AN: Thanks for the reviews and encouragement! Sorry it took a while to update; I definitely have no plans to abandon this fic. :-)
CHAPTER III
A week later...
"...hatching his most diabolical scheme yet!" Buzz Lightyear interjected, holding one finger dramatically aloft in the air.
"One'd think he finally might change the tune, after all these years," XR muttered behind his commanding officer's back. "Classic Phrases of Captain Lightyear and all, own a signed copy myself, but this is getting plain ho-hum."
Team Lightyear alternately stood or lounged around a long briefing table somewhere in the ileum of Star Command Headquarters. The room weltered in a total chaos, appearing worse than a library after a hurricane. A straggle of papers, coffee mugs, and holographic documents decorated every available horizontal surface, while two large mail containers—unsealed letters and hastily piled folders leaking out of the shelves like bookish entrails—hulked near the door.
Beside XR, the slightly worried Jo-Adian moved a step backwards, and managed to capsize a whole tower of papers, which, according to the universal domino effect, propagated the offer to have an interesting meeting with the floor to other near-standing mini-mountains of the same kin. Some seconds later, XR had vanished, and the offender stood waist-deep in a deluge of sheets, wringing his hands and grinning sheepishly.
"Don't mind me, I'm just demonstrating some new office survival techniques here," the robotic ranger snorted somewhere nearby.
"Um...sorry about that..." Booster dipped one arm into the papery sea and scooped his friend up. "I just still get kind of jumpy when Buzz talks like that... What if Zurg really is hatching his most diabolical scheme yet?"
"D'oh! Zurg's losing his touch, and that's a fact. Remember five months ago, big guy?" XR began, once back on the safe ground. "I didn't even bother to count how many times that litany became repeated during the operation—which was actually sixteen times, because someone who is practically a computer cannot help it, no matter how sentient—and what did Zurg's grand, cosmos-shaking design turn out to be? Spreading mothball dissolvent into the atmospheres of a couple of planets, so that pests would devour everyone's winter clothing, as a consequence of which innocent citizens would catch deathly colds! That was just...beyond lame, not to mention that a third of these planets were tropical! Huh, even Saturday morning cartoon villains manage better these days; I almost feel sorry for him. Seriously, whoever even uses something like mothballs these days, when the market bursts with much better repellents?"
"Still...it heinously claimed the lives of two traditionally-minded elderly citizens, and that is no laughing matter!" Buzz fingered his chin, his eyes narrowed. "Besides, it could all be a clever ruse to mislead us! Perhaps he's pretending weakness while secretly concocting something so vile only one who has long studied the footpaths of his evil, twisted strategies might fathom the extent of it... Hmm... Now, look at this. Months and months of, admittedly, sub-quality plots but with a wicked purpose nonetheless, and all the while he has been striving for something completely different behind our backs! I am certain that these subterfuges-"
"Yesyes, we know you take a personal interested in Zurg's insanity. But what's so universally vile about looting speck-sized museums and whatsits on some rock of clodhoppers beyond the reach of most stable hyperspace routes? Sounds like something every Trade World denizen would do, besides selling their grandmas in the nth generation," XR harrumphed while picking up scattered papers.
"I...I'm not sure," Mira cut in yawning, bent over yet another square foot of office chaos. For the past hour or so, her tired eyes had merely brushed over the lines of text, hardly taking in any new information. "Buzz might be right, though. Remember that case with Natron a couple of years back? I later heard the whole mess started off from a single artifact stored in the vaults of Capital Planet Museum of Intergalactic Prehistory. Next the LGMs found Planet X, then Zurg interfered, and...well. Besides, he's been unnaturally silent after that mothball incident. I, ah, well...eh..." She rubbed her eyes and blinked hard a couple of times. "Well, I thought he might've finally cracked and maybe taken a vacation, given the recent...well, like XR said, but this actually does show something's going on. Maybe we should take this...seriously?"
"Something does not equal the imminent destruction of the galaxy by an invasion of evil space mummies! Which just sounds so cliché I would rate the odds of such an event ever happening minus googolplex to one, had I not actually experienced a close shave with one myself! Never-the-less," the robot rolled over to the desk and angrily stamped at the date on one of the documents with an angry finger. "Look at this! An alleged theft from some dingy collection of rock scrawlings, dating back to the previous year. Another from twenty months ago. We wouldn't even have heard of such pointless, petty thieving, had not the ol' bucket-head started demolishing some nature reserve in the colon of that...Urghth or whatever."
"Earth," Buzz corrected, thumbing through a thick wad of sheets complete with detailed maps. "The planet's called The Earth."
"Earth? What kind of name is that for...well...anything? It'd be like calling Bathyos The Water or Rhizome The Plant! What kind of verbally challenged, insipid..."
Across the table, Mira grimaced and gesticulated at the blabbermouth robot to shut up. He, however, appeared to pay as much heed as a dead amoeba.
"...jejune blah-people would-"
Buzz cleared his throat, brows knitted, a faint redness spreading across his cheeks. "While I do admit that my ancestors did indeed possess their flaws, I unfortunately cannot agree with your statement about 'jejune blah-people'. The history of the species named homo sapiens sapiens represents a colorful mesh of-"
"Eh...? But...I always thought your family came from...well...Morph?"
"That is indeed the case. However, The Earth is the noblemost ancestral home of all humankind, which is why I am taking a deep personal interest in this case and will not, as you suggested earlier, hand it over to Team Crockett or, as you so finely added, the paper shredder!"
Shaking her head, Mira sat up and banged her mug hard against the table. "Will you boys stop it? We won't get anywhere with this constant bickering! And why are you so crabby anyway, XR?"
The addressed folded his arms around his torso and mussitated something half-vague about his perpetual dating troubles.
"H'kay, ho-kay, just everyone sit down and calm...uh...also down. Zurg's acting more crackpotty than usual, the uncommon stillness of Zeta Quadrant worries the Commander, and Buzz obviously won't drop this assignment as it's directly linked to his...well...interests. Maybe we should just go through everything at least once, take a look at the full picture, and then decide what to do. Anyway, I can't digest a single new report anymore; my eyes are so tired they'll soon fall asleep without me knowing it."
"Good thinking, ranger!" Buzz slapped his hands together. "Now, let's see what kinds of eggs of ultimate destruction the foul fiend has been brooding all this while..."
Mira sighed. Yes, XR had pinned down a serious problem in his own fashion: Buzz definitely needed something to distract him from the perpetual Zurg obsession. It might transform into something truly unhealthy in a matter of a year or two. Perhaps an emergency vacation on Rhizome might come into question. With two extra tickets for her fatigued eyes.
In spite of this, she snapped on a holographic map of the galaxy, and instructed it to pin down the particular planet.
"Alrighty...so, about nine days ago, we received circa six cubic meters of documents relating to unusual alien activity on Earth. One thing stands clear: the officials over there don't exactly know what's going on either. Or at least some of them don't. Here we have reports ranging from the inappropriate probing of cows to crop circles to luminous clouds, but the newest one at least pins down an indubious image. The Foreign Office of Baltis...uh...how do you read this? Those little dots above the letters, do they mean something?"
"Baltiska Förbundet. It stands for The Baltic Union in a certain, practically extinct language," XR hummed.
Mira shot him with a sharp glance. "A minute ago you virtually condemned Earth under the title of a bad joke, and suddenly you pretend to know how they speak? Don't tell me you plugged yourself again into some mainframe somewhere!"
The robot shrugged. "Blame the LGMs; I never built myself. But nope. I largely stopped being an infojunkie after that mishap, yet that doesn't stop the odd residue from floating about my neural networks. Those data erasing algorithms don't work for everything, you know, especially if a part of one's circuits resemble a tangled-up hypercube. But what does it matter? Every team needs a handy mobile know-it-all/translator, especially when they're decoding ancient hieroglyphs or gibberish spoken only by minus 0.313 persons living in the center of a black hole."
"Uh...fine, whatever. This nevertheless," Mira pointed at the bundle of sheets Buzz had just leafed through, "shows that at least someone over there can distinguish patterns in weird activity. So...this document from The Baltic Union records several demolitions of sites with apparent pre-historic value plus break-ins to museums. In some cases, local natives have sighted a large purple warship, while a few braver ones have voluntarily disclosed information about 'violent questioning' by...eh...mind you, this is not my wording, but a direct quote, 'violent questioning by bloody effing giant bugs and a codswallop-speaking bastard in a skirt, obsessed with some stupid outlandish letter and sissy colors'."
Cheeks shimmering, she cleared her throat after catching Buzz's disapproving scowl.
"Hmm...eh...well. But...no direct attacks against cities or even flights over busier settlements, so obviously Zurg has wanted to keep this undercover. Eh...as undercover as possible, obviously, since...eh...that description is pretty accurate despite the...ah...colorful language."
"Then we have what appears to be a boxful of Zurgish debris collected from the outskirts of some mountain..." Buzz stood up and trod a few times around a container with soil and odd scraps of metal peeking out of it, frowning as if a pack of miniature evil emperor clones might jump out any moment now. "Didn't the LGMs analyze this yesterday?"
"Yup; contains no explosives, hazardous chemicals, or contagious substances, only traces of grub DNA and, well, trash. So we can conclude that Zurg actually did visit that particular place quite recently. Then, we have this...other lot." Mira sighed and inclined her head towards the mishmash of papers crowding the other end of the table. Topmost sat a blurry, holographic photo of an old bottle cap hanging from a piece of almost invisible string, failing miserably in its task of pretending to be a UFO. "Hard to figure out whether even a single per cent of those relates to our arch-nemesis. Quite sad to notice, that this clutter of nonsense came bundled with the real deal from the only Star Command Office of the planet."
"Maybe they, out of general curiosity, wanted to see whether someone up here among the high and mighty top brass could forge any sense into their tricennial collection of x-files," XR mused.
"Hmm...such a lack of professionalism from the model citizens of the Galactic Alliance is unacceptable," Buzz muttered. "It is our sworn duty to protect the galaxy from the dark forces of evil, and not plague our fellow Rangers with such outrageous misinformation! Hmm, I doubt that any higher-ranking officer has executed a proper inspection on that misdemeaning office for a long while either."
"He just can't spot a prank, even if it danced naked around him, wearing a blinking duck suit, can he?" the robot hummed almost inaudibly somewhere near Booster. "I also fear he's crafting yet another excuse for us to visit that odd hunk o' rock. Incidentally, why is dark always associated with evil? If I happen to prefer dark blue to periwinkle and evenfall to daytime, does that automatically label me more untrustworthy than-"
The Jo-Adian, however, seemed to catch only the middle of XR's mumblings, and practically shouted, "Hot rockets! Do you mean we're going to visit the home of Buzz's ancestors? That's so exciting!"
"That's the general plan, ranger. We must find out what Zurg's up to."
"Wh-ww-wait, wait, wait," Mira cut in. "We're talking about a journey of several weeks here, aren't we, and that's just to reach the border space of Earth! Are you certain we can risk-"
Meanwhile, in the hindgut of the charted space—when the galaxy thus becomes anthropomorphized in order to achieve a certain narrative effect, one surely cannot hand over any of the nicer body parts to represent a whole quadrant devoted to stinking foulness—Emperor Zurg peered into a gloomy cell through a set of thick bars reinforced with a triple energy shield. These were mostly for show, however, since nobody knew a flying hippo's tail about the actual powers of the dweller within. A splash of washy light spilled in from where the monarch stood, but it grew so weak midway through that the rearmost parts bathed in a deep purple dusk.
A set of glowing, blue eyes stared back at Zurg from the darkness, accompanied by an unnatural hush. Only after a while of silent observation did he, at least partially, comprehend the reason to this.
That blasted creature did not breathe. Well, considering its state, this ought to have stood out as a self-explanatory detail, but...was he truly dealing here with something from the other side, or did this nitwit merely attempt to bamboozle him with a well-crafted exoskeleton? Somehow, he still refused to accept that those uncanny events of late had indeed been achieved without holographs and special effect gurus. Rationality—or at least a Zurgish, rather mangled and perverted form of it—endeavored to overtake those deeper, more primeval levels of consciousness shivering and cringing with dread before the unexplainable.
Then, there was this...this peculiar, oppressive sensation that kept plucking at his nerves. He could not put his claw fully on it, but it felt slightly like...well...like having a constant, unreachable itch on the inside walls of one's skull during the stuffy, stifling hour of treacherous calmness just before a violent thunderstorm. Gah, the thing must have somehow created it to...
Zurg shook himself mentally, hacking asunder the railway under the onrushing train of thought. No more of this ridiculous brooding! The blasted wight ought to feel the heebie-jeebies because of him, not the other way round! MRAH! He lorded over its powers now, and had paid a hefty price for all the upcoming evil fun of universe-conquering and population-enslaving. Time to show that the laser-stare of his lenses drilled through more adamantine substances and layers of consciousness than those bloody travesties of light bulbs! Well, at least once he'd get fully rid of the eye patch...
"Have you...spoken to it at all since the departure from Earth?" he inquired of the brain pod fidgeting squeakily next to him.
"Yes indeed, Your Abominableness. It does not wish for anything to drink or eat, only...silence and darkness. Uh...preferring preciseness, I reckon we ought to refer to it as he, since...well. Anyhow, he finds this place depressing, the music taste of the guardian grub dreadful, and would prefer to return to-"
"Don't tell me that deuced nincompoop with the intellect of a frozen cow hoof yet again defies the will of his solemn master by listening to Justin Bieber here in the blacker than black heart of my evil empire? RARH, I shall bake him into a bug pie for this; I shall-" Zurg roared, almost shaking with sudden, over-boiling fury.
"Uh, my liege, please do remember your blood pressure! At your age, one should be careful with sudden adrenaline bursts-"
"CRATERS, DO NOT BELITTLE MY DEEP PURPLE VIGOR! Why does everyone keep doing that these days? I feel as sprightly as a fawn on a springtime meadow!" After muttering something semi-inaudible under his breath about never getting a rollator or a rocking chair, Zurg turned his attention back to the wight.
"Furthermore, I'm not here to listen to any maudlin, mawkish mummery about weeping hearts and Motherland's sorrow upon seeing its sons being forced into the far-off unknown! That puny...uh...whapping mallard-head is to STAY HERE no matter what, and that's the final dot in the end of the sentence! No buts or ellipses or whatever stupid grammar-y effects of indecision there are!" he growled, his good eye blazing crimson while the right behind the eye patch obtained only a washy shade of pink. "Now, open that blasted door and we shall proceed with the first interrogations. Hrrmpfft, I had presumed that my deviously bright mind would have grasped that irritating lingo—Old Morse or whatever—in a week's time, but perchance some slight overestimates plague this case. I wonder why a supervillain of considerable experience and an extremely high IQ cannot manage the same as those prissy teenling heroes in fantasy books... Or am I reading too much into that...? Bah, whatever. Anyhow-"
There and then, a deep, rumbling voice, like subterranean boulders shifting, issued from the dungeon.
"Hvers fregnið mik? HAH! Ósnotr maðr þykkisk allt vita..."
Involuntarily, Zurg flinched, the unpleasant memories he had attempted to stifle all week long flooding back into his mind.
Huh. Huh-uh. Well, at least he had brought back the right bugger. His ears had never met the equivalent of that over-bombastic voice with its strange harmonics. It made one's goosebumps' goosebumps erupt into goosebumps. Hrrhmh, wherefore could not he, the embodiment of all cosmic naughtiness, bellow down upon his snuffling stooges with such tones? Mayhaps the helmet required again a couple of tweaks, not to mention the new syncing issues with the lenses...
Now, however, he attempted to hide the momentary relapse of imperiousness behind a haughty stance.
"Well? What's it blathering on about? Haven't you twerps told it that it's extremely rude to prattle on and on in some gobbledygook not all of the present company understands?"
"Err..."
"This-" Emperor Zurg began, but hesitantly left the sentence hanging in the air. Slowly, both he and the brain pod turned to goggle into the blue glow of the prisoner's eyes. An odd vibration had just passed through the ether, and the oppressive sensation at the edge of Zurg's consciousness had begun squirming and bristling, as if irritated, questioning tendrils were reaching out to burrow into his very thoughts. Apparently the ambulatory encephalon could feel it also.
Fine, he had dealt with mind powers before, like those of the pestilential Tangeans, yet this bore no likeness to anything he had hitherto experienced. What in blazes was that thing up to?
"Hwæt syndon gē | þē þus hider cwōmon?
Nū gē, mīnne gehȳrað ān‐fealdne geþōht!" the rumbling base rolled forth again, yet with a hint of faltering shading its various harmonics.
Nonplussedness took over the brain pod. "Um...er...I'm not sure I understood him... It's as if he had changed the lang-"
The blue pinpoints of light in the darkness flared angrily. Soon, the whole dungeon rang with a strident oath, dust falling down from the ceiling as the forceful echoes bounced hither and thither and jumbled together.
"Oi Ikutaara taivoinen | Pitkänen pilvenalainen,
kunpa nuolesi napsahuttaisit | vimmaiset vasamasi veistäisit,
sinkoaisit selkään säköpäitten | hivusille heikkomielten!
Miks' herätettiin ikiaikainen unen unholasta koetokseen kiusalliseen?"
Then, a great harrumph, and the voice continued with calmer tones. Somewhat astonished, Emperor Zurg witnessed the wight meandering through an assortment of inflections and sentences that grew less and less impalpable by the second. It was like listening to a very linguistic rockslide. Finally, his ears seized the entire meaning of one, even if the expressions tasted quite archaic.
"Once anew asketh | one of Bölþorn's blood:
Whate'er wantest thou | proud-helm, purple-clad?"
Arms akimbo, Zurg glared down at the brain pod. "Huh. It speaks our tongue! Why did you biscuit-wit claim it only twaddled on with that Old Horse?"
The servant lowered his voice down to a whisper, tossing a furtive peek at the cell, as if afraid that the dweller within might hear. "Eh...it's Old Norse, my liege. Begging your pardon, but I had no idea about this. My sources unfortunately aren't, as Your Reverence has seen, all that consistent. Please understand that we're dealing here with a creature of immeasurable age and wits, both far beyond our own."
"Twit." Zurg brushed away the minion's concerns with a wave of his hand. "There's no such thing as a wit beyond mine, except maybe for when it comes to all these pointless languages. Wisdom, now, that's a different matter, and I crrrrave to unearth the secrets of auld lang syne this well-ghost, as of yet, hides from me! Besides, when I'm the ultimate master of the universe, a single language shall rule all my slaves, which also ought to reduce the odds for secret rebellions, as anyone found gabbling something unintelligible shall be executed forthwith. And now..." he addressed the being wallowing in the gloom. "As for you—Whatever your name is. Can't pronounce it and shan't even try; that's one of the perks of being an evil emperor, no need to follow all the conventional social norms—I'll list my demands shortly. However, if you indeed can speak like everyone else, what was up with that blasted pasquinade inside the cave and afterwards? Huh? Such insolence is just the salt upon my snails, indeed! Lots of time would've been saved, had you bothered to manifest your skills a teensy weensy bit earlier!"
"I think it might be because we've hitherto talked to him only in Old Norse," the brain pod put in.
"Hah, it did hear proper speech already in the cave, and doubtless scads thereafter from the grubs! It has no excuse for this buffoonery-"
"Harken to the Hel-mara harried; | the sheerest sooth spaketh he!" the wight retorted, indicating the minion,
"Thin-spun tides were those | rare the reasons, rightly
for sons of Albion to fare forth | set sails for a northbound ship-road.
Westerly wisdom, tongues seldom-spoken | had I, alas, nigh-on mislaid
during the dreamtime deep-rooted | e'entide everlasting!
Yet finally found I fain | the way to my word-hoard!"
Thereupon, the eldritch voice lowered down to a hissing snarl.
"A warrior well-wrought thou mightest be, | silver-gauntlet, strong-corselet
but heed thy haughty oaths | stand ware of thy tricksy tongue!
Kennings keen-said, steadfast | to thy will bind me:
Yet Yme's young | frets fleering mouths;
scorn for scorn | a boon for a boon!
If I yet fared free | roamed the rime-woods of yore
holmgang hog-wild | wouldeth will thy weird!
With many a might-rune ready | vaunting a Völund-blade bright
would I avail afore thee | hew thy hauberks, sunder thy swords!
Be yet warned | wanderer of welkins:
For e'en on this harry-hour ne'er | quaileth kithless the cold-born;
power yet bideth | beneath the boughs,
underneath the root of Ash ancient | Élivágar's eagres ebb ne'ermore!"
Finger poised aloft in the air, Emperor Zurg almost snapped back a petulant retort, but in the last second closed his mouth. A speck of cautiousness huddling in the bottom of his mental cesspit of evil plotlings had just trilled a warning. The wight was manifestly annoyed, and angering him further might pose the risk of losing more body parts, or perhaps worse. The emergence of the familiar language had shred apart some of its alien nature, but nothing had yet dispelled the eldritch aura questing seemingly every cranny of the ethereal plains. Whatever the latter actually meant, but the heavily superstitious warlord of Pyxis 71 trumpeting his ridiculous views on the mailing list of evil overlords frequently used it, and somehow it seemed to describe perfectly the...well...whatever those ethereal plains had been called before the invention of this expression.
"Hrrhmph, very well...uh...well-warden. I shall extend my courtesy further than commonly, but just this once." He tossed an irritated glare down at the servant. "And don't you groveling body parts and whatsits start nurturing any...ideas. I still got the Bubble of Torment ready for those demanding courteousness. I'm an evil emperor; I can't dance around throwing flowers, singing 'I love you, you love me, we're a happy family!' to every by-crawling puddle of protoplasm. Now...open that blasted door! This corridor echoes too much and I don't wish to share my world domination plans with every deputy assistant of a junior sweeper!"
Dithering, the brain pod wheeled off to type the entrance code. "Uh...Your Sinisterness? I still think we ought not to hop into this so rashly. If you'd let me peruse through that manuscript I disinterred from the Gamla Uppsala archives, I'm certain we could-"
"Pish-posh! I have a universe to conquer here, and for too long has that Star Command served as the icky fly in my cosmic soup! Besides, where do I need some stupid scrolls, when the collected knowledge of countless centuries couches a couple of clippity-clops in front of me?"
The cell door stood finally open. Slowly, Emperor Zurg trod in, and intentionally left the lamps unlit. In the tremulous light, he could just distinguish the podium upon which the being perched—or lay, or whatever it was that the blasted phantom did—besides masses of wavy, fair hair, which appeared to possess a life of their own. Even now, despite the air moving as much as a soleless sandal inside a block of concrete, they snaked and undulated around the sharp scowl of the burning eyes. There were no pupils or whites; only luminosity so intense it nearly hurt to look upon.
"Woven into words | bound into bundles
hast thou yet nay | thine avarice unsung," the quite definitely non-avian jailbird orated.
In his mind, Zurg groaned. Why did the wight have to sound like some bloody fantasyland prop? He'd only ever met that kind of language in dweeby movies infested with magic rings and suchlike rubbish, based on even dorkier books that no-life nerds with the physical fitness of an unborn jellyfish devoured during the small hours. This would become one brain-wracking hour of questioning, if this poesy braggart entirely refused to accept the existence of the prosaic form. Those outdated metaphors were already giving him a minor headache. Funnily enough, it appeared to compose more normal-sounding sentences with that snooty-uppity Old Gorse, so it had to be snidely deliberate.
"Well, shall we proceed with this avarice unsung of mine, then?" Zurg asked, not able to conceal the sarcasm that unwittingly crept into his voice. "You spoke of the power that yet dwells beneath the Root, but what about this?"
From the recesses of his voluminous robe, the emperor produced a large scroll. He unrolled it with a triple flourish, and held it open before the wight. It featured a printed image of a block of stone carven with crude, ill-proportioned humanoid figures. One appeared to lie on its back with its hands and legs bound, while another, possibly female, bent over the first, holding a faintly semicircular object in its hand. To Zurg, this looked like a wonky taco, but you never knew.
At this, the blue gaze flared brighter for a moment, and after a few seconds, the prisoner gave a grumpy grunt of recognition.
"Ah, I see that this kindles a spark!" Zurg smirked, extending one clawed finger to tap meaningfully at bound character. After a second or two, the sharp point pierced the paper and the finger sank halfway through the hole.
"Bloody blistering blazars...you, pod, fetch me some tape here!"
In vain, the emperor tried to smooth out the tattered opening now replacing the character's face.
"Anyhow, it seems you're nonetheless familiar with...hmm...it? Him?" he addressed the wight again with a conspiratorial helmet grin, "Now... Tell me, o ancient one—What was your name; didn't quite catch it?—where is he, this Father of Beasts, as they sometimes call him? And how does one unleash him into the world again?"
The glowing eyes narrowed. All traces of residual benignancy dwindled away from that scowl now burning with a hard, icy blue flame.
"Oh, and...out of curiosity, how do you manage it? I mean, for a 6000-year-old ghost you seem spankin' full of pep, and little birds told me you were hardly a suckling when you became as you are now! A whole millennium represents no trivial matter! I certainly would not pout at the prospect of a prolonged life or even eternal youth..."
"...Apparently we can risk it," Mira sighed, leaning heavily against the console of 42. Behind her, Booster snored in his seat, his tongue lolling out and slowly coating a patch of floor with Jo-Adian saliva. XR played half-heartedly with a very crackly internet connection, appearing quite as bored as everyone else. Even Buzz's alertness had slipped down a couple of grades. Several days' stubble shaded his jaw, while his Ranger's uniform sat quite askew upon him, as if he had not bothered to fasten even a quarter of the internal straps.
Team Lightyear had been speeding through the stupor of hyperspace* for about a fortnight now. This form of traveling, when unnecessarily prolonged, belonged to some of the most wearisome aspects of the ultramodern society, besides watching terillium carbonic alloy decompose or listening to the lectures of Dr. Azelfafageabout the socio-economic importance of spatula trading between the Theta and Kappa Quadrants during the first half of the Third Galactic Repression.
City-bred aliens oftentimes complained how the ennui of driving through the countryside practically drew them crazy, but at least they could sightsee such intriguing phenomena as clouds and perhaps a flea-ridden domestic animal every five kilometers or so. Wormholes, however, granted the journeyer nothing but stripes. Stripes formed by distant stars, stripes formed by distant galaxies... It was like crawling through a nigh-on endless drinking straw. Statistics told that dying of boredom did not express a mere figure of speech in these circumstances. A stack of good books often helped people avoid such fatalities.
"Kids these days..." XR muttered from across the cockpit, "Wonder whether they get all these crazy ideas during stretches of deadening travel like this."
"Uh...what?" Mira yawned.
The robotic Ranger had apparently found a semi-working network link and now frowned at the screen in front of him. "Just trying to kill a few of these pests called Time here... You know how tweens stuff the 'net with all sorts of silly stories they concoct about movie characters and suchlike? Often plagued by truly bad spelling and grammar? Well, now they've apparently started the same with famous figures of the Galactic Alliance."
"Eh...?"
"Celebrity Fiction and Fan Works at GQnet. Oh, hey, there's a separate category for Star Command, and..." XR clicked his way through the maze of sub-links. "Oho, that's us over here!"
"Ah, those little tykes, our Hopes of Future, what wondrous creativity they have..." Buzz smiled wistfully, leaning back in his seat, stars striping the universe with infinite, fine lines beyond the windshield. Somewhere, a little fluttering personification of Tedium**, born out of the random fluxes of cosmic radiation, died of its own essence. "Obviously reiterating all our magnificent adventures against Evil Emperor Zurg's sinister strikes-"
Mira had wandered over to XR, and now peered at the screen over the robotic ranger's shoulder. Judging by her present expression, she might have striven to swallow jalapeno-spiced vinegar and rotten lemons with the speed of continental drift. Nobody had ever seen XR blush before, but now his floating grimace would have found similarly tinted buddies in a basket full of beetroots.
"Eh, Buzz? This really, really doesn't look like we're fighting against Zurg. Nope, not at all. Nah-ah. Oh gods, oh gods, what am I doing with Zurg, Darkmatter, and Buzz at the same time?" Mira cried, seemingly unable to drag her perturbed gaze away from the rather badly animated video.
"Blyurgh...at least Buzz—well, the real Buzz over yon—got the part about creativity right. Never knew Mira was supposed to have three elbows per arm and a head shaped like a sideways pyramid. One'd think Zurg might've brainwashed these angelic little Hopes of Future to fabricate something of this ilk, but even his grandly twisted mind isn't this...creative. Gaah, what now?"
The Ranger duo gaped hypnotized at the disturbing display.
"That...that's supposed to be you, right? With Nos-4-A2 and...what's that deformed monkey with glasses on?"
"Well...the helpful caption says, '~~~~IxUr/NusfOrrutu/NArburt quelrM OT3~~~~ ^w^ ÖwÖ KAWAIIIII!' I'm not sure who NArburt quelrM OT3 is, but perhaps it refers to Norbert Klerm- AAARH!"
Suddenly, the poky, formerly calm world inside 42 became sheer chaos, as the whole ship somersaulted sideways and those currently neglecting seatbelt regulations were flung into various corners with hideous cracking sounds. Swearing, Buzz grabbled for support and managed to haul his bulk back into the pilot seat from under the console. The lights in the cockpit were flickering, and a terrible grating sound issued somewhere from the confines of the engine.
"Everyone, back to your places!" the captain boomed over the cacophony, "Laughing emergency pl-"
A second time, something slammed violently against the ship's hull, sending it tumbling and rolling down the warp.
"Wh-what is it?" Mira gasped from behind her seat, holding onto the backrest for dear life.
"No idea. The whole computer's gone haywire," the captain nodded towards the insanely frolicking numbers on the console. 42 refused to obey, no matter how hard he hammered at the various buttons with his fist. "XR, force a manual override!"
The vessel flipped and walloped again like an over-playful dolphin. The robot stumbled across the bridge, smashed straight into the Tangean princess who had barely managed to stand up, which caused them both to topple headlong into the main screen.
"No time to play space flies, and you're on the wrong side of the windshield to start with," Lightyear shouted. "Get that override WORKING NOW!"
The following chain of events clattered onwards in a great jumble of shouts and somersets. XR launched into motion, while Booster shouted an anxious warning and the half-dazed Mira another. Both indicated at the opposite directions, which lost their meaning in a heartbeat, as 42 once again performed an impressive acrobatic feat. Outside, the stripe field of stars had turned into a madly swerving bedlam of psychedelic patterns of color and light, which never should have taken place in that elsewise so bi-chromatic boredom.
"Beginning a full override in five, four..." the robot cried, mashing one of his cables into the nearest computer port.
Just as he reached down to zero, Buzz yanked hard at the steering controls, and barely managed to fly past the massive bulge wobbling in the hyperspeed tunnel's inner wall. Only when he fully succeeded in straightening the ship's course, could the Space Rangers better discern the scale of weirdness abruptly raining down upon them. Or, more correctly put, clobbering 42 into scrap metal, if this kept continuing.
The whole left side of the normally so smooth hyperspace passage resembled a vertical sea of rising and falling swells. Just behind the vessel, one such had almost entirely eaten up the tunnel's inner space, and still distended in the manner of a soap bubble.
"Did we just get hit...by those? Or something that's causing them?"
Mira and Booster gawked at the swells, flying sparks, and the blinding, fractal-y designs on the wormhole's surface, worth a hundred doses of magical mushrooms.
"What in the name of festering fermions is this?"
"No idea," Buzz muttered. "Never seen anything alike."
"The robotic department doesn't have the faintest clue either, other than that I'm getting some se-ri-ous-ly weird energy readings here..." XR shook his head and the scientific instrument he had extracted from his mid-locker. "Blazes, I can't keep re-calibrating this gimmick every half a nanosecond! This whatever-peculiar-space-anomaly-even-Buzz-doesn't-comprehend attacking us must really hate preciseness! Hmh, energy storms in some exotic dimensions might be involved, of course."
Buzz maintained the ship's position as near the wormhole's right edge as possible. Only now, he dared breathe more freely. With a free hand, he brushed out of his eyes some quite damp hair, which had spilled out of his hood during the worst turbulences. Fractionally relieved, he noticed that the newer swells grew only to about half the size of the ones left behind, before beginning to collapse again. Perhaps the danger was withdrawing.
"Shouldn't we jump back into regular space? Doesn't seem very wise to follow this course, in case that-"
"Negative, ranger. If I remember correctly, we'd emerge near the third asteroid belt of Theta Iota K7. A ship of this size would never pass through undamaged, no matter how experienced the crew! Billions and billions of splintery rocks mingled with the debris of the first Eta Carinae wars into a deadly maze where the longest distance between an unexploded mine and a discarded warhead might be one third of the diameter of our coffee pot. Besides, I deem this odd disruption is only temporary. We should be fairly safe, if we stay out of the reach of those...waves...bubbles...whatever they are."
"Um, are you totally sure we can stay out of their reach?" Booster piped up, pointing with a trembling finger at the stretch of hyperspace approaching the ship. "That one looks...well...like it's gonna close in on us any moment now!"
Team Lightyear stared aghast at the crackling, fizzling surge of energy dilating so rapidly that only a narrow gap of safe space remained to the right. Yet, even that tiny sanctuary might briefly vanish...
Footnotes:
*In science fiction, this hardly ever corresponds to the actual speed of light. If those heroic buggers riding their clattering junkyard ships actually attempted to save the captured princess on the other side of the galaxy by traveling in lightspeed, they'd be mummified skeletons when they finally reached the spot which the evil overlord's vessel already left a couple of hundred years back.
**Resembles an overused, gray dishrag and feeds on dust, cobwebs, and snores heard in university auditoriums.
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