'So this is how it ends for the great Phil Eggtree; stuck on a crappy space shuttle with a moron whose delusions of grandeur ruined my triumphant return, trying to stop the backstabbing second in command. Isn't life just perfect?'
Understandably, Phil was more than a little irritated with this fresh hell of circumstances. Having looked forward to a hero's welcome after defeating one set of cliché super-villains, he was give nary a pat on the back before being whisked away to meet the second set. Quiz's excellent timing on delivering the bad news did not help matters.
"What do you mean 'this ship is not equipped with weapons'?" Phil demanded. They were hovering right in front of the massive Vizion ship, a prime target for the energising ray waiting to discharge at the earth. Behind the glass of the neighbouring ship, Phil could faintly see the gloating figure of Diz, manning the wheel and frowning at their audacity. He gave the other alien a half-hearted wave; Quiz's plan was a mystery to him too, so he couldn't fault Diz's confusion. Quiz tapped something into a control panel with more determination than certainty. Not being someone with a great deal of knowledge on the inner machinations of spaceships, Phil could only say that the efficient bleeps sounded professional enough. Didn't detract from the fact that they were sitting ducks before icy death with, apparently, no weapons, but hey, maybe it would scare Diz off if they looked authoritative.
"Nope, no weapons. This ship was built to transport the components for the death ray. We have three battle ships; Diz has one of them, the others are still aboard the mothership where you and your friends woke up." Phil raised an eyebrow when Quiz stopped, slight concern morphing cheerfully to begrudging anxiety.
"Soooooo...what are we gonna do?"
Opening communication comms.
"We're going to talk to him."
Begrudging anxiety suffered a stroke and was replaced with mild panic.
"Close communication comms. Close, Alphimn rot you! Quiz, what's the meaning of this?" Diz's already-nasal voice was tinny and distant over the transmitter, like a horde of irritable wasps that had somehow learnt morse code. It was the sort of sound that gave nails-down-a-blackboard and squeaky-wet-rubber-gloves a run for their money, all while being recognisable as speech. Almost impressive, if you were in the mood to be generous. Phil really wasn't.
"We need to talk Diz." Quiz's voice held as much confidence as a mouse parading naked in front of a large, sexually-perverse cat. "I've temporarily overridden your controls."
"Why?"
"...because...we need to...talk?"
"Is this about the whole 'destroy the earth' scheme?"
"...possibly..."
"Quiz, you useless clod! Learn when to stop meddling, please, before I get it in to my head to teach you myself!" From the way Quiz flinched, Phil could guess that lessons with Diz would be anything but pleasant.
Both sides seemed set to launch in to the classic argument strategy of 'both speaking at the same time, at the tops of your voices, so that neither can be understood' and Phil decided that he was quite content to let them get on with that; it wasn't a three player game and it would turn out laughably useless in the end. With all the attentiveness of his high-school-self doodling in class, he began to fiddle with buttons. In all honesty, it was an activity more depressing than therapeutic; most of the buttons were red, like Viz, others green, like Diz, both of whom were people he would rather forget at the minute. The blue buttons were cool, seeing as Quiz was actually on his side. Unfortunately Quiz had the drawbacks of being useless and being a colour frequently associated with depression. Yep; crappy space shuttle, no weapons, right in the line of fire, and buttons that couldn't sufficiently entertain a toddler. This mission had it all...
Meanwhile, Quiz was pleading fruitlessly with Diz, leaning over the speaker as though hoping to glimpse his old comrade somewhere amid the harsh words.
"You were on my side, Diz! You agreed that earth didn't deserve destruction! What changed?"
"I was wrong. That planet declared its intentions clearly enough when it attempted to capture me, ensnare me in some military base like a common experiment."
Beside him, Phil saw Quiz flinch guiltily and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose; by the names of all of his dream teachers, why did this stupid misconception have to endanger the fate of the world? On the monitor, Diz was still talking.
"I tried to be nice, Quiz, honestly I did. But no; Earth has proven itself to be no better than anywhere else. If I was mistaken here, what else would I be wrong about? What other rotten civilisations would I have spared? First, I'll destroy this deceiving lump of dirt, then I'll find Viz; he'll come round to this change of plan easily enough. After all, I am the smart one." His voice softened, almost imperceptibly, "you can come with us if you want, Quiz; I won't mention any of this to Viz. Everything can go back to normal." Tempting offer though it was, Quiz was given no time to consider it before Phil launched in.
"Viz is alive?" Phil could feel the satisfaction of victory drip, drip, dripping away with caustic glee and a well-earned middle-finger. Diz snorted.
"Oh please, killing fire with ice is something that only happens in children's games. Last transmission from the remains of Viz's ship has it that he's on a nearby asteroid. His remote is intact. He will contact me again when he manages to return to the mothership. This whole sequence of events would have played out much more smoothly if someone," cue a pointed look at a shuffling Quiz, "Had stayed put like I asked them, but no matter. Face it Phil, you didn't defeat V.I. . You barely scratched us."
You know that feeling when a seemingly solid floor suddenly drops from beneath you, no warning, no transition phase between 'floor' and 'not floor'? With the same jarring sense of whiplash disillusionment, Phil saw every instance of victory he had endured that past few days thrown into a perspective that rendered it less than worthless. Something similar to despair took him over.
"Why Diz? Why are you doing this?"
There was no pause between question and answer. Surprisingly (or perhaps, more accurately, disturbingly) Diz's voice, though raised in passionate conviction, retained a guise of reason that was almost believable. That, combined with the swiftness of response, created something that felt eerily normal, yet painfully out of place; like hearing the same advert played on a loop in a dark house, portent of disaster but mundane of itself.
"Because it needs to be done! Because I have seen that, time and time again, evil refuses to recognise itself, refuses to end what it starts, refuses to learn from its mistakes. This universe is imbalanced, Phil, and the only way to save what is good is to destroy the impure. I will have peace. And if the cosmos refuse to learn it on their own, the we will gladly teach them." Phil felt a small shock of fear creep its icy way down his spine. Diz was reminiscent of the extremists and madmen he had seen on television at dream-college. Downplaying the effect of the alien's psychotic words, he returned to his root solution for pear-shaped adventures; quips.
"Ok, you're seriously starting to sound like some sort of mad cult leader, Diz."
This did not produce the desired effect. Like a child throwing a fit, Diz slammed his fist against the dashboard, the impact audible through the transmitter.
"I am a cult leader, Eggtree!"
Incoming transmission.
"I think you'll find that untrue, Diz." Phil sighed, resisting the temptation to throw his hands in the air. The whole gang of quasi-terrorists was back together. Wonderful; frying pan, meet fire.
Viz's grating voice crackled grimly through two sets of transmitters, somehow just as irritated, self-satisfied, and cynical as it had been in person. Quiz was looking less like a confident martyr and more like a child caught in the act of doing something stupid by the second. Had this whole situation not been kind of his fault, Phil might have felt sorry for him.
"Beam me on board, Diz. We've wasted enough time."
"Yes sir." Moving from his position at the helm, Diz leant to input something into a control module to the right. In a low voice clearly meant for Quiz's ears only:
"Last chance Quiz; come back to the ship and we can pretend none of this ever happened." Diz sounded almost pleading now, a strange, near pitiful contrast to the mad dictator of before. For a second Phil struggled to reconcile the two sides in his mind; it was always the quiet ones who snapped. Beside him, Quiz gave a sigh of such unending weariness that it seemed to deflate him; as though the tribulations and stress of these past few days were all that was keeping him together, and without them, he'd simply wither away.
"Diz...I can't do that. These children have taught me that we'd be destroying a planet filled with people that, whatever you throw at them, will keep fighting for their right to survive. They're not all bad...you saw that before."
Over the communication comms, before Diz could offer a response, there was a bright, static snap that corresponded with a flash of blue-white light from the opposing ship. With the same sneering arrogance he had displayed during their first meeting, Viz stalked up to the windshield and smirked down at the transport ship with all the disdain of someone watching a worm crawl into their dropped sandwich. Phil wondered if Quiz was familiar with the phrase 'sweating bullets'.
"What's that clod blathering about, Diz? And why is Zone 5.1 complaining about a security breach? That facility hasn't been used in years. Nothing important could have got out, but every five minutes they message me complaining that 'project V.I. data revival' has been critically compromised. Does that mean anything to you? Diz?" Viz trailed off. Staring up at the hovering craft, Phil felt like he was watching a film that broke the fourth wall too often. He could see the realisation dawn in Diz's eyes, see the shock build, give way to rage, and felt intensely grateful that the alien's glare wasn't directed at him. Quiz held up under the pressure like a wet piece of bread under an anvil.
"Diz, look, I c-can explain, I-I swear—I d-didn't mean—"
"You." Even Viz was beginning to look concerned now.
"L-look—I didn't th-think it through that w-well I kn-know but—"
"You kidnapped me." Diz's black eyes seemed to burn through the vacuum of space separating them.
"Diz please just—"
"You used that machine to churn my mind to bits." His hands were white knuckled on the wheel. Well, pale green, but the sentiment was both present and terrifying.
"Listen to me. I—"
"You tried to kill us both!" The last was delivered in a harsh scream, effectively silencing Quiz's verbal scrabbling. Phil was looking determinedly at the dashboard, certain that looking up at the enraged alien would provoke some apocalyptic form of judgement.
The silence hanging between the two vessels transcended an empty idea and became a living thing, cold, immovable, and threatening, the distant hum of the charging laser forming the ripples and frills of its scales, Quiz's hasty, shallow breaths the scrape of it's claws on the gunmetal floor. When Viz finally spoke, voice significantly less confident now, it wasn't as though silence was broken; more as though he had drawn the malevolent attention of this beast.
"What...what does any of that mean, Diz?"
Such simple words were all it took to breach the dam. With that, silence became a story told to children foolish enough to believe that monsters were mythical beasts of legends, and not simply the cruel and the powerful.
"I told him!" Diz howled, windmilling his arms in pent-up frustration, "I said 'stay with the ship, Quiz, I'll take the kids to earth. Viz will establish contact soon and you need to be here to activate a teleportation device' and what does the imbecile do? Galavants off to earth, leaving everything up here unguarded! He even took Nitwit, though God knows why, that lumbering fool was never good for much. But not only that, Viz, he attacked me. I'm the cause of the security breach; he was trying to find out about the ship." Even from that distance, Phil could see that Diz was shaking. "You were going to betray us, weren't you Quiz? You were going to take our projects and run like the coward you truly are."
Quiz was quiet now, breaths not even a whisper, such a contrast to the laboured gasps of before that Phil had to look closely to convince himself that the alien was still alive. One of his blue-skinned hands had drawn into a tight fist, blackish blood leaking from between the fingers. When he lifted his head to meet the accusing stares of his old friends, his eyes were wet. His once quavering voice had darkened and hardened into something bitter and twisted, like a blackened blade digging into stone.
"In your own words, Diz, 'I am a traitor, but not to you'. You and Viz, you're always the ones calling the shots. I just hover in the background with Nitwit and Oswald. For once, I wanted to be able to do something, to take control of a mission. I was going to let you go from Zone 5.1, I swear, I just...wanted some information of my own first. And you, Viz, you didn't need my help to get back on board ship! You always say I'm useless, so it can't have been that hard if you needed me—"
"Enough." Surprisingly, it was Viz's anger strained voice which cut Quiz's ramblings short this time (though, looking at Diz, it may have simply been because rage had pushed the lieutenant past the point of speaking.)
"But I—" Quiz's tottering helplessness had returned in record time, dust in the concentrated spotlight of Viz's assertive command .
"Bring them both on board."
Surrounded by the inescapable field of green light that was the Battle Ship's tractor beam, Phil gave a cynical huff that he hoped was sufficient to cover up his mounting worry. Wasn't there a saying about this? Frying pans and fire? No. Both an understatement and already used. Fire, meet the utterly broiling hellfire that is the molten core of the Earth. Yeah, that summed it up.
Aside from his hitched breathing, Quiz was unresponsive, choosing to look at his shoes rather than face the disappointment of his young companion. Always made to feel like a failure, this was probably a new record for him in terms of letting people down...
Opening cargo bay doors.
The scene beyond was taken straight from a thousand sci-fi movies and gave everything the surreal unreality usually enjoyed by those still awake, in the middle of nowhere, at five in the morning. Viz was standing central, arms—all four of them—folded behind him in a coldly stately fashion. Diz was at the helm, turning to glare at Quiz at occasional intervals. Both wore calculating looks, expressions that openly considered your imminent demise and dared you to challenge that authority.
When the Battle Ship lurched, Phil initially dismissed it as a quirk due to the ship being a pieced-together mess. It was the agitated reactions of the other three that ticked him off to the fact that such violent shudders may not be natural, even for this ragged vessel.
"What was that?" More irritated than unnerved, Viz's triumphant expression was marred by a frown as he spun to glare at his lieutenant.
Diz tapped at something on the dashboard, a screen whose glowing letters and numbers were fluctuating wildly. By their gleeful, neon light, the way the alien paled was almost sickening.
"Oh no..." As though in a trance, he repeated his ineffectual ministrations, continuing as he spoke and becoming increasingly frantic, "We've gotten too close to Earth." Somewhere from within the ship, a siren began to wail, a dreadful banshee sound unheard of outside wars and nightmares, "We're entering its gravitational field."
Mild panic called it a day, tagged in blind terror, and left for a farm in the countryside.
"Well get us out!" It was the closest Phil had ever heard Viz come to fright. Contrasting his air of desperation, Diz sounded calm. It was the faint quiver in the background of his words that gave tell to his lack of situational control.
"I can't! The Death Ray has taken most of the power and we were running low as it was. Attempting to power up anything more, say re-entry fields or back-up thrusters, would push the battery into critical condition."
Again, Phil couldn't help the sense of detachment that swept over him, as though he was watching this unfold on television or in the theatre. That this could happen to ordinary, well meaning people was just inconceivable. That things like this could happen to Phil Eggtree was slightly more believable, but still enough to disorientate him to the point that, when he finally spoke up, it took a second for him to recognise his own voice.
"Is there anything you can do?" Diz bit his lip, hand hovering anxiously over the keys.
"We have, estimated, five minutes before our position becomes too unstable to hold and we plummet to earth."
"...Diz that doesn't help." The green-skinned alien snapped out of his trance and directed a disapproving glare at the cabins inhabitants.
"If we reroute all nonessential power to one of those time-stop mines, we may be able to buy ourselves enough time to drain the power from Quiz's vessel to this one. Then we could put up re-entry fields."
"Are you sure that would work?"
"No Viz. But have you got a better idea?" All around them, the struggle between the ship and the surrounding atmosphere was becoming more evident; the metal of the walls was groaning and creaking, shuddering under unseen pressure. Common sense (and lack of a better plan) meant that it took Viz barely a second to reach a decision.
"Quiz get over here and help with this."
Partially ignoring Viz's order, Quiz looked between Phil and the distant orb of Earth. Thought process written starkly across his face, he started when Phil snatched at his wrist, determination gripping him in a sudden, brief bout.
"You don't have to stay with them."
Quiz gave a smile that was as fond as it was bitterly cynical.
"Yeah, yeah I do."
"Why?"
"Well, first off, that escape pod is meant to carry one person only." Quiz began to usher Phil towards the now-familiar escape capsule, "Secondly, Viz and Diz are my friends Phil. You wouldn't leave your friends stuck here, would you?" Phil couldn't argue that point, knowing he hadn't a leg to stand on. Looking somehow younger and more vulnerable than before, Quiz pressed Phil's shoulder, uncomfortably aware of how final the gesture felt, "Go. At some point in the future, we'll be back."
Phil studied the alien's face, each scabrous, dull scale, the slightly uneven nasal slits, the liquid, black eyes. Behind Quiz, he could see the alarms strobing light reflect off Viz's angular glasses, hear Diz calling out a nonsensical jumble of orders and figures with near-military efficiency. Reaching up, Phil squeezed the four fingered hand.
"...I'll count on it, Quiz."
The last thing Phil saw as he was jettisoned from the Transport Vessel was Quiz hurrying over to assist Viz with a nondescript box that he could only assume was to be the craft's salvation. Then everything was lost to fire as he hurtled back to the real world.