What An Idiot / Alice, Girl from the Future

• The Voyage of Alice:
  • Bluk is a planet whose capital city hosts a gigantic weekly fair, attracting thousands of visitors from all over the galaxy.
    You’d Expect: A proper system of border and customs control on the cosmodromes.
    Instead: There’s no control at all, and a space pirate is able to smuggle air-consuming worms that nearly destroy the planet’s atmosphere.
    Even Worse: After it happens, no additional security measures are taken. The officers at the border threaten to search the heroes’ ship but never proceed with it.
  • Another jewel of wisdom and common sense from Bluk. Mother Volga, a hotel for humans and humanoid aliens, has a guest who smashes their robots and boils sausages on his bed.
    You’d Expect: The hotel staff to give him a warning at once, then demand he leaves, and, even better, notify the police. Most machines in this universe are Ridiculously Human Robots, so a guy who is violent towards them might just be dangerous for people.
    Instead: The staff put up with him. He turns out to be a space pirate – the same one who has nearly destroyed the very same planet!
• One Hundred Years Ahead:
  • Granted, it kicks off the entire plot, but in the very beginning, Kolya's being a reckless idiot. He is entrusted with the key to his sick neighbor's apartment, and he knows there is one room where the neighbor has forbidden him to go. Kolya decides to take a peek there after all and discovers a mysterious machine inside.
    You'd Expect: Kolya to stay away from that machine, since he doesn't even know what it is used for.
    Instead: He turns it on.
    The Result: Well, the entire plot, where Kolya is the one who suffers most.
  • Alice is entrusted with a mielophone, a priceless thought-reading machine (there are only twenty-six of them in the world and new ones can’t be made in the foreseeable future).
    You'd Expect: Her to be careful and never let it out of her sight.
    Instead: She leaves it lying on a path in a public zoo. Of course, it promptly gets stolen.
  • Continuing from the above. Alice figures out that the mielophone is now in the possession of a guest from the past, and said guest is running to the Institute of Time. She has contacts at that Institute and at the Intergalactic Police.
    You’d Expect: Her to alert the authorities at once.
    Instead: She is ashamed to admit her previous mistake and decides to catch the boy herself. She ends up leading pirates to the time machine, suffering a concussion after hitting her head on a trolleybus during her chase, and getting stuck in the past for a long while. She realizes pretty soon she has been foolish.
  • Later on, stuck in the 20th century, Alice befriends one of the boy's classmates and goes to her school, pretending to be her distant relative, to find out which of the boys has the mielophone (she hasn't seen his face and only knows he's called Kolya because he wrote his name on a zoo bench, but there are three Kolyas in the class and she can't guarantee the boy wrote his real name).
    You'd Expect: Her to keep a low profile. Since she's just recovered from a concussion and pretends to have amnesia, the teachers aren't going to demand any noticeable results from her, and she can quietly figure out how to approach the boys about the mielophone.
    Instead: She stands out (not to show off deliberately, though, but because it's hard for her to lie) at practically every possible moment, using advanced mathematics in algebra class, saying she speaks eight languages, blurting out names of yet-nonexistent cities at geography, and beating a grandmaster at chess. As a result, everyone sees she's no usual girl and it's very easy for the pirates to track her down.
  • Mila, a twelve-year-old girl (a model student, by the way), is walking to school when she meets two people claiming to be psychiatrists and saying her new classmate Alice ran away from a high-security ward.
    You'd Expect: Mila to pretend she doesn’t know anything about it, make an excuse and leave as quickly as possible, or at the very least ask for the doctors’ identification and some written proof of Alice’s diagnosis.
    Instead: Mila believes them right away and leads them to the school. They turn out to be space pirates from the future, and it leads to one of Mila’s classmates being kidnapped and tortured, and the rest just barely making it out alive.
  • The space pirates aren’t immune to that either. Continuing from the above, after sneaking into the school with Mila’s help. Rat shape-shifts into the English teacher while Jolly U distracts the real one. He keeps an extremely thin and long snake trained specifically for pickpocketing.
    You’d Expect: Rat to at least try to act the part. He might not know 20th-century English, but he can order the class to do writing exercises or read a text. In the meantime, he can use the snake to fish out the mielophone from whatever bag it’s in and leave the room. This way, he and Jolly U will be on their way to the future before the class even realizes what happened.
    Instead: He reveals himself as an impostor immediately, Alice gets suspicious and alert at once, and the whole class chases the pirates.
  • Rat has the children cornered in an empty, abandoned house. Among the children, there is Alice, who has the mielophone. Bonus points: they don’t notice Rat until he speaks out and he has a soporific gas gun with him.
    You’d Expect: Him to immediately shoot Alice with the soporific gas, grab the mielophone and run. The kids will be too stunned to react.
    Instead: He threatens Alice with the gun but doesn’t use it. Alice gets over the initial shock and plays for time, allowing herself and her friends to prepare to attack Rat.
  • Continuing from the previous scene. In the ensuing fight, Alice manages to grab Rat’s soporific gas gun.
    You'd Expect: Her to use it at once. All right, her principles don’t allow her to do serious harm to anyone, but she has seen what the gun does: the gas simply causes one to fall instantly asleep, with no ensuing side effects. Rat might still manage to overpower the children and/or run away, and Jolly U might return to help him (the latter is unconscious outside, but Alice doesn’t know that for sure).
    Instead: Like Rat before her, she doesn’t go beyond threats. Hasn’t it been for The Cavalry, he could have slipped away.
• A Million Adventures:
  • Arkasha decides to use a portable time machine that would rewind the time to the moment when the weeds in his vegetable patch were barely grown, enabling him to get rid of them. This time machine is brought and managed by a technician who has never been to that biological research station before.
    You'd Expect: Arkasha to warn the technician that the station is home to several friendly tropical animals, as well as a pithecanthropus.
    Instead: Arkasha forgets to do it. The technician gets scared by a python, falls into a pool, and accidentally hits a button on the time machine, setting the rewind speed at maximum level. Mayhem ensues.
  • The space pirates have successfully captured Alice, along with her friend Rrrr and the rest of La Résistance, and have no intentions to spare them.
    You'd Expect: Them to just kill the captives on the spot.
    Instead: They throw the captives in prison, planning to have them all shot on the following morning. Moreover, the prison has only a single guard. Alice and her friends, feeling they have nothing to lose, outsmart the guard and make a daring escape.
    Even Worse: Among the pirates, there is Rat, who has already encountered Alice and knows she has a tendency to escape from captivity. So either other pirates don't consult him while thinking up this brilliant plan (which makes them twice the idiots, because he doesn't hide the fact Alice is known to him) or he decides she won't be able to run away this time (which makes him twice the idiot, because he doesn't even bother to at least upgrade the prison's security).
• The City Without Memory:
  • Two Nouveau Riche brothers, hated by everyone already, quarrel for a petty reason with a highborn noble during a truce. Later on, they notice him and his men in the street ahead of them. Their servant notes that they really shouldn't attack, as he has far too many connections and they're lowborn.
    You'd Expect: Them to agree and just take a different road to avoid any new fighting.
    Instead: They ambush the party and kill the enemy noble. The ruler of the country and all of his courtiers take the latter's side, and the brothers are sentenced to death.
  • Squirrel is a Rebellious Baroness in hiding with undercover enemies of the feudal lord. In the middle of the night, she gets a message that someone wants to talk to her outdoors.
    You’d Expect: Her to be suspicious and refuse to go outside. Practically everyone in the house is wanted for some reason or other. Bonus point: her friends tell her it is probably a trap.
    Instead: Squirrel immediately jumps to the conclusion that it’s a messenger from Brook, the young man she loves. Big surprise, it’s not – it turns out to be the local Double Reverse Quadruple Agent who also wants to marry her. The ensuing fight leaves many people dead, and Squirrel escapes only narrowly.