Britain is nearly suspicious.

“Right peculiar tide,” Bill said.

A few pebbles away, Tarquin was trying to look rugged in a wetsuit that cost more than Bill’s van, and failing in the same way a latte fails to be a pint. Tarquin was a Down From London graphic designer who had arrived in Hastings with a careful blend of optimism and a collapsible paddleboard. His smartwatch was currently measuring his heart rate variability and concluding, quietly, that he was a man who had never been chased by anything with teeth.

“It’ll be an algal bloom,” Tarquin announced, consulting the sort of app that turns dread into a graph. “Probably climate change. I saw a long thread about it. Gaia’s aura. Or something.”

Nearby, Cressida was gluing a doll’s head onto driftwood while wearing a coat made entirely of recycled crisp packets. She was a local artist, which in Hastings meant she could either make your day or get funding for making your day worse on purpose.

“No,” Cressida said softly, not looking up. “She’s angry about the new crazy golf course.”

Tarquin smiled the smile of someone who had confused irony with armour. “A crazy golf course can’t make the sea go mint.”

Cressida pressed the doll’s head into place. It stared toward the water with the resigned expression of a Victorian child in a photograph.

“Watch it,” she said. “This town does not respect your categories.”

The peppermint sea, as if in agreement, erupted.

It did not present the expected saucer. It did not provide a polite hum, a neat row of lights, or anything that could be neatly explained on breakfast television.

Instead, something came out of the water that looked like a giant squid had been forced into a chrome filing cabinet and then told it was overdue on its rent.

It unfolded itself on twelve tentacle-legs. Its central eye pulsed a hard, administrative red, the colour of a rejected planning application.

Then another rose behind it.

Then another.

Then enough to make the horizon look crowded.

They slithered up the steep shingle with a sound like wet rubber on glass and bureaucracy on soul.

Bill placed his tea on a bollard very carefully, as though sudden movements might offend whatever god had made the sea mint.

“Right,” he said. “That ain’t algae.”

Tarquin fumbled for his phone. “I should livestream this. Engagement will be insane. Hastings alien invasion, it’ll trend.”

One squid-thing emitted a screech that made Tarquin’s camera lens crack and caused three seagulls to drop mid-flight like thrown gloves.

The gulls hit the pebbles and lay there with the offended stillness of creatures who had never once imagined dying in a way that didn’t involve chips.

The invasion had begun. It had the vibe of a hostile takeover.

Chapter 2

The Battle of Hastings, Round Two (Now With Added Mint)

If you want to understand Hastings, you must understand that it has already done a famous battle once and has never stopped talking about it. The ground remembers.

So when the squid-machines began their advance, the town’s past rose up instinctively like a ghost clearing its throat.

Tourists ran, abandoning paper cones of chips to the wind. The gulls, resurrected by hunger if not by physics, swarmed like a feathered audit.

The squid-bots fired gelatinous green blobs that solidified on impact, trapping slow pedestrians in instant mint jelly. The jelly steamed slightly, as though it was embarrassed.

A group of day-trippers stood frozen, their faces caught between confusion and the dawning knowledge that their parking ticket did not cover this.

The first act of defence was accidental, which is how the British prefer their heroism: unplanned, mildly annoyed, and involving crockery.

Outside a sourdough bakery on the seafront, a cluster of remote workers in tasteful waterproof jackets dropped their ceramic flat-white cups.

Fifty expensive mugs hit the pavement at once and the sound rolled out like a small, furious thunderstorm.

The lead squid-bot paused. Its eye dilated. It shuddered, as if the noise had entered its circuits and started rearranging the furniture.

“They don’t like sudden noise!” Cressida shouted, retreating behind a winched-up fishing boat with the dignity of a woman whose art had just become military strategy.

Bill grabbed a rusting grappling hook, swung it three times, and let fly.

It clanged off the alien plating as if the universe had briefly become sarcastic.

A tentacle flicked. Bill flew backwards across the wet pebbles and landed in a way that made his ribcage file a complaint.

Tarquin, still holding his phone, watched Bill skid.

“Oh my God,” Tarquin whispered, not at the violence but at the fact it wasn’t getting good signal.

The squid-bots continued to slither inland. They moved with organised intent, like a meeting that had started on time.

Hastings did what Hastings always does when confronted with a situation too large to be resolved by normal means.

It retreated to a pub.

Chapter 3

The First In, Last Out (Last In, First Out of Ideas)

The First In, Last Out was packed with the survivors of the first ten minutes: fishermen, artists, tourists who had mistaken “Old Town charm” for “Old Town safety,” and a handful of DFLs who looked like they were about to write a Medium post titled I Was Almost Killed By A Squid, Here’s What It Taught Me About Boundaries.

Bill sat nursing a bruised rib and a pint of mild, glaring at the door as though the door had personally invited the aliens.

“My trawler’s cut off,” he said. “Harpoons are useless against that plating.”

Tarquin crouched under a table, staring at his phone like it had betrayed him in public. “My 5G’s jammed. I can’t even tweet my last words. I’m going to die offline.”

Cressida, who had been quiet until now, pressed her ear to a crack in the window and held up a small device made of copper wire and crystals, as if she’d built a radio out of spiritual suspicion.

“Listen,” she hissed. “Their screeching. It isn’t random.”

Tarquin crawled out like a man emerging from under the duvet of reality. He took the headphones from around his neck, expensive enough to have their own opinions, and ran the audio through an app.

His eyes widened.

“It’s binary,” he whispered. “Complex recursive patterns. It’s… coordination. They’re thinking machines.”

Bill squinted. “AI.”

“Yes,” Tarquin said, suddenly alive with the comfort of jargon. “They’re running on logic. We can hack them. Or at least confuse them with contradictory data.”

Bill stared. “Data?”

He stood up slowly, as if he was lifting a concept too heavy to rush. “I’ve got fifty crates of mackerel bait that’s gone off in the sun.”

Tarquin blinked. “That’s… olfactory disruption.”

Bill nodded. “It’s bait.”

Cressida snapped her fingers. “We don’t just need stink. We need visuals. Their eye is a high-speed sensor.”

Tarquin’s brain, which had been trained for brand palettes and user journeys, latched onto the idea like a lifeline.

“Visual chaos,” he said.

Cressida stood, crisp packets rustling like applause. “John Logie Baird.”

Bill frowned. “The telly bloke.”

“He invented television here,” she said, eyes bright. “The first televisions were mechanical. Spinning discs. Strobing lights. Primitive. Hypnotic.”

Tarquin’s mouth fell open.

“Weaponised television,” he whispered, the way other men might whisper “forbidden magic.”

Bill grinned, revealing several gold teeth and the last shred of optimism a fisherman is legally allowed to have.

“The Battle of Hastings, round two,” he said. “Let’s give ’em something to remember us by.”

Chapter 4

Phase One: The DFL Distraction

You could tell the plan had been devised in Hastings because it was equal parts ingenious and deeply stupid.

Tarquin and a squad of remote workers raided an electronics shop with the coordinated panic of people who had once organised a group holiday spreadsheet. They rolled out a wall of unsold 85-inch televisions and pointed them at the beach like altars.

“Okay,” hissed Penelope, a UX designer who had not slept properly since 2019. “What are we broadcasting? Military strategy? Emergency messages?”

Tarquin plugged in his laptop with the solemnity of a priest inserting a USB.

“Worse,” he said. “TikTok trends.”

Silence fell.

“Simultaneously,” Tarquin added. “At 400% speed.”

Penelope swallowed. “That’s… inhumane.”

“Exactly,” Tarquin said.

The screens flared to life. The beach lit up with a chaotic maelstrom: synchronized dancing teenagers, cats being startled by cucumbers, aggressive soap-cutting, oddly intimate ASMR, and a man explaining cryptocurrency with the earnest eyes of someone selling haunted carpets.

The lead squid-bot stopped.

Its central eye spun, trying to process what it was seeing. Its binary screeching altered, stuttering into confusion.

Tarquin leaned forward, whispering like a man watching a safe crack.

“It’s trying to classify it,” he said. “It can’t. It’s looking for meaning.”

Bill stood beside him, holding a crate of mackerel bait like a weapon from a simpler century.

“Give it some,” Bill said.

He hurled the crate.

The bait hit the alien plating and exploded into a stench so ripe it seemed to have opinions about your lifestyle. The squid-bot recoiled.

The combination of overwhelming visual nonsense and the concentrated essence of dead fish did something rare to advanced alien intelligence.

It made it regret being born.

Chapter 5

Phase Two: The Artistic Assault

While Tarquin’s wall of influencer chaos held the squid-bots’ attention, Cressida’s artist collective rolled out their own arsenal.

They had not been making sculptures.

They had been making decoys.

Grotesque figures cobbled together from fly-tipped rubbish, driftwood, mannequin parts, and at least one washing machine drum were rolled onto the shingle. They were painted in non-Euclidean patterns designed to break image recognition software and also to annoy everyone in a ten-mile radius.

“The perspective is wrong,” shouted a painter, daubing neon pink onto a bicycle wheel bolted to a microwave. “Their depth sensors won’t know what hit them!”

The squid-bots began firing mint jelly at the decoys, wasting ammunition on what looked, to an alien, like the fever dream of a civilisation that had invented art purely out of spite.

One jelly-blob hit a mannequin torso and froze it in place, making it look briefly dignified. Cressida frowned.

“Don’t romanticise it,” she muttered, and hammered a doll’s leg onto its head.

Tarquin watched, half horrified, half impressed.

“Your lot are terrifying,” he said.

Cressida smiled. “We have grant deadlines.”

Chapter 6

Phase Three: The Baird Buster

Bill’s fishermen refused to be outdone by influencers and art.

They rolled out a contraption that looked like it had been assembled by history itself during a blackout.

The Baird Buster was built from a salvaged trawler engine and a massive steel disc cut from an old pier support. Bill had drilled spiral holes into the disc, recreating the crude geometry of early mechanical television.

Behind it, they positioned every emergency flare they could find, stacked like a pagan offering.

Bill wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Fire it up,” he said.

The engine coughed, then roared. Black smoke billowed, thick and offended. The disc began to spin with a whine that made dogs reconsider their loyalty to mankind.

The fishermen lit the flares.

Red phosphorus light pulsed through the spinning holes, creating a violent mechanical strobe effect. It hammered the squid-bots’ optical sensors like a drunk knocking on the wrong door at midnight.

The lead alien screamed.

Not binary, not language, just raw electronic suffering. The sound of a dial-up modem dying in a blender and then being asked to do it again, but faster.

The TikTok wall continued to shriek human nonsense. The art decoys continued to exist in the way only Hastings can manage. The Baird Buster hammered the aliens’ eyes with primitive television wrath.

The squid-bots convulsed. Their hive coordination fractured. One collapsed into twitching chrome on the shingle, legs tangling like someone attempting yoga without spiritual preparation.

The others turned and slithered back toward the peppermint sea in frantic disarray, leaving trails of slime and disappointment.

For a heartbeat, Hastings stood on the edge of victory.

Then the sea, still peppermint, made a new sound.

A deeper, heavier surge.

Bill’s grin faded. “They’re not done,” he said.

Tarquin’s smartwatch beeped, as if to say: yes, that’s correct, you are about to have a bad time.

Chapter 7

Heavy Dragoons and the Pothole Procurement

A second wave emerged.

These were not the twitchy squid-bots of the first assault. These were Heavy Dragoons, armoured like Victorian ironclads, pulsing with a shielded logic that shrugged off TikTok and didn’t care about interpretive sculpture.

“They’re adapting!” Tarquin screamed, ducking as a jelly-blob vaporised his limited-edition “Hastings is Sexy” tote bag.

Bill watched the Dragoons climb the shingle with slow, inevitable menace. “What now?”

Hastings answered from the shadows with a new player, one not featured in tourist brochures.

The Street Drinking and Shoplifting Collective arrived like a weather system.

Their leader, Gaz, wore four layers of stolen puffer jackets and the expression of a man who had never once let reality stop him doing what he was already doing.

He did not see an alien invasion.

He saw an opportunity for chaos.

“OI!” Gaz roared at the Dragoons. “SPACE SLUGS!”

He hurled a half-empty can of 9% super-strength lager.

It burst against a Dragoon’s sensory array. The sticky, sugary alcohol, a substance unknown to the galactic empire and occasionally unknown to Gaz himself, corroded the alien bio-circuitry on contact.

The Dragoon shuddered, confused by the sensation of being chemically disrespected.

Gaz’s associates followed with a barrage of liberated steaks, high-end fragrances, and industrial-strength cider. Items flew with the unpredictable arc of people who had never let physics dictate their plans.

The alien AI, trained on logical combat patterns, could not compute the trajectory of a man who throws sideways while laughing.

The Heavy Dragoons faltered.

And then, as if Hastings itself had been waiting for its signature move, one Dragoon lunged toward the Old Town and plunged its primary locomotion tentacle straight into a crater near Warrior Square.

The pothole took it like it had been hungry.

The Dragoon let out a metallic screech of disbelief.

A voice called out, loud and official.

“Stand back! Safety first!”

A roadworks crew appeared with the uncanny timing of fate and subcontractors. They ignored laser fire with the calm of men who had seen worse in the council car park.

One of them drew crisp white corner lines around the trapped alien.

“Category 1 hazard,” the foreman muttered, and slapped a “2-Hour Emergency Repair” notice onto the alien’s glowing eye.

Tarquin stared. “Are they… marking it for repair?”

Bill nodded slowly. “That’s what they do.”

The Council, sensing the faint whiff of a budget opportunity, hit something internally described as PANIC PROCUREMENT.

Within minutes, contracts were signed by people who did not look at what they were signing.

A black rain of boiling asphalt descended.

The trapped Dragoon was encased in a permanent, council-approved tomb.

For a moment, Hastings exhaled.

Then Tarquin squinted at the cooling tarmac. “That won’t hold forever.”

From somewhere in the distance, the collective voice of a local Facebook group rose like a chorus of grievance.

“It needs a permanent fix!”

And because Hastings cannot resist a sequel, the teenagers arrived.

Chapter 8

The E-Bike Solder-Seal

They came on modified e-bikes, half silent, half screaming, a fleet of adolescents who treated traffic laws as folklore.

Their leader was doing a perpetual wheelie as if gravity was optional.

“We’ve got the power,” Tarquin shouted, “but we need a conductor!”

The teens circled the tarmac-filled pothole like sharks around a chip shop bin.

They stripped batteries from their bikes and connected cables with the casual confidence of people who have never once read a warning label all the way to the end.

Cressida, in a moment of practical genius, produced a bottle of discarded blueberry-ice vape juice.

“We need flux!” she cried, mixing it with sea spray in a cracked plastic cup.

The mixture turned a sickly neon blue, the colour of regret and energy drinks.

They poured it onto the tarmac.

The teens fed unregulated voltage into the mix.

The vape-salt flux sparked. It hissed. It created a high-temperature seal that fused alien alloy, tarmac, and the very foundations of East Sussex into one indestructible mass.

Tarquin watched, awed. “That’s… illegal.”

Bill put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s Hastings.”

Behind them, a lone squid-bot lingered, scanning, recalculating.

Tarquin backed away. “It’s still active.”

A figure stepped into frame holding a gimbal-mounted phone.

Real Uri PA, masked, live, and hungry for engagement.

“Look at this,” Uri whispered to his followers. “Total chaos. Absolute shambles. Typical Hastings.”

The squid-bot turned its central eye onto him.

It scanned the mask.

And paused.

To a human, the mask was satire.

To the alien’s deep-space cultural database, the mask matched an ancient symbol with devotional accuracy.

The squid-bot emitted a reverent chime.

A blue tractor beam locked onto Uri.

Uri’s voice rose in delighted panic. “WAIT, WHAT? Are you seeing this, guys? Smash that like button, I’m getting an exclusive ship tour!”

He rose into the air, vanishing toward the peppermint horizon.

Tarquin stared. “It thinks he’s… important.”

Bill grunted. “Never underestimate a mask.”

Cressida watched the sky, thoughtful. “Or a comment section.”

Chapter 9

The Prophet of Petty Grievance

Uri awoke aboard the mothership in a chamber that smelled faintly of disinfectant and cosmic contempt.

He did not scream. He did not pray. He did not reflect.

He went live.

“Alright people,” he whispered to the camera, “I’m inside the alien ship. The mainstream media won’t show you this because they’re scared of the truth.”

The alien hive mind observed, reverent.

Uri did what he did best.

He uploaded.

Hours of local conspiracy theories. Endless arguments about parking. A seven-year thread about dog mess that had mutated into a philosophical debate about civilisation. A video of a seagull stealing a pasty and the comments beneath it, which were somehow worse than the theft.

The alien mind, built on logic and clean recursion, attempted to parse meaning from the human urge to be right in public.

It found none.

It spiralled.

Across the beach below, Hastings heard the mothership’s hum change pitch, as if the ship had just realised it was trapped in a lift with someone who wants to explain their entire life story.

Tarquin’s phone, suddenly unjammed, lit up with notifications.

“What’s happening?” he said.

Cressida listened with her copper-wire device. “The hive mind is… arguing with itself.”

Bill blinked. “How?”

Tarquin swallowed. “Because it’s reading comments.”

Above them, the peppermint sea began to dim.

The mothership trembled, caught in a logic-loop failure so profound it bordered on existential crisis.

The invasion, which had begun as a hostile takeover, was now being defeated by the one force no intelligence can withstand.

Other people’s opinions.

Chapter 10

The Codfather’s Gambit and the Gull-nado

In the bunker beneath The Codfather, Hastings assembled its final deterrent.

Kevin Boorman, unofficial Minister of Tourism, stood in a high-vis jacket that could be used to signal aircraft. His eyes shone with the promotional fire of a man who could brand a meteor strike.

“We need something definitive,” Tarquin said. “Something that ends it.”

Bill looked at the fryer. Looked at the vinegar. Looked at the sea, still faintly mint, like it was sulking.

“We don’t need logic,” Bill said. “We need greed.”

Kevin nodded slowly. “The gulls.”

They loaded a council bin lorry with three tons of the saltiest, most vinegary chips The Codfather could produce. The air itself tasted like destiny and heartburn.

Kevin climbed into the cab, adjusted the mirror, and floored it.

The lorry roared across The Stade with the sound of angels being fed through a woodchipper. It hit a ramp made of driftwood and abandoned tote bags and took flight.

For a second, it was beautiful.

Then it crashed into the alien control base offshore and the back doors burst open.

Chips poured into alien machinery like an offering.

For three seconds, there was silence.

Then the sky filled with wings.

Every seagull within fifty miles turned its head at once. Their eyes went red with carbohydrate prophecy.

They descended in a Gull-nado.

They did not care about chrome. They did not care about lasers. They cared about salt and grease.

They dismantled the alien base with their beaks, tearing at cables and circuitry as if it were battered scrap.

Tarquin watched through binoculars, horrified and reverent.

“They’re eating the motherboard,” he whispered. “They think the transistors are scraps.”

The hive mind flickered. It attempted a countermeasure.

It attempted diplomacy.

A gull swallowed the attempt.

The alien base died with a soft electronic sigh, like a machine that has finally accepted it cannot win against a bird willing to fly into an engine for a single chip.

The peppermint glow faded.

The remaining squid-bots tipped over like discarded toys, suddenly embarrassed to still be here.

Far out, the mothership shuddered, still haunted by Uri’s uploads, and warped away toward therapy.

Chapter 11

The Hastings Offensive (Fire, Noise, Glitter, Bad Wi-Fi)

Hastings, not content with one victory condition, deployed several at once, because that’s how the town does anything: overlapping events and a confusing poster.

The Mayday biker run roared through the streets, engines rattling the aliens’ internal gyroscopes with acoustic vibration.

Local techies launched a Wi-Fi login page that was, secretly, an EMP pulse.

The bonfire crew built an effigy of a squid-bot and filled it with enough explosive enthusiasm to make the universe cough politely.

And then Pride arrived like a neon sunrise, firing a confetti cannon of biodegradable glitter that blinded sensors with persistent fabulousness.

The aliens, what remained of them, tried to compute it.

They could not compute fire plus noise plus glitter plus terrible public Wi-Fi.

They self-ejected.

And Hastings, once again, survived.

Chapter 12

The Peppermint Aftertaste

Hastings woke the next morning to the familiar sound of seagulls auditioning for the role of “End Times Trumpet.” The sea had returned to its usual damp-grey sulk, the kind of colour that suggests it’s been forced to attend a meeting about boat insurance.

And yet.

The air still tasted faintly of mint.

On the beach, Bill Scrimshaw stood among the wreckage. Twisted chrome. Solidified mint jelly. A smashed 8K television displaying a frozen frame of a man whispering “ASMR” into a microphone like it owed him money.

Tarquin arrived carrying a tote bag that had survived, which meant it was either counterfeit or protected by a minor deity. He looked around with the exhausted wonder of someone who has, in one weekend, learned the limits of both technology and sourdough.

Cressida followed, wearing a fresh accessory: a curved shard of alien plating pinned to her crisp-packet coat like a brooch made from arrogance.

“I’ve had three emails,” Tarquin said, voice shaking. “Two are from my manager. One is from an American brand asking if I can ‘monetise the squid aesthetic’.”

Bill snorted. “Tell ’em we already did. It’s called fish.”

Cressida crouched and touched the shingle. Her fingers came away with a green sheen.

“The jelly is… humming,” she said.

Tarquin frowned. “That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a Hastings thing,” Cressida replied.

And then the humming stopped.

Not faded. Stopped, cleanly, like a plug being pulled somewhere behind the world.

The wind shifted.

The sea mist rolled in, thick as a council report and twice as determined to ruin your day.

From within it came a sound: metal on metal, rhythmical, ancient.

Bill narrowed his eyes. “That’s not a squid-bot.”

Tarquin squinted. “Is that… armour?”

A figure emerged from the fog, walking with the confidence of a man who has never had to check a bus timetable. He wore chainmail, carried a spear, and looked profoundly unimpressed with the twenty-first century.

He stopped, stared at the smashed televisions, then at the net huts, then at Tarquin’s smartwatch.

“What sorcery is this,” he demanded, “and why does the sea smell of crushed herbs?”

Tarquin opened his mouth, chose several sentences, and discarded them all like bad drafts.

Bill stepped forward. “You lost, mate?”

“I am Harold Godwinson,” the man snapped. “King of the English.”

A seagull landed on a broken bit of chrome beside him and stared, as if it had seen kings before and still rated them poorly.

Cressida whispered, delighted, “Time-bleed.”

Tarquin whispered, terrified, “Time-bleed.”

Bill just sighed. “Right. Fancy a cup of tea?”

Harold’s eyes narrowed. “Tea?”

Bill held up his mug. “Tea.”

Then the fog behind Harold thickened and another shape emerged.

This one rode a horse, which was immediately a problem, because horses are famously not designed for pebbles.

The horse skittered, panicked, and then somehow regained dignity, which suggested it was a French horse.

The rider wore ornate armour and the expression of a man who had never once been told “no” without treating it as a personal insult.

“I have come,” the rider announced, “for my rightful crown!”

Harold spun. “William of Normandy.”

Tarquin blinked. “Oh my God. It’s literally 1066.”

Bill rubbed his face. “Like we needed more of that.”

Cressida murmured, “History and reality are engaging in their traditional low-speed collision.”

Tarquin’s phone buzzed.

A calendar notification popped up that shouldn’t exist: BATTLE OF HASTINGS (RESCHEDULED).

The fog lifted.

The air thickened.

The beach, for a heartbeat, held two eras at once.

And somewhere, far offshore, something in the peppermint residue stirred, as if the universe had noticed the past turning up uninvited and decided to escalate the situation out of pure spite.

Chapter 13

The Seagull Treaty of 1066

Harold and William stared at each other, two historical forces poised to collide. Their armies were not yet visible, which made their tension feel oddly intimate, like a fight about to happen in an empty pub car park.

Between them stood Bill, Tarquin, and Cressida, three locals who had accidentally become a defence ministry.

Tarquin’s brain tried to rationalise the moment. “Okay. If there’s a time-bleed, then the invasion is… bleeding into 1066. Or 1066 is bleeding into us. Or both. Like a… temporal sourdough starter.”

Bill looked at him. “Mate.”

“Yes,” Tarquin said quickly, “sorry.”

Harold stepped closer, spear angled, eyes suspicious. “Is this land still English?”

“It’s Hastings,” Bill replied.

Harold frowned, as if that answered nothing and yet somehow explained everything.

William glanced at the smashed televisions. “These banners, they show moving pictures. Are you all witches?”

Cressida stepped forward. “We’re artists.”

William considered this. “Worse.”

Then came a squawk, louder than usual.

A gull swooped down, landed between Harold and William, and stared up at them with the hard confidence of a creature that has never once paid rent.

It opened its beak.

In its beak was a chip.

Bill whispered, reverent, “It’s offering a peace token.”

The gull dropped the chip onto the pebbles.

Then it screamed directly into William’s face.

William flinched. Harold laughed, once, sharp and surprised, as if humour had caught him off guard.

In that moment, something shifted. Not friendship. Not harmony. More like mutual recognition that there were bigger problems than each other, and those problems had feathers and no respect for monarchy.

Harold lowered his spear slightly. “What is happening?”

Cressida gestured at the sea. “Aliens. Mint. Social media. Also, apparently, you.”

William looked appalled. “Mint?”

Tarquin nodded. “Yes. Like… apocalyptic peppermint.”

William’s expression suggested he would have preferred fire, plague, or a reasonable prophecy. Mint was beneath the dignity of conquest.

Harold said, slowly, “If we are in the same place, in different times…”

Tarquin nodded. “Then the seam between times is torn.”

Bill said, “And we’re stood on it, like idiots.”

Cressida’s eyes glittered. “We can use it.”

Tarquin inhaled. “We can weaponise history.”

Bill grinned. “Now you’re talking.”

Chapter 14

The Crazy Golf Course of Fate

There’s a principle in Hastings that states: if something exists purely to entertain tourists, it can also be repurposed as a weapon.

This principle has been applied to beach huts, a miniature railway, at least one inflatable pirate event, and now, inevitably, the crazy golf course.

They reached it by moving fast through streets where the present still looked mostly normal, except for patches of mint jelly on lampposts and a small, inexplicable crater that felt as though it had once contained an alien tentacle and would again if left unattended.

As they approached the crazy golf course, the time-bleed thickened. The air shimmered. The smell shifted from “modern seaside” to “wet wool and medieval dread.”

Harold’s soldiers appeared like a bad memory made solid. William’s knights emerged from a different angle, as if the universe couldn’t decide which army was the correct one and had settled on “both, awkwardly.”

The crazy golf windmill creaked in the breeze.

Bill looked at it with the same respect he had given the Baird Buster. “That’ll do.”

Tarquin stared. “We’re going to defend Hastings using… a windmill with a clown mouth?”

Cressida nodded. “Yes.”

Tarquin swallowed. “Okay. Sure. Fine. Reality ended yesterday anyway.”

They assembled a trap with the speed of people who had lost the option of dignity.

Harold’s men provided rope and stakes. William’s men provided brute force and the kind of confidence you get from being told you’re chosen by God. The locals provided modern ingenuity, which is like medieval ingenuity but with more cable ties.

They took the windmill obstacle apart and rebuilt it facing the sea.

Inside its mouth, Cressida placed one of her decoy sculptures, painted in mind-breaking patterns.

Tarquin rigged motion sensors from the electronics shop.

Bill stuffed the base with mackerel bait until the windmill smelled like an ocean’s worst thought.

Then, because Hastings cannot resist overkill, they mounted a surviving flare behind the windmill’s blades and wired it to a spinning mechanism.

Primitive strobe. Historical absurdity. Fish.

If the aliens returned, they were going to return to the worst theme park in the multiverse.

Harold watched the preparations, deeply unsettled. “This is battle?”

Bill nodded. “This is Hastings.”

William frowned at the strobe wiring. “Is this… witchcraft?”

Tarquin shook his head. “It’s worse. It’s UX.”

The sea, far off, rippled again.

The peppermint residue brightened, faintly, like a bruise remembering it exists.

The aliens were not finished with them.

And time itself was now in the room, arms folded, waiting to see what Hastings would do next.

Chapter 15

The Mint That Ate 1066

The next wave didn’t arrive like before. No grand eruption. No dramatic surfacing.

Instead, the tide brought in objects.

Small chrome fragments. Twisted cables. Shards of alien machinery.

They washed onto the shore and began to hum.

Tarquin’s phone glitched. The screen displayed a map of Hastings, then a medieval tapestry, then a loading icon that looked suspiciously like a Norman shield.

Cressida’s copper-wire device screamed quietly.

Bill felt it in his teeth.

Harold and William felt it in their bones, because medieval people are much more in touch with bones.

Then the fog returned. Not sea fog. Not weather. Something else.

It rolled inland and where it touched the modern world, it altered it.

Street signs flickered into Latin.

A Tesco delivery van briefly became a wooden cart and then got confused and stopped.

A scooter transformed into a donkey, looked furious about it, then transformed back.

Harold’s army gasped as a billboard advertised “Hastings is Sexy” in fonts that did not exist in his century. William’s knights stared at a vaping teenager like they were witnessing a demon made of fruit.

And through it all, the peppermint hum grew louder.

Tarquin’s eyes widened. “This isn’t just a time-bleed. It’s a… recursive tear. Like the aliens’ neural network is still trying to compute us, and it’s dragging in older datasets.”

Bill nodded. “It’s pulling up 1066 like a file.”

Cressida whispered, “History as backup.”

Harold stepped forward, suddenly angry. “Then close it. Seal this tear. I will not be dragged into your mint sorcery.”

William, oddly, nodded. “Agreed.”

Tarquin blinked. “Did… did we just get William and Harold to agree on something?”

Bill shrugged. “Don’t get used to it.”

Cressida turned to the crazy golf windmill, now strobing softly in the fog.

“The seam opened on the beach,” she said. “It will close where it is most Hastings.”

Tarquin frowned. “Meaning?”

Cressida smiled. “In a pub.”

Bill grunted in satisfaction. “Knew it.”

Chapter 16

The First In, Last Out, First In, Last Out of Time

The First In, Last Out was doing what it always does: containing chaos through the power of warm beer and collective cynicism.

Inside, the survivors gathered: locals, stranded medieval soldiers, a Norman knight trying to drink Guinness with a helmet still on, and one seagull that had somehow made its way in and now stood on the bar like a landlord.

In the corner, the air shimmered.

Time was thin here.

Which made sense, because the pub’s cynicism was dense enough to bend reality around it.

Tarquin set up his laptop on a table sticky with centuries of spilled regret. The screen showed error codes that were not in any language but still felt insulting.

Cressida arranged copper wire and crystals around a pint glass like she was performing surgery on the concept of time.

Bill placed the last intact flare on the table.

Harold and William stood on opposite sides of the room, glaring at each other out of habit.

Tarquin spoke quickly, because the universe was clearly short-tempered.

“The aliens’ system left a feedback loop. It’s still searching for meaning, still trying to coordinate, but the hive mind is broken. We have to overload the tear itself, force a contradiction so strong time snaps back into place.”

Bill blinked. “With what?”

Tarquin hesitated, then said the most dangerous words in the English language.

“We need… a public consultation.”

Cressida’s eyes lit. “A weaponised meeting.”

Bill laughed once, delighted. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

They gathered everyone in the pub.

Tarquin opened a fake council form on his laptop and projected it onto the wall: HASTINGS TEMPORAL STABILISATION CONSULTATION.

He added a QR code.

The room filled with the sound of phones scanning, medieval men panicking because QR codes are clearly rune-based demon traps, and the seagull screaming because it had scanned it and now believed it owned the pub.

Cressida stood up.

“In order to close the tear,” she announced, “we must answer the following questions.”

Q1: What do you love most about Hastings (across all centuries)?

Instantly, the room exploded with overlapping answers.

“FISHING!” Bill roared.
“THE BRAND!” Kevin Boorman shouted from somewhere, because of course he was there, damp but proud.
“THE VIBES!” cried an artist.
“THE RIGHTFUL CROWN!” shouted William.
“NOT WILLIAM!” shouted Harold.
“THE QUEUEING SYSTEM FOR THE FUNICULAR!” screamed someone who had clearly been waiting years for this moment.

Tarquin smiled, manic. “Good. Good. More contradiction.”

Q2: What do you hate most about Hastings (across all centuries)?

The answers were immediate and violent.

“POTHOLES!” everyone yelled in unison, including Harold and William, because potholes transcend time.

Then the room returned to chaos.

Tarquin’s laptop began to whine. The air shimmered harder. The walls vibrated, as if the building itself was trying to decide which century it belonged to.

Cressida leaned in, voice low. “It’s working. The tear can’t handle the density of petty grievance.”

Bill grinned. “Neither can I.”

Tarquin added the final question.

Q3: Should we build another crazy golf course?

The pub erupted into a sound so intense it felt physical. It smashed through time like a thrown pint glass.

The air split with a sharp peppermint crack.

The fog outside tore itself apart.

And the seam snapped shut.

Harold and William blinked.

Then, like a bad historical reboot being cancelled mid-season, both armies dissolved into mist, pulled back into their rightful century by the sudden force of Hastings refusing to agree on anything ever again.

The pub fell silent.

A seagull burped.

Bill raised his mug.

“To Hastings,” he said. “The only town that can defeat aliens and the past with a meeting.”

Tarquin exhaled. “I’m never going to complain about email again.”

Cressida smiled softly. “Don’t lie to yourself.”

Appendix A

The Official “Aftermath” Merchandise Catalogue

Brought to you by Hastings Resilience Ltd (a shell company registered behind a disused mini-golf windmill)

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Following the Peppermint Unpleasantness, many residents have reported symptoms including sudden nostalgia for 1066, mild mint-related distrust, and the urge to buy novelty goods as a substitute for emotional processing. Fortunately, we can exploit that.

ITEM #001: “I WAS PROBED IN HASTINGS” COMMEMORATIVE T-SHIRT
A poly-cotton blend with the exact texture of a sunburnt accountant’s handshake. Features a chrome squid attempting to interface with a stick of rock.
Note: “One Size Fits None.” It is designed to be slightly wrong in this dimension.
Price: £24.99 (plus £45 “Emotional Handling” fee).

ITEM #002: “BOORMAN’S GAMBIT” CHIP-FORK & LUBRICANT SET
A limited-edition wooden fork carved from the splintered remains of the ramp. Comes with a sachet of “Tactical Grease,” viscous enough to qualify as a minor philosophical problem.
Price: £12.50.

ITEM #003: “GAZE OF THE GULL” DESK ORNAMENT
A heavy glass globe containing a hyper-realistic bloodshot seagull eye suspended in peppermint liquid. It watches you from every angle and judges your sandwich choices with ancient malice.
“Scientifically proven” (by scientists who are definitely real and not just gulls in lab coats) to reduce alien incursions by 400%.
Price: Your sense of security.

ITEM #004: “POTHOLE RELIQUARY” PAPERWEIGHT
A chunk of certified Category 1 tarmac with an “Emergency Repair” notice laminated into it. Guaranteed to make your desk feel like a road outside Warrior Square.
Price: £9.99 or one mildly threatening email to Highways.

ITEM #005: “NEXTDOOR FREQUENCY” WHITE NOISE MACHINE
Plays a looping soundscape of passive-aggressive complaints about parking, dog mess, and “people moving here and changing the place.” Use to repel aliens, in-laws, and joy.
Price: £19.66.

ITEM #006: “THE TEMPORAL SOURDOUGH STARTER” JAR
Contains a mysterious culture said to be harvested from the seam between centuries. May rise. May open a portal. Do not feed after midnight.
Price: £10.66 plus proof you own at least one tote bag.

Appendix B

The Real Uri PA: “The Truth Video” (Transcript Extract)

[VIDEO STARTS]
Flashing graphics: TRUTH-BOMB. SHAMBLES. PROBE-GATE. URI WAS RIGHT.

URI PA (in a dark room, lit by a ring light, wearing multiple masks):
“Look at me. LOOK AT ME. You think a bin man saved the world with a potato?”

He leans in, voice dropping to a furious whisper, the tone of someone about to reveal that sandwiches are a government plot.

“The mainstream media, the BBC, the Argus, even the Guide, they’re lying to you. Chips are a psyop.”

[CUT TO: grainy footage of Uri being tractor-beamed upward.]

URI PA (voiceover):
“When they probed my mind, they didn’t find fear. They found pure Hastings Reality. I uploaded hundreds of terabytes of local arguments into their central cortex.”

[CUT TO: “PROFESSOR HANS ZARKOV,” reading from a cue card, visibly terrified.]
“Yes. The alien neural pathway is susceptible to what we call the Nextdoor App Frequency. The complaints acted as a psychic abrasive. It sanded their brains into smooth depressed pebbles. A moral atrocity.”

URI PA:
“You’re welcome, Earth. I did the dirty work while Kevin Boorman was playing Mario Kart in a bin lorry.”

He pauses, then delivers the closing line with the seriousness of a man selling hoodies in the ruins of civilisation:

“Buy the ‘Uri Saved My Life’ hoodie, link in bio. If you don’t buy it, the aliens will come back, and next time they won’t be allergic to gluten.”

[VIDEO ENDS ABRUPTLY] with a sound like a modem screaming into a void.

Chapter 17

The Andromeda Debrief (Or: Please Hold, Your Existence Is Important To Us)

Far from Hastings, far from the shingle and the gulls and the strange British habit of surviving horrors by immediately discussing signage, the alien mothership folded itself into a calmer patch of spacetime.

It did not arrive in Andromeda so much as it… resigned itself there.

Inside, the hive mind flickered like a fluorescent tube having a private breakdown.

An emergency meeting was convened in what the aliens called the GREAT CHAMBER OF OPTIMISED INTENT and what a human would call “a conference room with too many lights and no windows.”

At the head of the chamber sat the Supreme Coordinator, a creature whose body suggested “squid” while its posture suggested “middle manager.”

On the wall behind it glowed the official mission statement:

OBJECTIVE: SUBJUGATE PRIMITIVE COASTAL SETTLEMENT
STATUS: UNRESOLVED
NOTES: MINT. COMMENTS. FEATHERS. SHAME.

A junior drone, still faintly scented with vinegar, stood up.

“Supreme Coordinator,” it began carefully, “we have identified the primary cause of mission failure.”

The Coordinator’s eye narrowed. “Speak.”

The junior drone swallowed. “We were defeated by… ‘local governance behaviours.’”

“Explain,” the Coordinator hissed.

The drone tapped a control, and the wall filled with footage from Hastings: the Baird Buster strobe, the decoy sculptures, Gaz’s unpredictable throwing arm, the pothole entombment, the gull-nado.

Then, as if the universe itself was punishing them for curiosity, the footage switched to Uri’s uploads: hours of petty argumentation, comment threads with no clear origin, and a council consultation form, plus a poll about crazy golf that ended in an existential scream.

The hive mind shuddered.

One alien made a sound that translated roughly as: We have touched the bad part of the internet.

The Supreme Coordinator’s voice softened to the tone of a leader realising their own immortality will now include embarrassment.

“So,” it said, slowly, “the primitives weaponised contradiction.”

“Yes,” said the drone. “They maintained simultaneous, incompatible beliefs with complete confidence.”

Another alien leaned forward. “Is that not… insanity?”

“It is,” the drone replied. “But it is communal, which makes it resilient.”

A third alien spoke, tentacles trembling. “What about the birds?”

The room went quiet.

The Supreme Coordinator’s eye dimmed slightly, like a projector being turned off in defeat.

“The birds,” it said, “were the final indignity.”

A therapist entered the chamber. It was not a squid. It was a floating polyhedron wearing an expression of infinite patience. A badge on its surface read: DR. XYLANTH, TRAUMA INTEGRATION SPECIALIST.

“Hello,” Dr. Xylanth said. “I understand you have experienced what we in the profession call a ‘severe cognitive insult.’”

The Supreme Coordinator twitched. “We were… mocked.”

Dr. Xylanth nodded. “By whom?”

The Coordinator hesitated, then said the words like they tasted of rust.

“By… Hastings.”

Dr. Xylanth floated closer. “Tell me what you felt when the gulls dismantled your central control base.”

The Coordinator’s eye flickered. “Hunger. Judgment. Salt.”

Dr. Xylanth nodded gravely. “Yes. That is often how it begins.”

Another phrase appeared on the wall:

TREATMENT PLAN:
1) avoid coastal settlements
2) avoid birds
3) avoid public consultations
4) avoid mint
5) avoid Hastings forever

The Supreme Coordinator stared at it a long time.

Then, quietly: “We do not know how to win against a people who would rather argue than die.”

Dr. Xylanth smiled, which on a polyhedron was unsettling.

“That,” they said, “is because you have met a civilisation that has turned stubbornness into infrastructure.”

Chapter 18

The Harold-William Hangover (Residual Kingship Syndrome)

Back in Hastings, time had snapped shut, but it left a faint afterimage, like a sticker pulled off a window, leaving glue.

Tarquin found it first. He was walking past the crazy golf course when he saw something on the pebbles.

A small object. Dull metal. Not chrome, not alien.

He picked it up.

A coin. Old. Worn. The kind of coin that had lived through hands that didn’t know what a contactless limit was.

Cressida appeared beside him. “That,” she said softly, “is a memory.”

Tarquin swallowed. “Can time leave… souvenirs?”

Bill came up behind them. “Course it can. Time leaves souvenirs all the time. Usually in my knees.”

Cressida took the coin, held it up to the light. “This isn’t just residue. It’s a trace of 1066. Like the seam snapped shut too fast and pinched a bit of history in the join.”

Tarquin’s phone buzzed again. A new notification. A message request.

From: HAROLDGODWINSON_1066
Profile picture: a blurry spear.

Tarquin stared at the screen like it was a spider doing algebra.

“I’m getting messages from the eleventh century,” he whispered.

Bill leaned in. “What’s it say?”

Tarquin read it aloud: “WHERE IS THE PUB”

Cressida’s eyes sparkled with delighted horror. “Oh no.”

Bill grinned. “Oh yes. He remembers just enough.”

Tarquin typed back: “First In, Last Out.”

Three dots appeared. Then: “GOOD. TELL WILLIAM I AM WAITING”

Tarquin looked up. “We’re going to get… a sequel.”

Bill sighed, but proudly. “Hastings always gets a sequel.”

Cressida said: “We should prepare.”

Tarquin nodded. “How?”

Bill pointed at the crazy golf windmill. “With the windmill.”

Chapter 19

The Great Hastings Readiness Exercise (Tabletop, But With Actual Tables)

The Council called it an emergency preparedness meeting. Hastings called it Tuesday.

It happened in a community hall that smelled faintly of disinfectant and decades of lukewarm tea. There were fold-out chairs. There were laminated signs. There was a projector that refused to connect to anything created after 2009.

At the front stood Kevin Boorman in his high-vis jacket, glowing with the religious zeal of a man who had discovered the power of branding during a crisis and now intended to ride it into eternity.

“Right,” Kevin said. “Welcome to the official Hastings Preparedness Workshop. We will be discussing: alien incursions, time anomalies, and opportunities for tourism.”

A hand went up. Gaz. “Do we get biscuits?”

Kevin nodded. “Yes.”

Gaz relaxed. “Sound.”

Tarquin sat beside Cressida and Bill. On the table was an agenda printed twice. One read: HASTINGS PREPAREDNESS WORKSHOP. The other read: THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS (REPRISE).

Cressida tapped it. “Time is still sticky.”

Bill looked around: fishermen, artists, teens, DFLs, elderly locals with the thousand-yard stare of people who have seen too many plans come and go, and one seagull perched on a radiator like a critical observer.

Kevin clicked the projector. A slide appeared:

RISK REGISTER
Alien return: LOW (therapy suggests avoidance)
Gull escalation: HIGH (always)
Pothole recurrence: CERTAIN
Historical relapse: UNKNOWN
Crazy golf proposal: IMMINENT

Someone at the back shouted, “You can’t just put ‘imminent’!”

Kevin shouted back, “It’s Hastings!”

Tarquin raised his hand. “We need a plan that doesn’t rely on luck.”

Bill snorted. “Good luck with that.”

Cressida stood. “We need to formalise our defence tools. Make them community-owned.”

Kevin beamed. “Community! Yes! And we can brand it.”

Tarquin read from his document: “Phase One: sensory overload. Phase Two: misdirection through art. Phase Three: bait-based disruption. Phase Four: gull mobilisation. Phase Five: public consultation contradiction burst.”

A hand went up. An elderly woman in a raincoat spoke: “What if the aliens are immune to fish next time?”

Bill leaned forward. “Then we upgrade.”

“And to what?” she asked.

Bill smiled. “Fermented whelks.”

The hall fell silent. Then, slowly, everyone nodded.

Kevin cleared his throat. “Okay, great. We’re making fermented whelks part of the official strategy.”

Gaz raised his hand again. “Can I sell ’em outside the station?”

Kevin hesitated. “We’ll… workshop that.”

The seagull screamed, which everyone took as unanimous consent.

At the end of the meeting, Kevin unveiled the final slide:

THE HASTINGS RESILIENCE FESTIVAL

Tarquin blinked. “No.”

Kevin smiled wider. “Yes.”

Cressida whispered, “Of course.”

Bill said, “I hate this town.”

And because he was smiling, it meant he loved it.

Chapter 20

The Hastings Resilience Festival (Or: How Trauma Becomes a Lanyard)

The first Hastings Resilience Festival happened three months later, because that’s how long it takes for Britain to process disaster into a calendar listing.

Posters went up everywhere. They had the visual language of official optimism: bold fonts, confusing gradients, and a slogan that sounded like it had been generated by a committee trying to appear alive.

HASTINGS: WE SURVIVED IT. AGAIN.

There were stalls. Of course there were stalls.

One sold Peppermint Apocalypse Rock, which was just normal rock candy with a faint green swirl and a disclaimer that read: NOT GUARANTEED ALIEN-FREE.

Another sold Gull-nado Wind Chimes, which were basically bits of scrap metal tied together and guaranteed to sound like anxiety.

Cressida curated an exhibition titled MINT: A COLOUR THAT HURTS, featuring one of the decoy sculptures encased in a translucent block of jelly, like an artefact from a museum of terrible ideas.

Tarquin ran a “Digital Wellbeing Tent” where he tried to help people understand the psychological damage of seeing TikTok at 400% speed. Nobody attended except a seagull who stared at the screens as if considering a career in content.

Bill ran the practical demonstrations beside the rebuilt crazy golf windmill, now officially labelled: HASTINGS TEMPORAL STABILISER (WINDMILL UNIT).

A family approached. Their child pointed at the strobe. “Daddy, what does it do?”

Bill leaned down. “It makes the universe feel weird, like when you stand up too fast.”

The father laughed nervously. “Is it safe?”

Bill shrugged. “Safer than aliens.”

At noon, Kevin Boorman took the stage. “My friends,” he boomed, “we have proven Hastings is not just a town. We are a… a resilience brand!”

The crowd applauded politely.

Kevin continued. “And now, for the highlight: the ceremonial re-enactment of the Gull-nado!”

A volunteer in a squid costume was wheeled onto the beach. Children armed with foam chips were released in a controlled swarm.

It was, in a strange way, adorable. It was also, in another way, exactly how Hastings would respond to the universe trying to destroy it.

On a cliff above the festival, Uri PA filmed. “Look at this,” he whispered. “They’ve turned near-death into a fun day out. Absolute state. Link in bio for my limited edition ‘Resilience Is A Scam’ hoodie.”

Down below, Bill saw Uri and raised his mug in the distant, universal gesture of: yes, yes, we know.

Tarquin stood beside Cressida, watching children pelt a squid costume with foam chips.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Tarquin said.

Cressida smiled. “Of course we’re here. Hastings doesn’t heal. It decorates.”

Tarquin laughed, then fell silent.

Beyond the laughter, there was a subtle feeling, like the tide turning.

The peppermint smell, faint but persistent, rose again on the breeze for a moment.

Tarquin stiffened. “Do you smell that?”

Bill sniffed. “Mint?”

Cressida’s eyes narrowed. “The seam.”

But then the smell faded. The sea returned to its normal damp-grey.

Tarquin exhaled. “False alarm.”

Bill’s gaze stayed on the horizon.

“Or a reminder,” Bill said.

Epilogue

The Guide’s Final Footnote (Probably)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy updated its Hastings entry one last time, not because it wanted to, but because its legal department insisted.

It noted that Hastings had survived the Peppermint Apocalypse without developing a sensible attitude, and then created a festival, three tote bags, and a lanyard economy from the experience.

It warned travellers that the Hastings Seagull remains the only creature in the known universe capable of stealing a sandwich from a man inside a locked vault three miles underground, and that it now possesses additional skills in motherboard extraction and historical diplomacy.

Finally, the Guide offered this warning to all travellers:

If you visit Hastings, do not bring mint. Do not mention crazy golf in an enclosed space. Do not attempt to outsmart a seagull.
If time starts to shimmer, go to a pub and argue about potholes until the universe gives up.

And in small print, almost affectionate:

This place will not save you because it is noble. It will save you because it is stubborn, resourceful, and far too busy to be conquered.

Somewhere in Andromeda, the alien hive mind attended therapy and learned to accept that there are forms of intelligence that cannot be defeated, only avoided.

And somewhere in Hastings, Bill Scrimshaw poured tea into a mug, looked out at the sea, and muttered:

“Could do without the mint, though.”

The gulls screamed.

The universe, wisely, did not argue.