Fox sighed, lifting his furry face to the evening sky. Beyond the purple and orange colors marking another day fading into night, he could see tiny points of light, brighter and larger than the surrounding stars. They were planets. To the far south he could see Fachina, gleaming coldly and brightly, and directly above him he could see Corneria, the massive blue planet of the Lylat System, rivaling Venom in diameter.
"Whatcha lookin' at, Fox?" asked Slippy from behind him. Fox turned to face his childhood friend, a disappointed look on his face.
"I just..." he said slowly. "I just want to see the stars. I've piloted loading ships at the imperial base before, I've had experience. I want to be like those rebel pilots, flying into dogfights and saving the day," he said wistfully.
Slippy gulped down the last of his supper. "I don't mean to sounds like I don't support you Fox, I do. And I'm ready to leave this dust ball just like all my brothers and sisters did. But you can't always get what you want," he said.
Fox frowned, looking back up at the stars. "No," he said. "I guess not."
The two young friends trudged through the sand to the garage, preparing themselves for the tedious and difficult job of wiping an android's memory. But when they arrived and turned the lights on in the garage, they found that ROB had disappeared.
Fox blinked in confusion. "ROB?" he called loudly.
Slippy waddled into the room, checking behind the covered hovercraft that Fox had repaired. "He isn't here!" the toad cried in alarm.
Fox frowned at a dark spot on the cracked cement floor. "Wait a minute, what's this?" he asked, hurrying over to it and kneeling down. On the floor, scrawled in large, black letters, was a message.
Young Master McCloud and your friend, I apologize for leaving you and your family, you seem to be caring and friendly people. But I have been sent on a mission to find Peppy Hare, and I intend to fulfill the promise I made to Mistress Krystal. Goodbye. P.S. I am sorry about wasting your engine grease to write this message, it was all I could find.
Fox was incredulous. He had never heard of, let alone seen such devotion in an android before. He wondered if the Cornerian rebellion must have upgraded his logic system to think like a living creature would, without endless numbers and statistics.
"Wow. We're dead," said Slippy grimly.
Fox put his face in his hands, groaning. "Ugh, stars! I knew I shouldn't have left him active!" he scolded himself. He stayed crouching by the message for a few moments, then stood up, grabbed a pair of binoculars from a shelf, and hurried outside. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon, looking for any sign of a tall, thin android in the light of the setting sun.
"Damn! I don't see him anywhere," Fox muttered.
"We have to go looking for him, your uncle's going to be fuming!" Slippy cried.
Fox shook his head. "It's too dangerous at night. You want don't know how many Trychen are out after dark," he said. Despite popular belief in the Lylat System that Katina wasn't inhabited, its deserts were full of beasts of all sorts, including an ancient alien race known as the Trychen, the original intelligent inhabitants of Katina. Although small in size and seemingly mindless, Trychen were ruthless hunters and were incredibly dangerous in large numbers.
"Man, I'm going to get it for this," groaned Fox, lowering the binoculars.
Slippy suddenly hit Fox lightly in the shoulder, struck with an idea. "Hey, you and your uncle don't go out to the crop fields until noon, right? How about I stay here the night, and we can both go looking for that thing in the morning!" he suggested.
Fox blinked. "That could work," he said. "That hovercraft has a radar on it, we may be able to use it to find him. But let's go back in the garage and wait a few hours so my uncle thinks we're working," he said. They both turned and hurried back into the garage, anxious about the following morning.
***
Fox and Slippy set out earlier than either of them expected. After telling Angela that they were going out to test the hovercraft, they hurried away quickly before Michael woke up. Fox made sure to bring his uncle's antique bullet-firing hunting rifle with him just in case of any lingering Trychen.
The hovercraft was a bit more wobbly than they would have preferred and it lacked a windshield, but it was more than adequate for the short distance they were traveling. They headed west, where the supposed home of Peppy Hare lay, hoping to run into ROB on the way.
After a few miles speeding through the desert, a small blip appeared on the dusty old screen showing the engine heat and energy output from the vehicle. "Look, look! The radar picked something up! Might be our lost android," Slippy said excitedly.
Fox guided the craft over sand dunes, boulders, and roots of the large mushrooms growing from the soil until a small silhouette appeared in the distance. As they came closer both Fox and Slippy were able to make out the form of ROB 64.
Fox swerved the hovercraft in front of the android, coming to a full halt just meters away from him. "Woah, hey! Where did you think you were going?" he called to ROB, deactivating the hovercraft and hopping out onto the sand.
ROB only bowed his head in shame. "I am sorry, young master Fox. I was only trying to complete my mission for mistress Krystal. I had all intentions of returning to you once Peppy Hare had received my message and the data I carry," he said.
Fox just waved his hand in the air passively. "It's fine, just don't do it again. I'm just glad you didn't get hurt out here. But right now you have to come with us," he said, gesturing towards the hovercraft.
Slippy suddenly gave an alarmed cry from the passenger seat of the hovercraft. "Fox! The radar is picking up a bunch of... I, I don't know what they are, but there's lots of them!" he said.
Fox's eyes widened. "Trychen!" he hissed. "Slippy, get ROB into the hovercraft. I'm going to go see where they are. They could be trying to surround us," he said. As Slippy hopped out of the vehicle, Fox pushed the drivers seat forward, reached into the craft, and pulled his uncle's rifle out.
One advantage that the three of them had was that they were on a large plateau overlooking a wide plain. Fox realized that the Trychen could have seen ROB shuffling across the sand while he and Slippy approached.
Fox unhooked his binoculars from his belt, readied the rifle, and crawled to the edge of the plateau. He peered down at the sand dunes below with the binoculars, looking for any sign of life. He grimaced, seeing numerous footprints trampling the soft sand. "Well there's Trychen all right, and they're close. We should be careful getting back to the homestead," Fox called to Slippy over his shoulder. The toad was at that moment straining to pull ROBs left foot out from behind the passenger seat, where it had gotten stuck.
Fox turned back to the binoculars to look at the footprints again. But to his surprise the binoculars were dark. He frowned, adjusting the focus. Nothing seemed to help.
"Fox, look out!" screamed Slippy suddenly.
Fox lowered the binoculars and looked up. The binoculars hadn't been defective at all. They had just been pressed against the folds of a Trychens clothing as it stood in front of Fox.
Fox scrambled for his rifle, throwing the binoculars aside carelessly. He raised it, aimed briefly, and pulled the trigger. Click. Fox swore loudly, realizing that he had forgotten to flip the safety switch off.
The Trychen threw back its brown, wrinkled head and let out a bloodcurdling yell that almost sounded to Fox like a laugh. Then it raised a heavy wooden club in its hands and swung it downward.
Fox barely blocked the blow with his rifle, but his own weapon broke from the thunderous impact. The Trychen raised its club and swung it horizontally, clipping Fox in the side of the head as he rolled aside. It wasn't enough to break his skull, but it was just enough to knock him unconscious.
Three more Trychen rose from the side of the plateau and hurried towards the hovercraft. Slippy had disappeared, and ROB was shouting loud, monotonous protests as the three aliens pulled him out of the hovercraft and deposited him roughly on the ground, accidentally pulling his stuck foot out of its socket.
The three creatures began rummaging through the hovercraft, tearing at the already tattered seats and grunting to one another whenever they found anything of interest. Suddenly they all looked up, sniffing the air.
They looked down at the bottom of the plateau, and to each of their apparent horror, a short, dark shape was climbing up the face of the cliff. The three Trychen shrieked in horror and rushed down the opposite end of the plateau, their stolen treasures hidden in the folds of their clothes.
The dark shape continued slowly climbing the cliff until it reached the top. The dark, stocky figure surveyed the scene, looking first at the defiled hovercraft, then at the deactivated ROB, then at Fox's unconscious body.
The figure approached Fox, pulling its wide-brimmed hat down low to shade its eyes from the sun. It knelt down next to the unconscious youth, checking his pulse, then carefully examining a bloody scrape on the side of Fox's head.
Slippy Toad, who had hidden under the hovercraft, nervously poked his head out from the shadows. "H-Hello?" he called timidly to the figure.
The figure turned its head slowly towards the toad, then pulled off its hat to reveal an old rabbit with grey whiskers and half-moon spectacles. The rabbit smiled pleasantly at Slippy. "Hello there," he said. He gestured for Slippy to come closer. "Come on, you don't have to be afraid of me. You can come out," he said.
Slippy slowly crawled out from under the hovercraft, dusted himself off, then hurried over to Fox, who was beginning to come to.
Fox blinked up at the middle aged rabbit kneeling over him. "P-Peppy Hare?" he groaned, shielding his eyes from the sun.
The rabbit grinned. "That's me. What brings you two young men out to the middle of the Katina desert?" he asked.
Fox sat up, rubbing the scrape on the side of his head. He nodded towards ROB. "That android said that he had a message for you. He seemed pretty determined to find you. Claimed he was carrying data from the Cornerian rebellion to bring to you," he said.
Peppy frowned. "Really? I can't think of why an android would want to find me. I'm just an old man. Retired," he said. He glanced at Fox and Slippy, then at ROB. "You boys have been through an eventful day, but I fear the Trychen will come back. They never give up their prey easily. My home is less than a mile away, if you could accept the hospitality of an old hermit."
Fox and Slippy shrugged at each other. "I don't see why not, but we should fix ROB up," said Slippy.
Peppy nodded. "I see. I have plenty of tools at my home, we can fix him there," he said. Then he smiled at Fox. "And we might as well take a look at that message he says he's carrying too, eh?"
