Mira did not have to roam around like a lost ant; the accommodation was spotted quite easily. The Bates Motel was a small, cozy, hostel-type service a tad away from the town's promenade. A three-store building about four hundred years in age was the hostelry, held by a mid-aged man and his senile mother. She reserved a simple room in the first floor, with a dark-brown decoration and furniture made of real, ornate wood. Funny, how such winsome chambers could still exist in this mega-modern cosmos. Well, Kaon was a colorful mixture of history and cyber age; and that blend she was allowed to touch when stepping out into the drizzly twilight. Most of the boutiques had slammed their doors shut for today, but the variety of cafés and restaurants were just receiving their customers. She entered the promenade that replaced the oh-so-protective frivolous moat. Yet a light shower pattered down from the dusky clouds, the lanes looked anything but desolate. Old-fashioned lampposts pulsated opaque, yet sufficient light. They were aided by illuminated fountains and statues here and there. She stopped anteriorly one of those; and just admired. The water sparkled in the lumen of various blue shades, whereas a mighty effigy -depicting some ancient local nobleman in medieval attire- guarded the water from above with a flaming sword. She laid a look at it, soon giving a chuckle. Did not that stern face with thin nose, strait-laced frown, and a swirl on the big chin look even too familiar? Yes... the snobby Lightyears were a huge part of this city's history. If that grim wanna-be-heroic statue had received a jetpack, it possibly would have blasted off to space on its own, hollering 'To infinity and beyond!'
This goggling returned Mira to reality; to recall the unsolved mysteries and to notice that her stomach rumbled like a bulldozer. All this tiptoeing around here would have made even ascetics hungry.
A Salad Bistro with take-away meals at one corner settled the dilemmas. Ah, how a juicy greasy two-inch thick steak would have tasted after such full-day galactic hitchhiking... but no. Yick. A few hours after eating that sort of barbaric dishes, the Princess started feeling that a mammoth lived inside her stomach. So heavy and sleepy and icky it was afterwards, not to mention the occasional pyrosis... thus, perhaps something lighter. She grabbed a few packages of nosh from the bar and headed back to the motel.
The space gear was tossed aside, the jumpsuit acting as a very festive evening dress. Nova groaned, she did not have even a toothbrush with in this foreign town. On the other hand... not the first time. There had been no mirrors or antiperspirant bottles in the vast forests of that Kaleva-whatsoever Indian planet... Team Lightyear had roamed one and half weeks in the thistles looking like apemen. And most possibly she would be at home tomorrow again, which was a shame concerning the interesting town. Capital Planet felt just sometimes so boring...
"Alright, but I got work to do!" she rubbed her hands together and set the dinner onto a table with some study material. The Princess detached a part of her wrist communicator; a palm-held computer that could stand on its own. It could make some further analysis of that odd canvas while the blueblood ruminated the pasta. "A ranger always gets his or her man whether they'd be male or female! I'm sure there starts to be light in the end of the tunnel sooner or later concerning this assumingly highly criminal case... uhm well I hope I can solve it... always a ranger has to be ready to mesh his or her criminals whether they'd be criminals or not!"
The tiny computer's investigation software began beeping while the big latte and the not-so-feather-light chocolate dessert were getting with good speed down Nova's gullet. However the results seemed to be a tad lost in space. Again.
"Well well... you're a tricky fellow..." A deca-set of blue fingers typed something on the small feathertouch pad. The 'comprehensive analysis' showed quite much the same niceties as the on-stage scrutiny. The tatter was one of those cases that obviously enjoyed the shelter of anonymity. No info about its origin. No DNA traces whatsoever. Only that it was old like a mummified tomato and was stitched from some extravaganza fabric.
Pondering, reflecting hard, Mira kept curling a lock of blue hair around her finger until it was in such an overhand knot that she had to ghost the finger through it to get the tangle off. There was something oddly familiar with a canvas that could refract light so that it would be invisible for anyone looking at it...
"Wait, that's it! It must be something similar to the odd globule we used to go through the Gate a while ago..." She came to recall the Xanedian interferator innovation, under whose shield the Fellowship of Eight had been literally unseeable -until the ball had overheated and exploded. However, in any case, there was a crucial resemblance between the functions. Still... this did not answer any heated head-scratching or puzzled pouts. What the stale supernovas did this ancestor-age cloth actually do on Buzz' yard? What did it have to do with anything anyways? What if it was just a random rag the wind had blown there or a stupid peewit had brought in its beak?
"Oh craters... now I'm again at the scratch. Great. I start suspecting too much my own theories and then I get nothing up." She stretched, yawned, and took a better pose in the rather uncomfortable chair. No, there had to be a connection of some kind. Zurg had not shooed his freshly backed marionettes here in vain. There was a serious trouble going on with Buzz.
Out of the blue, she winced to hear a knock on the window. A haphazard glance nonetheless told that there was nothing to be spotted.
"Hmh. Maybe a woodpecker thought it could tap a nest in that interesting transparent wood..." Mira sneered and continued the data search. "Stupid computer. Are the wireless local area connections just slow or is there really no further material relating to this odder than odd rag?"
Knock. Knockknockknock -- pok. The window moaned again.
"Now what? Do I need to build a miniature scarecrow there?" she grunted and decided to see what pestered there so enthusiastically. However, nothing was to be seen. The shutters were about to be drawn back shut, but then... Mira's leer espied something. A piece of material looking like kraft paper was attached with a pin to the window frame.
"What the melting meteoroids...?" Her fingers picked it up and unfolded it. It was not craft paper, it was parchment. The sheet seemed to be brimful of text, scribbled fast with somehow familiar-looking handwriting. Was this for her? But what, who...?
Again she winced. An evident gush of some clothing reached her ears from the darkness outside. The person who had brought the message still had to be there!
"Wait! Who's there? Who are you?" Unnoticed, in the thoughts of catching this anonymous courier, she ghosted through the wall. It was the first floor, yes, but a rather high foundation raised the house a neat amount of feet above the soil. Thus, she fell.
A series of cracks and splats followed. Mira found herself sitting in soft, colorful mass. In the matte light of one single lantern she could understand that it was someone's greatly treasured flowerbed. Well, was. Now more like something that came out of compost.
"Oops..." she glanced nervously around. Obviously no-one had seen the little blunder. She was initially perching on an open backyard of some sort, although it was quite much too dark to determine it clearly. However, the messenger was probably far away gone, she could not catch him or her or it any longer. And as willing to avoid quarrel with some bun-headed ol' spinster complaining about her dear lovely smashed tulips, Mira climbed back through the window into her room. The not-so-pleasant facts lurked forth from the dark nooks: her jumpsuit's back was all the way miry and full of loose flower petals. But luckily there were bathrobes in the bathroom; so it was no trouble to dry-clean the wanna-be dungarees. Coincidentally, this cubicle had one of those flash-quick apparatuses.
"Alright, Mira... now stop goofing around", she sighed at herself, sitting back down to see if there were any new auto-search results in the palm-computer's screen. "You're gonna get a 'danger zone' sticker onto your forehead if you won't watch your steps. Hmh... on the other hand... Buzz blew up the Alliance Plaza when he was younger. And Zurg... calculators would go bonkers if they tried counting his every bungle. I guess I'm still a minor factor compared to the Lightyears... but still. I need to be a good example and role model for the cadets, so gotta be a tad more careful."
Nova unwrapped the parchment piece she had momentarily forgotten. But before even able to read it, she remained just staring at the scribbling stupefied.
"This... but... this is Buzz' handwriting!"
What on Mars was going on? Why would Buzz write her a note, and even in a situation like this? It could not be from him. That was the sole logical justification. And what came to the contents of the script, it was even more head-spinning.
"'Interested in to know more about the artifact you are studying? I can help you get more information about it. I am waiting for you in the daybreak, in the place the enclosed map shows. Come alone. Keep this letter as a secret from the others, otherwise I am possibly not able to help you find answers'", she read aloud with round eyes. There was indeed some hand-drawn chart included. And it pointed at some odd location deep in the Xi Muon forest.
The puzzle Mira had solved this far, seemed to shatter into even smaller pieces. From who was this uncanny, almost ominous message? Someone had spied her, how else would anyone have known about the cloth? Not even the rest of Team Nova was aware of it, not to mention the outsiders. But something this quandary cooped up. The rag had a meaning after all...
Nonetheless... most likely this was a trap of some sort. Although Mira did not possess such things as 'ranger instinct' or 'Zurg alarm' -as her former commanding officer had called his intuitive skills- this case stank like a rotten herring. A nasty sour taste remained in her mouth when deliberating what to do. On the other hand, it was not 100% assured that it would be a deadfall. Sometimes anonymous information sources helped Star Command in tricky cases. There had been all kinds of double agents in the police forces as long as those had existed in this universe. However, this case was slightly different. There was no real evidence of crime yet at all, and still someone snooped in the background. With what kind of motives? Was this Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. or Thing just crocheting schemes or really willing to lend a helping paw? And why to contact just her? Also XR and Booster had been questioning Buzz today. But obviously it was she who had found accidentally out something pivotal.
Musing, she analyzed the parchment. For her consternation, the software gave similar kind of results as concerning the shred. Several hundreds years of age... no fingerprints, nothing left that could help identifying the sender.
"What kind of showoff anyways wants to use parchment? I didn't even know such stuff was manufactured even so recently as three centuries ago. I mean, talk about three millenniums maybe... Is this courier or its host just willing to look cool and mystifying? Or what's the point?" the Princess rolled her eyes.
Then there was the shady location. With her computer, she sent a query for one Morph-orbiting routing satellite so that it could remote-scan the near grounds of Kaon. The little screen showed the reflection picture of the satellite, presenting an aerial view of the Xi Muon woods. She zoomed in the scan, took a few more snapshots.
"There..."
The place of the doodling truly existed. The air photo framed some kind of rock circle among the overgrown vegetation. It was not even quite near the city, but several miles away. Curiously enough, the local net databases had nothing to say about that Stonehenge. But it could not be just sculpted by the erosion; there were pillars and other man-made things visible, though they were blurry in the image.
"This still stenches... like a pile of week-old perches... why so far away? In such a remote place? I can get there fast with my jetpacks, but afoot it would take a while. At dawn..." According to the timer, the sun rose around six am. So, if she really wished to meet this friend-foe, she should get to sleep and fast.
Despite the danger, there was a sort of tickling thrill in the air. Like when she had hoped that this would become her first, own mission, independent of anything else. It did not feel quite alluring to call now Booster and XR or Zurg and chirp it all out. What if this really could bring her on the right tracks and... lead to some bigger well of secrets? Introduce her an enigma broader than she had ever even imagined? It just felt so tempting to accept this request.
"Still it's stupid and reckless. I shouldn't go... I should contact my team... still... didn't Buzz always want to play solo? When we for the first time infiltrated Planet Z, he asked us rookies to go away. He took the Lumini Summit task and dispelled us to guard that matter transport device. He always preached about role models. Role models like him. So... if I'm taking this into my hands, I'm just kind of following the imago he left behind..." she philosophized. "And I've wanted to work alone, really. I would've easily infiltrated Planet Z with Alpha One back in the rookie years unless he had stopped me." Her cerebral CPU still whirred onwards. "This is a risky case, but I'm really not a rookie any longer. I'm armed, I can defend myself if some brickhead tries to trick me. I got authority to arrest whoever attempts breaking the law. And if this really gets me on the doors of some bigger nest of sneaky villains, and I succeed to decipher it alone... Heh heh, I don't want to swell up, but a bit of extra respect from your subordinates never hurts..."
Was it now decided? That the Tangean Princess would go and face the hazards just like that? Obviously.
Finally Mira set herself to lie between the bedsheets, ready to snooze. The Buzz-glitch escorted her bit by bit in the lands of dark-blue nebulas. A few years ago that man had lost his inner balance badly, ever since had acted weirdly. Of course he had had his blaringly-visible whims before, but once he had tasted the dark side, it had left such stigmas in him. Hopingly he was sane now. Nova could not be fully sure of that, though. His acts today, and the verity that the parchment piece was indeed written in his handwriting or at least confusingly similarly. A horrible scenario popped in her mind abruptly. What if Buzz himself was behind this confusion? What if he had turned somehow schizoid when fighting against the dark side in his heart and mind? Mira snorted at her own high-flying illusions. Such a surmise was just blatantly absurd. And she would find out tomorrow...
Perhaps...
The sleep came at last.
---Next day---
A fresh scent of rain was in the wane, dark-green dawn. The air stood almost still in the great forest of Xi Muon. The atmosphere hung like some dreamy fantasia, so silent, so picturesque. Somewhere in the bottle-green bushes something faintly rustled, but otherwise the panorama hovered in slumberland. A climber bloomed in the nearby oak. Its white flowers incensed sweetish aroma. In a single statue of flimsy light, filtering through the tree leaves, was dancing an orb of transparent butterflies. The path of grass and fir needles felt soft under the feet.
It indeed felt like back in that Kaleva planet. Tangean landscapes were covered with jungle; thus woods alike this appeared exotic to Mira. And what did you actually experience when growing up in a sealed palace? Pot plants, perhaps, if not even those. Thus, nature felt always like a new adventure, even after years of space odysseys in the service of Star Command. It was all to thank for her rebellious character that such escapades had been possible. What a dull, torpid life she had created herself if just being daddy's obedient little girl. Maybe she would know generally nothing about the cosmos around, only the walls of the Tangean Royal Palace. An obtuse environment that bred only prejudices...
The worries had somehow faded due to the brilliantly beautiful landscapes. The real purpose of roaming here felt instantaneously like a futile accessory. But still, Nova would not want to be late from the appointment. Just if she had known what to expect there. A secret discussion with some crook? Or someone having perhaps similar worries to Buzz? There was still a long way to trod to the destination, whereas she was not all that keen on using the jetpack. This lush scenery here was just too lovely to miss.
Through all kinds of transitions and brain-knots, Mira's sphere of ideas fell to reminiscent the day when she had for the first time really seen any Tangean wilderness. The solitude brought a similar sort of sensation... her being alone, adventuresome, willing to experience something noveau just on her own. But obviously there would be no Grounders hiding in these shrubberies.
Abruptly her legs froze. Not because of a sudden appalling danger, but just because of a single statuesque image in her mind. Indeed, those Grounders...
She had not in a long time lain a thought aside to remember the one person that had had rather a crucial effect on reducing the biases the royal court had implanted in her. And shown what kinds of wonders Tangea really kept inside itself, outside the narrow world of those blue snobs. On the other hand... how to really take positions concerning this guy called Romac? Wind had whisked him away, he shone only with absence. So the years had just passed, him not appearing back any longer. Who knew if he even existed. She had no idea what had happened to him after her father had denied the contacts, but seemingly his boots had selected the slightly wrong track. Romac was a rebellion equal to her, but the Princess had at least chosen to canalize it for a good purpose; Star Command and the universe protection. He had become some kind of bounty hunter and lastly climbed on Zurg's payroll... Yet the Grounder had on the last second turned his back at the Emperor. That had been the first and final time since the naïve teen years he had popped out of nowhere.
His company might have been nice while walking here... he might have liked these quarters... such a nature-personality.
But most likely that man did not even recall her first name any longer. If he even was somewhere...
"Now why did I start even thinking about him?" Mira slapped her forehead irritated. That rather ugly-looking half-savage had precisely nothing to do with anything over here! "Craters, I'm supposed to go and figure out something about the canvas piece and not weep after some devious scoundrels!" She squared her shoulders and managed to stomp a fraction of time like Buzz; chin pointing importantly upwards and her whole pose aslant.
The old Nex Crucio turret was finally reached. Nova was just in time; her wrist communicator showed that the local sun had crept over the horizon. But no-one was there yet. Or at least not visible.
"Hello? Someone here?" she hollered a bit around, loitering among the half-burned pillars. Odd, how this square felt so creepy. What had happened here? This had been a building, but why had the normal map explanations told nothing? Usually historical ruins were strictly marked and archeologically combed out. She gave a brush on her laser. It was better to be tuned if something unexpected would occur.
This impression, muffled in great physical pain, remained as her last recollection. In the corner of her eye she had for a nanosecond seen a flash of green light. Then, just black.
--------------
"Uhh what the...?" Mira squirmed and lifted a benumbed-feeling hand on her forehead. The vision spun a while, then settled down to depict a blue-glowing wall. Bewildered, she gradually sat up to squat on a hard stone floor. One glance told that this chamber was a perfect cube; perfect in every sense. There was no visible door, no windows, just these weirdly shimmering flat surfaces.
"Oh craters, was it a trap...?" the Tangean gritted her teeth. "Man, how stupid I was! Now even the toads in ditches start cackling at me! 'Captain Nova, the gullible clown'. Craters, leaping leptons, now what...?" Moaning and cursing she stood up, taking support from the wall. Some twerp had prowled in the scrub and just waited for her to step inside the ring? Hard she blamed herself, yet still seeing the metaphorical light in the end of the underpass. Despite this burning wrench in her muscles, she was back conscious and had a vast assortment of abilities to flee almost any danger.
"Ughhh... someone must've shot me with plasma or something... now let's spot a way out of here." She brushed some dust off her Star Command suit and ghosted through the nearest wall.
But what? There was nothing else but an exactly same kind of cubicle. Shrugging, she selected another wall inside the new chamber. But they just kept repeating, those blue-glowing empty rooms. Wherever she ghosted, there seemed to be only a copy of the past.
"Where am I?" she squinted her eyes, lightly suspecting if she was seeing some sort of nauseous nightmare. Some of her friends had occasionally complained about such nocturnal aggravations. Dreams that anyone would have wanted to get rid of.
But Mira was awake. "Hmm... should I change the direction? There must be somewhere an end to these things." Thus the Princess ghosted through the floor, and was dropped into another stereotypical cell. More ghosting. And more. Progressively this would start tiring her out, if this idiotic maze would not decide to cut short its foul play. However, at last there was some 'improvement' concerning the unyielding escape. Mira's fingers found an obstacle that did not allow her to walk through. It had to be some kind of outer wall, obviously Tefloyd 7 -reinforced. She was still optimistic for a second, but then the merriness was strangled.
Laser did not cut that wall.
"The play isn't over yet", she puffed peeved. "I still got the backup as every ranger has!" Thus the wrist communicator was clicked open, and words whistled in, "Coming Star Command, Captain Nova call---" Nonetheless, the sentence was interrupted with mute stupefaction.
The connections did not work. The screen blinked with an error message.
The blueness on her cheeks went white. But, there had to be a way out! From this place... what place was this anyway? She had no clue whatsoever. If the satellite transfer blacked out, she had no means to locate herself even with the most antique GPRS.
Somewhere in the black veins of this subterranean stone behemoth, unbeknownst by Mira, someone silently hummed a rune of desolateness. It joined the shades, grew deep together with them... the near mute notes hovered above the moldy dankness, yet not danced, only stood... the ice-cold teardrops of a crushed prisoner whose hope discolored brutally minute by minute...
"Parempi minun olisi, parempi olisi ollut; syntymaettae, kasvamatta, suureksi sulkeutumatta; naeille paeville pahoille, ilmoille ilottomille...
...olisin kuollut kuusioeisnae, kaonnut kahdeksanoeisnae, ois en paljoa pitaenyt: vaaksan palttinapaloa, pikkaraisen pientaretta, emon itkua vaehaesen, isoni vielaeki vaehemmaen..."
Yoka's song of pining away had transformed into sheer doldrums. It was futile to wait for tomorrow; here in this underworld, clocks never ticked. There was no savior, Proud Crescent seemed to be darker than the evil itself. Was her life meant to be wasted from the beginning on...? At home, perhaps her father would have helped her when seeing a soulless menace like this. But home... it had perished with the wishes.
As the mind had begun losing faith, so languished also the body. The green light of pain came back every day... with his sick game. So many times she had tried... to find a loophole out of this leviathan's chasm. But where was it? The ghoul would strike again, and again, and again... waiting evidently for her final fall.
Proud Crescent wanted her to die.
And somewhere, Mira made another ghosting. Only to encounter one more of those uncountable dull cubicles... And someplace else, a man's figure sat in front of a small monitor, cackling hoarsely and rubbing his hands together with evil enjoyment. Oh, what a show...
...to be continued...
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