Gamora lurked in the shadows of the mining gantry and readied her sword as she counted down in her head. In the distance Peter's tape deck slowly wound down, streaming out his music for all to hear.

Awesome Mix Tape Vol2; The Bangles: hazy shade of winter.

* Time, Time time. See what's become of me? *

She peered around the corner cautiously, checking both the sword and her target pistol and tensed her muscles. It couldn't be long now, she thought, as she mentally counted down. Three…two… one

The Charges blew.

Gamora ran.

*Time, time time, see what's become of me*

*While I looked around for my possibilities*

She pushed all distractions from her mind as she broke cover and sprinted down the gantry: the generations of miners of Knowhere had eaten the flesh and bone of the Celestial away to either side as they perused viable deposits of pineal matter, leaving an rough arch of intact bone hovering above the neon lights of the town like a bridge. This was where a handful of sharpshooters had pinned down Yondu and his men when he'd come to Knowhere. It was a good spot to defend, and a very, very stupid one to attack: no cover, one way in, one way out, and a hell of a drop to either side. If you wanted a place to hold hostages, you'd not be disappointed.

*I was so hard to please*

Unsurprising: Papa Thanos didn't raise fools.

*Look around*

*Leaves are brown*

*And the sky is a hazy shade of winter*

Gamora ran down the centre of the bridge as the first set of mining charges went off behind her, kicking out a cloud of dust and shards of bony shrapnel, giving her precious little cover but perhaps confusing their sensors for long enough for her to get some speed up. The first drone came at her out of the dust a moment later, but she swatted it aside with a shot from her laser and focused, putting it from her mind as she sped down the bridge towards the Blue figure waiting at its centre. She had to hit the centre before the next set of charges went off: if in doubt surprise the enemy.

If faced with an un-assailable objective, don't assault it: demolish it.

There was a distinctive crack of ionizing air and a plasma bolt shot past here head, close enough to singe hair. She saw Nebula drop her aim, and she jumped up just in time as her sister put the next round low and in front of her, forcing her to vault over it to prevent the splash-damage burning off her feet.

She staggered as she landed and fired of a shot, making Nebula flinch back, when the next set of charges went off and the bridge shook under her. Gamora grinned grimly, she had a plan to get down from here, and she was willing to bet that her sister didn't. Nebula would have to run, or fall.

*Hear the Salvation Army band*

*Down by the riverside's, there's bound to be a better ride*

*Than what you've got planned*

Nebula dropped the plasma gun, but didn't run. She drew her Kali sticks with a crackle of electricity, and ginned at Gamora charged.

Which was stupid, thought Gamora, because how was she going to get off this bridge unless…

Gamora looked to the ship hovering off the side of the bridge to Nebula's left, an then and only then noticed the one slowly rising into view of her right, and suddenly Gamora realised that she didn't have a clue which of the two identical ships was the Milano and which was the Barracuda. Which was a very big problem because she needed to jump onto one of them to save her friends, but needed to take out the other one before it could shoot her down, and the time available to make the call was somewhat limited by the fact she'd just blown up the structural supports for the big ass arch she was standing on.

That said, This isn't the craziest situation I've ever been in with my sister. She thought as she leapt, sword signing and pistol already picking out her target.

*Carry A gun in your hand*

Earlier that day…

Peter Jason Quill, striped down to shirtsleeves, grunted as he and Drax man-handled another box of Nova M.R.E rations up thought the lower hatch of the Milano and onto the ship. Groot, stood patently on the outside of the ship with a dozen of the crates held in one weirdly overlong arm, and was handing them the boxes one at a time with his other hand so they could stow them, while Gamora ran thought the checklist on an infoglass to make sure they had everything they needed for their trip to recover the infinity stone.

*Freeze-frame on Starlord*

Sisters: part one. Home invasion

Victim One: Peter Jason "Starlord" Quill

*Resume*

Quill was, Gamora noticed , unsurprisingly talking non-stop. And he'd taken by far the most breaks out of the four, and insisted on having his choice of music playing on the tape deck while they worked.

Awesome Mix tape Vol 2: Dolly Parton; Nine to five.

"I mean not that I'm complaining…." Complained Quill, for the third time in half an hour. "But wasn't Rocket supposed to be helping with this at some point? I mean, wasn't he supposed to be the one checking stuff on the infoglass so we could divvy this work out between more people and each do less? Not that I'm sore but… no. No I'm sore. I am physically sore, and I blame him for having to do so much schlep work."

Gamora rolled her eyes, and checked the contents of the box matched the label on the outside before ticking it off her list.

"Funny that, because I distinctly recall at the start of this saying that the three physically strongest of us should load the crates, and when I pointed out that that was me, Drax and Groot someone got insulted and defensive and took off his over-shirt in a fine display of Terran macho posturing and then immediately pulled a muscle because he refused to do warm ups, Quill. So, Starlord, if you've re-thought your attitude about ingrained gender rolls a bit…"

"I'm just saying that Ranger Rick should be helping too!" said Quill, quickly. "Or at least, I don't know, use his knack for making go-go-gadget gadgets to cook up some sort of robot to do the heavy lifting for us. It's an efficiently thing, Gamora, don't go making this political and shit just because I kind of did first. I mean, this is clearly a job that needs mechanising somehow."

"I disagree." Rumbled Drax, taking a fifty pound crate of medical supplies from Groot as if it weighed nothing and putting it on the top shelf, to Quills chagrin. "I have always found the endorphins released by physical exercise and the sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing manual toil and being able to see tangible evidence of one's own labours hugely satisfying." He said, standing back and admiring his handwork before reaching for another crate. "There is an inherent honesty to uncomplicated work."

"Yeah, well you want to go John Henny yourself that's your call Drax, but as a captain I need to consider the risk to my crew that someone might injure themselves before we go on a combat run. I'm thinking of the team here." He muttered, grunting and sweating as he hauled in another crate of equipment.

"So that's why you insisted you, with your injured shoulder, do it, rather than let me have a go with my perfectly good un-injured cyborg enhanced muscles?" asked Gamora.

"Hey, I'm just looking out for my crew." Said Quill, leaning on the crate and grinning. "Besides, don't act like you're not enjoying this, I've noticed you shooting me looks. I know, you can't help it, I'm gorgeous and you kind of like seeing me get to strut my stuff."

"Um, quite." Said Gamora, disinterestedly ticking off another box on the info glass. "I mean, the sweat-stain on the front of your t-shirt has formed almost a perfect map of Ithcar province, Xandar. It's uncanny. Just thinking about it makes me wet… because I'm going to have to shower to get the image of how awful it is out of my mind and feel clean again. Careful with that crate, Quill, it's breakable. Like your allure." She said, with a half-smile

"Ouch. Admit one to the burn ward… So where is Rocket and what's his excuse this time?" said Quill, helping Drax with the last crate and then helping him and Drax boost Groot up into the ship, before wiping his forehead on his t-shirt and grabbing a beer from the cooler he'd carefully positioned by that hatch for when they finished.

Gamora sighed. "I have no idea. He said he wanted to tune up the ship before the job, and then disappeared into the bowels of the engine. I think he's sulking because I said that he couldn't get us the supplies we need for this trip."

"Why'd he start sulking about that?" asked Quill, striping off his damp shirt and trying to cool down his head with a can in his best diet coke commercial mode, more because he could see Gamora was struggling not to laugh than because he genuinely thought she might be into it.

"I mean, Nova is handing out aid to Knowhere left right and centre, and we work for them, so all he'd need to do is go to an aid station and fill out the requisition forms and….. oh, right. He'd just steal it, wouldn't he?" said Quill.

"Yep." Said Gamora, popping the p sound to hide the fact that she was near to laughter at Quill's increasingly ridiculous posing. She handed him a clean t-shirt, much to his disappointment. "When I pointed out he could legally take them without paying a penny he got angry. Apparently that spoils the fun."

"Yeah, yeah that sounds like him." Muttered Quill, pulling the t-shirt over his head and finishing his beer. He then grabbed a spare one from the cooler, and activated the ladder on the door. "I guess I'll go look for him."

"U-huh? If you are, do you mind if I show you something first?" asked Gamora, pausing and running a hand thought her hair. "I think you ought to see this before you speak to Rocket."

"Why? Oh god, has he done something weird and creepy again and who am I kidding?" Quill said. "It's a good day when he hasn't weaponised the caffeine dispenser: Weird and creepy is at the good end of the spectrum when Rocket's concerned." He said, following after Gamora as she walked up the stair to the common area of the ship.

Gamora paused in front of Rocket's Giant wall o' junk, and gestured with both hands.

Quill looked from the wall, to Gamora, and then back again. "So? He's messy. At this point I'm just happy any day the mess doesn't fight back or start making ominous ticking noises. You remember last time? That impromptu game of Oh shit one of them is unstable, let's all hunt the pipe bomb before it goes off? That was a fun Tuesday night, right enough"

Gamora sighed, and then gestured to the lines of electrical wire and scrap metal radiating out from the spot on the floor under Rocket's hammock. Quill paused, and squatted down, stilling on his heels to examine the mess a little more closely. There was an almost perfectly straight line down the centre of room where Drax, with precision and presumably a big ass ruler had gone along and thrown away every scrap of Rocket's mess that intruded even a millimetre onto his side of the berth: there was even a cheap filmy-novella that was either experimenting with some seriously weirdly shaped pages, or had had the corner of the book that crossed the line amputated with an exacto-knife.

Quill shrugged. He couldn't see anything more than usually weird, and the mess of discarded bottles in the upper strata of the midden didn't indicate heavier than usual drinking, and so he stood up again, and as he did the sudden change in height and perspective made it click.

"Oh boy." He muttered, squatting down again.

Hidden in the random mess of electronic parts, discarded bottles, M.R.E packs and old copes of Raygun's and Fuel Cells was a clear pattern: a neat, but slightly irregular boxy zigzag, repeated several times and linked by radiating zig-zags. It looked like a cubist spiders-web with Rocket's bunk at the centre. Or, Quill thought, almost exactly like an aerial photo of world war one trench layouts, designed to maximize enfilade areas and zig-zagging to prevent anyone shooting down the line of the trenches, complete with saps and reserve lines and communication trenches, with his sleeping area at the centre and all, perhaps, one inch tall.

"O-kay…. Building teeny tiny symbolic defensive lines around his bunk. Not creepy, not creepy at all." Muttered Quill, putting his palms on his thighs and pushing himself up.

"My thoughts exactly." Said Gamora, leaning on the wall at the far end of the room, as far away from the mess as she could. "Not a bad use of enfilade either, closely resembles the defensive walls at the citadel of Vosh: for some who's not a military architect he sure knows his stuff, but fortifying you bed against invisible enemies is still seldom a good sign."

"Tell me about it: what happened to the good old fashioned blanket over the head until the bogey man goes away?" said Quill. "Then again, this is someone who takes a gun into the shower with him, so I can't exactly say if this is normal or not for him."

"Speaking of showering… have you noticed how often he's bathing at the moment?" asked Gamora. Quill paused, and then nodded.

"So you noticed too? Yeah, he does start excessively grooming himself when he's stressed, but again, I don't know." Said Quill, poking at a miniature redoubt with his boot. "The hoarding, the hand washing… these are things I remember just plain old non-cyborg Racoons on earth doing on documentaries and shit. I'm not saying this isn't a bad sign, but it's like his drinking, I just don't know where his limits are: this could be a minor quirk or this could be straight-jackets and padded rooms One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest break-out-the-vorpal-pillows level stuff. I have no idea. I don't even know if he's an actual racoon or some sort of convergent evolution shit, like how Xandarians look just like humans. Who knows?"

"We should still address this." Said Gamora. "If we're going into combat we need to know we can rely on him, and while he superficially seems as unrepentantly irascibly unpleasant as ever, you… you don't go through what he went thought in that memory chamber and come out unscathed. Frankly I never thought I'd say it, but it looks like he has some serious father issues, and given this is me saying that to you, that's something Quill. And besides, Human's aren't completely identical to Xandarians, it's easy enough to tell if you see them naked."

"Yeah well, his memories did seem to be a shit sandwich with a shit topping and a gooey shit filling. I mean I hate to say it, but Drax had a full, normal, happy life and a family before Ronan attacked, Groot too, and while we both got kidnaped as children, at least we had family lives and a childhood before that: Rocket strait up got dicked over by life over from day one, minute one. Horrific and wrong an idea as it is, this right here?Us and our messed up adventures? That's probably the closest to a supportive and stable family life Rocket's ever known, and we are strait up horrible at stable and…wait, what? Easy enough to tell if you see them naked. Like how? Not to get side-tracked but…. Seriously? Because I don't mean to either boast or lower the tone, but I've seen naked Xandarians a lot. I mean, a lot and I'd say it's all pretty similar to terran by galactic standards, compared to say, Kree, Shi'ar or Voldi. Don't even start me on A'askavarian chicks..."

"Have you ever seen a Male Xandarian naked?"

"No…. why?"

"No reason." Said Gamora. "No reason at all."

"Okay, it's just the way you said that made it sound like there was some sort of big thing there…"

"Oh, there usually is, but of course, it varies from Xandarian to Xandarian. Just to check, you terran's… is it an odd or even number of penises you usually have?"

"You're kidding, right?" asked Quill, as Gamora half smiled, and turned and begun to walk back down the steps. "I mean, you're actually kidding right? Gammy?"

"Go and talk to Rocket, Quill! Check he's all right. I need to call Denarian Dey and warn him that were about to off on a wild goose chase and we can't tell him why." She said, as Quill followed her down the steps.

"Maybe I should be the one to call him you know, I am captain and-"

"You're suddenly overwhelmed with a nagging curiosity? No, I think I'll call him Quill. Talk to Rocket." She said, easing past Drax and Groot to the lower hatch.

"If we are in fact contacting Nova with regard to this mission, should we not inform them that we are attempting to recover another infinity stone?" asked Drax, and Quill grumbled and finished his beer. "They have an established interest, and may be unhappy if we in fact recover one only to return it to the Collector."

"Yeah, well it's not an easy call." Muttered Quill. "And I know you and Gamora thought that we should tell Nova… but look at the last one we gave them: they have no way to actually use it safely, and their solution to store it safely was to just build a big ass vault. The memory I saw made it pretty clear: the Asgardians wanted ole' crazy cat lady Tivan to have this thing, and their reason, the whole it's not good for anyone to have more than one of these things, not even other Asgardians, was pretty convincing: if extra dimensional Viking gods think they can't handle having two of these things at the same time, I doubt we'd be doing Nova prime any favours by heaping another one on her plate."

Especially given you know one or two things about that the rest of the crew doesn't. Thought Quill, with a shudder. Nova Prime's final briefing to him had been far from a reassuring experience. She hadn't rebuilt the Milano for him purely as a reward for saving Xandar; it was hush money: she'd asked him a lot about infinity stones, and the medical that had discovered he was only half Terran was part of that. Nova prime real may be one of the good guys, but she still had an empire to run: someone wields an infinity stone in your back yard and survives, you find out how, and why, and how to weaponize it. She'd been more that academically interested about what it might had done to Quill's body as well, spesificaly she'd wanted to know how many times he could survive doing it again, and that was the point he'd got really uncomfortable. She'd told him her plan for the infinity stone, one that sensibly revolved around not using the dam thing unless she absolutely had to, but even so, he'd found it far from re-assuring that the absolutely had to line had to in there, and what that implied. She already had one of the damn things, and now that another had come up, Quill strait up didn't trust her with this one. One thing his cold-war upbringing had taught him was that sometimes a balance of power was preferable to giving the supposed good guy all the cards.

Besides, the Collector did offer us four billion credits for the last one. Ker-ching, dollar signs in eyes, etcetera etcetera. He thought, as he went to go and find Rocket and, as casually as he could, check if he was crazy or not. This was something that required extreme tact.

"I'm off to check if Rocket's gone off the deep end: Groot, if you hear gunshots and screaming, make the little bastard my pallbearer, that'll teach him." He said, as he climbed down the steps and out of the Milano.

"I do not believe that he would intentionally endanger your life." Said Drax, leaning out the hatch and handing Quill his Beers and snacks once Quill was off the bottom step. "He seems to genuinely rate you as a friend and confidant, and is more than pragmatic enough to realise that killing you would provoke the ire of the rest of the group and the loss of the safety and security he enjoys as part of it. And he thinks that flesh wounds are far more amusing."

"Gee, thanks for that Drax; anytime you want to re-assure me like that, you just go right ahead."

"What's you plan for dealing with Rocket?" asked Gamora. "A full year of running into him when our night terrors sync up and he'll still barely open up to me. How are you going to get him to be honest about his feelings?"

"Traditional male bonding 101: I'm going to annoy the shit out of him until he either laughs, or screams at me and threatens violence; either way I've provoked an genuine emotional response."

Gamora stared for a long time.

"You know, now all those tiny pointless wars terra has with itself make a lot more sense."

"Hey, sometimes to get through to an emotionaly retarded man-child you need to be an emotionaly retarded man-child." Said Quill. "And sometimes you just have to be the jerk." He said, putting on his Walkman and turning away.

He brought the remainder of the beer, and some homemade pizza pockets, however. There's no need to be a complete jerk about these things and besides, he felt Rocket was far less likely to shoot him if he brought food.

Having almost immediately discovered that the racoon tail hanging out of the gutted engine nacelle was in fact a decoy, made from a painted feather duster with the words "LEAVE ME FRICKIN' ALONE!" written on the handle, Quill paused, and then shrugged and headed off across the Rockcrete floor of the warehouse complex they had taken over from the Watt's brothers, to the mess of small storerooms off a corridor to one side: the farthest one of had been taken over by the racoon as his personal workshop slash playpen slash armoury. Quill spent a few moment winding down the corridor, paused to re-ballance his handful of pizza pockets and beer to free up a hand, and knocked on the door.

"Piss off Quill!" yelled a voice from inside. "I'm frickin' working."

"Hey dude, I just came to talk!" said Quill, not even asking how the racoon knew it was him: the door didn't look airtight, and even if it was Rocket claimed to be able to identify the different footsteps of the crew at thirty paces. Although in my case that might be because I tend to dance along to whatever's playing on my Walkman.

"I'm busy. Go fuck yourself, Quill."

"I brought Pizza pockets!"

"Oh, well that makes things completely different…. Go fuck a pizza pocket, Quill. There's a burns kit in the medi-bay."

"Okay." Said Quill. "Well, if you don't want to talk…"he said, popping he ring pull on a beer can. Tch-clink.

There was a moment's pause and then the heavy electronic locks of the room clunked open.

"You shoulda opened with that." Muttered Rocket, bitching and griping as he shoved the door open with a footpaw, a complex electronic component in his hands as he polished it with an oily rag. He was in his Red bodyglove, Quill noticed, and already it was half covered with oil stains and lint from some task or other inside the engines. The fact that he had changed clothes on a near daily basis since the Collectors memory cell was another sign that he was grooming more than usual.

"What, and miss out on the scathing pizza pocket related Humour?" he said, walking in.

Whereas Quill and Gamora and Drax, even Groot, had picked out bedrooms for themselves in their new pad, resulting in a brief but hotly contested war of words over who got the one room with a en-suite, Rocket had been curiously disinterested in that, preferring to focus on finding a secure room where he could store all his shit and isolate himself when he was working on gadgets. As a result, Rocket's room was… odd. A windowless cell barely three meters by three wide but nearly three times that tall, it was probably once intended for an industrial elevator shaft of ducting or some shit, but over time a re-build of the warehouse block had rendered it completely vestigial, a weird narrow, tall dark appendix of a space at the back of the building that the racoon had instantly taken a shine to and colonised with bench drills, 3D printers, laser-ablative milling machines, soldering stations and god-knows what. It was packed, floor to very high ceiling, with shelving and wire mesh, tube-lights and miniature platforms so Rocket had more space to bolt things to: with his climbing ability, he'd taken one look at the space and turned the walls into basically extra floor, and then covered them with gadgets, guns, and hidden nooks where he could nap. What little floor there was was dedicated to the machinery and tooling too heavy to glue to the walls, so Quill, having no-where to sit leaned on the edge of a large, sinister white polymer tank filled with what looked and smelt like a mix of white Sothern style gravy and liquid mercury, while Rocket took the proffered opened beer, ignoring the pizza pocket, and hopped up on the large black monolith opposite him: given the extra wall space to climb on, Rocket used the room to get a rare height advantage over anyone who entered, and Quill didn't begrudge him that so long as he was talking.

"So… like what you've done with the place." Muttered Quill, leaning over and peering into the tank of white goo. "Where's the big slab for strapping your monstrous creation to and yelling it's alive, its alive bwahahahaha!?"

"He just walked in, but he was carrying beer so I'll let him live. Don't lean over there Quill, ya dummy." Muttered Rocket, slurping from his beer before resuming polishing his doo-dad and not making eye contact with Quill.

"Why, what's it do?" asked Quill, peering into the vat.

"Replicates any organic matter you drop into it. One of you is bad enough, leave it well alone."

"Jesus, is this a cloning vat? I thought those things were illegal!"

"Cloning vat? Phhhsssshhh, what is this, the stone age? It's a collagen 3D printer with a nanite cell-sampling matrix and instant stem-cell mill… what primitive worlds used to call a Golem forge: if you fall in, it'll map your brain waves, kill you, harvest your cells, 3D print an exact copy of your body, and seed it with new cells based on your own DNA to grow a new one of you overnight, then re-upload your consciousness, and then ask how many more I want. I found it in the Collectors place, looks like he was using it to churn out spare parts for his prizes in case they got hurt, print out bodies of his own design and then seed it with cells from different species to create chimeras with one phenotype but an entirely different genotype, even resurrect the recently deceased based on lingering synapse electrochemical analysis. You know, the usual sinister billionaire scientist shtick: it was churning out old-timmey gunfighters when I found it: Star's know what he had planned for them…. It's a very dangerous and very cool bit of kit and not to be fucked with under any circumstances-"

"Hey cool, my Pizza pocket fell in and it made another one!" yelled Quill, as the pale grey goo bucked and heaved and gave birth to a perfect golden brown steaming-hot pizza pocket which it fired out at Quill. Rocket stared, disgusted and aghast, as Quill bit into the snack, sending hot cheese and self-replicating nanites squirting out over the wall.

"Oww! Jesus, the inside of this is hotter than the sun! Ahhh!" he yelled, slurping beer as he tried to cool his mouth down and the machine begun to ask if it wanted him to start making Quill/pizza pocket hybrids. After a moment Rocket felt compelled to speak.

"How do you not fall down more often?"

Quill shrugged, and took another bite, while the machine spat out another Pizza pocket. "Luck I guess. So, why are you hiding in here rather than fixing the engine nacelle you gutted? I mean, if it's sheer laziness I get that, I'm 100% on your side for that one, but given were about to head off into a combat and to get paid, it seems like that's 100% the sort of thing you're usually all keen for and can't wait to get started on…."

"I ain't hiding: needed to re-calibrate this flux capacitor, is all. Gonna take some time and couldn't do it upside down inside the heat sink of an engine, so I came here to do it in peace and quiet."

"So why the decoy tail?" asked Quill, slurring his words slightly due to his burnt tongue.

Rocket, sighed, annoyed, and glared at Quill for a second before resuming his work, not looking up from the part.

"Because this is difficult, and delicate, and needs to be done right and I didn't want to get annoyed by bored and needy Humies, is how. Don't touch that." he added, as Quill tapped on a heavy glass jar with a finger in between bites of pizza pocket.

"Hey, you didn't even look. Besides, what is it?" he asked, leaning in to stare: the jar was filled with stringy looking black goo, that reared up and attacked his finger when he tapped on the glass.

"Fuck knows, but it was in Tivan's collection in temporal stasis in the high security area and I seems to react to the presence of living beings, so nothing good by the looks of it."

"Hey, you're right, it does kinda react to people." said Quill, tracing his finger along the glass and watching as it followed his finger. "Huh… neat." He said, picking up the jar and trying to read the label.

"998th generation Klyntar symbiote, highly corrupted, do not open for any reason, codename Ven… ven something…" said Quill, shaking the jar, struggling with the child-proof top for a moment before giving up on opening it and trying to hold it up to the light for a better view.

"Codename Ven something… can't read the rest, looks like there's blood or something on the label. He said, shaking it again. The jar gave out a very quiet angry snarl, and Quill noticed that it seemed to shy away from the headphones to his Walkman, which were dangling from his neck as it played to itself. Rocket sighed, put down his stuff and stared into space.

"Seriously, Quill? Two unrelated highly dangerous goos and you manage to misuse both in ten seconds? Do I need to buy you silly putty, is that it? Will you leave me alone then and… and dear god, what have you done?" he asked.

Quill beamed back to Rocket, his headphones wrapped around the jar and the volume on full.

"Hey look, it reacts to sound! Aww, it must like stuff with heavy bass, look at it dance, Rocket! It's like a little lava lamp! Hey Rocket-man I'm going to keep this on top of my amp, is that cool?"

Rocket stared for a full ten seconds.

"Get out."

"Aww, come on it's just a little fun….."

"Quill, stop playing with the jar of goo, the quantum atomiser, my Escafil device, the meeseeks box or anything else in here, and go, I have to fix this."

"Fix what? Oh, the Flux capacitor. So how'd that get miss-aligned? I thought those things were basically unbreakable unless you hit a tachyon bump or exceeded their factory power rating by 1.21 gigawatts. " said Quill, biting into nanotech pizza pocket with every sign of enjoyment as he watched the angry symbiote writhe and dance to Earth Wind and Fire. After a moment he noticed Rocket's incredulous open mouthed stare, and smiled, very slightly.

"I've owned this ship nearly twenty years: believe it or not I know how to do basic maintenance, tho' I'll admit I don't have your gift for it. How'd it get broke? That seems like a serious problem."

Rocket snorted, annoyed, and then muttered with well concealed confusion and barely concealed anger and he went back to trying to clean off the component.

"I don't know, and that's what's eating me. It's all gunked up with organic plasma discharge: we could maybe have hit a patch of interstellar gas rich in methane or some other organic molecule, if the engine intakes were open at the time it could ionise the gas and have the plasma hit the capacitor and combine with its casing to produce this mess, but unless we flew through the outer layers of a gas giant without anyone noticing I can't see how it would get this bad. The only time I've ever seen anything like this was when me and Groot were robbing space truckers and we'd intentionally gas their intakes at pit stops to stall the engines a few light minuets down the line so they'd have to drop out of FTL and we could ambush them. It was a good way to rob people, actually, trouble was, Groot didn't like it: we were using industrial Freon and CO2 extinguishers to coat their engines with dry ice and CFC residues, they turn them on, sublime and then ionise the gas and boom, motor dead until they clean of the gunk, but Groot couldn't cope with the Freon: he, heh, he don't cope too well with very cold temperatures, freezes his sap, it sort of fucks up his movement." Said Rocket, as the door to the room creaked and the racoon shrugged, then continued cleaning the part.

"Either something literally died on top of the capacitor and got ionised and fused to it, or someone screwed with our engine while we were out getting supplies for our trip." He concluded

"So what? Someone put sugar in our tank?" asked Quill, suddenly nervous. "Who would do that?"

Rocket snorted. "This filth-hole we live in, more likely some critter wandered in, tried to sleep on the component because it was warm, and got fried when were test-fried the engines yesterday. Lizard-rat maybe. I mean call me paranoid, but I'd usually claim sabotage if we were on a job, but here? Firstly, it's either a really really smart, or really really dumb sabotage: there are a lot easier bits to hit if you wanted to cripple the ship, like the sub-luminary fuel lines of the FTL core, or if you straight up wanted to murder us, go for the Geller shielding or inertial dampeners and watch us get turned into pink mist the next time we try to go FTL: this doesn't hurt us, and it doesn't break the ship majorly, it just delays us leaving until I can clean off and re-align the part so unless you just trying to keep us on Knowhere a little longer it's a dumb sabotage. An' secondly, who, how and why? We've dealt with Robo Tivan, Yondu and the Watt's: everyone else of this stupid head thinks were amazing, and even if they did want to mess with us, how'd they do it without us knowing? The security scanners were up, the doors locked, and I can't smell anything on the component. Sure, in theory you could get in, spay an odourless gas into the engine casing and wait until we gunk up the part when we do the pre-flight checks, but without getting caught? I could do it, Gamora could do it, but that's the skill level we're talking about: inter-planetary super-spy level shit. Unless there's another me or another Gamora running around Knowhere right now, forget it. Something up and died in here, simplest explanation."

"Okay, well that's a weight off my mind I guess. I guess we run more frequent and pedantic vermin drills or we get a cat."

"Why, we need something that sleeps and day, cries when it's hungry and craps in a box, we got you, ain't we?"

"Okay, firstly it wasn't a box, it was an ammo can: we were pinned down in that trench and I wasn't about to break cover to go find the little Terran's room, and secondly if we get to make cat jokes about a team member, you don't get to talk, Boots, you've got teeny tiny whiskers and you hiss when you see dogs! You can't use laser sight on your gun because you find the little red dot too distracting!"

"I find it annoying, not distracting, like other things I could name right now… and stop saying red, stop making up made up colours you dummy. It' a glowing grey, yanno?"

"No, no I don't know, because I actually have three-colour cones in my eyes and not two: red's a real colour, stop saying it ain't. I mean… how do you even tell these apart?" said Quill, holding up a roll of black and a roll of red electrical wire. "How do you even read circuit diagrams?"

"Smell: they impregnate the different insulating plastics with different essential oils, and alter the density of each insulting plastic for species that use sonar, dummy. It's a big galaxy, Quill, not every species has the same senses you frickin' Humies have, they market those things to be identifiable to everyone, regardless of sensory apparatus. Moron."

"Really?" asked Quill sniffing at the wire. "Huh. Clove. Neat. Ohhh, bacon wire, that's so cool. What do they taste like? Ugggg! Oh god, that's awful!"

"Yeah, they also coat them with a bittering agent so toddlers, simpletons, and terran's won't accidentally swallow them. Moron."

"Ugg, so what, if you're in a EVA suit, in a vacuum fixing an engine, then what then? How do you tell the wires apart then?"

Rocket sighed. "Look, I'm trying to work here. I dunno… make a laser ablation mass spec mounted to my helmet so I can vaporise small samples of stuff by looking at it, analyse it's chemical composition and get it to interpret the information and feed it directly to my olfactory nerve, I guess. I'll work it out when it comes up, dummy. Piss off, I'm trying to work."

"U-huh? You need anything? More tools or lights or anything? Just checking because, you know, I'm your captain. Got to look out for my crew, check that everything is, yanno, okay. For captin-y reasons. Because I'm the captain. Making sure everything is a-okay…."

Rocket swore, and dropped the Capacitor and glared and Quill, picking up the beer.

"Stars! You're the most annoying thing in existence… Gamroa. She sent you to check on me, didn't she?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny the involvement of other crew members in operation Is Rocket okay. But now that you mention it… you've been surlier than usual, lately, if that was possible. Spent a lot of time hiding in here and not talking to us, even to Groot… you Okay man? We… we genuinely care, is all. We want to know that you're okay. Are… are you laughing?"

Asked Quill, surprised "Are, are you actually laughing?"

"Heh, sorry it's just…. You're here asking me if that shit in the memory machine has fucked me up at all… and I've bin' avoiding you guys last couple of days because I've been thinking that after all the fucked up stuff you saw in my head that it maybe might have messed you lot up and you don't wanna see me around 'cause It'll remind you of it… hehehe, you're here asking me if I'm okay, when I'm avoiding you because I thought that maybe you guys weren't okay with it all… "

Quill stared back for a long moment, and then started laughing along with the racoon. "Rocket, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I'm me."

"heheh, yeah, sorry… I just figured, hell, I don't want to be reminded of that, so you guys wouldn't either so… I don't know, go live under a bridge of some shit until you all forget I exist. Guess I didn't exactly plan it through."

After a moment the laughter just sort of petered out.

"Well… that was far more awkward than it needed to be…" said Quill.

"Yeah, yeah…"

"Yeah, we're going to need so much counselling, after all this, aren't we? I mean... a lot." Said Quill. Rocket snorted, gulped the last of his beer, and went back to cleaning the doodad.

"Prrrf, speak for yourself, weaksause, I ain't speaking to some therapist, they'll probably either chemically lobotomise me or get so depressed listening to me that they'll need therapy, kicking of some sort of horrible depressed therapist chain reaction ending in some sort of ritualistic mass suicide. Why put myself through that? I… I just need some space for a bit, is all. Okay?"

"Well, okay." Said Quill, standing up. "But dude… you're not alone with this… you need help, like, ever, and we're here. We won't judge, we won't tell anyone else, we won't mock… because we fully know you'd open an airlock in our sleep on us if we did… just… just don't freak out over this shit: you can talk to us, okay?"

"Prrfff, yeah, whatever faggot." Said Rocket, looking down and glowering at his work, his voice more than usually husky, but Quill decided it wouldn't be tactful to mention it. "Like anything you could say could make it better…. Not that it needs making better." He said, as Quill sighed, and turned to leave, disappointed.

"I mean…" said Rocket, as Quill went to leave the room, surprised to see the door was part ajar when he thought he'd shut it behind him. "I mean…. If you're having a needy Terran cry-baby moment, and you need to talk to me, well, so long as I can drink through it, I might maybe just be able to put up with you unloading at me with your, your know, feelings and shit. I mean if you needed to do that, I could probably do you a sold and stay awake through it… maybe… I dunno… reciprocate a bit… you know, just so it wasn't awkward for you?" he asked, pleadingly.

"'caus you know… it's a bit uncomfortable if someone bears their soul to you: you've kinda got to do it back just a little, for symmetry and shit. I… I could probably put up with that, once in a while." Said the racoon, glancing over to Quill's back. "If… if that's okay with you?"

Quill grinned, knowing the racoon couldn't see. "It's a date."

Rocket pulled a face. "Uggg, you just had to make that like 20% gayer than it needed to be, didn't ya? Not that I've got anything against that, a lot of preconceptions change when you spent as long as I have in prison but seriously, Quill, being forced to imagine you in any sort of sexual light is just outright replant to me you're, you terrans, you're a pretty disgusting species, is all. Ugg… now I need another beer to wash that metal image out of my mouth."

Quill turned, grinning, and tossed Rocket another beer can from in his coat pocket while next to him the machine spat out its ninth pizza pocket: the rate at which it was producing them seemed to be increasing . The Racoon caught the beer one handed, and Quill turned to leave.

"Oh, and Quill" said Rocket, not looking up from his beer. "Please return the dangerous jar of clearly evil sentient goo back to where you found it. It's not a toy, you know." He said, nodding to Quill's bulging back pocket. "Seriously, dude, like I wouldn't notice? It looks like you've grown another ass on your ass, bringing your total up to three, counting the one you talk out of."

"Yeah, my bad…" muttered Quill, pulling out the jar of angry black symbiote. "Guess this isn't a toy…. Catch!"

He yelled, tossing it under-arm at the racoon, who spilt his beer in a moment of panic and scrabbled to catch the jar two-handed, before both him and the jar fell of the precarious perch on the top of the black monolith thing and fell to the floor, Rocket getting under the jar and wrapping around it so it thudded harmlessly into his stomach winding him instead of shattering open, making a panicked chittering noise loud enough to be heard in the corridor outside, followed by a distinctively racoonsish yelp of pain as the jar landed on him, and then swearing.

"Idiot! Bean me over the head with my frickin' ball while you're at it!" yelled Rocket.

"If you insist…." Said Quill, as the battered containment sphere bounced off the Racoon's snout.

Grinning to himself, Quill jinked out the door just in time to hear the thrown sphere bounce of where his head was a second before, and walked back along the corridor, reaching for his headphones as he did.

He was just about to turn the corner back into the view of the Milano when he noticed that the song playing on his headphones didn't match the song he was hearing, and he lowered his headphones to listen, looking confused. Someone other than him was playing a Terran song: one that he didn't own on any of his tapes

Obvious bait soundtrack: Credence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising

*I see a bad moon a-rising …I see trouble on the way…*

"What….. Rocket, are you playing Terran music? Hey no fair man, Not cool, I thought we agreed that if you find and cool terrain transmissions you tell me asap!" he yield, jogging back down the corridor to try and find which room the music was coming from, retreating down the semi dark corridor, trying doors as he went and getting farther and farther away from the Milano. Anyone stood at the entrance to the corridor would have seen him getting smaller and smaller has he walked away, until at the very end of the corridor, past Rocket's room, he turned a corner and disappeared from view for a moment.

*I see earthquakes and lightnin'…*

"What, I mean, if you got a new transmission would it kill you to tell me? I need to know what music is cool now, if the soviets have nuked us yet, and if they ever un-cancelled Pirates of Dark Water and… Hey lady this is private property and Oh shi-!"

*I see bad times today…*

There was the distinctive swish of a weapon and then the brief buzz and crackle of an electronic stunner, and the top half of Quill re-appeared at floor level as he fell flat on his back.

After a moment that too disappeared as he was dragged off by his ankles, leaving only his Walkman behind, squeaking tinnily to itself.

*Don't go round tonight, because it's bound to take your life… there's a bad moon on the rise.*

Victim two: Drax the Destroyer.

Drax Finished stowing the supplies for their trip with Gamora's help, finding that the work went far faster without Quill, and ran through a final inventory check with her: the planet where the Collector had stowed the other infinity stone was in the centre of an area of vicious magnetic disturbance. The system was a binary star where a wandering K2 star had got trapped in a mutual orbit with a small dense pulsar: the radiation shooting out from the pulsar had fatally irradiated every planet in the habitable zone except one, Náströnd Prime. Shielded by the magnetic field of a nearby gas giant, it hung on to the very extremes of life: chilly, windswept, wracked by terrible solar storms when the pulsar's energy swept over it, and prone to random extinction level events that kept it's biosphere from fully developing, the combination of hellish environment and extreme magnetic disturbance had made it a no-go zone for anyone with half a mind, and it's only known contact with the outside world before a few years ago had been when a Kree prison ship had decided to maroon a batch of Kree and Sakkaran mutineers there at the start of the Kree-Xandar war. The magnetic disturbance fried most electronics, leaving the mutineers and their descendants scrabbling for existence with a far more primitive level of technology than most planets. Hence Rocket's extensive testing of the engines, to ensure the ship wouldn't fail in the extreme conditions of the planet. It also meant that after the Kree-nova ceasefire both sides had suddenly remembered that the planet existed and decided to try and prevent the increasingly psychotic locals from acquiring weaponry and technology far in advance of their medieval culture, while general low-lives from across the galaxy realised that there was an incredibly lucrative market in arming these mediaeval fuckers and fuelling their endless, petty wars over territory.

In short, it was an unpleasant out of the way spot that had suddenly got a lot more unpleasant, and both Gamora and Drax had to wonder if that was in any way related to someone hiding a possibly behaviour altering Infinity Stone there.

It was also somewhere were energy weapons were rare and their use frowned upon and likely to provoke a lot of interest from local warlords wanting to either recruit the owners or steal the tech, so after stuffing the ship with high-energy Nova low-temperature Macroscopic ration packs and caffeine-and-Bezz-nut fortified chocolate bars, Gamora and Drax decided to polish up their close-combat skills on the warehouse floor while Groot napped in the sunlight coming thought the whitewashed windows.

"I am still uncertain as to why Starlord and our furred engineer do not join us for this." Said Drax, ducking under a stroke from a blunted polymer training blade and countering with a slash with a sheathed knife and he backed up, and realizing that Gamora was trying to back him into a corner he grunted, and parred an quick slash before using his superior strength and weight to bull forward and turn and circle away from getting trapped. He got out of getting caught, but not before Gamora let him over extend himself and caught him a light tap on the pate to let him know he was dead. He paused, nodded to her, and they took a moment to get some water and walk back to the start positions they had agreed upon.

"I mean." He said, wiping of sweat on a towel to stop it getting in his eyes. "Their close combat skills are less than optional: Quill lacks discipline, he is aggressive and strong enough, but he relies on technology like his rocket-boots to make up for sloppy technique… and as for Rocket…" Quill shrugged, and made the finger to the throat means death gesture.

Gamora winced. "He either runs for cover, or jumps and bites, yes. Well, Quill's a good brawler with his gadgets, but you're right, without his electro bolas, or stunners, or boots, he's just that, a brawler. Rocket can be dangerous up close, but only if he gets the drop on someone: take away the element of surprise and he's hardly deadly, so long as you've had all your jabs. He relies on guns or Groot, I know. Well, I told them they needed to train, but Rocket was trying to get the engine fixed, and frankly given his extreme reliance on guns I'm not sure what we could do in the time we have. He says he'll be sure his guns will work there even in a magnetic storm, and given he probably knows half of the mercs' and gunrunners trying to turn this medieval war into an atomic war I don't doubt he'll find some way to advertise our presence with gunfire before too long. We should focus any training on Quill: he's less insecure about criticism and while he relies on cheap tricks, he is at least good with them; he can throw a punch at least, and has the right muscle memory to avoid blows. It's a start."

Drax nodded in agreement. "We should make an attempt to transfer skills that might be useful in combat to other team members: I can aid in teaching unarmed combat, but also learn useful skills form others: Quill could teach pistol shooting, Rocket rifles, and you could teach me to dishonourably slit the throats of innocents in service to Thanos."

Gamora paused, and then lowed her polymer sword and glared. "You know, I make a point not to bring up your murder-spree backstory, could you at least try to reciprocate?"

Drax hesitated, not wanting to make the situation worse but unsure what to say.

"My apologues, I am aware that you too desire vengeance on your father."

"He's not my father… but thank you. I accept your apology." She said, getting back into a fighting posture, closing her eyes and breathing deeply to clear her mind. Drax nodded, and resumed his two-knife stance.

"It is, after all, not your fault your fighting style lacks honour."

Gamora opened one eye. "What."

"Your style of swordplay relies on intentional misdirection, and in combat you primarily use concealment and surprise, as well as sudden changes in speed and motion to confuse and distract foes. You do not take people in fair fights."

"That's because I'm fighting to win, there's no points for fair play. If your motives are honourable, who cares about the methods?"

"A fair point…." Said Drax, and Gamora nodded again and tried to get back into her guard posture.

"… although not one I subscribe to". Said Drax. "Warriors should not rely on concealment or misdirection but on superior skill and determination. It is however beside the point; whereas many believe that deceptiveness in combat indicates some degree of moral falling on the part of the combatant, I have never ascribed to the belief myself…"

"I'm glad to hear it." Muttered Gamora, through clenched teeth.

"… I just feel it is an effective way for lesser warriors to make up for their inability to overpower enemies thought raw skill and power. With luck and a suitable training regime, we could get Quill and Rocket to emulate your backstabbing, deceptive ways most effectively."

Gamora snorted, and tossed the plastic sword on the ground.

"You know what, I just remembered why we don't do combat training as a group. If you'll excuse me, Drax, I need a shower." She said, gritting her teeth and storming off because it was that of break the polymer sword over his stupid, bald head.

Drax frowned, confused, and turned to Groot. "Was it something I said?" after a long moment scowling at nothing.

Groot opened one eye, and shrugged. "I am Groot." he said, non-comitially before closing his eyes again and sinking back into his nap.

Drax shrugged, and having nothing better to do, and with Gamora using the shower on the Milano, he headed for the Watt's bathroom to freshen up: they'd got the shower here working yesterday when Rocket had finally got fed up of waiting for his turn in the Milano and fixed the warehouse's plumbing; if they could work out why the faucet in the kitchen exploded every time some flushed the toilet upstairs, the place would almost be liveable.

Turing the corner out of the main warehouse area, and stepping over the battered and burnt wreckage of the fridge that they'd not got round to moving yet, Drax passed out of site of the Milano and was about to start up the stairs, when he heard a faint buzzing noise behind him.

Drax paused, and turned his head.

...and out of the very corner of his eye he though, just for a moment, he saw something moving fast and at head height around the corner of the corridor, towards the ground-floor store rooms, and dead spaces and the furred one's nest.

There was something awfully familiar about that sort of movement, and while Drax didn't see what it was, the way it moved gave him a pretty good idea.

Loosening his knives in their sheathes a fraction, he very slowly and very carefully stepped back down the stairs, keeping a hand on each pommel and his eyes fixed on the corner of the corridor.

He stood there at the bottom of the stair for a long time, staring at the blank grey rockcrete of the walls.

And then just as he was about to give up, and go shower, he saw it again, the very edge of the blank grey disk hover into view, peering round the corner at him.

There was no thought, only reaction and muscle memory honed by years of combat: Threat!- react!

The first knife slammed into the wall where the thing had been as it retreated and zipped down the corridor, and he was after it like a greyhound after the electric bunny, snatching his knife out of the wall as he rounded the corner, other blade in his off hand as he sprinted down the corridor after it. Had he stopped and thought about it, he would have probably realised that since the events of Altiar four not only was Baz Sandhurst out for the count but probably left thousands of his damn drones scattered across a major capitol city, meaning that they could hardly be all that rare on the black market now a days. He would have also, probably, have realised that chasing after the damn thing without warning the others that something strange was in the warehouse was a bad idea. He would have certainly realised that it was leading him to a quiet corner of the warehouse out of sight of the others, where only Rocket could possibly hear him, and only then if he didn't have any noisy equipment running.

He would have defiantly known this for a trap when he saw it, had it been anything else. But he associated those drones with Isha, and he wasn't having anything of hers in his home. That he wouldn't stand for. Couldn't. So he followed, and pushed the little voices or warning down to the back of his mind, and burred them under the bodies stowed there.

He rounded the corner into the old storeroom, still filled with the Watt's brothers stuff, or maybe the stuff of the people who lived here before them, forgotten things under dust-sheets, and saw it hovering there in front of him just waiting, and dived at it with both blades raised, and struck it down.

And while he was distracted, and while he was obsessed, and while he wanted to tare that thing to the ground and rip it apart and dance on its ruin, and while he wanted to destroy everything with any trace of Isha or anything that reminded him of his old life when his family were alive, he wasn't an idiot. Which is whole as he dived thought the room at it, he kept half an eye on the corners of the room and was aware of his six-o-clock position, because when you've been tasered more than once by your ex, you learn yourself some caution.

So he wasn't completely surprised when a female shape moved suddenly out a shadow by the door swinging a weapon and him, and he was already twisting mid-air, throwing the gutted carcass of the drone at her as he swung with a knife in his off-hand.

What he was completely surprised by was the efficient and business-like way the female figure blocked the blow and spun under the thrown drone, readying the kali stick in the other hand to strike.

His brows furrowed, and he recognised the person before him, and ducked under the blow, striking out with a knife as his twisted his hips to get this footing back, and then threw a quick kick and a whipping elbow to try and put them off-balance.

"You!" he snarled.

"Me." The woman replied, before knocking one of the knives out of his hands as she stepped out of reach of his kicks and knives and use the longer reach of her weapons to dictate the terms of the fight.

Drax was not having that, not twice in one day.

He took the first hit to his ribs and ignored the blaze of the stunner as he pushed on thought the pain, using sheer willpower and brute strength to close the distance and take away her advantage. There was a momentary look of surprise on her face before he shoved her into the piles of old furniture in the room with a mighty crash-

- In his nest, Rocket swore, and dropped the flux capacitor. "For fuck's sakes Quill! I know you're lonesome, but for once would it kill you to masturbate frickin' quietly!" he yelled, banning on the wall angrily with a tiny fist. "Keep it down or I'll cut it off!" There was then a loud crash of breaking furniture, more than could be explained by one body began thrown into it, followed by a Williams's sister's female-tens pro level yelp, and a far more masculine strangulated grunt. Rocket stared at the wall for a moment, surprised.

"Oh come on Gammy… I thought you had some standards." He muttered, making a disgusted face and scrabbling back up the mountain of pizza pockets slowly filling his room and, after a moments consideration, stuffing a lump of pizza crust in each ear to drown out the noise.

"Ficking' savages." he muttered. "They could at least have the decency to do it some place normal, like on someone's bird feeder or something." -

-but as Drax tried to pull back an knife to strike, she crossed the hafts of her two sticks over his throat and begun to choke him, using them like a yoke to turn his head this way and that so he couldn't see to get a good strike with a knife. She also locked her thighs around his waist and started to try and constrict him, making it doubly imposable to take a breath. It was an effective way to dictate the terms os a fight at close range, he had to concede.

So he head-butted her in the face, bald head on bald head, and let go of a knife in order to grab at one of her kail sticks in the same moment, and she responded by releasing him with her leg and kicking him square in the gut, sending him reeling back. He got steady on his feet the same moment she did, each of them with one stick and one knife in their hands.

An even fight. He thought, and charged the same moment she did.

As he came forwards, his opponent ducked slightly, and her eyes shifted to the left, and he smiled, internally. After all day of this with Gamora, he wasn't going to fall for such an obvious freight. He readied himself for her to go high and right-

-and had just fought time for one look of comical surprise as she went low and left and beet his guard through superior skill, rotating her wrist and hips around his sick to aim a perfect Krumphau at his side that winded him, followed by a simple straight-forward overarm blow to the pate, just to let him know that, yes, if she wanted, he was dead.

Perhaps I should have tried deception. He thought, just before he blacked out.

Victim Three: Groot.

Groot was sunning himself happily by the Milano when Drax and Gamora stormed off after their bickering, and was happily dozing and wondering, vaguely why his shipmates seemed to spend such a large about of their time bickering when it was clear from their body language and contextual clues that they just needed re-assurance and support from each other: With his suite of senses and with brain designed to see things from other people's viewpoints, it was clear Gamora still feeling guilty about the things she'd done while working for Thanos and that she still felt for him, and taking Drax's comment on her honour harshly because it reminded her of that, and Drax was investing in the macho a-man-fight-fair ideals of his style of fighting because he was a afraid he might be too week to protect his new family and might lose them like his wife and child. And yet, whenever he tried to say this, people just ignored him. He was, clearly, going to have to educate them properly in Phenomenological Ontology in order for them to develop until they could reach a state of individual fulfilment without being haunted by an unreachable personal definition of completeness. That, or distribute more hugs until they were all too tired fending off hugs to bicker

Actually, going with hugs might be better: Rocket had shown him how non-responsive fast-hot-wet could be to addressing their own incompleteness and also hugs were super fun, although the crew did seem to complain of loss of feeling in limbs and difficulty breathing after an inordinately short number of hours. He shifted slightly, enjoying the spritzy tartness of the hydrogen spectra of the local star and wondering if this new planet they were going to head to would have nice tasting sunlight, if it was in fact possible to find any new prime numbers today, and if Quill's socks would make a nice hat, when there was he could only describe as a shiver in the world, and he stropped photosynthesising and, eyes narrowing and leaves retracting, suddenly focused.

Something had changed in the warehouse. Something wrong. The air currents were moving differently, someone had opened a door or window to the outside, and then closed it again, some time again, the fresh air only just reaching him now, and it wasn't in any part of the building where the crew should be. Feeling thought his roots to pick up any stray vibrations, he realised that Drax had gone way of track, and they, after a brief flurry of action stopped moving. And something else…

He froze, feeling the air currents and the vibrations coming thought the floor.

There. There it was again; Footsteps. Very, very gentle footsteps. Somewhere where no footsteps had a right to be.

Groot moved rapidly towards the Milano. If something bad had happened to Drax, he needed to tell Gamora right away, and they needed to both go and find Rocket and make sure he was alright…

Groot sprung up the stairs of the lower airlock, not even bothering with steps, just extending his body until he could grab the top rung of the step and pulling himself into the ship ion one move, and hurtling up the internal stairs like a heard of angry buffalo to find Gamora. He found her in the tiny room designed to simulate rainforest conditions and enable the fast-hot-wets to shed outer layers of protective tissue that had died and were no longer useful as well as removing particulate build up and playing with the adorable plastic ducky, and began to bang on the door and urgently relate to Gamora that there was an unauthorised person in the building, Drax was down and that Rocket and Quill un-accounted for.

Gamora paused mid-way thought conditioning her hair.

"Groot, I'm in here right now, if you want to drink you can get some water out of the faucet."

"I am Groot!" yelled Groot, urgently updating her on the situation. She sighed. "Groot, we spoke about this, we have this thing called privacy, and yes, I can see why you'd enjoy playing with the water droplets but not while someone else is in here, okay sweetie?"

"I am Groot!" yelled Groot, urgently. He wasn't dumb enough to go after whoever this was on his own, and he wanted Gamora there to back him up.

"Groot, we've explained this to you, I'm not drowning, anything that comes of my body is dead skin cells and dirt so I'm not dissolving, the foam is from shampoo and I'm not in any danger, surely as some point when you were traveling with Rocket he explained this to you…. Ah… right… Groot, unlike Rocket, some of us do actually bath because of hygiene, not some form of weird OCD animal-grooming thing: just because I'm in here doesn't mean I'm feeling stressed. I'm okay, Groot, everything's fine."

Groot, banged his head on the door to the shower in frustration, and then ran outside. If she wouldn't help, then perhaps Quill or Rocket…

He was just out of the lower airlock, when he heard the high, birdlike twittering and the raccoonish yelp of pain. And what's more, with his senses, he picked up on the ultrasonic frequency, that high, wild flutter that let him know that, yes, this wasn't someone imitating, this was actually Rocket, startled, and then in pain.

All thought more or less stopped at that point. Groot did not get angry readily, nor quickly, nor without reason.

-the high, birdlike twittering and the raccoonish yelp of pain-

Passing the sabotaged engine nacelle, with the fake, decoy racoon tial still lying on the floor and declaring LEAVE ME FRICKIN' ALONE, Groot stormed down the corridor, subconsciously growing his legs longer so he could move faster and sprouting thorns as his body reacted to his emotional state.

The sound cried out again, surprise, and then a pained yelp.

"I AMMMM GROOOOOT!"

He pounded down the Rockrette hallway, and, angry and ready for combat, rounded the corner to the room where Drax had been when he'd stopped moving and where the sounds of Rocket in distress were coming from, snarling, arms ten feel long whips covered in spines like wooden daggers, roaring his fury at the idea that some would come into his home and do harm to Rocket and-

Groot paused, and cocked his head on one side, curiously.

There was a small hollo projector lying in the centre of the floor, showing a 3D rendering of the back of Quill and a half-open door. Visible through the partial view through the door was Rocket, blue, flickering and transparent, as Quill tossed a jar at him and he chittered with surprise, fell over, and caught it on his belly with a squawk of pain. The hollo was looped to play again and again and again….

Groot heard the noise, and looked up.

The warehouse they had chosen as their new base had been left in a pretty wretched and filthy state by the Watt's brothers, but it was still a prime bit of real-estate: good location, viewing corridor overlooking the stars, private airlock, ship maintenance bay, the works. It even had its own private starship refuelling bay, loaded up with tens of thousands of litters of fuel, liquid oxidizer and compressed CO2 for RCS thrusters.

All kept at sub-zero temperatures with an extensive coolant system.

The micro-detonator took the valve of the first canister of Freon wedged upside-down above the door with a champagne-cork pop, no louder than a silenced firearm. Groot tried to bellow in shock and pain, but the freezing gas made it hard to speak, and the staggered, hands raised over his head to protect his delicate sensory organs from freezing, and he instinctively staggered a pace forwards into the room to get out from under the icy jet, and as he did the second canister liberated form the re-fuelling bay popped, and then the third, and then the forth and fifth, hidden in the detritus in the corners of the room, pointing inwards towards the holo in the centre of the space, and then the looted RCS thrusters fired up, spraying high-velocity carbon dioxide into the freezing air, where it instantly filmed anything it touched with a fine layer of dry ice, filling the room with dancing strands of mist and Groot staggered and screamed silently, part of his foot freezing to the floor and then snapping off as he tried to step away, casting terrifying shadows against the glittering frosty walls and he danced through the holo again and again, as a blue Rocket fell thought the air, chittering with shock and trying to grasp a dangerous thing he couldn't understand, again and again….

The canisters emptied in less than thirty seconds.

It felt a lot longer to Groot.

Bearded with frosty rime, his body immobilised and frozen to the floor in a dozen places, Groot silently reached out the one arm still functioning, extended his hand, and grew a tendril in the direction of the wall he knew Rocket's nest was on the other side of, hoping to lay just one finger on it and somehow, he didn't know how exactly, make some fort of noise that could warn Rocket as to the danger he was in. His icicle covered brow furrowed in concentration, as he re-directed warm sap from vital bodily functions and put parts of his brain into autumn hibernation mode to free up resources to warn his friend. He was almost there….

The gentle scrunch scrunch scrunch of footfalls across the forty floor rang out, accompanied by the quiet ringing noise of clothing bruising up against a metallic bottle.

A blue hand reached down, and with the tendril millimetres from reaching a chink in the rockcrete wall, snapped it off. Two legs appeared framing his head as he lay on the floor.

Groot looked up, painfully slowly, made stupid and clumsy by the cold.

"I… am… Groot?" he asked, at length.

There was a soft sloshing noise and a gentle clink as the fire-extinguisher was placed on the ground next to one of the legs for just a moment, as the leg's owner considered this.

And then the sudden spray of Carbons dioxide directly into Groot's face, and cardice filled his eyes, and he felt and heard no more as everything went a cloudy white.

Final victim: Rocket Racoon.

Rocket paused part way through cleaning the last of the from residue off the flux capacitor, and stared straight ahead for a long time, while the golem forge in the corner burped and boiled and spat out it's thousandth pizza pocket. He sat there, not moving, and trying to get a fix on the sudden sense of unease that had filled him. He had survived a lot of shit, and after a while he'd devolved pretty good instincts for spotting when something was suitably wrong, even in his conscious brain hadn't put the pieces together yet.

Then again, you've also got so much buried trauma you could snap at any time. It's telling those two apart, ain't it Rock? Step right up, ladies and gentlemammals, strait jackets at the ready and let's play another game of Premonition, or just Paranoia!

He shivered, and looked to the bare rockcrete wall next to him, and tied to work out why he suddenly had a sick, cold feeling in his gut just looking at it.

Something is very wrong here.

After a moment, and very hesitantly, Rocket held out a palm towards the wall, swallowing down his nervousness and trying to work out why he was afraid to tough it. it was as if a sudden chill had come over him. When his paw was within millimetres of touching the wall, he pulled it back, socked: the chill he'd felt wasn't a psychological effect, he realised, the wall was genuinely freezing cold. He put his whiskers close to it, and let them feel the vibrations as he tried to get a scent: dammit, the couldn't spell a damn thing over the stink of the golem forge and the spicy scent of peperone pizza pockets, but could see his breath in the air, and a fine film of frost where his hot animal breath hit the wall.

Grabbing his gun and C2 com's headset, Rocket slipped out of his room wading thought drifts of pizza pockets and, not even bothering to close the door behind him, started slinking down the corridor to try and work out what the hell was going on. Nose and whiskers twitching, he made his way along, trying to get a clue for what was going on and fight down the hard not of tension in his gut that told him that something was going sideways, and he was missing it because he was too busily cleaning up engine parts and fighting off intrusive self-replicating terran foodstuffs thanks to Quill.

Almost as soon as Rocket got out of the room he noticed the smell of blood down the corridor, in the direction of the Milano, and cursing to himself, shouldered his gun and begun to Jog in the direction of the blood, booting up his headset with a nerve impulse.

"Gamora, we have a ghost in the house, and it ain't one of the cute ones from Quill's stupid Terran movie: I got a blood trail in the corridor and-"

Rocket winced as the feedback flared up, and then snatched his headset of just in time as it spiked, loud enough to deafen, and threw to one side. It hit the floor, the light on the side blinking: Blocked signal.

"Gorram frickin' hack our com's, eh?" he muttered, glaring. "Fine, you wanna play it like this, bub, that's great by me…" he said, stalking aggressively towards the ship to get Gamora, tasting the air: the blood trail looked like small droplets, far apart and spaced out, so not a dragged body, more like someone running with an injury. Relieved there was no sap, so Groot must be okay, he crouched for a moment, gun pointing at the ceiling so it didn't over balance him while he sniffed at the floor, to work out which of his friends was hurt. He hoped it wasn't Quill, and sure, he'd feal bad if it were Drax or Gamora, but he'd never pretended he didn't have favourites-

-Lylla-

Rocket nearly fell flat on his ass, floored by the shock. Staggering slightly he dropped his gun and got on all fours, and sniffed at the blood. Otter, female, and as familiar to him as the sound of his own breathing. 100% patent-pending Keastone Life Sciences proprietary Universal Ranger, Mark one star, model L3 (female). Lylla.

Rocket cursed, and picked up his gun, running down the corridor in a blind panic.

"Lylla! Lylla where are you? Lylla, what happened? How the fuck did you find me? I covered my track you sneaky bitch, oh gods, are you hurt I"- the blood tral ended in a puddle, and then there was a drag-mark, leading straight towards the open doorway that lead to the Milano and he was about to run after, flowing that scent when-

-fox blood. Reynard.-

-when Rocket racoon paused.

Now then Roc', not one but two of your old squad back on this space-station, right in your own home. What are the odds?

No, seriously. What are the odds? In a galaxy as big as this. Two, three billion to one?

Rocket paused, and hunkered down, and retreated back down the corridor to where he'd dropped his gun, by the first blood-splatter, and crouched on his heels, covering the corridor with his gun, thinking.

One: odds of this being a coincidental meet-up almost imposable high. Two, if it's deliberate and Lylla came here willingly, why didn't she call ahead? Three, if Lylla was here and didn't want you to know, she'd find you, not the other way around. Four, the survives all split up, to make it harder to track us, so wht the hell would Lylla and Reynard be here together? Double all the existing long odds, and finally, you all took a heck of a hit from that chemical attack at tranquillity ridge, fucked up everyone's endocrine system somewhat, permanently, so unless Lylla has found a cure, why can't you smell that shit in her blood?

Rocket reached out a finger and, after a moments paused when he considered if he was really going to do this or not, dipped it in the blood, and then licked it, inhaling sharply like a wine taster, drawing it over it his tongue and towards his Jacobson's organ, in the roof of his mouth.

Pain. Fear. Chronic exhaustion, both physical and mental Borderline dependence on military grade go-pills, you can taste all that in the Blood. And just a little hint of freezerburn and EDTA, that all time multi-use chemical for all your metal ion sequestering needs: removes limescale, softens water, and prevents blood from clotting by blocking the calcium pathway, making it very handy for, say, keeping medical samples on ice for over a decade.

Someone is fucking with you, Roc', and that someone has access to the old medical samples from during the war, back on Halfworld.

Rocket didn't even think from then on, he didn't need to: thinking was for chumps who hadn't already thought out and pre-planned for every eventuality. He knew he needed to get away from here, alert whoever in the crew hadn't been got to yet, and hold up somewhere safe until they could link up with him. It was too dangerous to go looking for Quill or Gamora, they needed to come to him.

Turning on his heal, Rocket stalked along machine-gunning the wall next to him in short busts every few seconds to get the attention of whoever was left out of the Guardians of the galaxy and, on the basis that the blood trial was clearly trying to draw him towards the Milano, he went the other way and ran back to his room, fast: He could feel his breath coming faster than usual, and if he was honest with himself, he was spooked by that blood: the idea that someone had broken into his home and done something bad to his friends scared him, but the idea that that person was either from KLS or working in league with them scared him even more. False trials and using his sense of smell and familiar scents against him seemed like exactly the sort of thing a jaeger would try, and he wasn't sure he could cope with that, not again.

Frightened and alone, Rocket backed up to the locked door of his nest and, not having any better pre-prepared space to hold out, spent a good five seconds of genuinely pants wetting fear as he fumbled with the lock, cursing and constantly looking over his shoulder half suspecting to get grabbed from behind any second, fumbled with his keycard and waited an agonised half second between his entering the code on the touchpad and the heavy electronic locks buzzing open. The second they did, Rocket jinked through sideways, dragging his gun behind him and, cursing as he slipped on Pizza Pockets, scrabbled over the steaming heap of snacks on all fours and, fighting to get the spicy scent of pepperoni out of his nostrils, dragged himself to the wall and sheathed his gun over his bac for just a moment and shot up the wall, climbing fast: with all the heavy equipment bolted to the walls, there were literally hundreds of places you could hide completely from anyone below you in this room.

Rocket got to a large wooden crate bolted two-thirds of the way up the wall with an opening cut in the side, one of the spaces he used for storage and the occasional sneaky nap, and dived inside, drawing his gun and lying down flat, aiming it down and the door, five meters directly below him. Someone would have heard the shooting, either Guardian or attacker, and pretty soon they'd have to check this room, and if the head that poked through the door wasn't one he knew and sort of liked, it was getting blown off the second he saw it.

He waited, for a long moment, as below him the Golem Forge bubbled and farted to itself and spewed out pizza pockets at a rate of about one every twelve seconds.

"Come on, come on…" he muttered to himself, as the box he was lying in creaked slightly. "Come on, you fucker, show yourself, I have the perfect ambush, come on." He muttered. "Come on!" he snarled. "Let's frickin' get this over and done with!"

The Box creaked again.

Rocket racoon realised four things at the same time.

One, Over the stench of the Pizza Pockets and noise of the Golem forge, he couldn't smell or hear and damn thing.

Two: with all the heavy equipment bolted to the walls, there were literally hundreds of places you could hide completely from anyone below you in this room, and in his rush, he hadn't checked a single damn one of them.

Three: Now that he thought about it, with his perfect memory, he didn't remember shutting the door behind him, let along locking it.

And finally, he realised just a little too late, that the box had never creaked under his weight before…

Rocket rolled over, rising his gun and snarling and twisting like a scalded cat, when the two boots on the top of the box finally pushed, and while the screws holding it to the wall held, the wood around them splintered, and suddenly he was falling, falling falling, twisting mid-air half in and half out of the box and reaching for his rifle as it spun away from him and-

Splat!

Rocket landed on his back, hard, and the heavy wooden crate slammed into him across his ribs, and he heard something splinter like bone, and a hot red liquid sprayed across his face, and he gasped, just once.

Well, that's it then… cut in half by a falling box. As deaths go that was fairly unexpected… he thought, until he realised that the splintering noise was the box, not his bones , well not entirely, he still felt the wound from Yondu's arrow open up again, and he realised that if he was alive, then something must had cushioned his fall.

Rocket raised a paw to his face, and wiped off some of the red.

"Tomato? Oh great, frickin' pizza pockets." He said, grimacing at the mound of oven-snacks he was lying in, trapped under a box, and reaching for his gun.

A shape detached itself from the shadows at the very top of the room, and dropped like a hawk: aimed perfectly to land on Rocket's head and crush it like a melon underfoot.

Crunch!

Rocket winced and closed his eyes, but when he realised he was still in pain and therefore still, probably, alive, he opened one eye, slowly.

There was a dark blue combat-boot either side of his head, and a figure crouching over him, knees flexed to absorb the worst of the famed cartilage-crunching superhero landing. He looked up at the crotch inches from him with the utter disinterest of someone whose libido was very much secondary to his survival instinct and even then not directed at full humanoids, and then glanced up at the face of his attacker as she strained up from the crouch, frowning.

"You?" he grunted, and the chuckled, weakly coughing a little blood, which he spat at her boot.

"Ugggg, huh, yeah, guess you and Bligh have the contacts to scrounge some old samples off those fucks back home. Well, enjoy it while you can, sister, Gammy's gonna tare you a new one when she finds out you're here, toots." he said, weekly grabbing the first thing to hand, the dammed symbiote in the jar, and throwing it at her. She caught it easily, and the glass didn't break.

There was a slight slithery noise, as pizza cascaded off Rocket's gun as the figure picked it up, and, pressing his paw to the grip for a second to de-activate the gene-lock, levelled it at his face and chambered a round.

Rocket snarled , and leaned forward, pressing his forehead to the muzzle.

"Oh, go on bitch, do it if ya' got the stones 'cause I won't talk! Whatever you got planed, it ain't gonna work so end it now, dollface, because otherwise I'll be there when Gammy gets you and I'll piss on your grave you bald-"

The gun fired once, point blank. A Taser round. Rocket screamed and writhed for a moment, before the Heavy glass jar caught him neatly behind his ear, on a spot that you had to know was there, but if you did, would put any KLS product out cold neatly and without brain damage, and there was a moment of calm.

Then the figure standing with a boot to either side of Rocket's head carefully put the writhing hissing jar down, and, ignoring it, squatted down again, and gently, inquisitively touched a finger to the old wound that had re-opened on his narrow, furry chest.

The figure paused for a moment, and then got out a tracking chip, and drew one of Drax's knives from her belt.


Half way through her shower; Gamora froze up, and stared at the door for the moment.

She had heard shooting. Machine gun, short burst, Rocket's weapon or one identical to it. Most people, even most soldiers, would have doubted themselves then. Asked "did you hear that?" to someone. Even Quill would have frowned, confused, and then waited to see if he heard it again.

Gamora was not most people. She grabbed the sword, propped up against the side of the shower (because while she mocked Rocket fro bring a gun into the shower with him she did have to admit that the racoon had a point. Maybe it was a cyborg thing), and opened the door and stepped out. She did not waste time trying to dress, but she realised after a long moment of standing in the middle of the Milano's common area dripping on the floor that having a fight barefoot and covered in slippery shampoo was going to make her lose her footing fall over, and she'd rather be prepared than rush in, so she slipped into her trousers without drying, and buckled on her combat boots and, after a monuments thought and some cursing and fumbling, a sports bra, because doing any exercise without one, even just jogging, was just not worth the pain and she didn't need the distraction in combat. There was a series of short burst from Rocket's gun for the first then seconds of er dressing, and then nothing. She was dressed and had her weapons, sword, knives, pistol and some explosives, prepped in under a minute ten, more than fast enough for her to get the drop on almost anyone: you had to get up pretty early in the morning to beat a daughter of Thanos when it came to working fast-

Peep. Peep.

The com next to her rung. She glared at it, about the head off down the lower airlock.

Peep. Peep.

Angered, she went to ignore it, whoever it was could wait…

What if it's Quill calling for help?

Hesitating a moment, Gamora turned back from the airlock and, hand on the haft of her sword, walked over to the com and activated it.

The holo projector flickered on, and the pre-recorded message stared, as Nebula glared acidly; out at the camera for a long moment, before speaking.

"Gamora, Count Bligh and the consortium of other individuals I represent have discovered that you are in possession of information left by the Collector, Tivan. This information reveals the location of an infinity stone, known as the ether. You may have been planning to return it to Tivan, l or give it to Nova like the other one, or even to father for all I know…

"Instead, you are going to recover it yourself, alone, and bring it to me, without a fight or any sort of trickery." She said glaring. "Because if you don't, sister, then you will never see you four friends alive again-"

To be continued.