Crackling lightning pulsed within ink-black clouds above Omicron's turbulent ocean. Rain bludgeoned the derelict shell of The First Rogue, while a cyclonic vortex lashed the waters below. Besieged by these relentless elements, the flying garbage swayed, buckling under the planet's perpetual tempest.
Deep in the bowels of the battered space junk, Erika, the new 'leader', simmered like an unstable compound. Her triumphant theft of the ship and hasty crew recruitment had crumbled into rancorous disillusionment. Instead of soaring into open space, she remained trapped in Omicron's unyielding gravity well.
The taste of failure, of sour lead, coated her tongue as she confronted the source of her predicament: a reclusive engineer in the engine room.
"What do you mean we can't leave?" she screeched, her voice a sonic battering ram against the walls of reality. "Just fix the engine! How hard can it be?"
Framed by shadows, the mechanic in barely distinguishable coveralls narrowed his eyes. "Speak to me like that again and I'll smash us all down to hell," he warned, each syllable spelled in menace.
"You wouldn't dare," Erika scoffed, her false bravado masking burgeoning trepidation.
The cranky recluse reached for a heavy wrench on his belt. Outlined as a revenant, the hollow-eyed man strode to a nearest pipeline, obscured by dim lightings, and struck it with a resounding crack.
Before madness’ echo, her composure crumbled. "What are you doing?!" She pounded on the metal door, panic rising. "Are you insane?"
"This is my kingdom!" the recluse declared, raising his wrench towards the shining Astrolabe of the Rift Compass. "I won't tolerate disrespect here."
"Okay... okay," the career woman conceded, her nerves frayed by the man's illogical howling. "I won't disturb you anymore! Just stop!"
The mad man complied, his hollow eyes peering through the door's crack. "Don't you dare disturb me," he hissed, spittle flying. "Either bring me offerings or get lost!"
The door snapped shut like a gunshot in Erika's face, leaving her alone with a bitter taste of defeat.
Stunned and confused, she trembled. Ignorant of the mystic arts to beguile the senile mechanic's compliance, she could do nothing else. Neck hung low, she backed away from the engine room and shuffled to the crew quarters.
The scene that greeted her in those dilapidated locales inspired anything but positivity.
Her new Fae crewmates lounged about, lazily puffing on narcotic-laced pipes. In a haze of decadence, one of the slacking newcomers belched. "Are we in the great hall of vomit?"
His companion took a profound whiff of mind-altering fumes. "This place sucks," a female Fae mumbled, her thoughts meandering through memories of what she'd left behind. "Why are we even here?"
One of the addicts, a friend of Kirby's, waved a sweet-smelling roll in their leader's direction. "Want to join in, Erika? You look very stressed."
Shayara the Light Clanswoman strutted over, her eyes gleaming with hidden intent. "You should take that, Miss Erika." She prodded their leader with a coo. "You look so tired, honey."
"Thank you for your concern," Erika grumbled, her penetrating gaze never left Shayara's superficial kindness.
Amidst this tense exchange, a young Fae, oblivious to the subtle power play, piped up nervously. "Shayara, aren't we forbidden from flying?" His eyes darted fearfully at each raindrop pelting their hull. "The tradition for Omicron dispatch is clear—all navigation should be by sea."
Hearing such fear, the Exos prankster, her voice dripping with disdain for authority, retorted, "You mean the rules made by those dusty old farts?" Her giggle, too bright and too bold, rustled like a peacock's plume. "Come on, buddy. Relax! Why should we listen to those ancient mandates?"
"But those stories..." the young Fae began, only to be cut off by the human woman's sharp interjection.
"Enough superstitious nonsense," She snapped, her barbed tone silencing all dissent. "We're not children, and we're certainly not rowing this ship like some primitive boat."
Another timid voice rose from an original crewmate, a young woman hugging herself for comfort. "So what should we do next?" she asked, trembling before the thunder and uncertainty.
Erika's eyes softened a fraction at the sight. She turned to Shayara, "Are you absolutely sure there are no safe places to land?"
"You already fled that place," the betrayer replied, her words a careful blend of authenticity and misdirection. "Going back is always an option, of course."
Trusting the deserter's word, Erika left the crew quarters, too tired and too blind to her own folly.
As their so-called leader's footsteps faded, Shayara and her prankster friend huddled close, sharing whispered secrets.
"So we're not telling her about the south," the rebel mumbled, her voice barely audible.
Shayara's reply quivered with dread. "I don't want to go there. Do you?"
"Who in Luna's name would want to do that?" her partner-in-crime shivered, earlier bravado crumbling before religious fright.
In the corridor, oblivious to the deception, Erika walked. Stale air filled her lungs; each step felt like dragging chains. Yelling and smashing echoed from distant corners, a dirt-crusted bell tolling for an ill-fated union of crew members who should never have been thrown together.
She would have lost herself in despair if not for a girl's cry.
A teenager with mousy hair leaned against the rusty wall. She wore the same dirty clothes she'd had on since leaving Genesis VIII. Purple bruises ringed her eyes as she looked up at the older woman.
"Erika," said the girl, who looked about sixteen. "Are they going to take over the ship and throw us overboard?"
Despite her worry about the violence she'd caused, the older woman kept her face calm. "Did the Exos tell you that?"
The girl nodded. Unsure what to do, Erika was glad the flickering light hid her fear. "What's your name?" she asked.
"Sistine," the girl answered. She held out her hand.
"Come on, Sistine," Erika said. "I promise I'll get us out of here."
The lie was as much for herself as for the girl. The mentee took her new mentor's hand. Lifting each other up, they walked to the cockpit door together.
That pathway to lucency cost them only a few minutes, but torment stretched for eternity.
Eyeing the old door suspiciously, the girl turned to her leader. "Where are we going?"
The careerist grabbed the rusty handle. "To find answers," she said and pushed the heavy gate open with a clang.
In the cockpit of deceptive monitors and ill-working controls, thumbed an addict on the verge of a mental breakdown. Staring at the ceiling of gray clouds squirming like a digestive tract and abyssal cauldron frothing with brine for several hours had whittled away much of his sanity. Early signs of withdrawal symptoms drew a syllable of rattling teeth. The room was cold courtesy of Omicron's raging tempest; yet streams of frigid perspiration had soaked his shirt.
Startled by the "clang", Kirby's hair bristled like a cornered rodent's final act of defiance. Seeing his leader by the door with a much younger girl, his frayed nerves loosened a few notches.
"Thank God it's you," he exhaled, his voice barely above a rasp.
"Sistine, go wait in the corner," Erika ordered her protégé before attempting to excavate a solution from the researcher's brain. "Kirby, can you scan this planet for a place to land?"
"Do you think this piece of junk can do that?" He gestured at the dark monitor, his expression a solid "no".
"What about taking us to space?" She asked, trying another angle.
"Erika, we're not in a position to do any of that," He pointed at the shroud of angry condensation above them. "You might not know but—"
A rumble cut Kirby short. A flash of light illuminated the veil of blackness for a second of clarity. Briefly, the outlines of a humongous serpentine beast, large enough to squeeze The First Rogue into scrap metal with its long tail, were revealed to the cockpit. Sistine witnessed the horror and shrank back, her hands covering her mouth. Erika could only shakily point at the silhouette of an almighty lord, the Omicron Sky Titan, diminishing their efforts from among the heavens.
Unlike them, the crackhead had grown accustomed to this psychological fraying. "I think that concludes my explanation. I've been looking at the clouds for hours, and we must have passed a hundred of those things." He gave the career woman the most serious look of his life. "Erika, I cannot fly us out past those things."
"Okay, I get it," Erika, still terrified by her brief staring contest with the shadow, leaned on the wall to support her waning nerves. "But how did Edgar fly us in?" she questioned.
"I don't have a clue," the engineer cried. A sudden "beep" alerted him, and he briskly switched it off.
"What's that?" the untested leader fixated on the alarm; her instinct refused to let go of that detail.
"Nothing," Kirby dismissed her concern. "It's just an alert for magnetic-field anomalies. This thing has been going off for hours now."
Still watching the welkin like it might swallow her, a thought drifted through young Sistine's mind. "Erika," she wondered aloud. "Why haven't those things eaten us yet?"
"Sistine, you're being too depressing," the mentor attempted to placate, but it was the addict who grasped the mentee's meaning.
"No, she's onto something," Kirby said. "Even if they aren't carnivores, they should have tried to check us out of curiosity. But they didn't even come down from the sky. Do they hunt based on territory or something?"
Erika recalled a certain Fae, and a sinking feeling budded in her stomach. "What about the sea, Kirby? Is there anything below us?"
"Creepy, long giant snakes did break the surface," He informed. "Those things are certainly predators."
"Despite that, those aliens’ tradition still stressed that they should travel by sea," She reflected, coming to a dangerous epiphany. "Are they telling me that sailing in the middle of a storm with a bunch of monsters is a better alternative than flying over the ocean?"
Suspense hung there for a second until all three came to a chilling realization: they were currently traveling in a hunting zone of the most dangerous thing on this planet, far surpassing everything above or below them.
"I'll try to fly the ship as low as possible," Kirby shouted.
"Sistine, go and drag that meek-looking Exos kid right to me," Erika shrieked, shaking the girl from her horrified stupor. "I want to know every single darn thing about their tradition, right now!"
As quickly as the three realized the truth, they were too late. The First Rogue had flown in the forbidden realm for too long. With no cloaking from the perpetual storm above, nor interference from micro-bacteria in the water, the vessel existed naked to many psychic sensors mapping Omicron’s airspace. The true king of the ecosystem saw the offering, and it wasn't about to let them turn their ship around.
From a maelstrom large enough to be seen from space, a flashing lance flared from the mouth of the waves. Intense beams of light crossed kilometers of liquid and vapor. It arced forth towards the flying target, width thinner than a dinner plate, momentum unstoppable, and accuracy surpassing any product of supercomputers.
The beam penetrated The First Rogue, hitting its engine room with eerie precision. The following explosion bellowed in fire, engulfing one mad engineer still praying to his beloved pipeline. Near the volatile epicenter, group of Fae enjoying their drug-induced bliss were violently dragged back by piping heat. A prankster and her friend, Shayara, let out screams of disbelief as their vessel began to plummet.
Meanwhile, saner occupants of the ship could only cling to anything stable as they lost altitude.
But The First Rogue never reached the water; instead, the aqueous expanse itself attacked. A total of seven quadrillion tonnes of abyss quaked, conjuring a cyclone of unimaginable proportions. Be it the mighty Sky Titan grazing the stratosphere or Sea Leviathan swimming in the cerulean depths, all creatures felt the stirring of a supernatural beast and retreated to save their souls. The creature had awoken, establishing its dominance over all. Nowhere near the wake was safe from the maw of an atmospheric sinkhole, drawing all into its horrifying feast.
Blown upward by extreme wind-speed, the cockpit's view spun like a turbine. Inside, Erika desperately hugged the sobbing Sistine. Kirby, unfortunately, hung on long enough to witness a dire sight: a chasm in the inky expanse, and from its depths, an eldritch mass awakening.
Confronted with such an extreme image, the drug-addict researcher's mortal brain and voice box paralyzed into an incomprehensible mess; he couldn't even scream before such overwhelming nightmare.
No soul on board realized what their folly had unleashed.