The diagnostics of the Hubb, which had been floating listlessly amongst the vacuum of space for months with a single human advocate resting within its confines, began deteriorating soon after Zanz witnessed the small dwarf planet of Pluto, its moon orbiting slowly around the meteor-cratered surface of the floating mass of rock. Xerneas was watching the numbers slowly decline, and even admitted that their thrusters were exhausted and she was wasting even more of her endowment to bring the ship through space to Erdenwald. He commonplace associated the declining status of the ship to the goddess commonly at its helm, and as he sat at the back of the hull and peered upon her dimmed luminosity, he knew that they were both moving towards dysfunction, malcontent with their lack of control and power through the journey in space.
He didn't mind the slow draining of the Hubb, however. He was more concerned with his own health, and how its decline was obscenely increased in the last few months. Both he and Xerneas flitted away from communication, keeping to themselves, but he made it a point to refrain from complete isolation, pulling the cold, dim-lit goddess from the helm before she slumped across the dash and began to distinctly fade away. He was scared that she would disappear on him, that he would be stuck in space with no fuel, no power and, after running through his remaining rations, no food, and acted accordingly to this fear, making sure that she wasn't slipping away as he was. They spoke frequently, their longing for land and others abounding their necessities and enlisting their thoughts for extreme haywire.
He didn't believe that an immortal could go mad, especially one who had lived with their counterpart for more than three thousand years, but looking upon her, he supposed she was as worse as she was going to get. Yvetal had been silent since his appearance prior, keeping himself far from both Zanz and Xerneas, and even if Yvetal had done abhorrent things hitherto his encampment within the Rock of Enigmas, he would have appreciated the banter, the wit which emanated from his mouth, translating an admixture of choler and glee that would have easily contrasted his stressful isolation. More playful than serious, Yvetal was a great escape from the boring in-betweens that followed his hourly check-ups on his botany, and sometimes, he tried to contact the god of Death through his thoughts, calling out to him and pleading with his life for the dark-skinned man to release him from their loneliness. All these attempts went in vain, the substantial necessity of communication undermined by his vengeance and need to torment the two into submission.
He refrained from speaking about Yvetal within Xerneas's proximity, so instead, he spoke about his family, friends and the things he loved back on Earth. Usually, it was Xerneas that engendered the conversation, questioning him about the things which were supposed to be obscenely unimportant to him. Astronauts were told the moment that they began their training that if they do set out upon space-travel, they should have no qualms with staying up there for as long as the mission had required. And Zanz had always went by this code as he walked amongst the panels of the Satoshi, thinking nothing wrong of the want to be away from all of the people on Earth. Their germs were cantankerous, their inability to keep themselves confined to their own spheres of privacy was an obnoxious article to sustain, and generally including himself within public situations was toxic beyond comprehension, for both of the parties involved.
He just wished that he could take it all back now. He remembered when he'd stare outside of his dinky apartment in Lumiouse. He was a child and his mother struggled with money to keep the place afloat, so they lived in a one-bedroom apartment where the two of them slept in the same room until Zanz turned twelve, where he then began sleeping inside the living room, his bed being the couch. He'd walk up to the glass in the bedroom and looked down at the sidewalks from the tenth floor. He saw the bustling of the streets beneath him, the cars zooming through the streets and the pedestrians yelling at the unwelcome drivers that strayed too close to the sidewalks. The sound of the city was obnoxious, constantly filling his ears with clangor, intonations of all sorts and the secular noises generated by the stray Pokémon that wandered the streets or the domestic ones which ran alongside their trainers.
He looked out of the window now; no sounds came from the outside as he peered downward at the unending splattering of stars encapsulating the universe in boundless energy lasting millions of years. So far away from anybody, he realized as he gazed into the direction of the other planets of the solar system. Earth, where his withering mother was slowly dying in her house, on her lonesome. Earth, where he wished he could travel to within moments. Earth, where his discoveries would be appreciated by all those who wished to escape from it so he could appreciate it more. Earth, where his friends at the university were still accommodating, their voices whining about how unexciting their life was down there on the precious land, seeing the rush of water, simply hearing the waves crash against each other. He envied even their ability to have white noise surrounding them, because he yearned for the lulling sounds of fast cars, complaining individuals and the Pokémon which populated the planet. The only sounds that he heard on the Hubb were the puling of the young litter of Growlithes that were born just two weeks ago, and the exhausted exhales of the goddess of life from the front of the shuttle, her lips slightly parted to let the sound emanate throughout the ship. Distraught, they were; all the inhabitants of the Hubb.
He wondered how the crew in the Satoshi were feeling right now. All of them seemed happy with their accommodations, but he knew that they weren't beneath the same stress that he was. Mary was probably going on about her way with her loud voice and big accomplishments being waved in front of their faces. He could see her multicolored hair through his squinted eyes, the glow of her smile, the shining of her eyes. Lemon perhaps was having struggles with his crew, keeping them under control and making sure that they didn't blow a hole in the hull and accidentally kill all the Satoshi's inhabitants. The weary expression he adorned throughout the duration of his captain's time was now worn by Zanz himself, the bags underneath his eyes darkened and deep, the dimness of his eyes increasingly surreal. He assumed that Pelo was trying to convince the tired, exhausted Lemon that he needed to change his policies about robotics and fix them to adhere to his manic inventions. The robotic engineer would stop at nothing to revert the captain to his initial state of disregard, and even though there were many different occasions where Lemon had thrown Pelo out of the Satoshi with only a tether connecting the nanosuit adorned by the unaffected roboticist to the travelling space station, never would the entourage of claims of better living and survival rate cease, seeing as Pelo's passionate disposition rarely lost steam.
The shuttle, however, didn't include these civil arguments or influences due to the fact that the inhabitants refused debates of any kind; for their purpose was useful in the never-ending vacuum of space. Until they arrived at Erdenwald, where Zanz was supposed to play prophet of both Yvetal and Xerneas, who could not be seen by anyone else except him, nothing of significance was to be brought up considering. Sure, there were many times when dysfunctions about the Hubb were treated so delicately that Zanz constantly forgot about his original mission and how fruitless everything seemed, but these were few and far between.
But the fuel situation was a problem that he was excited to indulge in, because the act of having something to do besides tend to his plants was more grateful than he would have thought of otherwise. This was an indefinite situation which affected them greatly, as the loss of fuel was beginning to grate on Xerneas's internal endowment. He had to scrounge about the shuttle for ingredients to manufacture the fuel into a consumable liquid in inject within the shuttle. It was a struggle, using the makeshift setup at the back of the cargo hold to develop fuel for the shuttle, but in the end, he was happy when the chemicals from the canisters found in the safe boxes around the cargo hold could be used to create such perilous things.
The hardest part, however, was transferring the single one-liter canister of fuel outside of the shuttle into the indefinite frigidity of space, which would freeze the liquid within the uninsulated canister within seconds of exposure to the pure vacuum of space. He had thought of enveloping the small container with scraps of nanosuit he used as a makeshift blanket to prevent the cold from affecting the canister immediately, but experiments using other liquids of almost the same freezing point (he guessed as much, as the databases in the shuttle had given him scarce information about the concoction made from scratch he intended to put inside the Hubb from the outside) had ended fruitlessly as he tracked the amount of time between exposure and freezing with the nanosuit scraps surrounding the container. He cursed when his experiments' outcomes were innately unsatisfactory, and although he was aggravated about it all, he still found happiness and glee within his work as he indefinitely began development on a canister which would withhold the coldness of space.
So he went through the motions to find whatever materials could be used as insulation. Zanz tried more of the nanosuit fabric, which hadn't worked just as he thought it might not. The frost which gathered upon its flimsy surface then grew brittle and unusable as it broke apart the moment he tried to remove it from the canister. There goes my blanket, he thought.
Shortly thereafter, Zanz began experimenting with the collective shed fur of the Growlithes kept in the cages, collecting it from beneath their paws and combining it using dangerous molecular fusion. The aftermath of that excursion had nearly decimated the cargo hold into a searing, desolate space wherein ashes would rapidly accumulate, but thankfully, he was able to lessen the peril of the altercation by carefully redirecting the excess energy expelled by the fusion to another outlet. He'd gathered from the biologists on the Satoshi that their fur was resistant to all sorts of extreme conditions, including below freezing temperatures back on Earth. But as he wrapped the fused fur around the canister and threw it out of the miniature airlock with the tether attached to it in his grasp, he withdrew it to find that the Growlithe fur couldn't withstand the temperatures outside in space.
Zanz slowly began to resent the fact that the people who developed the Hubb were so incompetent that they had to make it difficult to even refuel during an expedition. It was growing increasingly evident to him that the situation wherein he was located was surreal and queer in all senses, but this still didn't make it any less aggravating for him when he thought they simply could have placed the fueling slot into the back of the cargo hold, removing the need to exit the shuttle and refuel from the exterior. However, the shuttle was made for little expeditions, meant to return to the Satoshi once its fuel began to lower less than twenty percent, where it could efficiently refuel, and this fact resonated within Zanz as he continuously brute-forced through the difficult situation placed in front of him, thoughts of egregious distaste floating amid his mind.
Then, in a stroke of genius that he thought came from Arceus himself, he found the solution to his problem.
Working on extracting samples from his plants was customary for Zanz himself, having his astrobotanist title actually mean something after location of plant-life was discovered. And throughout these samplings, there were discoveries about the dispositions of these certain plants. Zanz experimented greatly on Earth with pressure withstanding with plants from Mars, whose atmosphere was thin and thus created a cold surface which the plant-life thrived within. Although it wasn't as cold as the vacuum of space, which was unaffected by the sun, the basic construction of certain Martain plants were able to circumvent these cold temperatures to properly grow and thrive within such extreme environments and conditions. The malleability of these plants, too, were exceptional due to the high winds and dust storms and freezing weather which affected the surface of the planet, and their flexibility, while innately frustrating whenever Zanz attempted to stand them upright without the assistance of Xerneas's life-empowering abilities, was indefinitely lifesaving for him in this very moment.
From a spare Martain potato plant that was experimented endlessly through intensive sessions of scientific research and sleepless days tending to the slowly growing Martain plant-life that was the solution, he created a several-coated layer of skin shaved from plants themselves, fusing them together and fitting it to the canister. He didn't know whether or not it was going to work, but his experiments revealed to him the usefulness of the hitherto disregarded plant, having saved the Hubb from complete cease in function once he found out that the potatoes could reasonably withstand the frigidity of space, within parameters which were already slimmer and smaller than the stalks of his Mercurian plants.
So when he climbed out of the Hubb with the fuel in its canister and the layering of skin wrapped around it and came to the fuel port wherein a small nozzle inserted into the main centrifuge of fuel consumption, he was relieved the know that the meager liter of fuel which ailed him for several weeks of ceaseless experimentation and failing hypotheses was finally able to be used without freezing in open space. When he reentered the shuttle with a successful smile breaking across his addled features, he slowly, methodically bereaved Xerneas of her position as the helm of the Hubb that sleep cycle, telling her that she was finally able to rest after so long controlling the shuttle through the emptiness of space, and when she turned to him with desolate eyes that bespoke unrest and weariness, he insisted, pulling her dainty, numb form away from the dashboard controls and to the cargo hull, where Zanz usually slept and relaxed.
His plants had perked up slightly at the promixity of the goddess of Life, but the diminished extraction of her abilities desecrated its inherently unstoppable growing, which was why using her as a tool during the potatoes growth was an unacceptable option.
And with the assistance of Zanz, who sat beside her as her eyes fell and her exhaustion suddenly peaked, she slept for the first time in weeks, maybe even a few months. She was devout in her attempts to get to Erdenwald, even if the journey itself was draining her from the inside and out, and although Zanz wanted nothing more than to keep her powerful within his presence, she was drifting each day wherein she was despondent, unresponding to an onslaught of questions which would usually engender hours of meandering conversation.
And he watched her sleep, the rise and fall of her chest slowly regaining some of her illumination with every breath, the seven colored stones in her horns aglow in the serenity of her position; it was beautiful, the sight of such an elegant creature finally being tranquil after prolonged turmoil and unrest.
The central computer systems of the Hubb informed him that it was nearly a quarter till three in the morning. He assumed that he, too, might as well go to sleep, and whilst he set himself on his side next to Xerneas on the cold shuttle floor, his face pressed against the metal sheets that separated him from the blackness of the universe outside its protection, he thought that this was a revolutionary mark in his journey.
This was not Xerneas's alone any longer; for he intentionally furthered the lifespan of the Hubb to get it properly to Erdenwald. His contribution was not one of simple disregard anymore, but instead was a meaningful position to the problems at large which affected the two of them completely. Now he was on board, and if he were to make it to Erdenwald, he would do it without diminishing his only friend throughout this inherently monstrous slog through space.
Maybe if he had the chance (and he hoped he did), he would perhaps return to the Satoshi with the changed mindset of a man more open to corroboration than lonesome research, but those hopeful days were behind him. On Erdenwald, he would find his beloved plant-life, sample it, experiment on it, make notes and details about its features, chemical make-up, and send his findings back to the Satoshi, who would send it to Earth.
Yes, he wanted to go back, and yes, he would jump at the bit to finally make the journey to Earth once more, but he needed to make sure that his trek wasn't in vain, wasn't a decision made by a madman who lost his mind in the dizzying, unsettling disposition of space. He needed his plants.
And he would get them, no matter the cost.
