“What do you mean, we have to stop here?” Kinisis screeched as she stomped into the main deck. “We can go anywhere and do anything, why the hell are we stopped here?”
Normally Tahanhos was quite content with his duties. He had a nice, tidy schedule, great co-workers and all the amenities he could ever want. But his boss was, to put it nicely, a bit of a handful at times.
“There’s a vacuum storm out there. We need to wait for it to pass.”
“This ship has anti-vacuum shielding though!” Kinisis continued to screech, the pitch of her voice being too much for some of her more acute-hearing-based Guardians. “Why can’t we go through?”
“Because it’s a super storm and literally every other sensible being around this vast area of space is sensibly avoiding it!” Tahnahos snapped. “We have shielding, yes, but that is a HUGE storm and, for your safety, it is better that we stop here, bunker down and allow it to pass!”
Kinisis crossed her arms angrily. By her side, her two on-duty guards, Phovos and Kayenus, both rolled their eyes and tried to tut as silently as possible.
“Couldn’t you at least pick somewhere a little more… nice-looking? This area is nothing but rocks and darkness.”
“This is the safest spot we could find, Kinisis. We need to anchor ourselves down, because we’re looking at anemos-speeds of, well, really fucking high.”
“How high?”
Tahnahos checked the console. “Low micro-universal light speeds.”
“Can I have a number?”
“About 10,000 omniversal meters per void-second.”
Kinisis finally calmed down. “That… that is pretty bad. But still, why here of all places? There’s a Life Oasis not too far from here that we could have stopped at.”
“It would require us going through the storm.”
“Oh. Damn…” The Life Goddess frowned, then tapped her fingers together. “So we have to bunker down here? There’s literally nowhere else?”
“Yes. Unless you want to be ripped to shreds. But I think we can all agree that being ripped to shreds is kinda bad.”
“Alright…” Kinisis tutted. “I don’t like it, but you’re right. Excuse my anger. Do we have any good news?”
Tahnahos sighed, not really sure what to say. Luckily, a tiny voice next to him perked up.
“We do, actually!” Tahvra beamed. “While we’re stuck here avoiding that vacuum storm, we are gonna see if we can salvage any data from that stray trap transmission Voidborn thing!”
“Oh?” Kinisis’s eyes lit up. “That is interesting! Anything so far?”
“Uh…” Tahvra’s smile faded. “No, not yet. Barely got started on it all… But claws and tails crossed, we might discover something! Or, well, anything…”
“Not a problem!” Kinisis at least seemed satisfied with Tahvra and his honesty. “So we’ll just chill out here for a bit. That’s fine. I do have a… little request though…”
Tahnahos and Tahvra glanced at each other awkwardly.
“Yes, Kinisis?”
“Scan the nearby channels. All frequencies, not just Life Goddess ones. Let’s see if there’s anyone else out there that we can chat with…”
“Will do, boss…” Tahnahos sighed. “Will do…”