Sheena, the team’s moral center, was in the galley of her group’s collectively owned ship. A Spaceship, called the Chrysaora. She was preparing lunch, and without noticing, found herself singing along to... the song.

  The horrible, accursed song.

  “Ahh Sheena, I can hear you!” Lucas, the team’s lockpick, scout, and engineer had walked in and caught her in the act of singing along.

  “Oh dammit, shit! Was I singing it? Aaghh, Nooo…” Sheena’s surprise at herself was evident. After a moment of double face-palming and screaming into her hands she half-sarcastically said, “Dammit Lucas, Why!? Why did you have to walk in on me? Stupid fucking cursed bullshit...”

  There was a rule on their ship: no singing along with the song. If you were caught, you had latrine duty until the next person was caught. No using the internal cameras or recordings to catch people, you had to do it in person. Or open the intercom to talk to them about something else, only to find them singing the song.

  Lucas had been on latrine duty, that is until he caught Sheena. He smiled gleefully as he slapped the intercom button on the wall to report to the rest of their tiny, five-person crew, “I caught Sheena singing the song.”

  “You sneaky little asshole!” Sheena’s mock-angry voice could be heard in the background while he made his announcement. As could the wretched song.

  “Sucks for you Sheena,” Rex, the dumb-muscle, said through the intercom. “But… uhh, whatcha making for lunch?”

  The song playing always meant someone was making food. It issued forth from the object, on repeat anytime any member of the crew went from thinking about food, to having actual intentions of making food. From intentions to completion, it would finish playing the whole track, and then immediately start over… every time any sort of cooking took place. When cooking was done, the song would finish playing, and not restart. Unfortunately for the crew, even pouring cold cereal into a bowl with F-Milk would kick off the song.

  “F-Meat Sandos with spicy aioli, melty cheese, some plant roughage. For dessert we have some of them purple fruits the Nuphidri grows in her room, turned into fried cubes with powdered sugar on top.”

  “I’ll cover your first shift on the shitter if you give me your portion of fried purple fruit.” Rex said. He would end up covering all of Sheena’s toilet cleaning shifts, as long as she was willing to share her dessert. Despite the ‘rule’ Rex’s sweet tooth caused him to end up cleaning the toilet a good fifty percent of the time.

  “Deal.” Sheena said from the galley.

  The eponymous Nuphidri, the sole non-human on the crew, was on the bridge, “Those purple fruits are called Phlegmectarines.”

  Bethany, the last member, and the team wizard was taking her turn in the captain’s seat, next to the Nuphidri over on the scanners. “Nuphidri, dear, we know. We hate that name, so we call them purple fruits.”

  “Oh. Fascinating.” The Nuphidri said.

  “Us not liking your fruit name is fascinating?” Lucas asked.

  “No.”

  The Nuphidri as a species are amazingly blunt at times. This particular Nuphidri, while refusing to rejoin the main hive, still had many of the hive’s most wonderful qualities, bluntness included. Fortunately, despite being such an aberrant individual that she didn't want to rejoin the hive, she still possessed that knack of her species for noticing subtle things on scanners.

  “I have detected something on a similar magical frequency to the object.”

  “All hands, report to the bridge,” Bethany was in the captain’s chair today, so she made the calls. “And... bring lunch.”

  Everyone hopped to it, Captain’s orders. They all took turns as captain, that rotation was simply based on the day. Same as with cooking, they all took turns being tempted by the object and its terribly toe tapping music.

  While they ate together on the bridge, the Nuphidri explained that the source of the signal was a planet nine days out at high warp. Longer term decisions like this were made by council vote, but everyone was immediately onboard; any chance, any way, any hope they could find to help them get rid of the object was worth investigating.

  ____

  If you’re wondering why they didn’t just leave the cursed object behind, they tried. Oh gods how they tried. It just reappeared any time someone started cooking. They had thrown it into a couple different classes of stars, dangled it in the drive plume of a primitive nuclear torch-ship, and even tried a volcano planet. If there had been a black hole nearby they would have tried that too, to no avail.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Nothing stopped it from reappearing. Nothing stopped it from playing the same song every damn time. Nothing.

  Also, it is worth noting since we're having this lovely aside, the cursed object only played the song; it did not technically force anyone to sing it. No mind magic involved, only music and psychology.

  ____

  Bethany got caught singing the song by the Nuphidri half way through their nine day journey to where the signal sent them.

  The typically quiet wizard swore up and down at her big, blue, three-eyed, alien-but-humanoid-shaped friend. She really hated latrine duty. Rex would enjoy his double dessert rations until the next person was ‘assigned’ latrine duty.

  The night before they arrived, Rex was on cooking duty. Bopping along, he was unaware of his singing while chopping veggies and F-Meat into cubes for his ‘dogbowl’ style meal.

  He was discovered by Sheena. She clicked on the intercom to ask him something.

  "Ohhh Rex? Whatcha doing?"

  "Makin' Dinner and singing. AWWW, shit!"

  "You didn't forget the bonus protein, did you? We got gravwell work in the morning."

  "No..." He got the extra F-Meat portions from the nutrient dispenser and started adding them to the bowls, "I didn't forget."

  The Chrysaora dropped out of warp at their destination planet in high orbit at 0800 ship-time. If you've been wondering about the ship's name, it's a type of jellyfish. From most angles the name seemed weird, however, when viewed from head-on - the view its designer might have been a little too comfortable with - The Chrysaora had a sort of jellyfish look to it.

  It hadn’t occurred to anyone on the current crew that they could rename it, so the Chrysaora, it remained. There were many biological components to their Space-Jellyfish-Ship, though truth be told, not a lick of actual jellyfish DNA.

  From high orbit over their destination they scanned with the short range, high resolution scanners. High res visual scanners too, not just the magical gizmometers they’d installed to help them track down frequencies associated with the cursed object.

  “Oh, wow!” Bethany whistled. “That’s certainly a Darsunian construction. Just about the biggest ley line adjuster I’ve ever seen on a non-colonized world. I’ll bet three dessert rations we find information on the object in there… hell, even if we don’t, we could sell the location data to the Wizard University for a bundle. Always good money for Darsunian artifacts, and no doubt there’s more than just the building down there.”

  No one was taking her bet. More importantly, they were all praying to whatever gods might hear them, to find a way to get rid of the object.

  “Well,” The Nuphidri, captain of the day, still on the scanner station, said, “at least it’ll be a productive landing, one way or another. Sheena, take us down, please.”

  As the only competent pilot, Sheena held sole responsibility for landing, docking, or piloting during combat. Not that she often had to perform the last thing, they preferred to run rather than fight in space. Their only weapon was whatever spells their onboard wizard could throw out there… so not much of anything. Bethany was an academic, not a combat mage. She was skilled in utility magic, and research, not ship-to-ship pew pews.

  They could really use a ship gun.

  Sheena eased them out of high orbit and as they descended the sensors continued to report.

  “By the hive, that’s some thick jungle.” The Nuphidri’s scans showed the biomass density was quite a bit above an average equatorial jungle. “The nearest clearing is twenty kilometers from the structure.”

  “You want us to walk through twenty klicks of hot, thick jungle on an alien world?” Lucas voiced the general human concern. “Ain’t this planet 1.4gs too? So that’s a hot, heavy, and humid jungle? Nasty, no thanks.”

  “Another option is to land on the structure.”

  The whole crew was pretty gun-shy about that idea, the last time they’d tried that the whole structure collapsed the instant they cut engines and let the weight of their ship rest on it.

  The four humans booed that idea.

  Sheena flew the ship in a lap around the large pentagonal structure. “Let’s look for a spot that’s closer, if it’s flat enough and not so dense… I could hover above, and we could drop Rex and Lucas to clear us a little landing space.”

  “You humans are almost mutinous today,” The Nuphidri said, “but fine. I have identified three possible locations for your deforestation plan.”

  “Could we not call it that, though?” Sheena said, before muttering, “Planet’s got plenty of trees anyway.”

  She pulled the ship into a hovering maneuver over the closest spot indicated by the Nuphidri. It would only take them removing a handful of small trees to make a viable landing space.

  “Perfect.” Bethany declared, looking at the landing camera, “Suit up boys. You have a bit of forest to clear.”

  The wee wizard woman got up too, knowing she’d need to slap a slow falling spell on the boys before they jumped out of the cargo bay. A couple hundred meters fall in 1.4g was way beyond what their suits could compensate for and would be rather… deadly, without a magically softened landing.

  Rex put on his military style, heavily armored, exosuit. “Locked and loaded baby!” Lucas rolled his eyes as he suited up in his ‘infiltrator’ kit they’d purchased from the same shop. They each had a plasma torch attached to a backpack fuel kit. If it could cut metal, it could surely cut trees.

  In thirty minutes they cleared a landing zone big enough to fit the ship; a two kilometer walk, instead of twenty and flatter terrain. Once the lumberjacking was done, the boys called the ship back.

  In the meantime the rest of the crew had taken a couple of slow laps around the structure and managed some better scans. Luckily, those scans proved fruitful, they showed what appeared to be a way inside the structure, one they wouldn’t have found if they hadn’t been doing laps waiting.

  Lucas and Rex waited at the edge of their makeshift landing zone. The ship didn’t exactly blow out plumes of fire to fly like a rocket, or use spinning props like an airplane; neither of those methods work the same on every planet. Instead the Chrysaora flew with four magical gravity-manipulating engines, but just like those other engine types, being in the gravwash of a landing ship was ill-advised. It would easily break bones, or worse.

  The soft green moss covering the jungle floor was smashed flat by gravwash in four perfect circles. The landing gears extended their wide, suction-cup like feet and plunked down directly atop the compressed jungle floor. When Sheena killed the engines the whole ship lurched off-balance and sank about a meter into the jungle floor, all the way up to the belly, then stopped.

  “We are secure, and will not sink further.” The Nuphidri announced with scientific certainty. “Let's suit up.”