All right. Chapter 9. This is a little shorter than I would have liked it, but I'm just going with the outline that I made for myself. Also, my profile has hit 2,500 views!

With this chapter, we get into the 50,000-word mark. Also, we have now crested the halfway point of my story.

I don't know if you guys noticed, but I have started a new Pokemon fic, Underworld. I'm updating it once a week, every Thursday until further notice. You might want to check that one out if you have not already, because it already has 3 reviews as of Saturday morning. It's about twin siblings who turn into Pokemon.

Responses to reviewers (Yes, I will begin to do this).

Cosmicsafe74: Thanks for the compliment! I'd like to know what about it was great.

Zaravan: Yeah, they kind of are outcasts. Not Willow so much, but the others could definitely qualify.

LUCAS'S POV

After we went through the portal, we were very pleased indeed to see that the Great Fox was still there, exactly as we had left it. We had only been in Cartagena for about a day total, but it was still great to see it intact. That showed that the Venomian forces had not managed to get to it.

The area still looked pretty similar to how it had done before. The entrance to the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas was still visible through a window, but luckily the humans wouldn't be able to see us. I was tempted to ask Falco, or Jack for that matter, why this was, but I decided against it. They were probably going to have quite a few questions of their own for me.

For instance, how I was doing after the shot Dr. Howler had given me. I wasn't sure what was in that needle, but whatever it was had caused my blood to literally boil...and then pretty much completely healed my leg. She'd told me that she'd told Falco about what she had done, and that he had approved. The sooner I was able to stop using crutches, the better.

Now, the crutches were back in the med bay of the Great Fox. Last night, Falco had travelled back to the catacombs to deposit them back there. They were waiting for someone else to have to use them, which they would hopefully never be used again, at least not for a long time.

Later, I was in my cabin, looking out the window at the warp zone that we were passing back through, when there was a knock at my door. "Come in" I said.

Jack entered. It was still quite a shock to see him on the Great Fox. After losing Mrs. Hooter, Will, and Mike in one fell swoop, I'd never thought that we would ever have more than seven members of our team again. And Jack looked very different from our other two chaperones, for want of a better word. He was a human, for one, but he also looked a lot stricter.

I mean, Dr. Howler kind of had to be strict, since she was our physician, but Jack looked a lot more like a military guy. After all, he was a weapons expert.

"Do you want to show me around the Great Fox, Mr. Enfield?" he asked me.

I was about to say no, but I worried that he might not take no for an answer. I said, "Sure. I'll do it".

I got up off my bed. My leg was working normally again now, so I was physically okay with showing Jack around. I felt like he'd probably already had more than enough time to explore, but I was going to give him the tour anyway.

First, I showed him around the top deck. "Here's all of the cabins, and here's the med bay. Konstantin and myself have both spent some time here, and it's pretty well-equipped".

"Indeed, this would probably put any human hospital to shame" Jack said, chuckling. That surprised me. I'd only known Jack for about fifteen hours, but I'd never figured that he even could have had such a lighthearted side to him.

Jack took note of the beds, the cabinets, the IV poles. Then, he turned back to me. "Do you want to show me the other decks now?"

"Yeah. I'm assuming you've already seen the control room?". He nodded.

"Let's do it, then" I said.

We took the stairs down to the second level from the top, and I showed him the dining room. He seemed to approve of it, so I went down to the rec room, where Cole, Ian, and Willow were having a Mario Party match.

"I see that they pulled out all of the stops in building this ship" Jack noted.

"That's true" I said. "They really did think of everything".

Finally, I showed Jack the hangar, which really impressed him. "This is going to be the number one place where I'll be doing most of my upgrades" he said. "Of course, we'll be better able to defeat the Venomian forces if we have very strong weapons, stronger than we have now. I don't mean to brag, but it sounds like I came at the perfect time".

"I agree with that statement" I said to him.

Jack indeed looked very happy to be with us. I decided that I liked the military side of him better. He just didn't look natural when he was acting super happy. I just wanted to fix up these weapons. Then, I wanted to take all of the planets that we needed to take. Then, I wanted to win this war.

Later, I was heading to the rec room. My leg might have healed up much faster than expected, but that didn't change the fact that I had quite a few other distractions. Over lunch, we'd talked more about strategy, and how we were going to battle on Titania, our next destination planet. Even though we had a plan, I still had apprehension about this.

For one, I didn't know how well Jack would be physically at combat. I mean, he'd been good at tejo in Colombia, if what the others had told me was true, but that didn't change the fact that tejo didn't exactly prepare you for war against aliens.

I was hoping that there would be someone to hang out with there. Someone with whom I could play table tennis or Mario Kart or something like that. There was no way I was going to do this all alone.

Thankfully, I wouldn't have to.

Because the first person I found in the rec room was my girlfriend, Willow Foster. She appeared to have been looking for me as well, and, knowing how much I liked video games, would probably have guessed that I was likely to be hanging out here.

"How's it going, Willow?" I asked her.

"I'm a bit sad to leave Cartagena, but we'll have a good time on the Great Fox too. At least, until we reach Titania. Then it's back to battling, and Lucas..." she trailed off.

"What is it?" I said.

I could tell she was fighting back tears as she said, "I don't want you to get hurt again. Try to avoid the lasers tomorrow".

"Wait, tomorrow?" I asked. I was surprised by this. It had taken five days for us to get from Corneria to Fichina, so I was expecting to have had at least another day or so.

"Yeah. According to Falco, it'll take about a day to get to Titania. You look like you're not ready to fight for your life again".

"Well, what would there have been to fight in Cartagena?" I said. "Drug cartels?"

We both had a good giggle at that. Then, she said "Do you want to dance again?"

I had a short debate with myself about this. Eventually, I decided that I might as well do something with Willow, in order to distract myself from everything else. Whether or not we were about to die tomorrow, at least I could have one more glorious day with Willow, the one person I wanted to be with ore than anyone.

"Why not?"

WILLOW'S POV

I selected the song "Hey Ya" by OutKast. It's considered a very good dance song despite being a highly emotional tune about relationship issues. I tried to tell myself that no, this was just a coincidence, and Andre 3000's thoughts didn't really reflect my own.

The song started playing, I grabbed Lucas's arms, and the rest is history.

We started by doing a slow dance, something that you might see at a wedding. Of course, if my thoughts were anything like Andre's, we were far from the point where we would even consider marriage.

"Hey Ya" wasn't just the happiest song released in 2003. It was probably the happiest-sounding song released during the entire decade. The first stanza is sung by a guy who's in a relationship with a girl who he is sure isn't cheating on him, because she loves him. But, he asks himself, what if she actually DOES want to cheat on me, but won't because she doesn't want me to get mad and leave her? It's also a reflection on the divorce rate increasing, but to each his own.

As we moved, I planted a kiss on Lucas's cheek. I realized, however, that there were some things about the song that were resonating with me, more than I would have liked to admit. It was quite scary, and I wondered: Was love really the exception to the rule of "nothing lasts forever"?

The music player censored one adult word from that song, but it was easy to get the meaning, even if the song was very deceptive in sounding so fucking happy. Lucas grabbed my arm and spun me around, and I then did the same thing. Slowly, we were moving around the room.

That third-to-last stanza is the most deceptively happy part. "Shaking it like a Polaroid picture" is really quite a happy-sounding thing to do, but in reality it's just a distraction from the true meaning of the song. In fact, at one point Andre even says that you don't want to hear him, you just want to dance. And that is so true.

But as I tried to think about how grateful I was to be with Lucas at this moment, I kept on having those doubts. It was really scary, because I knew that Lucas was fully committed to me. I didn't want to tell him that I didn't love him anymore. I was pretty sure that I still loved him, though, so that wouldn't be quite true.

And really, could we even break up now, with everything riding on the Star Enfield team? It would be very awkward to work together as exes, so that might not happen. We'd gotten ourselves into this, and so we'd have to "stick two together" as Andre 3000 puts it, at least until we defeated the Anglars.

But maybe we didn't know how.

Still, though, I was confident in our relationship after seeing Lucas in his room again that afternoon. I felt that the sparks between us were still going strong, and I really did love him. I wasn't leaving him anytime soon.

On the other hand, I could definitely see problems. For one, Lucas seemed to be very clingy. He seemed to always want to be with me. Which I didn't have a problem with, but he set too much store by what I wanted. I cared enough about Lucas to also care about how he took care of himself. I mean, he was recovering from laser wounds. Clearly, I shouldn't be his only priority.

Another thing was at dinner that evening. Lucas didn't have his napkin on his lap. Now that I thought about it, I realized that he never did on the Great Fox. I didn't call him out on it, because that might be seen as rude. Even so, not displaying such basic table manners was a problem for me. I might not have had the most affluent childhood, but this was such an important thing to me that I just couldn't let it slide. Maybe some other girl could, but not me.

And after dinner, when I was in Lucas's cabin (I was just wandering the ship and he wasn't there), I noticed that something in his room was out of place. His clothes, including his boxer shorts, were strewn all over the floor. He couldn't even keep his own area clean. Now, I'm not considered a fancy girl by any means, but even I was not going to be able to let this go too easily.

One might call me picky, or a crazy girlfriend, for these things. Napkin on your lap, boxers in your drawers...those are things that shouldn't really be deal-breakers. And they weren't, at least not for me. But maybe the threat of the Anglars, of the Venomian forces, was stressing me out.

Or maybe I was just seeing all of the bad things about Lucas Enfield for the first time.

KONSTANTIN'S POV

I was pissed.

Rightfully so, since Wolf had still not truly gotten his justice. First, he turns the court against me, causing me to almost be executed. I didn't know if I'd ever recover fully emotionally from my ordeal. As long as I did not make sure that Wolf suffered personally for his actions, I was always going to have an axe to grind with him. That's just the way it was.

Then, Wolf had shot Lucas with his blaster. Meaning that Lucas almost died. And Wolf had gotten shot by Cole after that, so at least he'd had some injury. But he'd escaped then.

There was just no easy way to get revenge. And so, I decided that I was going to take matters into my own hands.

I wasn't anywhere close to getting to actually do anything to Wolf right now. I mean, Wolf was probably on Venom right now, waiting for Andross to awaken or whatever, and we were just traveling towards Titania. We weren't close at all. But there was a way that I could satiate my hunger for revenge.

And so, I'd gotten some crayons from the supply room of the Great Fox. I wasn't the best artist despite being a huge nerd. But even when my fluids were at their lowest levels in that cell, I'd been able to keep a very specific picture in my head of that fucker.

With relative ease, I was able to control my hand movements and put together a C+-grade portrait of Wolf O'Donnell. And C+ would be graded by kindergarten standards. It really was a pretty mediocre job, but I knew what it was, and so was Wolf likely to if, for whatever reason, he happened to wander into the same room as me on the Great Fox.

Wouldn't that be great? I thought.

Almost immediately, I realized that it wouldn't actually be as awesome as I assumed. I had no confidence that I would be able to take Wolf in a fight, when I was being perfectly honest with myself. It just wasn't going to happen. I'd need to have more skills.

Which, of course, was one reason why I had decided to do what I had decided to do.

I went into the weapons room of the Great Fox. It was for weapons training, like throwing knives and things like that. For all the world, it was kind of like the training room in The Hunger Games. I'd practiced fighting with swords and blasters here, but by far the most enjoyable for me, the one that was best at venting my anger, were the knives. They were very satisfying to throw, because it was just so awesome to see them spin around in midair when, instead of cutting through fruit, they're about to cut through someone's skin or something.

That was a morbid thought, but whatever.

I got some duct tape and taped the poster of Wolf to the boards on the wall. Then, I took out a knife and threw it at the target.

It just barely missed. Yesterday, I'd managed to practice on my hand-eye coordination when we'd played tejo in Cartagena, but here it didn't seem to be helping. I was back to my old ways of being not very good at that. And so, I was back to the drawing board. Practice, practice, practice.

If I turned twenty years old before I was able to get this correctly, that would make me even angrier at the universe, but I'd be even more desperate to take it out on Wolf.

I made another throw, and it barely missed the target once again. Instead, it embedded itself in the wall, much like the knives do when they have the guy at the circus throw knives at a clown. Hissing in frustration, I went to remove it.

"Let me help you with that" came a voice from the doorway.

I turned around and found that it was, in fact, Jack Novsky, the new member of our team. He was standing in the doorway, looking a little stern, but also willing to help me train.

I was about to protest, but Jack said, "I'll give you some pointers. Come on".

Jack showed me the correct way to hold the knife so that it would be easier for me to hit the target that I had drawn. With his aid, I was able to land less than an inch from Wolf's head.

"Who's that?" Jack asked. "I notice that your target looks like a person. Why are you throwing knives at them?"

I might have lied, but I got the feeling that Jack would be able to sniff it out easily. "It's Wolf O'Donnell, and I'm pretty mad at him right now".

"What did he do? I mean, yeah, he was on Andross's side during the First Lylat War, but I thought he had come over to our side".

"I thought Falco told you. He was the one who swung the jury into voting for my conviction. Because of him, I got sentenced to execution by firing squad, and I would be dead right now if I hadn't gotten busted out of there by the Star Enfield team" I said, trying not to clench my teeth.

"Sounds like a major jerk. I'll help you with your knife throwing".

"And he also shot Lucas with a laser from his blaster, so that's another thing. But, by all means, help me perfect my throw a little more".

This time, I managed to hit Wolf in the leg, near the place where he had shot Lucas. Another knife landed in his heart. I was getting a lot better at this!

That night, we ate dinner in the usual dining room. Over dinner, we decided to have a strategic discussion about the next day's battle.

I thought back to the last battle I'd been in...which, really, wasn't much of one. Besides the whole Sector X trip, there had been the battle that had ensued when I was being freed from my mountain prison. But I hadn't been a participant, just the person who was carried back to the Great Fox on a stretcher.

But tomorrow, we were going to reach Titania. Tomorrow, we were going to battle for control of the red planet. I didn't know if I would even survive tomorrow, so there were quite a few things that I wanted to say to people.

Over the last three weeks, we had definitely built a lot of trust with each other. That was one thing I was sure of. And I'd been keeping track of the days as well. It was February 23, 201Y. Exactly twenty-one days since we'd left Corneria.

"So we're going to go to Titania tomorrow" Jack said. "While we're there, I'd definitely like to take the base, because that's going to be an important way to get to Venom. The more of their bases we can take, the better chance our invasion has of working. I really do think we can do this".

"We're going to attack Venom head-on?" Ian asked.

"That's right" Falco said. "And, once we can take over Venom, the rest of the Anglar race is at our mercy. We're going to decide then whether to make peace with them or destroy them".

"Personally", I said, "I'm okay with destroying them".

"I know" Lucas said. "But we have to see how things are going then. Right now, we have to get ready to attack the enemy base on Titania. I don't know how easy it'll be".

"It'll be pretty hard" Dr. Howler said. "It's pretty well-defended, for one. There are no doubt a lot of traps and tricks in there, so that's something we'll need to be careful of".

"And when are you going to upgrade the weapons?" said Ian to Jack.

"Once we get done with Titania, I'm sure that I'll find what I need in the ground. Titanian dirt is what's needed. I know this, because I've used it before to upgrade ships like this. I'll give you guys the speed you need".

Falco brought out a map of the base, showing us where we would have to go in and out. It sure looked well-guarded, all right. I wondered if this was what it had been like to break me out of the Cornerian prison. It must be pretty hard to free a death-row prisoner like they did.

"We're going to enter here and exit here, picking off as many guards as possible. We'll have to touch down about two kilometers from where the base is, because we don't want them to see us. Sandstorms are pretty frequent, but visibility of the Great Fox is still a problem".

"And once we've gotten Titania", Jack said, "we can move on to Bolse. We'll capture the satellite and then move towards the upper planets. How's that plan to you guys?"

"I like it" Cole said.

"I think we can make it work" said Dr. Howler.

I agreed with everyone else that the best course of action was to capture the satellite, or at least destroy it so that it could no longer be used to defend Venom. But Zoness, Macbeth, and Area 6 were still the top priorities to attack and defend, because that was where the war was going to be won or lost.

This was complicated stuff.

LUCAS'S POV

That night, I had yet another nightmare. This time, I wasn't on Venom.

Instead, I found myself on the planet Titania. The very planet that we'd be battling on tomorrow. All I knew was that I really didn't want what happened in this dream to become reality.

I could hear laser fire all over the place, and I instinctively ducked to avoid it. I didn't want to get shot again. Not so soon after having my leg repaired.

Of course, I knew it was just a dream, much like many of the others I'd had. Even so, that didn't make things too much less terrifying. I still knew that we'd be facing these dangers tomorrow, whether I liked it or not. That was just the way things were when you were a member of Star Enfield.

The fact that it was a dream didn't prevent me from feeling the full blast of the desert air on my skin, either. It really wasn't pleasant, to say the very least.

Eventually, I was just crawling, like someone suffering from severe starvation and dehydration in the desert, not something that would be too unusual for someone in this situation. I knew that I would need to wake up, or else I would get shot again.

I sat bolt upright in my own bed on the Great Fox. I couldn't believe it. Today was the day that we were going to fight on Titania.

There was a very real chance that I was going to die. But I would do everything possible not to let that happen. And I was determined to protect Willow, Cole, Ian, and Konstantin as much as possible. I was convinced that Falco and Dr. Howler would be able to take care of themselves.

After I got dressed and put the rest of my clothing in its proper drawers, we ate a quick breakfast before arming ourselves for battle.

It was time to take Titania. And then, we'd be one step closer to Venom.

I do not own the song "Hey Ya". Nobody does except Andre 3000, or Possum Jenkins, or whatever you want to call him. And Big Boi, too. OutKast in general is who owns this song. Not me, not anyone else on this site. Maybe one of the two of them has an account, but I have no way of knowing that.