⚡️THUNDERFANG S3 #21

⚡️THUNDERFANG S3 #20: Past Tense

While making himself at home again, again, Ticks let’s everyone know just how things could have been…

GXYZTavon Gatling

Conspiracy Awaits

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Later that same evening, Irēn and Blackstone headed out to gather supplies while the rest of us handled our preflight preparations. The flight plans for our upcoming trip were displayed before me on the monitors, ready for reviewing, and yet, even though I had signed off on the idea, I was dragging my feet. The thought of going back to the precursor vault again made my skin crawl. It’d been a constant thorn in our side recently, making things worse for us each and every time we’d visited it. It was taking every ounce of hope I had to convince myself that maybe—just maybe—we could turn it into a rose with this next visit.

Speaking of thorns: the Scarlet Adler’s radars indicated that the Salvi ships surrounding Saffron hadn’t moved. To get back to the vault, we’d need to go through them again. And once we did, we’d have to worry about bounty hunters trying to make a quick buck. Oh, and the Moriartys, because they always seemed like they were lurking around the most inconvenient corners. We still had Yelena’s cloaking tech and Tick’s looping, but after hearing about all the corrupted timelines, I didn’t want to have to rely on him bailing us out.

I sighed heavily. We had our work cut out of us. 

Movement to my right caught my attention, and I let out a bigger sigh. “You ready to visit everyone’s favorite pre—”

It wasn’t John.

Michael eyed the screen before me, looking over the flight plans. 

“How’s our plan looking? Think this is what we need to do next?”

He didn’t acknowledge my presence. Instead, his eyes simply narrowed, his gaze never leaving the screens before him. Were we going in the right direction? Was this his way of telling me that we needed to rethink things?

I kept calling his name but he didn’t budge, as if he couldn’t hear me, and before I could reach out to him, he disappeared in a blink. What good was seeing my Hivebranded brother if he wasn’t going to actually help us? After what Tick had told us—the voices, and hearing my name—I needed to talk to him. I had so many questions. What had the voices told Michael to do? He was fully Hivebranded; I had to believe they were worse for him than Tick. Had Michael always known that I was part of some grand scheme? Why didn’t he tell me? What was Michael hiding? I called for him again and again and—

“Everything okay in here?” Jane and her green hair filled the entryway of the cockpit, brow raised.

I steadied my breathing. “Yeah. Michael’s just…not being helpful right now.”

“Is it hard, seeing him?” This was unlike Jane—she seemed genuinely concerned. So much so that no amount of Shadow could hide the thought from my face. She simply smirked. “I’m just saying, no one else gets help from Hivebranded as much as you do, and no one else gets to see their loved ones. Anyone else might think you’re haunted or something but…I dunno.”

She paused for a moment, eyes looking back out into the common area where Yelena, Kaisa, and Fletcher were moving about and Lestrade sat in quiet contemplation. Jane’s lips parted, as if ready to say something, but she was held herself back.

Then she huffed and rolled her eyes. “Fuck it. I think you’re lucky. Yeah, I said it. You are. Plain and simple. Don’t give me that face, either. No one else has this kind of luck but you. If anyone else’s loved one went missing decades ago, they’d be crying for years, hoping for just an ounce of something to grab on to and…here you are, your missing brother, planting visions of himself in your head and talking to you.

“You get to travel the stars with your fiancé after years of being apart, having randomly stumbled back into his life. You’re surrounded by people who love you and support you, despite all the fucked up shit going on. The ex-leader of the S.P.D. A bounty hunter. Two career criminals and—what the hell did Yelena do before kidnapping me, anyway?

“Also, a fucking time traveller. Listen to that again: a time traveller. I know you hate the L-word but, sometimes, it just fits.”

The silence was uncomfortable. Not because I hated the word “lucky,” or saying it would somehow summon negativity. But because…all of it was true, every word. Ever since Akim, that word felt like an ill omen. It held all of this negativity that I couldn’t shake, its meaning twisted into some kind of cruel, sarcastic joke. It was my version of a Miss and a Match.

But…it didn’t have to be.

I was the one who made my luck seem like it was a bad thing, when the truth had always been the opposite. I had luckily seen John’s escape pod and was able to save him. I luckily learned the names of the Benevolent, having stolen one of their uniforms moments before. Luckily, John and I helped save Lestrade and learned more about Dr. Hendrix and her plans. My crew—my family—was growing constantly. Hivebranded from all over were doing their best to help me win. The list went on and on.

Bleeding Heart was supposed to be a negative quality, almost an insult, and yet here I was, wearing it like a badge of honor. I didn’t care about what it was supposed to mean, or what definition everyone else had applied to it.

Luck didn’t have to be something negative, either—especially because I was the one who had made it negative to begin with.

“Thank you,” I said with a smile and a nod. “I needed that.”

She returned the gesture and exited the cockpit.

I held my breath as we made our way past the Salvi ships in orbit. Some of them had returned after our previous bit of subterfuge, adding to the building tension on board the Scarlet Adler. We’d been lucky the first time…Yes, lucky.

But would that luck hold up? 

YOU THINK THE WORST OUTCOME IS THEM COMING AFTER YOU?

ISN’T IT MORE TERRIFYING IF THEY DON’T?

WHAT IF THEY WANT YOU TO KEEP DOING WHAT YOU’RE DOING?

SUCH OBEDIENT LITTLE PAWNS…

I gripped my seat, willing the voice to go anywhere but my head. We would be fine. And even if they came after us, we would get away. We were good at that. If they let us pass…well, we’d worry about what that meant another day. Today, we only cared about getting back to that damned precursor vault.

When the Salvi ships were out of sight, I felt the air on the ship return to normal and everyone released their held breaths. Once again, Yelena’s clever decoy had worked, and we could make it to the vault without worrying about Salvi ships chasing us.

As we travelled, we began working on what exactly our plan was. Yelena agreed to lead the repairs on the parts from the automaton with Kaisa and Fletcher’s help. Irēn and Lestrade began searching for suitable places for us to hide out afterward.

“I want to join you guys this time,” Blackstone said as we approached.

“You sure?” John asked.

“I mean, not really. But Lestrade’s not freaking out the closer we get, so presumably whatever was causing our visions before isn’t doing it now. It was probably the automaton we’re here for.”

“There’s Risen inside, though,” Jane said.

Blackstone jabbed the air a few times, smirking with confidence. “I can handle myself. May not be Branded, but I can fight, and I’ve got my weapons.”

Luckily, we didn’t need to avoid a corrosive atmosphere, so a normal suit would fit Blackstone just fine.

“And what do you want me to do?” Tick plopped down in his section of the common area, eyes glued on me. I couldn’t tell if I was envious of his carefreeness, or worried by everything he was currently enduring.

“If you wouldn’t mind, a save point—that’s what you call it, right? This precursor vault has only caused us problems so far. I want to be prepared in case something goes wrong, with a little wiggle room to go another way if need be.”

Tick nodded and rummaged through one of his pockets. He retrieved the old-fashioned pocket watch I’d seen from before. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I glanced at my ring, confident that I had been correct initially: it was made of black iron. 

Tick closed his eyes and said softly, 

“Bound in iron, this memory I burn, 
To retcon one day, I shall return.”

Seconds passed and nothing happened, at least to my knowledge, but Tick seemed pleased with himself. He stowed the pocket watch again, then raised a brow at all of our curious faces. “What?”

“We’re waiting to see if you flip out or something. You know, from coming back in time to this moment,” Jane said bluntly.

“I don’t come back all the time,” Tick said stifling a laugh. “Like I said, sometimes, sometimes it’s worse to come back. But this does normally mean that things don’t completely, completely suck. Maybe. Who knows.”

As the vault came into view, we got changed into our suits. Luckily, we were not assaulted by visions again.

Yet. Getting rid of all of my pessimism would take some time.

We took a small pod over to the precursor vault. I had forgotten that as we previously made our exit, the vault had begun to fall to pieces around us. As we trekked through the pitch-black portion of the vault, our suits doing their best to keep us cool in the sweltering heat, we kept having to reroute ourselves to avoid all the debris littered about. 

"How are we going to get around all of this and haul pieces of that bot?” Blackstone asked.

“I could just…go in and get them,” Jane said matter-of-factly.

“By yourself?” I said, pausing. Everyone did the same, though Jane added crossed arms and eye rolls. “That’s too risky. Besides, the Risen might still be active down there and you’d be all alone. We wouldn’t be able to get to you quickly.”

“Fine. I’ll just take you all with me.”

“Jane, I don’t want you to exhaust yourself and end up stuck, either. I’m not sure what it feels like for you, but I know I have an internal battery and—”

“Blah blah blah. You weren’t complaining back on Saffron. I’ll be fine. Besides, if you don’t let me”—she added air quotes, the light in her helmet illuminating a mischievous smirk—”I’ll just do it anyway. So either I go by myself or I manage to take you all with me.”

“Jane, I—”

She stuck her hand through a large chunk of debris in front of us and began to disappear from view. 

I grunted loudly and grabbed her hand, following behind her. One by one, Jane navigated us through the debris and down to the lower level.

My nerves were shot to hell—Jane didn’t make it easy for me—but we managed to gather all of the pieces of the automaton that we could find and bring them aboard the Scarlet Adler. Jane boasted about having proven herself to everyone in the crew while Yelena began pouring over all the pieces within the workshop. She labeled some pieces as frivolous and gathered the parts that might have some use in a separate pile. We were strictly instructed to not throw anything away yet, though.

“There’s no telling what any of these parts are for,” Yelena said as she sifted through wires. “Just because it seems like a purely cosmetic addition doesn’t mean that it’s so. We have no idea how the people who built this thing thought. It could all be important.”

“Yeah, but,” Fletcher began, picking up a small chunk of metal in the frivolous pile, “you’ve already said some of these things are useless.”

It did seem to fit the description: it looked like a piece of metal that’d been unintentionally turned into shrapnel when the automaton exploded. Aside from melting it down and turning it into something else, I couldn’t see us having much use for that piece.

Yelena sighed and wiped her hands on a nearby rag, then focused her sights on Fletcher. “You are an idiot.”

“Whoa! No, I’m not,” he said, taken aback by her sudden verbal attack. “The hell makes you say that?”

“Because I think you are.”

“Well, for your information, I’m very intelligent. Just because I don’t get why you called something useless but still want to keep it around, doesn’t mean that I’m stupid.”

“Exactly my point. Just because I called you an idiot doesn’t mean that you actually are. Same with this stuff. It’s labeled frivolous just so I can group things together that I think are similar. But I can always come back to them later should I discover my label for them was a misnomer.”

He held up his hands in front of his chest in surrender. “Fine, you got me.” Fletcher turned to leave, stumbling on another frivolous piece of metal on his way out.

I moved to pick it up and place it back in the pile, but stopped, eyeing something small, about the size of a pen, and oddly shaped affixed to what would’ve been inside of the automaton. “Yelena, what’s this?”

She dropped what she was doing and took a closer look…and a smile crept onto her face.

“I think it’s a recovery drive. We can use this to see how it worked! I must have overlooked this earlier!” She yipped and drew me into a deep hug before letting me go just as quickly and ushering Watt to her side. “We need to go over all of this data, ASAP! There’s no telling what’s on here. Think of everything we could learn!”

I nodded with a smirk, my presence suddenly forgotten, and left her to handle the new discovery. I’d taken only a few steps before Yelena called my name, a hint of shock in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s…Um…”

After we gathered everyone in the common area, Yelena took her place in front of us all. Her hands fidgeted with the bottom of her shirt, her eyes avoiding all of us. I had done my best to encourage her; she’d found it, and she should be the one to present it to us.

“Th-there was a ton of data hidden in the automaton,” she began, “and…even a few videos, showing how it worked. Perfectly preserved instructions, but it’s in another language. Luckily Watt can handle some of the translation. But then I kept digging and…Well, this stood out to me, for obvious reasons.”

She pointed to a file hidden amongst a mess of others. It was titled “for_the_detective.” 

How lucky.

Naturally, it elicited a few gasps. She opened it.

“’The voices telling me not to do this only make me want to do it more. This vault was made to contain an infection. It works by containing the host to a singular place, and denying it of its power. Whatever you do, beware. It has already sundered our lands. You cannot let it continue.’”

Yelena’s voice slowed and quieted, her eyes scanning us in the seats before her.

“Is that all it says?” Jane asked. “That doesn’t tell us much of anything.”

Yelena nodded and quickly moved to join us in our seats, eager to no longer be reading aloud in front of us. 

“The voices part concerns me,” Irēn said. “It sounds like the creator was Hivebranded.”

“And they fought back—didn’t realize Hivebranded existed so long, long ago though,” Tick said.

“So, the precursor people—whoever they are—made this vault to contain…Malice? Is that the conclusion we’re coming up with?” Fletcher asked cautiously, as if afraid of what his question might imply.

“So, Malice is super, super old?” Tick cocked his head to the side in confusion.

“It almost seems like it existed even before Old Earth. How did it get all the way there, then?”  Blackstone raised a good point.

Once again, we found ourselves with more questions than answers, and the frustration of it all was growing more and more palpable by the second.

“Why don’t we head to Obon?” Irēn said. “Maybe we can find more information, but at the very least, we won’t be running from Salvi forces.”

We agreed, though I could tell the message was still on everyone’s minds. What did it really mean? Would we need to lure Malice all the way back to the vault and imprison it again? And just how long had Malice been infecting the stars?

And…what happened to all the precursor people?

Next week on ⚡️THUNDERFANG:

Since Season 1, a question should have been asked. But a lot has gone on since then, so it's only natural that Locke has never thought it.

But now... The Correct Query has been asked.

⚡️THUNDERFANG S3 #22: The Correct Query

One of the earliest questions, buried under a mound of conspiracies and bad luck, has finally been asked.

GXYZTavon Gatling