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"Huh." I hadn't thought about Barney the dinosaur for many years. And now there was an alien —who looked vaguely like a man in a green dinosaur suit— standing in front of me, holding a poster. And calling him a trickster god, N'armeth something. Resisting the urge to twist off the alien's head, to see if it was actually Bob having a laugh, I cleared my throat.

"Well, if you can find him, you can have him. But it might be difficult." The alien stared at me, with eyes that didn't blink. It was unnerving.

"Difficult? Why?" I pulled out my phone, calling up all the different things about Barney I could find. The alien's face didn't change, but I could sense a sort of horror emanating from him. Which changed to a definite terror, when I showed him how we felt about the purple dinosaur. All the many and varied ways we'd thought up on how to kill, destroy, or maim it.

"But, he has not committed the kind of crimes on your planet, that he did with us. How— why, do you hate him so much?" I shrugged at the question, putting my phone away. No one really knew how it started, but it was entrenched.

"Don't know. But like I said, it might be difficult to find him. If he's still alive, or still here."

"We tracked his signal here. He's definitely on this planet." The alien tilted his head to the side, stroking his chin. Or what passed for a chin. "I need to find him, to prevent a war. I think we would not wish to go to war with your people." He shuddered. Shrugging again, I pulled out a beer from the cooler beside me. This wasn't the way I'd planned to spend a Saturday afternoon, but at least it wasn't boring.

"Drink?"

"No thank you, I need to think." The alien—who I was mentally starting to call Fred—paced around my backyard. I thought about taking a video, but no one would believe it. After all, he really did look like a man in a dinosaur suit. After a few minutes, he raised a finger into the air, shouting "Ah-ha!" It seems like Barney didn't get all his exaggerated mannerisms from being a trickster god. Turning to me, he strode over, explaining his plan as he went. I chuckled. It was brilliant.

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**Report #458967**

**To all ships in the colloquially named Milky Way Galaxy. N'armeth has been tracked to the third planet from the sun, referred to by residents as Earth. He had engendered such hate there that the plan from many of the inhabitants is to kill him on sight. Our job is to make sure that Earth becomes his prison and his tomb. N'armeth is not to leave the surface. And let us hope that their war song becomes a reality.**

**I hate you**

**You hate me**

**Let's go out and kill Barney**

**With a baseball bat and a 4x4**

**NO MORE PURPLE DINOSAUR!**

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Submitted by Mooses_little_sister on Sun, Jul 03, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

“Humans. We have no quarrel with you. The choice to live or die is yours. We seek only the trickster god N’armeth who is a fugitive of our kind. Present him and you can avoid this war.” The alien holds up a faded poster of Barney the Dinosaur.