4241/The Unseen Labyrinth

The Unseen Labyrinth
Date of Scene:	29 November 2020
Location:	Everywhere. I mean two whole different universes, the inside of a white hole, and a whole bunch of hyperspace between.
Synopsis:	The four lost Titans visit Endovar's final base and find the White Hole. Gatekeeper's gifts carry them through the rough ride back to Hyperspace, and the psychic beacon sent by the Titans left on Earth guides them back to the wormhole, and the way home. The four Titans know they have returned to normality at last when they are insulted by an angry raccoon.
Cast of Characters:	Donna Troy, Caitlin Fairchild, Terry O'Neil, Victor Stone, Rocket

---

Donna Troy has posed:
    It has taken the limping assembly of parts the Titans refer to as the dreadnought eighteen hours to make the journey from Gombar. The ruined hulk the Titans have called home these last few weeks was meant to travel on mighty engines, not be towed by an interplanetary shuttle that takes forever to accelerate and decelerate the considerable mass. It could have been much worse though - there simply isn't very far, in interplanetary terms, to travel. This entire universe is tiny, and much beyond two AU from the singularity at the center and a traveller would find themselves following a catenary of space-time that would be leading them back towards the middle.

    Sometimes eighteen hours can seem like days, but finally the journey is over. The distant, solitary rock that had been their target has resolved from being a LIDAR return with little more than an approximation of size data to a RADAR target returning a clear indication of a roughly spherical shape to a rocky mass in the long range visual sensors. Now it is a dim gray asteroid hanging in space just a couple of miles in front of the ship, a little smaller than the remnant of the Dreadnought itself.

    The Titans gather in the Dreadnought's bridge, attention split between the sight of the rock through the main viewscreen and the confusing scan returns coming back through the ship's sensors. The scanners show the rock is generating a lot of radio noise and there is an abundance of exotic particles in the vicinity. Even at this range, it's beginning to seriously disrupt ship's systems. Radar returns indicate the surface is partially flat metal, and inexplicably the scanners claim it has a negative mass - though perhaps that's an erroneous reading caused by the interference.

    As the ship gets closer and details start to resolve, the reason for the radar returns becomes clear, though it was always easy to guess. The other twelve of Endovar's bases were hollowed out - this one must be too, and one side of the asteroid is dominated by a huge pair of metallic doors, sealing off what must be the entrance. Above the door the asteroid has been carved into a relief of a bearded human face, bearing a strikingly enigmatic expression. The face looks oddly familiar.

    Donna gives out a low whistle. "Uh. It's not just me, is it?" she says. "I mean it's younger, but that face looks a whole lot like Gatekeeper to me."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"I'm guessing that's the White Hole, and I'm starting to think I should have held that jerk Gatekeeper upside-down by his ankles, and shook him until something intelligent fell out," Caitlin says grimly. "I might just do that anyway if I see him again."

The Reality Compass that the Gatekeeper provided is set on the helm where she can keep an eye on it. "Now we find out if this thing is worth it," Caitlin mutters, and drifts the nose of the ship away from their objective. Her eye tracks the motion of the Compass as it swings one way, then the other.

"I'm compensating some from some asymmetric gravitmetric shearing forces, but the Compass is telling us that realspace is either right on our current bearing, or behind us. I think we're slipping through a stabilized gravity well."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"It occurs to me that we asked him if he had known Endovar when he came back. We really should have asked him if he /was/ Endovar. Except that at the time the idea was preposterous."

In his Cheshire shape, in case his powers are needed, he leans on his console and looks at the gate face, "It's a rather good likeness, isn't it? Got to give him marks for top craftsmanship, the crafty devil."

He leans back and produces the flashlight from his frock coat pocket. He flicks the switch briefly to check if it still works, and then nods to himself.

"Well, this is it. Let's go and do some science and get us home..."

Victor Stone has posed:
"Kind of a weird choice to put a big bas-relief picture of yourself on your supposedly secret base," Vic comments dryly from the engineering console. "I mean, yeah, our tower is a giant T, but we aren't trying to be subtle, are we?" Unlike the others, his boon from space Galadriel isn't in evidence.

Donna Troy has posed:
    "The white hole is /inside/ that thing?" Donna asks Caitlin. "Well that makes things a little easier, I was assuming we'd have one more stop to make. So, we open the doors, fly in and then... what? Do we know how to navigate a white hole? Do you just kind of fall out of it the way you fall into a black hole? Do we have to worry about anti-spaghettification compressing us into... no, that doesn't make sense."

    She frowns, leaning her hands on the console to peer forwards at the asteroid. "There isn't a whole lot of space traffic here, Vic. And plenty of rocks. I doubt Endovar was too worried about someone coincidentally getting close enough to notice the carving. And even if they did, those are some big doors. Could take some work getting them open."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"I'm not looking at it because it's just going to make me mad," Caitlin tells Donna. Her eyes are glued to her instruments. "But at this point, I don't have a lot of ideas. It's... darnit, hold on."

A few moments of silence, and her brow furrows, and she shakes her head. "There's a ... gosh, I don't know how to say it. Like a little corrido of realspace that's not being affected by the gravimetric shears. But our sensors keep losing it and recharting it. The shears aren't coming in any sort of pattern I can see. I refuse to admit there's an actual white hole inside that asteroid because that will just make Sir Newton cry, so... the... thingy, behind those gates, is probably where we need to go. I'm not exactly seeing a lot of other options forward, and I am /not/ turning this ship around."

She looks over at Terry and Vic. "Um... any suggestions on how to get the gates open, though?" she hazards. "There's some system acknowleding our hails, but it's not reacting to anything beyond the handshake protocols."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Vorpal fumbles with something in his pockets, and brings up a notepad. It looks worse for wear, and it is covered in his trademark near-hieroglyph handwriting. "Let's see... I knew it was a good thing to keep notes... okay, here we go. Gateway..."

He flips a few pages, "Gatekeeper... got a flashlight. And... god, what is this? Okay, so the words I wrote down here is 'Open Sez me', I'm sure." He stares at the small page, "I'm pretty sure that's right. Anyways, something about having to say the words in the right place but you need that thing he gave to..."

He frowns, he flips the page, "Huh. I guess I didn't write down that part. But I'm pretty sure it's not my flashlight. So..." he glances at Cait and Vic, "It's one of you. Unless Donna has to use the cape to make flag signals or something."

Victor Stone has posed:
"Still, it's kind of extra, don't you think?" Vic answers Donna. "A little on the Kanye West end of the spectrum. He didn't /seem/ that image-obsessed when we met him -- if it is the same guy, and not one of those time-travel movies where the great great granddad is played by the same actor in a different hat."

He leans back in his seat, pinches his chin between thumb and forefinger, and continues, "Anyway, we'll probably get a chance to ask him about it. Genre conventions aside, if a bunch of superheroes showed up on a spaceship all 'we're gonna find this dude's secret hidden base,' and I were secretly that dude, I would drop everything and go to my hidden base.'" He hitches one shoulder upward and points at the big metal doors. "Even if I weren't going to try to stop them or guard it or whatever, like a video game's final boss, I would at least want to see if they really figured it out."

He sits forward again, and pulls up the console's readouts on the ship's flight characteristics. "As for going through the white hole, if we're worried about dimensional turbulence, we might want to ditch the mostly-dead-nought and just take the shuttle through. One's looking a lot hardier than the other. As for the doors..." He taps a panel on his shoulder, which hisses open to reveal the transponder he was given. It has (perhaps inadvisably) been wired directly into his systems over the course of a few weeks. "Vorpal, he did mention 'open sesame' when he gave this to me, which is a weirdly specific Arabian Nights reference, but at least kind of indicates it's a key."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna nods her head in agreement to Vic. "Yeah. Well for a start, if the White Hole is /actually/ inside that thing, we're not going to get the Dreadnought through the doors. Terry, whip us up a rabbit hole onto the shuttle, I'll disengage the docking clamps."

    Donna's fingers run quickly over the controls as she starts the separation process - she may not have many ship-board duties as one of the two less technically-oriented Titans, but it's good to feel vaguely useful. In an attempt to continue to be useful, she opens communications and broadcasts "Open Sesame". She waits expectantly, looking at the doors.

    Nothing happens.

    "Well so much for that. Cait, do we know that even got through? It's responding to a radio ping, but there's a lot of noise. Can we up the signal strength or something?"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Once everyone's deboarded to the shuttle Caitlin takes her place at the conn and starts bringing it closer to the ship. "I'm remoted into the dreadnought's power systems. I'm going to route the comms through the shield emitter array. It'll boost power quite a bit."

The message plays on loop and Caitlin starts bringing the shuttle closer to the massive doors as carefully as she can. Even with her Compass and a steady pilot at the helm, the shuttle quakes and shudders as gravimetic swells wash over the hull. "Huh. Well, small blessings," she muses. "The shears aren't hitting us any harder than they were on the dreadnought. At least our hull integrity will stay steady."

"My compass thingy is saying the way forward is... forward, so... if anyone has any ideas besides 'blast them open', I'm listening."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
After bringing everybody aboard the shuttle, Vorpal remains quiet for a few seconds as he goes over his notes. He hmmms and haws for a few seconds, before looking up. "Okay, I'm going to admit something. I'm not sciency in the least, so... excuse me if this sounds as dumb as I think it does... but you said you didn't think our signal didn't get through to the gigantic monument to Endovar's insecurities." He turns over to look at Vic, "That thing you got is some sort of transponder according to Sir Playing Two Roles In This Movie. Might that be able to boost the signal or... I dunno. I am really starting to think that maybe you should have had Nadia instead of me for this road trip."

Victor Stone has posed:
Donna's unsuccessful attempt at providing the password elicits a short hum from Cyborg as he decamps and hustles onto the significantly more crowded tow shuttle. As they settle in, he answers, "One step ahead of you, Vorpal. Since it's wired into me and so is that tattoo transmitter thing from Alfort" -- is there anything in this system he /hasn't/ plugged into the moment it came within arm's reach? Vic must be getting lonely -- "I can power the transponder up, beam through that, and even psychically amplify its signal," he suggests.

"If you get a sudden urge to rip open a seed packet and season a hamburger bun, it's working." He goes silent -- except, presumably, on the astral plane and whatever frequencies the transponder itself is tuned to.

Donna Troy has posed:
    The shuttle moves free of the Dreadnought, closing in on the asteroid. As the Titans get closer the controls become a little trickier to manage and the readouts grow more chaotic. The increasingly hard-to-read sensors show the density of exotic particles rapidly increasing as they get closer, and some of those particles are exotic indeed. Complex baryons that shouldn't exist, Rho mesons that last far longer than their decay width would allow for indicating something very strange happening to time, negative mass strangelets... if it wasn't for the unreliability of the readings casting doubt that anything being detected actually exists, it would be a scientific goldmine.

    Vic activates the entropic transponder and broadcasts the painfully cliched phrase, but apparently painful cliches were Endovar's thing, because there's a response. The eyes of the carving move, and home in on the shuttle. Crackling with noise, a voice comes through the shuttle's radio in response.

    "I created this place, this universe, in the hopes of making an island of sanity, in the belief that separating people from their past would allow them to craft a better future. Twice already I have returned through the circle of time to attempt to correct my mistakes. All that is behind me now, if such a word makes sense in this context. Forgive me for what I have done, Titans. I have tried to make up for it. Perhaps your fortuitous arrival provided the disruption that was needed to set things back on the course for sanity. I will live to see if it is so, though by the time you hear this message, I will not remember the part I played in it. You will be gone before the seeds you have planted grow. I wish you luck."

    A crack appears in the great doors, and slowly they begin to open. A shaft of brilliance lances out from the crack, millennia of slowed light leaking out from the White Hole's gravitational effect, freed from the contstraints of shallow time and flooding realtime with blinding light. Even from a distance, even without being directly in the line of light, the interior of the shuttle becomes washed out with light.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"I can't see anything!" Caitlin cries. Her eyes are more tolerant to injury than most, but there's simply nothing *to* see. It's nothing but infinite, blinding white in all directions around them.

Her hands wave in front of her face, the gesture invisible to all the Titans. "I'm-- I've lost our guidance path. Vic, you'll have to navigate, I'm flying blind here!" The sudden disorientation seems to be giving Caitlin an onset of blind panic. Darkness is one thing, but this whiteout blindness clearly has her very distraught.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Oh my god, he is even dumber than I thought. He MADE this looney bi- AUGH!"

The Cheshire cat brings his arm up to shield himself from the brilliance. "--he just fucking blinded us with science, didn't he?"

He fumbles with his jacket and extracts the flashlight again. He remembers the nature of the thing- that it shows things as they are not. Does that work with light? Or the source of the brightness? He hasn't had a lot of time to test just how far the thing can reach, but it's the only thing he can think of.

"Here goes... nothing."

Click

Victor Stone has posed:
"Cool motive. Still kidnapping, on a massive scale," Vic replies, his dry tone undercutting the seriousness of Endovar the Gatekeeper's pronouncement. He looks like he has more withering remarks to offer, but as they go through the gate, Caitlin's outcry has him on his feet and rushing toward her. His own organic eye is lidded against the blinding brilliance, and in fact he has a metal hand over it to block more light, but for his artificial eye, it's just a matter of flickering through wavelength filters until he finds something the white hole isn't beaming into their cockpit at industrial scale.

"I've got you, Cait," he says, as one filter finally gives him a functional view. "It looks like a scene out of Predator, but heat vision still works." He's standing behind her chair, reaching over her shoulder to keep the controls steady and the compass pointed forward, when Vorpal tries his experiment with the flashlight.

Donna Troy has posed:
    As with Vorpal and Cait, Donna finds herself blinded by the brilliance of the light and covers her eyes with a hand - not as effective as metal hands, but enough. "I knew I should have packed my sunglasses, but they bother Terry," she quips.

    Vorpal flicks the switch on his flash un-light, and it's reality-denying beam lances out in a cone of dimness that rejects the reality of the flood of photons. Sensing the sudden drop in brightness, Donna cautiously uncovers her eyes, blinking. It takes a little time to adjust to the sudden dimness in the cockpit, but there it is, in the place Caitlin had put it on the console - the reality compass, visible, pointing the way.

    The shuttle slips into the engulfing brilliance beyond the doors and drifts forwards silent into the endless white. There is no sense of motion here, or scale, or time. Nothing moves but for the slow motions of the reality compass pointing the way, and Vic's hands as he works the controls, nudging the ship this way and that to keep the compass pointing forwards.

    There is no sense of why the compass points the way it does, nothing apart from that moving dot to indicate a path through the infinite whiteness. Nothing to do but trust the reality compass is guiding them true.

    The sense of emptiness in this white void is profound; the whiteness visible through the windows might as well be a wall. There could be nothing beyond the hull of the shuttle, no universe anywhere out there, nothing in all of existence but for the shuttle and the Titans within it. There is no sense of presence, but also none of absence, as if this endless whiteness was a void more empty than the blackest depths of space.

    The journey through the whiteness feels like it takes forever, and feels like it takes just a few moments, and it ends without warning with a shocking suddenness. The whiteness is gone and the shuttle drifts on, no longer in the white void, but also not yet returned to space. There is a sense of depth to the view outside the shuttle now, the space outside has a strange, gray-red mottled texture to it, flowing and moving almost hypnotically.

    "Hyperspace," Donna murmurs in awe. "This is what the inside of the wormhole looked like. "We returned to where we came from, but we were in hyperspace when we entered the singularity. In the mouth of the wormhole."

    The words unspoken are that the shuttle does not have warp capability, does not have the drives needed to navigate out of hyperspace and back to normal space.

    In his seat at the rear of the cockpit, behind the pilot and co-pilot seats where Caitlin and Vic sit, Vorpal becomes aware of two things. One is that the black cloak Donna is wearing, Endovar's old cloak, is suddenly no longer pure velvet blackness, but is covered in a faintly glowing spray of white dots like the night sky. The other is that Gar misses him. This latter awareness is somehow more than just a thought or realization. It comes with a powerful sense of Gar's love, and Gar's /presence/. It feels like not a thought that he himself has had, but one that Gar had for him. He is faintly reminded of the sensations of communicating with Kian through the mind-touch, the awareness of another consciousness, a mind beyond ones own. And it is close at hand.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"That must have been the only thing that let us survive," Caitlin whispers back. There's no real *need* to whisper, but for some reason, the gravitas of the moment and their silent passage through the turbulent power coruscating around them seems to prompt it. They are sailing through the cresting, crashing waves of the universe in nothing but a single-sail dinghy, and with nothing so much as a rocking of the waves to accompany them. It's like a paddleboat on the face of the sun; impossible, and yet...

"I don't have any astrogation data. Or charts. I'm..." She shrugs helplessly and gestures at the Compass. "It's sending us somewhere. I just hope the somewhere is from where we entered. Best case we get ejected into realspace near a primary star in a settled system. We only have sublight engines."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
It's certain that Vorpal has seen a lot of things he will never forget on this trip. Hyperspace, with all of its strangeness, with the notion that that's where they /are/, is certainly up there with them. Normally, he might have stared on, hypnotized by the strangeness, but suddenly he is slammed by something he didn't expect: the feeling of /Garfield./

Everything he's been keeping at bay breaks through when he experiences the bizarre sensation of someone else's emotions- knowing that they are, and everything it reminds him of. Gar. Mother. Home. Earth. Concepts he'd been able to keep at bay in the form of intellectual abstractions worthy of gaining him a position in the hallowed hall of that planet of sophists. It's how he coped.

But now the emotions were flodding in, and out, and suddenly there are tears in his eyes and he has to look down to wipe them.

That's when he notices what has happened to Donna's cape.

"A-- a chart, a map! Donna your cape, Endovar's. Is a map!" he cries out, still sounding like someone holding back a good cry session. He adds "I-- It's Gar. Donna he's near, I can sense him. Don't ask me how, but I do- he's close! We've got to do..."

Victor Stone has posed:
As Vorpal's un-light makes the visible spectrum tolerable again, Vic abruptly realizes just how far into Caitlin's personal space he has blindly intruded to help her with the controls. "Oh! Um," he stammers quietly, shifting to the side so that not only will his peeking head and his reaching arm be over the same shoulder, but she'll actually have enough room to move without bumping into his lumbering frame.

Speaking of which, as they leave the blinding void, he moves past his awkwardness to spin up the guidance and balance systems that have been malfunctioning the entire time they were in the space-bent pocket universe. If he's guessed right about what was causing the problem, they should work again now, finally making his body his again. Even hyperspace at least curves in a predictable way.

Caitlin's comment about their engines brings him to a thought of perhaps more immediate concern. "Do we even have the capability to /leave/ hyperspace in this ship?" he asks. "I'm not exactly an FTL expert, but theoretically you'd need the same kind of distortion to exit that you would to inject." He glances down at the compass, then ventures hopefully, "I guess the 'most normal' space might include some kind of naturally occurring gateway...?"

Vorpal's sudden relief is palpable, but he can't personally share it until they're on slightly more stable ground. Spacetime fabric. Whatever.

Donna Troy has posed:
    "I'm not sure that's right," Donna replies to the discussion between Caitlin and Victor. "I mean that thing points the way to the most real part of space, right? But we're in hyperspace. We need to get out of hyperspace. Wouldn't a wormhole count as the /least/ real area of spacetime, not the most real? If we're looking for a naturally occurring gateway, well that would be an anomaly. So maybe we should go the opposite direction to the way the compass is pointing us?"

    Vorpal's comments draw Donna's attention to her cape, and she pulls a corner of it up to take a look at it. "Huh," she says. "That's weird. Why wasn't did it... why didn't it look like this before?" She unclips the cape and spreads it out over the console in front of her, studying it intently. "The pattern is moving slightly, look. Is it possible it's reacting to our motion through hyperspace? Like a real-time map of the stars around us?" Her eyes rove over the surface, trying to detect any familiar patterns in the spray of stars, and she reaches an arm out to give Vorpal a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "I know Terry. We're almost home, and you miss him. We all feel the same. So close you can taste it, right?"

    She's not getting it. Vorpal KNOWS it's not just that. He 'hears' it again, Gar's words in his mind, telling him "Find this beacon. We'll help you get home. We miss you." The words are clearer this time, but fainter too. Vorpal feels sure they are moving further away from Gar with every moment.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"NO- Donna... in my head. Like when Kian touched me..." he stands up, suddenly, gripping the seat in front of him. "Beacon. It's a beacon! 'Find this beacon. We'll help you get home. We miss you'..." his eyes are wide and not altogether focused, like someone listening to something beyond hearing. A pause.

"It's growing dim. Victor, we're moving away from it!"

He stumbles to the console to look at the map which, indeed, seems to be updating in real time. "Go- go back... this way." He jabs a finger at the map, trying to make sense of direction. "We're moving away from them! They're..:"

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"Note to self, when I get home, I am starting a doctorate in astrophysics," Caitlin mutters, fervently. She gives Vic's arm a reassuring pat when he shifts around. It's a little too urgent a situation to worry about everyone being crammed too close in the tin shell around them.

She's following directions as best she can, gawking only momentarily at Donna's cloak before turning the ship around to confirm Vorpal's instructions. "Holy smokes, I wish I'd paid more attention to Dr. Richards," she frets. "Okay. Normally we're looking for... primary sequence blue stars, high-mass objects we can guide off of. But nothing on the cloak lines up with what we've got."

She looks to Vorpal; the distress on his face, the intense emotion, speaks to her heart. Terry's pulled some creative loopholes out of his rear several times this trip. For once, Caitlin's leap of faith is in Terry rather than in science.

"We've gotta be in some kind of ... passage or wormhole," she surmises. "We don't even have the *shields* for hyperspace. So, passages go more than way, and there's an entrance and an exit, so..."

She wheels the ship around heads in the direction indicated.

"Hey, what is--" Caitlin squints. "Holy smokes, I think that's one of the missiles from our T-jet!" she declares, and points emphatically at the monitors. "See it? It's right at the edge of the slip into realspace. But--" she looks at the sensors, makes some adjustments. "Vic, I need you modulating the shields," she tells him. "I can't do it fast enough. You've got to match the waveform harmonics while we transition. Otherwise it'll..." She goes a little pale. "Well, the alternative isn't good."

"Can you do it?"

Victor Stone has posed:
Vic slides sideways into the seat at the engineering console; he doesn't have to move nearly as far here as he would have on the dreadnought. "I can try," he says. His hands splay out, then extend even further as his mechanical joints telescope and bend oddly so that he can have all of the relevant controls literally at his fingertips.

Under his breath, he adds: "Man, I hope my spatial sensors really are working again." If not, at least they won't have time to give him awkward, accusing stares. The readouts in front of him give a live feed of the harmonic feedback on the shields' surface, to which he simply has to react very, very quickly. Back at a normal conversational volume, he says, "Time to find out if all of those years playing Smash Brothers really did teach me anything."

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
"This from the guy who keeps trying to make Jigglypuff work," Caitlin mutters under her breath.

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna activates the shuttle's docking clamps and hooks the beacon on to the outside of the shuttle as Caitlin steers it towards the mouth of the loose wormhole. The psychic refrain echoes in Vorpal's head, repeating every few minutes that same message. We will help you get home. We miss you.

    The shuttle slips into the torrent of folded hyperspace and hurtles chaotically through the squeezed tube of space-time. Alarms blare as the little spacecraft, never designed for hyperspace transit, is battered on its way through. Vic works tirelessly to remodulate the shields with every lurch and jolt of the white-water ride through the rapids of hyperspace, attempted to optimise the energy flow to concentrate the shields at the points most needed on that chaotic, tumbling journey.

    It should be an impossible task to get the balance just right, to keep the harmonics sufficiently in sequence and yet, just, Victor manages it. Jigglypuff evolved into Wigglytuff that day.

    There is a sudden brightening of the fabric of hyperspace, a pinching, a momentary sensation that feels like every molecule of the Titan's bodies suddenly got a lot further apart, and a rapid crescendo of electrical crackling across the hull that is almost deafening to the Titans inside, and then... silence.

    The red-gray fires of hyperspace give way to a blue glow as Hawking radiation drains the plasmatic radiance of the manifold around the mouth of the wormhole exit, and then the shuttle is adrift in the calm blackness of space. All around the shuttle is a brilliance of stars dotting the sky, a sight the Titans haven't seen for weeks. This may not be Earth, but it suddenly feels like home. The silence on the shuttle's bridge is interrupted by a loud, whooping "YES!" from Donna.

    The damage alert sirens have long gone out, leaving many warning lights flashing on the shuttle's consoles, but after a few moments another siren starts up: collision alert! As Caitlin struggles to get the shuttle's spin under control after that violent exit from the wormhole, another ship is visible in the darkness ahead, a ship rather larger than the shuttle but quite a bit smaller than the dreadnought, unfamiliar in configuration and brightly colored, drifting through the stars and right in the shuttle's path.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Wiping his tears away, Vorpal woop-woops, a fist in the air, "FUCK YES! WE'RE GOING HOME! WE'RE GOING-"

The Cheshire cat's celebration is cut short as the alert rings and the bright ship looms into view. "-TO CRASH WE'RE GOING TO CRASH! Do something!"

He slams his fist into the wall of the shuttle, the bright purple flare of Chaos Magic flowing from him and into the shuttle, "Don't let us crash goddamnit!"

He was not sure if that would have any effect at all. But something is better than nothing, especially since he didn't want to die here of all places, having gotten so close.

Victor Stone has posed:
Vic is too exhausted from concentration to whoop or celebrate beyond an exhausted puff of exhaled air and flopping back into his seat. Then alarms start blaring and he's right back on his adrenaline rush, weirdly extended hands clattering over the controls as he tries to figure out if this thing has a structural integrity field he can route more power to. "Brace brace brace!" he says. That seems to be the sort of thing you're supposed to say under these circumstances.

Caitlin Fairchild has posed:
Caitlin's cheering with the others without realizing it. She almost doesn't hear the collision alert siren. In fairness, every sensor, alarm, and readout on the shuttle is ringing an alert.

"...Crabapples! Obstacle dead ahead!" Caitlin shouts with alarm. Fingers fly over the controls. "Engines are offline! Shields ... offline! We're closing fast! BRACE!" she shouts, echoing Vic's command.

Caitlin grips the conn and hammers at the controls, desperate to try and get *something* working-- and for her efforts, all she produces is a brief sputtering thrust of exhaust from the thrusters. They produce just a few degrees of pitch, barely anything at all... but it's just enough to turn a headon collision into an impact skipping off the side of the /Milano/.

The shuttle's beat all to hell already, but the impact certainly doesn't do the /Milano's/ hull any favors.

Rocket has posed:
The ship in question is not so much drifting, but lancing through the depths of space at a high rate of speed without reaching jump-related levels.

Why? Because there is another in hot pursuit! There must be a reason.

With the Milano, with the crew on board, there is /always/ a reason.

Rocket sits in the driver's seat, so to speak, his little hands wrapped around the nav controls. The ship has a very bird-like appearance to it, with a large bubble-like set of windows at the bow, providing a free and clear view ahead and to the sides.

Rocket is laughing, for now.

"Hahaha! You losers think you're gonna catch us, but I'm just toyin' with you, lettin' you think you got a shot!" It doesn't stop a blast of a laser from glancing off an invisible shield along the underside of the ship, the impact area only briefly flashing. It causes Rocket's expression of amusement to twist into something more annoyed. "Yeah yeah, make off with a little prize and everyone wants a WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!"

Rocket is no longer laughing, as the pirate ship is briefly relegated to the second most important thing on his mind. Evasive maneuvers! Smaller ship in the way! The Milano might be able to just plow right through it, but that could get messy for someone.

He veers the sticks to the left, causing the ship to narrowly pass by..no, there is an audible sound of scraping metal. The shields appear to mainly be for energy-related attacks or missiles, and it causes Rocket to grimace while at the same time he slams a hand down on the comms to send out a localized broadcast any monitoring ships could pick up:

"What the hell is wrong with..whoever you are? All the room in space - that's why it's /called/ 'space' - and you idiots just decide to cruise along in /my/ lane? Is this your first fucking time flying or something??"