156: Timaeus and Critias – Three
The remaining four conscious members of the Pelekys were back together on the bridge in no time at all, Pryseia at ease in her throne while Rhea and Malakh casually flanked Nevara at the gunner stations, their chill attitudes hiding the fact that nearly half of their crew had been rendered comatose by whatever remained in the area.
The view screen showed three ships, the harsh geometry of them calling to mind breakwater tetrapods, only built for combat instead of to protect shores against tidal forces. Each one was a violently neon green colour, and as Nevara had said, they were coming in slow and unarmed.
"Let us hear what they have to say." Not dressed in her Kith finery, Pryseia still let Queen Kaizoku's authority ring through her voice.
A moment later and Nevara had connected to the ship contacting them.
The interior of said ship was all harsh, industrial grey metal, dimly lit with bright neon lights scattered across the consoles in the background, glowing in the smoky interior of that other bridge - it looked more like an atmospheric effect for aesthetic purposes than it did some actual mishap that had led to something catastrophic enough for a fire to break out in their own bridge. Whoever these people were, they cultivated a visual vibe like a Kith would.
An assortment of aliens were seated at several of the visible stations, but sitting at centre stage was a zymeth, pale orange in colour and though still rail thin compared to the other races that surrounded them, they were considerably more bulky than was average for their species. From what was visible of them through the view screen, they were wearing a deep brown leather jacket, narrow at the hip and broad at the shoulder, the sleeves shoved up to the elbows, with a fingerless leather glove on their left hand, while their right arm appeared to be a metallic prosthetic, copper and verdigris and softly glowing with teal lights. A thick hood was hanging off their head in a way that seemed styled to make it look like they had hair, the right side of their face a slightly darker orange than the rest of their skin tone, patchy like a burn scar, one that had damaged the right side of their mouth enough that it was pulled partially up and open in a permanent sneer. Their right eye was artificial as well, a copper implant with teal lighting, a sharp contrast to the black expanse of their remaining eye.
Seeing a zymeth in a less than law abiding line of work wasn't that much of an oddity, but the misty eyed relief this particular one was regarding them with was not the look any of them were expecting to be on the receiving end of when the line opened up.
Their voice came through as a psychic projection, and it called to mind one of Pryseia's grandmothers. She'd been a pilot herself, back before her retirement, flying transports on and around Aigyts, the colony her family came from. She'd been a brash and jovial woman before she passed, and had taken an immediate liking to Nevara when Pryseia had first brought her new friend home. "Finally, a granddaughter who appreciates ships!" She'd joked, the memory bubbling up to the forefront of Pryseia's thoughts as the zymeth spoke.
"I can't believe you're actually here," they conveyed, shaking their head in wonder, "I feared this day would never come."
Again, not the sentiment they thought they'd be met with.
"You speak as though we were expected." Pryseia said after a moment, mind reeling at the implications, and the zymeth relaxed in their seat, sighing in relief.
"You were hoped for, but given that it's been so long since we've received anything other than dire omens, many of us had given up on said hope."
"And what, exactly, do you hope that we're here to do?" Rhea asked, all the cool professionalism of a trained doctor.
"Stop the entity that will reemerge from that tear in the fabric of reality you're parked in the middle of," the zymeth said, nodding towards the void outside, "All signs and portents point to the fact that the time of its rebirth is drawing near, so I am very glad that destiny has brought you to its doorstep at long last."
Below the console, out of sight of the camera that was projecting their own bridge to the zymeth's ship, Nevara, Rhea, and Malakh all flashed Pryseia quick hand signals, a Thalatte combat shorthand to silently get orders across, and Pryseia had to suppress a laugh at the fact that the three of them had all given her the same signal - they needed more information.
"Signs and portents," Pryseia drawled, leaning back further in her seat, "You aren't the first person to tell us of such in the recent past. You'll forgive my skepticism on the matter. Fortune telling is more psychology than mysticism, in my experience."
"A demonstration, then," the zymeth said, pulling what appeared to be a pair of balls out of a pocket of their jacket, giving them a brief shake before staring intently at them, "You yourself came perilously close to death recently, a pale spectre tethering you to life while golden light stitched up your wounds. You should have been safe behind the borders of greed, but reptilian grudges know no bounds."
It was only her years of servitude under the Thalatte that kept Pryseia from showing any outward reaction to that.
"I believe an in person discussion is in order." Pryseia said after a moment, and the zymeth nodded, looking like they could cry from relief.
"I shall inform the other two captains who have accompanied me, and we can be on your ship promptly."
Pryseia directed them to the port side cargo access, and then the zymeth ended the call.
"Kith or pirates, do you think?" Rhea asked as she stood from her seat, "They're for sure one of the mystic types that vanished a decade ago."
"We will see soon enough," Pryseia said as she got up herself, "It is my hope that they will be able to provide more answers than our own disastrous scans of this area have. I've grown quite weary of scrambling in the dark."
Without Viatrix to run things, Malakh had to manually link the docks to their two ships, the blast door coming down to reveal the zymeth, alongside the aforementioned two other captains. One was a brawny koleopteran, pale blue flesh beneath a dusty green carapace, the latter of which was covered in halfway healed gouges, visible from the rolled sleeves and open collar of the slate grey jumpsuit she wore, along with heavily armoured boots that came to her knees, and a massive sidearm hanging from the thick belt around her waist. The other was a lean usgaisjan, emerald green skin and black haired, shaved short below the arch of her moss green horns, the rest of it left long enough to hang dramatically over one eye, her dark grey space armour partially obscured by a long overcoat that appeared to be made out of some tan, scaly leather.
"Captains Akav, Spiracle, and T'haye at your service," the zymeth, Akav introduced, "And you'll forgive me, but we have reason to believe that you are missing some of your own."
"We are," Rhea confirmed once Pryseia had introduced them all, her stance going rigid despite herself, "We've got a koleopteran crewmate, and a psychic scanner, and when she tried to get a reading on the area, she was overcome by… whatever it is about this place. When our usgaisjan crewmate tried to help, she was caught up in it too. The both of them are unconscious."
Spiracle and T'haye shared a look at that, before the former said, "The psychic wound on this fringe is like nothing else in the galaxy, not something you want to go poking around with without protection. We learned that the hard way. We should be able to get your crewmates sorted out, but they'll need to be on light duty until their psychic systems have had a chance to recover."
"That is perfectly acceptable," Pryseia said, "The thing set to emerge from this wound, given its ties to the Leviathan, we've been calling it the Omega. From what we can gather, its return isn't going to be immediate, and so the needs of my crew take priority over whatever information you have in regards to this situation. If you can help them now, then we shall be in your debt."
Letting out a humourless laugh, Spiracle told her, "Given the disaster you're all destined to overcome on behalf of all life in the galaxy, it's the rest of us who are already in your debt. Lead the way to your crew, and we'll see what we can do. Get some use out of my doctorate in psyence, for once."
It was a short trip to the medbay, Spiracle checking readings the moment she was close enough. She knew what she was doing, using the equipment with a confidence born of familiarity, though her frown grew more pronounced as she looked further into the readings coming off the unconscious pair.
"You said you have a psychic scanner," Spiracle said after a few minutes, "How exactly does it work?"
"I can show you." Malakh told her, going over to the nearest console to bring up the schematics for it. She and Spiracle fell into complex jargon that the rest of them couldn't follow, and so Pryseia and the others told Akav and T'haye about how the Thalatte found Zaanlaa, and the compulsion to find more like it that it had instilled in them all.
They managed to recount up to how they found V'tala in stasis by the time Spiracle made a noise like she found a breakthrough, startling the rest of them.
"Sorry," she said, both her and Malakh grimacing at how involved they'd gotten in their conversation, "We might have something. How familiar are you all with psychic energy?"
"Not as much as I would like, I'm finding." Rhea admitted.
"Given its rarity on the galactic scene, you shouldn't beat yourself up over it," Spiracle told her with a sympathetic frown, "Simplifying matters as much as I can, the three psychic races are able to utilize a different wavelength of energy than the rest of the galaxy can, just at a different frequency from each other. Sort of like only being able to pick up one channel on an old school radio. But with this empathic booster, it inadvertently opened them up to every single channel, and they're still receiving, so they don't have bandwidth enough for their own thoughts. That's why they're both out of it."
"So if we block them from that signal, would that allow them to… come back online?" Rhea asked, shifting into work mode.
Nodding to that, Spiracle continued, "It definitely should, we'll just have to be careful about it, shut off the channels one at a time so they will naturally be drawn back to themselves. If we just isolate them completely, with their consciousnesses shoved back as far as they are at the moment, it could take a lot longer than a quick nap for them to come back on their own. If at all."
"Our ship is at your disposal, and we will assist in whatever way that we can." Pryseia promised.
"I might actually need your help," Spiracle pointed over at Akav and T'haye, "Having active psychic wavelengths will be useful."
"We're yours to command." T'haye agreed immediately, Akav nodding along beside her.
With Malakh leading Spiracle to the fabricator room, the pair of them got to work.
Akav and T'haye had their three ships, along with a handful of other allied vessels that had been close enough to answer their call in a timely manner, patrol around the border of the void, keeping their sensors up for Leviathan and other ne'er-do-wells that could potentially take advantage of the Pelekys in its vulnerable state. This safety measure was very much appreciated, especially with the memory of the last time the ship and Viatrix had been knocked offline like this so fresh in their minds.
Nevara had used the QECD to get in touch with Adyt, letting her and the crew of the Gorgon know about their current predicament, which eased the worries of those aboard their sister ship, what with Viatrix unresponsive to Adyt's communications, and the Pelekys itself unable to receive long distance calls in its current condition. Despite being neck deep in a mission of their own, Adyt had assured Nevara that they'd drop it in a heartbeat, but the situation wasn't dire enough for that just yet, Nevara had promised her.
And while Malakh and Spiracle had fabricated what they needed to safely pull Elytra and V'tala out of the psychic mire they'd inadvertently gotten themselves into, Akav and T'haye explained who, exactly, they were.
Seated on one of the armchairs in the rec room, T'haye nodded over at Akav as she said, "Some of us were Kith, others like myself just simple space pirates, but there are quite a few of us who had no spacefaring affiliation at all, but instead a more than passing interest in the more mystic arts that the bulk of the galaxy is quick to claim are nothing more than pseudoscience. But despite the fact that so many of us were utilizing so many different forms of divination, we were all being granted the same vision: something dark and monstrous, the force that had destroyed the Hyttan themselves, was set to reemerge into the galaxy."
"This place was where all our disparate visions led," Akav continued, their mechanical arm gesturing out at the unnatural void beyond the ship, "A hole in the galaxy, ancient and painful. Some tried to plum its depths, but the only results anyone was able to get back were anywhere from bad to worse. Some, like your friends, were rendered comatose by the overwhelming force of this wound, while still others were driven mad, some to the point where they took their own lives. Whatever happened here, it left a scar that will never heal, and a tear into some other realm that the Omega will one day return through."
T'haye's expression darkened as she dredged up unpleasant memories. "It was a long time of confusion and chaos, more of us coming in by the day, all of us led by visions of horror. Plumbing the mysteries of this place proved to be too dangerous to do psychically, so we reverted to the methods that had drawn us here in the first place - divination. That was how we learned that the Hyttan had unleashed something that does not belong in our galaxy, and were powerless to stop it on their own, and so they created a weapon strong enough to kill a God."
"Storlayacas." Pryseia breathed, and the two pirate captains nodded, their expressions of relief mirroring one another.
"Like so many of the details of this situation, the information we could safely get out of our divination was fuzzy at best," Akav continued, "We knew the weapon was powerful, that it had been hidden away in parts, and that only those chosen to wield each part would be able to track them down. Nevertheless, we tried to find the pieces of the weapon ourselves, but our every attempt to plumb whatever the source is for our visions resulted in the same answer - they were not for us to find. Whatever force called us here, it was to act as guardians of this threshold, and nothing more."
"Some of us have been here for a decade, doing what we could to uncover the truth of this place, but our efforts have borne little fruit," T'haye told them, "Beyond the fact that this scar on the face of the galaxy exists, that the thing that destroyed the Hyttan will emerge from it, and that the Hyttan built a weapon that would prevent us from suffering the same fate was the bulk of what we'd been able to learn ourselves. With how we seemed to be blocked from finding out more about said weapon, many of us feared that it didn't actually exist. So when your ship appeared in the middle of the void, practically glowing with the energy of the weapon meant to save us all… well, it's been a long time since any of us felt this confident about our chances of survival."
"Glad to provide a little hope where we can," Rhea shot her a smile, "We might be able to provide something a little more concrete, however. The Storlayacas were able to impart visions to us, and it sounds like theirs have more context than what you've been able to get out of fortune telling. We can take you to meet them, have them show you what they showed us."
"Truly?!" Akav almost shouted, snapping out of their casual slouch with a chiropractically worrying speed, "They- they're intelligent!?"
"They are, though communication with them has its challenges," Nevara explained, "The reason that nothing Hyttan can be understood is bec-"
The door to the rec room hissed open, Malakh darting through sideways before it had widened enough to fit her through as she said, "We've got everything set up to get our people back. We're gonna need everyone in the medbay."
"Our conversation will continue after this matter is settled." Pryseia promised as she stood, the others quick to follow suit as they followed Malakh to the opposite side of the ship,
Spiracle was attaching cables to some type of central console when they entered, the device on a cart that had been shoved between Elytra an V'tala's beds. "Alright, I'm simplifying things to save time, but the way it's going to work is like this: these two have basically been shoved out to sea, so we're going to need something to draw them back, and that's going to be the rest of you. Your emotional bonds will act like a lighthouse to shine the light home while the three of us shut down the frequencies that are holding them back."
"What do you need us to do?" Rhea asked.
Gesturing over at what appeared to be a pile of cables, Spiracle explained, "Neural interfaces. If you could get one each on yourselves and our patients, I'd appreciate it. Once the device activates, it's going to drag you all into unconsciousness too, so you'll want to grab a seat beforehand so you're not collapsing later."
It didn't take the crew of the Pelekys long to get themselves sorted, the four of them seated against the wall between the two beds, propping each other all up, neural interfaces in place.
Spiracle had Akav and T'haye hooked up with neural interfaces as well, the three of them seated around the main device on chairs they'd pulled out of Rhea's office.
"When this thing starts up, you're going to be hit with a sense of vertigo," Spiracle explained, "You're going to have to let yourselves fall. I don't imagine it'll take longer than an hour to get all these frequencies shut down, especially with the work being split between the three of us, so it's just going to feel like a quick nap for you lot."
"We're ready to proceed when you are." Pryseia told her with a nod, settled between Nevara and Malakh.
Spiracle nodded in return, saying, "Everyone take a deep breath and relax. Activating the device in three… two… one… Now."
Vertigo hit, just as Spiracle said, and Pryseia forced herself to lean into it, follow the way her vision tunnelled into the darkness of unconsciousness.
Only to be met with blinding, unrelenting white.