Tardily, his visage lopsided into a beseeching, maudlin grimace, Buzz approached Yoka.
"Please, c-calm down, it's just Mira and I. We're not here to hurt you! There's been a horrible mistake, you've been mislead to think I have been t---"
"Katoa, senkin saastainen Tuonelan rakki! Tappamaanko minut olet vihdoin saapunut? Paholaisen sikioe! Oi isaeni, miksi tuomitsit minut taehaen kurjaan kohtaloon, miksi pakotit minut orjaksi, jalkavaimoksi Tuonen Herran?" a myrinx-bursting screech killed Buzz' petition. The woman had retreated in the furthest nook of the stinky, moldy cell.
The door was open... but a hovering demon was guarding it... could she possibly be able to escape through the barricades...? No... the doom was coming closer...
Lightyear was aware of how the girl kept twitching from side to side, as though about to jump past him. She merely resembled a wounded gazelle that was trying with its last strength to flee the approaching hungry pack of lions. Buzz felt as though history was repeating itself: he was back in Kaleva, in his teepee, trying to soften the weeping Yoka-hanen who was lamenting her miserable life as a monster's servant. This time the space ranger just had not destroyed half of her property. Haze was binding his awareness. What to do, what to do? How to make her understand?
The following seconds transformed into an agitated anarchy of stumblings, collisions, and vain attempts to flee. Yoka had decided to use her last ace, and rush away, whatever then would follow. Her nerves were in their breaking point: only a flimsy string of sense held the fragments of reason together. Thus she made a roaring attack of blind rage, ready to knock the fiend out of the way with a well-aimed kick. Buzz was not quite in condition to pounce around like Super Mario, but he had to cease this foul war. A few ducks and painful somersaults, and he ended up clinching the struggling Kalevan in his arms.
The woman's mad howl was not staunched; her bleary soul pictured her being arrested into the fatal pinch of the grim reaper, rather than being finally lifted into safety. A push of shoulder, a jolt of elbow. The rope around her wrists seared her skin, causing only more ache. But she had to fight herself free! She did not want to die in the talons of Hornan aarnikotka.
It was only more terror to Buzz to see her this close after the stifling weeks, and at the same time endeavor to tame her forcibly. "Stop it, Yoka dear! You're hurting yourself!" he implored, more salty tears bursting out from his eyes. "Yoka, my poor Yoka, what has he done you? Mira, help me! I can't hold her still!" His request was quite much as possible as asking a sausage to sprout wings and fly to Andromeda. And Nova rasped reasonably through her respirator that she had none kind of magical tricks in her pockets.
"But I can't keep her like this, I'm hurting her and she's hurting herself..."
Nonetheless, a familiar robot head peeked in to the room just at the moment. XR had whizzed back from his deadlock tournée, alarmed by the brouhaha coming from the other end of the archway.
"Sweet granddaughter of Venus, what the---" he raised an artificial brow when spotting the vista. The he-man archetype Buzz Lightyear was shedding tears, a ferocious woman trying to sink her teeth in the captain's arm... The male's yelps of help yet awakened him in a split nanosecond.
"XR! Do you have anything to calm her down? Tranquillizers, anything? Blast, we can't get her out; she thinks I have come to kill her or something!"
"Phew, what a lady-killer..." the mecha rummaged his cylindrical mid-section, tossing a few incomprehensible objects -including a Barney plushie, beach ball, and bonsai yucca palm- over his shoulder, before extracting an injection needle and a bottle of some liquid. "Egh..." The droid looked repulsively at the sharp, glimmering needle. "Now I don't wanna do this...it's a damsel after all, though not really your basic D.I.D. ..."
"Do you think I want this?" Buzz interjected, "But it'll hurt her a lot less than this! Wait a moment, what is that stuff?"
"Neuro-Paraly-Z-55X, Star Command approved. Though I think they approved this for sedating those Karnian beasts..."
"One microgram, no more! And dilute it!"
Rather reluctantly, the bot dashed to sting the Kalevan. The wasp role did not last long, and the tranquillizer was quickly dosed in her vein. A cacophony of screams and fierce wriggles pursued, but the medicine began working in a flash. Yoka started losing the stamina, and soon flopped listlessly down to rest in Buzz' hold. This variant of Neuro-Paraly-Z did not actually stun the victim, but affected the central nervous system and the nerve impulses to major limbs. So, the girl remained semi-awake, but could raise a fist against nobody due to the muscle-paralyzing effect the drug caused.
Lightyear stood no more. He sunk down onto the flagstones, the slack Kalevan crammed in his arms. Splashing tears around like a malfunctioning fountain, he squeezed the beaten woman hard against his chest. He had not felt her warmth in weeks, not sensed her softness in ages... One large hand found its way to stroke her shaggy mop of hair, while it pressed her head gently on his big, soft shoulder. The woman still was evidently battling, yet could not produce but a shoddy stir to shoo the 'foe' away. Opening the knots of her wrist ropes, Buzz freed her from the last physical pain.
"Shht... it's all right, please don't be afraid..." the male slurred some kind of incoherent mantra. Oh why, why everything had to fall into the chasms of impossibility? Why the life never lingered in blissful valleys of harmony, but always had to be twisted with sorrow? Her presence in his hold did not abate the hatred swelling in his heavy chest, nor thoroughly washed the mourn away. His own wife did not answer to his caresses; he was again the universe's most infernal fiend in her eyes. But there had to be a way to reverse the tragedies, there just had to be!
Blackness, incomprehension embraced his mind. Buzz just wanted to make her understand... see though the thick fog of falsehood... His cheek nuzzled her back of the neck, his lips beginning to fondle her. Such an eternity had passed... everything was so hard to comprehend...
It was as though Mira had read Lightyear's mind. She was goggling at the whole show of desperation from the cube's threshold. And for once, XR's irony sensors had been grounded and no sarcasm current was flowing in them. He was giving a report to Zurg about the quasi-successful mission. The Princess hovered to him, prompted something, and soon fluttered to the recess of rejected love. In her trembling hands, Nova held a Babelfish translator the droid had lent. She adjusted the airborne chair to glide inches above the floor, and somewhat arduously changed her pose under the seatbelts. The Tangean became face à face with the former prisoner, whom the Morphean man kept clasping in a bit uncanny way. Yoka's visage was phlegmatically gawking over his anconal; hence the external eye connection was possible.
Mira sensed the situation bathing in weirdness. She hardly knew the foreign woman; neither quite approved her skeptical, biased, rather bizarre nature. And suddenly she was obliging herself to act like a big sister, had acquired this odd responsibility of trying to hammer some sense under those dreadlocks. Even someone with the IQ of a prune could have apprehended that Buzz' cuddles aided much nothing. Zurg had arranged Mira's brainwashed synapses in order by growling out the differences between Buzz and Buzz. Someone had to do the same for the Indian.
The blue one picked up one of Yoka's drooping hands, taking a concerned gaze straight in her impassive grey irises. The translator had been hacked to twaddle Sivakka.
"Hey, can you hear me?"
Yoka's vision had been blotched with glutinous mist. She was drifting in dark-blue ether, in an atonic sphere of shades, indolence... Why had the pain not yet gushed her broken? From where had this inebriated sensation come from, this inability to move? Or was this the death itself? No... this was the same dull cell, just the same hell as before the intoxication. But... there was no coldness, no wrench, but a mellow warmth instead. Why...? Nonetheless, the Prince of Darkness, Proud Crescent, was still present... only that he was behaving against all the logic. She was actually receiving slow, long kisses from the demon, so much the comprehension had dawned her mind. Then... what was that figure staring at her? That blue face, with those worried pupils... But was not that the Manan haltijatar, who had just guarded the entrance...? Abruptly, she recognized the alien. That was suuremo Sininen. What was she doing here? She seemed to speak... However, the words appeared unclear, until the Kalevan distinguished a perfect pattern of sentences not articulated with Sininen's timid tone, but gibbered in metallic, monotonous emphasis.
"Hei, kuuletko aeaeneni? Oletko kunnossa? Ethaen saeikaehdae, olemme tulleet hakemaan sinut pois taeaeltae. Kukaan ei tee sinulle pahaa, ymmaerraethaen? "
Yoka-hanen's heavy eyelids raised a millimeter, as a minute streamlet of conception was bubbling in her soggy awareness. It was talking to her, in her own language...
"Mit... Mitae tapah--- tuu...?" Her succulent mouth barely formed the sentence. But just a tiny vibration of ether was enough for the translator to catch it and carry it to Mira.
So, there was a connection. The Indian was somewhat in reason despite boisterous, almost unsound rioting earlier. Evil Buzz had not yet shattered the delicate orb of sanity, at least not thoroughly.
Mira bit her lip. How to go onwards? What to utter, what to explain, so that a humanoid from a primitive culture could drink from the goblet of truth, and become sated with understanding? How to depict parallel universes and their threats to an individual, who had so far been unaware even of extraterrestrial life? How to explain believably that her husband had an evil counterpart from a mirror cosmos? She felt the uneasiness jamming a clod in her throat. Evil counterpart... and the good Buzz himself had been evil to Yoka-hanen. But that there was even something eviler existing, a twin-like male...
Twin. That was the magic word. It was not utterly correct, since those two Buzzes were nowise related. But maybe this slightly false interpretation would fill the void, and a tiny trust could be built. And upstairs, Yoka could with her own oculars see how the torturer was an identical copy of 'Proud Crescent', even their beard models matching perfectly nowadays.
Thus, slowly, awkwardly, Nova began the explanation task. With the cloudy stare of a semi-benumbed, the Kalevan gawped at her. The miscellaneous slurping noises coming from Buzz' direction somewhat distracted the fact-illuminating, but Lightyear took no notice of Mira's sharp side comments to stop the kissing for a second. The man had become deaf to the reality, and was chained inside the realm of unbounded, swelling emotions.
Minutes later, Mira sighed the final syllable. She could not figure out more to squeak, and was very unsure whether the story had not even been grasped. Yoka's stupor-ish gaze had not shifted a millimeter, and appeared just as braindead as before. But just when the Tangean was thinking about the laborious job of re-explaining everything, a broken prompt gurgled out from the other woman's throat.
"Kak-- kak-- kak-sois... v... v-eli...?"
Mira's hope leaped up an inch. She was making results. Squeezing lightly the dark-brown hand in her own, she affirmed,
"Juuri niin, sinun miehellaesi on hyvin paha kaksoisveli, joka on vaeaeryydellae kohdellut sinua naein. Ei mitaeaen haetaeae enaeae. Olemme vanginneet sen, joka on petkuttanut meitae kaikkia. Saat itse naehdae kohta taemaen roikaleen", the translator wheezed Mira's response.
"Do you believe me?" she added.
A delirious 'I do not know' answered.
The situation required something more, perhaps verbal interaction between Buzz and his dubious wife. Nova's second attempt to drag Lightyear's attention away from the futile caresses succeeded, and he raised his regard to listen to what the Princess had in mind. Hence, step two in the process of taming one fierce creature was taken. Yoka had to be made to comprehend that her real mate was present, and that he wished to help her just as much as Sininen. A big soft palm lifted the Kalevan's slack head from the shoulder, bringing her glazed mien nose to nose with the watery expression of Buzz.
A muffled squeal welled up from Yoka-hanen's lungs, burbling out in raucous hacks.
The Prince of Tuonela.
Inches away, staring at her.
Then again... why was there such a different hue in the hazed bogey, such an altered sonus in the lore of Manala...? It indeed was Proud Crescent anteriorly, but... then again, it was a fully dissimilar Proud Crescent. That sniveling countenance was not curved into a malicious grin at all. And his eyes... where was that sadistic, soulless glint she feared so much? How much she ever searched for it, there was not even a hint of it. Instead, large tears were rolling down his cheeks, under there shining an appearance extremely pleading. But still, it was he, was it not?
Twin brother...
A petty shred of sunlight crawled through the sackcloth mass of Yoka's mental stormclouds. It cast an ashen lumen above suuremo Sininen's mumbles, giving a minute glow for the gems of truth. A dawn of mind is always a relief that fractures granite-hard burdens to pebbles, and aids digging up these precious jewels from the pits of suspicion. She stared back at those misty blue eyes, for the first time feeling the light caresses of his thumb on her bucca. Then it spoke, not in the weird language of the dark heavens, but in the tongue of her ancestors. The baritone utterances clang with false grammar and broken accent, but there was solace in them, warm calmness... "Rakas, ei tarvita pelaetae, rakas pieni tyttoeni... "
Proud Crescent had a twin brother...? And this was not him...?
Gulping down the acid taste of bitterness scorching his palate, Buzz repeated many erroneously articulated splutters against her lips, searching for trust in the deep grayness of Yoka's irises. During the short, shared weeks of their beginning love, he had learned crumbs of Sivakka, rather subliminally. And right at the moment, he felt it best to begin creating the confidence this way, by telling things in the means most familiar to the Kalevan. Even if the few expressions he knew would sound thoroughly ridiculous. But the translator had no emotions, it never was able to render the feeling behind the syllables, never could convert the desperate love flowing beneath the tone...And the more Buzz lingered in the profundity of that grayness, the more he spotted small streamlets of reborning faith.
The narrow seconds were stretched to decades on the starry pattern of the galaxy. So it felt like, always, during the moments of extreme, anxious waiting. Then, abruptly, he was granted with a sign, which told that his dirge had been at least partly heard. A single tear escaped from the corner of Yoka-hanen's eye, while her heavy-feeling lips were forming a phrase so timid that even Lightyear barely caught it. Nonetheless... this little expression was the treasure he had been seeking for so frantically.
The petite sign of trust....
She understood, at least a weakly.
His lips wiped the teardrop away, sliding down her cheek to unite with her mouth. There was no answer to his deep, burning kisses, but perhaps there would be one day... when the hell would be perished, and the trust built again. Maybe...
*****
Meanwhile in the main chambers of the Nex Crucio fortress, Zurg and Booster were furthermore waiting for the backup. The old emperor sat at the console, snarling menacingly at the malfunctioning communicators. Booster sat in one dim corner, guarding Evil Buzz. This time the Jo-Adian was keeping the snake staff, which had become some sort of a hot potato nobody quite wanted to hold. Even he leered at it utterly disgusted. The viper's slit-eyed head with bared fangs was frowning evilly, the cane's silvery rod shimmering cold light.
Munchapper did not pay attention to the swiveling side-glances of the Shadow, who grumblingly hovered nearby. His malignant blue oculars were constantly sweeping around the oval chamber, ending again and again to rest on that particular shiny serpent. In the endless chambers of evilness and scheming, a new plot was being woven. His lip curling slightly, the fiend decided to take this new invention into his claws.
Zurg was back against him, and that red insufferable mudblood would be easy to distract...
He hovered a tad nearer the quasi-antsy Jo-Adian, and lowered his mocking voice into a mere whisper. "Do you know what you're holding there?" he asked casually, hiding cleverly the intentions of this conversation. As Booster did not figure out what to respond, he went on.
"It's the main weapon of a Nex Crucio cult member... an elegant gun, so to say... heheheh. Do you know where I found it? Want to know to whom it has belonged to?"
"Umm..." the reptilian stole a nervous glance towards Evil Buzz. The ranger could not really comprehend why the foe had bothered to unleash this chitchat.
The bearded man's tone deepened furthermore, its callous drawl starting to put frosty wriggles worm down Booster's spine. "I found it in the dungeons... in a moldy cell where two skeletons were... hehehehe... the second one of them was still holding it... I bet you would die to know who he was..."
"Umh... why would I want to know?" the space ranger murmured. He was eyeing at the snake staff even more loathing.
"Oh but of course you'd want to know... especially because of your dear friend Buzz... You know... it was his forefather who owned that once. Zoxewa Lightyear, a man full of such enviably pure evilness. You know... he used to slaughter incompetent blobs like you with that weapon..."
Now Munchapper's hand was slightly trembling. Second by second, the ugly artificial snake became more and more abominable, as though some dirty demon had possessed it. He figured out nothing to blurt, just cast a semi-angry side glimpse at the enemy and his dark propaganda.
"Hey, you duck-brain! You shall keep your idle trap shut and stay in your puny hole!" Zurg's bass bark came from the console. He had obviously heard fragments of the uncanny chat. But he did not take further notice of it, only swirled back to tinker with the half-rusty knickknacks.
Evil Buzz scowled at Zora's wide back, his thick black brow furrowed deep. That blasted blood-traitor would pay his every toot and moo... he would cringe, rot, the Judas of his glorious inheritance...Gathering back his determination, the Shadow went on with his scheme. Munchapper was reacting just the way he had wished... grown abruptly jumpy, a tad distracted... just a bit more restlessness would be required...
And while drawling more ghostly songs about the Dark Lightyears, Evil Buzz carefully hovered nearer and nearer the Jo-Adian's seat.
"He was still holding the stick in his rotten, gnarled hand... heheheh... ever seen a real, mummified skeleton close by? Or a mummified Lightyear? Hehehehe..."
This latter whisper made Booster's stomach lurch and some gastric acid crawl upwards his gullet. He wanted to throw away the viper cane, as though it had suddenly transformed into some kind of slimy, hideous, wriggling Swamp Thing.
It was now, or never.
Out of the blue, Evil Buzz took a flash-quick spurt with his hover boots, and lunged towards the Jo-Adian. It had been a mistake to chain his wrists from the front, since that made him able to use his fists rather freely despite the ion handcuffs. As the ranger's hands were feeble from nervousness, it was rather effortless for the Shadow to repeat the trick XR had done to him.
Snap, and the horrible weapon was back in his grip. Adjusting quickly the plasma-laser pulse level towards maximum, he made the snake belch a blast of green light towards the red alien. Booster had only a brief second to yelp something incoherent, before he was lolling on the stone slabs, looking horribly lifeless. The sudden hullabaloo had awakened Zora, who swung around in his chair. It must have been a sheer reflex that made him bounce off from the seat, but it saved his soul at that instant. A second later the stool had transformed into a smoldering wreck. Zurg had no time to ponder deeply what on cracked quasar had happened behind him, he only saw that Evil Buzz was loose and that the chamber was too swiftly being converted into a flaming inferno.
If he only had had something with which to defend himself now... anything... no, no time for that... he had to stop Evil Buzz and tear that staff from him...
Amazingly quick reflexes the Emperor had a man for his age, not to mention the flexibility, which made him throw somersaults and dodge the missiles. Or then it was the sheer panic that heated the adrenalin. Yet, arduously he was advancing towards the Shadow on the other side of the chamber. If only the menace had not had the ability to fly...
These dreadful seconds of anarchy were like a deathmatch between a fierce dragon and an unarmed knight. Evil Buzz' cackles were echoing across the musty den of ancient evilness, mocking the futility of Zoxedaszeĉ's kangaroo imitation.
"Give it up, you wrinkled old fool... it's time for the blood-traitor to decay... hahahaha. You and your stupid son ruined my universe, now it shall be my day of revenge! I thought I might have benefited from your Dark Arts knowledge, but it's so futile. You'd be just a sting in my flesh, with your pathetic prophecies about the light. Oh so you have smelled the death's putrid stench, well smell it AGAIN! And rot in peace! HAHAHAHAH!" The hoarse laughter discorded together with the cracks of breaking furniture. The viper kept puking the green flames so thick and fast, that this blaring, fatal fire was making even Evil Buzz' eyes burn with green, half-blinding afterimages.
And suddenly, it was the enemy's turn to fall. Something yanked his robes hard, and he was torn down from the highnesses. Painfully the Shadow was being smashed on his back onto the cold flagstones. The outline of a huge, vicious figure was being delineated above him: the muscle-bulging torso of Emperor Zurg. In the sickly sallow lumen of the stone chamber, he appeared like some sort of huge goblin with his newly received bruises, messy shrubbery of black locks, his hairy chest and iron-hard thick arms bare between the rags of his almost fully torn shirt. But the most furious strength was sparkling in his dark eyes which were burning like two raving bonfires.
How the old man had leaped behind the Shadow and overtaken him briefly like this, he could not understand. Nevertheless, despite the handcuffs, he was still holding firmly the snake staff, ready to turn his rival into ashes. But before his thumb pushed the trigger, a hairy fist cramped itself around his wrist, obliging the viper's grimacing mouth to point elsewhere. Evil Buzz literally squealed with wrench, saliva gurgling from his lopsided mouth. Zurg's physical force was horrible, seemingly far beyond Evil Buzz' one, even though the foe was by no means any wad-filled teddy bear.
The snake's maw was turning away from Zora's thorax, the Shadow's fingers sliding off from the trigger... But if he could grab the weapon with his left hand, and fry the cursed blood-traitor...
The effort ended to a sickening crunch, just before a blinding zap of green light curtained the scene under its appalling orb.
****
Down in the dungeons XR awoke with an alarm to notice that Zurg's grooved visage had vanished from the portable screen, and had been replaced with the ominous sounds of evident battle. Emerald green flames were faintly dancing in the ceiling the monitor now depicted. Several times he tried calling the Emperor, but in vain. His queries were answered only with the sizzle of those dodgy green blasts.
The robot twirled about on his caterpillars to meet Mira, Buzz, and Yoka, who were furthermore crouching in the same corner of the cell.
"Red alert! Something has happened upstairs! We have to get up there and fast!"
...to be continued...