Pleecy looked up from her conversions, stared out over what she presumed was what hyuumans called "countryside": it was quite pretty. Sure, it had a brown hue, but it wasn't as bad a hue as the city had. Gently sloping hills, populated with fields, and not nearly as many houses as the city had! There was even the occasional, crystal clear, glass-still pond. How pretty, how peaceful…Pleecy contemplated moving her base here, putting her greenhouse aboveground instead of below so it could get natural sunlight. With how close the planet was to its sun and the other stars, why, everything would grow much better! Less smog, too, more oxygen, more rainfall—
Pleecy's mind suddenly snapped back to her scrap paper. That's it! Her PAK had finished doing a calculation Pleecy figured she wouldn't have time to do. She was calculating how fast they would have to move once they got into space-no, they hadn't gotten off the planet yet. Ley was circling the planet, chasing the sunrise, flying with the planet's turning so it would give them speed-slingshot them into space—and so the atmospheric entry would be easier on the ship. Which, she insisted, hadn't flown for ages, but Pleecy wasn't so sure about that claim…
Ley also secretly wanted to show Pleecy around the planet. (:P) Ley wanted to take a look the rapidly-disappearing beauty left on Earth, too. How sad. Such a lovely planet, destroyed by its own creations…maybe Irkens had something in common with Humans after all…
Pleecy had changed the setup of the back seats. Now they were along the walls of Ley's ship, elongated in length and width like some frickin' Hollywood sofa. The interior in back was surprisingly roomy when one moved the side seats, well, aside, and had the middle seat move up against the luggage to hold it in back.
She was sitting sideways on the now couch-like right-side seat so her feet were propped up and she was slouching slightly with her back to the cockpit. A levitating tray sat—or rather floated— at the seat's side. She jotted down a few variables on her white scratch paper. X=87, Y=Pi—ah, Frick, Pi. You curse-ed number—s=Lower Nova-Great. Lower Nova was an Irken scientist term for somewhere below the speed of light. Oh, wait! She had to divide s by y, times x—
She was jolted from her PAK's calculations by the ship lurching, and then shuddering. Neeka, who was in sleep mode across from her master, suddenly woke up, red-eyed and ready to shoot the next thing that moved.
"Ley! -the Frick is the ship shaking apart?" Pleecy called, steadying herself on the seat.
"It's not, Pleecy! We're about to enter the Ozone Layer. The Jetstream's shuddering is a warning sign to strap in!" Ley called back over the clatter of metal and the rush of air.
Pleecy re-buckled herself as Neeka zoomed to her side in a blur of gray and red, saluted, and curled up in a disguised cat-nap posture on her master's lap, fusing her tail and front paws to the ship. Water started to spray over the sides of the ship. "What's with the water, Ley?" Pleecy yelled over the noise.
"Keeps the ship from overheating, and the steam helps with exit and entry," Ley called back as tongues of flame leapt and swarmed over the ship's exterior, followed by streams of steam. "The steam makes a sort of 'bubble'. Lessens the friction," she stated.
After a few moments, the ship gave a final sudden lurch. The ship's quivering stopped as the black matter of space Pleecy was so used to faded in swiftly around them, replacing the sickly-blue-brown polluted sky of Earth. Pleecy sighed at the homey sight of constellations up close-well, as close as one can get to one, anyway.
"Where'd you say the wormhole was going to open up at again?" Ley said, breaking the silence and making Pleecy jump.
"Oh, uhm, near Jupiter, I believe," Pleecy said, alert. Her PAK did a quick search. 'Yup, just ahead. Keep goin' straight," she said rather cheerfully. "Switch the Stabilizer on when we pass Mars."
"Eh-ha! Well, I'm not sure how straight we can stay in space, but Jupiter I can get to easy," Ley replied as she pulled the ship's nose up slightly.
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Gaz walked in to her house, surprised to hear her dad greet from the kitchen, "Hello, kids! How was your sleep over?"
"We weren't at a sleep over," Gaz stated flatly, marching to her room to grab more batteries and stuff she figured she'd need while Dib-sitting.
Professor Membrane thought a moment, pausing from his newest toast experiment. "…Oh, yes! Dib is sick. Well, did you bring your brother home?"
"No."
"Huh? He's not actually that sick is he?"
"Yes. I have to go watch him while Pleecy does some work."
"Mwuhahahaha!" Membrane cackled. "A junior scientist, trying to cure my son! You are my funny chil-"
"It's her chemicals making him sick, Dad. I think she can handle it," Gaz said with a touch of sarcasm. Gaz strolled up the steps to her room, leaving her ignorant 'father' in her silent wake of terror. (XD)
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Pleecy strained to see out the cockpit window, but she had to keep herself steady in the ship's neck, which was hard to do when the floor's made of metal plates and you're straining to pick up the energy signature of something that shouldn't even exist and makes no sense to anyone's science. They were almost to Jupiter, just outside its gravitational field. They had been waiting a while for the Galactic Wormhole to open. Ley was making a few final preparations, so as to make a safe wormhole-jump.
"Well, everything's ready. Sense anything yet, Pleecy?" Ley asked over her shoulder.
Pleecy closed her eyes, focused. Waited.
There! A sudden burst of energy popped up on her mental radar, but disappeared as fast as it had come up. A sure sign of reality being warped. Pleecy's eyes squeezed together from strain: All the moons around Jupiter messed with her thought-meats. "…Faint, but that was definitely It. Just wait for it, Ley, here it comes…"
Sometime in the next instant, though Pleecy and Ley weren't exactly sure when, a twinkle caught their eyes up ahead, in between the nice view of Jupiter and them. Time seemed to stretch and warp or slow down. Odd, but only to be expected when the wormhole was forcing itself open. Of course time was being tweaked: space was being massively tweaked, so time, as part of the time-space continuum, had to be tweaked in turn. It felt like a slow-motion movie scene to Pleecy, but then again, the wormhole seemed to just be…there. No explosion. No insanity. Nothing. But wait, she couldn't tell whether she remembered instant beauty or not, but Neeka could make sense of it all. She watched in awe as a rainbow in the shape of a tunnel seemed to yawn open, take the appearance of a human eye instantly, and morph into a tunnel shape again. The color was amazing! All neon, all new, all a tiny flick of spectacle displaying the space between dimensions-or rather, what it looked like between dimensions, if there even was any appearance…huh. Blues, greens, pinks, yellows, some even Neeka couldn't identify! Ley and Pleecy were in awe, complete awe, like deer in headlights. That was the problem with any type of Wormhole: they were hypnotic, insane, but sane at the same time. They might as well be Moon-Blinking* their victims, those who traveled through space and wound up running into-literally or figuratively- wormholes they didn't expect to open. Therefore, Neeka had to activate the Stabilizer's effects herself. The two front mechanical spider legs pointed themselves toward the wormhole and shot a braiding, twisting beam into its center, into its event horizon. It looked like Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon*. Neeka directed the ship into the now-stable quirk of science.
A shock ran through both Pleecy and Ley, a PAK's wake-up call. Both doubled over, panting.
"Well, that was…interesting," Ley said meekly between pants.
"No matter how many times I do that, it never gets easier," Pleecy griped, and threw back her head in laughter.
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Author's Note-eh? Not bad for a winged chapter, huh? XD You can really tell I like science in this chapter ^FT^ Anyway, Moon blinking is a term from The Guardians of Ga'Hoole book series. Some bad owls took owlets and made them sleep at night under the moon, and they had to 'sleep march' every once in a while. Screwed up their heads. Even worse, they had to say their names over and over when they walked. Compared to the book, the movie was terribly inaccurate .. Piccolo is from Dragon Ball Z. Anyone notice the "I Feel Sick" by JV line? Thanks for Reading! ^FT^