Welcome to Gaia! ::

Aquamarine didn’t care much for the aliens. He didn’t care much for anyone, really, but he had even less to do with the aliens than he did everyone else and generally didn’t care to change that. Maybe they were useful. Maybe they were knowledgeable enough to be of some benefit in circumstances like this. For the most part, Aquamarine avoided them. In three years, he’d had no reason to intrude upon any of them.

He wasn’t exactly pleased to be there now.

Even rested, freshly showered, and fed enough to sustain him for the next several hours, Aquamarine stood by Jet with his customary expression of undisguised disdain—directed at no one in particular right then except for the situation at hand. He let Jet handle the initial intrusion because Jet ranked higher and was more personable by nature. Aquamarine stood at his shoulder, peering at the house with little in the way of curiosity.

“Dramatic delivery,” he muttered to Jet, suppressing an amused smirk. “Very moving. No introduction either. I like that.”

Despite the sour look on his face, Aquamarine was in a notably better mood than the evening before. For now, at least.

There wasn’t much time between knocking and the door opening, but he managed to cast a fond glance over at Aquamarine. He might have been a bit much to handle, and many people would not find him to their liking, but Jet appreciated his candor with him, and his loyalty.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” he nodded politely as he took a step into the foyer of the little house. Although the ceilings seemed tall enough to accommodate rather tall aliens, at least. Jet took a few moments to peer curiously at the tables and everything spread out across them. And then another few moments to glance up at the Commanders were present.

“I’m General King Jet. This is General Aquamarine,” he introduced, but then he wasted no time pulling up the photos on his tablet, setting it down for the others to view.

“We are sharing this information with you because I believe none of you want to see the Earth destroyed,” he said, as much of a warning as a precursor to what they would see. “Queen Laurelite believes Velencian technology and your experience and knowledge of the universe could help protect it.”

The images showed the room -- prison -- or whatever it was. It showed the murals, and while they were looking through the pictures, he pulled out the charred piece of ceiling.

“I was hoping to get this analyzed as well. It broke off from the ceiling. We believe the White Moon may also have information we hope to get from them, so anything we can share with them…” Jet paused to make sure his voice was calm and he wasn’t clenching his teeth too tightly.


They’d been visiting to go over some of the reports they had, and to share their daily activities and any progress they’d made in their research. It had been a relatively good night, despite the strange storms that had taken place and kept them distracted from some work they’d planned on collaborating on.

Aliez certainly hadn’t expected visitors, much less a General King and General. He’d nodded reassuringly to the Commodore when they were given a chance to stay or leave, but immediately turned to stare at Vyn and Andreiya with wide, fearful eyes.

Did they just say the Earth was in danger?

Aliez was hesitant when the two officers entered the house. It felt as though their safe space was being taken away from them, even though he knew the Commodore wouldn’t let anything happen to them.

Cautiously, he approached the tablet, but never closer to the two officers than the Commodore was.

“Commander Aliez,” he greeted quietly in response, curiously looking through the images that had been provided, but not really knowing what to say. He was trying not to let panic settle into his heart, but they were already worried about one planet dying, and now this one?

Andreiya did not like the Negaverse. They were loud, and pushy, and vulgar. He wanted to grant them leniency because they were humans, and young. In Velencian years, they’d have been only children, so maybe they didn’t know better, but it was still difficult to imagine a Velencian child without necessary decorum when addressing The Commodore.

He did not allow himself the chance to look surprised, but that only meant that the emotion warped into an expression of what seemed to be frustrated consternation.

Aliez had introduced himself, and Vyn hadn’t, so Andreiya was at a crossroads for what would have been socially correct. The Negaverse Agents seemed more preoccupied with Lyndin, and Lyndin seemed to prefer it that way, so Andreiya decided it best to keep to himself. He leaned in close with the other two Commanders, eager to absorb whatever information they could now.

He alternated between looking at the strange piece of ceiling and peering at the tablet.

Jet couldn’t help the quiet scoff that escaped when Lydin praised the Queen’s wisdom. Of course she was wise. That wasn’t even something that should be commented on. It was why they were allowing the Vanguard to live instead of eliminating them -- because they still held some value.

Other than that, Jet held his composure, even though he thought the purpose of the murals were obvious. Like conveying emotion and meaning through music, art was a tool to be used as much as it was for entertainment.

Hearing that the Commodore guessed the mural itself was the work of the Moon Kingdom, on the other hand. That was news to him. Unsurprising, but he hadn’t considered it. Probably because the Moon Kingdom was so far removed from anything they’ve had to deal with now. It was a relic of an ancient past that had no use to them. Or so he thought.

“One of the six circles was dark. We tried recharging it with energy pulled from the room and a senshi’s transcended magic,” he frowned, trying not to sound too scathing about the idea of having to find Kerberos to convince him to share his findings.

“It seemed to do something, but some idiot Senshi named Murikabushi decided to harass the giant eye that appeared on the wall before we could get any conclusive answers.”

If he wasn’t already mad about the traitor’s actions, he would have been seriously questioning whether the sabotage was intentional. Or if he was just stupid.

Aliez peered over Vyn’s shoulder as he analyzed the fragment of the ceiling, frowning at the results because he couldn’t quite piece together the meaning behind it. Despite being on Earth for the past few years, he felt he knew very little about the history of Earth and the Moon Kingdom, and what the Moon Kingdom had done in the past.

Except for not helping them in their time of need.

“May I make a copy of those images, please?” he asked the General King, because maybe there could be something figured out by more of the Vanguard than just a handful of them. He waited until Jet’s skeptical look eased and he nodded before waiting for the Commodore to allow him to start downloading what had been shown to them.

“Do you think the place you were taken was the Moon itself?” he asked quietly of the two officers as he withdrew his ComTech from the tablet once he’d obtained the images. “The readings indicate it’s ninety-five percent ‘Moon-Specimen 1045,’ which could indicate the location being the Moon.”

He paused, realizing that didn’t seem right because then they would really be in danger if the serpent from the images was loose and preparing to attack the Earth.

“Or… maybe they used material from the Moon to build this… prison.”

Aliez glanced over at both Vyn and Andreiya to see if they had similar thoughts. He noticed he’d been the only one to offer his name, but that was okay. If the Negaverse had any problems, he would rather they use his name instead of his friends’.

The array of questions and moving pieces did not seem to overburden Lyndin, who was used to managing a number of tasks and projects simultaneously. It was a relief to have the Commanders in attendance, as this allowed him to focus on the conversation while they collected research.

Aquamarine had an array of good questions, and his presentation of the spike and energy seemed to draw most of Lyndin’s attention.

“I do not pretend to know the inner workings of their empire. You may very well be correct. I have access to very few records of the time, and even if I did I, I suspect the Moon Kingdom would have covered their tracks if a story didn’t fit their narrative.” He shrugged, not keen to linger on hypotheticals. Whatever the purpose for keeping it alive, he assumed two key points: “If they chose to keep it alive to further their own purpose, then they were confident they had a means to control it. If they couldn’t kill it then, I can only speculate we’ll not have unlocked the means to do so since their fall. Thirteen hundred years is a long time to innovate, though. Someone may have continued their research, but I can’t imagine where you’d find them. Whatever the case, they have left clues to piece together the process.” He nodded to the murals but drew away from the two agents for long enough to retrieve something from his work station.

He returned with his ComTech, and what looked like an electronic thermometer.

With the ComTech, he scanned the spike, but with the other device, he held it to the energy. A red light started to blink on the side but Lyndin’s expression was unreadable.

“We’ve picked up similar readings to this before,” he said after a moment, nodding to the orb of energy. “Not quite identical, but I’ve seen this register after a supernova. We were able to harvest the energy at the time, I’m sure someone else might have found a way to utilize it. Something like this shouldn’t have been leaking. It’s dangerous if not properly maintained.”

He was still making his mind up about the spike, and the ComTech was still scanning it so he didn’t move.

“I think it’s safe to assume that whatever was being kept there has broken out. I can’t imagine it would have been constructed with leaking energy as a feature.”

He thought of the mural, of six points with six hallways. The only dim circle aligned with the only hallway they knew to be broken.

There was a reaction when it was introduced with the energy.

“Do you know how many of these were recovered?” he nodded to the spike. “And if there was any reaction when you extracted it?”

“No, wait,” Aquamarine said. He put a hand to Jet’s arm like he was trying to hold him back, only Jet didn’t need to be held back at the moment. Aquamarine tapped him once, twice, trying to get his attention, trying to think, to stop the questions because he was thinking. “Wait, wait.”

Space wasn’t his forte. Far from it. He knew the very basics of astronomy, enough to know the planets, their order, their symbols, their general features, enough to know that a supernova was incredibly powerful, but certainly not enough to have any clue how they were supposed to harness one’s energy. He knew nothing of physics, nothing of cosmology or astrology or whatever the ******** else might help them understand the wider universe.

He knew art and music, and through those he knew how to construct a story.

“When we found this,” he said, allowing the purple haired alien who’d introduced himself as Aliez to scan the spike, “it was floating above a pedestal. Weird as ********. Kind of felt like I needed to take it, so I did. The air seemed to hum. Then we heard the roar. The room we were in before with the murals, it was like a storm was building there, but there were barriers protecting the hallways. Those fell. Then the lightning struck again and we were back on Earth.”

Aquamarine frowned, staring at the spike rather than anyone else, suddenly deep in thought.

“There were ten of us there. Five hallways if we assume the sixth was the only one that’d caved in. The lightning seemed to strike us in pairs, so if we each ended up down a different hall… and the rooms corresponded with the circles on the floor, which corresponded with the spikes on the murals…”

His face, often indignant, or sullen, or aggravated, but always lovely despite that, screwed up like the process of getting his thoughts in order took more effort than he liked it to.

“Look at the pictures again,” he said, directing Jet to the tablet. “The building storm. Then the serpent around a world. Then these things were created; when I saw this mural and got the energy from it, there was a crack in the spike. Then the next one—lightning striking them, charging the perimeter. I saw that one too. Then the serpent was trapped in a cage of lightning. It slammed against the barrier until it broke free, probably because one of the ******** spikes was faulty to begin with. But the serpent’s what originally brought the storms, right? At the very beginning. The storm, then the serpent. Then later it was trapped by lightning. Did the ******** Moon Kingdom use that thing’s own storms to trap it?”

Aquamarine glanced up, presenting the last question to Lyndin. “That makes sense from the pictures, right? Or am I just a ******** idiot with an active imagination?”

Vyn joined Aliez in his study of the spike, fastening his wide eyed gaze at the orb on top rather than glancing between the agents and the Commodore. He willed his heart to calm and schooled his expression back to something appropriately neutral. Whether or not the General was “a ******** idiot” (his own words, not Vyn’s!), the fact remained that a powerful serpent that could destroy worlds was likely on its way to Earth at that very moment.

The people of Earth certainly left something to be desired, but the planet itself had endeared itself to Vyn. Having grown up on an artificial world, a living one was more than a novelty to him. It was what he aspired to have for his own people. It meant life, and growth, and safety, and home. The Earth was worth saving, even if it wasn’t theirs, even if the people who claimed it as their own often took it for granted.

Lyndin had been considering Jet’s words when Aquamarine was struck with inspiration. He stood by silently as thoughts filtered from mind to mouth. At no point did he make any effort to interject, though he did glance between the Agents to the Commanders to make sure they weren’t at odds.

“I don’t think that’s a bad assumption,” Lyndin said, but he wasn’t so quick to speak with any certainty. They couldn’t rule anything out yet so it felt like an infinite wall of possibilities.

Though Aquamarine was sharing the picture with Jet, Lyndin could recall them clearly enough as the General spoke of them.

“It would probably be easier to harvest the energy it’s creating than it would be than to locate and travel to a star. Which is not impossible,” he reminded Jet patiently. Lyndin did not like the idea of using starseeds as fuel; aside from the morality of it, they were a far more finite resource than energy they could freely gather.

He exhaled. “I don’t think it would be unwise to gather what energy you can. I’ll ask the Vanguard to do the same. I’ve been running some tests, I have a prototype I might be able to recalibrate. I might be able to synthesize this quality, but.”

Having the energy didn’t mean much if he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to do. Power the prison?

“If the creature can generate its own energy, it would be wasteful not to make use of it. I can only assume that they had guarantees to ensure this would be self-sustaining. Laziness would be unbecoming of an empire with their legacy.”

But he couldn’t be sure. Maybe they did take shortcuts. One of the spikes was damaged so the cage was already of lesser quality than it needed to be. If they’d been more dutiful, maybe Earth wouldn’t be under threat at all.

With six hallways, it was safe to assume six spikes. It matched the mural. One was recovered with certainty but the other five were unknown, and at best it sounded like one was still missing.

Though there were murals to depict the steps, it wasn’t as if there was a detailed instruction to cover how the spikes were made, and he hadn’t been to the Moon to know if there was some well-guarded cache of them.

Would it matter if one was completely gone? Maybe. Probably. Why make more than they needed? If five had been enough, why use the damaged one?

He didn’t answer Jet because the General King wouldn’t have liked to hear it.

Lyndin’s ComTech had finished scanning. The results were listed clearly on his screen and he looked, but did not announce the results.

Though the orb itself appeared to be incredibly clear, durable glass, Aliez’s ComTech would register it as Astricite - a rare mineral found only in dense, energy packed areas of the universe. The Velencians had obtained a small supply of this and utilized it on their artificial homeworld; it was a known, powerful energy conductor. Within the orb, the ComTech identified 156 unique materials, no more than a pinprick in size, but the samples were too small for it to scan without greater computation.