Chapter 3

Planet Zebes

Samus' ship slipped into the lower atmosphere of Planet Zebes with little effort; the thick black upper clouds flashed violently with jagged streaks of lightning. As the little ship broke through the upper layer of clouds, the ship became soaked in the torrential rain as it descended toward the surface, and with a flip of a switch, the anti-gravity thrusters initialized and brought the vessel to a sound halt a couple of feet off of the ground.

Samus stepped out of her ship and landed on the water soaked ground and punched a few commands into her power suit causing her ship to secure itself. Samus had followed Ridley's trail back to the Planet Zebes after the explosion at the Ceres Space Station; the fact that Ridley returned here was a little surprising since her last visit had obliterated the pirate's base. The rain pattered off of her suit and soon little rivulets of water began streaming down her visor; lighting struck nearby, the flash highlighting the power suit against the dark and rocky terrain.

"Welcome home girl", Samus thought to herself, recalling what memories she could of her childhood. She remembered playing with the Chozo young and training under the watchful eye of their tribal leader Old Bird. There was a time in Samus' life when she lived with her own parents, but those days were vague to her even though the face of her father and mother were as clear as if they stood before her now. Her parents had been murdered in an attack by the Space Pirate legion; afterwards, the Chozo had arrived to investigate, finding only the young Samus as the sole survivor. The Chozo themselves had been harassed by the Space Pirate general, Ridley, and his company of minions. The Chozo were told in a prophesy of a stranger that would become their defender and little did the Space Pirate leader Ridley know when he left the young Samus alive that day, that she would one day return to devastate his forces and free the Chozo from their fear of further attacks. Samus' first attempts at stopping the pirates failed, forcing the Chozo to leave Planet Zebes and take refuge on nearby Amidos where they reside to this day.

Samus let out another heavy sigh and snapped back to reality; she carefully took in her immediate surrounding. She had landed in the Crateria region of Zebes, the very place she had grown up at. The valley seemed dead, no visible signs of life were evident and the rain that poured from the open skies tested as being acidic. The atmosphere had changed greatly since her youth, and exposure to it would mean massive trauma to vital organs. Nearby, Samus spotted a door; the same door she had used to escape from Planet Zebes as the labyrinth of tunnels collapsed under explosive force beneath the surface from her first assault. Samus ran for the door and blasted it open with her arm cannon, sliding past the retracting metal and into the dimly lit tunnel. A purple haze shifted lazily within the tunnel Samus had entered; some type of green algae had made its home on the dampened walls of the rocky corridor.

Samus followed the cave till it dropped off into a crevice, small outcropping of rock created ledges just big enough for her to jump down to the blue door she had spotted at the bottom. Once through the door, Samus found herself in the abandoned escape shaft she had used to flee the impending doom of the pirate base; she leapt off from the top platform and fell down one of the sides of the three hundred foot drop. She fell gracefully, unconcerned for her landing, knowing fully that the suits material would break the laws of gravity and instead of falling at 9.8 feet per second it would only be around four feet per second. The Chozo technology was amazing and she could never help but be amazed at how advanced the species was, but at the same time, how primitive they chose to live. Though the impact would not be like that of a normal falling object, she braced for the landing, as the inertia would still jolt her from the fall.

With a successful landing, the bounty huntress knew what she would find behind the next door; the Mother Brain's lair, the area of Tourian that the hideous genius behind the pirate legion claimed as its own. Only a few pirates were granted permission to enter Tourian, those that overlooked and worked the research on Metroids, and her two highest-ranking officials, Kraid and Ridley. The Mother Brain's lair lay in ruins as Samus entered the room, the life-support and data lines that kept the brain running and informed hung lifelessly from the broken cell the gray matter once occupied. Shards of glass remained, hanging like stalactites from the cells metal structure; the same held true for the Zebites barriers the Mother Brain used to protect her from unauthorized intruders.

The barriers hadn't held up too well when they crossed Samus Aran's powerful arm cannon; she had seared the fleshy material behind the glass tube rather easily as she advanced in on the Mother Brain. The fight with her had been no easy chore; the entire battle consisted mostly of her dodging plasma beams and Rinkos, all the while trying to stay perched atop a ledge above the boiling acid beneath her. In the end, she had defeated the hideous creature and won victory over the pirates; or so she had thought, but now it was more than obvious to her that she had failed.

Samus made her way out of the hazy room and much to her surprise, Samus found an elevator in the next room. The explosion must have caused a change in the interior tunnels of the planet, she thought to herself; power still ran through the elevator and out of curiosity, the bounty hunter rode the device down. She expected the elevator shaft to be destroyed at one point but signs of repair could be seen across the tubular glass structure as it descended through the rock and soon the platform came to a rest at the end of its track.

Bluish-purple rock surrounded Samus and she immediately knew where she was; Brinstar had been notorious for its rich Denzium rock, a strong molten formation mostly used for securing restricted areas. Samus recognized her exact location instantly as being where she had first entered Zebes on her previous mission, and if her bearings were right, she would be able to find the morph ball to her right. After a quick climb over a wall, Samus found that she had indeed been right; the hologram that represented morph ball technology dimly spun on a pedestal and as she passed her hand over the hologram, her suit came to life. She didn't resist the suits forceful movement of her body and she soon found herself rolled into a small ball. From the floor, a compartment opened up and two separate halves of the morph ball appeared enshrouding the bounty hunter in its metal before clamping on.

Samus rose out of the ball reading the screen that appeared in her visor, "Morph Ball obtained." "This should make things a little more simpler", she thought to herself while making her way through a couple more rooms, collecting two packs of missiles along the way. As Samus collected the last pack of missiles located on a shelf against a wall, a small beam of yellow light engulfed her. She covered her visor and glanced up the wall to find an eyeball looking camera shining a spotlight on her; she fired her cannon at it but the camera was unaffected. She quickly rolled out from its gaze and once out of sight, the bright light turned off. "Damn. What the hell was that?" She asked herself, heading back too the elevator and taking it up.

A/N Well the end of another chapter. This story is gonna be really hard to do without making it too boring. Hopefully the next chapter will pick up a little more speed though. I know for sure that the fifth chapter should be full of drama.