The Bosun climbed over the fallen stones to find them lying on their backs staring at the sky. “Good job not dying.” The Navigatrix’s dusty face was streaked with tears and she was laughing, or crying, or both; and the Captain looked stunned. She blinked and looked at the Bosun.
“You’re gonna need a rope for me.”
The Navigatrix wiped her face and crawled out of the gap they’d hidden in. “I’ll get one.”
She climbed up beside the Bosun and waved at the Engineer on the ground below.
“How did you do it?”
“Camp stove plasma cannon!”
“My plasma? For my guns?”
“All of it!”
The Bosun laughed at the Navigatrix’s expression. “It was desperate times. You’ll forgive us someday.”
But the Navigatrix had quickly turned deadly serious. She was staring towards the water. The Bosun and the Engineer both looked quickly, and there they were. The Stowaway.
“What do you want, you little shit?” The Bosun could see that they looked much worse for wear.
They were staring at the Navigatrix, and when they had everyone’s attention, they lifted an arm and pointed out into the water.
The Engineer was already stomping their way, pulling her hair back. The Bosun wasn’t going to stop her, but the Navigatrix stepped back in horror, and yelled with an unholy rage, “NO!”
And then she leapt precariously across the huge fallen stones, to land on the ground unsteadily and start running towards the water herself.
The Bosun, the Engineer, the Stowaway all stared as she ran, full tilt, into the water, eyes on something in the middle of the lake. As she got closer she yelled with audible rage;
“Stay the fuck away from my ship!”
And that fucking time wizard reappeared from a glowing point of floating light.
The Captain was shouting for information from deep within the ruins, but the Bosun grunted at her to hold tight, and scrambled her way down to run to the water’s edge.
The time wizard didn’t look quite the same as before; his blue aura was diminished down to a sphere around him that made the water fizz and disappear; and he stood on dry lake bottom, cobblestones just visible at his feet. In his many hands, that weird inverted Orb writhed and throbbed with awful light.
The Navigatrix pushed herself through the water, to her knees, to her waist, deeper still.
He turned and watched her approach, and the Bosun was impressed she kept going, because the expression on his many changing faces was pure murder.
But the Navigatrix was egging him on. “It’s my Orb! You’re not worthy! It won’t listen to you! Don’t you dare turn away from me!”
The Bosun looked at the Engineer, and she shrugged, an exhausted kind of confusion on her face.
“She’s gonna get herself killed,” the Bosun whispered.
The Engineer nodded. “Can you stop her?”
The Bosun sighed, and handed the Engineer her last few electrified knives.
But she barely had one foot in the water when the Navigatrix managed to finally really piss off the time wizard.
He shoved four, or seven, or eleven hands into that cursed Orb and shot that blue aura in a beam right at her, and for a moment, the Bosun thought she disappeared.
The water around the beam boiled as it grew in height, touching lake bottom, and then the Navigatrix was there, inside it, some magic wind pushing her soaked hair into her face, as she slowly and steadily walked through the blue towards the wizard.
“Shit.”