Chapter 6
"Oh no!" Coran hollered in a high-pitched panic. "Oh, this terrible! Dreadful! Oh, help! Help! Someone, quick!"
The closet door was unlocked and slid aside, revealing his pair of wary pirate guards. Their expressions turned to surprise, though, when they found Coran backed up into the far corner, Pidge standing on the floor just in front of him.
"Help!" He cried out to them. "It's a Screaming Pidginator! Their wails can deafen and kill! They travel in huge swarms! If there's one aboard the ship, we're probably infested! Oh, please help!" With that, Pidge turned to face the pirates, scrunched up her face, and let out an almighty, wailing scream. Both the invaders promptly clapped their hands over their ears and backed away. Coran shrieked as well, mimicking the gesture but also falling down and convulsing as he did so. Pidge took her caterwauling to an even higher level, and as Coran pretended to expire the pirates took off running.
The two kept up their charade for a few moments more, before leaving off and breaking down into hopeless chuckles.
"Well, that went perfectly according to plan. Thank you kindly, Miss Pidge."
"Welcome, Coran!"
"Alright, let us go get the others and prepare for Phase Two, shall we?"
"Ye-es!"
-Change-
"There's no such thing as a 'Screaming Pidginator', you idiots."
"You didn't hear it, boss! That thing was a demon!"
"Yeah, it killed th' butler-moustache guy!"
Growling, the small group's leader stepped forward to slap some sense back into her idiot underlings. "It was probably a trick, morons! Now get the grak back there and make sure t' kill anything that moves!"
"Y-yes, boss..." Reluctantly, the pair turned to go, but froze when a distant wailing started up. "Oh-no."
"What is that?" Another of the pirates asked.
"Th-the Pidginator! That's the s-s-sound it makes!"
All of the pirates grew nervous as the screaming intensified, rebounding and echoing as though there were dozens of the small creatures, not just one.
"Wh-whole s-s-swarms, he s-said," one of the two guards muttered, eyes darting to every small shadows. "Sh-ship's inf-fest-ted!"
"Then we use some disinfectant," the leader growled, hefting her gun up a bit higher. "C'mon."
They stuck close together while traversing the ship's halls, the screaming seeming to fade in and out but a constant background noise. It didn't help when the lights started to flicker around them, creating large sections of shadow. Then, the pirates turned a corner, and halted in their tracks. From the intersection where they stood all the way to the next one and out of sight, a strange green goo was splattered around, as though several different lifeforms had exploded. One of the two guards started muttering about 'Pidginators' again.
"Oh, shut up already." Another of the pirates shoved at him, clearly worried herself but trying to hide it. Setting off again, the six of them avoided the goo piles as well as they could, though one idiot inevitably stepped in some.
And promptly set off an explosion.
Howling as he was tossed away, the guy landed right in another pile, setting off several explosions that started a chain reaction. The rest of his companions took off, though two more were taken down before being able to reach the safety of the next hallway. Those who escaped were the leader and the pair who'd first been scared off by the initial Pidginator.
"Comin' 'ere was a bad idea!"
"Shut yer trap and come on!" Thoroughly disgusted at having lost half of her remaining forces, the leader headed back towards the airlock where there own dingy little ship was waiting. Halfway there, though, she tripped on something invisible stretched across the hall and fell flat on her face, gun sliding away. The two idiots didn't fare any better, also tripping and losing their weapons. Grumbling to herself, the leader started to go and retrieve her blaster, only to freeze when the screaming, which had gone silent after the explosions, started up again right around the corner.
"Run!" She shrieked.
-Change-
Smiling with an indulgent air, Coran allowed the children to go watch the last of the fleeing pirates through the windows while he got a few of the training drones to help clear out the bodies of those invaders killed in the goo explosions. Such a thing was not fit for young minds to see, after all.
"Well now!" He announced upon returning to where the young paladins and princess were still giggling amongst themselves. "That was a splendid victory, and I daresay we've won ourselves a celebration for it. But first, we do need to tidy up what's left of our traps and retrieve those recording devices! I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather not be walking down a hall only to jump out of my skin when a swarm of Screaming Pidginators starts up!" Laughing despite the tasks they had to do, the children scattered to their different stations. Keith and Hunk went to get up the trip wires while Shiro and Allura disposed of the dropped weapons and started mopping up the goo hall, and Lance and Pidge crawled through the ventilation ducts to get up all the speakers they'd planted barely an hour before.
Once finished, they all met up again with Coran on the ship's bridge, where he'd just finished using a wormhole to take them to a safer sector of space.
"Alrighty, what shall we do for our celebration?" He asked them.
"Treats in the pillow fort!" Hunk promptly stated, an idea which the others all agreed to. And so, Coran led the group back to the kitchen, where he started preparing a mixture of Altean desserts and some similar to those of Earth that Hunk had devised in his older form. Allura and the yellow paladin remained to help him, while Shiro took the others to repair their pillow fort, even making it a bit more spread out and open. By the time that the food was all ready, it had turned into more of a pillow playhouse, with much easier ways of crawling in and out.
More exhausted than he'd have liked to let on, Coran simply laid down in the central section, content to let the children play on and around him, occasionally calling out a warning when any of the mock-battles got to rough. Eventually, Pidge came over and curled up beside him, falling asleep with a smile on her face. Through the course of the next hour, the rest of the children also found themselves dozing off against Coran and one another. The man himself followed suit, glad for the extra rest after his harried day.
He woke up when there was a sudden weight increase. Glancing about in befuddlement, Coran was rather startled to see that all of his charges were inexplicably themselves again, still slumbering away in the same positions. Pidge was tucked against his side, head resting upon his outstretched arm, while Hunk sprawled overtop both Coran's legs. Allur and Shiro were curled together against his other side, with both Lance and Keith laying across their laps.
Blinking, Coran couldn't help but smile, and go back to sleep himself.
It was a good long while before anyone else awakened, and then everyone was brought to full awareness by Lance's indignant squawking and flailing. In the mad scramble afterwards to get up and separate themselves, the pillow fort suffered a bit of damage, but remained mostly intact. Coran himself didn't bother to move, still lying in the center of it as he listened to his princess and the paladins start comparing fuzzy memories of their time spent as children.
As the others dealt with the rush of embarrassment, Pidge fell silent, and wound up crawling back under the sheet roof in order to stare quizzically at Coran.
"You gave me a bath?"
"You needed it."
Smiling with his eyes closed, Coran simply patted the mattress beside him, where Pidge promptly laid down and made herself at home.
"The only reason this isn't awkward is because I'm not fully awake yet," she warned him, tugging at the material of the enlarged green dress she wore.
"Duly noted, Miss Screaming Pidginator."
Once the rest of the team realized their smallest member had gone back into the fort, they reluctantly returned one by one as well to finish their naps. Lance rather pointedly set himself on the opposite side of Keith, who took up a position next to where Shiro and Allura were most definitely not cuddling, but even so there was a great deal more of a relaxed air than before they'd all been de-aged.
"I don't know about the rest of you," Hunk mumbled with a grin. "But I kinda had fun being a kid again."
There was silence for a few moments, before a few murmurs of assent were made.
Later, they would have to return to their formal duties, but in the meantime, the members of Voltron were content to let themselves relax a bit longer. And one very tired Royal Babysitter turned Advisor was happy to let them.
