Chapter 10

"You're kidding me, right?" scoffed Master Chief. "Why can't you just send up a bunch of solar panels to hover around the sun and collect energy? It's possible; where I came from, its been achieved already."

"That's an excellent idea, but the only problem is that this device needs 10 googol watts to start up and 100 googol watts per hour to keep it running. Another problem is that if we beam the energy from the solar panels and we don't beam it to the correct place, the Earth will be burnt crispy nuggets."

"That sounds wrong." snickered Isaac.

"Oh, that's SO mature." Samus rolled her eyes beneath her visor.

"We can just have the solar panels send the energy to us in a canister I guess." suggested Master Chief. "We can attach parachutes to the canisters so they come back safely here so they don't create a f**king meteor shower."

"Great idea. Now the only problem is manufacturing the circuitry, alloys, and other crap needed to make the solar panels." said Samus. "We'll have to get them first before we can mass produce them with the Energy Condensers."

"Exactly. Now we can mine or dine. Which one?" asked Steve.

"Let's dine first. I can eat an elephant." admitted Isaac.

Later...

"That was quite a scrumptious meal!" said Master Chief, wiping his face with a piece of sandpaper.

"It would've been better if they had real napkins instead of sandpaper." grumbled Isaac.

"All Master Chief ate was watermelon and pork chops with the 'NRG' drink, and Isaac only ate some spaghetti, a crapload of tangerines, and a glass of milk. So much for variety." scoffed Samus.

"But quite healthy, won't you admit?" said Isaac. "Look at what you ate; apples, bacon, candy, Durian (a type of fruit that tastes ok but smells like crap), egg, fried fish, and a variety of leafy greens. That's more 'crazy' than 'variety'."

"What's your secret?" asked Steve, obviously jealous of something.

"Yes?"

"How do you eat so much and not get... you know..."

"Fat? I exercise daily. It really cuts down on the extra weight."

"Well, we can't really tell how fat or thin people are now that we are stuck in a place where there is no such thing as 'round'." sighed Master Chief.

"There's roundness where you come from? I'm afraid that's only a theory here." said Steve.

"Is there even anything round in here?" asked Master Chief. "Do you know what Pi is? Circumference? Diameter? Pythagorean's theorem?!"

"Everything you just said is a theory except for Pythagorean's theorem, only that we also don't have anything triangular here. But we do have these photos:"

Steve showed the trio a series of pictures all with one thing in common: they were all pictures of gigantic spheres made out of some material taken from a distance away.

"You see, up close these gigantic structures will appear 'cubical' as you call it, but if you look at it from a distance..." Steve showed them a picture of the same structure taken from miles away, "...that the distance nullifies the 'blockiness'. It was then we saw that not everything had to be limited in geometry. Maybe there was something else... and this is what proved it."

"Oh, there's going to be much more than just round objects. You'll be geometrically shocked, that's for sure." sighed Isaac, taking out his picture of his girlfriend.

"Is that what roundness looks like where you come from?" Steve pointed to Isaac's picture, and to his surprise, his picture of his girlfriend was back to normal. No more pixels, no more blockiness. The only thing that wasn't changed was the background, but all he needed to see was his girlfriend.

"YES! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!" yelled Isaac with joy, now in his green-moon rare happiness.

Suddenly the picture warped back to its pixelated state.

"NO! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!" shouted Isaac in fury, shaking the picture as if he was a high person with maracas. "THE PICTURE IS F**KING WITH ME!"

"Maybe the multiverse is rejecting Isaac's new shape and is trying to change him back." suggested Master Chief. Coincidentally, the room flashed white and Isaac was gone.

"WHERE DID HE GO?!" yelled Samus. "He was right here-"

The room flashed white again and Isaac was back- and now he was back in his normal appearance. There wasn't a single pixel on him, and even his Plasma Cutter was back to normal, as well as his picture.

"Huh. You were right." Master Chief was hitting his head on the wall to see if he was dreaming. No, it was real. Isaac Clarke, the space engineer, was now "unpixelated", as Samus called it.

Steve, however, was lying on the floor, out cold. "WHOA! WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY HOW!?" Isaac Clarke was looking everywhere and shaking his head to see if he was having another hallucination, but no. He was fine again, and so was his picture of Ellie. Even though he was still slightly depressed about his missing girlfriend, it surely made him more optimistic about the current situation. "WHOO! NO LONGER AM I CONFINED TO A RIDICULOUS PIXELATED APPEARANCE!"

"Well, I'm more interested in Steve than you." said Master Chief as he looked at Steve who was getting his bearings back together. He was staring at Isaac's helmet mysteriously and was pointing at him.

He managed to mumble "He- he... armor.. round-" before fainting again. Isaac realized what he was fainting at; Steve had never seen a round object before, nor had anyone or anything where they were. Isaac's helmet was round at the visor, which explained why he was so excited.

"It's like he-" Master Chief barely started his sentence when the room flashed white again, and this time both Samus and Master Chief were gone. Thinking they were going to appear at any time, Isaac waited patiently for them to appear again, unpixelated. He waited for a few seconds, then minutes.

It was becoming obvious that Isaac was getting annoyed when suddenly a horrible thought struck his mind; If this multiverse, which only existed theoretically where he came from, didn't "agree" with Isaac's, Master Chief's, and Samus's, then it was going to be like antimatter vs. matter. One of them finished the other off, leaving destruction in their wake. Isaac conjectured that it was possible that Master Chief and Samus were clearly wiped from existence. And Isaac was the only sole survivor, which caused him to put his head on his hands and sob.

However, he was completely oblivious to the room flashing white and Master Chief and Samus showing up again, except they were back to normal.

"Isaac? What's wrong?" asked Samus, worried that he was hallucinating again. She approached him but stopped when he flailed his free hand and wailed.

"THEY'RE GONE!" roared Isaac between sobs.

"But we-" Isaac cut Master Chief off with a series of sobs and nose-blowing. Isaac was too distressed to realize he was using Ellie's picture as a tissue.

"MASTER CHIEF AND WHAT'S HER NAME ARE DEAD! ALL BECAUSE OF THE STUPID PORTAL-THING!" wailed Isaac.

Master Chief, however, knew how to get his attention. He grabbed a musket from a soldier and fired it in the air. Alarmed, Isaac hopped up and pointed his plasma cutter at anything that moved and even fired in the air. When his clip was empty, he finally got himself back to normal and stared at Master Chief and Samus.

"Hey guys, what's going on...-" moaned Steve as he was just waking up. He looked at Isaac who fainted and at the Master Chief and Samus who were no longer confined to the "cubical" dimensions, as Master Chief admitted. Steve shambled over to Master Chief, took a grenade off of his belt, and looked at it as if he were holding Medusa's head and ran outside so fast a loud BOOM could be heard.

"Uh oh." groaned Samus as she facepalmed. She ran outside and saw Steve stuck in the steel wall of the factory/base, with a large dent formed where he landed. Luckily, the grenade didn't release sharp fragments of metal, but the UNSC didn't call it force grenade for nothing. Master Chief guessed that when Steve dashed off to show his colleagues proof that the theory of round objects was actually real, he accidentally pulled the pin and BOOM, he was in the wall.

There was a flump as Steve hit the cold, hard ground.

Samus walked over and gave him a good one across the face, and he snapped up again, darting over to get another grenade from Master Chief before he stopped him and said "Don't worry, there's more where they came from. And less dangerous too."

"Hey, Steve, if you're planning to get us out of here, I suggest we start working on the dyson bubble now." suggested Isaac.

"What's a dyson bubble?" asked Samus.

"A dyson bubble is pretty much a bunch of solar panels surrounding a sun." explained Master Chief. "It's like Halo, except Halo is a dyson ring."

"What exactly is HALO?" interrogated Samus.

"We'll get to that later. Time's a wasting." groaned Steve as he started taking some painkillers. "Ok, first things first, we'll need lots of materials to create the solar array."

Master Chief ran over to an every condenser and grabbed a steel ingot out of it. He placed it in the "copy" section of another condenser, and steel ingots literally flew out of it by the dozen, each ingot 10 pounds. "All done-WHAT THE FU-" shrieked Master Chief as he was buried in a pile of steel ingots. He crawled out of the crushing weight and fell to his knees, injured.

"I hate this place." grumbled Master Chief before dropping on the floor, exhausted.