Chapter Text
"Come on, quick! We have to stabilize her in the chamber!" a dark brown male mobian hedgehog yelled at his crew mates while being in a rush, just like the rest of the crew aboard the spaceship. The pilot of it, a white furred male mobian hedgehog with bright blue eyes steered the helm either left or right, trying his best to navigate the spaceship through the cosmos and get it to a safety zone of the nearest planet in the range. Which happened to be a blue planet with green spots all over it, similar to their own home planet Green Mobius, but it was visibly different from it. The light hedgehog realized that after he first felt relieved, that he found their home world again. His hopes faded away and his thoughts were violently trembled out of his mind, when the spaceship suddenly quaked within all its foundations and an alarm went off, making the whole crew panic even more.
"We've been hit!" a young purple female hedgehog screamed in horror and the white hedgehog found out, that he couldn't properly steer the ship anymore due to one of the rudders getting severely damaged.
"Damn! Is Scarlet safe?" he got up from the seat and set up an autopilot to navigate the ship towards the foreign planet, which was now their only chance, how they could possibly get some help and where the injured crew mates could recover from the wounds they endured during this one hell of an adventure.
"Yes! She is stabilized, sir," the purple hedgette nodded in response, confirming the fact, that his wife is safely put in the cryo chamber.
"Okay, good. I set up an autopilot, everyone secure everything! We are going to have a very hard landing!" he ordered, since he was their captain. All the crew mates, including the captain, got to motion, securing as many things as they possibly could, so they wouldn't get completely everything destroyed. The crew consisted of 4 males and 3 females in total. All of them were hedgehogs, chosen to be the best candidates for such difficult space travel. They weren't any ordinary Mobians either, as each of them had technical title and thus everyone knew what to do in hard situations, such as the current one.
After all their important things got secured, the crew mates headed to the sleeping room, where many cryo chambers were located.
"How long will it take, until we arrive home?" a yellow furred male hedgehog asked their captain, who paused next to his chamber and sighed in response. The silence of their captain worried everyone present in the room, as they all stopped doing their actions and just stared at their captain in anticipation.
"The thing is... we aren't going to be home for a while," the ivory hedgehog finally confessed while giving his crew an apologetic look.
"What do you mean by that?" a red furred hedgette crossed her arms while chewing a gum.
"We are heading to-"
Another quake of the spaceship cut the captain instantly off and this time it only sped up the process of collapsing, as the ship was uncontrollably tilting on one side due to one of the motors being completely destroyed.
"We're crashing!"
"It's happening too fast!"
"I told you, that they won't give up until we're dead!"
"Hold on tight!"
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"As if that potential... 'immortal' being couldn't have flaws!" retorted a man sporting an excessively big mustache underneath his pointy nose and wearing a round shaped glasses on his eyes hidden behind the opaque glassy circles. Crossing his arms he narrowed his eyes behind the specially made glasses, thus his companion wasn't able to see his expression, only his own reflection.
"Do you doubt my belief, Ivo?" the other, visibly younger, man raised an eyebrow while staring at his own reflection in Ivo's glasses, which irritated him to an extent, for he prefered to see the full faces of the people he is talking to. His messy hair reached down to his shoulders and naturally sported a delicate silver shade of white, quite matching his noticeable pale skin tone and maroon eyes decorated by a pinkish hue around the edges. It does not happen so often, when one would meet an albino human, yet here was the man suffering from such condition. Sitting nonchalantly behind his desk, opposite of Ivo, who was situated on an armchair on the other side of the said desk.
"Why are you so obsessed with finding something so ridiculous?"
"Ridiculous? If you pause for a moment," the albino man stood up from his seat and half-circling the table he slowly walked behind Ivo's armchair while placing his hands on the back of his waist in a confident fashion.
"And actually pay attention to my research," he continued, as he stopped right behind the mustached man and placing his pale hands on Ivo's shoulders he gently patted them with his slim, long fingers for a brief moment.
"Then you would see, that my theories are not so far fetched," he finished his thought, whilst Ivo just sat there and waited for the younger man to be finally done with his antics.
"That does not answer my question," Ivo groaned underneath his mustache while scoffing in response.
"Well, unfortunately, I cannot tell you my reasons for the research I pay so much attention to. But trust me, soon enough I will find something, that will entirely change your view at things," the younger man did not back off so easily, now standing up straight he moved his hand around as if drawing a big rainbow shape above his head while forming almost dreamy expression on his face. Ivo furrowed his eyebrows so deeply, that he had a set of tiny wrinkles now decorating his forehead. He opened his mouth to say something in response, but a sudden knock on the door slightly startled both him and his albino companion, who now returned to sit back behind his desk.
"Come in!"
Upon the cue, the door flew open and a nearly breathless woman entered right after.
"Sir, apologies... for.. the interruption, but.. you might want to see this!" she said in between her breaths while pressing her hand against her chest, as she tried to catch her breath. The way the two men saw it, the scientist had to rush over here. The albino man abruptly rose up from his seat once more and gave Ivo a brief glance.
"You know what to do," he said firmly before following the female scientist through the corridor of the complex they were basically living in. Ivo stood up and rubbing his face upon the frustration, that took over him, he left the office and headed to the sector belonging to him and his precious inventions, which he always had at the first place of his priorities.
"What do we have here?" the albino man asked while narrowing his eyes at a computer screen in front of him. The woman zoomed in, showing him as many details of the scene on the screen as possible.
"Some kind of spaceship named Journey crashed there just a few minutes ago, sir. According to our scanners there are only two sources of life energy," she explained, whilst the man listened to her carefully while thoughtfully rubbing his chin.
"Send out the medics to take care of it," he ordered and the woman immediately left to carry out the task. The man formed a small smirk on his face while staring at the said Journey. Perhaps his journey finally brought some fruits, which he is trying to find for so long.
"Do we have everything we need?" a man in a special protective suit asked his five companions. He was one of the medics, who were now heading out of the complex in their vehicle, which looked simply like a long box on big wheels. One of Ivo's inventions, this vehicle was capable of completely masking the users' thermal trail and happened to be nearly undestroyable.
"Yes, we've got everything," a young, red haired woman with green eyes and multiple freckles on her face, also wearing such protective suit - which resembled of an astronaut suit, replied, as she finished checking their equipment.
"Good, we should be there in a few minutes," the same man responded while driving the vehicle through a rough terrain of an open land they were currently in, heading towards the location, where the crashed spaceship was situated. Thanks to the vehicle being able to move in a high velocity, the group arrived to their destination within 5 minutes.
"Here we go!"
The group members got out of the vehicle and all of them approached the shipwreck in front of them. Splitting up, each member looked for the two survivors, which their sensors could detect via a thermal scan.
"The two signals are coming from the depth of the ship! How are we going to get there?" the red haired woman asked while watching the two pulsing dots on the small screen of her scanner device.
"Let's remove the rubble first, guys!" another male member exclaimed, as he started pushing the ship pieces aside to form a path for them, so they could get to the survivors as fast as possible. Several minutes later they all finally got to the very depth of the shipwreck and there they discovered a terrifying scenery. Multiple furried bodies were covered with blood and motionless they laid scattered all across the room with many broken cryo chambers nearby them.
"Holy Chaos, what exactly happened to them, that they crashed so harshly?" the woman asked in a worried tone, the sympathy audible in her soft voice.
"I don't know, but let's not waste any minute?" the driver man replied in a serious tone while already tending to one of the survivors, who happened to be none other but Scarlet, an ebony female mobian hedgehog with a bright crimson hair tuft growing on her forehead and now resting on the side of her face. She seemed to be unconscious, yet still alive.
"Her pulse is weak, but she is now stabilized. Heather, get her to the car," the driver man tasked the young woman, who nodded in response and focusing on her task she gently carried the poor Mobian to their car, where she secured her on a hospital bed built inside.
Meanwhile, the remaining 5 members looked around for the other survivor, but regardless of how many times they refreshed the scan, it kept leading them towards a spot, where there was something dark sitting firmly on the floor thanks to an unidentifiable material, which kept the object basically 'glued' to it. The medics exchanged a confused expressions, as they looked at each other, everyone having questions written all over their faces.
"So, are we taking it as well?" one of them finally ended the silence, his voice laced by uncertainty.
"Do we have any other choice?" the driver retorted and snapped his fingers in a silent signal for any of them to bring a special case, which could sustain even a foreign forms of life from other worlds, such as this unknown object they just discovered. Moments later, two medics brought the container and opened its metallic lid with two handles attached to it.
"Now careful, the strange material could be an important part of this thing, so we have to be precise while peeling it off the ground," the driver instructed and along with the others he tried his best to carefully remove the object from the floor and secure it inside of the glassy container. It took them a while, but eventually the medics successfully put the object to the container and locked it up in there.
"Okay, we did a good job," one of them said in relieved tone and they exchanged a high five with each other.
"What should we do with these unlucky guys?" another one asked while pointing out the dead bodies laying in the room.
"Dispose of them. There is no way how to help anyone," the driver replied while pulling out a small marble, which looked harmless at the first glance. The others hastily headed back to the vehicle, where they secured the container with the strange object inside, whilst the driver pressed the only button of the marble and throwing it on the ground he quickly ran away from the scene, getting into the vehicle he awakened the engine and drove back to the complex. The marble beeped multiple times before firing a number of lasers, which each aimed at the dead bodies and fully disintegrated them, making it look like there were never any bodies in the first place.