"He's not coming back?", Gazelle asks, sounding devastated.
"'Fraid not", James says as he starts up his ship. "He said he'd be more useful in the lab helping figure out how to reverse the hypnosis process, so he's staying here. We should still be able to contact him if we need weapons or gadgets, but I guess the risk of being out in the field like that was a little too much for him."
The announcement is a huge blow to the team. Not only was he the smartest person on the team, he was someone anyone on the team could take to and ask for advice, which he gave frequently.
"Man… that sucks so much. Doc was gonna teach me how rain happens…", Jack says, dejectedly.
"Oh, come on, you could look up how that happens on your comm at any time", Zoda says back while rolling his eyes. "We could replace him with a couple tutorial videos and a trip to Dirty Dvorak's House of Mayhem."
"It's more interesting when someone shows you how to do it!", Jack shouts at Zoda. "Maybe if you had someone do that for you, everyone wouldn't HATE YOU!"
He storms off back into his room, leaving the rest of the crew stunned, aside from Zoda who just shrugs it off. "As if I don't already know why people hate me."
James has a concerned look on his face watching him leave. "Oh boy, that's PTSD if I ever saw it. Someone should go talk to him soon." Before he can even finish talking, Monique's already stood up and headed towards his room to talk to him again.
"How come she never does that for me when I get angry?", Zoda asks.
"Because she… hates you?", Jody says, super confused on if he's being serious.
"Oh riiiiiight, forgot about that", Zoda says back to himself, seemingly serious.
Meanwhile, James turns on the jet, and starts flying off to their next location. Luckily, for all of them, Porix is only a couple of galaxies over from where they are right now, so it'll take less than a day to get there. Fairly handy, since time is now not on their side.
Monique knocks on Jack's door, which makes him jump a little, but he lets her in. She's made two cups of tea, and sets one cup on his end table. She doesn't say a word to him, just like what she did last time, and waits for him to say the first word. She takes a long, somewhat loud sip of her warm tea, seemingly trying to tell him to drink some without saying anything, but he's not in the mood right now.
"Can you please tell Zoda that I'm sorry for snapping at him? It wasn't supposed to come out like that, I promise."
"That's something you should tell him yourself. It'll seem more genuine that way", she says as she blows on her tea. "But you shouldn't have to rush an apology out to him either. You can do it whenever you feel like you're ready to talk to him."
Jack nods and lets out a deep breath, getting a strong whiff of his tea. "I thought I'd be over this by now. Jack and Jody made this sound so easy. Just do a few flips, hold your feet in the right spot, and pull the trigger. Easy squeezy. But like… I didn't know that guy. He wasn't my enemy, he was just some dude. Maybe the Doc's got the right idea, maybe I'd be more useful somewhere else. Except I'm not as smart as he is, so it's not like I could go anywhere. Like what am I supposed to do, sing at Black Shadow? I just feel like a burden, ya know?
Monique listens to Jack's thoughts on the matter, and just drinks her tea in silence while nodding, letting him get it all out of his system. "Jack, you wanna know a secret?", Monique says as Jack looks at her, with his bloodshot eyes starting to well up again. "I don't think any of us are 'cut out' for the stuff we're doing. When I was on Zorok with Jody and Doc, I was just making stuff up, and praying that it would work, because if it didn't we'd be screwed."
"Well, yea, but that's still a skill you can improve upon. My skills mostly involve just being marketable, good with women, and driving a race car. How the hell is any of that gonna save these guy's lives. Why am I even trying?"
"Because you're a good person. You want to save Katie, and you'll do anything to make sure she's safe. You don't have a plan, but that's fine. Neither do the rest of us. And we've made it this far. We've already saved two lives, and we're going for #3 now. Look, how about we just not think about the mission for a little while, we can just stay up here, and hang out for a little bit, just let the galaxies pass us by. I'm sure you have plenty of stories from your touring days you could tell me about."
Jack smiles and nods, drinking a few more sips of his tea before he recalls a story from those days, that he normally only tells girls he's flirting with, but it's a warm memory for him right now. Monique smiles and listens, just happy to get him back to a calm state.
As James is flying the ship towards Porix, he's looking for maps of the planet's surface or pictures of what's on the planet or reports of the beasts roaming the planet, literally anything that could help, but he's coming up empty, and getting frustrated.
"What's the problem, Jim-Jam? We pass by the planet, and now you can't get it out of warpdrive?", Zoda says in an intentionally obnoxious sort of way, just trying to liven up the mood of the flight.
"It's just this stupid planet, there's basically nothing about it on any of my resources. It's all just the same few facts. Totally uninhabited, crazy evolved monsters, mostly unstable planet surface. That's it, everything else is just speculation. And we've got to find the one person on probably the entire planet. How the hell did alternate timeline us figure this one out?"
"Probably took them a long while", Gazelle says. "This feels like the kind of thing where they spent weeks just looking for one guy."
"I wonder what happened to the Grand Prix in their timeline then", James ponders. "If we only had four and a half months to find all these people, and they couldn't find everyone, maybe the Grand Prix had to shut down while we continued the search."
"Are we even gonna wanna go back to the Grand Prix right now?", Zoda asks. "I mean, let's just say we manage to recover every single pilot who Shadow's captured. What would be stopping him from just coming back next year, and doing the exact same thing?"
"Well, for one thing, his F-Zero license is totally gonna be revoked, so he won't be allowed to race", Jody says.
"And the GSF took over the mine's producing the black goo, so he might not have the resources to make more of it", James adds.
"Um, the doctor's said it was called Shadow Serum", Gazelle points out.
"I will call it that when it stops being cringe", James bluntly says
"And maybe him coming back to the Grand Prix is a good thing", Jody continues. "If we're able to organize a whole new series, and get us all together in the same location, Shadow would have to come out of hiding to recapture us. If we load up on security, we could nab him at the Grand Prix!"
"Jody, there was already a ton of security there before", Zoda retorts. "Believe me, I tried to sneak stuff in all the time, and it was a nightmare."
"We can always do more, especially to arrest someone so wanted", Jody says back.
"If you say so", Zoda says, getting annoyed, "but it just sounds like a surefire way to put us all right back in the line of fire again. Yet another reason to just go for Black Shadow first, and before you ask, no I haven't figured out a plan for that yet. I'm working on it."
"Well, keep trying to figure that out, Zoda. For now, I think we go with Jody's plan. ("Thank you, James.") I think I might've found us something for this mission. There's a little shop a couple planets away from Porix that makes maps, and they say they can make any maps of any planet in the solar system."
"Wait, if they can make maps of anything in the solar system, why aren't those maps on your resource log?", Jody says skeptically.
"I dunno, so they can make me buy it?", James says rather nonchalantly. "It looks a little strange, but I really don't see a reason not to check it out, since it's on the way."
"OK, but let's be quick about it. We don't have a ton of time to be spending on maybes", Jody says as they make a slight detour and head towards the nearby green planet.
The planet of Shinar is similar in some ways to Huckmine, in that the residents of the planet tend to group together. However, unlike Huckmine, where everyone pairs up with a stranger and sticks with them until they marry someone else, Shinarians stay attached to the rest of their siblings for the rest of their lives. When the racers land on Shinar, they immediately look out of place, as not only do most of the residents wear similar clothes to one another, Shinarians are also less than three feet tall on average. Gazelle, in particular, has to watch to make sure he doesn't step on any of these tiny, peaceful-looking people.
After a little bit of searching, the team manages to find the place they're looking for, using the translation tools in James's sunglasses. "This looks like the place. Dai San Gen Map. Guess the first three words don't have a translation, but it's got 'map' in the name, so it should be good. Let's see what we can find", he says as he, Jody, Zoda, and Gazelle walk inside.