The inside of the ship was a lot smaller than the outside would have denoted. There was only one hyberpod present on the ship, which was cosied up next to the left wall. The controls and the only window present were located at the front of the ship.

Anue had already taken up a spot to the left of the control panel. They stood perfectly still and watched as Elmadan and the Timechasers came in one after another. If they hadn’t known any better, they would have thought Anue was a statue with how still they were standing.

Elmadan sat beside the hyberpod. He let out a quiet sigh as he slid down onto the floor.

“So, what do you all think?” Anue asked.

“It’s… a ship?” Ralivil replied.

“It’s… great…!” Boson added.

Buzzy Bol had already hovered up to the control panel and had started tapping away at it. He brought up the preinstalled map of the solar system and looked it over for a second.

“…WHERE’S NEPTUNE?!”

Buzzy Bol’s shout alerted everyone else aboard the ship.

Boson frowned. “What do you mean, ‘where’s Neptune?’”

“It’s GONE!” Buzzy Bol exclaimed. “It’s just… not there anymore! Take a look for yourself!”

Boson flew over to Buzzy Bol’s side and looked at the map. He was silent for a moment before saying, “Actually, yo, where is it.”

“EXACTLY!”

Arix and Ralivil came over and looked for themselves. Sure enough, Neptune was nowhere to be found on the map. Instead, there was a small part of the map that was glitching out where Neptune would usually be.

“Maybe this ship is *click* one of those used ones they sell sometimes,” Arix suggested.

“This ship is not second-hand, it is just an older model. Neptune should be there… Unless…” Anue shook their head. “No. It does not matter now. Let us just continue onward to Jupiter.”

“But shouldn’t we see if Neptune is okay?” Buzzy Bol asked.

“No. Time is of the essence.”

Buzzy Bol sighed, then started up the ship. It growled to life, then slowly rose into the air. Buzzy Bol glanced at the Timechasers around him.

“Could you guys… just… move… like, somewhere else, please?” he asked. “I can’t focus with people looking over my shoulder.”

The others understood, then moved away from the control panel and Buzzy Bol. There was quiet thumping noise from the roof as the ship’s growling softened and ascended into the stars. Ralivil could only assume that the thumping was from the ship itself. It couldn’t have been from anything from Saturn; even the Mr. Sickos weren’t stupid enough to jump onto a moving ship…

The trip to Jupiter took a lot longer than Ralivil had thought. Boson knew it would take a while, but simply wasn’t very patient, Arix knew it would take a few hours and had all the patience of the Timechasers, Buzzy Bol and Elmadan couldn’t care about how long it would take and just wanted to rest (Elmadan did. He climbed into the hyberpod he sat down beside after telling Ralivil that), and Anue… seemed anxious. It was hard to tell, with their hood and general mysteriousness, but Ralivil couldn’t shake the feeling that they were worrying.

The ship didn’t have an autopilot feature, so Buzzy Bol was at the control panel for the entire four-and-a-half-hour trip. He had requested Anue to give him a word every once and a while, just to keep himself awake and alert. Anue had done so without hesitation. It did seem to help. Boson had offered to play a card game with Ralivil and Arix, but the cards he had were made for insectoids. As Boson had put it, bummer.

The trip was long and uneventful, and it felt like Buzzy Bol was the bringer of world-saving news when he announced that they had arrived on Jupiter. The other Timechasers wearily cheered.

“You four go down to Jupiter and find the Point of Power there,” Anue told them. “I will stay here and make sure Elmadan is okay when he awakens.”

Ralivil nodded, then exited the ship, the other Timechasers following. Once they were on the green clouds of Jupiter, he looked at the others for a bit longer than comfortable. He then cocked his head and asked, “You’re all following me?”

“You’re the one with the Prophet's Mark. That makes you leader, right?” Boson replied.

Ralivil looked back at the road in front of him as he frowned. Of course he had to be the leader. He continued walking regardless.

After the first couple of steps he took, he could have sworn he heard something from on the ship’s roof. Like something scuttling about. He dismissed it as another one of the Prophet’s Mark’s strange doings.

Jupiter itself… was not what anyone was expecting. Boson knew the names of the things that lived there – and none of them were acting the way they should have. The Airpuffs froze for seconds, sometimes just a couple, sometimes just about for a minute, then suddenly teleported to a nearby spot as though they had been moving the whole time. The Crazed Cacti’s eyes were filled with a strange static that glitched at a near constant rate. It hurt just to look at them. And sometimes, the Cacti would freeze for a few seconds too.

And then Arix wondered aloud, “Is this happening to us too, *whirr* or are we immune to it?”

The Timechasers climbed down the rope that led to Bolos. The town… was empty. At a first glance, it seemed that like Satralia, the townspeople had shut themselves inside their homes.

A shout came from their left. “Look! There’s the rebel the captain was telling us about! *click*”

Another shout followed. “Stop right there!”

Two Starmen, a Blue Starman and a Ghost of Starman, teleported up to them.

“Thought you’d get some Saturnians to protect you, huh?” the Ghost of Starman scowled.

“No, I'm travelling with them. *beep*” Arix explained. "We're trying to save the wor-“

The Blue Starman fired a PK Beam at his feet. Arix barely managed to step out of the way.

“Yeah right! That kinda bull is exactly what the captain said you’d spout! *whirr*” the Blue Starman said.

The Ghost of Starman looked over at the Blue Starman. “Should we take them out?”

“Hell yeah we should!” The Blue Starman raised a fist and shouted, “For Captain Deepsea!”

The Blue Starman shot another PK Beam at Arix, hitting him right in the chest. Boson extended a metallic arm from his UFO, and threw a bomb at the two opposing Starmen. They suffered a fair amount of damage, but still had a lot more beating down to get. Buzzy Bol cast a PSI Shield over Arix, then fired a beam at the Blue Starman. Boson followed up with another bomb. The Blue Starman was finding it hard to stay on their feet now. The Ghost of Starman raised a hand as the sky grew dark. Two bolts of PK Thunder came down from the darkened sky, the first hitting Arix, the second hitting Boson. Ralivil looked at one of his hands, then up at the opposing Starmen.

As he held out a hand and squeezed his eyes shut, Ralivil murmured, “Please don’t be as bad as last time…”

Ralivil felt a pain similar to the one he felt back in front of the protest in the Saturn canyons, but softer. Power surged from the Prophet’s Mark and to his hand. A sharp chill came out, and Ralivil felt the air around him get significantly colder. Icicles formed around the two opposing Starmen, holding them down in place. A burst of raw psychic power erupted from Ralivil’s hand, and soft flash of pink followed light blue lines and geometric shapes served only as the visuals to the attack that bombarded the two Starmen. Once the lightshow was over, Ralivil dared to open his lower eye as the opposing Blue Starman toppled over. A glitchy mess surrounded the Blue Starman, and once it cleared, they were gone.

The Ghost of Starman refused to go down so easily, though. Though they should have been dead by now, they insisted on standing up. They held out their hands for a PK Beam, but some sort of… jolt hit and stopped them. They were then covered by the same glitches the Blue Starman was, then disappeared.

From the top of the rope the Timechasers had climbed down from, a familiar voice asked, “Are you all okay?”

The Timechasers turned and looked up to see who it was. “Anue!!!”

Anue jumped down from the higher cloud and delicately landed in front of the four Timechasers.

“Didn’t you say you were gonna stay in the ship?” Buzzy Bol asked.

“Elmadan is fine. But I sensed a great danger outside, and I left to make sure you were okay,” Anue told them. They looked at Ralivil and told him, “Ralivil… I did not know you held that kind of power.”

Ralivil’s face heated up as he realised that Anue had been watching the fight. His upper eyes glanced away as he replied, “Me neither!”

“So, what kind of power is it, anyway?” Buzzy Bol asked.

“It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever seen before *click*,” Arix added.

“Its name varies from wielder to wielder,” Anue told them, “but it is always fuelled by intense emotion. With different emotion comes different manifestations. There is a certain kind, I’ve heard, that has use outside of battle. I do not know what kind of emotion powers this one, however.”

“Aight, that’s cool and all, buuuuut…” Boson turned to where the two Starmen the Timechasers had been fighting and asked, “What was with those Starmen? That… weird stuff. That was really weird.”

Anue hummed in thought. They took a couple of steps forward. “…Leakage.”

The Timechasers let out a “huh?” in unison as they set their eyes on Anue.

“Leakage,” Anue repeated. They sounded… upset, this time.

“But… there are no water sources around here?” Arix said.

“Not a water leakage, Arix. Leakage… from the RPG-maker.”

There was only one question on the Timechasers’ minds, but Boson was the one to ask it. “Dude, what’s the… the that?”

“The Reality Pathfinder Generator-maker – the RPG-maker – is a powerful machine capable of locating alternate dimensions and points in time and generating pathways to them. I can only assume its misuse has caused it to leak out into our world and corrupt it. The RPG-maker is what is causing the end of time – and our world.”

Silence.

And then, another voice rang out from above them. “And there’s nothing – NOTHING, I SAY – any of you can do to stop it!”

The Timechasers and Anue looked up at who had spoken. An elderly, off white Mook glared at them from the cloud above Bolos.

Arix let out a robotic gasp. “Old Mook from beside the swamp! *beep* …It’s Malik, right?”

The old Mook nodded. “Though names barely matter to me anymore.”

“I thought you were going to stay in your home and… not go near the end times? *click*” Arix asked.

Malik heaved out a sigh. “You’ve… You’ve all gathered… If any chance remains of this world’s saving… It’s ME! I wasn’t going to sit around twiddling my tentacles any longer!”

Arix took a step towards Malik. “Hey. Come on. *whirr* It doesn’t have to be like this. You… can stay with us! We have a ship! You could stay there and help us! …Please.”

Malik squinted at Arix for a few moments. He then climbed down the rope to Bolos, and slithered right up to him. Anue, Buzzy Bol and Boson moved out of Malik’s way as he approached Arix. Malik continued squinting at Arix for a few more moments.

“I already know of your ship. That’s how I got here,” he told him.

Buzzy Bol frowned. “But you weren’t on board-“

“ON THE ROOF!” Malik snapped. He held eye contact with Buzzy Bol for a few moments before returning his attention to Arix. “I refuse to stay aboard that thing any longer than I did.”

He slithered a short distance into Bolos, and away from the group, and cast a glance over his shoulder. “I leave you, the horsemen, to Death themself. You’ve already made your choice.”

Malik then ran away, through Bolos and into the cloud fields between it and Anolin.

“Wait!” Arix called out. He was too late to stop him, though. He looked out in the direction Malik had gone, concern written on his face. “I never asked if he got some sleep…”

“I don’t know about you, Arix, but I’m mostly concerned about that last part he said,” Ralivil said. “Ignoring the fact I don’t know what a horseman is, who’s Death in this situation? And we’ve ‘already made our choice’? What is that supposed to mean?”

Buzzy Bol and Boson hummed in agreement.

“Regardless. Continue forward to Jupiter’s Point of Power. It is in a cave with a complex tunnel system to the south,” Anue told the Timechasers.

“Riiiight…” Buzzy Bol said. “We’ll be on out way, I guess.”

Ralivil cast a worried glance to Anue, then shrugged, and led the other Timechasers on their way.