"We didn't stand a chance up there…"
Dr. Stewart takes a deep breath as Gazelle offers him some hot tea, which he happily accepts. He takes a long sip of it, filling his insides with that warm goodness. "Once Shadow won the championship, I knew something bad would happen. His plots have been an open secret for years, but I just wasn't expecting it all to go down so quickly. I was barely unstrapped from my vehicle when the invasion started. I'll admit, I froze in place, trying to figure out what was happening, especially with those strange orbs.
"Their ambush was nearly perfect, honestly. Some of us fought back, and they were dealt with. Some of us ran, and they were dealt with. Some of us counted on the abilities of others, and those others were dealt with. When they turned their attention to me, I did the only thing I could think of, and tried diplomacy. I offered to go willingly, in exchange for my sentience. I would've been a good little soldier and done whatever they asked of me, but I suppose that wasn't enough."
"Yea, they weren't just trying to enslave you, they also wanted the prize money you'd get from the next Grand Prix", Jody tells him.
"That actually makes a lot of sense. I just really didn't want to have control of my body ripped away from me. It's one of those unlikely phobias that feel too fictional to happen, but it's just possible enough for the thought of it to send shivers up your spine, like a shark attack or a plane crash."
"What did it feel like?", Jack asks.
Stewart ponders this question for a second, "It's like being in the passenger seat of your body. I could still see out of my eyeballs, and I could still offer directions to whatever was controlling me, but ultimately, it was up to whatever was inside me to decide whether or not to use those directions. Say I was in the medical bay, and I was treating a patient. My mind would tell the rest of my body how to treat the patient, and since that was my job, my body would comply. However, if I wanted to do something that deviated from what they wanted me to do, like say run away, my body just wouldn't go anywhere. It was a lot like certain cases of severe dissociation that I've treated before."
"Do you know what was controlling you?", Monique asks, to which Stewart just shakes his head.
"I didn't hear a voice or anything telling me what to do. It's almost like it was controlling my muscles to make me move and speak, rather than my mind."
"Do you know what it was that unhypnotized you?", Jody asks.
"Not… really, it must've been something that happened while I was unconscious."
Jody thinks to herself, "Mmmmm, the only radical thing that happened was us jumping to warp speed."
"Maybe I accidentally figured it out with the warp speed jump", James says, half-joking, to which Jody shoots him an annoyed stare.
"We'll just have to keep the next one conscious until they turn back", Jody says.
Zoda jumps in, "That would've been way easier with Stewie here than anyone else. Most of the rest of the racers are a bunch of aggressive, macho male BAs who won't like just being experimented on until they stop being evil."
"Yea, yea, well Phoenix didn't tell us that part when he showed up from the future, so how was I supposed to know that?"
"I dunno, I just wanted to say something was your fault."
"Alright, Doc. Here's the thing", James says to Stewart. "We're going to have to swing you by GSF HQ in order to inform them of your safe recovery. From there, they'll probably have to figure out a place for you to go for the time being, since if Shadow tries to come back for you, your home or office would be the first places they'd check."
"A reasonable point. I wonder if the GSF would let me stay there then. Surely, their headquarters would be as safe as anywhere else, and I could help figure out the long-term effects of the bubble, maybe even see what it's made out of, or pinpoint what cured me."
"Hey, if you're willing to offer a hand in it, I'm sure they'd love to have one of the best doctors I've ever been around."
"Thank you, Mr. McCloud. I feel as though it's my duty to help my fellow racers in that regard."
The team makes their way to GSF HQ where James is able to bring Dr. Stewart to the collection team there. Once Stewart's safely under their protection, James gets the first bounty sent to his account, which he was worried wouldn't show up after what Phoenix said to them. After James and Stewart swap contact information, James heads back to the ship. When he comes back, things seem relatively calm. Jody's been talking with Dr. Clash and Zoda, of all people, about hypnotism processes. They actually seem to be getting along way better than they previously had before. He thinks it's a little odd that she'd get so upset at him for how he made his escape, a move that was meant to save all of their lives, and yet she's hanging out with a known criminal like it's no big deal. Super cool.
As he walks away from them, the three continue their conversation. "Anyway, typically the way to unhypnotize someone has to come from the person who did the hypnosis in the first place", Zoda says, "Like them snapping their fingers or telling them to wake up. So for us to just get Stewie to snap out of it feels like we're missing something."
Jody starts thinking long and hard about this little conundrum. "What about the darts?", she says as she examines her little pistol. "You think there's something in these things that negates the effects of the bubble?"
"I guess it's possible, but I hope that's not the case", Clash says, "Think about it. If darting them takes away the effect, then the only way to run tests on someone is to bring them back without darting them, so they'd be awake and probably hostile."
"Sure, but there are other ways to knock people out without tranqing them. I mean there's…"
"Don't admit to anything there, Zoda…", Jody says to him, flashing her GSF badge at him.
"My lawyer has advised me not to incriminate myself, but you get my point. We should maybe invest in some other kinds of knocking-out things that can make it so we can test this stuff on a live patient."
"Sounds like James won't like that. That'd probably count as "serious medical attention", and would cost him 150 million space credits", Clash says.
"Eh, I'm sure he can tank that loss, he's already getting a boatload of money from us."
"Attention passengers", James says over the intercom. "We are currently on course to Cryton, barring any better ideas. While we're on the way there, anyone who wants to help figure out where these other people are can come to the fourth level war room, any fresh perspectives will be appreciated."
The other six racers all decide that that sounds better than just hanging around and doing nothing on the way there, so they head to the war room in unison. When they get there, James has already updated the roster with the information gathered from Clash's pictures. Shadow and Blood Falcon still have the red borders around their pictures, and the seven of them are still grayed out. Tanaka, Octoman, and Pico have green borders on their pictures with question marks on them, and Dr. Stewart has a gold border, signifying that he's off the list. The other seventeen racers are left on the board, ranging from beings far more advanced than them like Mr. EAD and The Skull, to peak-human adonises like Baba and Beastman, to just regular folks like Silver Neelsen and Gomar & Shioh. What purpose could all these people serve?
James has already laid out a bunch of laser pointers on the table for the other pilots to use, but wasn't expecting everyone to pile into the room together. "Alright then. We're on our way to find Antonio Guster next, and we still have a strong idea about Beastman. What else could we deduce from what a guy like Black Shadow would want from these people?", he says, gesturing to his big wall of racers.
As they all start thinking about it, they get distracted by one of the laser pointers squiggling against the wall, just underneath the racers' images. The trail of the laser stays behind until the user presses a button on the pen that serves as an undo button, and the laser keeps signing "Jack Levin" underneath the pictures.
Everyone turns to Jack, who has a look of cluelessness on his face. "What? I practice autograph signing when I'm nervous." James reaches his hand out to him, about to ask for the pointer back, when Gazelle stops him.
"Just write on the table, not the wall." Jack smiles and nods, following the cyborgs instructions. This works much better for everyone, so James just rolls his eyes and gets back to the task at hand.
"Alright, so I remember one of you guys said something a while back about Michael Chain still being with his goons (Jack: "that was me!"), and while that is possible, he might be used as something similar for Shadow's troops, almost like a drill sergeant or something for his men."
"Might still be a good idea to swing by his stomping grounds, and see if his men know about his whereabouts", Clash offers.
"I mean yea, but I don't know how well that'll fly. Just going into gang territory and be like, 'hey, can we talk to your boss? We're definitely not cops, we swear'. We'll do that as a possibility, but I just don't know how likely that'll be", James replies.
Monique points her laser at the wall, shining it on her husband, looking at it with a look of despair on her face. The other racers empathize with her, aside from Zoda, who's trying really hard to follow the 'don't antagonize her' rule Jack laid down for him.
"So um… I'm a little out of the loop", Gazelle says to Monique, "but… what kind of powers does your husband have? Might help us figure out how he's being… used", he says, not liking how that last sentence came out.
This gets her out of her own head for a second and gives her something to think about. "Let's see here, a lot of mind-based powers. Telekinetics, precognition, force pushing, that sort of thing."
"Oh good, Shadow basically has a psychic who can tell him what we're up to next", Jody says in an annoyed tone, which she swiftly apologizes for, worried she sounds condescending.
"Well, not from as far away as we… probably are", Monique says sorrowfully. "But it will certainly make things tricky when we track him down, as he'll likely have a leg up on us."
"Hey, I've got one that I've been thinking about", Zoda says, trying to get the subject off of Super Arrow.
"Hold on, we were still talking about my husband!", Monique shouts at him.
"Does anyone have any better leads than 'he's doing telepathy things for Shadow'?" Pause for an answer, no one says anything, much to Monique's annoyance. "Terrific, moving on. What the heck is this guy up to?", Zoda says, circling the Skull.
"Well, the guy's basically a necromancer. He might be using the same dark powers that brought him back to life to bring others back. Maybe his fallen soldiers?", James poses to them, which gets Jack super nervous.
"Are you telling me that we might have to deal WITH ZOMBIES? Nope. Hard no. Not participating in that mission. You can't make me."
Jody chimes in to calm him down, "I mean they wouldn't be like the classical BRAAAAAAAAINS type of zombies", she says with her arms out, while doing the undead voice, "they'd just be more… reanimated, you know, like how he is."
"I'm gonna hold you to that, and if I get my brains eating, I'm gonna come back to life and eat your brains", he says, only barely joking.
"Don't make the easy joke, James", Monique says to him, "I can already hear it in your brain."
"Hey, if you already hear it, I don't need to say anything", he says with a little grin.
