"Where was the body? Where was it, Blue?"

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't comprehend it. My heart slammed against my chest, sweat drenched my body, I couldn't steady myself. Cyan had JUST been alive twelve minutes ago. Now…now he is gone. All that was left was his lower half, still lying there in that hallway in the darkness. In the darkness that now encompassed me. I felt a terrible sadness, a gut-wrenching sadness, like when my mother had died in that accident.

This was how they all felt, huh? Yellow losing Red and Banana losing Orange on The Skeld, Fortegreen losing Yellow and Rose here on Polus…

Cyan was gone. Cyan was dead.

"Blue," came the soft voice of Tan. I felt her put her hand on one side of my helmet. "Blue, what happened?"

I tasted my tears with my tongue. "In between…in the m-middle of Up…Decontamination, b-by the Specimen Room," I choked. I took a deep breath, "the Imposter killed him. Ate…him…and…hrrrrrr…"

I took a seat. How could this happen? My only friends are gone. My mom is gone. My dad is far away in a mining facility. I just have…

I clutched Tan's hand. I squeezed it. She didn't mind. She understood my pain. I looked around the meeting room. Fortegreen gave me an understanding look. Pink clutched her clipboard, moving her feet back and forth in an anxious way. Olive was rubbing his arm, his visor scrunched in thought.

"I was in Weapons, doing the Clear Asteroids task—my last task for today," said Pink. She elbowed Olive, prompting him to speak.

"I was in O2, refilling my oxygen tank, since I'm done with my tasks," he stated.

"I wrote up a report for MIRA HQ in the Laboratory after comparing the samples collected from the Inspect Sample task," Fortegreen said with confidence.

"I completed the second stage of the Fix Weather Node task," Tan murmured.

"I was looking for Cyan," I said. "I did all of my tasks…and, and, I w-w-wanted to…check on…him…but then, well…" If I had come with him to the Specimen Room, the Imposter wouldn't have been killed because I—or Cyan, if the Imposter killed me—could have reported and voted out the Imposter. I shouldn't have left him alone…I…

"Blue could've killed Cyan and then reported his body!" Fortegreen suddenly exclaimed, waving his hands.

"NoOoo!" I screeched, my voice cracking.

"Blue didn't do that!" Tan vouched for me, "They were good friends, Blue wouldn't have!"

"Imposters are only friends with other Imposters," growled Olive, staring down Tan right in the eye.

"You know this because…?" Pink turned to Olive.

"It's a reasonable assumption," Olive replied sheepishly, as if feeling bad for angering her.

Hmm... I think.

"Fortegreen is my top suspect," I say suddenly, rage fueling me. I'll do anything to avenge Cyan. "He may have fixed the communication error, but he's been prone to sharp things screwdrivers and drills and have always partaken in sacrificing others to the lava, but he disappeared quickly from Communications and was closest to CYAN'S BODY IT'S FORTEGREEN IT'S FORTEGREEN!" I was just in a blind rage.

"LIAR!" Fortegreen shot back. "You've been suspicious of everyone, and you didn't Submit a Scan for me when I asked."

"You had me put your stupid top hat over CREWMATES' GRAVES JUST SO YOU COULD GET AWAY WITH ANOTHER KILL!"

"YOU KILLED CYAN!"

"THEN YOU SHOT ROSE AND DROWNED YELLOW, SON OF—!"

Fortegreen slammed the table with extreme force. "I. DID. NOT. KILL. THEM. Gray shot Rose and he, or the other Imposter WHICH ISN'T ME, killed Yellow."

"If you didn't kill your favorite crewmates, Fortegreen"—I spat his color like it was a dirty word—"then I didn't kill mine." I regained a steady voice, trying to fight back the rage and the tears.

"It could've been Tan, then," Fortegreen said, pointing at my crush, "she's so quiet you can hear the tree in O2 growing and she was near Cyan's body as well!"

"She was in the Laboratory, near the main entrance," I spat, "well away from…Cyan's…body. You were basically in front of Upper Decontamination." Tan nodded and squeezed my hand back.

"I was semi-blocking the freaking bathroom, dull-head," Fortegreen said back, slamming the table when he said "dull-head."

Olive and Pink looked around, as if they were considering speaking, but both decided not to.

Pink took out her pad. "The voting session…is open."

There were five beeps in a matter of seconds.

I checked my pad slowly like everyone else. Fortegreen voted on me. Olive, Pink, Tan and I all voted on Fortegreen.

Olive arose from his seat. "It's been decided. I'm sorry, Fortegreen." He gave him a shrug, and then his visor darkened as he grimaced.

"NOO! NOO! NOOOOOO!" Fortegreen yelled, backing up into Admin. Olive tackled him and they hit a bookshelf, causing holo-books to cascade over them. They punched and kicked and shoved, and it seemed that the two similar colors wouldn't stop fighting. I ran at them, feeling Tan getting pulled along as she still gripped my hand.

I jumped Fortegreen, and after an intense wrestling match Olive and I successfully subsided him, with Olive dizzying him completely for a few moments by whacking him over the head with a folding chair so hard that it broke. Fortegreen's visor even cracked, but I couldn't see an Imposter or human face under there. Just...darkness. But I knew there was an alien.

Olive and I dragged him towards the east exit of the Office, and Tan came up behind us and helped push Fortegreen, who was still trying to break free and was cursing and protesting like Coral and Gray had before him as he started to get back into it. His voice became more and more hoarse, and before long it was just icy garbles.

We left the Office's east exit for the lava lake when out of the blue, Fortegreen shot forward and upward, the directions we'd been pushing him this whole time. Since we weren't expecting him to comply at all, we were all completely taken off guard and we let go, falling the opposite direction onto the slippery purple rock. Fortegreen took a sharp spin on the heel and ran towards the Dropship, but I ran after him and rammed him in the side. Fortegreen unbalanced and fell over the edge of the chasm.

I exhaled a mighty breath, wincing at the pain of the spots Fortegreen had hurt me. I went over to see what was happening to Fortegreen, and I saw him gripping the ledge. He grabbed my leg and pulled me down, and I felt myself falling towards the precipice. I heard shoving and a grunt from behind me, and then I saw Tan's hands around my arms, trying to pull me up. All three of us began to go over, but Olive pulled upwards sharply and Tan almost lost her grip on me entirely. The jolt disoriented Fortegreen, and his other hand reached for me but then his hand slipped from his slick glove, and I watched the horrifying sight of Fortegreen shouting in the most surreal way ever as he fell down, down, down and landed on a flat rock that was halfway sticking out of the lava. Fortegreen was immediately silenced by the impact except for the crunch of his inhuman bones, and as Tan pulled me back to hard ground, I watched fire begin to creep from the lava to Fortegreen's boots and then continue upwards.

"Blue! Are you all right?" Tan asked, her visor cloudy and dimmed as if she had been crying, thinking I was going to fall and be roasted alive.

"Y-y-yes, Tan, I'm okay…" I said, which was a complete lie. I was shaken to the core at the near-death experience.

"Well…we got 'em," Tan replied, "that was the other Imposter."

I said nothing but nodded. I sure hope so.

And only for the fact that Cyan was now avenged.

The next day, MIRA HQ really loaded it up with our tasks: I had Insert Keys, Dropship; Record Temperature, Outside; Replace Water Jug, Boiler Room; Inspect Sample, Medbay; and Start Reactor and Unlock Manifolds, both in the Specimen Room. But you know what? I didn't care. I didn't do my tasks. I couldn't. Not with Cyan. I didn't get to spend much time with him here on this Polus outpost, but now that he is gone…I thought back to The Skeld, and all of the jokes we cracked and the times we comforted each other and…just...I couldn't. I felt dead inside, like a piece of me was missing.

I was laying down in the Bunker, trying to rest, I heard the door open, and someone sat down at the foot of my bed. After a minute I sat up to see who it was. It was Tan, sitting criss-cross applesauce.

"How are you feeling, Blue?" she said timidly.

"OK."

"Um…that's good. Yeah."

"Yeah. It is good."

"Yep.

"Yeh…"

This felt like the time I asked Tan how she was doing in Medbay when she had that headache and Gray tried to poison her, only except it was now much, much more awkward, especially since I've now realized I really do have a soft spot for her.

"You feel like getting up?" she asked.

I paused for a moment. "Alright."

I got out of bed and, after considering it for a moment, timidly, she took my hand and led me through the Office, then Admin and Lower Decontamination. Once we got into the Specimen Room, I saw that Cyan's body was not there anymore.

"Pink buried him," she explained, "next to White."

Just the thought of Cyan truly being dead made me stop walking and lean into the wall.

"Cyan…" I whispered.

"Blue, I am really sorry," Tan said, her helmet touching mine, "very, very sorry. I know how it feels."

I looked at her. "You do?"

She nodded slowly but didn't answer how. Instead, she went a different direction. "I made something for you."

"You…made me something?"

"Yes."

"What?"

Tan went over to the table in the middle of the Specimen Room with all of the test tubes on it. I hadn't noticed it before, but now I did. It was a little bracelet—a circlet of a green fiber I've never seen before adorned with a purple cylindrical crystal, like an amethyst or something like that. She picked it up, opened my hand, dropped it in my palm, and then closed my hand.

"W…wow, Tan…um...thanks?" She had to be smiling.

"The green stuff is grass, I think," she said, "and the crystal…I dunno where it's from, possibly from one of the mines of this planet."

"Where'd you get the stuff to make it?" I asked, putting the bracelet on my right hand. I've never worn a bracelet before, and it was a little tight, but I didn't dare complain. This was Tan showing remorse, which meant she must like me to some degree, right? I didn't care about the girly aesthetic of the accessory.

"Both from MIRA HQ," she said, putting her hands on her hips. "Do you like it?"

I was thinking if I'd ever seen a female, shy, tan crewmate when I grew up at MIRA HQ, but when Tan asked the question, I quickly said "Yes, sure, very much! No, really, I…I do like it."

"Thanks. I-I originally got the materials and made the bracelet because I thought it looked pretty, but people said it was babyish or whatever the heck, so I've just kept in my boot this whole time—eleven years, wasn't it?"

This was in her boot for eleven years… "Did you ever, uh, wash it? I mean, your boot?"

Tan thought for a moment. "Nah."

I gave a snort of laughter before turning to look out the window at MIRA HQ in the distance. Tan must've grown up there, like me, huh?

"You ever heard of The Plan?" Tan asked me after a bit.

I grabbed a folding chair from one of the bins in the Specimen Room and sat on it, then grabbed on for Tan. She sat in it, just across from me, next to this giant purple tube that hummed as shimmering (yet highly toxic) bubbles floated through it, then circled back to the bottom somehow.

"No," I finally answered her prompt. "What is this Plan?"

"Well, it's a conspiracy," she chuckled, "that MIRA HQ is breeding Imposters on some remote moon on Polus, Moon 30154515, nicknamed the Fungle, a mainly tropical place with lots of weird killer mushrooms, to slowly take over the entire galaxy and beyond! It sounds really stupid, but you never know! MIRA is more secretive than you'd think, trust me. I got into all sorts of trouble snooping around in places I didn't belong in the HQ, back when I was younger." She smiled in her helmet, reminiscing. "But yeah, that's The Plan."

I chuckled too. "Not the craziest conspiracy I've ever heard."

"Oh?" asked Tan. "What is it, then?"

I leaned back in his chair, making it creak. "Well, when I was on The Skeld, there was a crewmate with a brown suit, you see. Now, Brown was a prankster and a BIG conspirer. He probably talked about The Plan once, I dunno, I haven't heard about it until now, but that's besides the point. Brown's craziest conspiracy was that the entire galaxy was actually centered around a giant chicken nugget!"

Tan laughed out loud, a good belly laugh that made Blue shiver with...happiness.

He decided to continue retelling Brown's insane theory. "It was a dinosaur chicken nugget, to be exact. And...and this dinosaur chicken nugget, well, this one was almost nothing. He said that MIRA HQ's energy, you know, from its artificial star in the reactor there, was actually a dinosaur chicken nugget in disguise! Same with The Skeld's artificial star that powered that giant Warship. Not only that, but..." Blue paused to breath as he laughed to himself, "...b-but, there was a dinosaur chicken nugget in the center of each and EVERY galaxy, and if you went far enough, at the center of the UNIVERSE, there was a massive dinosaur chicken nugget. And THAT..." he shook his head, recalling those spare moments he had with Brown before the crewmate's untimely death in Navigation at the hands of Purple, "...was the Dinosaur Chicken Nugget Theory. Plain and simple as that."

Tan wrapped up her laughter. "Wow. You had some...funny friends."

I nodded. Had...

Just then, a little orange dot began to fall from the sky all the way over there. I pressed my face against the window to get a better look, and Tan did too, right beside me so that our shoulders were touching, which made me feel kinda off.

The orange dot suddenly morphed into an ugly, spidery, green dot as it kept falling, the thing's crewmate attire breaking as it revealed the Imposter inside. The dot then disappeared behind one of the lava waterfalls in the distance, meeting a fiery end.

"MIRA HQ just found an Imposter and Ejected it," Tan breathed to me.

"Huh," was all I could say. How was there an Imposter in the most secure place of all secureness? Or, more so, had been?

"They always find a way, don't they?" Tan said. "Somehow."