Welcome and thank you for showing interest in my crazy impulse project that will probably end up being the longest fic I ever work on!

Arc I: Race's End

Fate's Machinations

The few moments of tense, worried breathlessness gave way to relieved jubilation when Eva saw the plume of yellow smoke, coinciding with a victorious whoop from Jordan. They'd scored their second win in the playoffs for the Pre-Selections. They'd move on to the next round. One step closer to the Ultimate Prize…whatever it was.

Any wish, any dream.

That had a few implications by itself, but then again, Para-Dice had admitted to not even being twelve years old (at least in Wetanian years) yet. But that still made it worth wondering about.

She vaguely heard the race judges call out the final score—they'd won by one point—before taking the cue to start back to their team's pit. "Jordan, how're your eyes?" she asked after they cleared the tunnel, remembering that he'd been a bit too late in turning off the infrared sensors the Arrow had.

"Still feel like they're on fire, but other than that, fine," was his answer while she turned the star-racer in place before setting it down. The first person to greet her when she climbed out of the back hatch was the team's first pilot, Rick, who smiled and gave a thumbs-up. As for the one she was looking for…

"Bravo Jordan!" their team manager praised, walking up to the team's gunner. "That was excellent shooting out there today! The race wouldn't have been won without you."

"I-It was nothing, sir," Jordan stuttered in response, momentarily glancing over at Eva. She clenched one fist slightly without really thinking about it.

One thing had become clear very quickly to her: this was not the Don Wei she remembered. The Don Wei she remembered was a kind man, completely different from the overly-strict team manager they had here on Alwas.

He certainly would've recognized his own daughter…but he hadn't.

He hadn't, and a lapse in confidence on her part had ended with her inventing a false identity on the spot.

So to the team, she was Molly, and had been Molly for the past several days. A lot had happened in that time, from Rick's career-ending accident, to their first loss against Toros that ended with their secret weapon—the Whizzing Arrow II's hyperdrive—being put out of commission until Stan and Koji had time to get it replaced altogether.

She almost missed the stilted comment from Don that was directed at her, to which she replied with a simple "Thank you, sir," before going back into the Arrow, this time to start on detaching her rocket-seat from the steering column, moving quickly so that she wouldn't get in either Stan's or Koji's way while they did the post-race work.

The air in the building seemed to have become suffocating within the last minute.

"You coming or not?" she asked, glancing over at Jordan, who paused where he'd been making use of an eyedropper, before giving a half-grin and taking a seat behind her—and then they were off.

While she was sure to avoid anyone that was in the way, there might've been a time or two when a Scrub had to dive out of her way first. The sun was starting to set, staining the area around them fiery-orange. "Hey, uh, Molly?" Jordan started when they'd reached the edge of the souk. "I'm not sure I'm up for a long ride. Besides, all these fields look the same. What if we get lost or something?"

"Jordan, you have no sense of adventure," she deadpanned in response. With a simple warning of "Hang on!" she floored the pedal, and the rocket-seat shot forward again. The fields were a blur going by for a few minutes before she eased up on it, seeing the stone structures lining the edges of a few of them. "Hey, those don't look like anything else the Scrubs built, do they?"

Jordan looked at them for a few seconds. "I've never really paid attention to how the buildings look."

"You could at least pretend to be interested, you know!" Eva cut the engine to the rocket-seat when they'd passed a ruin that still looked mostly like a building, having a half-crumbled pillar on one side that led up to what looked like it had been a balcony at one point. "I'm gonna check that one out."

"But it's starting to get dark!" Jordan complained.

Eva rolled her eyes before starting up the pillar. "You seriously think Don Wei is gonna worry about us?" she asked after reaching the balcony, turning to look back at Jordan. Something else caught her attention, though; it was a glimmer of brighter-orange against the sky, and would've otherwise been easily dismissible had it not been getting bigger.

Jordan, who was halfway up the pillar, looked confused for a second before following her gaze. Two seconds later he looked back up at her, eyes wide. "Molly get down from there, that thing's gonna crash!"

That was all the prompting she needed to skid back down the pillar with him, and just in time—the decently-sized flaming object crashed into the top of the ruin, smashing right through it and planting itself in the muddy bank on the other side of the lake.

The sound of stone breaking continued, all while the entire structure of the ruin tilted gradually sideways, until a louder crack signaled the entire thing rapidly sinking into the water.

"…and you wanted to go in there," Jordan said finally, his voice fainter than normal.

Eva opted to not make a remark this time, instead looking past the stilling water at the still-smoking not-a-meteor. "Jordan, look—it's a ship!"

"A ship?" he repeated, confounded, staring at it. "Huh, I guess it is," he muttered, before stammering "H-Hey, wait a sec!" at seeing her starting to wade through the shallower half of the lake. "Molly, we don't even know where that thing came from, or—or who might be in it! What if they're not friendly?"

"Jordan, they just crash-landed," she retorted, turning to glare at him a little. "Even if they're not, what if they're hurt?" His gaze went briefly skyward with a heavy sigh, before he started after her.

The ship was a little bigger than the Arrow, if being narrower in build, and was primarily gray in color, with the edges being a darker shade. At cautiously holding one hand near the metal to test if it was safe to touch yet (it was still easy to tell that it just came in hot from space) that a deep unease suddenly overtook Eva, abruptly enough to make her jump slightly.

It wasn't a something's-wrong sort of unease, though. If anything, it was more like something's-changed.

But she didn't know what might've changed. Or how.

Jordan took a step back, scowling as he looked the ship over. "I don't recognize it from any of the books back home," he said, before side-eyeing her. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

She didn't reply, instead taking advantage of the fact that they were still standing in a few inches' worth of water to splash some onto what looked like the primary entrance for the ship. It didn't immediately evaporate, so she tested it again; still warm, but not to the point where she couldn't touch it. "Jordan, d'you—I don't know, see a lever or something anywhere?"

"No. Molly, a spaceship wouldn't have a lever on the outside—" He stopped talking, looking back over his shoulder. Eva looked as well, just in time to see the star-racer belonging to their opponent of earlier in the day come to a stop, with Rush jumping down to start toward them, pickaxe/chainsaw in hand.

"Um, did you—need something?" Eva asked cautiously.

"I'd followed you out here to congratulate you on your win," Rush replied. "And I saw the ship crash on the way out here." He eyed the sealed hatch before adding, "Allow me." One swing of the weaponized tool later, the hatch had one sizable dent in it, the doors being ajar enough for both Eva and Jordan to pry them aside, with some effort.

Two seconds later Eva scrambled backwards with a barely-stifled scream, nearly falling backwards into the water, with there being a hurried "It's a robot! It's just a robot!" from Jordan.

That doesn't make it any less scary, she thought, creeping back over to the door. A second look showed that there were wires sticking out of the half of a humanoid figure. To the side, Rush hummed thoughtfully. "I've never seen a ship like this before."

"Me neither," Jordan agreed halfheartedly, looking up a bit. Then there was a quieter "Huh?" before he took a step into the ship. For a few long moments, he stood completely still, before he breathed "No way."

"Jordan, what…?" She trailed off when he wordlessly pointed. Further back in the ship was the one actual passenger. He had black hair with a gray undercut and a white forelock, a lateral scar running across the bridge of his nose, and was wearing an outfit that was more rags than anything, but what had Eva really staring was that he was human.

"That—that can't be him." Jordan's voice was thick with disbelief, but it didn't stop him from moving forward to make an attempt at picking the man up. He settled for half-carrying/half-dragging him into the light after a few seconds' worth of struggling.

"Can't be who?" Eva asked, confused, before a quiet, pained-sounding exhalation from the man prompted her to reconsider their priorities.

She looked first at the rocket-seat, deduced that there was no way all three of them would fit on it, before looking up at Rush. "Do you think we could—get a ride back to town, please?"

He nodded, moving to take the man from them easily. "I'd be glad to."

It was funny, how fast it could go from feeling like you knew someone, to realizing that you actually barely knew them at all.

Rick had just figured that out the hard way. Don really, really did not seem like someone that would even bother with having a family, and yet, he'd just up and told Rick that exact story, all because of one little comment he'd made to the team's manager after Molly and Jordan had taken off.

Rick adjusted his shades so that they wouldn't slide down at all before glancing at the old book he'd set on the table in the mezzanine. If it didn't shed any light on that weird old stone pendent and the weird old symbol on it, he didn't know what else would.

It was pretty much a history book, or at least something close to it—the scrawling letters that the Scrubs used were easy enough to get a basic grasp of, at least, otherwise this would've been an even-bigger headache than it needed to be.

The first couple of minutes hadn't been much more than a self-imposed history lesson (turns out the Scrubs weren't always so peaceful), and the one remotely-promising part of it—which had been describing some kind of "calamity"—had dropped into another subject altogether with no transitions.

Like whatever disaster it had been was purposefully removed from the record books.

Given that nature had decided to be a bitch and drop a lightning bolt on the one person that was his lead, it was frustrating.

Given that whoever or whatever that symbol was linked to had definitely sabotaged the Arrow I and ruined his racing career with that, it was beyond frustrating.

It made him feel useless, and Rick did not like feeling useless.

He also wasn't sure he liked the feeling that had crept into the air over the last ten minutes or so—a heavy sort of tension that made it almost seem like there was a storm coming. The sky had been spotless earlier, but there were dark blotches on the horizon outside that might be rainclouds.

Another flip of the page faced him with an illustration that took up both sides of the old book, absolutely nothing on it even remotely resembling the symbol. What kept him from checking the page after that was the centerpiece of the illustration.

Footsteps to the side had him glance up. Rick wasn't too much of a book person, either, which was probably why he could practically see the unspoken question on Don's face. He picked the book up and turned it so the team manager could see the image. "Nice picture, ain't it?"

"I'm not sure I understand what I'm looking at," was the near-monotone response.

"Pretty sure it's a cat." Rick paused, before adding "They don't even have cats on Alwas," in a mutter mostly meant for himself. So maybe that was another thing to look into later.

Beneath the image was some writing, but it had to be an older dialect or something, because at the most Rick could only make out a mention of some fire-guardian or other.

Some commotion in the hangar below got Don look through the window, and then scowl before walking over to the top of the stairway. "Jordan? Where on earth is Molly?"

Rick followed him out to see that the team gunner had come back by himself, looking like he'd just run a marathon; he was doubled over and probably would've fallen over if Stan hadn't been holding him up. "Jordan, breathe first. Okay?" Koji said after Jordan had tried and failed to answer Don's question.

"Ship…crashed," the gunner managed to say between gasps after a few moments, starting to catch his breath. "Someone was…in it. At hospital now. Molly's there."

"And why is Molly still there, exactly?" Don asked, an edge in his voice—there's the Don that Rick was used to. (Not that Rick was necessarily glad to see him that way again.) "We have a race tomorrow, and we'll all have to be adequately rested for it!"

In response Jordan raised his index finger in a wait-a-moment gesture, and swallowed hard before saying "It was the Kerberos pilot."

The title didn't immediately ring any bells for Rick, and if Don's still-irritated look was any clue, the same went for him.

That did not go for the mechanics; he saw Koji frown a bit, and there was a doubtful "You sure it wasn't just a guy that looked like him?" from Stan.

Jordan shook his head. "I'm serious! It's Shiro!"

It felt like only a few minutes had gone by before Jordan came back with the rest of the team in tow. The stormy look on her dad's face when he saw her there was replaced with something that might've been shock when he looked a little further to the side, at the window that separated the hallway from what the doctor had referred to as the quarantine zone, before starting at a pace that wasn't exactly walking toward the doorway leading into that room when the aforementioned alien motioned for him.

The only reason it was being used was because they didn't know where this man had come from. Eva was also certain that she'd seen him somewhere before, but Jordan had taken off in the general direction of the pit before she could ask him. She'd at least remembered to thank Rush for the ride beforehand.

Stan and Koji both stared through the glass, before the former said "Well, it definitely looks like him."

"It is him," Jordan insisted. "Shiro was one of the best flight instructors in the whole Garrison before…" He trailed off, biting his lip.

"Before what?" Eva asked. If she had to be honest with herself, the four looks of confusion she got really should've been expected. "I mean, he looks familiar," she added. "I'm just not sure from where."

"Well, it was from a year ago," Stan admitted. "It was all over the news when it happened, though."

"It was a routine trip out to Kerberos," Jordan clarified. "Which, uh, it's one of Pluto's moons. A-Anyways—all three of them just vanished not too long after they even got out there. They said it was pilot error, but…but Shiro was the pilot, and he's right there." He got steadily quieter as he spoke.

"You know him?" Eva asked.

"Uh, n-not personally, 'cause he was stationed in a different country, but he broke practically every single piloting record the Garrison had."

Broke every record? Okay, maybe now Eva had some questions she wanted to ask the man.

A sudden cacophony from the other room grabbed their collective attention, and Eva looked to see that Shiro had jolted awake and had made an attempt at sitting upright, only to sway a bit before sinking back down again. His attention darted around the room until it fixed on both her dad and the doctor (moreso her dad) and he was saying something that…that she couldn't make any sense of.

She could dimly hear what sounded like they should be words, but the tones weren't like anything she'd heard before and the translator-attachment that she'd gotten along with the others was just not working with whatever language that was. She could hear a few words being repeated, but they didn't have any real meaning to them, as far as she knew.

Her dad tried saying something now and then, looking increasingly unnerved, before the doctor cut in with something else, moving to take something off of a nearby table. Following that was a frantic stream of words that, while she still didn't recognize it, Koji apparently did, with how he flinched.

"Did you catch that?" Stan asked uncertainly.

"Not really," the technician mumbled, shifting uneasily. "He really didn't want to get sedated right there."

"I don't think anyone would want that," Rick remarked quietly. "So what's the verdict?" he asked at normal volume when Don came back into their half of the room.

"We're going back to the pit," he said stiffly. The fact that he looked rattled was enough to have Eva feeling nervous herself. "They'll be bringing him there a few minutes from now."

From a distance, Satis watched the entire Earth Team start back toward their team's pit, absently fiddling with his beard. He'd heard enough of the newcomer's rambling to have a grasp on what was coming, and coming soon.

It was nothing good, to say the least.

He turned his gaze in the general direction of one of the distant capes before saying "It's a good thing you've made your choice already. You're running out of time here."

The recipient of the words wasn't there physically, but he certainly was mentally-speaking; he did the psychic equivalent of an uneasy shift of the foot before agreeing.

To say that the most recent events of today had been the mother of all surprises would be a vast understatement, though it was one that Don admittedly had a mixed opinion on.

Mixed, because while he hated surprises, a man presumed to have been dead an entire year was actually quite alive…if not exactly well.

Takashi Shirogane had left Earth with both arms, and had come to Alwas with one flesh-and-blood, one metal of an unknown kind. That the prosthetic was wired directly to his nervous system was something the doctor had not been able to keep the awe from his tone over.

He'd spoken nothing but gibberish up until the very end, when there had been a single, panicked protest in Japanese. Koji had clarified on that last detail, which had been another surprise—Don hadn't been aware that their technician was bilingual until then. The only reason that language wasn't coded into the translators was because there simply hadn't been a reason for it to have been.

It was minor compared to the other surprises they'd had so far, however.

All of it together made for a troubling image that left him feeling on-edge, to the point where he wasn't able to maintain his usual composure when contacting the president; he tapped two fingers repeatedly against the desk, waiting for the interlink to connect to Earth.

If the Coalition's president was surprised to be contacted, he didn't show it. "Don Wei, I wasn't expecting to hear from you again so soon," he greeted, though his tone took a solemn tone at the addition of "Everything's well, I hope."

"Today's race was a victory, if a narrow one," Don replied. "Though we did have a bit of an unexpected development not too long ago. It—" He paused, feeling momentarily hesitant, before finishing "It has to do with the…incident involving Kerberos last year. A ship crashed here on Alwas, and the mission's pilot was inside."

"Lieutenant Shirogane, if I remember that disaster right. He's alive?"

"Well, yes, but there are some concerns for his mental state."

The president sighed, though it was nearly inaudible. "I'm not surprised. If he's alive, it probably means he and the other two were captured and held prisoner for that entire time. Has he said anything about that?"

Well, that went better than Don had expected. "If he had, it was nothing we could understand. The language he was speaking was indecipherable. And whatever he was saying…" Truthfully, Don wasn't sure if Takashi had been fully conscious earlier. The look in his eyes had been borderline hysterical. "I would almost say he was trying to warn us about something."

There was a pause, the president looking as though he'd aged a decade all of a sudden, before saying "Arrange for Lieutenant Shirogane to be brought back to Earth as soon as possible."

"Understood. But if I may—does this have to do with this threat you mentioned before?"

"No, it does not. And for all of our sakes, I hope that this isn't the precursor of something much worse."

Shiro heard the voices first.

They were quiet and indistinct when he noticed them, but slowly grew clearer—and then they stopped. Why did they stop, and why did they sound familiar, even though he was sure he'd never heard them before?

Unless—

The mental fog was ripped away with no precedent, and the first lucid detail Shiro comprehended was that his head collided very hard and very fast with someone else's. Whoever it was fell back with a sharp curse, with someone else hurriedly asking if they were okay.

Shiro himself kept one hand to his forehead for a few seconds, waiting for the spike of pain to pass, before moving the appendage just low enough for him to see that he was lying on a low couch, with there being a small coffee table to his right. Beyond that were the voices' sources, whom Shiro could only stare at.

All four of them were human, and that observation was both relieving and disconcerting at the same time.

The first ever-so-elegant words out of his mouth was "Uh, hi?" if only because he not only had to mentally fumble to not use…some alien language, but also speak a specific human language, which was one he thankfully had at least a basic—emphasizing basic—grasp of.

He never thought he'd be thankful for those mandatory language lessons that the Garrison had, specifically the French ones, and yet here he was.

At the same time, something seemed…off about this, like his ears were hearing one thing but his brain was comprehending it as something else.

"Hi," the one sitting closest to where he was returned; the only girl of the four had black hair with the top half dyed red, and was wearing a cropped green-and-yellow shirt with beige trousers. Her right ear had three piercings in it, and she had two tattoos on her face, under her eyes: a star on the right side and a vertical line on the left. "A-Are you, um, okay?"

"I…think so." Half of him wanted to say yes, the other half wanted to scream no. He felt fine, for the most part, except for the fact that everything before now was a foggy mess. "I-I'm sorry, but—where are we?"

"Alwas."

That sounded familiar, somehow, in a way that made his heart jump. At the same time, he knew all the names of the planets in the Coalition, and Alwas wasn't one of them.

Both of the girl's responses had been halting, as though she wasn't sure how to address him. Which, considering they'd just met, made sense. "Who are you?" he thought to ask finally.

"Molly," she answered after a moment, offering a quick smile and holding a yellow-gloved hand out. Shiro took it after a moment of hesitation, telling himself that they were extremely unlikely to be a threat of any kind—but the unease refused to go away. "The guy you knocked heads with is Stan," the girl went on, before gesturing over her shoulder. "And that's Koji." One of the two sitting offered a small wave, dark-haired and pale and bespectacled.

Shiro offered a quick apology to Stan, who replied with "I've been hit with worse," as he stood up—he had dark skin, red hair and sideburns, and was wearing beige overalls with smudges of what Shiro assumed was engine oil on them; the same went for his own pair of gloves.

Koji's outfit was similar to that, with the addition of a shirt colored like Molly's, and minus the gloves. Mechanics, maybe?

Shiro found himself being intercepted by the third boy before he could ask, in the form of a vigorous handshake. He was talking too quick for Shiro to catch much, aside from the fact that his name was Jordan Wilde, and that he referred to Shiro as Lieutenant Shirogane.

"Just Shiro is fine," he replied, finding himself smiling a little at Jordan's enthusiasm. He had black hair with one half bleached blonde, and some light freckles across his face. His cameo-patterned green outfit had those same yellow highlights as Eva's and Koji's—it had to be a uniform of some sort.

Stan got up, shaking his head a bit, before pausing, making a face. "No offense, but those reek. How long've you been in 'em?"

Shiro glanced down at himself, specifically at the dark-colored outfit he was wearing.

As for the answer to the question…he found himself unable to come up with it. He settled with "You probably don't want the answer to that."

Jordan scratched the back of his head a bit. "Well, I have some spare boots that might fit you," he said before turning on his heel and vanishing through a doorway to what looked like it was an elevator.

Stan followed him, muttering something that vaguely sounded like "I might have something too." Koji shuffled his feet a bit before vanishing into a smaller room off to the side; from what little Shiro could see of it, it might be a kitchen.

Not that he was complaining, because he couldn't remember when the last time he ate was. Actually, he couldn't remember much of anything, now that he was thinking about it. His head felt like it was filled with cotton candy.

Shiro nearly missed Molly asking him a question. "Hospital?" he repeated blankly, brow furrowing slightly. He could dimly recall being somewhere hospital-like, now that he was really thinking about it.

She nodded. "You were saying something back there, but we couldn't understand most of what you were saying."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Shiro replied, frowning more at himself than at her. He offhandedly noted that her eyes actually weren't brown—they were more of a maroon shade in this lighting, and might actually be red in direct light.

Red. Whether or not it was just because he'd been seeing quite a bit of it in short order, something about the thought of the color sparked something for a moment—but it was gone before Shiro could even think to chase after it.

At the same time, Stan and Jordan both returned, each holding something. "These look okay?" the former asked, proffering the fabric.

"They do." Shiro took the clothes before adding, "Thanks."

"No problem. Bathroom's the first room to the right up the stairs."

The room was mostly greyscale, with some tan hues here and there. While Shiro knew he looked different, considering that he'd been gone for—months? Years? He didn't know how long.

Either way, he still stopped at seeing his reflection in the wall-mounted mirror over the sink. He looked ten years older than he really was…which was what, still twenty-four? Twenty-five? Or older than that? Shiro didn't know what day it was, or what the date in general was, so he couldn't be sure.

The clothes and boots all fit okay, which was a plus. The dark-colored raggedy outfit was promptly stuffed into the wastebin, and while Shiro was tempted to find a lit match to drop on it, he wasn't sure how safe that would be.

He'd also found with a jolt that there was a small device fastened to the back of his neck, though at the same time it might explain why it was like he was hearing two different things at once from the others.

After he was back down the stairs and as he turns the corner, something stopped him cold.

He was pretty sure his nose actually twitched a few times as he tried to put a name to the scent in the air. "Hope you like cup-ramen," Molly said when she saw him, seeming to be halfway through her own already. "It's all we have."

Cup-ramen. Shiro could tell by their expressions and the barely-suppressed giggles that they hadn't been expecting him to practically inhale the cheap noodles, but it was the best thing he'd tasted in a long time. That one was a fact—he could practically feel it in his bones.

When he was about finished, something caught his eye, out the window. A better view of it came from the balcony through the door: indisputably a star-racer.

It was no Persephone, but it did look like a decent craft, sporting an orange/purple paint-job in a flame-like pattern on both reactors. The left one had what looked like a pink rabbit's-head spray-painted onto it. Pilot's touch, if Shiro had to guess.

"That's the Whizzing Arrow II," Stan said from somewhere behind Shiro, a note of pride in his voice. "Koji and I helped build her."

"What happened to you, anyways?" Jordan asked then. "You were going on about some stuff back at the hospital, but you were really out of it."

"What kind of stuff?" Shiro asked, raising an eyebrow. (Yep, that thing was definitely a translator.)

There was another tense pause, before Koji said, "Nothing you were saying made sense. I mean—we couldn't understand a word of it. What language was that?"

"I…I'm not sure." He really wasn't. The more he thought about it, the more it was seeming like someone had taken a vase full of his memories and thrown it onto the floor, and thrown a few of the larger pieces out. "I remember the mission, and being captured, but everything between that and now…it's all a blur."

"Do you know who captured you?" Jordan asked. His tone took on a belligerent edge when he added "Was it the Crogs?"

"No." He'd answered suddenly enough to have all four of them startle, and thoughtlessly enough to surprise himself. "Not—not Crogs. Something else."

Something else, who were looking for…for something.

Something important.

Jordan wasn't really sure what he had been expecting when Shiro—actually Takashi Shirogane himself—woke up, but this…wasn't exactly it. He seemed a little amused by Molly's various questions on all the various records he'd broken piloting-wise, and he'd asked a few questions of his own about the Arrow, which Koji had answered by showing him a few things on his tablet, but the tension hadn't disappeared from the lieutenant's face.

His team hadn't been captured by Crogs, but he didn't remember who or what the culprit had been. The only clue they had to that puzzle was the robot half that had been in the ship he'd come to Alwas in.

Jordan was almost tempted to go back out there to take another look at it, but there wouldn't be much of a point to that, though, since now it was too dark to…wait a second. "H-Hold on. That ship you came here in—there was half a robot in it."

The conversation halted, and Shiro's brow furrowed a little. Jordan was also getting two dumbstruck looks from the mechanics at that detail, but he ignored it for the most part.

"Yeah," Molly agreed. "Does that sound familiar?"

"I think so," was the slow response. "What did it—" Shiro stopped abruptly, at the same time as a bizarre sort of tension abruptly creeping into the air.

For a few seconds, it felt almost like gravity had been momentarily turned off, and then back on before anything had a chance to move. Then the entire foundation of the pit shook hard enough to throw him to the ground, an explosion sounding somewhere scarily close.

"What the hell was that?" Stan asked seconds after picking himself up off the floor.

"Maybe one of the nearby teams did something?" Koji suggested, his voice wavering. That actually would've been a viable reason, given that one of the teams closer to the lake managed to have their star-racer explode after a modification went very wrong a few days ago, but a second, louder explosion not only rendered that null, but also left the lights flickering.

At that point, Jordan bolted down the stairs and to the pit's entrance, and then his train of thought all but derailed both hard and fast. The most notable things about the sight outside was that more than a few buildings were on fire right now, and there were multiple dark shapes in the sky, visible through all of the smoke by vivid red highlights.

A sudden movement next to him shook him out of it, and Jordan turned to see Rick; the ex-pilot stared out for two seconds before looking over his shoulder, saying "Molly, take the others in the Arrow and get out of here!"

"But what about—" she started protesting, but he cut her off.

"Don might be a human cactus, but he can't throw a punch to save his life! Now go!"

Don Wei had gone out a few minutes before Shiro had woken up and hadn't come back yet. And now Rick was gone too, Jordan already having lost sight of him in the darkness.

It took Stan grabbing him by the shoulder to snap him back to attention again, and he'd barely had time to strap himself into the turret before the Arrow shot out of the pit at a speed quicker than what Molly usually did when heading to a race.

Then again, this wasn't a race, and that detail was shoved to the forefront of Jordan's attention when a laser blast just narrowly missed the Arrow, the resulting explosion briefly sending the star-racer careening to one side.

Jordan wasn't sure what was going through her head at the moment, either. She hadn't gone for the open plain that went away from the civilized area, but then again, maybe these aliens would've expected that.

It also meant that they were constantly swerving left and right to avoid more laser shots and what Jordan thought were other star-racers, but they were going by way too fast for him to actually get a solid glimpse of anything.

Even then, he wasn't sure he wanted to get a better look—and it got even worse when they reached the souk, because then there were all the buildings to watch out for too.

Another near-miss forced Jordan to suppress a flinch, and he angled the turret upwards to aim at the source. With the light from the fires, he could see that the alien ship was dark-gray in color and all angles, looking vaguely similar to the ship Shiro had come to Alwas in. Jordan set his shoulders before opening fire, with the thought of I don't know who you aliens think you are, but you're gonna regret messing with us!

But it became painfully obvious after a minute that, while star-racers were not meant for combat, that alien ship was.

The Arrow had the turret Jordan was in, but it just didn't have the raw firepower to even leave a mark on that thing—and on the other hand, he did not want to know what would happen if the Arrow took a hit from one of those laser blasts.

Maybe we can outrun him, he thought, opening the comm channel, but the suggestion faded in his throat almost immediately.

He wasn't sure if Molly noticed that the comm was up to begin with, with how she was staring straight ahead with a glassy-eyed look, and though he couldn't see either of the mechanics, from what little he could hear over the currently-redundant alarm and all of the background noise, they weren't doing much better.

Shiro looked tense, his face beaded with sweat. If he started panicking, Jordan was sure it would spell doom for his own nerves. The Arrow made another sharp turn, now streaking across some paddy fields, picking up speed now that they were on open ground with no obstacles ahead—but that alien ship was still behind them, keeping pace with them.

Over the screen, he saw Molly punch in a command without looking at the console. The Arrow jolted seconds later, accentuated by a loud backfiring sound from both reactors, and Jordan's view was obscured by dark smoke and flickers of flame. She must've tried using the hyperdrive, he thought, swallowing reflexively.

There was a sound akin to a terrified whimper over the comm—it took a bit for Jordan to realize it had been from Molly—right before the star-racer pivoted to the side into a stand of thick trees. At least, Jordan assumed they were trees.

A metallic crunching sound made him flinch, but Jordan saw the bloom of flame from up in the air; the alien ship had crashed into one of the trees. There was a hoarse sigh over the comm from Stan, and Shiro visibly sagged a little in relief.

Molly didn't let up on the speed, still staring ahead dazedly, and Jordan opened his mouth to say something to maybe snap her out of it, but something else caught his attention—and a few of the more flamboyant words in his vocabulary ran through his head in rapid-fire succession when he realized what exactly they were speeding toward.

"MOLLY—CLIFF!"

Up until this tick, the assignment had been going absolutely perfect. Lirax had nearly laughed aloud when he saw just how primitive this planet was. It had no defense systems of any kind anywhere, and the participants of the racing competition had been all too complacent with the truce in effect.

True, there had been some attempted resistance, but that was equally laughable. Those held aboard the ship now would be sent elsewhere in the empire's reaches where they could be made use of, once this was all settled with—specifically the one major hiccup that he'd just been presented with.

"What. Is. That?" he growled, staring at the video feed that had been recovered from a destroyed fighter.

"It appears to be one of the racing ships, sir," one of his subordinates answered. That much was obvious by design alone. The smaller craft swerved frantically from side to side, just narrowly avoiding every single shot, all while a side-mounted turret fired onto the fighter. Despite its blocky build, it was surprisingly swift.

At one point there was a burst of flames from the two reactors of the racing ship, shortly before it turned into a stand of fossilized flora. The video cut out the moment the fighter hit one of the petrified structures.

Lirax's eyes narrowed. "Which planet is that piece of scrap from?"

The subordinate audibly swallowed before replying, "It was from the escaped prisoner's homeworld."

The commander rounded on the rest of the crew immediately. "Search the island for them! They cannot be allowed to find the Lion before we do!"

(endnote)

-everyone participating in the Great Race receives a translation device, because the everyone/thing-speaks-the-same-language thing just really irritates me. The device is attached to the base of the user's neck, and interacts with the nervous system via short-range electronic signals, translating auditory input with the use of a computer database that's constantly updating.

-the whole human-language bit is running on the basis of only one language being in the translator, i.e. the one the race team spoke. Which in this case, as a nod to where OSR was developed, is French. Shiro is pretty used to English, given that he was stationed in what might just be the state of Arizona, if some little details in VLD's first ep are anything to go on.

-Space Academy (OSR) = Galaxy Garrison (VLD). Using the latter's name because it sounds less cheesy. Jordan is known as "that guy who always goes overkill in target practice" and "the guy that made Mr. Feinberg retire" on top of being William Wilde's grandson. He isn't a favorite of many of the staff for the latter two reasons, Iverson included, and is ostracized by most of the other cadets.