Chapter the Threequel: Space 'Race'
The year was (will be?) 2125. Unfortunately, Strip didn't have the faintest idea of how to operate the Mr. Fusion, and he found himself in the far future. What an idiot. He found himself floating helplessly in space. This would have been a tragic circumstance for a human, but, as Elon Musk has taught us, cars are perfectly fine in space. Well I say "perfectly fine", Strip was not able to control his movement, or anything else about his situation.
Suddenly, Strip was enveloped in a green light. He looked up to see that a flying saucer had caught him in a tractor beam! The glowing light pull him up into the spaceship.
Inside the spaceship, Strip found himself in a large, rectangular, and mostly empty room. The walls and floor were a dark metallic gray color and covered with green tron lines. The room, for some reason, also had gravity like Earth's (rather strange a ship out in space and away from any planets). Strip, not liking this situation one bit, thought it would be a good idea to time-jump away. He lined himself up on the back wall of the room, and charged at the opposite wall. About three quarters of the way across the room, Strip reached the 88 mph required for time travel, and then realized that he wasn't traveling through time. The Mr. Fusion was missing! Strip slammed on his brakes, and came to a stop only inches from the wall in front of him.
A search of the room revealed no trace of the time machine. If the time machine wasn't in the room, Strip would need to look for it out of the room. The only trouble was, there didn't seem to be a way out of the room; all of the walls were without any visible doors. Seemingly at a deadend with his escape, Strip decided to sit still and wait for an opportunity to present itself.
After an hour of sitting and waiting, a section of one of the walls molded itself into a door and opened. Strip was amazed by the strange shifting wall, but he was a little apprehensive about going through the strange door that seemingly created itself. The rest of the walls in the room, as if to give Strip encouragement to leave, started rapidly closing in around him. Strip fled the room and into the hallway beyond the door.
The hallway had the same aesthetic as the room; dark grey and green tron lines. Strip made his way down the hallway until he came upon another door that made itself into existence. As he started to peak into this new door, the old door and much of the hallway around Strip turned into walls. It was as if something or someone was trying to manipulate his movements, and trying to get him into that room. He stopped to have a serious think about his captor(s).
"Could it be aliens on board the ship (just like in the movies)? Could it be that the ship itself is alive?", Strip wondered to himself. WELL OF COURSE THE BLOODY SPACESHIP IS ALIVE! In a normal sci fi setting, "the ship is alive" would be a huge plot development that would have taken time to be built up to; but not here ladies and gentlemen! As we all know, the main gimmick with "Cars" is that the vehicles are self-contained living beings. Spaceships are vehicles, so they should be alive, right?
After establishing that his captor is probably the spaceship surrounding him, Strip decided it would be best to obey the spaceship rather than get crushed by its mystical changing walls. Inside of this new room, Strip was greeted with pleasant sight; the Mr. Fusion. The time machine was on top of a table of sorts (this table obviously made with dark grey metal and green tron lines), and had many glowing green wires stuck into it. Overjoyed to have found the Mr. Fusion, Strip raced over to it, unplugged the wires, and tried to put it back on. But before he could take it, another tractor beam, which had just come from a newly formed emitter in the wall, pulled the Mr. Fusion out of Strip's reach.
"Hey!", he finally lost his cool, "You give that back!". The spaceship did not give the time machine back. Instead, it formed a television screen out of one of the walls, and showed Strip a series of images: The Dinoco Racing and Speed development headquarters, the doorway to the top secret development section, a small black orb, a large explosion, a very large explosion, an apocalyptically large explosion, then several images of a flat, empty wasteland. Strip believed that the spaceship was trying to tell him something. Was it a warning? Of course it was a warning! Strip made the reasonable assumption that the orb was responsible for whatever that explosion was about. The orb was the macguffin.
The spaceship then released the Mr. Fusion. The spaceship had also added a display to the time machine that allowed Strip to tell when he was (you'd think that would come standard). The Mr. Fusion reattached itself to Strip. The room around him then morphed into a long hallway with enough space for Strip to time-jump.
"Why thank you!", the blue car said to the spaceship, and he began driving. Sparks enveloped Strip, and he was thrust somewhere (somewhen?) else in time. Like the Delorean from Back to the Future, Strip left little flame trails where his wheels were.
