I told someone on here that I was doing this. Well, here it is!

Light burst through the dark in patterns similar to the long trails of white and yellow that would explode out from Earthen streetlights, the ones that were fated to bloom into stretched smudges from looking out of a traveling car window. Only the light source, this time, was nothing so mechanical. No, these lights had been spat out from the stars themselves, in balls and blobs of grandeur that had lost their spark and stretched out over the distance a young Anodite had presently traveled.

Said Anodite now laughed, twisting and running her hands through the optical illusion her speed had made, a smile springing to her lips at the thought of her fingers diving into the cosmos and dividing its light with the lines of her flesh; or the mana-spun form of it anyway. She slowed and made an effort to enjoy the streaks of the stretched-out stars for a few more lingering seconds, before her hair erupted like a firework behind her and she came to a stop. The ends then flared out, quicker than any sword, to score the underside of a small cruiser that had been ferrying itself through deep space, and unbidden, her grin widened into a smirk.

Bingo. She was right on time.

She raised her hands, pink blasts automatically spaying out like ammo from a machine gun to successfully cut through the hull of the cruiser and she 'oooh'ed to see the angry red spill of fire and bursts of hot gas in its wake.

'Sorry, small stuff,' she said finally as she recovered from her awe. Her shoulder raised in a flippant half-shrug as she airlifted the driver out of the wreckage, their form enclosed in a small orb of pink. 'Should have brought some breathing apparatus with you.'

The girl, some weird furry creature that she had never seen before, glared at her, still crouched over as she fought to keep her lungs collapsing from the brief dip in deep space. Her clothes were blackened, burnt from the hot push of the explosion, and her left arm clutched feebly at her right, the metal cuffs on the forelimb looking as though it wouldn't take much more heat to shatter them down into a liquid splash of silver.

The Anodite rolled her eyes. 'Oh come on! It was for less than a second, I swear! You can't be dying from that already.' She hesitated, then titled her head to the side. 'Jeeze, what are you, a James Cameron guppy? I swear Earthlings would eat you up.' Then she shrugged again, a brief line of concentration appearing in her brow. 'Lame. You're probably a hick like them if I haven't seen another of your kind before; I've been to all the major haunts and I've never stumbled upon such a Navi-lookalike before. And since I don't want you coughing hairballs all over my sweet new energy source...'

She clapped her hands and with a brief swirl of light the orb spread and spun out like a miniature galaxy, an echo of the Milky Way still present in the way the trail of its limbs draped out against the dark and fell into disintegrating specks of light. The creature had time for one final glare, before she and the light, suddenly blinked out of sight.

Sunny grinned. 'Take that perfect princess Gwen. Who needs some dusty magic words when you have mana the way I do.'

She giggled and dove down towards the wreckage. 'Now let's take a lookie here...'

Rook was bristling, furious, and Ben couldn't blame him. Shar wasn't dead, but her vital signs still flickered alarmingly across the screen, all the sharp points and dips in the quick flicks of their lines playing twister with each other as though to spite him. And down below, under a tangled trail of wires and the clear stem of an IV line, her right side was wedged tightly under a thick layer of white. It rose up like the fine wrapping of a branch covered in spider silk, the bandages soaring up to cut across her chest and rest on her shoulder with a weight that looked far from small.

But yet none of that seemed to stop Shar from shifting, making a face, and then croaking out from under her furrowed brow a simple, 'ow.'

Her brother was by her side instantly, his hand nervously folding over the left one that had been left hanging over the sheets like it was unaccounted for, free from both the trap of wires and linen that bound her right.

'Please Shar, do not try moving.'

She gave him an annoyed look. 'I did not. I was simply speaking; you are aware of the phenomena, are you not?'

Rook sighed, though he managed a small smile at the petulant tone in her voice all the same. 'You sound like Rayona,' he muttered.

'Good,' his sister said firmly. 'At least I am emulating someone with actual sense.'

Rook smiled and cast a sad look at her bandaged side, his eyes slowly narrowing as they took in the small twists and tucks that bound the linen into the firm lines that smoothed over her body like tiny roads lined up side to side. It left very little to the imagination but Ben knew what it was that had really caught his partner's eye; months of weaving his own fingers through blood-matted fur and scraped claws had shown him all the angles bandages and even plasters took on when they were wedged against the bulk of fur, however short-haired it might have been. And none of these same bumps were present now on Shar's frame. No, not a tuff of blue or comforting white could peek through and make her look Revonnahgandian. Instead that side of Shar looked smaller, weak and vulnerable in the way Kundo's bald head sometimes did when it caught the light.

Well. Perhaps that was an unfair comparison. He couldn't really see Shar's skin and compare it to the flesh of a plucked chicken with the bandages in the way. Besides, she still had the fur on her face, and even if she hadn't, Ben was willing to bet that she'd be lot easier on the eyes than Mr Tradition and his slanty eyes.

'Hey,' he said, 'Not to worry; the doctors say it will grow back, right?' He flushed and made a quick gesture to her bandages, suddenly painfully aware that he wasn't sure if it was improper or immodest to refer to her lack of fur like that; perhaps it had the stigma similar to nakedness or something, he didn't know. Though Rook had never seemed bothered by Kundo's baldness - except that Rook was weird, even for a Revonnahgander, and Shar was a girl and the rules always seemed to be different for them, no matter the species.

But Shar didn't huff or look at Ben like he was a tiny insect she wanted to squash with both her hands the way Gwen might have done; no, she simply peeked down at the part of her Ben had indicated and sighed sadly.

'Yes, but it will take a while. Not because our fur grows slowly, but because the bandages must first come off. And I do not know when that will be.'

'Please be patient,' Rook instructed her, reaching out to flatten a palm against her head; it slid over her hair like the glide of a familiar brush, practised and smooth. 'I know it is hard and you have never been one who likes to wait. But this time, haste will do nothing but harm.'

'Thankfully I am not Ben,' she muttered, before her eyes widened at Ben's indignant gasp and she hurriedly said, 'no, I meant our younger brother! These drugs make my mind fuzzy and words hard to come by. Though...you do not seem to be the most patient of people either.'

'He is not,' Rook reassured her firmly. 'The very opposite in fact. Rest now; I will make sure the delinquent responsible for your pain will face justice for what she has done.'

Ben shifted uncomfortably. After all, it was because of his family that a member of Rook's was in the hospital.

But Rook was already moving, giving his sister's hand one final press before he let it go and Ben watched as if flopped down to carve out more wrinkles into the sheets with its weight.

'Come Ben. We must plan how to deal accordingly with your other, much more unpleasant cousin.'

Yes, thought Ben, let's.

Far below the main control room, Ben hunted through a set of long-lost files, frowning heavily at the untidy hand-writing of a past Plumber. Rook meanwhile, was at his side, busy slamming his fingers against a holo-projector with such agitated force that the machine let out a protesting beep, one that sharply rose into a squeal that resembled the onset of a fire-alarm. Ben winced, before glancing over to see the neat lines of the grid it portrayed rippling out into staticky waves and failing to criss-cross each other. Those blurred lines were home to a map, stars and dotted lines of pre-planned travel routes hashed out through chucky squares and they quickly recovered, straightening out again into inky blue blocks, before distorting as Rook's finger landed against the screen once more.

'There,' he said, in a very cool, clipped tone, with no hint of a snarl beneath his breath. Which didn't exactly do anything to ease Ben's worry. 'That is where my sister was...' he paused, obviously fighting back the words he wanted to use. '..accosted.'

Ben sighed and closed the file. 'It's alright, you can say it,' he said, trying not to sound as tired as he felt. 'She was attacked. Sunny's crossed a line and we're going to find her and throw the book at her.'

'I would rather throw her into a solid object, a cell preferably, than waste a perfectly innocent book,' Rook said coldly.

Ben's lips quirked. 'We can do that too, if you like.' He groaned and reached for another file, stretching to rid himself of a crink in his neck. 'God, these things must have been sitting down here forever. They're all dusty. Whose job is it to put the info here into the Plumber's database so that I shouldn't have had to do this, anyway?'

'For once, it is not Blukic and Driba,' said Rook, no trace of hesitation in his tone. 'It is considered good training for the academy students to transcribe and upload it onto the system. It teaches them the importance of cataloguing files.'

Ben shook his head. 'Either way, this is all I can find on Anodites taking up interest in agriculture. They don't seem particularly interested in crops, even the wonder-fruit that is Amber Ogia. Why Sunny would want a batch-load of the stuff is beyond me.' Ben threw his hands up in disgust. 'In fact, this last one goes on and on about the fish he and this one Anodite, some guy he called Waffallia – that's gotta be a mistake of some kind – caught and how 'Waffles' kept cooing over the energy signature of it's 'flailing fins.' Ben made a face. 'Guy writes like a novelist. A bad one.'

'Be that as it may, it does not change the fact that your cousin, an Anodite, felt such a pressing need for Amber Ogia that she was content to destroy Plumber property and risk my sister's life.'

Ben hesitated. 'To be fair, Sunny's not the kind of girl who feels she needs a compelling reason to do anything,' he said slowly, watching the way Rook's fist closed, bunches of ruffled-up fur littering his fingers in place of wrinkles. 'Careless destruction in the name of fun seems to be her MO.'

'Ah,' said Rook, and Ben flinched as those teeth landed together in a ruthless clink. 'So she takes after you then, instead of Gwen. At least personality-wise.'

Okay. That was clearly unfair. But Rook's eyes were tight and yellow, looking nastily enough like Kundo's for Ben to swallow down his retort and say surprisingly gently: 'Sure. But at least I try to make sure people are out of the way before I start wrecking stuff.'

Rook sighed and threw his head back, pressing his fingers against the closed folds of his eyes.

'I am sorry,' he said. 'I am not focusing on the things I should and I tend to get...laser-focused? Or develop 'hole vision' when my family is involved.'

Ben smiled and reached over to rub a taunt shoulder that was busy slumping behind the blue filter of light from the holo-projector's. It threw out a dark shape like a shadow over Rook's form, before Ben's fingers danced through the hovering screen to chase out the dotted lines of trade routes and replace them with the blur of static. He managed to ignore the shudder of pixels surrounding his wrist as he methodically kneaded the muscle below and they both paused there for a moment, the two of them leaning over a small desk that was surrounded by the green flare of monitor boards from the Plumber's lesser-used storage units.

They were in a tucked-away location, a tiny annex with the hiss of wires crackling loudly overhead as though to confirm how alone they were. Unfortunately that also meant that this place was subject to sudden surges of electricity, causing the lights to flicker into a low hue without warning and the shadows to swoop in and soar out like claws from the corners they had originally been forced into.

Rook sighed again as another such flicker took place, before rolling his shoulder more firmly into Ben's grasp. It was the best he could do with the hard press of Proto-armour between them, because it distanced his nerves from Ben's fingers, letting them register only as light sweeps of pressure. Or at least, that's what it always felt like when Ben was attempting to be as gentle as he now was. Unfortunately, tender caresses didn't really work in work hours, not when Ben directed his touch towards the parts of his anatomy that weren't his face or hands.

'No sweat,' said Ben. 'I get it.' Then he laughed, sharp and bright and obviously forced. 'And congratulations; you actually got an expression right for once. It is laser-focused. But not 'hole vision.' I think you were trying for 'tunnel vision' there. Still, one out of two ain't bad.'

Rook rolled his eyes. 'Oh yes, that is certainly an achievement to be proud of.'

Ben softened. 'Okay, I'm not saying anything more because you have the right to be grumpy, but...how exactly are we planning to track Sunny down? We know where she's been, but not where she'll go. And Gwen is busy with some dissertation that's due in a few hours, so we can't get help from that quarter. Well, not without her flunking.'

Rook let out a tight, taunt hiss of breath, his frustration rising.

Then Ben smirked. 'Then again, I am still Sunny's family. Enough to know that we can't really appeal to her better nature. The party animal inside her, however...'