Captain Nathaniel and his crew receive a distress call from a village threatened by an ogre. When they get there, the village is already destroyed, so they travel back to yesterday and wait. The villagers (human-like beings with long noses) all know some rudimentary magic, enabling them to repel flies with orbiting wands or to create scents that never mix, so that the beef stew smell won’t mix with the donut smell across the street. It is even possible to eat chicken nuggets covered in chocolate and never taste the two ingredients at the same time, making them edible. They cast spells with yo-yos while explaining that magic is nothing but very advanced technology. They grow apricot trees, watermelon trees, and strawberry trees.

The visitors befriend a tyrannosaur with an oak tree growing from the back of his neck named Mr. Dinosaur who is also living on the planet. He tells them he once slept for so long that a tree grew its roots into him. He snacks on the acorns. Only later does he reveal that he has met them all before on planet Iddhya, where he saw them all die while fighting giant worms. “I learned afterwards that dead worms become bombs that explode when disturbed, releasing all their spores at once.” Nathaniel realizes that this must be his own future.

The ogre arrives the next day juggling swords and taunting the villagers. He turns out to be immune to lasers. When Nathaniel kicks him in the belly, the belly grabs his foot and sucks him in before he claws his way out. The town wizard fires at the ogre with his magic staff, but it is immune to that too, so the wizard fires at the rock underneath it, liquefying the rock just long enough for the ogre to sink and be trapped. The ogre does not take long to escape but by then the village is evacuated. They flee to the mountains only to come to a wall of fire. The only way through is to open a portal that has a ten percent chance of collapsing with someone inside. The wizard can either open a portal for everyone at once, with a ten percent chance of everyone dying, or he can open a portal for one person at a time, with a virtual certainty that ten percent will die. After some debate, they choose the latter.
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Eventually, ninety percent of them circle back and make it to Nathaniel’s ship, but the ogre catches Nathaniel there and almost kills him. Nathaniel grabs a broken hose and sprays the ogre with antigravity fuel, causing him to suddenly fall upwards into the ionosphere and suffocate.