Tabai was relieved beyond belief to be out of the elevator. It would not do to sprawl oneself across the floor, but Tabai briefly flirted with such an idea, owing to the natural stability the floor might provide her in such an hour of need. The elevator shaft had groaned painfully, as if it had been ill, and even more nonreassuring were the continuous raps of space dust against the exterior, which felt more like a loose string than an erect spine in such trying conditions.

As the temperamental ship closed behind her, almost biting her tail off, Tabai was met with a growling "Stay calm," from Alexa, up front.

Before the ship was a slew of small asteroids, all of which dangled in front of the ship, taunting them.

"So we're sustaining damage." Pechi hadn't predicted that. "Should have known it was all superstition and folly."

Alexa leered. "What are you on about?"

Another round of fire sounded from the ship, followed by the successive scattering of debris.

"We're out of fire for the left cannon," warned Dusty.

"We have cannons?" asked Tabai.

Dusty sniffed. "We thought we might have to put up a good aerial game against the seraph, if it came to overt chase. This vehicle is more combat than it is exploratory." He turned back to Alexa. "I can take power from the main core of the outer ship, but that's going to take forever to regenerate, and it risks putting our back-up systems out of commission if we get into another trying situation. Obviously we shouldn't run into that if we keep using the inner ship for exploratory missions, so this could be--"

"What are the chances of us dying now, Dusty?" asked Alexa.

"Counting seraph intervention and what we've established of his principles, low, but I wouldn't rule it out. It's not as if there aren't ships out here in the wreckage. We saw the I-55-I earlier," Dusty said.

"Our kind?" asked Tabai.

"No," Alexa and Dusty said at once.

"I'd vouch for it," Alexa said. "Pull the power."

There was another loud whirring, succeeded by a glow from outside and an almost hissing noise as all the interior monitors lit up. A large red triangle crossed the screen, a warning in another world's language, but the ship was being piloted by Omnians, with Omnian instinct, Omnian drive, and sheer Omnian grit. Alexa waved it away and Dusty moved beside her, dozens of buttons depressing and switches flipping between their parallel telekinetic instincts.

"Get in the pod," barked Alexa.

Tabai obeyed, though she positioned herself so that she could almost still look ahead. Her breath seized violently as she stared out at the calamity happening before her, but it was not dread that had her but a visceral sense of awe and envy.

Before them, a green light razed everything, extending into a cone that shot out far into the void of space and incinerated everything in their path. The ship picked up, throwing Tabai against the wall, and everything went white. Tabai felt her organs straining against her body, trying to fly out the airlock and into space, and then everything stilled.

She took one deep breath, staggering upwards, and Dusty and Alexa, seemingly unharmed, looked back to her. Ahead once again was the darkness of space, free of any planets or asteroids to speak of. "What happened?"

Alexa and Dusty exchanged one of those looks that made Tabai want to personally yank the pair of them into space.

"Are you feeling well?" asked Alexa.

"No thanks to you, but I believe I'll manage," Tabai curtly informed her.

"It wasn't much of a jump. At most, you pulled 2 to 3 Gs. We had the stabilizers up about as high as they could go, which probably also screwed us on the fuel," Dusty said. "Well. If you really must know what the maneuver we just engaged in was, we've managed a large enough blast to clear the debris, then we jumped up the speed to exit," explained Dusty. "You know, Alexa, I think I enjoy having passengers aboard when we do this! It's nice to get some sort of admiration now and again for half the work we're putting in here. I know it looks like we just managed some kind of a miracle." Dusty paused. "That would be because we did."

Alexa looked back at the dashboard with a slight 'tsk' that might have even been amused. "The important part is that we're free, and we'll need to repair the outsides before we lose a critical amount of air into space. Dusty?"

"I have the wielder for the metal, and I should be able to whip around a few extra sheets in space, should we need them," Dusty said. "I'll go grab my materials from the exterior. I know how to activate the 'unretracted' form, so..." Another few miraculous swipes, a tick here, a turn of a key Tabai didn't know had existed the whole time, and suddenly the elevator widened. Dusty bowed himself out, gracefully but also as deliberately as possible, and receded into the darkness.

Alexa smirked. "He'll be back." She removed herself from the cockpit with an almost uncharacteristic slump, sighing as she drew herself back towards the room at large, and brushed past Tabai, closing the green Canis's mouth with her shoulderblade. "No need to be so shocked."

Tabai's jaw remained firmly locked. "I had almost forgotten you-- well, if you'll pardon such a crude expression, the extent of your competence," Tabai admitted. "I feel a little safer knowing I'm in your ward, now."

"We forget that any of you do much of anything all the time. Don't feel so bad about it," said Alexa, in a way that made Tabai feel terrible about it, though not towards herself. "You'd understand, as a Canis, how important it is that we keep things under wraps."

"As a Canis," Tabai said, before freeing herself from Alexa's sinister gravity, "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."

Alexa's throat seemed to rumble with the force of her ensuing 'hrrrm' before she generously continued, "It's our job to keep the ship in order, acting with the utmost competence where more skittish folk could stumble and falter."

"I'm afraid I don't agree with that. The way the cast is arranged, it's set up that we're all on equal step," Tabai said. "Quite diminishing the need for your outdated hierarchies."

"I admire your idealism, Tabai, but you've expressed the point before, and as you were wrong then, I'm afraid you're terribly mistaken now. You can see that the critical roles were passed off to Canii, again--"

"--then why would they make G'ana our captain?"

"Oh, I don't know. Diversity? Because she has an auspicious face? By all means, it looks as if the poor, wonderful little novice with dragon blood might find the magic within her to rise above her own inadequacy and inexperience and become the hero our world needs, but by all other, more concrete, sensible ways of judging her merit, she has no reason to be in the administrative position she was in, save for as a puppet position. Maybe they felt sorry for her, Tabai. Maybe they wanted to get her out of the way. She'd never even left the Auspicia's castle! Whatever they intended, I'm certain that they didn't mean for the greenhorn who may I remind you, was down within days, to be the true mind behind these operations, because that would be truly, utterly preposterous. Dusty and I are the only ones with any kind of seniority and credentials on this ship--"

"Pechi and Cassie are both distinguished," Tabai threw back. "Pechi had worked on dozens of missions on-world, including the flushing out of major crime syndicates across Opphemria. Her knowledge for detail is impeccable. As for Cassie, not only has she attended top-of-the-line schooling, but she's been working directly under the Auspicia for years on timeline finding and on 'personal projects' that ended up economizing the time of her entire cabinet."

"Pechi almost never speaks to us unless she has to, in which case, she s-s-stutters out as little information as she can mange. Cassie was useless the second we hit this dimension, hardly stuck to her own little plans, which should have fallen under G'ana's command, proving her redundancy... if I'm going to be entirely frank, say what you will about Dusty or I, but we're the only ones on here who do anything, and you're free to have the audacity to claim we all have our strengths, but somehow I find ours keep coming into play again, and again, and--"

"You've made your point," Tabai said. In her mind, she was running down the ways to pull the queen of cruelty down from the pedestal. There had to be some way to swat the crown from where it savagely glowed across her head, between those massive horns, but why, oh why did it always have to come back down to force?

Dusty exited with several dozen pieces of scrap, a welder, and a large roll of tape, which he was handling in midair with scarcely any difficulty. He glanced at both of them, and Alexa jolted her head towards the airlock. "Go on, won't you? We don't have all day."

Dusty tilted his head, too, but the gesture was certainly intentioned towards Tabai. "Think you can help me with something, Tabai? It's hard to levitate this on my own."

Tabai nodded. The two of them entered the airlock, which shut behind them. Dusty put some tape around a camera, and looked her dead in the face.

"What, are you about to say something that will get us both killed if she hears it?" asked Tabai, wryly. "If such be the case, speak on. I'd love to see her make an attempt on the group at large, and I'd love for her to recognize the extent of her own mortality for once in her--"

"You made her angry?" asked Dusty.

"What makes you say that?" Tabai asked.

"Her mane rustles up a certain way, and she tilts her head so that it's raised, but she's looking down at you. Old intimidation tactic."

Tabai could not have asked for better information if she tried. "You suppose so?" she asked, innocently.

"Suppose so? I'm her best friend, insofar as the two of us, given our positions, have any. I know so."

"And you're telling me all this why?"
"I asked you a question, first, though a redundant one. I don't think you like me very much, so this is silly, but I'm going to ask you a favor. Try not to anger her anymore. I can already sense that the pair of you are on some precipice, or you're about to be on one, and when you get over it, you're going to find yourselves stuck in another one of the seraph's traps. We can argue anything in the world as soon as we get home, and I might agree with you more than you think. Just don't press it now, because there's someone out there who wants to teach us mortals the error of our foolish ways, and as far as I can tell the lesson ends uniformly with our petrification."

Tabai said, "Whatever you have to tell yourself to justify the wretched silence you keep, cur."

Dusty gave her an Alexa-like leer. "Bet I deserved that. We'll call it a 'yes'. Now, if you don't mind, I'll be saving all of our lives, even in a ship that needs the likes of these poor scaled atrocities as plating--"

"What, do Omnian ships not use plating?" asked Tabai.

Dusty was either thrilled or completely rabid about this question, and it was hard to tell which. "Actually, old Omnian ships used a primeval kind of plating, but the Tabula changed most of that when they enstated their principles. You see, Omnians have several large, mainly organically structured 'joints' in their ships, with magic sealing together the parts... each ship's metal is heavily infused with haemo, resulting in organic fracturing, but the pieces can be made to bend and fold over each other on a macro scale. While this fracturing would be an atrocious quality in any other material, once it is set, Omnian haemo-infused steel and other metals are actually more durable than any other alloy, but more importantly, they heal themselves. They are living, not entirely metal, and so clearly, with the kind of foreign technology used on this expedition, you run into all the difficulties of keeping a body working that has no natural defense systems, or truly, any systems at all, which as you can imagine is disgusting."

"Fascinating," Tabai said. She would have been tuning him out, but she at least admired his ability to prattle like this.

"To summarize, It's not the same beast," Dusty mourned. "We're living inside of a dead body."

"A dead body which you promise you can fix," she said. "With those plates, which you will apply correctly, despite it being against your sacred Omnian technological ethos, or something to that effect."

"And this," Dusty said, levitating the tape. "Don't forget this. As far as I'm concerned, it's the greatest magic there is."

"You can't be serious," muttered Tabai.

"Of course I'm not. The greatest magic there is is magic," Dusty said, the suit coalescing around him. His helmet was fitted to his horns in such a manner that it didn't look overtly ridiculous, but he still looked overstuffed as he turned to the airlock. "If you don't want to be thrown out into the void of space, now would be a good time to leave."

Tabai did not want to be thrown into the void of space. The door back from the airlock opened reluctantly, and only after at least five buttons had been pressed, but nonetheless Tabai stalked back into the main room unharmed. Alexa looked up, her green eyes alight with not envy but some similarly sinister energy, and asked, unturning and unflinching as always (and stars save her for it), "You two have spoken?"

"He just wanted to prattle about plating. He's your problem, still."

Alexa bobbed her head, unturning. The vast expanse of space lounged out before the two of them, and as they sat in the cockpit, they could hear the clunk of paws as Dusty moved about the cavern. With telekinetic grace, he rotated himself about the spaceship, jumping off the window and landing on the outer ring, all the metal following him as if he were afflicted by some magnetic pull. Before he was almost out of sight, Tabai could see his mouth moving. Was he muttering to himself? What was he complaining about, now?
Alexa leered upwards, her face a mask of cool. Its reflection quivered in the windowpane, silhouetted by all of her lights. Tabai imagined how it would feel to narrow her eyes. Tabai thought of all the small ways to defame her that wouldn't catch attention. It would be a few kicks to her authority here, some means of dragging Pechi away from the fold, and slowly, surely, she would drag the group out from under her.

Call her useless then.

Alexa turned, as if waiting for some kind of response from Tabai, who had merely been relaxing in the back.

"Well? What's the plan going forwards, captain?" asked Tabai.

If Alexa had heard the poison in her voice, she gave no indication. "We keep going."

Tabai thought, reflectively, on plans she had made.

Keep going.

It would appear there was nothing else to do.