21.04.2023
It is I, the Absolute Madman and I'm back with a direct continuation of last week's chapter! But first, the comments!:
DragrexTheBrit - Let's not get too ahead of ourselves here with all that 'doing ok' and 'feeling better'! I'm partially back to how I was about a month ago, so let's just say I'm back to normal!
deathdog08 - What pitch was that 'hmm'? Like a really high or a really low note?
n1ght4ury20 - Ain't no one crashing MY Harrier! Especially not me! Or my AI!
And now, the chapter!:
The romantic atmosphere from just a minute ago totally forgotten already, Tokage and Izuku ran like the wind, heading back to base as fast as their legs allowed them to. The sky stopped glitching already but the spaceship was still there and it didn't seem to be leaving any time soon. From the few glimpses that they managed to steal at this it looked as if though it was on fire in a couple of places, but it was impossible to accurately gauge just how serious the situation could be as they had no idea how big the spaceship itself actually was. For all they knew it could be the size of a commercial airliner parked not that far off the ground. There was always the scary possibility that it was far, far larger than that, but they decided not to dwell on that thought too much.
The duo managed to return home without any issues and immediately saw their friends huddled around the campfire, all staring into the sky.
"There you are! We were worried!" Kendo, who was the first one to notice their arrival, shouted in their direction. "Have you seen this?" She asked whilst pointing towards the spaceship.
"Oh we saw it alright." Tokage confirmed and it was clear that she was pretty nervous right now. Then again who wouldn't be?
Izuku approached his girlfriends and noticed that Momo was currently scanning the spaceship through a spyglass. He was wondering where she got it but a single look at the currently fast asleep Shu was all he needed to piece that mystery together. He'd reprimand her later, for now they had much more important things to worry about.
"Do you see anything?" Izuku asked, catching Momo's attention and causing her to lower the spyglass.
"Well, for starters it doesn't seem to have any weapons, though we shouldn't rule it out just yet. I don't think they are hostile, but that may be because they hadn't seen us just yet." Momo reported anxiously.
"Can I have a look?" Izuku asked and Momo wordlessly passed the spyglass over to him.
As soon as he raised it to his eye it was very clear that this was no ordinary spyglass. He was fully prepared to have to squint his eyes real hard just to see the ship itself, but was pleasantly surprised when that turned out to be unnecessary. The zoom was just perfect to watch the details on the spaceship without straining his sight whatsoever.
The ship itself was dark crimson in color with lots of gun-metal gray antennas and other equipment protruding from the main hull. It had some blinking lights on the outside, but other than that there were almost no indicators meaning that this ship was probably made with stealth in mind. Well, as much stealth as a giant spaceship could have anyways. Izuku was able to locate what he thought to be the front of the ship as there was one semi-dome-looking part that seemed to be made out of some tinted glass as though they looked like windows, Izuku was unable to look inside.
He continued scanning the underside of the ship in search of anything that could help them predict the alien's intentions when he noticed that the fires onboard the ship were already extinguished. It was only a few moments later that he noticed something very worrying - something emerged from the ship and was moving towards their vague position.
"Something's coming!" Izuku exclaimed, alerting the others and making their anxiety sky-rocket. They were heroes in training alright, but fighting a potentially hostile alien race was not something they were trained to do.
"Something?" Kendo asked for clarification as Izuku did his best to follow the object.
"It looks like… a plane or something along those lines? It's descending towards us." Izuku explained to the best of his ability.
"At least they're not attacking us just yet, right?" Mina said, hoping to alleviate the pressure at least a little, though that 'just yet' part definitely ruined the attempt.
It was around this time that they heard a distant sound similar to that of a jet engine just… warped somehow. They all knew what a plane's engines sounded like and this was very similar, just entirely different at the same time. Whatever the case, the sound kept getting louder and louder even as the vessel descended to the point where it was hidden by the trees.
The seconds stretched for hours on end until they finally got eyes on the flying object - when it stopped and began to hover directly above their hideout.
"Well, who could've known that we should be worried about hiding ourselves from the bird's eye?" Kyouka mumbled out.
Their hidden valley was the perfect place to hide from the land-bound predators that might roam the surrounding forest at night, but - as they were now painfully aware of - it offered absolutely no protection from any airborne threats. Before they got the chance to start analyzing the holes in their security their attention was once again drawn to the smaller ship directly above their heads.
As it turned out there were hangar doors at its back, doors that were now slowly opening. They were still moving when something jumped out of them and began falling to the ground at an alarming rate. They were about to run in search of cover when something quite mind-boggling happened.
The object - which they now realized was a heavily armored humanoid suit - did a flip in the air, reorienting itself about one hundred and eighty degrees before small blue-ish circles appeared on the armor's feet and hands. They lit up with a glow that was similar to what they thought to be the engines of the smaller ship hovering above their valley and the armor started slowing down considerably, eventually losing all of its momentum and landing gently on the ground just a few feet in front of them.
Now that it was up-close and personal, they were able to really take in the armor's details. The armor itself looked bulky and quite unwieldy, but they knew better than to assume it was slow or cumbersome. Just from what they saw right now it was easy to assume that it had at least some flight capabilities which - if true - gave it excellent dodging capabilities that could also be used to close distance between opponents if used offensively. The design was nothing to write home about - a simple basalt black coat of paint with some blood crimson details thrown into the mix. It was very basic, but somehow pleasing to look at. Black and red really work well together. I'll fight anyone that tries to challenge this statement.
There didn't seem to be any weapons attached to the armor, but then again there didn't seem to be any glowing circles on its hands and feet too, so they shouldn't drop their guards just yet - who knew what could be hiding under the armored plates?
Their attention was brought to the helmet of the suit when it suddenly released some air, similar to what happens when you open a hermetically sealed container. Not even a moment later the entire helmet began to move, opening from the front and collapsing backwards, revealing the head of the alien as the individual plates folded in on themselves and eventually formed into a collar at the base of the alien's neck.
The sight of the supposedly alien lifeform was… underwhelming. Mostly because it looked just like them with all the humanoid features that you could find on Earth. The man, as they decided to assume, had dark brown - borderline black - hair that was neatly trimmed on the sides but left to grow wildly at the top, resulting in a strange undercut/mohawk combination. But even that wild hairstyle was not the most eye-catching feature of the stranger in front of them. What caught their attention almost right off the bat were his captivating purplish-blue eyes that seemed to glow and shimmer. There was a polite smile on his face as he started to speak.
"Hallo?" He said in a language that, though it sounded human, they did not understand.
He waited for them to respond for a split-second, but once he realized that he wouldn't receive a response he started fiddling with a screen that flared to live on his right forearm.
"Olá?" He then spoke once again, in an entirely different language! Sadly, none of them knew that one either.
"Privet? Ahoj? Kamusta? Bonjour? Gamarjoba? Aloha? Namaste? Hola? Chomreabsuor? Sveiki? Ave? Zdravo? Kia ora? Sain uu? Witajcie? Habari?" The stranger tried time and time again in an astounding number of different languages. Unfortunately he had yet to say anything that they could understand. He seemed determined though and kept trying.
"Hallå? Merhaba? Salom? Ciao? Sawubona? Nǐ hǎo?-" The stranger kept trying and his efforts were eventually rewarded.
"Was that Chinese just now?" Tokage asked her fellow tribeswomen and man.
The stranger noticed the recognition on their faces and gave it a few more tries.
"Annyeonghaseyo?"
"And this was Korean, wasn't it?" Now Yaoyorozu was the one to recognize the language.
The stranger looked puzzled for a moment before facepalming quite hard and fiddled with the screen on his forearm one last time before speaking up.
"Is this better?" He asked in perfect Japanese; accent, pronunciation and all.
"This guy can speak Japanese!" Mina expertly observed, causing a few members of their group to sweatdrop at the sudden display of genius.
"That I do!" The man cheerfully confirmed. "I speak everything from Russian and Polish, through French and German all the way to Mongolian and Chinese. Although it'd be more accurate to say that I'm actually just speaking in my native language and it's being translated on the fly so that you can understand it. I was trying to come up with a way for it to translate into every language known to mankind at the same time, but the different languages ended up overlapping and were subsequently reduced to gibberish, so I'm stuck with this inferior version for the time being." He explained his oral prowess like he was talking about the weather and not just revealing that he had the answer to any and all language barrier issues that could ever arise.
"Who are you?" Izuku, who was the first to overcome the information overload, asked the question that was on everyone's mind right now.
"Well, that's quite the loaded question." The man mysteriously started, though he didn't avoid answering. "I'm just a genius, trillionaire, philanthropist inventor, the captain and sole crewmember of the Harrier and many other ultimately meaningless titles, but you can just call me Martin for the sake of simplicity."
Izuku and the girls each took turns introducing themselves, the man in front of them nodding every now and then as if confirming that he was still listening and totally not spacing out.
"You from the Land of the Rising Sun do that funky thing where you address each other with your family name all the time, right?" He asked and even though calling Japan the 'Land of the Rising Sun' wasn't wrong, it was certainly a strange choice of words.
"That'd be correct, though since you told us only your given name we won't mind it too much if you use our given names as well." This time it was Yaoyorozu that spoke up.
"Great. Now that the introductions are done, how about you tell me how you all got here?" The polite smile on his face took on a more curious hue as he studied their group with those enchanting eyes of his.
"We… are not sure really. All that we know is that we stepped out of our rooms and started falling through a void only to end up here." Kendo explained and the others nodded to confirm her story.
They expected Martin to become perplexed at the mystery just like they were, but were surprised when a look of realization crossed his features instead.
"You must've encountered a resonance, though it's certainly unusual for multiple wormholes to open up and it's even more rare to find multiple wormholes leading to the same spot…" He mused to himself, clearly having at least some idea as to what had happened to them.
"A resonance?" Yaoyorozu - the most sciency out of the bunch - asked, her curiosity peaked at the mention of wormholes and this mysterious phenomenon.
"It's what allows the Harrier to travel through space, time and a few other things." Martin explained nonchalantly whilst pointing towards the sky where his spaceship was parked. "That surely won't satiate your hunger for knowledge, so let me give you a quick course on not-so-theoretical-anymore physics. There used to be a theory stating that everything is a wave, you, me, that rock over there, everything made out of waves. I dove into this theory and found out that it's not a theory, but the truth. Everything really is made out of waves. And do you know what waves are famous for?" He asked, the smile on his face growing wider and wider as he talked, clearly enjoying the monologue.
"Vibrations?" Momo responded with an educated guess.
"Correct! So since everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is made out of waves, then that means that everything must be vibrating! But of course it can't vibrate randomly. I studied those waves, found out their frequencies and eventually discovered a way to alter them to the point where they could start resonating with each other! From there it was just a matter of creating a device capable of replicating this effect on a wider scale and voila! - instantaneous space travel has been achieved." Martin's monologue eventually wound down and he struck a pose that radiated nothing but pride at his achievements.
"That's, like, incredible!" A starry-eyed Yaomomo exclaimed immediately. "If this ship is really capable of traveling great distances in the blink of an eye, then it's basically the solution to humanity's greatest roadblock on the path to colonizing our solar system and then the Milky Way itself!"
"That is the power of resonance." Martin summed up nonchalantly but then his expression turned to a more concerned one. "Are they okay?" He asked as he pointed behind Yaoyorozu.
Momo turned around only to see all of her friends laying unconsciously on the ground with smoke coming out of their ears. Some of them like Izuku, Kendo, Shiozaki and Tokage were still displaying vague signs of being alive and unwell, but Mina and Tooru in particular looked straight up dead.
"They're gonna be fine, it's probably just information overload." Momo shrugged the issue off, having already witnessed Mina in a similar state during one of their many tutoring sessions back at the dorms. "What's more important, if you know how we got here, then can you figure out a way to send us back home?" She asked hopefully.
"Well, I've never tried reversing a resonance before and my database doesn't have the wavelength or frequency of your Sol System, so I can't open a direct passage at will. Not being able to do something right off the bat has never stopped me before, so I'll try to look into it. Now I'll leave you to tend to your friends whilst I retreat back to the Harrier to see if Martha managed to deal with the fires during my absence. I'll get back to you as soon as I find something noteworthy." Martin promised and with a courteous bow his collar unfolded back into a helmet and the circles on his suit flared back to life.
Just as Momo expected, the suit really was capable of flight and Martin used those miniature engines to get back on board his desant ship before flying back towards his spaceship - the Harrier. A strange name, though Momo suspected there was probably a story behind it.
"Alright, I guess it's up to me to clean this mess up." Momo said to herself as she looked at the mess of limbs and bodies that used to be her friends.
She had a lot of work to do.
Momo was eventually able to sort all of her friends out and one by one they began regaining consciousness. Some of them needed a quick reminder about what had happened and Mina almost lapsed back into slumber at just the mention of a spaceship but she thankfully managed to pull through in the end.
"So we were unlucky to be affected by this so-called resonance in the first place, but lucky enough to all get transported to the same place?" Izuku summed up what they'd learned from Martin's explanation.
"Pretty much, yeah." Momo confirmed.
"So what do we do now?" Kendo asked.
"Wait I guess." Izuku responded. "Something seems off about him, but not in a bad way. He is certainly quite extravagant, but I think we can count on him to at least try and help us." Izuku stated and the girls eventually all agreed to put their trust in that strange man. Now they at least had some semblance of hope.
For now they'd go back to their usual routine and wait for Martin to contact them again. Perhaps a way home was just around the corner?
It might come off as a spoiler, but yeah, no, the way home is not just around the corner!
What is just around the corner is my newly founded Discord Server! - discord,gg/NpqTvXj3Wd (just change the , to a . and it should work, I hope)
There's not much there as I've never created a Discord Server, but I think we'll eventually be able to improve it together!
That's all I wanted to say today so have a great day and I'll catch y'all in the next update!
