A New World of Gods and Marvels

by astrocitizen

For Britannia, it is the year 2017 A.T.B., the beginning of the Empire's end as a young prince in hiding launches a revolution. For Europe, it is the year 1962 A.D., the next step in Mankind's destiny as four would-be astronauts thrust themselves into the unknown. For both, it is the year that everything changes.

1. Gulliver's Travels

A New World of Gods and Marvels

Chapter 1: "Gulliver's Travels"

Disclaimer: Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion is the property of Sunrise, Bandai Entertainment, and Ichiro Okouchi. The Fantastic Four mythos and related characters are the creation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and are the property of Marvel Comics, Inc.

Warning: Possibility of adult language and strong violence.

---

Narita Mountains, June 2017 A.T.B.

Lelouch vi Britannia would wonder how he came to be such a quick draw afterwards. But at the moment, he was just satisfied with his skills as an orator and a natural leader of men.

A minute before, there had been a split second of dead silence as the members of the newly christened Order of the Black Knights came to the conclusion that they'd followed a madman to their deaths. Granted, they had some Knightmare Frames of their own: Burai models, which were an effective enough countermeasure to Britannian Sutherlands, as well as the crimson-finished Guren being piloted by Kozuki Kallen, a half-Japanese teenager who was one of their gutsier, more competent members. But still, they had spent the afternoon hiking to the summit of the highest mount, only to dig holes and plant explosive charges, the kind used in mining operations. Now they were surrounded on practically all sides as the Britannian Army came in pell-mell to finish off the last of the Japanese Liberation Front, along with any other Eleven resistance stupid enough to be out in the open.

The reaction of the team's resident hothead Tamaki, a role he practically advertised with his clumsily dyed-red hair, could be more accurately described as apoplectic. Waving his rifle around, he'd made the gut-reaction decision to kill the masked mystery-man they knew only as Zero. Then, if his words could be believed, he intended to take over as leader himself, a move anyone could see was about as healthy as diving into the mouth of an active volcano.

Fortunately for all concerned, he had no real training or experience with the weapon, which he'd indolently allowed to hang by its strap over his shoulder. His clumsy attempt to bring it to bear in a quick manner thus gave Lelouch more than enough time to beat him to the draw. Nevertheless, the pistol seemed to magically appear in his hand as Zero unholstered it and took aim, placing the man's underused head square in his sights, with one quick, fluid motion.

His features hidden by the violet faceplate of his helmet, itself partially inspired by both the crest of a hawk and the crown of a black king's chess piece, Lelouch smirked at the loudmouth's instantly pale expression. Deciding he had enough fun, he then started about bringing his errant knight-errants back under his sway.

Having allowed all present a moment to suspect they were about to see their friend executed for mutiny, Zero then twirled his gun over, offering it handle first to each Black Knight in turn, questioning aloud if they agreed that he'd led them astray. First was Tamaki, the idiot too shocked by both his close brush with death and the astounding offer to take advantage of it. Then came Ohgi Kaname, the ex-school teacher who'd been the resistance group's nominal leader before he came along. Long-haired Sugiyama. Bespectacled Minami. Inoue, the group's only female other than Kallen (or the only one Lelouch had taken note of, anyway). All were thus pressured into continuing acceptance of Zero as their leader, however problematic their current dilemma was.

Giving a little speech, whose material sounded rather cultish he had to admit, Zero reminded all of them that the Black Knights were a fellowship more ironclad than a marriage. There would be no till death do they part, rather they won as one or died as one. They did not even have the option of hanging separately as (ironically) the traitor of another great rebellion once posited.

With that over and done with, he began giving orders again, sending everyone to their Burais as he reminded them of routes to take and mission objections. As he stepped to the drop-line of his own KMF unit, he spoke into a radio to address the Guren's pilot directly. "Q-1, charge power output of the Radiant Wave Surger to full, then await my signal to—"

BOO - OOO - OOM!

As if the ear shattering thunderclap wasn't enough, a wave of displaced air then surged over the rebels, knocking several over. Landing flat on his back from where he'd been trying to clamber into his Burai, one Black Knight took the opportunity to look straight up into the sky, and even reached up with an open palm to feel for water drops. He expected to see a rainstorm coming, but could see no significantly dark clouds.

Using the drop-line's rungs to pull himself up, Lelouch instinctively began scanning the surrounding area in search of plumes of smoke from cannon fire or possibly an explosion. He examined the horizon slowly like a professional, but concentrated on the land below them. Inoue was doing very much the same, but included the sky in her vigil, having considered that the sound had been the sonic boom of a jet. As a result, she was the first to notice.

"Holy shit!" she cursed aloud, pointing into the fair distance. Following her line of sight, the Black Knights saw a ball of fire steadily becoming larger and larger, a flaming contrail stretching off into a curve far behind it. Also increasing was a low roaring sound, which they'd first assumed had been just the blast from before still ringing in their ears.

"A meteor?" Ohgi asked incredulously, directing his question towards Tamaki. The red-head only gulped uselessly, terror stricken at what looked to be the Devil's finger pointing straight at them.

With a dull popping sound, something ejected off of the flaming projectile and flew off from it. As the shape sailed away to the earth below, the air friction against it tapered off, allowing the flames to die. It was very far away, but still it could be discerned as mildly rounded, rather like one of the engine pods for a jet airplane.

As soon as she made this comparison, realization struck Kallen, her hair, already combed out into a winglike formation of spikes at the sides of her head, flaring out even more. "Oh my God," she gasped before slapping the Guren's loudspeaker button. "Zero, that's got to be the—!"

"I know!" yelled back Lelouch, who'd reached the same conclusion. Here and now of all places? he asked himself, confounded by the unlikely chain of events.

Nevertheless, this was happening, and he had to adjust for it. He glanced first down the sides of the mountain, where Britannia's troops could clearly be seen having come to a halt, having felt and heard the same blast of air. Then he looked back up at the oncoming projectile, ran some quick geometry in his head, and came to a conclusion.

"There's nothing we can do about it," he bleakly pronounced to his followers, raising his voice to be heard over the growing howl. "They, on the other hand, are about to do our job for us. This side of the mountain," he explained, pointing downwards to the main body of enemy KMF's, "for better or for worse, is going to be used like a giant ramp! Everyone take the emergency escape routes I plotted; we'll use them to take cover as it… lands." Internally, he knew that to be an inaccurate description, but about as tasteful as any for what was about to happen. "After which we'll come out, and engage Princess Cornelia and any remaining forces!"

Abandoning the charges, the Black Knights did as they were told, Kallen dialing back the R.W.S. as she did the same. Scrambling back to his Burai to join them, Lelouch took one last look down the mountain as the drop-line pulled him up into the cockpit. It was clear the Britannians either had not yet realized the danger they were in or hadn't received orders to retreat yet. In any case, they were too far up the mountainside, and many of them were surely done for.

Not so many as with his mudslide scheme, he reckoned, but he'd already wondered if the avalanche might slip further than he expected and deluge the settlement below. To use the blasting charges on top of the crash would definitely be overkill and threaten civilian lives. But still... having to abandon his carefully planned miracle and strategize on the fly?

"Damned Europeans," he grumbled quietly, reflecting the microbe of royal Britannian upbringing still deep within him. Inserting his key, which looked like a large, fancy flash drive, into the console, he activated his Burai, the vaguely humanoid, two-story-tall robotic combat vehicle whining to life around him. He then proceeded to high-tail it somewhere safe as the joint English-German spacecraft grew ever larger on the Knightmare's view screen.

/ * * /

Ashford Academy, one month earlier

"Well, that was, uh, memorable," Rivalz Cardemonde remarked without enthusiasm. None of the others in his group of friends responded as they continued trudging along the pathway.

Just a few minutes ago, the entire student body for the upscale boarding school had been dismissed from the conservatory. There, they had watched the televised funeral for Prince Clovis, Area 11's late viceroy, from the imperial capital of Pendragon as it played out on a screen fit for a movie theater. The proceedings had not only been started by, but arguably climaxed with, a thunderous speech by the Emperor himself, Charles zi Britannia. In response, the assembled princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and high military and administrative personnel all rose in chanting their imperial hosanna - "All hail Britannia!" - as the broadcast ended.

Reassembling outside, the members of Ashford's student council by unspoken mutual agreement decided to reconnoiter at the clubhouse. Looking like a fair-sized manor on the far end of the campus, it served as both their meeting hall and home to siblings Lelouch and Nunnally Lamperouge. Orphaned during Britannia's conquest of the former state of Japan, they'd been taken in and all but adopted by the elder Lord Ashford, whose granddaughter Milly was the council's president. This same normally exuberant girl now shot worried looks at them; for once, she was willing to allow everyone to their own thoughts, but the Lamperouges' state of mind could not escape her concern.

Unknown to all present but herself and (as she suspected) Suzaku Kururugi, the academy's first, newest, and onliest Honorary Britannian student, the Lamperouges were royalty themselves. They had known Clovis personally as children before they were exiled from the homeland, so it was obvious they were upset with their father's handling of the situation. Lelouch, the elder of the two, had marched mechanically out of the hallway without saying a word while Nunnally, who was attending classes in the junior-level division, was silent as she was pushed along in her wheelchair by her maid, a native woman named Sayoko.

As an Eleven, Sayoko's presence at such an event normally would have been objected to, but given her mistress's disabilities, not a word had been said and hardly a glare sent her way. And a good thing, too. She'd been a stabilizing factor for Nunnally, quietly slipping to and fro with a handkerchief as the princess-in-hiding suffered through the funeral. With it she had muffled her tears, earning her a few brownie points with her peers and the teachers present as she was apparently overcome with emotion.

That assumption was both right and wrong, as the young girl had been overwhelmed by the Emperor's speech, but with disgust instead of patriotic fervor. Lelouch had never given her the details, but she imagined the curt dismissal of their fate by their father seven years before was akin to the Emperor's behavior today. What should have been a solemn affair meant for mourning and remembrance had been warped into nothing less than a political rally.

Lelouch's thoughts were no better. Analytically speaking, he was in no position to criticize the eulogy for his half-brother as he was the direct cause of it, the assassination of the viceroy his first official act of revolution against Britannia. Nevertheless, his trepidation at the likelihood of seeing Clovis receive the final respects that, to his knowledge, had been denied his mother, had turned into outrage as their father took the stage. With a boot camp instructor's bullhorn of a delivery, his speech had consisted solely of a lecture, glorifying the Empire and predicting its inevitable triumph over all other, inferior nations. The ex-royal's mind had since then whirled in a circle, cursing his father and promising vengeance for every life he'd crushed and blasphemed.

The thoughts of the others ran the gamut as they also took apart the funeral, ranging from bewilderment to similar feelings of revulsion. Even quiet-as-a-mouse Nina Einstein, normally a supporter of His Majesty's doctrine of continuous conquest and subjugation for no other reason than her morbid fear of non-Britannians, foreigners, and anyone else that fell under the heading of "other," could think of nothing laudable to say.

"You'd think His Majesty would have said something good about his son," Shirley Fenette finally spoke up, the continued silence proving too much for her nerves. "It was his funeral after all."

"He may not have had anything good to say about the Viceroy," Lelouch responded evenly. "The imperial consorts number in the dozens, with each one producing at least one child on average. As such, the Emperor has a small army of children to... fill in any blanks that may arise on occasion." Unseen, he reached over and grasped his sister's hand, squeezing it in a consoling manner, as he said so.

Picking up the train of thought, Milly continued for him. "Between dozens of kids, having to run an empire, all the high nobles and military officials he has to analyze the world with and give orders to, he probably doesn't have much time to spare on most of them. Not as much as a regular household with a wife, a mortgage, one and a half kids, and two cats in the yard, anyway. For all we know, the day Prince Clovis asked to be appointed viceroy was probably the first time His Majesty even really met him."

"'Two cats in the yard'?" asked Suzaku. He'd already been sidetracked by the physiological connotations of having half a child when the reference to cats bowled him over.

Turning to his childhood friend, Lelouch was about to explain the musical reference when his cell phone started buzzing. Excusing himself as he took a few steps away from the group, he frowned when he saw the call was coming from the clubhouse, but answered anyway.

"This better not be about ordering pizza," he snapped quietly. Given that it was a day of mourning, most businesses - including C.C.'s favorite pizza chain - had closed early, if they'd been open at all. But try telling her that, a feat Lelouch was expecting he'd have to attempt yet again.

Meanwhile, the others continued without him, Rivalz rubbing his chin contemplatively at the object of his affections' hypothesis.

"So, the Emperor and his own kids are pretty much strangers to each other, huh?" he pondered. "I never thought about it that way. Well, nothing's ever perfect, so I guess there'd be a downside to having your own personal harem, too."

As expected, Shirley blushed furiously, scandalized by her own imagination with assumptions as to the extent of the teenaged boy's thought patterns, for which she began to loudly reprimand him. Standing off to the side watching this was Kallen, her naturally magenta tresses now hanging loose as part of her "disguise" as a perfectly ordinary Britannian schoolgirl, Kallen Stadtfeld. The secret rebel silently agreed with the redhead, although with not as much condemnation. "Ecchi," she muttered quietly to herself as Rivalz vainly tried to defend himself from the flustered orangette's recrimination.

Earlier, when everyone had assembled in the music hall, she found herself oddly reminded of the tyourei from her school days before the invasion, standing alongside her childhood friends. Looking at each of the new set of friends that had foisted themselves on her, she found herself reevaluating Britannians, or rather this tiny pack of them. While they weren't willing to just come out and say it, none of them had agreed with, and in fact been offended by, the Emperor's boorish behavior, his crass dismissal of one of his own. The only actual mention of the dead prince had been a reminder of the Empire's addition-via-subtraction mentality where deadweight was cut away so the rest could keep pushing forward, making it sound like it was a good thing the young man had been killed.

That being said, a quiet, respectful service would not have been her choice for sending off Japan's despotic governor either. On the contrary, Kallen's fantasies concerning Clovis had she gotten her hands on him post-mortem were a kaleidoscope of enthusiastically spiteful acts. Elements in them ranged from a pack of hunger-maddened boars to a catapult aimed in the direction of a large tire fire or a marksmanship competition.

If she were honest with herself, however, Kallen would not have bothered with such glaring, semi-comedic displays of ill will in real life. Given the chance, it was more likely she'd get sloppy drunk and spend the better part of an hour or so screaming at the corpse, loudly demanding answers and explanations for every sin committed against her homeland since the day the Emperor and Prime Minister Kururugi had decided the world wasn't big enough for both of them. After finally venting her spleen, and sadly realizing no answers were forthcoming, she'd then dig a shallow grave, kick the body into it, and do a decent job of covering it up just so it wouldn't be so easily found. And that would be the end of it.

. . .

Okay, assuming whatever cheap wine or hooch she'd procured had finished being processed in that amount of time, she'd go to the toilet in the grave first before filling it up, but otherwise, that would be the whole of her vengeance.

These were thoughts she could only share with the other members of her resistance group, founded by her late brother. Naoto had received little better than a potter's field burial, but still he'd been wept over, and not used as an opportunity for a Social Darwin tent revival. It was his memory, and his wish for her to live a more peaceful life, that her leader and friend Ohgi consistently shoved in her face whenever he felt she was distancing herself from school too much. One would have thought she'd announced her engagement the way he reacted when she groused that she'd gotten herself press-ganged onto the student council.

It all made her wish they had stronger ties to that masked man, Zero. Organizing the rescue of Kururugi's son from the Purebloods' kangaroo court showed that his counterattack in Shinjuku wasn't a fluke, that he had the ability to make a real organized resistance against the Britannians. A turnabout from the occasionally violent annoyance that most insurgents were, one that could be easily quashed by an effective viceroy.

That's probably the real reason Ohgi keeps encouraging me to stick to school, she considered apprehensively. Make sure I'm outside of the blast zone when the hammer finally falls.

It's not that she disliked any of them, although she could do without Lelouch, a patronizing creep whose only redeeming quality was his sister. It was just that one day, they would all have to go, packed onto refugee ships and shooed back to Britannia, never to return.

That was the best case scenario, of course, which was unrealistic. More likely, the final showdown between Japanese resistance and Britannian occupation would be bloody, with people killing each other in the streets, either out of naked rage, vengeance, or fear of retribution. In which case, it was possible they would surprise her and join in, arming themselves with whatever weapons they could find or fashion, just as she would have to surprise them by fighting against them. Probably kill some of them, in fact.

She looked at each of them in turn, even Lelouch, and imagined them dead at her hands, shot or perhaps stabbed with the spring-loaded dagger in her sewing pouch. It took her a moment, but she realized that the mental image made her shiver. Since when did the thought of killing Britannians scare me? she wondered.

It's because you've gotten to know them, the more logical part of her mind answered, using Naoto's voice.

She'd only met them because she wanted to corner Lelouch, find out what if anything he knew about her being in Shinjuku the day of Prince Clovis's assassination there, and then dispose of him if necessary. It had instead led to one embarrassing incident after another, culminating with her accidentally exposing herself to him in the shower.

Nevertheless, she'd been stuck spending time with them, and been surprised to see none of were snooty peacocks like her stepmother or her father's cronies, grimly chuckling over how they'd ground the local Numbers into their place. Rather, they were a normal pack of teens her age, relatively speaking given the dissonance between Japanese and Western social norms, that she could imagine hanging out with in a different world. Her actual problems with them were few and far between, and even these were minor quirks and idiosyncrasies that one would find with any group of people.

One thing she'd initially been suspicious of was a maid that often waited upon them, a Japanese woman some years her senior named Sayoko. But since then she'd found no sign of her being exploited or mistreated by them. At worst there was just a hint of an attitude off of Lelouch, making the distinction between himself as employer and her as servant, but no more than that. A far cry from Lady Stadtfeld, from whom the mentality of lord and serf - or perhaps, owner and property - was evident.

Sayoko for her part was not the obedient drone that the Empire desired, nor the happy-go-lucky knucklehead that it found tolerable as with Suzaku. She seemed genuinely happy with the council gang, and they with her, although in Nina's case this was probably just ease due to familiarity. There had even been signs that they viewed her like family, as with moments where Nunnally had treated her with daughter-like deference, one more thing about the poor blind girl that Kallen had found hopelessly endearing.

The only real sticking point had been the cat hunt yesterday, when Milly offered students a kiss from a student councilor of their choice as reward for catching a stray cat that had earlier gotten into the clubhouse. Kallen's kneejerk reaction had been to copy Shirley in her exaggerated presumption of others having impure motives.

"Offering people as prizes?! This is why I hate Britannians!" Ha! I can't believe how I blew my top over that, she thought, amused at herself. She'd been startled by the notion on top of feeling embarrassed, having never actually kissed a boy before. All the same, she may not have gotten so hot and bothered if it hadn't been for those hentai idiots from the film and gardening clubs she encountered right after the announcement, each loudly postulating on who, what, when, where, and how they would demand the kiss to take place if they won.

In retrospect, the whole deal had been good for all of them. She and Shirley had shared something of a bonding moment as they mutually hunted the little couch-shredder… until the star of the swim meet started nattering on about making Lelouch kiss one of them. Suzaku, meanwhile, had rescued Lelouch from falling off the roof of the bell tower, a heroic act which had since afforded him enough leeway from the student body that he was no longer being treated like a Refrain addict that had wandered onto school grounds.

Kallen had thus settled down by the time the student council regrouped at the clubhouse to make Suzaku's induction as a member official, while the cat made itself at home on a sofa. As she should have come to realize already, Milly's actions had been typical behavior for her - embarrassing but not intentionally malevolent. The Ashford heiress viewed the world as a game board, with everyone as pieces that hadn't realized they could be players too. Her carefree attitude and devil-may-care mischief was just her way of making people break out of their set routines.

In Milly's opinion, Lelouch was in sore need of this manner of "therapy," and the recent excitement of the day, including his near-miss destiny with becoming street pizza, had not been sufficient to the task.

This became obvious as Lelouch, Suzaku, and Nunnally pieced together for the group their reunion after the boys had gathered up the cat, the younger Lamperouge explaining that she'd covered the bet and so the lips of any unwilling prizes were now safe. With a mischievous twinkle in her eye, Milly had then evaluated her handling of the situation.

"Well, Lelouch is your brother, so I'm afraid I have to deduct points on the grounds of poor taste. But aside from that… two boys at the same time, Nunnally? Top shelf!" she'd exclaimed as she held the uncomprehending girl's hand up to give her a high-five. Rustling her hair, she continued, "Even with the old sourpuss constantly hanging around, I knew you had it in you to become a little heartbreaker someday."

Whether or not Milly noticed Shirley's face turn beet-red was anyone's guess. She was enjoying Lelouch nearly suffer a coronary too much. All in all, it was probably Kallen's best day at school ever, she realized with a smile.

It was a smile noticed, but misinterpreted, by Milly right at that moment. "Oh, so you think it's a good idea, too, huh?"

Realizing she'd been spoken to, Kallen shook her head, clearing away the cobwebs before responding. "I'm sorry! What again?"

"Madame President asked if it may not be too late to hold an awake festival for Prince Clovis," Suzaku told her.

"Not 'awake,' Suzaku," Milly playfully admonished. "A. Wake. Festival. Since everyone seems to agree His Highness was kind of given short shrift, why not have the students hold a fair in honor of his memory?" She then stepped back with a cat-like look of satisfaction at her brilliant idea.

Everyone in response gave her a look as if she'd lost her mind. Nina started slowly inching away from her while Rivalz tried to think of some way to vote against Milly's plan while not ruining his chances of ever getting a date with her. Even Lelouch glanced up from his phone and sadly shook his head as he continued intensely listening to his caller. Beside her, Kallen could hear Nunnally as, cupping her hand, she quietly asked Sayoko if Milly had actually said that or if she was just imagining things.

"Milly, they're probably hoisting a slab over him in the imperial mausoleum even as we speak," Kallen answered, "so, yes, I'm afraid it'll be considered too late."

Ignoring the fact her own ideas for a deserving memorial service revolved around wild pigs and flaming piles of trash, her real concern was that whatever activities the blonde may think of would likely attract the kind of scrutiny that the school or herself as an undocumented Eleven didn't need. The reason for all the oddly-themed fairs she'd seen held on campus had become clear to Kallen since becoming acquainted with their source.

For her part, Milly rolled her eyes and tsk-tsked at her friends, wondering where they'd gotten the impression that she lacked any sense of decorum. "Come on, you guys, we can still do a nice, tasteful memorial for the viceroy. There can be a contest for collages depicting his life and times. A ceremonial procession with a jazz band like they do in New Orleans. It's not like we're going to hold fireworks," she added mockingly.

"Even if you did, by now it would be considered hideously passé as well as inappropriate," Lelouch suddenly spoke up, slapping his cell phone close as his pace began to pick up.

"What is it, Lelouch?" asked Rivalz, wondering what his friend's phone call had been about.

"That was someone I met once while out for a chess match," he answered truthfully enough. Before Shirley could let into him about skipping school to gamble, he continued speaking. "There was a news bulletin right after the funeral ended. While everyone was paying attention to that, Europe launched a rocket!"

He began to run (well, sort of) the final hundred yards to the clubhouse while the news made its way through his friends' brains. When things finally clicked, the first to react was Milly. "To the TV room!" she declared as she struck a melodramatic pose, like an explorer in olden times pointing out to undiscovered lands beyond the horizon. She then started sprinting, the rest quickly joining her.

Needless to say, although he has a head start, Lelouch was quickly left eating dust as everyone - starting with Suzaku, of course, and ending with Kallen, despite keeping to her public persona of a chronically sick girl - gradually overlapped him.

"Suzaku, wait up! Hey, this isn't a race, you guys! Nunnally? You little traitor! I saw that finger, Kallen!"

/ * * /

Five minutes later, when Lelouch staggered panting into the clubhouse's television-viewing room, the rest had already gotten snacks and arranged themselves around the big screen. The only empty seats was one waiting for him, the other having already been claimed by Kallen, who was off somewhere making a phone call to Ohgi in private. Ready as always, Sayoko handed the prince a cold bottle of water, which he guzzled as she half-guided, half-carried him over to his seat.

Over the next few hours, they watched as video clips repeated ad nauseam while rumors and actual facts were gathered, reported, then authenticated or rescinded, while talking heads on either side of the oceans analyzed the situation. Slowly, the full picture took shape:

A rocket had indeed been fired during the state funeral, practically halfway through the Emperor's speech, from a decommissioned military base in the northern part of the United Commonwealth of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It had not been the start of a ballistic missile attack as initially thought, but rather it was a space launch. Such things were not totally out of the ordinary, as deliveries of new satellites happened on occasion. But this was not one of them. From all accounts, the launch was of a genuine spaceship with a crew on board, piloting the vessel as it broke free from Earth's gravity, hopefully to re-embrace it safely later on.

Clips from recordings taken of the launch and the projectile itself quickly filtered into news stations and aired worldwide. Some came from CCTV cameras within the launch facility itself, others from eyewitnesses, news teams at work in the field who'd been lucky to be within sight of the launch, even astronomers already recording events in the night's sky. As the world quickly realized what was happening, satellites equipped for image-gathering were realigned to watch as it left Earth's atmosphere.

The sight of the projectile as it rose on a pillar of fire into the sky had been spellbinding enough. Added to it were multiple shots from different angles as it began to lose its cylindrical outer hull, plates shedding in sequence until finally the external nosecone separated and broke off. Thus revealed was the actual spacecraft itself, a kind of, well, the word "space-plane" quickly became bandied about. It looked like a plus-sized airliner, but broadened like a stealth bomber, with a massive delta wing configuration. Aside from this revelation, the best, and certainly most dramatic, footage of it was transmitted from one of the afore-mentioned satellites. Usually a storm-tracker, it had recorded video as the vessel nearly clipped it, zipping pass from less than a hundred feet away.

In the past few decades, as knowledge of rocketry grew, along with equipment for maintaining life and limb higher into the atmosphere, so did the prospect of slipping the bonds of Earth, until one day space programs began to pop up around the world. Artificial satellites had been first, and eventually became foremost, as the modern international telecommunication systems could attest. But launching people into space someday was never far from the minds of visionaries.

Real life, unfortunately, stagnated these dreams. The prospects of foreign invasion, either the prevention or instigation thereof, always gave military programs the higher priority for time, money, technology, and personnel. Even after aerospace scientists and physiologists had pretty much worked out the kinks in the prospects for sending live test subjects into space without danger of asphyxiation, getting crushed by g-force, or any variety of torturous deaths, there was always something, a battle or a bureaucrat, that had gotten in the way.

From all accounts, the birth of the Knightmare Frame and the shot in the arm it gave international warfare should have been the final nail in the coffin of manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future. But such thinking had turned out to be presumptuous, Lelouch and his friends conceded, as details trickled in on the space-plane, or "space shuttle" as the Euro Ultra-union's news services called it, now known as the Gulliver.

In an almost conciliatory manner, these same news services communicated that the ship had been launched without authorization from the Central Hemicycle or any other government agency on the local, national, or continental level. For the past five years, it seemed, a private scientific research and development foundation known as the Future Trust had been constructing the shuttle piece by piece, testing and assembling components, starting and stopping as financial support came and went, or government agencies stepped in with some almost-imaginary complaint concerning public health codes, zoning laws, all kinds of maddening minutiae. The Gulliver, in fact, had been completed the year before, fueled and ready to go, but hampered by a web of red tape.

Then, the whole world stopped for the funeral of the assassinated Britannian royal. The European nations, like many, hadn't taken the chance that some enterprising soul out there would decide to mark the occasion by doing something stupid and reckless. And so, police were out in force at all major public areas, military bases were on high-alert, and all but essential air traffic had been cancelled. With commercial airplanes on the ground, and gun sights and radar dishes all trained towards either Britannia, Africa, or Asia, a handful of people, including the Future Trust's founder, had decided there would never be a better time to see their phoenix rise.

To keep personnel to a minimum, innumerable automated systems had been built into both the facility and the rocket, enabling the launch sequence to practically run itself. As a result, a small group had been all that was necessary for a manned spaceflight to become a reality. These people - four in all - were now the center of attention for every news service and media format on Earth.

And who were they? Images taken from the facility's security cameras, in addition to a recorded message left behind by the crew itself, had allowed all four to be positively identified. Two were citizens from the United Commonwealth - Reade Richardson, a professor at Cambridge University, and Benjamin J. Grimshaw, formerly of the Commonwealth Armed Forces' Air Corps. The other half of the team were Germans - physician and biochemist Dr. Susanne von Stromberg, along with her teenaged brother Johann.

The four of them were evidently close-knit, journalists soon uncovered, and were actually planning to become even closer. The group's two academics, Richardson and the elder von Stromberg, had recently announced to friends and relatives that they were engaged to be married. To this Britannia's more cynical critics retorted that they had probably been drawn together as they were both the product of a broken home.

Indeed, Richardson had been raised alone by his mother after her husband, also a noteworthy scientist, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The von Strombergs, meanwhile, had lost both of their parents starting with their mother, who died in a car crash. Taking to drink to escape the pain, their father Franz soon afterwards found himself in a bar fight where he accidentally killed a man. Still consumed with survivor's guilt from the earlier accident, he allowed himself to be convicted of homicide, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt until Susanne came of legal age.

Grimshaw, incidentally, had hardly a better past, first growing up in one of the rougher sections of Manchester. The area was swarming with street gangs, which eventually claimed the life of his older brother. That was the final straw and his parents' already tumultuous marriage disintegrated, with nether of them taking custody of young Benjamin. This turned out to be the turning point in his life, as he was thereafter taken in by a loving uncle and his wife, Petunia.

If anything, their problematic pasts only drew Lelouch's empathy to them. That's not to say he wouldn't have found them interesting anyway. As photos and biographical material about them appeared on TV and online in earnest, he quickly found himself becoming something of a minor expert on them.

The first he studied was the Future Trust's CEO (or "managing director" in European parlance) and ringleader of the Gulliver project, Professor Richardson, followed closely by former Flight Lieutenant Grimshaw. He was surprised to learn they were cousins, their mothers having been sisters, as they looked nothing alike. In fact, they could have been some variation of the traditional "fat man/skinny man" comedy duo, although some Britannians chuckled that they looked more like opposite ends of an Evolution-of-Man display.

Originally from the Chelsea area of London, Reade Richardson was now a professor at St. Cedd's College, one of Oxford's satellites. There, he held the chair for pure mathematics, but his sphere of interest reached further out than that. In fact, he appeared to be a genuine polymath, possessing master's and doctor's degrees in chemistry, physics, microelectronics, robotics, and, as recent events proved, astrophysics, plus functional knowledge of several other fields.

More inclined towards applied science than theoretical, he'd published papers rarely, but had become a sought-after specialist all the same. He had dozens of patents under his belt, had refined several previously existing chemical processes and electromechanical systems, and had been a pivotal technical expert in the E.U.'s quick and early response to Britannia's burgeoning KMF infantry. It was supposed by many that he even had a hand in the Panzer-Hummel model Knightmares that for now kept His Majesty's Sutherlands and Gloucesters at bay along the Mediterranean.

From the looks of him, it was natural to take Richardson for a professional science whiz. Photos showed a moderately handsome fellow of Anglo descent pushing thirty, with a high forehead and chocolate-brown hair already shot through with bits of white, particularly at the temples. He frequently had a pipe, although it was hard to tell whether he actually smoked or if it was just an affectation, as he was shown gesturing with it as often as holding it in his mouth. There were also his eyes, focused and attentive in one picture, then distracted in the next. In the latter, the professor was evidently lost in thought, some private world where circuitry and wire or equations and formulae were coalescing in his mind's eye.

Not helping to cut down on the nerd quality of his appearance was his body-type. Not gawky, but still tall and lanky with close-set hips and shoulders. Such a frame made him seem a bit taller than the 6-foot-one-inch he was reported as standing. All images showed him fully clothed, in a three-piece suit or lab coat usually, although one showed him in a flight suit. This made it hard to gage if he was as pencil-thin as he seemed at first glance, or perhaps he just had a trim physique such as a bicyclist would.

Richardson's height was the least of things that distinguished him from his cousin, whom he towered over by a good six inches. He would have been a fool to try to lord it over the Mancunian, however, whose picture one could imagine finding next to "stocky" - among other, even less complimentary words - in the dictionary.

Benjamin Grimshaw was a bear of a man, barrel-chested and looked to be nearly two-thirds as wide as he was tall. He probably weighed as much as the rest of the Gulliver team combined, with every ounce that wasn't bone or guts, muscle. His face was pleasantly homely, his mouth just a bit too wide while his lips were very thin, his eyes set deep within craters of gristle - caused by too many fist fights - set on either side of a broken stub of a nose. His hair, even in pictures where it had been cut to military specifications, was a patch of brick-red bristles that looked like his barber had to use gardening shears to give him a trim. About the only normal feature he had were his ears, which were perfectly formed rather than the misshapen cauliflowers one would expect.

All of this gave the impression of a punch-drunk brute with hardly a brain cell to his name. But prior to joining the Air Corps, Grimshaw had gone to college on a rugby scholarship and graduated with a set of engineering degrees, including avionics and instrumentation, skills he evidently brought to the construction of his cousin's spacecraft. He'd also been cited for his quick-thinking and bravery in the field, having led both bombing and surveillance missions. Prior to that, he'd been central to an incident between Britannia and the E.U. when his plane had been shot down over what was ostensibly neutral territory, and he managed to hike his way back to friendly lines despite encounters with imperial troopers hunting for him.

In addition, candid photos of him with former girlfriends, his cohorts in the military, etc., evidenced that he was also a well-humored man with a twinkle in his eye and a broad smile, albeit the latter often interrupted by an oversized cigar which he definitely smoked. Overall, despite the surface marks of a man from the wrong side of the tracks who should have been stuck there, he was good-natured, reliable, and possessed that unknown quality that, after a moment's hesitation upon first sight of him, was likely to appeal to dogs, small children, and little old ladies, not to mention the occasional tall young one.

Speaking of which…

Aside from a shoulder-length cascade of pale blond hair, Susanne von Stromberg did not meet the German stereotype of the steely-eyed, voluptuous, Nordic warrior goddess. Close-ups had shown Lelouch a woman with soft features and deep blue eyes that, rather than the fire he'd seen in Kallen's when meeting her as Zero, reflected warmth in a way he hadn't seen since he last looked into the eyes of either Nunnally or Euphie. And as for the rest of her… she was tall and leggy to be sure, but instead of a blatantly hourglass figure, her body was slim, fashioned from a series of gentle curves that bespoke of graceful movement. Said movement was displayed by old photos and video footage from a brief modeling career when a series of legal entanglements surrounding her inheritance caused her to seek employment to keep her and Johann fed and clothed, as well as to finance her education at Heidelberg.

(This last revelation led to an embarrassing moment for Rivalz, who loudly proclaimed that he was certain that he knew her from somewhere, and that all the fashion and swimsuit magazines she'd appeared in were still hidden somewhere in his old bedroom back in the homeland.)

It was from this prestigious university that Susanne had made a doctor of herself, both as a practicing physician and a learned biochemist. After graduation, she signed up for the E.U.'s military reserves, where she cut her teeth in a series of regional conflicts in Africa and elsewhere. Officially, she was a surgeon for a mobile hospital but was reassigned as a field medic if needed. She left the service under a cloud, having interceded when a higher-ranking surgeon, an egotist she'd butted heads with on occasion, attempted to operate while drunk. She escaped his attempts to have her dishonorable discharged, but the experience soured her on continuing in the service. When her tour of duty ended, she matriculated to Heidelberg's university hospital where she became a sought-after diagnostician, and occasionally took part in biomedical research.

Last but not least was Johann von Stromberg, or "Jannie" to his friends. As with his sister, he did not fulfill the idealized Teutonic model - no over-manly, jutting lantern-jaw there - although he did have the prerequisite head full of blond locks. Said hair was styled in the way called "curtained" up front while shaved into a "fade" in the back, giving him a somewhat punkish appearance, but kept well-combed and not shaggy-looking. He still carried some baby fat in his face, so his features looked to be an amalgamation of Britannian straight angles and Japanese roundedness, provoking Milly to kid Lelouch and Suzaku that he looked how she imagined a son of theirs would turn out. Typically, Lelouch was unamused while Suzaku was perplexed, attempting to point out such a thing was medically impossible.

Unlike his fellows, Jannie had no grand education or world experience, but then he was still only seventeen. While this may be old enough to enlist and possibly wind up a Knightmare pilot in Britannia, or become an urban terrorist in the former-Japanese state, Europe was a whole other matter. Latching onto what they could find, Britannian pundits joked that he'd probably been taken along because his sister didn't trust him to be left on his own.

What background information on young Johann that could be found all centered around his brushes with the law, resulting in a minor's rap sheet which included petty vandalism, unlawful entry, ticket scalping, and selling exam answers. While bordering on juvenile delinquency, his lack of a solid male role model had not resulted in an angry young man, just one with the same "eat, drink, be merry, leave a good-looking corpse" outlook as Milly often aired, only taken in the wrong direction. Photos from his arrest record showed not a defiant, spiteful teenaged malcontent, but an embarrassed yet still cocksure class clown. His expression in each looked as if to say, "It seemed like a good idea at the time".

This was the team of four, the "Cosmic Quartet" the English tabloids called them, that attention had centered around. Oh, they were not alone, Richardson and Grimshaw's skills and the von Stromberg fortune hardly enough by themselves to have made the Gulliver a reality. There were innumerable scientists of lesser contribution attached to the foundation group, as well as a multitude of financial backers, some of whom had seen the whole venture as just a tax write-off.

Most of these ancillary figures were now carrying themselves in a holding pattern to either distance themselves from or ride the coattails of the space pioneers, depending upon the final verdict of their actions. Needless to say, between their defiance of government regulations and the mild international incident caused by their timing, the success or failure of the foursome's mission would be the deciding factor in whether they received medals for their actions or extended jail sentences. Some argued to split the difference and hold an award ceremony during their trial.

Out of all of these people, much like a musical band of some note that had come out of England years ago, there was one man who could have been a fifth member of the group. His name was Dr. Viktor Domovoi.

Much like Richardson and his friends, he was a man of many skills and achievements, who'd crawled over the setbacks of life to achieve a personal fortune and some fame in scientific circles. He was originally from the so-called "nomad nation" of Latveria, a remote mountain valley settled by gypsy tribes wishing to found their own country after the nightmare of the National Socialist movement in the Austrian-German territories. A child prodigy, Domovoi sought and earned a myriad of scientific degrees in the halls of academia found beyond his native soil. Eventually returning to his countrymen's adopted land, he became its burgomaster, working to refine what many still scoffed at as bandit country full of superstitious rabble into a small but prosperous first world nation, independent but allied to the E.U.

This was the official version, of course. The more intimate details painted a much different picture.

All accounts of the good doctor agreed that he was charming and charismatic, a trait it was noted often shared by psychopaths and narcissists. As a child, young Viktor had witnessed his mother, a fortune teller with suspiciously accurate vision, burned alive as a witch. This was just one of many events in the chaotic first years of Latveria's existence that permanently stained his worldview, instilling a thirst for power, a need to armor himself against his fellow man, that could never be fully slaked. Nor was he discerning in how it was to be obtained, as he dabbled in politics as well as science. Magic and forgotten pagan beliefs hadn't escaped his interest either, a steady stream of rumors presenting him as a modern day Aleister Crowley.

It was his professional career as a scientist that was the most worrisome, however. Like Richardson, Domovoi's work was innovative; unlike him, its execution was sloppy, the phrase "measure twice, cut once" a form of personal attack in his opinion. Having gotten far in life on raw talent, he refused to be second-guessed, assured that, other than some superficial modification once a working prototype was developed, anything he built had been designed flawlessly the first time. As a result, his creations, after some initial success, inevitably broke down, often with disastrous results. This was due to wear and tear, insufficient integrity, overheating, any number of errors in design which Domovoi would blame on cheap materials, the fault of workmen, even sabotage. He developed a reputation and became referred to as "The Doom Doctor" behind his back. Frankly, his strengths lay in theory over application, another inverse to the professor, but again his ego would allow for no such critique.

Regardless of his shoddy work habits, the man's ingenuity had made him a sizeable fortune. It turned out he was the brain behind a number of household consumer products, the kind usually not available in stores but bought online or from catalogs and TV commercials. Unlike his more complex inventions, these were simplistic enough that he actually had gotten them right the first time around, and had proven to be popular items. While he was flushed with proceeds from their sales, Domovoi was wont to admit responsibility for them; not only were they inconsequential in his opinion, but they were contradictory to his image of being a serious, groundbreaking scientist. Such was his reasons for signing onto Richardson's Gulliver project.

The precise details were still not publicly known, but apparently Domovoi had ideas for a radical new propulsion system to be engaged for spaceflight once the ship had broken from Earth's gravity. Unfortunately, working with someone who could easily understand his work had grated on his nerves, as it conflicted with his sense of self as a genius far head of his time. That Richardson was also able to discover and eliminate flaws, fundamental ones which the Latverian had blinded himself to, only aggravated the situation.

Finally, in an attempt to put Richardson in his place, one day Domovoi engaged in an unauthorized test of one of his prototype engines, certain that it would function properly in spite of the professor's analysis. The resultant explosion, they say, left him more dead than alive. He did recover to some degree, although no one had actually seen him face-to-face since then.

Through his lawyers, Domovoi made accusations that the engine had been sabotaged by Richardson in an attempt to kill him, a baseless claim which was summarily dismissed by the courts. After that, he returned to Latveria, taking with him a small mercenary army that helped wrestle the still-dysfunctional region under his control. While officially a mere burgomaster, Viktor Domovoi was for all intents and purposes the region's king, as he owned outright or in part all its industries, had built and therefore controlled all municipal services, and every public official owed his post to him. While to all appearances a picturesque series of Balkan hamlets, Latveria was now in reality the Doom Doctor's private realm, where it's said that not even the birds sang without his permission.

"A good lesson on the dangers of allowing old wounds to control you, instead of providing motivation," Lelouch remarked as he closed his files on the people involved in the Gulliver project. Typing in the appropriate code words, he then got to work on his projected Zero missions.

Sprawled indolently across his bed, using some crust to dab up some errant marinara sauce from the bottom of a pizza box, C.C. just shot him an amused look before she returned to the business at hand.

/ * * /

During the month following the launch, life continued normally in Area 11, although "normal" meant different things to many people.

Lelouch continued to ply his new trade as a professional revolutionary, which had turned out to be a learning experience. A near-miss in the ghettoes of Saitama, care of the new viceroy Princess Cornelia, convinced him to create a formal organization rather than bounce from resistance cell to resistance cell, relying on his reputation as Zero to secure obedience. Approaching Ohgi's group, he led them on a series of raids against Refrain trafficking, which contrary to popular belief were the handiwork of Britannian businessmen and minor nobles. This established his credentials as a strategist while also giving the erstwhile freedom fighters valued experience, in addition to a taste of victory.

All their hard work solidified at the Lake Kawaguchi incident. A rogue(?) faction of the Japanese Liberation Front hijacked the hotel complex there while it was hosting an international Sakuradite allocation conference. Those people were important enough, but when the terrorists released video footage that showed Milly and the other girls from the student council among the hostages, Lelouch and (thankfully) Kallen were of the same mind that they needed to act.

Despite Tamaki moaning that they'd risked their lives for a bunch of spoiled gaijin fat cats, especially after Cornelia's sister Euphemia was found among them, the mission had been an unqualified success. Even the reappearance of that white-and-gold Knightmare from Shinjuku had served Lelouch's purposes nicely by helping to wreck the hotel, thus destroying any evidence that would contradict his version of events in dealing with the rival insurgents. It had proven the appropriate venue to publicly reveal the Order of the Black Knights, allies for justice that would punish the exploiters of the former island-nation.

At the same time Lelouch had been so hard at work, the Gulliver was all anyone could talk about the world over. It was approached from every conceivable angle as astronomers continued to follow the course of the spacecraft, which was taking it straight towards the Moon. It was discussed from the perspective of science, religion, politics, finance, even levels of entertainment, as copies of old novels and movies about journeys to the Moon suddenly sold out, while Las Vegas and Monte Carlo both reported being swamped with bets placed on either its success or failure. Even those who believed it all a hoax - which was the official stance of the Chinese Federation's politburo, the so-called High Eunuchs - effectively engaged in discourse over it.

The only one who it seemed had nothing to say was the Emperor, who'd returned to his solitude within the inner chambers of the Imperial Palace following his appearance at Clovis's funeral. Good loyal Britannians took it as a sign that His Majesty felt the entire matter a gauche stunt by Europe at his son's expense, and was unworthy of recognition. Silently, of course, there was undercurrent of dissent, a belief that he was hiding out of embarrassment, having made a speech writing off the Ultra-union as backwards while exalting the Empire's forward motion. All said and broadcasted worldwide the same moment a band of European commoners were in the process of a scientific achievement that Britannia was unlikely to ever surpass. By now, it was practically a fait accompli that Europe, not Britannia, would go down in history as the first to place a man on the Moon, and there was nothing the Empire could do about it.

Lelouch had no doubt Kallen felt the same delicious irony, the sadistic glee at the Emperor humiliating himself like that, as he did. He knew so as she couldn't help but walk around with a huge smile plastered over her face the next few days. She only became aware of it, and made efforts to suppress it, after her friends from school, the same who'd scattered at the sight of a bee not too long ago, started asking her questions. Questions like, "So, where did you first meet?" or "Does he have a cute brother you could introduce me to?"

Too bad, he'd thought as Kallen attempted to squelch boyfriend rumors from spreading. She actually has a nice smile.

Late that same day, the Gulliver safely landed on the Moon. By then it was little more than a semi-triangular dot to even the best of telescopes, but could still be seen as it leveled off and descended upon the Moon while reducing its speed, just like a standard plane. After touching down, it came to a rest a few miles outside the bluish plain known as the Sea of Tranquility. Minutes later, a number of earthly communication centers and radar tracking stations began picking up transmissions from space.

"Gulliver to Terra, lunar landing achieved… Phase 2 complete," came in Richardson's voice with a slight buzz, while Johann could be heard in the background shouting what amounted to "Land ho!" in German. International rivalries be damned, crowds cheered and champagne corks flew as the staticky words were rebroadcast around the world.

The follow-up transmissions showed the crew's tentative first steps onto the alien body. It began with a recording taken by an external camera, capturing the shuttle's bumpy landing. An hour later came video transmissions from H.E.R.B.E.R.T., a robotic probe much like a hi-tech remote-operated bomb-disposal machine that took last minute environmental checks of the lunar surface. This turned out to be a sea of white powdery dirt broken up by the occasional crater, evidence of meteor strikes throughout the ages.

Finally came the four-man crew themselves, disembarking in specialized pressure suits due to the almost nonexistent atmosphere. Padded, bulky affairs colored a bright blue, they looked like deep-sea diving suits from the future. Each suit was covered here and there with small keypads with lit-up buttons, or metal locking rings where sections had been fastened together, as well as carrying a solid, boxy backpack containing the suit's life support and power systems. Instead of large spherical "fishbowls" like in the movies, they wore what looked like oversized full-face helmets like those used by auto racers and motorcyclists. The visor was more circular though, with an internal, shaded visor that could be brought down with the twist of a knob, reminding Lelouch vaguely of his own helmet as Zero.

As H.E.R.B.E.R.T. continued recording, the Europeans gathered together with their backs to the Moon's horizon. The sky was a field of pitch black broken only by the Earth, which floated seemingly at peace, the Gulliver's crew standing on either side of it like an honor guard. Rather than setting up a flag and claiming the Moon for any nation, they laid upon the ground a trapezoidal marble plinth affixed with a bronze geographical globe on top.

Solemnly, Richardson identified himself and his teammates one by one, then collectively as the crew of the Gulliver. Their mission's purpose in coming to the Moon, he explained, was executed for all of mankind, as a demonstration of its courage and the sum of its knowledge. These same words, and the day's date, were inscribed on a plaque bolted to the plinth, prevalently in Britannian (or English, if you were European) but repeated in other major languages, Japanese kanji among them. Grimshaw had then grabbed Johann in a headlock, giving him a faux noogie with his free hand, as the small ceremony broke up.

It was a little maudlin, but doubtlessly heartfelt, in Lelouch's opinion. He snuggled up closer to Nunnally on the couch in the TV room, his beloved sister crying, overcome with genuine emotion at both the achievement and the shuttle crew's gesture of good will.

Once the transmission ended, it was followed up by official reactions from governments the world over. The Chinese Federation was the first to react, a state official stammering her way through a hastily-written denunciation of the whole affair as foreign propaganda, which belligerently ignored the mounting evidence confirmed by even their own scientific community. The Euro Ultra-union's Prime Minister, meanwhile, gave a speech praising Richardson and his team, which his political rivals would later criticize as a forced string of banalities insisted upon by his reelection team. Indeed, the remainder of his speech sounded far more sincere, a thick dollop of European patriotism which made up for the professor's nonpartisan stance.

The Empire enjoyed a respectfully congratulatory speech from its chancellor, Prince Schneizel, to "our cousins in the Old World" as he skillfully put it. As expected, it was eloquent and thought-provoking, pointedly ignoring the obvious propaganda win for the Europeans while calming citizens' worries over the obvious potential military implications. All of this was presented with such a natural air that no one would have guessed it had been prepared days beforehand, along with a now needless announcement of Britannia's condolences at the Gulliver's disastrous fate.

Princess Cornelia, on the other hand, would deliver the next day a reminder that knowledge was a mere tool, that the future belonged to those with the strength to wield it. Furthermore, this civilian undertaking, however impressive, in no way, shape, or form washed away the Britannian blood from the hands of Europe in its continued aggressive defiance of the Empire reclaiming its ancestral lands.

"Hands which include those of England's vaunted Reade Richardson, progenitor of the Ultra-union's Panzer-Hummel monstrosities," she bellowed across Area 11.

C.C., for her part, had watched the Gulliver transmission on a tiny portable TV in Lelouch's room while the siblings and their maid stayed up past bedtime downstairs. Aside from studying the Moon's surface and its flour-like covering, the lime-haired witch seemed completely indifferent as always.

"No, it doesn't," she'd said suddenly. "I guess I'll have to continue making do with standard yellow, Earthbound cheese," she added as she glanced at her pizza with a disappointed air. She was totally alone, so an onlooker would have no idea who had commented to her that it seemed the Moon wasn't made of green cheese after all.

As one could tell, not everyone took the historical event completely serious.

/ * * /

Needless to say, Ashford Academy held a festival, the student council thankful for the alternative to Milly's continued tribute-to-Clovis idea. They were also able to convince her to play it safe by planning the festivities' theme to be the Moon itself rather than specifically about the moon shot. As such, the Gulliver was downplayed, although not completely ignored. Noteworthy were some wags from the literary and drama clubs, who presented dioramas of caricatured Europeans thoughtlessly trampling villages full of tiny, thumb-sized people or being enslaved by talking horses.

Anything and everything related to the Moon was used as fuel for displays and activities. Prevalent of course were depictions of the fabled Man in the Moon, both as simply a large, rotund face and as an old man carrying an overstuffed sack on his back. Elsewhere, a haunted maze was set up, this time with participants sweltering within werewolf costumes. There were living whack-a-mole games with students dressed as the bug creatures from H.G. Wells's novel, which players would try to hit with a foam rubber fly swatter. The dunking booths used stale mooncakes instead of baseballs, not only staying with the theme but also making a sly critique of the High Eunuchs' continued stubbornness. Rather than a giant pizza, there was an attempt to make the world's biggest moon pie, which resulted in a great sticky, chocolaty mess.

It was even rumored that Milly secretly held a "mooning match" - essentially a contest to see who had the best butt - somewhere on campus, with participants hooded and masked to protect their identities, but it was never proven. That night, however, C.C. would hand over to Lelouch a school uniform she'd "borrowed" so he could drop it off in the academy's lost-and-found. As she did so, he noticed that now proudly displayed in his bedroom was a large, ornate blue ribbon embroidered with a silvery moon and the number one. It was a crescent moon, the type where a short spiky protrusion rose up midway from the inner-curve, which looked at from an angle easily communicated the award's true meaning.

"They weren't making a pizza, and I had to do something to pass the time," was all she said in way of explanation, giving him a sly wink.

Japanese stories concerning the Moon were not entirely exempt, as in private Sayoko amused Nunnally with the fable of a rabbit who attempted to sacrifice itself to feed a starving beggar, and so its profile was carved onto the Moon by the King of Heaven as a reward. Suzaku, meanwhile, was happy to note that a particularly girly adventure cartoon from his childhood, which his cousin had been obsessed with, was wholly overlooked. Unknowingly, this provoked a sneeze from Sumeragi Kaguya, knocking askew the blonde wig on her head. Arranged in the odango-style with pigtails, she'd been prancing about the Kyoto Houses' secret lair while wearing it and a modified serafuku almost every day since the Moon landing.

While the Ashford staff and student body played it coy about the achievement of the European team, notions of its impact on the future were not far from most people's minds. While helping to give out the last of a large cake, Shirley broached the topic of there being a Britannian colony in outer space someday, perhaps within their lifetimes.

"We will… just as soon as the E.U. finishes building it," Rivalz noted sardonically as he took the slice reserved for himself.

To his credit, he'd checked to make sure Sayoko and Suzaku weren't in earshot first, but not Kallen. She'd been roped into managing a bouncy castle all day, a job requiring her frequently to give demonstrations to the ogling customers, and as a result was rather dizzy... or so she claimed. In any event, she suddenly lost her balance and stumbled into Rivalz, knocking him over face first.

"Oh, Rivalz, I'm so sorry," she said with feigned regret. The blue-haired boy simply looked at his ruined dessert mournfully, or the half of it that hadn't splattered onto him anyway.

Not even the celebrated space explorers were austere 24/7. Additional transmissions showed the team's scientific endeavors, such as Richardson dropping a wrench and a feather at the same time, proving Galileo's theory that, in the absence of aerodynamic drag, all objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. These same studies were interspersed with hi-jinks the crew had caught on camera of each other. These included reactions and mishaps while weightless in-between Earth and the Moon, an "experiment" by Susanne wherein she whacked a golf ball a mile with one short swing, and Grimshaw butchering "Singin' in the Rain" while hopping along the surface like a giant frog in slow motion.

/ * * /

Whatever the events of the day - battles along the El Alamein, Black Knight vigilantes attacking Refrain dealers, terrorist activity in other Areas - people stopped for these regular communiqués. Only an occasion as momentous as the hotel hijacking could distract the public eye. So when the Gulliver stopped transmitting, it did not go unnoticed.

The last report had made no mention of trouble among the crew or any unusual plans for the next day. All that had been said was their scheduled time on the Moon was ending, and they would soon continue with the remainder of their mission, which many assumed would be their return to Earth. The last few hours had been spent double-checking their equipment and engines, Richardson had explained, and they were about to take one last look around the region. When that was done, they would then call with further details before launching. Seventy-two hours later, there had been no updates, and astronomers could still see the dot that was the Gulliver on the Moon's surface.

Many were still nervously suggesting it was just a glitch in their communication system, caused accidentally while running diagnostics, when an audio transmission erupted from the Moon. It was garbled, a blob of white noise that could just barely be discerned as human voices. Government personnel in charge of communications with the Gulliver responded, asking them to repeat their last broadcast, but no further signals came from the shuttle. Minutes later, rather than the gradual liftoff people expected, telescopes caught the Gulliver zipping off the lunar surface like a race car tearing away from the starting line. The shuttle started flying in a curve towards the dark side of the Moon, presumably to use its gravity in making a gigantic U-turn towards the Earth.

And then there was light.

Anyone looking up into the night's sky at that moment could see a tiny pinprick of light briefly appear on the very edge of the lit portion of the Moon, a pinprick which through telescopes was a far more impressive tiny sun, blossoming into life only to fade away just as quickly. After that, there was no more to be seen. The burst of light, which to the chagrin of both Lelouch and Cornelia became known simply as The Flash, had been momentary. This left more than enough time when the shuttle should have been visible, still in its turn around the Moon. But no, there was nothing more, not even signs of debris.

The news love to build people up just to tear them down again, and this time was no different. Journalists hopped on the bandwagon as it came out that one of the matters tripping up the shuttle's construction was that Richardson and Domovoi had both repeatedly and unsuccessfully requested a stock of ultra-refined Sakuradite, the reasons for which had not been made public. Grasping at straws, many supposed that they had finally gotten some, only for the volatile substance to be set off by the erratic takeoff, vaporizing the shuttle and all onboard. With that mystery solved to their hearts' contents, they moved onto supposition of how Richardson was finally able get his hands on Sakuradite in the first place, citing the black market or deals with hostile foreign parties.

Less public, but equally without merit, was nervous talk about the possibility of alien interference being the cause of the Flash. What started as just idle speculation that the shuttle's odd lull in communications was connected to the Flash somehow grew into madcap conspiracy theories. All over the internet were boards and web sites devoted to the idea that, in their last hours on the Moon, the space explorers had accidentally stumbled across something unexpected. Something outside the realm of human experience. Something monstrous. Something that either caused the destruction of the Gulliver directly, or had provoked its crew to commit suicide rather than bring it to Earth.

Rivalz had shown one such forum to his friends, intending it as a laugh, but Nina had taken it quite seriously. She was already wary of the Gulliver - a flying juggernaut slapped together by Numbers, hovering above the Earth like Poe's pendulum - and the thought that some primordial horror was now roaming about because of it did her no good. She returned to her nuclear equations (and Princess Euphemia fan sites) eventually, but for awhile all one could expect to see on her laptop were web pages full of bizarre scenarios more appropriate for a monster movie.

Back in Europe, continuous attempts to interview Dr. Domovoi had always been in vain, with streams of reporters barely able to get into Latveria much less see the reclusive head of state. Beginning again in earnest over the loss of the Gulliver and the supposed Sakuradite controversy, they were still turned back. There was an official statement, however, delivered by a servitor as supposedly Domovoi's ill-health had left him confined to bed and unable to see anyone. It answered no questions, however, only reporting the honorable burgomaster's satisfaction at seeing Richardson at long last pay the ultimate price for his unprovoked assault on the good doctor's person.

Similarly, the Knight of One Sir Bismarck Waldstein delivered an address on behalf of His Majesty. It too was brief and brusque, condemning the Euro Ultra-union for its patently obvious attempt - "And in such a churlish manner," the Emperor had written - to make preparations for its next wave of military hostilities, while drumming up support for enlistment. It ended with what amounted to a threat, warning that the Holy Britannian Empire did not so easily forget such slights to its honor.

As galling as the Emperor's attitude was, for a change it had done little to provoke Kallen's temper. She'd remained wrapped around the sudden loss of the Gulliver and its crew. This was in spite of her feelings toward the Euro Ultra-union which, like many of the Japanese, were ambiguous at the best of times. Their promises of being the arsenal of freedom against tyranny and repression (i.e., the Britannian Empire) had withered with the conquest of Japan. While continuing to oppose the Empire in voice, their politicians readily accepted the bribes of Sakuradite, the chief reason for the despoilment of her country, as did China in return for keeping off Britannia's back in the Pacific Ocean.

All the same, anyone who made a monkey out of Tennō Heika Charles zi Britannia was gold in her book. Furthermore, she found herself receptive to Professor Richardson's objective reasoning and goals, reminding the world of what they were capable of doing through cooperation, not as enemies or as master and slave. Whether she admitted it or not, it reminded her of herself, Suzaku, and Sayoko working as part of the student council, or herself and the Black Knights with Zero, if suppositions that he wasn't Japanese were correct.

This left her with little patience for any nonsense on the matter. Certainly not Tamaki's complaints that the Europeans hadn't taken advantage of the situation.

"They had the ultimate high ground!" he whined one day, stopping in his inventory of supplies Zero had arranged for them. "Instead of wasting time with dirt and rocks, they shoulda carried up a big ass missile, and blown Pendragon off the map!"

"Britannia has a first-class missile defense system, Tamaki," Ohgi pointed out, "same as any of the big power blocs these days." In fact, among his friends both in and out of the Black Knights, there had been trepidation over the likelihood of the Gulliver's safe return for that same reason. To fire upon the vessel, which was essentially a civilian aircraft all things being equal, as it returned to Earth would be outrageously petty and vindictive, but that had never stopped the Empire before.

"Baka," the loudmouth grumbled to himself, as if Ohgi had forgotten something obvious. "That's for if radar picks up an attack comin' over the ocean from the Euros or China. A missile from the Moon would come straight down on the bastards!" Holding his fist up high, he smacked it down on the palm of his other hand as a demonstration.

Kallen sighed heavily, depressed on how truly dim-witted Naoto's friend could be, as she tried to help explain the futility of the act.

"Firing from the Moon wouldn't have made a difference. There's always somebody with a telescope looking at it, especially these days, so a missile still would have been seen coming. And as distant as the Moon is from Earth, the Brits would actually have days, instead of just minutes, to notice and get ready to shoot it out of the sky. All that would do is get the Empire extra-pissed off!"

The following weeks would see the Gulliver's demise, and the scandal in its wake, fade into the background as life, and death, went on across the planet. People who'd admired the foursome were able to move on, Kallen among them. This was good in Lelouch's opinion, as she was increasingly proving herself to be a cut above the rest from her brethren in the Black Knights in terms of zeal, reliability, and dedication.

At first, he'd been worried, as the Gulliver disaster had followed too closely the Black Knights' final Refrain raid, the fallout of which had solidified Kallen's determination to grow beyond mere terrorism. Lelouch himself couldn't imagine, didn't want to imagine, what it must have felt like for Kallen to find her biological mother, already a pitiable servant to her former lover's family, under the fog of Refrain addiction.

"It could have been the perfect follow-up punch to break her resolve," Lelouch thought, "but she's built of sterner stuff than I'd imagined, like a true queen."

Bit by bit, day by day, one could see the changes in Kallen. The goals of her struggle were now for the future, rather than against Britannia. Instead of just another pawn, she now fit nicely into Lelouch's plan to see a new world order born that did not suffer needless warfare, conquerors, and prejudice.

"With luck," he privately hoped, "she'll be able to share the beautiful new world I've planned for Nunnally."

Of course, there was also her potential as an Ace-level Knightmare pilot to consider, something the resistance was in dire need of. Just one more reason he assigned to her the Guren, an experimental 7th generation Knightmare Frame provided by the Kyoto Houses. He held confidence in her, but tomorrow's mission in the Narita Mountains would be her trial of fire.

It would turn out to be a trying day for everyone.

/ * * /

The Gulliver, June 1962 A.D.

Reade Richardson's eyelids flickered blearily before deciding to stay closed. He was aware of being shaken, continuously but not violently. He could also hear an angry electronic beeping sound. It took a moment or too, but his semi-conscious brain finally put two and two together.

"Alright, Suse," he muttered sleepily. "I'll get the alarm clock."

As he said so, he started moving both hands without looking, hoping to silence the two nuisances and fall back into blissful slumber. One hand went to his chest to stop Susanne, herself obviously half-asleep, from shaking him so much, while the other reached out to his right where the clock radio laid on the nightstand. The latter found nothing, just flailed at empty air, while the former slapped onto something on his chest that felt suspicious.

Reade started considering the implications of what he felt on his chest, or rather what he didn't, as his fiancée's hand wasn't there after all. For that matter, neither could he find any bed sheets over him. Not that he could feel much as his entire hand, he was slowly realizing, was covered by a kind of thick glove. Furthermore, the glove was made of something unusual, not plastic but definitely some kind of synthetic fabric. As his awareness grew, he realized it covered not just his hands, but his entire body from his neck down to his toes.

As he continued to feel about his person, it dawned on him he wasn't lying in bed at all. Rather, he was in a sitting position in a large, sturdy chair whose armrests were dotted with buttons and switches, instinctively yanking his hand back after brushing them with his fingers. He was fixed to it by some kind of harness, composed of equal parts ceramic and metal, which went along his chest, shoulders, and other key junctions of his torso and pelvis. They held him firmly, keeping him in place without being painful or cutting off circulation. While the remainder of his face remained slack in near-sleep, a single eyebrow quirked inquisitively at all of this.

Did Susanne talk me into doing something… "fun" again, last night? Reade wondered humorously, remembering his mum warn him about dating German girls. It'd be so much easier to think if not for that damn noise, though.

As such, he redoubled his efforts to silence the alarm, stretching out his arm while shifting his body over to the right as much as the harness allowed for. His fingers thus grazed something which he began to poke at experimentally. It was rounded, not entirely solid but still firm with almost no give, rather like poking a bag of cement mix. Feeling along this strange object, his fingers relayed enough tactile information to delineate that it was in the shape of a man's arm. An arm covered completely in the same material as he wore.

Whatever this is, Susanne might want to take a look at it for the Buckminsterfullerene project, he considered. She and the rest of the Baxter Base personnel agreed a specialized, super-adaptive textile was required for the space mission's uniforms. Both the standard flight suits and the "space-walk" suits should be composed of and feel just like what I'm wearing now.

Nodding at the wisdom of this, the professor and would-be astronaut tilted his head back, perfectly willing to fall back into Morpheus's embrace, set on ignoring the increasing number of warning klaxons going off around him.

. . .

"What I'm wearing now"?! His eyes suddenly popped open as realization flew over him, his brain now fully online.

He tried to bolt upright, an action which only earned him a bruise as the harness continued to keep him secure. Grunting at the pain, he allowed his head to flop back and simply take in the world around him. He immediately wished he hadn't as he looked one way then the next within the control cabin of his baby, the space shuttle Gulliver.

It was in a shambolic state, as all illuminating lights were flickering on and off, burnt-out circuit boards hung from blown instrument panels that coughed the occasional spark, and alarm bells - some he thought he would only hear in the flight simulator - stopped and started, equally as damaged as anything else. Or at least, they seemed to be as, try as he might, his eyes could not entirely focus, going from unfocused to double-vision to, oddly enough, random changes in colour, and back again. Once or twice, something not unlike a Doppler effect would come over them, too. He tried to rub them, only to come up short as his hand slapped against his E.V.A. helmet.

"I'm wearing one of the 'space-walk' suits," he said aloud, half-incredulous as he ran his hands over himself and his seat again while glancing at the still-functioning instruments on the armrests. Yes, he was definitely wearing the full monty, life-support system pack and all, with his operational chair readjusted to handle it. Hitting a button, he toggled a small joystick mounted on an armrest and the chair grudgingly turned to one side so he could get a better look around and behind him.

"Correction, we're wearing them," he breathed.

In the cabin were three other figures whom, judging from the way they sat and their lack of movement, were all still unconscious. Or rather he hoped they were just unconscious. They were all in full gear with their helmets and packs on, their own operational chairs adjusted just like his. Next to him in the pilot's seat was Benji of course; his helmet had its anti-glare visor down, but he could recognize his cousin's blocky body anywhere. Behind them were two other figures with their faceplates clear. Despite his current vision problems, he could still make out their faces. It was the von Strombergs: His fiancée Susanne and her brother Johann.

"Yes, that's right! Suse and Jannie helped Benji and I launch the rocket!"

Pictures, words, and feelings both harsh and gentle from the past all ran through his head as the dark recesses of his mind gave up some memories on how he'd wound up here. He wrinkled his nose as he remembered the years of work being ground to a halt by, of all things, paperwork. The dithering by the various ministries and offices had increased as the Gulliver neared completion, with one jobsworth after another coming up with some obscure by-law whose purpose it seemed was simply to hold the launch back. As one obstruction was overcome just for another to appear, his cousin began to seem less paranoid in his comments that someone had it in for his Future Trust organisation.

Things went from bad to worse when the Britannians up and declared war on the Middle Eastern Federation. While not specifically an annexation of African territories, it had still unnerved Reade's sleeping partner, Prince T'challa. His ultimate remit was the safety of his people, and knowing the Empire would chew Wakanda up and spit out the bones if they learned of the Sacred Mound, he'd reluctantly broken off further communication. Reade had already made best use of the materials the prince had donated long ago, but at that point it was the influx of funds that he really needed.

With the Gulliver complete but stuck earthbound, the Future Trust had nothing to show for all its hard work, making the whole thing just another failed enterprise. In the interim, Reade had sparingly used the legacy accounts to meet payments on the various loans and hire purchases he'd taken in the very beginning. Converting the old missile base into a functional trading estate had been costly enough even before construction of the shuttle had begun. The only thing he could do was stave off creditors until he could finally organise a launch window.

That was the plan until the local council imposed a compulsory purchase. The base was locked up and placed under guard while Reade and his colleagues were offered a pittance of what it and its contents were worth. Whatever blinkered, bureaucratic bully who had it in for them had gotten their way. The Gulliver would never fly and with it, Reade's hopes of revitalizing interest in the productive application of science was dead.

Then news came out from Britannia, or rather the occupied island of Japan. An imperial prince had been assassinated while supposedly overseeing demolition in one of the crumbling estates on the fringe of Tokyo. This had been followed up by a daring public rescue of the supposed killer, a conscript in the Empire's Territorial Army, by a masked brigand who called himself Zero. Despite a platoon of top-of-the-line Knightmares being present, he was able to make his escape after proclaiming his own guilt in the prince's death.

Discussing these events with Susanne, Reade had been prepared to shrug his shoulders over the whole event as did she, feeling little pity for Emperor Charles's Kultur. That changed as the EBC newsreader reported the military was going on alert and the possibility of a curfew being enacted on the day of the prince's state funeral. Zero's actions had left the Imperials with egg on their faces and the Central Hemicycle was less than optimistic about the Empire rattling sabres to remind the world who was charge. In addition, air traffic would be cancelled and police patrols out in force, particularly bomb detection and counter-terrorism squads.

Hearing all this, the thought slowly, cautiously occurred that this was their big break. All he needed was a flight crew assembled post-haste, starting with a pilot.

"You're twisting my melon, mate," Benji said with a grimace when they'd met the next day. All things considered, this was a better response than some of his reactions to Reade's schemes in the past.

After a long, decorated service with the Air Corps, Flt Lt Benjamin J Grimshaw had been made redundant, Britannia's series of quick and easy victories around the globe having prompted the Ultra-union to develop its own Knightmare Frame army. As a result, aircraft that wasn't being phased out entirely was being converted into, as he put it, flying people movers for the new division. Offers had been made to transfer Grimshaw into mechanized infantry but he'd refused, deciding he would prefer an honourable discharge once his tour was over. True, there had been conjecture on flight capability being added to KMF's someday, but it wasn't any time soon and he wasn't willing to wait.

As such, Benji had found himself hunting for work, a stone's throw away from having to go on the dole, when he'd bumped into Reade while leaving an off-license one day. Their embarrassed reunion nearly turned into a punch-up when it was revealed Reade was part of the KMF development program that Benji had been sacked over. Despite the harsh words and hurt feelings of that day, Reade came to him when the Future Trust was on its feet and its first big programme was starting. The project was in aerospace engineering and, being an ex-pilot after all, Benji decided to leave the past behind him. True, he'd been less than optimistic about Reade's idea, but had slowly come around, his knowledge of aircraft design and assembly helping to put things into shape. The basic design of the Gulliver, in fact, was based off a proposal of his for a heavy-duty, long-distance transport craft.

Nothing so dramatic had occurred when he approached Benji with the idea of launching the shuttle by themselves while everyone else was distracted by Britannia. Yes, he'd been incredulous, both by the daring plan and that his cousin, a pencil-necked swot for most of his life, had been the one to propose it. He also knew better than most the vessel would work, so a trip to and from the Moon - "The last word in package holidays," he described it - was certain. Besides, bankruptcy and public humiliation were peering at them over the horizon, so it was better to go out with a bang.

The problem, however, was not launching the shuttle but getting inside the facility. There was one readily available resource for that part of the scheme, and securing him meant getting Susanne more involved than Reade had intended. Of course, that was nothing new for the two of them.

Years before, Susanne and Johann's aunt had started letting a room the same time Read had come to the Technische Universität Berlin to read computer science. Earlier arrangements made for lodgings had unexpectedly fallen through, so he took the room, making Susanne's acquaintance not long afterwards. In her fourth form lessons, she'd surprised Reade with her grasp of biology and chemistry, impressing him when her aunt asked Reade to review a science project she'd put together herself.

The experience had left an impression on him, but he was still surprised when they met again eight years later, the gawky schoolgirl now a radiant biochemist. They'd both been hunting for obscure documents from Russia's defunct Volstok programme regarding predicted physiological reactions to acceleration and weightlessness. Rather than fight over them, they came to an agreement to share the files for their respective work and, before Reade realized it, they were walking out together.

Their professional lives were soon just as entangled as their private lives, for which Reade was thankful. Figuring out mechanics, propulsion, etc. for a space mission was one thing, but the human factor - getting a crew to and from outer space alive and well - was another, for which Susanne was soon proven a godsend.

Well, usually she was. Suse had also taken responsibility for designing the space mission's dietary provisions, which required custom-made foodstuff. Try as she might, the nutritional beverage she'd whipped up, for example, always tasted like a fizzy drink version of tea.

They'd talked on and off about her joining as the crew's physician, but she had qualms about leaving her brother Johann behind. In spite of himself, Reade had felt the same way, a major turnaround from the mutual passive-aggressive behaviour that first marked their interactions.

It would have been easier had Jannie had been some nasty little yobbo, something expected from a boy with a family history as he had. But no, Johann von Stromberg was simply a lad too clever for his own good with a head full of ideas for getting ahead in the world with minimum effort. Ironic, considering he felt his sister had fallen for a Luftmensch with no future. He'd started to come around after Suse dragged him along for a tour of the Baxter Base, where seeing the space shuttle in its final assembly stages assured the boy his would-be brother-in-law was the real deal.

Besides, it was his own future that Jannie should have been more concerned about. His plans for achieving wealth and early retirement often involved skipping steps that kept you out trouble with the police. He was already in danger of being sent off to an approved school, so leaving him behind after getting them launched was off the table. With no other choice, Reade agreed to take him along to fill the mission's fourth seat. If nothing else, he could help test the adaptability of fullerene - or instabil Moleküle as Susanne called them - to expand or contract to meet different body types, which in Jannie's case meant a suit fitting a shorter, slimmer build than it had been intended for.

Of course, this was not without a heavy argument beforehand with Susanne. He'd pointed out that they could easily devise a plan and learnt what steps to take from Johann, but she'd insisted they take him along. He relented eventually, but it was not simple acquiesce to his fiancée's fears of leaving her brother to take the heat that motivated him.

Most of Reade's memories of his father were vague, but definite was that Nathaniel Richardson had chosen cold intellect as the guiding force in his life. As such, when he concluded his family was becoming a hindrance, he abandoned them with nary a thought, literally vanishing before his son's eyes. It was this lack of perspective, and the selfishness it motivated, that Reade promised himself he would never repeat with the new family he'd found himself a part of.

As such, Johann became the fourth member of the Gulliver's crew, and the mastermind of their infiltration of Baxter Base. With an ease that was actually rather disturbing, they'd been able to get inside the launch site by posing as part of a small group of estate agents, the vultures having converged to appraise the facility. Breaking off from the group, they'd hidden in a Nissen hut until dusk. By then, the guards had left due to a local curfew, leaving the police patrols with the responsibility of scaring off any potential break-ins.

With the gates and fences scrutinized, no one bothered to watch for anyone already on the grounds, and so they had the run of the place. Jannie proved himself a worryingly excellent cracker as he bypassed changes in the security system, allowing them entry into the facility. Sparing the telecast of the Britannian prince's funeral a moment's attention, they'd gotten to work, satisfied no one would be paying the abandoned trading estate much mind for another hour.

"And it had worked," Reade remembered. The automated systems they'd added worked like a charm, although it helped that the shuttle had been fuelled up and set to go for months already. The thrust of g-force as the booster rocket ignited, the days spent acclimating to weightlessness, the Moon's icing sugar-like surface, humping the memorial out of the shuttle, their daily transmissions to Earth...

He remembered a closed-circuit transmission he'd been allowed, during which his barrister, Matty Murtagh, had smiled as he informed him of the number of street parties being given for them. A nice bit of honey before giving him the vinegar, which ranged from international circles exhibiting disbelief at best, maddened jealousy at worst, to the possibility of criminal charges being levelled against them. A media mogul, Sean J. Jamieson, had particularly been trying to rile people up with leaders in the newspapers he owned.

Reade smiled a little sadly. "In spite of it all, all the naysayers, we did it. We reached the Moon. And after that..." He suddenly pulled up short, his brow furrowing with confusion. "What did we do next?"

He had a niggling feeling that there was something they did or had happened on the Moon that was very, very important, but there was just a gray hole in his memory. He had a vague feeling that they'd done some work to the hull, securing something to the fuselage.

"Or had we unfastened something, taking off the hardpoints where the booster had been fixed?" he asked himself, remembering the massive rocket. He remembered it popping loose, its storage of jet fuel spent, as they left the atmosphere, the outer hull plates with their ablative shielding having all fallen away. From there on, the Gulliver could move relying on ion thrusters, using its own supply of fuel only for leaving the lunar surface and for the landing back on Earth.

Before he could get much further with his recollection, his musings were interrupted rather rudely by the Earth's atmosphere. As cleanly pierced as it was thanks to the auto-navigational system, it still felt like the shuttle had hit a brick wall as the Gulliver met air pressure at several hundred miles an hour. The harness did little for Reade as the impact slammed him forward in his seat, nearly giving him whiplash.

"Shite!" Reade yelled at the top of his lungs, little suspecting his reaction would soon be echoed by a young Japanese woman standing a swiftly descending number of kilometres away from him.

The shaking intensified noticeably as the shuttle was now buffeted by air streams, doing little good for Reade's continued visual problems. Feeling as though he'd be thrown across the cabin if not for his harness, he shifted his seat back to the main control console - which he'd annoyed Benji no end by calling it a dashboard - as a new sequence of alarms and bells went off. Computer screens and displays continued to fade in and out, but he could tell these were an entirely different set from earlier.

These were keyed into the shuttle's ground collision avoidance systems in correlation with the sat-nav, warning that they were but minutes from a crash landing. Another buzzer went off as a computer readout began piling up a list of problems in hull integrity, most from where the shuttle was burnt or outright had punctures in it. As strange as that was, Reade's attention was drawn to the imminent danger caused by wind resistance against something called the outboard G.F.D.M. motor.

He scowled in wonder at those initials for but a moment when another, much uglier set of memories blazed through his mind. "Now that I remember," he muttered sourly as he started typing on the adjacent keyboard.

The "M" stood for "manifold" which in this case was a play on words, combining the definition of being an engine part with being an abstract mathematical space in Euclidean geometry. It was an uncharacteristic bit of humour from one Dr. Viktor Domovoi as he displayed to Reade and the other Future Trust executives his latest idea, the Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold.

It was a complex, Heath Robinson-esque affair to be sure, but it had proven to be his ticket onboard the Gulliver programme. This despite Reade and his fellows knowing better, Domovoi's reputation for egomania and unsafe work habits having preceded him. But like any demon, he'd known how to appeal to a person's vanity, to play upon ambitious men's need to succeed. What's worse, as if he'd planned it, Viktor had approached them the day after Susanne, seeing how much of the Gulliver programme was coming to life, had praised her fiancé over the spirit of Vorsprung durch Technik the shuttle's success was sure to bring about.

"It shall remind the world that Britannia hasn't an exclusive right to innovation," he remembered her saying.

Despite his nonpartisan declarations, Reade wasn't blind to the socio-political implications his work would have if he were successful. The Empire was abominable for numerous reasons, but it was its pursuit of some form of an unkind perfectionism that most worried him for humanity's future. As such, Reade was in a mood where he wanted the space mission to not just succeed, but win by several goals.

The offer of a real-life Alcubierre drive, the chance to travel faster than light without the side effects of time dilation, even from a man vilified as "The Doom Doctor," put those goals in his grasp. At the time, it had felt like a necessary sacrifice to put up with Domovoi's airs and graces, his progressively suspicious and domineering manner.

Right up until his accident, that is.

Even after Domovoi had relieved them of his presence, his time spent on the Baxter Base had still been felt. Legal agreements made prior allowed them to continue experimenting with the G.F.D.M. device and, God help him, Reade had still been greedy. He wanted to make this odyssey in space - his odyssey - a legend not just scientifically but on all levels of human consciousness.

And the people closest to me are going to pay the price for my selfishness, if I can't turn things around, he thought as the tempo of clicks picked up, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

Thankfully, the damage to the ship wasn't affecting the more pertinent emergency measures, he observed, as he finally hit the ENTER key. A heartbeat later, there was a dual of loud pops from further back along the fuselage, signifying the explosive decoupling bolts had been set off. Outside, a large disc-shaped device, not unlike the radar domes worn by A.E.W. aircraft, was forcibly blown free from the Gulliver. Despite the connector struts still affixed to it, it flipped like a gigantic poker chip over the lift dumper wing held by the shuttle's dual tails, before sailing safely away from the ship.

Back inside the cabin, Reade briefly wondered if using the G.F.D.M. motor had caused his blackout and memory loss, a possible side effect of being inside its space-time distortion field. He just as quickly brushed the idea aside as he started typing furiously at the other instrument panels, trying to wrestle the out of control craft.

If we used it, which we apparently did, he conceded, the plan was just to go from our solar system out to Alpha Centauri - the binary system being the stars nearest to Sol - launch a probe satellite for long-term study of the system, transmit a signal that would eventually reach Earth in a few years, then head on back home. We would re-enter normal space at the Earth's Lagrangian point with the Moon, deactivate the ions, and then just glide the rest of the way down with only to manoeuvring thrusters to keep us straight.

For the first voyage from one star to another, it had been a sensible, straight forward plan. The worst case scenario they had expected would be making an emergency landing at one of Europe's international airports when they returned. Or perhaps on one of the continental motorways... maybe. OF course, this scheme had not counted on them all being knocked out cold at the time.

At this thought, Reade suddenly came up short. "Knocked out..." The phrase seemed to trigger something deep within him, making him grit his teeth in pain as sounds and images swept over him.

They were of Jannie screaming incoherently, his breath fogging up his visor, while the shuttle rattled about as badly as it was now. He saw his own hands grip the front of Jannie's suit as he and Benji held him forcibly in his seat as the harness descended. This was followed by clamps, a draconian measure insisted on by Domovoi in case someone succumbed to space dementia, popping into place over his wrists and ankles, locking the lad down. Susanne then connected to his air supply a small gas canister, a slight hiss sounding as it released an anaesthetic gas which quickly silenced the hysterical young man.

With her brother settled, Suse then turned and gave him a concerned look before hopping into her own seat, Benji having already barrelled his way back to his own by the dashboard. Reade's field of vision swiftly panned around as he went to his own seat at the navigation post.

"We'll be well in a bitch if we don't get dustin' straight away!" Benji yelled as he began punching controls, instruments lighting up and the Gulliver shuddering as the ion thrusters came online. As he joined him at the controls, Reade saw the stars - so much closer yet still just fairy lights against the black backdrop of space - swing past the windscreen as the shuttle turned about.

Just as quickly as they came the images receded, with no explanation as to what came before or after. Was that the last thing that happened before we re-engaged the G.F.D.M.? he thought. But then why were we all unconscious?

Shaking the onslaught of questions away, he began manipulating more of the controls. "Stuff the analysis, Richardson," he muttered bitterly. "You've got a spaceship that needs landing."

Hitting a button, the blast shields over the windscreen pulled back, allowing light to flood back into the cabin. The sight caused him to gasp twice. First because he could see where layers of the polycarbonate safety glass were cracked in several places despite being practically diamond-hard. And second, judging from the mountain range the Gulliver was quickly approaching, they were nowhere near the Autobahn. He briefly wondered if by supreme luck they were headed towards inner Africa as he began hitting buttons and typing in commands.

Benji had insisted on giving him a crash course - "Ba-dum-bump, mush," he'd chuckled at the time - in effecting an emergency landing. These lessons he recalled crystal clearly, and none of them were making any difference. His hands flew over the controls, receiving nothing but error messages and the like as one attempt to arrest their flight failed, then another. Opening the air brakes, the fuel dump protocol, not even the emergency blinkers on the wings responded.

It's those little men from city hall over again, he thought bitterly as nothing worked.

He glanced at the prone figure next to him hopefully. It wouldn't be his cousin's first miracle landing of an unresponsive craft. Feeling around on the front of his suit, he found the proper button and activated the microphone within his helmet. "Benji, you're needed! Wake up, dammit!" he yelled but got no reaction. Other than the whisper of Susanne and Johann's steady breathing, the earphones within his helmet remained silent.

Seeing as it was no time to be gentle, he leaned over again, smacking Benji as hard as he could. A foolish move, he realized, as he stifled a yelp and shook his hand to fan away the pain. He knew his cousin was tough, but it had felt like swatting a brick wall.

Half-blinded by pain and half-blind to begin with, he thus wasn't too careful and hit some knobs on the dashboard with his fingertips before he realized it. Fortunately, these were just the radio and communication controls, a vaguely reassuring thought as air waves started crackling over the speakers in the cabin, replacing the din of emergency alarms. A myriad of voices, some sounding panicked. They were mashed together, so while he could tell most but not all were in English, he couldn't identify the other language at work.

Glancing at the radio then back out the windscreen, Reade studied the mountaintop they were fast approaching before making some final calculations. The algorithms for automatic ground collision avoidance and the digital terrain elevation database seemed to still work; usually these were for the automatic execution of collision avoidance manoeuvres, but his and Benji's avionics programming enabled the autopilot to also calculate a landing pattern. Given the current dive towards the mountain, this was apparently in effect, the autopilot intending to use the upcoming mountainside as an emergency ramp.

The problem was all the systems for actually enabling a landing - speed reduction, landing gear, etc - were fried. The shuttle wouldn't directly hit like a missile, but it would tear itself apart landing, smash through anything in its path, and likely as not ignite its remaining fuel. Inhaling and exhaling slowly as the truth became undeniable, Reade keyed in his mike and adjusted the radio controls to transmit on all local frequencies.

"This is Professor Reade Richardson, of the independent space mission Gulliver," he announced, part of him remembering how he'd chosen that name for its romantic intonations, not as a prediction of how it would end. "The space shuttle central motor is operating at full burn; my avionics systems are unresponsive; dive towards local mountainside unavoidable. Anyone within sound of my voice, evacuate or take cover as best you can." After repeating his announcement, he paused in thought, ignoring the sudden increase of radio traffic, before deciding to underline the situation to the undecided. "In just another minute or two, this ship is going to land, and land hard, and there's nothing I or anyone else can do to stop it. Get moving or get flattened. Gulliver signing off."

Snapping off the radio, he then reached over and twisted the cover off an extra-special instrument panel by his side. The insides were painted red, making it look like a fire alarm, which was entirely the point. He yanked on its single lever and breathed a sigh of relief as the pneumatic lifts hissed to life beneath the cabin. First were the seats behind him as Susanne and Johann were lowered down through the floor. Next came himself and Benji, although he frowned as the whine of the lift supporting Benji's seat quickly raised in pitch, sounding as if it was threatening to rupture.

They came down a shaft that went down to the bottom of the ship's hold, underneath where they'd stored the L.R.V. or "moon-buggy", H.E.R.B.E.R.T., labs, and the infirmary. At the bottom, their operational seats connected to a short monorail which carried the Strombergs, then Benji (moving with effort), and finally Reade into a large flattened spheroid, four metres wide, and painted orange. Going through a small entrance, they moved in a small carousel around the cramped space, their seats turning about as they stopped, backed up, and locked onto a thick support column in the middle of the room, with them facing its curved walls.

They were inside the Gulliver's escape capsule, its shape and colour having earned it the nickname, "The Safety Smartie". The shuttle's flight recorder or "black box" was a similar yet separate affair, containing not only their flight data, but also serving as storage for their central computer core and their more pertinent mineral samples. Thanks to T'Challa, both would easily survive, whether it was the impact of the shuttle crashing or the escape pod's fall to Earth.

Hopefully, we'll walk away as well, Reade thought as the automatic countdown began.

There was a hiss as air cushions inflated around them, a supplemental restraint system that filled unused space with extra padding. Firmly pressed into his seat, Reade had nothing to do but look up. As such, he faced a small monitor screen installed in the curve of the wall above his head. It had lit up when all their seats had locked into place, and a small hourglass icon was now twirling in the middle, conveying that its C.P.U. was at work.

Said work was tallying the heart rates, among other biological operations, of the crew, read by diodes embedded into their flight suits. This would happen automatically when they were in their assigned seats, recording the data onto a hard drive built into each chair. In this case, however, their biometrics were also being fed into a central computer along leads from the connection slots of the support column. In a moment, the information would be compiled and appear upon the screen.

Sure enough, the hourglass winked out and a report accompanied by a chart for each crewmember started appearing, one by one. Even with his jumbled eyesight, the professor could still read them and frowned at the results.

"That's not right," he muttered. The readings for Suse and Jannie - brain-wave activity, internal temperature, pulse - were all over the place, as were his. But other than his vision, he felt fine. "It must be another err—"

He broke off as Benji's medical readings came up all negative. Overlapping the readout, "DECEASED" began to flash in blocky letters as coldness fell over Reade in a wave. It couldn't be true and yet... the analytical part of his brain took over, pointing out how stiff and still Benji's arm had felt. How he hadn't responded to being yelled at or hit. How his helmet was the only one whose sunshade was in use, like the closing of a dead man's eyelids.

"It can't be true... it can't be!" he cried aloud as, hardly able to move, he thrashed his head about, slamming the back of it against the inside of his helmet. He quietly began cursing everyone he knew - himself, Susanne, Domovoi, T'Challa, even Benji - as his dreams kept turning into nightmares, one after another, before his eyes. "It can't be," he spat one last time as he gave up holding back the tears.

"What can't be?" someone asked sleepily, their voice a borderline bass-profundo with a Mancunian accent.

For a heartbeat, Reade was stock-still before looking off to his side. Sure enough, the helmet with the obscured visor had begun twitching, indicating movement inside. "Wah gawrn?" was heard next over his earphones, the voice unmistakable. Reade was about to respond when...

The capsule's countdown ended, and Reade was slammed into his seat again by unexpected acceleration as they were launched down the length of the shuttle's fuselage. At the end, a long rectangular panel of the hull propped open like the hatch of a letter box, serving as a blast shield against the shuttle's still-burning rockets as the huge orange discus was spat out into the air. As they sailed away from their home for the past month, Reade couldn't help but smile, oddly reminded of the reverse bungee cord ride Jannie had tricked him into going on at a funfair once. In spite of himself, he started laughing.

/ * * /

The Gulliver finally made its landing, having just flown past the point on the summit where the Black Knights had been gathered only a minute before. True to the professor's words, even at an incline, the shuttle sounded like the hammer of God at it struck the earth, gouging a furrow in the soil as its inertia continued unabated.

The convex doors of the cargo hold, which had given the ship a distinctive turtle-like appearance, crumpled horribly as the sudden introduction of traction caused the front-half to buck up into the air for a moment, bending the fuselage slightly. Slamming back down, the shuttle followed its nose as it continued speeding along, twisting this way and that as it was driven down the slope, its main thrusters still active. Anything in its path was smashed to the ground and flattened as it tobogganed madly down the mountain, its flaming exhaust catching fire to whatever was left in its wake. In the beginning, this was just trees and boulders, but soon the vast majority of its victims where Britannian Knightmare Frames and their pilots.

Unlike most, who turned tail and tried to outrun it, Princess Cornelia and her right-hand men simply fled to the sides, getting out of the monstrous steamroller's path. They nearly burnt out their landspinners doing so but they just did make it, using their slash harkens to yank themselves to safety with just meters to spare. A platoon of Sutherlands that had been nearby followed their lead in doing so, although a handful didn't make it in time and were torn in half by the shuttle's wings as it passed by. As the spacecraft began to go into a turn, the number of fatalities increased exponentially regardless of tactics.

Hitting some manner of embankment, the Gulliver flipped into the air for a minute, threatening to turn over on its side as it did so. For a moment, this looked like a stroke of luck for one squad of Knightmares that had been caught unaware. The pilots moved their factspheres to look up as it sailed overhead, amazed by their good fortune. Each was filled with a life-affirming feeling at the sight, which was something positive to go out on as they were then suddenly killed.

Within the shuttle, the inevitable had happened as the remaining fuel onboard was ignited. Perhaps it was simply the excessive pressure being placed upon the fuel tanks, or maybe the tanks had ruptured and caught a spark from the failing electronics. It could have been caused by a Knightmare exploding, either due to its Yggdrasil drive or the ordnance it carried, as it was run over.

Whatever the reason, the result was the same: First, there was a flash of light within it that could be seen through its windshield as well as cracks and holes along its hull. Then the Gulliver detonated, unleashing a fireball that enveloped everything within five hundred yards. This resulted in a second thunderclap that shook the entire region as the shuttle's fiery death was announced. Within moments, all that remained was its framework, what of it that wasn't still burning now warped and scorched by the tremendous heat. This tumbled almost languidly the remainder of the way down the mountain before coming to a rest, leaving a slowly developing forest fire behind it.

Some distance away was a giant orange disc, battered after being thrown by the explosion but otherwise still whole. Not quite parallel to the framework's path of destruction, it rolled along on its side almost jauntily like an oversized child's hoop. The shuttle's black box, one could be forgiven for assuming it and its contents were harmless.

This horrible tableau of the Gulliver's sudden return and violent demise played out within a few minutes to the inhabitants of the sleepy little settlement below. Briefly overwhelmed as they were by the latter, many still kept their heads as the fireball rose into the air and changed, becoming a geyser of flaming debris. Most of this fell back onto the mountain and surrounding hillside, upon the remaining flora and Knightmares lucky enough to have survived. Furthermore, most were but smoking fragments by the time they settled, either due to being blown out by the air or simply their flammable content having been exhausted.

Most does not mean all, however, something the civilians were reminded of as still-burning chunks rained down upon them, coming to rest in the streets or landing upon rooftops. Quickly, bucket brigades were formed while others fetched fire extinguishers, or simply slapped at the flames with bundles of sheets or their coats even. The one truly frightening bit of wreckage was a seven-foot-tall shard, still red hot, which stabbed itself into a fountain in the town square. A visiting geologist by the name of Joseph Fenette was knocked off his feet by the impact, then scrambled away on his hands and knees as the fountain's water boiled away into steam.

Miles away, the escape capsule floated along, carried aloft by its deployed parachutes. Inside, all was quiet as its conscious crewmembers waited for "splashdown," the idiosyncratic nickname that had been hung on the event of the capsule's deployment and safe landing. The silence was broken by Grimshaw's voice again.

"A little warning in the future, eh, High-pockets?" he chided affably as the capsule continued to bob in the air.

Reade ignored him, his mind occupied equally by questions over the odd medical readouts, as well as simple relief. After weeks in space, a good portion of which he could not for the life of him remember, they were at last back on Earth, the world of their birth. The thought consoled him as they continued to float downwards towards a not-too-distant valley.

In many ways, however, it was not the world they knew. It was now a brave, new world, for them and for the rest of humanity. Reade had constructed the Gulliver with the aim of changing everything Man thought he knew about himself. For good or ill, he had succeeded.

From this day forward, nothing would ever be the same again.

END OF CHAPTER 1

---

Hello one and all! Here we come to the end, for now perhaps, of my CODE GEASS/FANTASTIC FOUR crossover, "Area Four". Previously, I'd written what wound up being an incredibly overlong start-up multi-parter for a similar crossover using the Justice League. Considering the Fantastic Four was born as an answer by Marvel Comics to the Distinguished Competition's chart-busting team book, I thought it was the natural follow up. (Crossovers with the X-Men or Spider-Man, however, only go so far in my mind as speculated Epic Rap Battle of History material.)

Far earlier than this, I had a visual in my head for a bit of CG fanart guest-starring the F4's lead nemesis from outer space, Galactus. My train of thought had him ripping Pendragon or the Tokyo Settlement asunder in the distance while the foreground showed a three-way throwdown between the Lancelot, the Guren, and the Silver Surfer. Attempts to commission it fell through, but perhaps I'll give it another go.

Anyway, as you can see, I was plenty loyal to CG canon, whilst the F4 and friends (and enemies) have been folded out of their continuity and into that of Lelouch's world, as opposed to a pan-dimensional adventure. I've been re-reading Juubi-K's fanfic "One and Only Son", which melds together CG and GUNDAM, and became inspired by the situation with Task Force Bolivar, the E.U.'s infiltration team within the former state of Japan. That, and since the aforementioned CG/JLA fanfic is a prelude to a war scenario, I decided to prep a storyline that leans more toward a "heroes on the run" theme a la THE FUGITIVE or A-TEAM.

As a result, the Cosmic Quartet have mutated into European variations of themselves, although I stuck very closely to their back stories from the comics. (Sue and Johnny, I admit, are slightly patterned after their Heroes Reborn and Ultimate variations. Also, I made Reed and Ben cousins because… well, just because.) Don't worry; I visualize their characterizations sticking close to that during the Lee/Kirby, (early) Byrne, and Waid eras, accents aside.

Similarly, I tinkered with Victor von Doom. The surname is a bit too Saturday morning these days, especially for a Japanese adventure drama like CG. As such, his surname is legally Domovoi within this world, an update I credit to Dennis E. Power, who among other things is a historian of classic literature, motion pictures of all genres and ranks, pulp fiction, and comic books. He came up with this variant name for the "real world" Dr. Doom, as well as "Reid" for Mr. Fantastic's given name. (For those familiar with CG mythos, you can tell I mutated this last one slightly so as to not cause undue confusion with one of CG's supporting cast. It also becomes a callback to a once-famous Edisonade of the 19th century pulps.)

I should warn you, this is not the end of the mutations for the sake of this story. Changes with characters, names, origins, even powers (unless you really hate the idea of the F4 with switched and/or modified powers) are all running around in my head. That may be where they stay, or they may be typed out someday. Until then, as a writer far more talented than I once said...

Excelsior!
– AstroCitizen

P.S. I've noticed where some fanfic writers come up with a soundtrack for their chapters. These are invariably off of different anime series' soundtracks, which I admit to not being an aficionado. Western and European sci-fi/fantasy movies are something different, so I thought I'd give it a shot:

"Europe launched a rocket! / It's a spaceship!"
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY theme

"Lelouch's profiles on the Gulliver crew"
LOST IN SPACE 1967 theme

"Sea of Tranquility transmission / Reactions by princes, people, and pretenders"
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade (3rd Movement)"

"Milly's moonlight madness fair / First prize goes to C.C."
Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade"

"The Flash (or, Mission lost) / Retorts from the tyrants"
THE BLACK HOLE soundtrack: "Bob and V.I.N.C.E.N.T."; the first portion of "Into the Hole"

"Return to Earth / Gulliver's landing"
THUNDERBIRDS soundtrack: Barry Gray's suspense music (a.k.a. "Sun Probe collision course"); fast music ("Fireflash crash landing")

Segments of "Scheherazade" are used as the official soundtrack that goes with the silent classic, LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (trans., "A Trip to the Moon"), so it reappears here. Speaking of classical music, I did think of Debussy's "Clair de lune" but couldn't think of anyplace that was appropriate to use it.