“Group Six here, please respond.”
Galyn grunted as he picked up the receiver, listening in to this communication. “Thantir Two here, what is the problem?”
The voice on the other end, a weirdly mechanical voice, immediately perked up. “Oh, hello Galyn! How are you doing?”
“Kal, I thought you had headed off on your own path.”
Strange chittering could be heard in the background before the mechanical voice returned. “We were planning on it, but we got sidetracked. Plus, there’s these massive vacuum storms right now. Seems like someone blew up another nearby universe…” The voice trailed off and the chittering picked up again. “I’m about to tell them, Koh! What do you mean… Oh, I see…”
Galyn grunted some more, leaning forward in his seat and gazing out the window, waiting for the beings on the other end of the line to stop arguing.
“Are you OK, Kal?”
More chittering. After a moment, a new voice spoke.
“Sorry, Tah here. Leh got a tad over-excited for a moment. We actually didn’t know you specifically were stuck in this vacuum storm as well!”
“What do you mean by that?” Galyn sneered.
“Oh, nothing… It’s just that we picked up a distress signal from the Kiniseon One, a Life Goddess ship that’s too far away for us to reach but close enough for you to, uh… evaluate. We know your ship has denizens that are connected to the owner of that ship, so we thought we’d let you know.”
“There was a distress signal and you only just-”
The voices all began chittering again. “We received it literally five minutes ago. Brief and then cut off. We thought it may have been a glitch so we double-checked it, but the Kiniseon One isn’t responding to our hails because we’re, well, not proper Decay Lords… Also Koh thinks it’s a trap.”
Galyn frowned, then tapped a nearby button, which buzzed briefly. Behind Galyn, the door opened up. His fellow Decay Lord Vikalos appeared, as did their resident Time Drake, Kairos. “A trap?”
“Yes. Not sure what sort of trap, but who just sends one distress signal? We thought, maybe a Voidborn attack or something, but Gah suggested maybe it’s a Life Goddess hijacking. Been somewhat common lately, what with all the commotion around here. And the Kiniseon One is a nice, shiny new ship with some nice, shiny new Guardian Divines on it…”
“A hijacking?” Kairos whispered. “We should go and help rig-”
Vikalos grunted, silencing the Time Drake, allowing Galyn to finish the conversation.
“Hmph. Alright, we will look into it. Send us over the coordinates so we can check it out, and we will get back to you as soon as we have more information, and whether we will need backup or not.”
“Will do!”
The line cut out rather abruptly. Immediately afterwards, a stream of data started appearing on a nearby screen. Not just coordinates, but a vast examination of the distress signal too.
“We’re going to help Kinisis, aren’t we?” Kairos hissed.
“Of course we are…” Galyn tutted. “I just want to make sure we know what sort of trap we are wandering into first…”