Clash Champions
Season 2 - Episode 5 - Part 2
We Have Visitors 


Scene: LFS Friendly Face, bridge

Commander Chacolaté pushed aside the opened assortment of Russell Stover candies so that he could see the message on his console that was beeping a notification at him. "Ah. We're getting a signal."

Captain Wrongway nervously bristled in her chair. "On screen."

"Uh... okay." Chacolaté pushed a few buttons. The main viewscreen showed a two-dimensional wavelength graph. "It's just a repeating signal. It looks like a periodic long-range scanner."

"Where is the origin?" the captain asked.

"Mmm." Chacolaté had to chew away the candy he had just put in his mouth before he could answer. "There's a star system not too far from here. About a light year away."

Wary of running into yet another catastrophe, Captain Wrongway asked her crew for their opinions. "Do you think we should investigate it?"


Scene: Mick's base, first floor, lounge

"No!" Siobhan insisted. "Absolutely not! Under no circumstances at all am I to share my sleeping chamber, and my dressing chamber, with a boy!"

Mick grinned slyly. "Eric and Eleanor are sharing the other room."

"They are married!" Siobhan pointed out.

"Look at it this way," Mick suggested. "He's twelve years old, so nothing would happen."

"On the contrary," Abraham spoke dramatically from his seat on the couch, "I have loved... many women."

"You have not!" Mick teased him.

"I am four hundred years old," Abraham reminded Mick. "I've had the time to try a few things."

Mick turned to Siobhan. "Then look at it this way. He's four hundred years old so he's seen everything already."

Abraham attempted to win over Siobhan with a compliment. "I would happily admire the beauty of your youthful skin every morning for the brief time that we will be together."

Siobhan's jaw dropped open with the shock of hearing lewd language from a 400-year-old twelve-year-old. Unsure how to react to it, she reacted to Mick, angrily. "It remains Jill's bed! You had sworn that you would heal her and repair her nanites, or might you no longer remember!?"

Mick's playful smile disappeared. "Oh yeah. We were going to get around to doing that."

Siobhan continued her emphatic disagreement. "And if you insist on having him sleep in Jill's bed, then I shall spend my nights in the Death Box with Jill!" She turned and walked away up the stairs.

Horace entered from the kitchen where he had been eavesdropping. "I will go tell her that you were joking."

"You were right," Mick told Horace, who stopped to listen. "She blew up like the Bonita Island volcano. That was funny, but we do need to fix those nanites. The season's coming up quicker than I thought it would."

Abraham had a question for his two recruiters. "So where am I going to sleep?" They had still not found a place for him, and it was well into the afternoon.

"Uh..." Mick did a quick count in his head and determined that if Jill's bed was reserved for Jill, then there were zero unused beds in the house. "You could sleep on the couch, I guess."

Horace offered his ship as an alternative. "There are several open bunks on the Farseeker. That is where I have been sleeping."


Scene: Outer space, planetary orbit

The LFS Friendly Face established a stable orbit around an unfamiliar Earthlike world.


Scene: LFS Friendly Face, bridge

The ship on the viewscreen was a combat-adapted freighter of a similar design as the abandoned ships that they had seen in the last few dimensions. Someone had named the ship Charlie's Jazz, and it bore the name and logo of the Theris Mining Corporate. Someone had upgraded the ship with a pair of extra missile launchers, heavier armor, stronger shield generators, a second reactor, and adjustable maneuvering thrusters at the ship's corners. Someone had left it here.

Captain Wrongway carefully watched the derelict for any sign of hostile action. "It's not turning towards us... I don't see any space monsters flying out of it. Maybe something is invisible to the human eye?"

"The ship appears to be disabled," Lt. Commander Tupac reported, "and I see nothing else on scanners. Except for the planet."

Wrongway was not conviced that the ship was harmless. "A threat could be cloaked. Raise shields. Go to yellow alert." Tupac raised the shields, while Chacolaté held his Milky Way bar with his mouth to free his hands to issue a yellow alert. The abandoned ship could also have been a distraction. "What's on the planet?"


Scene: Mick's base, first floor, kitchen

Eleanor cradled her baby in her arms. She turned to Siobhan. "Would you like to take care of Lewis for a little while?"

Siobhan happily smiled and nodded.

"Good," Eleanor said, offering the child to Siobhan. "Then you can change his diaper."


Scene: LFS Friendly Face, bridge

Lt. Commander Tupac reported to the captain. "Our sensors detect no sign of intelligent life on the planet." He took a second look at his console. "Wait..." Something had come up just as he had finished saying that. Tupac spent some time quietly observing the results. He wanted to be certain that the result was correct before he announced it to the crew.

"What is it?" asked Captain Wrongway.

Tupac announced his findings with typical Phastian apathy. "It is the product tag for a handheld multiscanner that is standard issue for the League of Interstellar Friendship."

Shock and happiness spread through everyone else on the bridge. Commander Chacolaté dropped his bag of M&Ms which spilled down his console onto the floor.

"Woo!" Lieutenant Cadiz let out a joyful whoop.

"We're almost home!" Ensign Dim said with an eager smile.


Scene: Mick's base, third floor, observation room

The LFS Friendly Face could be seen in the sky through the windows behind Mick, but Horace did not notice.

"It seems that space is becoming a problem," Mick told his financier. "Have you seen Eric and Eleanor try to cram themselves and Lewis into the bedroom? They can hardly walk around the crib."

Horace had not seen this. "I do not often visit the upstairs without an invitation, but I can imagine it." Given the size of the house and the knowledge that the second floor was split into two bedrooms, he could guess how small the rooms were.

"So what I'm thinking is... " Mick sighed. "I'll give 'em my bed. They're married, it's big enough they can share it, and--" he knocked on the table "-- we turn this room into a day care."

"Are we planning to acquire more children?" Horace asked.

"Not unless you've done anything with Jill or Siobhan that I don't know about," Mick answered half-jokingly.

Horace smirked. "Regretably, I have not."

Mick cut short their joking. "Well, don't. We need them in good shape for the tournament." He returned their conversation to its previous subject. "So if you have free beds on your ship, --"

"You are welcome to them," Horace offered.

"So..." Mick was hesitatant to lose his comfortable bed and ameneties, but his plan made good business sense. "I lose my bed, I lose the whole floor, but that frees up two beds for two new fighters that we can have try out for the tournament. One of them'll be Abraham, unless he really wants to sleep on the couch. Or the ship."


Scene: LFS Friendly Face, bridge

Lt. Commander Tupac gave his latest report. "After conducting a sensor sweep of the entire plant, we have identified two locations of interest. The handheld multiscanner is located at the agricultural facility of a small colony that has an industrial facility located sixty two point eight four kilometers north by north west. We detect no more than one hundred and twenty life signs in total, of which several appear to be domesticated animals, and they have only one shuttlecraft for transportation." Overhead views of the sites appeared on the viewscreen, with the cloud cover algorithmically removed.

Lt. Cadiz happily spoke out of turn. "So do we want to visit the farm or the factory first, or hit them both at the same time?"

"Or the abandoned ship?" Commander Chacolaté mumbled through a mouthful of Coffee Crisp.

"I am not finished," Tupac said. "There is a second site of interest. It is over three thousand kilometers away." The viewscreen switched to an overheard view of Mick's base.

"Doesn't that make it a third site?" asked Chacolaté. 

Tupac explained his wording. "I considered the industrial and agricultural facilities to be one site because they are connected by road and are a short distance away from one another." He pointed to 3-d map of the planet on his console. "If you look at them on the globe, they are right on top of each other." Chacolaté leaned over, looked, and nodded, then ate another bite of his candy bar.

Captain Wrongway looked warily at the house on the viewscreen. "The last three times we visited a planet with one house standing by itself like that, it turned out to be owned by some entity that had murdered all of the planet's inhabitants, and sometimes an entire spacefaring civilization."

Ensign Dim happily noted the presence of the industrial and agricultural facilities on the planet. "It looks like they missed a spot this time."

"That's not helping, Ensign Dim."

Tupac described the scene. "It appears to be a form of structure known as a duplex which is equipped with an antigravity-capable spaceship. We detect... six or seven life signs in the smaller of the two substructures, and an underground nuclear reactor providing the structure with power. The larger substructure is... not penetrable by our sensors."

"Really?" Captain Wrongway was surprised to hear that. "I wonder what they're hiding in there."

Chacolaté mumbled through the candy in his mouth. "There's writing on the front of it." He finished chewing and swallowed, and then began to operate his console. "Let's see if we're at a good angle. We can zoom in."

The image on the the viewscreen zoomed in to a closer view in which the the name of Mick's training arena was clearly visible.

	DEATH BOX

"Let's not go there," Captain Wrongway quickly decided.

Liuetenant Cadiz swiveled around in his chair to ask the captain a question. "Can I visit the farm?" He seemed eager to go.

"There is also the abandoned ship," Chacolaté noted. "That is not any League ship that I've ever seen, and we might find something on board to tell us more about who we are dealing with and how they ended up with a League multiscanner."

"Very well." Captain Wrongway made a decision. "Chacolaté, you can lead an away team to the spaceship and see what you can find before we make a house call on whoever lives down on the planet. Tupac, you will prepare an away team to visit the farm and ask for directions back to League space, but you will not depart until Chacolaté's team returns. We are already running short on crew."

Lieutenant Cadiz frowned and turned back to his console.

Wrongway knew that Cadiz had wanted to get off the ship and get some fresh air, like most of the crew, and she let him know that his job was important. "Lieutenant Cadiz will be needed at navigation in case we need to get out of here."


Scene: Mick's base, third floor, observation room 

With the LFS Friendly Face floating far away in the sky behind him, Mick gave Horace his final word on their discussion. "So I guess... I don't want to, but I've decided. I'll live on your ship, and I'll have to lock the door because we're going to have a kid in this room." He stood up to walk toward the door to the command center.

Mick stopped midstride when he saw a transporter beam depositing someone into his house. This someone was an Asian teenager wearing the uniform of the League of Interstellar Friendship. 

"It appears that we have a unscheduled visitor," Horace politely pointed out the obvious. 

Ensign Dim nervously double-tapped the smiley-face League logo on his left breast and attempted to communicate with his ship. "Uh, this is Ensign Dim. I'm alive. There are two people here..."

"You tapped it twice," Mick told him. "That turns it off again."

"Oh." Ensign Dim tapped the smiley face again. "Uh, this is Ensign Dim--"

Mick interrupted him, talking loudly so that he could be heard by whoever was on the other side. "What's the League doing way out here? You're in the wrong dimension."