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Head still spinning as he followed Hiro Hamada through some back alley passages of this big ol’ honkin’ satellite, Mickey Mouse idly wondered: what heckin’ time is it?
The mouse didn’t quite know how to track the passage of time on the ARC. Truth be told, he was still pretty new to the whole idea of being in frickin’ space, period, so trying to figure out how normal planet things worked up here in the great beyond made his noggin go sore. He’d sorta lost track of how long he’d been missing from the Disney realms, between this universe and the last one, and if cosmic, clock-less adventures were his new destiny, well… he truly might never know what freakin’ time it was ever again.
Mickey and his new, blonde companion were led by their teenage guide into a sector of the ARC cordoned off for refugees from the Unmaking, mostly contained in an enormous, derelict hangar that somehow still seemed crowded despite its massive size. At one end, the bay opened into the vast reaches of space. The crowds inside were protected from the unkind elements by a shimmering forcefield, but the barrier was transparent enough that Mickey could see what must’ve been the Crossroads’ sun — or, well, one of its suns. The little mouse supposed he didn’t really know how many there were, or if a galaxy even could have more than one. Wouldn’t that just be insanely bright? Double the sunburns, too. Ouchie.
“The technology they use to protect us from the UV rays is actually really fascinating,” Hiro Hamada piped up, probably having noticed Mickey’s awestruck stare. “It’s sorta like they took all the things that hike up the UV index and amalgamated them into one, big radiation field to amplify and break down the light particles all at once.”
“Amalga-whoosit into an ampli-whatsit?” Mickey looked quizzically up at the boy, many years his junior yet already much taller than him, and much smarter, too. His humble beginnings as a servant mouse in the Musketeers’ tower hadn’t afforded much opportunity to delve into the finer sciences. He’d done his fair share of inventing once he’d gotten into adventuring, but mostly always had Chip and Dale around to parse through the technical mumbo-jumbo.
Hiro chuckled. “They took sunscreen and made it into a laser.”
“Oh,” Mickey blinked, shifting his attention back to the huge window, “neat-o.”
“Yeah,” Hiro crossed his arms, “for all the bullshit going on, Leia’s at least got her ducks in a row when it comes to science, I’ll give her that.”
Mickey’s gaze dropped to the haphazard tent city before him. This must’ve been the ‘bull poop’ the kid was referring to; makeshift domiciles were stuffed so close together they nearly overlapped, and the people in them seemed like they had seen much better days. Mickey wasn’t surprised — he’d yet to lay eyes on a world ravaged by the full might of Darkseid, but from what he’d already learned about those places, it wasn’t pretty. Hiro himself seemed to be in pretty okay shape, but even just in the small quadrant Mickey could make out at the moment, the mouse could spot more than one refugee who could be categorized as malnourished, as well as a few who seemed to be recovering from some pretty nasty injuries. The sight tugged his mouth into a frown.
Just ahead, the lithe form of Samus Aran peered into an empty tent. Mickey let his gaze fall on her, narrowing his eyes and once again trying in vain to place her. She let out a grunt, then turned back toward her two pint-sized companions. “Okay, so,” she started, “you want to give me the lowdown on what exactly is happening, Hamada?”
“Most of the people in here are refugees from Govermorne,” he shrugged. “Some from Cevanti. A few from other places.”
“Gover-what? Who-vanny?” Mickey asked. He’d heard of the two worlds that had gotten the brunt of the Unmaking’s first foray into the Crossroads, but he didn’t understand why the people here had given them such weird, hard-to-say names!
“You two… aren’t from around here,” Hiro observed, and Samus simply nodded.
Hiro wasted no time jumping in, giving Mickey and Samus the lowdown on what exactly a Govermorne was and the shiznit that had gone down on Cevanti. Mickey, normally quite chatty, remained quiet as the young man explained the Unmaking’s impact.
Sure, he’d slain a Parademon on Nos’talgia. But to hear Hiro tell it… one parademon was basically nothing. The mouse king still couldn’t be sure who this Darkseid fella was or what he wanted, but he’d been afraid that the Fallen Arbiter’s influence was far more formidable than what he’d already faced. Now, it seemed, he had confirmation -- this dude had already swallowed up a whole planet, and almost eaten another one.
His heart sank as Hiro’s story drained him, just a tad, of his traditional optimism. He, Blues, and the Sqwid Sqwad had basically almost died at the hands of one single monster, and now even they had gone missing somewhere in this big ol’ space station. How the heck was he supposed to stop Darkseid from, eventually, completely freakin’ wiping out this entire galaxy? And if he succeeded at wiping out this one, what was to stop him from moving on to some other sunspecting realm -- like, maybe, the one Mickey had come from in the first place?
Mickey scowled. It had been a long time since he’d felt like he had any shot at protecting his homeland.
The low hum of activity around them began to die down as Hiro’s story crested to its climax, his own personal encounter with a parademon — and something even bigger — during a huge battle on Cevanti. Mickey was sitting with Samus on a footlocker-turned-couch (Hiro had slapped some cushions on it, and it wasn’t altogether uncomfortable) when the hangar’s fluorescent overhead lights suddenly shut off, blanketing the entire bay in darkness. The glow of the sun still trickled in, but Hiro was right -- the forcefield dampened its effect considerably, giving the whole place the appearance of ‘nighttime.’
“Ah, I didn’t even realize it was so late,” Hiro sighed.
How could you? the mouse joked to himself, bringing a smile to his face even for just a moment.
“I’ll take you guys around tomorrow, if you want,” the teenager smiled. “I’ve gotta send some messages before bed, check up on some friends from Cevanti, see if they’ve found out anything new. You guys have had long days, you should get some rest. You can sleep here in my tent.”
Mickey wondered idly why Hiro would just offer up his living space so freely -- after all, he barely even knew either of them. But, the mouse supposed, when you’d been through a shiitake mushroom patch as bad as Hiro had, anyone who wasn’t the enemy could be considered a friend... yeah, he knew what that felt like.
And it wasn’t like there was much to risk letting an anthropomorphic mouse and an unarmored bounty hunter crash in this lil’ bachelor pad. For all his adventures and the excitement of his stories, Hiro’s life hadn’t been easy, it seemed. His brother dead. His robot best friend probably kaput. From the looks of their surroundings, the boy didn’t really have much to his name besides some spunk and an overwhelming desire to do the right thing. Or, at least, the good thing.
It was slowly becoming clear to Mickey that those weren’t always the same thing.
As they curled up in their own corners of the tent to sleep, Mickey’s gaze lingered on his new lady companion. Samus Aran… Samus Aran… trying to think about why he felt like he knew her was something else that made his noggin hurt, but she felt so familiar.
“You don’t have to stare,” she muttered, opening her eyes and turning toward Mickey.
“Oh,” he replied, embarrassed, “sorry, pal.”
“It’s fine,” she sighed. “I’ve been doing my share of awestruck staring since I got here, so I guess I deserve one back.”
Mickey smiled a gentle smile, and, betraying an exterior that until now had seemed almost steely, so did Samus. For a second, the pair of hunters — each hunting something different, but likeminded in their goals nonetheless — lay there grinning at each other, until finally, Samus went to turn over and try to get some sleep.
Then came the scream.
Instinct sent Mickey flying to the opening of the tent, unsheathing his keyblade and batting the cloth doorway aside before he had time to consider the implications. “Voltar thundasir!” he whispered, lifting his other gloved hand up and releasing a crackling, electric blue thunderbolt down the ‘corridor.’ The path ahead illuminated briefly, he squinted his eyes and watched for any signs of life, but none made themselves known.
“You can shoot lightning from your fingers?” Samus muttered, barrel rolling out of the tent and landing, kneeled, on the ground next to him. She placed her hands flat to the metallic floor of the ARC and hunched her shoulders slightly, making herself almost as small as the mouse king himself.
Mickey peered over. “Do you not have… a weapon?”
Samus scowled. “I’m working on it.”
Suddenly, muffled footfalls reached Mickey’s ears, and he let out a frantic ‘shhhh’ in Samus’ direction. She turned her gaze to where his was planted, and listened. The mouse knew she couldn’t hear what he heard, though — his big ears were much more formidable than any human’s. So without another word, he bounded off down the corridor, trying his best to keep his own sprinting as quiet as possible. He was surprised when he heard the slightly-heavier clacking of the Chozo warrior keeping pace, and even more surprised to turn and see her basically neck and neck with him.
She didn’t stay so for long, though, skidding to a stop at an intersection and training her focus to something just around the bend. Mickey halted his own sprint and spun around on his heel, looking to his would-be companion curiously. She glanced over at him, and met his eyes, but she’d lost the steely focus of a warrior. Instead, even as she remained in a combat stance and ready for any eventuality, horror glazed over her aqua-blue pupils.
She pointed down at the floor, and Mickey walked to her side so he could see what she saw.
Before them lie perhaps one of the most gruesome sights the mouse king had ever laid eyes on — and he’d seen some gross-lookin’ dead folks. The corpse that lay mangled before the pair now, though? Well, Mickey didn’t even really know if it could be called a corpse anymore. Did that moniker still apply if it had been ripped from the nape of its neck to its private parts into, like, seven different pieces?
Arms gushed blood. Legs lie prone far off from each other. An unsewn chest, ribs protruding out like something in the elephant graveyard, lay off to one side. The centerpiece, though? A severed head, rolling to and fro in the middle of the path, as if it had been dropped there not moments before and had yet to settle. Even as it moved, though, Mickey Mouse couldn’t help but notice that its expression was frozen in terror unlike any he’d seen in quite a while.
“Oh my goodness,” he breathed, something catching in his throat.
Samus went to speak, but her voice was cut off by sirens exploding from around every corner. Red-and-blue lights bounced off of several robotic sentries that zoomed out of the woodwork — or metalwork, as it were — and surrounded them. The colorful glow of the ARC’s built-in security droids illuminated the tent city intersection just enough to reveal a speeder bike dropping seemingly from nowhere into view, emblazoned on the side with the acronym ‘ARC-SEC.’
An honestly kinda jacked alien slid off the side, training his scanner on Mickey and Samus and resting his blaster rifle on his shoulder. He looked the freshly arrived pair over, read some read-outs on his scouter-thingy, and sighed a long, deep sigh.
“Don’t know who the hell you are,” he glanced at Samus, and then turned to the pint-sized one. “Mickey Mouse? As in… the Mickey Mouse from Dante’s Abyss?”
“Who’s askin’?” Mickey bucked at the guy.
The ARC-SEC officer scoffed. “Wrong place, wrong time, Mr. Mouse,” he said, lowering his rifle from his shoulder and aiming it at them. “You’re both under arrest for the murder of this refugee. Hands in the air, please.” He sighed again, exasperated, as the hovering droids’ weapons unfolded from the compartments they’d been hidden in, and the squadron of bots aimed for the supposed perps.
Mickey gulped. “Can’t we talk about this, fella?”
The mouse didn’t quite know how to track the passage of time on the ARC. Truth be told, he was still pretty new to the whole idea of being in frickin’ space, period, so trying to figure out how normal planet things worked up here in the great beyond made his noggin go sore. He’d sorta lost track of how long he’d been missing from the Disney realms, between this universe and the last one, and if cosmic, clock-less adventures were his new destiny, well… he truly might never know what freakin’ time it was ever again.
Mickey and his new, blonde companion were led by their teenage guide into a sector of the ARC cordoned off for refugees from the Unmaking, mostly contained in an enormous, derelict hangar that somehow still seemed crowded despite its massive size. At one end, the bay opened into the vast reaches of space. The crowds inside were protected from the unkind elements by a shimmering forcefield, but the barrier was transparent enough that Mickey could see what must’ve been the Crossroads’ sun — or, well, one of its suns. The little mouse supposed he didn’t really know how many there were, or if a galaxy even could have more than one. Wouldn’t that just be insanely bright? Double the sunburns, too. Ouchie.
“The technology they use to protect us from the UV rays is actually really fascinating,” Hiro Hamada piped up, probably having noticed Mickey’s awestruck stare. “It’s sorta like they took all the things that hike up the UV index and amalgamated them into one, big radiation field to amplify and break down the light particles all at once.”
“Amalga-whoosit into an ampli-whatsit?” Mickey looked quizzically up at the boy, many years his junior yet already much taller than him, and much smarter, too. His humble beginnings as a servant mouse in the Musketeers’ tower hadn’t afforded much opportunity to delve into the finer sciences. He’d done his fair share of inventing once he’d gotten into adventuring, but mostly always had Chip and Dale around to parse through the technical mumbo-jumbo.
Hiro chuckled. “They took sunscreen and made it into a laser.”
“Oh,” Mickey blinked, shifting his attention back to the huge window, “neat-o.”
“Yeah,” Hiro crossed his arms, “for all the bullshit going on, Leia’s at least got her ducks in a row when it comes to science, I’ll give her that.”
Mickey’s gaze dropped to the haphazard tent city before him. This must’ve been the ‘bull poop’ the kid was referring to; makeshift domiciles were stuffed so close together they nearly overlapped, and the people in them seemed like they had seen much better days. Mickey wasn’t surprised — he’d yet to lay eyes on a world ravaged by the full might of Darkseid, but from what he’d already learned about those places, it wasn’t pretty. Hiro himself seemed to be in pretty okay shape, but even just in the small quadrant Mickey could make out at the moment, the mouse could spot more than one refugee who could be categorized as malnourished, as well as a few who seemed to be recovering from some pretty nasty injuries. The sight tugged his mouth into a frown.
Just ahead, the lithe form of Samus Aran peered into an empty tent. Mickey let his gaze fall on her, narrowing his eyes and once again trying in vain to place her. She let out a grunt, then turned back toward her two pint-sized companions. “Okay, so,” she started, “you want to give me the lowdown on what exactly is happening, Hamada?”
“Most of the people in here are refugees from Govermorne,” he shrugged. “Some from Cevanti. A few from other places.”
“Gover-what? Who-vanny?” Mickey asked. He’d heard of the two worlds that had gotten the brunt of the Unmaking’s first foray into the Crossroads, but he didn’t understand why the people here had given them such weird, hard-to-say names!
“You two… aren’t from around here,” Hiro observed, and Samus simply nodded.
Hiro wasted no time jumping in, giving Mickey and Samus the lowdown on what exactly a Govermorne was and the shiznit that had gone down on Cevanti. Mickey, normally quite chatty, remained quiet as the young man explained the Unmaking’s impact.
Sure, he’d slain a Parademon on Nos’talgia. But to hear Hiro tell it… one parademon was basically nothing. The mouse king still couldn’t be sure who this Darkseid fella was or what he wanted, but he’d been afraid that the Fallen Arbiter’s influence was far more formidable than what he’d already faced. Now, it seemed, he had confirmation -- this dude had already swallowed up a whole planet, and almost eaten another one.
His heart sank as Hiro’s story drained him, just a tad, of his traditional optimism. He, Blues, and the Sqwid Sqwad had basically almost died at the hands of one single monster, and now even they had gone missing somewhere in this big ol’ space station. How the heck was he supposed to stop Darkseid from, eventually, completely freakin’ wiping out this entire galaxy? And if he succeeded at wiping out this one, what was to stop him from moving on to some other sunspecting realm -- like, maybe, the one Mickey had come from in the first place?
Mickey scowled. It had been a long time since he’d felt like he had any shot at protecting his homeland.
The low hum of activity around them began to die down as Hiro’s story crested to its climax, his own personal encounter with a parademon — and something even bigger — during a huge battle on Cevanti. Mickey was sitting with Samus on a footlocker-turned-couch (Hiro had slapped some cushions on it, and it wasn’t altogether uncomfortable) when the hangar’s fluorescent overhead lights suddenly shut off, blanketing the entire bay in darkness. The glow of the sun still trickled in, but Hiro was right -- the forcefield dampened its effect considerably, giving the whole place the appearance of ‘nighttime.’
“Ah, I didn’t even realize it was so late,” Hiro sighed.
How could you? the mouse joked to himself, bringing a smile to his face even for just a moment.
“I’ll take you guys around tomorrow, if you want,” the teenager smiled. “I’ve gotta send some messages before bed, check up on some friends from Cevanti, see if they’ve found out anything new. You guys have had long days, you should get some rest. You can sleep here in my tent.”
Mickey wondered idly why Hiro would just offer up his living space so freely -- after all, he barely even knew either of them. But, the mouse supposed, when you’d been through a shiitake mushroom patch as bad as Hiro had, anyone who wasn’t the enemy could be considered a friend... yeah, he knew what that felt like.
And it wasn’t like there was much to risk letting an anthropomorphic mouse and an unarmored bounty hunter crash in this lil’ bachelor pad. For all his adventures and the excitement of his stories, Hiro’s life hadn’t been easy, it seemed. His brother dead. His robot best friend probably kaput. From the looks of their surroundings, the boy didn’t really have much to his name besides some spunk and an overwhelming desire to do the right thing. Or, at least, the good thing.
It was slowly becoming clear to Mickey that those weren’t always the same thing.
As they curled up in their own corners of the tent to sleep, Mickey’s gaze lingered on his new lady companion. Samus Aran… Samus Aran… trying to think about why he felt like he knew her was something else that made his noggin hurt, but she felt so familiar.
“You don’t have to stare,” she muttered, opening her eyes and turning toward Mickey.
“Oh,” he replied, embarrassed, “sorry, pal.”
“It’s fine,” she sighed. “I’ve been doing my share of awestruck staring since I got here, so I guess I deserve one back.”
Mickey smiled a gentle smile, and, betraying an exterior that until now had seemed almost steely, so did Samus. For a second, the pair of hunters — each hunting something different, but likeminded in their goals nonetheless — lay there grinning at each other, until finally, Samus went to turn over and try to get some sleep.
Then came the scream.
Instinct sent Mickey flying to the opening of the tent, unsheathing his keyblade and batting the cloth doorway aside before he had time to consider the implications. “Voltar thundasir!” he whispered, lifting his other gloved hand up and releasing a crackling, electric blue thunderbolt down the ‘corridor.’ The path ahead illuminated briefly, he squinted his eyes and watched for any signs of life, but none made themselves known.
“You can shoot lightning from your fingers?” Samus muttered, barrel rolling out of the tent and landing, kneeled, on the ground next to him. She placed her hands flat to the metallic floor of the ARC and hunched her shoulders slightly, making herself almost as small as the mouse king himself.
Mickey peered over. “Do you not have… a weapon?”
Samus scowled. “I’m working on it.”
Suddenly, muffled footfalls reached Mickey’s ears, and he let out a frantic ‘shhhh’ in Samus’ direction. She turned her gaze to where his was planted, and listened. The mouse knew she couldn’t hear what he heard, though — his big ears were much more formidable than any human’s. So without another word, he bounded off down the corridor, trying his best to keep his own sprinting as quiet as possible. He was surprised when he heard the slightly-heavier clacking of the Chozo warrior keeping pace, and even more surprised to turn and see her basically neck and neck with him.
She didn’t stay so for long, though, skidding to a stop at an intersection and training her focus to something just around the bend. Mickey halted his own sprint and spun around on his heel, looking to his would-be companion curiously. She glanced over at him, and met his eyes, but she’d lost the steely focus of a warrior. Instead, even as she remained in a combat stance and ready for any eventuality, horror glazed over her aqua-blue pupils.
She pointed down at the floor, and Mickey walked to her side so he could see what she saw.
Before them lie perhaps one of the most gruesome sights the mouse king had ever laid eyes on — and he’d seen some gross-lookin’ dead folks. The corpse that lay mangled before the pair now, though? Well, Mickey didn’t even really know if it could be called a corpse anymore. Did that moniker still apply if it had been ripped from the nape of its neck to its private parts into, like, seven different pieces?
Arms gushed blood. Legs lie prone far off from each other. An unsewn chest, ribs protruding out like something in the elephant graveyard, lay off to one side. The centerpiece, though? A severed head, rolling to and fro in the middle of the path, as if it had been dropped there not moments before and had yet to settle. Even as it moved, though, Mickey Mouse couldn’t help but notice that its expression was frozen in terror unlike any he’d seen in quite a while.
“Oh my goodness,” he breathed, something catching in his throat.
Samus went to speak, but her voice was cut off by sirens exploding from around every corner. Red-and-blue lights bounced off of several robotic sentries that zoomed out of the woodwork — or metalwork, as it were — and surrounded them. The colorful glow of the ARC’s built-in security droids illuminated the tent city intersection just enough to reveal a speeder bike dropping seemingly from nowhere into view, emblazoned on the side with the acronym ‘ARC-SEC.’
An honestly kinda jacked alien slid off the side, training his scanner on Mickey and Samus and resting his blaster rifle on his shoulder. He looked the freshly arrived pair over, read some read-outs on his scouter-thingy, and sighed a long, deep sigh.
“Don’t know who the hell you are,” he glanced at Samus, and then turned to the pint-sized one. “Mickey Mouse? As in… the Mickey Mouse from Dante’s Abyss?”
“Who’s askin’?” Mickey bucked at the guy.
The ARC-SEC officer scoffed. “Wrong place, wrong time, Mr. Mouse,” he said, lowering his rifle from his shoulder and aiming it at them. “You’re both under arrest for the murder of this refugee. Hands in the air, please.” He sighed again, exasperated, as the hovering droids’ weapons unfolded from the compartments they’d been hidden in, and the squadron of bots aimed for the supposed perps.
Mickey gulped. “Can’t we talk about this, fella?”
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