Suspended as she was, water surrounding her, it took a while for Milly to collect her thoughts. She was still panicking as to what to do next. She was pretty much trapped there unable to do much except look at the screen. Her body ran with cold sweats, while knowing she was in a predicament.

However, since her immersion, and the realisation that her mind could somehow be read or even manipulated, she had started to become ever so aware of the small leaks of information flowing into her mind. This was particularly apparent when she had stopped to organise herself.

The things she felt; sensations, intuitions, things she shouldn't know being known, all culminating into tiny flickers. It was then she realised fully what the bubble of water was for.

“Mind link? Sensory transference? No, not even biometric synchronization would work like this?” Milly couldn't put her finger on it, but something was distinctly different to any of the systems she knew. Biometric linking to a ship to pilot it, wasn’t new technology, and wasn’t even anything special, but something about what she was feeling now was completely out of place. Although the link was incredibly unstable, it felt in some ways that she’d gained an extra set of arms. It was a fleeting sensation, and one where she would have to concentrate hard to really feel it, but it was there, and it felt really weird.

“It’s like I have another body outside my own?” She could feel the beating of hearts, the flow liquid, a numb pain on the back and left side, a weak dazed feeling that was not her own. All these, as well as the feeling of a wind brushing against her skin, and the tiny packets of intermittent verbose information were making Milly feel a little dizzy. It was like an out of body experience inside her own body, that fluttered in and out like a broken lightbulb.

“You really don’t feel well, do you? Still, this bubble is the pilot's seat, right? So, they feel everything you feel?” Extending her hand out, she attempted like in her training, to move the ship with only her mind. Yet another exceptional ability of Milly’s in her training days, was the fact she was an accomplished pilot, placed 4th in her year. This in the end was mainly due to her ability to adapt to new systems more than anything else, but it was enough to give her an edge over those under her.

Although it was hard to hear inside the ship, a low rumbling sound started to reverberate all around her.

Outside the ship, as if tensing it’s muscles, ripples of energy burst across the surface of the hull; strengthening it in preparation to move. The numerous fairies milling outside rushed back in as fast as their little wings could carry them. Then right at that very moment when the last fairy was safe, a soundless boom shook the surrounding void as the ship’s array of massive thrusters ignited in a vibrant, almost pyramid of white blue flames. Slowly, under its own power, the ship started to move.

“It’s ok, it’s ok… you need to stretch your legs. Come on, it’s ok. Baby steps. Haaa… *sigh* that's it. You can do it... Tetomi.” Straining her mind, every part of her doing its best to keep in step with the thruster’s calibration data, navigation data and sensory input, all the while experiencing everything the ship did; if to a lesser degree. She’d resigned herself to the influx of information. It was hard to grasp, but certain details were becoming more noticeable. The most noticeable, being the ship’s name. It had been secretly imprinted into her before, but now after her realisation, it had come to the foreground.

“Five n.p.x, twelve n.p.x, Thirty-two n.p.x. That’s it, just a little more power.” Calculation after calculation rushed through her mind as she tried to adapt the increase power levels, while keeping everything in sync. By this time, she’d already drifted a considerable distance from the Ventra. Although she had said it was for Tetomi to take a stretch, it was more to do with her learning how to move the ship in the first place.

“Ok, let’s make a turn. Shouldn’t move far from the Ventra, or the nag will eat me out when I get back. Yes, that’s it.”

The ship slowly did a turn while also rotating to level out with the Ventra, as it came up just above and behind it.

“Ok almost the-” It was then a massive shock hit, and the thrusters immediately petered out until they extinguished. All visible signs of energy that were vibrant before, now died down to nothing. The ship drifted unpowered in an awkward direction for a moment before some “power”, the same to what it had demonstrated before kicked in, stopping the ship in place, like a stone monolith. What Milly had discovered while looking through its systems was that this ship had within it a “Gravity anchor”. A powerful device that made one small spot in space super heavy, while shielding it from all inertia causing the surrounding ship frame to stop dead.

“DAMN IT!” Clutching at her helmet like she was trying to hold her head, Milly burst out in frustration, as red holographic warnings floated in numeral amounts all in front of her.

“Ah! No! No, it wasn’t your fault! It's ok! It was my fault; I couldn't think fast enough! But seriously, what was that?!” Milly became aware of a feeling, as if a little animal was inside her sheepishly recoiling from her outburst with a sense of guilt at disappointing her. The ship was obviously sensitive to emotional input, and seemed to have its own emotions, if in a primitive sense.

“Everything was fine but the moment I tried to apply the brakes, the calculations became ridiculous, I couldn't keep up and everything stalled… just why would that even happen? Stopping a ship should be just as easy as starting it? Was it because Ventra was in close proximity? Or what?” Monologuing her concern, Milly typed furiously as if to try and make up for scaring the ship a little.

“Wait… what? Insufficient power?!” Back tracing the problem through the ship’s autonomic response logs, she discovered the issue first occurred within the thruster’s particle density regulators. A system, which Milly could just make out, was designed to control the directional flow of thrust at a per newton level. This system didn’t have enough power to completely do what it was supposed to. A side effect of this was the need to do so many calculations to compensate for this. Another was that by burning the thrusters with any amount of power resulted in overburn, causing minor damage in key areas. Eventually everything came to a head, and the safety system kicked in; stalling the thrusters and shutting everything off, locking it out until it could be repaired.

In short, she messed up, and made things worse, but she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“You should have power. Everything else works, then what is this all about?” As soon as she said it, a power line diagram appeared on the main screen, as the ship schematic moved to a top down look, that showed all the paths power took to all the systems.

“Metabolic power generation is normal, but… oh… I see…” And so, she recognised her mistake, and felt like she should have cupped her face in her hands if her helmet wasn't in the way.

“All three of your main Rift generators are missing… you literally have no main power source left and are just running purely on body functions… You idiot! Why are you trying so hard?!” Although she knew she should have done some sort of check beforehand, but with how everything worked on this ship, she felt she could be forgiven for thinking there was already enough leeway. It was obvious to her that the amount of power used by half of the working devices she’d seen so far was beyond extravagant. To think that all this was purely from the ship's own passive biological generation and not some sort of massive reactor.

“I was at fault for pressing you too hard, but did you have to go so far to try and impress me? Let's fix this shall we? Before you break more than what I did! Silly Tetomi!!” She didn't know why she felt it in herself to rebuke Tetomi as strongly as she did, even though so far, all she’d been getting were feelings. There had been no vocal communication between them, not even a text bubble of direct conversation. Just feelings, and strange indicators of information.

Although she’d never had a pet before, how she felt towards the ship had suddenly blossomed into such a feeling. Despite Tetomi being large enough to dwarf the Ventra by a large margin, with an arsenal of weapons and equipment that would put a command carrier to shame, right now Milly could only feel like this ship was like a small smart puppy.

And just like a silly wolf pup, there was an underlying sense of boastful conceited pride, wanting to show off to the newcomer.

“Now let’s reroute some of this power to the proper places. You can't fix yourself like this if you keep acting so haughty!”

It took Milly thirty minutes to go through most of the systems on the ship that were requesting power. Her aim was to optimise restoring as much power generation first before fixing the other systems. This started from the solar wind absorption and photosynthesis on the ship’s hull. Eventually this then filtered down to other systems like life support, and environmental defence. It was slow going, and frustrating for Milly since, there was so much she didn't understand.

“Ok next is… wait… why is the dimensional transceiver sucking up so much power?! This is almost a third of our total generation ability?!” Her eyes darted all over the information she was getting. It was then, that there was also some strange emotional feedback coming from Tetomi that Milly was having a hard time interpreting.

“Let’s stop that right here… I’m not entirely sure why you need this thing on, but we have far more important things that need that power…” And so, she inputted then instructions into her hand panel. However, as soon as she did, a red window popped up.

“Access denied?! Why? What is that thing doing?” Surprised at first at the systems reaction, Milly began to feel a little irritated, since so far everything within reason had gone to plan. There was no real information put forward by Tetomi as to what it did and with no rationality as to why this wasn’t allowed, she felt a little put out.

A strange feeling of resignation fell on Milly deep within her. She knew it wasn’t her own feelings, but Tetomi’s. At that, all the screens snapped out of existence, and slowly the sphere of water descended back into the bowl, almost reversing its actions completely, forming back to become a tranquil pool of inconspicuous water. Not a single droplet was left on Milly’s suit, but she didn't notice this.

“You… you kicked me out?” Mumbling softly, she was freed yet somehow disappointed. Standing there in the centre of the pool, she was a little uneasy.

“But why? Tetomi, what is this about?” At that moment, a tiny ball of blue light buzzed right in front of her. It then flew up and down rapidly on the spot as if trying to get her attention before buzzing off behind her.

Turning around she followed with her eyes what the fairy was doing. It stopped a little way off, in the direction of the crystal and the upper deck, as if it noticed that Milly was just staring at her. Repeating that same strange up and down movement to Milly, it then continued on.

“You want me to follow?” Milly guessed unsure. Since leaving the sphere, her connection with Tetomi had become almost to what it was before, just a hunch.

She was about to follow, when her automatic response to adjust herself and her gun, seemed a little inconsistent to what it was before.

“Huh?! Where’s my rifle?! Tetomi?! Did you just steal my Rifle?!” All she could find was a suspiciously frayed end to the safety cord it had been attached to. It was then she also realised that her suit had not told her of this. Its overlay had worked all the way through, but never really displayed any useful information, so as if oblivious, Milly had largely ignored it. But now, like she had realised on the way into the bridge, something was afoot.

“Tartarus! System status!” But nothing happened. No response at all. “What on earth is going on?!” It was then she heard a tapping on her helmet visor glass. The little Fairy was there, looking a little pissed, as its little fist tapped on her visor like knocking on a door in a rude manner. It then proceeded to fly to her left forearm and grab it. To Milly’s surprise, the little thing had just enough strength, with a bit of a struggle, to pull her forward.

“Ok, ok I get it! I can walk by myself!” Staggering a little, she tried to pull back, then straighten herself up and walk without coercion.

Although it looked slightly less miffed at Milly, seemingly impatient. Something was going to happen, and it needed her to hurry.

Walking close to the set of desks around the crystal pool, the fairy stopped in mid-air, and then to Milly’s complete surprise, dive bombed the deck console keys.

*Bop* *Bop* *Boop*

Holding the back of its legs up in its arms, the fairy bounced at a determined speed on the keys with its buttocks. Why Tetomi had to do it in such a roundabout way was strange to her, but not as strange as watching the little ball of light use its backside on the keyboard.

“What on earth are you doing?” Looking at the holograph above the console, a countdown timer that gave exactly two minutes, popped up on top of the majority of the information displayed. For what would happen at the end of this countdown, Milly had no idea. The impending sense of crisis she felt as she watched the number tick over for a second was then interrupted, when the little fairy pulled on her arm again.

Everything she had felt so far from being here, could only be described as whirlwind. There was no one particular point when her feelings had been stable, and now with this rush, she once again fell into complete disarray.

The fairy, now with sore cheeks, flew towards the stairs leading to the upper level deck, where the throne resided while rubbing her rear with both hands, a cross look on her face. Milly didn’t question, knowing she wouldn't get an answer, as she followed at a brisk pace behind it.

It didn’t take long for them to arrive at the foot of the throne. The sound of leaves, a vibrant rustling, chimed throughout the surroundings. In front of the throne, two more little lights hovered in place, each holding the side of what Milly could only describe as a large thin ring or bracelet.

“I guess we don’t have much time... I can trust you right?” Milly’s eyes turned stern as she looked to the fairy that lead her. She had no idea what was going on, but as before, if they had wanted her dead, she would be by now.

Without much hesitation she held out her hand. However, the fairies had other plans. As soon as her hand was close enough, they looped the bracelet right through to her forearm. It’s circumference wide enough to pass through her gloved hand without her even feeling it.

Before Milly could even react to this, the fairies let go, and as they did, the bracelet quickly shrank. It stopped only when it hit the reinforced arm guard of her suit.

In shock, she tried to remove it, but it was fixed on hard to her arm, with no signs of budging. It was strange since all it seemed to be was a mat metallic bronze-ish brown ring, with a tiny blue crystal encrusted on one side. The crystal was shaped the same way as the one in the pool; barely five or six millimetres long and looked like a cross section cut long ways and embedded flat with the metal.

Although the bracelet was metallic, it also gave the impression of being organic. Its shape straight but twisting on itself with strange tiny engravings covering it, which seemed to form some sort of special function.

‘Tetomi, what is the meaning of this? You could at least explain!’ Keeping her complaints to herself.

A sense of anticipation steeped within her. Calming her breathing, she knew only seconds were away from something happening.

On her fifth exhale, the world around her started to change. Veins of multicoloured and white light began to shine through the entirety of the massive tree, its leaves turning as transparent as crystal glass. In the crystal pool on the lower deck, the crystal or dimensional transceiver, started to rise up until it was level with where Milly was standing. Once there, it stopped dead in place, but then started to vibrate at an audible level in a metallic tone. It was a sound similar to the ding of a low tone tuning fork but pulsed with rhythmic sine waveform. As it vibrated, a distortion was created in the space around it, giving off an almost static heat wave like effect.

Bewildered at the strangeness of it all, Milly looked all around her, to try and take in what was happening. The little fairies backed away, and then sat themselves down in a row on the edge of the throne seat.

Thinner than a fingernail, beams of rainbow light began to burst out from each of the giant tree’s leaves. Each beam, lasting only a second, struck the water within the upper deck’s channels, causing ripples of light on the water's surface. Again, and again beams hit the water, until eventually the water started to glow, in a pinkish pearlescent light.

All of a sudden once the beams had stopped, Milly again felt a strange weightlessness, as she was lifted from the ground. It then became apparent that she was inside another bubble, but this time it wasn’t one of water. Eventually, new beams of light burst out from the water channels, right towards Milly from all directions, only to be stopped when it hit the surface of what was at first an invisible force around her. As the beams hit, the bubble would tint lightly black, fading away at the edges.

It was now more apparent what the span in which the bubble had encased her was. Under the bubble, water began to accumulate and spin, like the chaos at the base of a tornado, spinning in place as if a strong wind surrounded Milly as she floated there.

The gem on her newly acquired bracelet was also vibrating with a steady strong glow. In an instant, a massive beam of light from the larger dimensional transceiver crystal hit the bubble and as it did, it, with Milly inside it, became a streak of phased out white light.

“Waaaahhh--…...” All this made Milly shout out in shock, but not enough for an actual scream. But before her voice could finish, the sound it made all of a sudden, stopped. Once the light faded, she was nowhere to be seen.

Same as before, once the light had dimmed, the fairies all sat there, only this time, a worried expression hung on their faces.