Little, ominous creaks echoed from the kitchen's open doorway. Booster and XR stood petrified in the hall, throwing quick glances at one other.
"Y-y-you c-c-c-check out w-w-hat there is! I---I'll be your backup!" the sturdy Jo-Adian whimpered and cowering tried to appear as minuscule as possible. In that task, he succeeded as well as a blue whale sitting in birdbath.
"Why me? Why do I always have to be the benevolent bait, the daring decoy, the brave pioneer?" the robot protested, "Why do I have to become the juicy snack for some omnivorous beast? Where did your Lightyear-like braveness fade? You could probably smash the menace just by sitting on it."
"Erm..."
"Alright, alright. It's again XR to the rescue. The valiant knight in his shining armor, riding with a non-existent steed to save the non-existent princesses from non-existent fierce dragons!" And thus, the android carefully rolled towards the kitchen, Booster looking at the shadowy opening with a thumb in his mouth.
The robot almost collided with the noise source. A white, cylinder-shaped object was teetering around the floor. It was the household's walking trash compacter. It had obviously woken up because of all the fuss around, and was ready to offer its kind services, in case anyone would need to get rid of some delicious garbage.
But as it saw XR, it went into utter hysterics. It started beeping and purring manically, and nearly one could see pink hearts flashing and sparkling above its top lid. It visibly thought the android ranger to be the most handsome thing it ever had met. It zoomed right at the baffled mecha, and began nuzzling his side, beeping and tweeting almost in a flirtatious way. Evidently Zarah had designed it as a female bot; also regarding the facts that it was so very ridiculously cute and smooth-lined.
"Wh-what the craters...?" XR yelped, trying to detach himself from the idiotic litterbin who was attempting with all its might to cuddle up to under his arm.
"Beep! Beep! Bop! Chirp!" the nutty bot trilled.
"Shoo! Go away! I don't need trash compacting! I just went through the annual LGM service and got top marks! Shoo!" He was less enthusiastic about the affection attack. He had an eye for pretty ladies, but this individual was just too artificial. Escaping to the living room did not however help even a per mille. The kookie litterbox whizzed on his heels and began chasing him around the table.
"Booster, help! Can't you see, there's a ranger in danger! Do something! Why don't you try charming it instead?" XR whined.
Nonetheless, the red reptilian was far much more interested in something more crucial. Had not Zurg given instructions to sniff anything that was uncommon? It did feel tremendously awkward for Munchapper to rummage his ex-commanding officer's house like some wretched weasel on his nightly gig filching small valuables. So, with trembling hands he had started opening the drawers of a nearby-stagnating dresser. Now he scratched his bald muddled. The top drawer was locked, and the nervous ranger was not sure whether it would be proper to open it furtively or not. The hubbub of one lovesick trash compacter and one nauseated cyborg continued in the background.
Just at the moment, large boots stomped down the stairs. Zora's deeply furrowed brow and cantankerous expression did not sing jovial chants. Moreover, he was fingering his chin and struggling with a cloud of poltergeistic thoughts. The half-ready abstraction tapestry was nonetheless dissected to shreds as he flitted in the middle of the tragic love drama spinning around the living-room table.
"What is this pathetic rickety?" the oldster bellowed, and made the carousel stop dead. "I ask you two blubbering trifling lackeys to aid My Imperial Majesty, and what do I get? An identical copy of the staff I had on Planet Z! No wonder nothing worked and my friskily plum-odoured Empire was meant to fall into the lowest and blackest bowels of oblivion!"
"Now it isn't my fault this loony trash compacter is smitten with me!" XR beefed, "I know I'm a guy with the right gear and magnetism, but..."
"What is that pitiful puny vacuum jug?" the Emperor shot a smoldering glare at the delirious wastebasket, "And it's WHITE! How many times do I have to declare that I HATE white! Of course my nitwit son has decorated EVERYTHING in his house with that infernally ugly shade! Together with the green stripes of Erebus! Oh I wish I could close my eyes in front of all this ill-favored color quarrel! Now go away, you ignorant dense jar! GRRWROARH!" A single hollow growl fled his angered maw. The bot literally blasted in the air for fright, turned about on its wheels and zapped back to the kitchen whimpering deplorably. It retreated under the table, into the farthest shadows, and wept alone its lovelorn.
"Well, did you lack-wits find anything?" Zurg inquired.
"Just a lot of nothing. And one gaga garbage can added to that. So it still makes nothing."
"Hymph. Just as I assumed. Perhaps the lamebrained brain-bots in my Palace did after all do better work. Ahh well, I have always known that Star Command decreases your IQ level exponentially. My son could have become a celebrated galactic hero if he had astutely chosen a career in some other place. And something that would have been less white and green..." Absent-mindedly blabbering, the old royal promenaded around the room. By the age, the loogin gabble just seemed to amplify. Behind him, Booster kept shyly pointing at the dresser and shifting his legs as if he had needed a potty break.
A long, thin index on the place of his cleft, Zurg just went on piffling as if he had had a great deal of loose screws under his cranium, "...is it actually so, that these two dismal colors do cause early senility and even brainwash you to think they are actually the most grandiloquent colors of the universe? They must be the root of evil! Hmmhyy... ghommh..." He halted his roaming steps in front of the oil painting hanging on the wall. Munchapper almost danced on his spot now, waving ferociously to get attention. XR rolled his eyes in some niche, rather frustrated about Zurg's unceasing slanders.
"Ahh, the mighty me!" the royal smacked his lips as he laid his gaze upwards and encountered his own phiz simpering at him. "Hrrhm. Now as I evaluate this piece of glorious art afterwards, I must say that the purple should have been seasoned with just a bit naughtier touch of crowberry. It is itty bitty too much on the lingonberry side. But still, ahh, so nefariously delicious!"
"Uhh, Sir Lightyear...?" the Jo-Adian puled.
"Now what? I wish to admire myself in peace!"
"Erm... I... well, Sir, I'd like to report t-that I found a locked drawer over here!"
"A locked drawer, that is fascinating..." Zurg muttered, holding now a pocket mirror in his hand. He smugly sleeked his amazingly thick hair while evaluating the coiffure he had in the portrait. "Perhaps I ought to order another painting from the artist. And this time with the right flavor of heinous bilberry in it... now Buzzy Boy could put it beside this one. He could have two pictures of the majestic m--" Abruptly the dotty Narcissus experienced an awakening. Somehow his synapses shifted from the self-admiring mode to observe the surroundings. And also recalled that why he was here initially. "Ah, what? A locked drawer? Where?"
"Right here, Sir!" the overweight dinosaur-esque minion pointed at the dresser. "You asked me to look for odd things and well, Buzz would say that a locked drawer is odd!"
"Hahaa! A locked drawer! How wickedly perverted!" the Emperor rubbed his hands together in sudden enthusiasm, "Odd, indeed! I could not find almost anything upstairs. Only that my son has apparently gone somewhere with his space ranger suit on, since it was not in the closet where he keeps it. Hmm now, let us see this one..."
"But I didn't find a key..."
"Key? What kind of pathetic waxwing needs keys? You could have opened this for me, so that we would have saved valuable time." Zora took a good grip of the drawer's handle, and with one snatch, ripped it open. The broken lock pieces bounced in the air and flied in perfectly arched trajectories across the room, right according to the fashion of the past few days.
It did not take planet-sized brains to perceive that something indeed was strange with this drawer.
On the top of miscellaneous thingamabobs, there lolled a set of half-crumpled parchment pieces: the threat letters the Shadow had written. Last Friday, in his cacophonic haste, Buzz had thrown most of the evilly cackling notes there. And later on added there even the ones which were gloating about Mira's snaring.
Yet, at the moment, Zurg and his Imperial Stormtroopers had no clue what these brownish cardboard-looking rags presented. The old male picked one of them between his unnaturally long, bony fingers, and pouted. The shred had an odd, moldy reek in it, as if it had resided in some clammy crypt for ages.
"What in the name of unholy Zarquon...?" was his thunderstruck gasp after he had unfolded it and recited the scribbling. Both Booster and XR gawped at the parchment rag with horror-struck grimaces.
-----------------
The air felt frowzier than ever in Mira's nostrils. She coughed almost ceaselessly; the smell of mildew and rot were prickling in her throat. Her hand trailed across a roughly cut stonewall to get some support. The Princess was still crumpling on the floor, being thoroughly exhausted after a nearly nonstop ghosting. Oh, what she would have given for an inhale of fresh air! She had never believed being allergic to anything. But during these last few days, her lungs had involuntarily gotten filled with mucus, and she kept frequently coughing out icky clods of tacky whitish slime. It had to be this nearly suffocating air; some kind of fungus had triggered these asthmatic symptoms. She would have been saved from the quandary if her helmet had agreed to work. Yet, something was clicking with her almost fresh-from-oven captain suit. Perhaps the Shadow's plasma-laser blast had defected the bubble helmet's open-close mechanism. In any case, she could not draw it over her head to give shield from these carcinogenic gasses.
This nook was nonetheless not as repugnant as what had been beyond it. But the sudden absence of the blue light was in a way menacing. Mira did not yet comprehend what had happened. She had arduously ghosted through something that had required the last fragments of her force and concentration. Something that had pushed her violently back, but had had tiny holes of yielding matter here and there. Only that it had taken a mere eternity to swim around the element and wriggle in the pliable bubbles. After Nova had wormed through the obstacle and drawn even her toes out of it, she had been starkly worn out. Hacking painfully mucus out of her lungs, her respiration wheezing, she had slumped down onto the floor.
The initial fatigue faded gradually as the slug-tardy minutes crept on. Mira sat up in an uncannily twisted pose, hugging her upper body. It still felt as if a thousand hot-white daggers were gushing her sides all at the same time. Her drowsy gaze divagated across the dark, endless stone. The visibility was poorer than ever. If Nova had not had her partly phosphorescent space suit, she would have bathed in mere void. Now the dim green glow of her collars and gauntlet straps were giving at least meager lumen into the desolated, sepulchral crypt.
Buzz Lightyear's sick, warped grimace lingered in front of her eyes. This ghoul had day by day transformed more and more devilish, had become worse than Zurg ever in his sinister, infuriated years. As Mira had lolled in her cell, this demonic visage had every now and then appeared in the wall. His only purpose seemed to be to insult and smash down the last shreds of her determination, in order to make her weak, cringing, something even more worthless than a decaying rat.
How could she have been so blue-eyed? Not seen the prowling beast inside the lamb? Buzz was rampant crazy, and becoming a threat for everyone. Mira had no assertive idea if Yoka-hanen was deceased or not. However, Lightyear's sneer was intermittently jesting about her, laughing out fragments of knowledge that she still might be alive in this weird Abaddon.
And still she did not recognize who really was behind the mask of the Shadow...
Two days the Princess had lain in comatose disbelief, and almost locked her senses. Her soul and mind were fighting against themselves, and at the same time pleading for help in order to understand. And, a third screech howled a dysfunctional canon with the whole cranial pandemonium. Her determination, which waged a desperate war against the bruising offences.
There had to be a way out of this possessed underworld. How jaded she ever was, she would have to find a getaway...even if she needed to ghost herself dead. For the sake of everything, anything... find someone to whom to tell, and get that sick maniac in jail...
Slowly the beaten awareness had steeled itself. It had started bringing Mira out of the insensible shock. She had begun observing more keenly on the uncanny surroundings. There were these endless chambers; they had to have a connection with the reality. Although in this blue ether, everything was hovering in a nightmare-like fantasy. Amazing was, that a part of her subconscious kept claiming she was indeed drifting in a dream...
But no, this was the reality. Not a digital illusion, not a disturbing hallucination.
And if the reality was this, why should she just accept it, relinquishing? Why not to fight against it? Buzz Lightyear had promised to kill her. So what was there to lose, if she would mutiny?
The inspection had gone on in silence, and she had scribbled more mind-memos. Some kind of monitoring system was linking the cubicles also together. Till this day, Mira had no hint of how she had been originally slung inside this creepiness. The rooms appeared seamless with no visible doors or windows... and actually, the Princess had no idea which cabin had even been her primary starting dot. The incoherent ghostings had made her lose the homing instinct. Yet, somehow Buzz always knew her location. Was he constantly surveying her through some sort of spy camera? The nutrition, which consisted of plastic water bottles and foil-wrapped junk food, were thrown inside the random cells through little holes that opened up in the ceiling. The ill man did not explain why he kept her still alive.
But...Never give up, never surrender.
*****
All in all, the Shadow's plan seemed to have one major defection. And that was the plan itself: there was no unfailing scheme, all his checkmates this far had merely been random luck and whims. Although it had seemed like a victory, Mira's napping had perhaps been his worst mistake. Evil Buzz Lightyear's problem was that he was relying too much on his own invincibility and to this old fortress. The Nex Crucio members had once gilded it with astounding technology: radar blockers, radio frequency distorters, Tefloyd-7-coated cell compartments, proton blaster -resistant cover shields and so on. Perhaps when Jardaz and Zoxewa Lightyear had sat here on their thrones, leading the whole satanic organization, everything had had the sugar-sweet chimera of triumph.
And so faultlessly the Nex Crucio toys had sparkled in the Shadow's eyes, as he was dropped here years ago. Everything glistened like in a dream, the age-old crystallic fusion generators produced electricity, the scanner-blocking shields hummed as if they had been activated just yesterday. And thus he grew to rely so much on his 'unblemished' castle in the sky, that he forgot the Time.
The time makes even the most delicate, dazzling butterfly to decay. Time cracks the mountains and perishes illusions. Time makes the great warrior wither and turn to dust. And till that day, the mankind had not built anything divine, everlasting. All the masterpieces were doomed to fall back in the mould.
Time, if anything, had befriended with Mira. Or at least involuntarily helped her, as its spell of erosion had slowly but surely bewitched the cult's ancient hideouts. Several hundred years ago, the manufacturing process of Tefloyd 7 had been slightly different as presently. Some of the adjuvants used in the corrosion-hindering layer and equally some alloy components made to bind the Löysälörtti-07 -named component (which was the whole core of the ghost-proof material) were not quite compatible. Later on, as it was noticed that the adjuvants kept slowly corroding one another, making the whole material a bit too unstable for long-term use, bioscientists and metallurgy researches developed better binding agents to replace the old ones. Currently a new generation of Tefloyd 7 was being drummed up in the LGM laboratories.
As Nova had risen again from the ashes of her momentarily deceased steadfastness, she had restarted the expeditions around the blue cubicles. She ghosted as much as her strength allowed, studying the place and attempting to make marks on anything that could lead out of there. In his stupidity, the Shadow had forgotten to whack broken her laser and wrist communicator, falsely assuming that they were no use in an entirely shielded prison. He had come to regret this later though, and hence terminated thoroughly the relevant components of Buzz' Pulsar 3000 Envirosuit. But the major problem of his idiocy was, that because of her being armed, he could not go to face her directly any longer. The blue one might strike back...
Evil Buzz cursed his lack of plan, but rather much ignored Mira's feeble attempts to get out. And soon he lost his interest to scowl at her aimless travel across the cell compartment. It had given a few good cackles, but too soon became a yawn-causing hobby. In addition, he had now a new game with the other Lightyear. The malevolent psychopath wanted to see him squirm and grieve; Mira Nova was quite much just useless tedious dirt.
Her travels had been just starting, however. She had surveyed the food-delivering system, but spotted no loopholes there. She had gradually found the whole outer shell of the ghost-proof material which was covering a few floors of identical blue-lit cells. And those dull, mind-tormenting cubicles were not infinite, after all. Unreasonable yes, but not everlasting. The Princess had occasionally pondered what the purpose of all these rooms connected together so bizarrely was. Yet, since the answer did not float anywhere nearby, she was forced just to shrug at the enigma. Thus she had taken an aim to approach along the outmost walls and, even if it was an absolutely ill-fated attempt, she would try to find a weak spot. Or anything. Perhaps a place where her wrist communicator would regain its satellite connection.
So far, the play for life and death had teetered dangerously towards the fiendish part. But just half an hour ago, the Tangean had encountered something abnormal on her voyage through the chambers. She had entered a room before unseen. It was of course carrying the same monotonous features as the rest of its siblings, but was in a far more inferior state. White fungus dotted the walls all over, and its ceiling was oddly lopsided, as if it was snail-slowly collapsing. Crumpled pebbles littered the floor here and there, especially below the wall that was draped most in the whitish putrid mildew.
If the semi-poisonous blotches had not been there, the following wrestling match with the wall would have been less strenuous for Mira. The air was little by little beginning to sting in her throat when she felt about the ghost-proof mural with her palm. She was to give up the whole venture due to her increasing coughing, but suddenly discovered something atypical. Half of the masonry had been stiff as bedrock for the average Jack, but now, abruptly, her palm actually did sink slightly inside the material. It did not plunge there effortlessly, though. And it was only a small area somewhere in the left side of the wall that had the possible slight defect.
Yet, this was the very first beam of better prospects. What if... what if the Tangean could actually dive through it? With reinforced determination, could she...?
There was only one way to find out.
And so, half an hour later the Princess was progressively getting on her legs on the other side of the cumbersome fungus portal. Time had certainly blessed the wall with its rusting kiss. Humidity and water damage had perceptibly even speeded up the corrosion, so that the masonry had begun eating itself from the inside.
She wiped her mouth to the back of her hand after another spit-and-harrump hack. The girl was lost in a narrow vaulted corridor of some sort. Both of its ends -as far as she could see- were swallowed by the sackcloth murkiness. Dewy moss grew in the holes of the uneven floor slabs. A wane smile found its way on her blanched face. She had gone through the wall. At least there was a pale strap of new hope illuminating this Hades.
A while her frown wandered along the ceiling and walls. Was Buzz watching her? Did he know what she was doing? She dared to take a few nervous steps into an undetermined direction. The tunnel echoed hollowly and multiplied the clap of her gaits almost endlessly, as if the alley had been not less than a mile long.
Absently she flapped her wrist communicator open. Here would be a good spot to check again if there was any life in the connections.
A shrill squeal was to escape from her throat, but just in the last nanosecond, she slapped a hand over her overenthusiastic mouth. Mira stared at the communicator screen, which had a yellowish glow over it.
'1 percent Local Area Connection established ...'
'Cannot connect to Satellite SC-4284-T3-K2: Connection aborted ...'
'Trying to re-connect ...'
Her saucer-round-flown eyes read the software's report all over again. There was a net field, even though it was pathetically weak. She shifted her position in order to find a better nook where to receive the signal.
'2 percent Local Area Connection established...'
But that was all. Mira was balancing on her toes, reaching the ceiling. It was only this tiny speck where the existing network did not wither. The wristcom began lamenting if she stirred even an inch right or left.
"Oh craters... I can't contact Star Command with connections like this..." she cursed. "But I have to try sending SOS! There is some LAN network available, I have to try! If at least someone nearby would catch it!"
Carefully, still balancing on her one leg like a stuttering ballet dancer in her first-ever big stage performance, she craned her neck towards the communicator she kept high in the air. Almost whispering, so that the possible spybots nearby would not hear, she began repeating a distress message.
...to be continued...