Fusty silence had taken the throne in the Nex Crucio fortress. After Zora's hissing about his past horrors, everyone was feeling as though they had tennis balls stuck in their throats. The blue dullness kept whipping the monitors. Another skeleton room grimaced evilly in the screen. Zurg's fist banged the switcher, and the disgusting vista was instantly banished. His ever gloomier-growing mind did not want to meet any more mortuaries.
Ten or so cubicles had whizzed past, when Mira's voice abruptly rang behind him.
"Hey, hey, wait! Can you go back to the room where the skeleton was sitting against the wall? Um, well, I think I saw something, something else than the-- eh... old bodies. Well... uh, not completely sure, but I eh..."
A bit aversely, the grumpy Emperor rewound the software. Soon the particular cubicle was flickering morbidly in one of the ceiling monitors.
"There, look! Can you zoom in to the very left corner?"
The squad gasped, as the camera crawled inside the darkest nook of the cell. There was a man crouching on the floor, hugging his knees, trembling all over as though an invisible washing machine had been milling him. His solidified mien told that seemingly every byte of reason had been sucked out of his brains. His eyes were staring irrationally at some distant nook, as though that remote target had been the only spot where they could find a fragment of rest.
"It's Buzz!" A choir of comprehension chimed in the vault. If it were not for Mira's quick remark, the rescue troop would have perhaps never found the Captain in the crypt's bowels.
"Sniveling quasars!" Zurg bellowed, "We have to get him out of there, he is bonkers! My son is so chipmunk-brained already; he does not need to reach the amoeba level. And it looks like that his twerp fake twin has shrunk Buzz' puny scull at least fifty percent."
Zora was to dive towards the cabin's entrance, obviously willing to rush straight down to the dungeons. But XR halted him halfway, hawking,
"Hey hey, has the gloriously ultra-intelligent overlord forgotten a few things, or is His Supremely Mighty Bucketheadness just a plain buckethead? Hello? You didn't even check out the location of the nice salon where Buzz is having his joyful holiday. And..."
"...we have to find the Kalevan too. I think it's best we go and get them out of there the same time", Nova cut in, knowing the robot might slip something controversial when it came to mentioning females. "And uh... don't start quarreling about my state, but... I think it's best that XR and I go down there."
"What? YOU? But..." the three men exclaimed simultaneously.
"I know, I know, I'm nothing but OK. But since the backup hasn't arrived yet, we need strong guys to keep an eye on Evil Buzz while someone goes down... grhgghhh... ghorgh..." a cacophony of unpromising coughs burst out of her mouth, while she clamped her arms to hold her ribs. Briefly surviving from the dilemma, she added, "Ugh... look, I can go if XR gets me a hover chair so I can sit, or something. And I got the gas mask. Okay? And there shouldn't be any real danger down there. We've seen Evil Buzz has no henchmen whatsoever. He's completely alone."
But the android had become one huge exclamation mark expressing rebel stronger than the French Revolution. "What do you mean I'm not a guy? Or a strong one? I got bigger biceps than that purple Hulk Hogan -wannabe!" The nutty robot began flexing his metallic arms as though he had flirted with 42. Mira rolled her eyes. It was sometimes so infernally hard to bang sense inside those insane microchips.
"I'm not doubting your ability to be a bigheaded showoff", she sighed "But there may be obstacles or locks only you can open. And I'm not sending you there alone. Don't even bother to ask why."
There were many barrels full of sense in the Princess' gibbering, although it sounded very foolhardy for her to take part in even petite adventures. The dillydallying of the backup slightly worried the quartet, though. They had been able to contact Commander Nebula via the age-old com devices, yet had lost the connections quite too soon. But meanwhile the channels had been open, the situation had been clarified, and the old moustache-man had literally fallen off from his seat with thunderstruck. After Zeb had found his chair again, he had been more morose than ever. One evident reason to this was that the male he regarded as a doating onionhead, had been more than 200% right with his assumptions. In any case, the Commander had promised to send troops swiftly, especially when hearing that Evil Buzz Lightyear, by some obscure reason, had risen up from the oblivion. Half-invalid or not, such a snaky foe needed a good heap of custodians around him. The same the Tangean tried to explain initially.
Obviously more than just a few nanodiodes had busted inside the medieval gadgets. So it was no wonder why the satellite connections faded away and left only cosmic radiation to crackle in the amplifiers. Then again, the distorting force fields around the cursed fortress were working almost irritatingly well, and made furthermore the wristcoms tongue-tied.
Murmuring sulkily, Zurg slouched back at the console to continue the irksomely brain-curtailing cube-swap. As the robot ranger had scribbled down the coordinates of Buzz' burrow, the search went on. And it did not require a million years to locate Yoka-hanen's cell. Yet, the view was not promising at all. The camera displayed her sprawling on the floor, but that was merely all the monitor barfed out. The girl was obviously alive since she was breathing. Yet, the Kalevan was reclining back against the surveillance, so her face was hidden. The ripped clothes and the tangled heap of matted hair still narrated their own unpleasant story... No nurture or care could be expected from the demonic mirror universe menace.
Presently the sick psychopath was hovering in his corner, looking like an oversized and extremely ugly bat. His vile blue eyes under the shadowy brows sparkled with fury. Apparently his dark heart was gradually surviving from the temporal stupor Zurg had given it. Nobody quite paid attention how his scowl kept measuring the room, there and then hitting the viper cane that was held every now and then by a different person.
He was not going to surrender to that evanescent scum... There still had to be an open gate to freedom and new glory...
The scan software was moaning. No more cubes were left, and they hid only two prisoners who still possessed the wisp of life. Although both Zurg and Booster furthermore opposed Mira's stubbornness, she and XR were preparing to descent into the stomach of this subterranean whale like two Jonahs. As the tin man's inners were fighting against all known physical laws, containing vastly more junk than naturally could be crammed inside such a minute space, it was no wonder he could conjure up a nice collapsible, remote-controlled hover chair for the Princess. The only thing she needed to do, was to move her fingers a bit on a feathertouch pad, and the seat would fly to Mars if she wished. Zurg slapped the portable monitor in XR's hand, so that they could keep in touch while the adventure to the center of the earth advanced. Thus, the duo flitted out of the room, following the map on the screen. There would be umpteen escalators ahead, sneering at them with their moldy walls.
*****
It stared at him, mocked him. Ceaselessly. With its inhuman, hollow eyes. It was as though it had been the embodiment of the Utmost Evil itself. Wherever he tried turning his eyes, it always seemed stealing glances at him, sideways, sneakily... its lopsided, grayed jawbone hanging in a devilish scoff... It mocked all the goodness, the light... Light had probably never embraced this deceased man even in the days of its existence...
His curse... All his life he had basked in the false illusion of honor... he carried nothing honorable in his veins...Only darkness...
Buzz crouched in the furthest nook of his cell, back glued against the craggy wall. Madness was burning in his inners, disbelief, horror, terror against the past and the future. Present did not exist; there was only the rumbling tumult of chaos racing through the infinities. He wanted to run away, fly away, make his eyes blind and ears deaf to this, immune to the shock that had made his every emotion bleed... The earth had been crushed from under his feet, and he was only falling, falling, falling...
The shock of finding out that his cherished family was nothing but a myriad of Dark Side's pawns, was almost as horrible as discovering the truth about his father. And, this very moment, how it bathed in sheer anarchy... Evil Buzz out there, forcing him to obey humbly his every sick command... and she... Yoka... There was no coherent thread in Buzz Lightyear's awareness. Every nightmare-like reflexion was merging into a great, dark cloud of perturbation, where reason had neither place nor authority. This made it impossible for the Captain to think anything clearly.
Mind-splitting confusion and panic always have secondary ghosts pursuing them. Buzz was no superstitious, but somehow he had grown utterly afraid of those two skeletons sharing the cube with him. He should have understood they were nothing but empty shells of decayed humans, nothing that could have harmed him. But in his perturbed illusions, they were alive, those inhuman slaves of the Dark Side. Especially the carcass leaning against the wall, Jardaz Lightyear, was the very worst personification of his terror.
Oh, the innocent, naïve curiosity that had filled Buzz when he had flipped through the Lightyear holo-photo album, and dashed against the ancient holograph picturing the two snobby-looking brothers in their velvets and frills. Oh, how there had been the thrill of adventure hovering above the picture, concealing the mysterious disappearance of these two respectable family members...
Respectable? Just as respectable as Mizar and his enigma. Buzz initially wished he would have never heard about these sagas of darkness, nor asked... Ignorance in all its dullness would have been such a heavenly bliss.
His mother's lullaby was fluttering above the screaming disbeliefs...But it did not soothe, like it tens of years ago had lulled the wee toddler asleep. Now, it remained there as a horrid poltergeist risen up from his most profound subliminal chasms.
It seemed that the more this Lightyear descendant was forced to hear hidden family atrocities, the more his sore mind became injured. Buzz' subconscious began hustling out memories that normally would remain doggo. At first the fidgety hallucination of the young woman curling her hair... Then, as the Morphean had fallen yesterday inside his restless incubus, more long-forgotten subliminal gremlins had been dug out.
The screams... He still could not fully understand what they were. The woman, whom he knew now to be his deceased mother, had been pleading to save her life...
Was he hearing the last moments of his mother howling inside his scull?
But that was impossible. He truly could not. Or... could he?
But had not his father told that he had been asleep, snoozing in a whole different room, when the assassins had ended the course of the poor Adi? Had not that saved his frail existence, the sanctuary of his cradle? But could his wee mind through the curtains of sleep have still heard, however faintly, the miserable end of one young soul?
He rocked his body back and forth, stuttering aloud half-incoherent mumbles. He wanted that lullaby to cease, he wanted Jardaz to stop his dead, mocking stare... no, it was all too much to bear... And where to shift the thoughts? To Evil Buzz and his future plans? He was his cringing puppet, he had to be ready to serve the Dark Master... with appalling consequences, if he did not obey. The vile twin wanted away from this planet, and it would be up to the space ranger to arrange his flee and new rise...
He wanted to scream aloud...
Abruptly, through the chaotic cerebral miasma churning anteriorly his vision, he saw the wall sliding open with a hollow rattle. Was the ghoul coming again to torture him...?
Buzz actually had to rub his eyes several times with both fists and pick his ears clean from earwax, before grasping who stood behind the bars. Jaw drooping listlessly open, he for a few seconds watched how a very familiar-looking robot was breaking the locks of the grating, another very familiar figure of a blue woman hovering in a chair beside it. The air was oozing with burning alloy, and finally, even the heavy bars were escaping from the view.
"Eygh. Cheerful company, eh?" XR launched his entrée sarcasm, leering at the skeletons. "Ok let's say I sometimes prefer silent roommates, but not actually this silent."
Mira's frown made the bigmouth mecha shut up. "Buzz, are you all right?" She hovered nearer the petrified male, who still recoiled in the cranny like a cockroach fleeing light.
Buzz' twitchy mouth blurted a few times something that sounded like 'agagagagaga', before rediscovering his English skills.
"MIRA? XR? How... h-how..."
"Long story. Will take a hundred years to tell", the robot confirmed. "If I just say it involves one darkside-paranoid ex-emperor and a lot of bawling, you should get the point."
Nova evaluated at Lightyear with concern, since the man had not yet lifted even a quarter of a leg up. "You okay? Can you walk? It's a bit of a long ascending and well... we still should try and find your wife. Your cell was nearer so we came here first."
His maw still hanging open, the addressed male arduously scampered up, yet grimacing with pain. His muscles were furthermore throbbing stingingly after the several plasma-laser shots he had received. His Pulsar 3000 Envirosuit had reedy holes here and there, but it was stellar amounts of more intact than Mira's almost molten one. Buzz eyed just as suspiciously at the girl as she did goggle at him. As there were different levels of suit wreckage, there were diverse physical conditions. The male at least was able to walk, and did not need to wear oxygen respirators.
Confusion spanked the Morphean even more ailingly. What on Mercury had happened? He had once arrived here in order to rescue the Tangean and Yoka, but initially everything seemed to be thoroughly upsy-daisy. Mira could well read his bamboozled mien, adding to the android's gibbering, "Your father's up there. He brought XR and Booster along and arrested the umm... you know Evil Buzz Lightyear was behind this, right?"
"Uhh... yeah."
Nova coughed, a slight puce tint warming up her cheeks. "Erm... I thought it was you who lured me here... and uhh..." she was to include 'tried to kill me', but clogged her tongue and only piped a small 'sorry'.
Buzz had gotten finally on his feet, taking support from the sooty wall. His whole left side felt nastily floppy, and his knees kept having a jellyish sensation in them. The blue room was lightly spinning in his vision. XR offered him a walking stick as though the Captain had been a 200-year-old grandpa.
"I hope we're not taking these chums with us too", the chatterbox made a mow at the skeletons, wondering the slight familiarity in the low-browed and big-jawed skulls. "Have I met them before? They remind me of something... no... couldn't have met them, they look as old as Jedi Master Yoda. Hmh. Maybe I have a busted association sensor."
"You have met them, in a way..." Lightyear glared grimly, not quite fancying the robot's joking attitude, "You see the descendant of their shame in front of you." Part of the bewilderment was now erupting as self-reproaches, making Buzz bury his face briefly in his hands. "I'm nothing but filth! Horrible filth who has nothing but the legacy of killers and diabolical monsters inside him!" As he lifted his visage back up, embarrassment and hatred were warping his expression. "Everyone is just like Zurg! And those..."
But Mira put up a hand to hush the bluster. "Buzz, we know, and we're sorry about it. We're not accusing you about anything. Let's get away from here."
It definitely did not need more roaming driveling to comprehend that those nasty mummies were his ancestors, and that Evil Buzz had dumped his mirror universe twin in the same chamber with them just to scare the living meteors out of him. Typical atrocity propaganda of the ruthless psychopath. Not once glancing back, Lightyear limped out of the chamber of terrors with his rescuers.
The stone wall was sliding back into its slot, leaving Jardaz and Zoxewa to decay in their eternal tomb. The moment the mural clicked shut with a forceful thud, the sitting skeleton crackled broken and collapsed on the flagstones. It did not stare or cackle any longer... only a faint dust cloud hovered above it for a while, before the ill cubicle sunk into a black silence.
******
The stale vault was getting narrower again. The battered, descending escalators were slippery with moss and fungi. This compartment looked shabbier than any of the other dungeons so far. XR's spotlight showed how bricks had fallen out of the grained walls. Contrary to Evil Buzz' beliefs about the everlasting durability of this place, time was indeed getting the upper hand of it.
And this lair of terrors earned to rot, to perish away...
XR was keeping contact with Zurg via the portable screen. The triplet was limping, rolling, and hovering towards Yoka's cube, which was situated a few floors below Buzz' one. Nonetheless, it appeared that the surveillance system had some defects in these parts of the rock titan. Thus the map was not all that glass clear. The cell number was known, but the corridor where it was supposed to crouch, was initially lost. So the searchers kept meandering in false archways, finding only a mildewy billion of cul-de-sacs. As Mira had experienced before, all those 'guide plates' on the murals were so patinated and worn-out, that they helped the team as much as a bottle of flower perfume aided fighting killer bees .
During the wandering, Nova and the robot summarized the happenings, and Buzz briefly detailed what his foe had plotted. He found unpleasant squirms going down his back, as he thought how he during the infernal trouble time had neglected all the aid Zora and co. had offered. Yet, the uncanny obscurity fluttering around his father was there to amaze the most. The expectations of a new Dark Lord raising, how he had known that Buzz had fallen back to the Dark Side while being lost in Kaleva... The younger Lightyear felt odd, unexplainable shame in his heart, not having courage to peek into the monitor himself and see his father's severe face. Apparently huge scolds were waiting for him up there... On the other hand, Buzz' indebtedness was only accumulating. If it was not for Zurg, he had never been healed by tha-grydda... if it was not for Zurg, the whole fight against the extragalactic blobs and their horrid starfleet had probably gone down the toilet... if it was not for Zurg, he would still be languishing with his mummified ancestors... Although he felt such embarrassment, he would probably dash to hug his father tight as soon as they would rise up from this ¦eol.
Then his whacked-up synapses recalled the aim of this searching. Yoka... he was going to meet her again, close her in his arms, kiss her until she would faint... A jubilant warmth streamed in his chest, pushing aside all the sepulchral coldness. The first feeble smile lit up his face.
Nonetheless, Mira's next sentence shattered the transient illusions, as though she had read his mind. "Umm... I'm sorry to say, but we really don't know how your wife is. She didn't look well in the monitor."
Lightyear's visage sunk back in its previous glumness.
Confusion, confusion...
The corridor was branching off again into two diverse directions. A small brazen plaque below an empty torch holster was trying to explain something with unreadable scribbles. This seemed to be the very rear part of the compartment: the triplet had snuffed every other crypt so far. Buzz' nervousness was growing faster than an exponential function; he wanted to find his wife with any cost. Due to his antsy anticipations, Mira made a compromise.
"XR, lend us a lantern and we'll take this second tunnel with Buzz. You take the left one." So, they selected separate paths. After a few minutes of strolling, the invalids had luck. At the rear end of the narrow passage gleamed a phosphorescent plate with number 144000 splatted on it. This was again one of the curiosities of this place's architecture: cell numbers were clear as starlight, whereas all other signposts were as readable as Klingon upside down. The same applied to the umpteen staircases: a simple elevator structure would have caused a lot less aching legs. But who knew, perhaps the ancient cult had had its reasons for this kind of tangled complexity.
Ants were teeming down Buzz's spine; a titanium band was strangling his throat. He stopped anteriorly the heavily sealed stone door, panting slightly due to the air's extreme mustiness. The all-purpose laser cutter XR had tossed him, was slipping in his sweaty hands. But he managed to activate it, and soon the air was sizzling with the sounds of melting metal. Crack, and the sliding wall's lock gave in. After a few tugs, the mural began rattling tardily aside. Lightyear merely squirmed on his spot, biting his lips, ready to lunge inside when there would be a gap big enough for his broad shoulders. He so sorely missed his dearest; he just wanted to carry her out of this nightmare...
However, as Yoka's cubicle came into a better view, something rather unexpected happened. Buzz had had the impression, just as Mira had told, that the girl would be comatosely sprawling somewhere there in the dust, ready to be collected up. Nonetheless, the man felt a blindingly painful jolt in his stomach as he entered the cube. He hasped wheezingly for breath, awakening a split second later to hear Mira's yelp,
"Look out!"
A brown, miry heel zoomed millimeters past his chin as he ducked. Horrible falsetto screech followed, beginning to thunder in the hollow archway with hundreds of echoes. The space ranger duo perching in the now full-open doorway met the rickety's source face to face.
It was the Kalevan woman, swaying in the middle of the room, looking absolutely awful. She was backing towards the rear wall like some panic-struck animal, squealing incomprehensible curses with her own language. The Indian's wrists were tied behind her back, but she had ripped violently the ankle ropes to shreds, thus being able to stand. She was using the last crumbs of her stamina to storm like a rampaging rhino. Yoka-hanen apparently was somewhat afraid of Nova's bizarre appearance, because she had no courage to kick-attack again. Perhaps that hovering creature was hiding some disgusting torture devices inside that flying chair and war mask.
White smog lingered anteriorly her eyes. No no, not the pain again... Not again... hour after hour, day after day, excruciating wrench... This was the eternal Tuonela, where the minds became rotten and hope perished. She did not want to sense what was coming, she did not want to see anymore, not hear, not suffer. Perhaps it would have been better, if she had gone away together with her emo, sunken into the oblivion instead of rising up above the clouds with those glistening white carriages. Beautiful cream-coated falsity was everything. The carriages had landed straight anteriorly the gates of Manala. That man, or demon, or whatever, to whom her father had given her, had to be the Mana, the Perkele himself. The Dark Prince of his underworld kingdom... and again he was there, ready to pierce her with that satanic, soul-ripping stare... When would the sanity-turmoiling cold laughter commence? When would the green light of pain gush her again...?
Yoka could not comprehend the difference between Buzz and the Buzz in her delirious state of mind, neither she had yet recognized Mira.
Lightyear was still holding his aching stomach, wheezing like a leaking balloon. Utterly shocked, he gawped at the ferocious woman. Was... was that supposed to be Yoka? His, his precious Yoka, his dearest, looking as though she had lost the faintest lights, not to mention her condition. Her garments were mutilated into rags; her once so sleek hair was hanging in shaggy, greasy dreadlocks over her face. She had lost weight a great deal and just received bruises instead. All the roundness she had achieved, while eating the strong food of the Lightyear household, had melted away. The girl was just as skinny as when he for the first time had met her after the bear slaughter.
Hot, bitter tears started trickling down Buzz' cheeks, his fists clenching with whitening knuckles. The taste of acid blood filled his mouth, as he unnoticed had bitten his lower lip broken, in his mad anger towards a certain sadistic devil. What had Evil Buzz done to his Yoka?
Just at this moment, it dawned on him why the Kalevan was acting that way. The Shadow's cackle was ringing in his ears: The chick can't recognize the difference, thinks it's you who's doing this to her...So, she thought Buzz had come to pommel the living quasars out of her...
No, no, this was horrible. The impersonation had thoroughly mangled the little trust the Indian had had towards him. He had to make her understand he was not the fiend of her nightmares, but that he had come to free her from the chains of this hell. Merely sobbing, he approached her, arms spread wide open.
"Yoka, it's me! We have come to get you out of here, not to hurt you!"
A fierce snarl coming from the shadows told that his plea had not been understood.
Still more to come.