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Joseph’s back hit the steel wall as he was roughly thrown into the cell. As he hissed from what would inevitably be a bruise later, his captors slammed the door shut. It was made of pure metal, Joseph noticed; lockable, and with a small barred window.
“You’ll stay in there ‘til the masters can decide what to do to you, ‘kay!” a grating voice told him. Joseph couldn’t help but grumble to himself as the sound of the guard’s cackling and footsteps grew faint. Another door closed, which he presumed was the door to the ship’s brig overall, and guessed that the guard was right outside.
Joseph walked up to the barred window and looked around. He didn’t see any other guards inside, or he presumed they were all outside. He didn’t know whose call it was to not keep a close eye on their prisoners, but it was definitely a sign of arrogance.
Joseph retreated to the back of the small cell, sitting down on a block of wood that he supposed was supposed to be a bed - wood was an insulator, but this ship was using a valuable resource for what was basically the bare minimum. He reached up and touched a small device in his ear, an earpiece communicator that had camouflaging properties.
“This is Jojo. Anyone read me?” he muttered into the earpiece.
To his luck, he heard the distinctive clicks of two people connecting to the radio line. Smokey, his operator and friend, must have heard him and connected him from the base.
He repeated, “This is Jojo. Anyone read me?”
“Read you loud and clear.”
Joseph sighed in relief when he heard the voice of his commander, Lisa Lisa. She’d assigned him to this mission knowing he’d be put in the heart of enemy territory, but her lack of panic means she at least had things under control back at base.
“Capture by the enemy successful. Currently in the brig. I’m on, uh…” Joseph tried to remember the code on the side of the ship he was put on. “I’m on Battleship 3-28.”
“Good, you got on the right one this time,” Lisa Lisa replied, a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Hey, that was one time-”
“SORRY I’M LATE!” a loud voice cut into their conversation. “The signal wasn’t connecting where I am!”
“Quatro. Are you in position?” Lisa Lisa asked.
“Well, duh. You got Suzi hired on that ship before you sent me out,” Joseph reminded her.
Lisa Lisa clicked her tongue. “Wait your turn. Quatro, are-”
“I’m in position! I got myself extra shifts in the electrical unit,” Suzi reported. “I guess being a housekeeper in your office paid off for the janitor ruse!”
“Good work. Joestar is in the brig. Do not tamper with any of the electrical panels yet.” The sound of clicking from a keyboard could be heard from Lisa Lisa’s line, a frequent sign of her recording and reporting information. “Joestar, did you learn anything during your capture?”
“First off, why the hell do you keep using my last name? You already know who I am, woman!”
“Our transmissions are recorded, so surnames are for identification purposes in official records. Now, answer my question.”
Joseph huffed. “Alright, uh… This battleship is en route to the Moritz cluster for ‘resource collecting’, which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism, but the Hashira Empire sent a battleship instead of a convoy because they’re planning on charging into the Yami Union first. Something about ‘taking back land that belongs to them’, even though the Yami Union was there first.”
“Didn’t the Hashira Empire come from the Yami Union, or am I misremembering?” Suzi asked.
“It did, the empire was made of a group of traitors at first, but they rebelled and started their own empire, and they just kept conquering.”
“So they did,” Lisa Lisa agreed. “The Speedwagon Foundation Special Forces are waiting for the battleship to reach the Unmei Checkpoint to launch an attack. Stand by, and I will give further orders when the checkpoint is being approached. Suzi, prepare to take their defenses offline when I next check in.”
“Roger that!” Suzi’s chipper voice replied, then disconnected from the line.
“Roger that,” Joseph sighed, and he laid back against the slab of wood. Saboteur missions were full of action, plus lots of fun, but he hated how much waiting was involved. If it were up to him, he’d bust out of here and shoot the bastards right now.
Of course, he knew that it wasn’t a good plan; they had all the guns, and the ship was pretty far from an inhabited planet he could crash at before he called for help. So despite all his protests, he knew he had to wait.
A few hours passed by, and Joseph entertained himself by singing a few renditions of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pop on the Wall”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. Surprisingly, he didn’t hear anyone yell at him to shut up. He knew the guards weren’t there at all, but were there no prisoners either? That was strange. Perhaps they were using the prisoners as slaves for their ship.
Or maybe, he thought, they just kill everyone they encounter. I was just lucky they took me prisoner instead.
The radio comm clicked again, and Joseph found himself jolting upright. He heard Lisa Lisa’s voice saying, “Joestar, Quatro, come in.”
“Go ahead!” Joseph replied, almost a little too loudly. He could hear Suzi do the same, followed by a sigh on Lisa Lisa’s end.
“The Hashira battleship is approaching the Unmei Checkpoint. Quatro, take their defence systems offline. Joestar, break out and meet up with Quatro. You already know the plan.”
“Roger that.” Joseph stood up in his cell. “Oi, Suzi, where’d you say you were again?”
“The electrical grid! Okay, almost…” He could hear a grunt on her end, followed by the sound of a heavy lever being pulled down. “Finished! Defence systems are offline!”
Joseph wasted no time running up to the door and taking out a small toolset from his sleeves. His captors had overlooked it when they hastily patted them down, though Joseph had about a dozen more backup tools on his person if needed. He quickly picked the lock from his side and kicked the door down.
He left his cell and reached under his jacket, taking out the energy pistol concealed by the layers. He looked around the brig, confirming that there were no guards and there weren’t any prisoners-
A low hum of electricity gave him pause. The sound was coming from one of the cells.
Joseph snuck down the brig to a door at the end of the hall. Unlike the other cell doors, which were made of steel, this door was made of concrete. It had no visible lock on the outside, save for a passcode panel on the wall beside it. Undoubtedly, the inside of the concrete was hollowed out and had wires running through them - a fortified electric door.
Moreover, above the panel was a label taped to the wall, reading “HIGH PRIORITY”.
Joseph touched his earpiece again. “Oi, Lisa Lisa. I broke out, but there’s one other prisoner besides me. They’re behind an electric door and labelled ‘high priority’. This wasn’t in the intel, was it?” he questioned.
There was a brief moment of silence, before Lisa Lisa responded, “No, it was not. Investigate it.”
“I was gonna do that anyway, jeez…”
Instead of a barred window, this door’s window was filled with some sort of plastic or glass material. Joseph looked inside, and what he saw was a man strapped to a chair. Tubes were going under his skin, and electrodes and scanners were placed all over his head and body. The man was wearing a tight prisoner jumpsuit with openings for the chair’s equipment; he’s probably been in captivity for a long time.
By the man’s feet, there were a couple pale yellow feathers. Joseph thought it was odd, since the man looked pretty human and the Hashira Empire didn’t have any citizens with feathers. Maybe one of the higher-ups used them for fashion?
“There’s a guy in there, he’s hooked up to some sort of device!” Joseph reported. “It’s like one of those death chairs from the twentieth century!”
“Death chairs- Oh, you mean electric chairs,” Lisa Lisa sighed. Her voice turned to contemplation as she spoke aloud, “A chair-like device… Joestar, what does the prisoner look like?”
“Uh… He’s blonde, pretty well-built, but he looks human enough to me. He’s got a jumpsuit on, but it’s got holes for all the wires and stuff.”
“Hm… He doesn’t seem like anyone of note, but the machine seems like a device that siphons something from its prisoners. It reminds me of an old rumour…” she trailed off.
“Oh, that poor man! I couldn’t imagine what he’s going through…” Suzi fretted over the radio. “Jojo, you have to help him! Please, get him out of there!”
Joseph sighed, not expecting a rescue mission to be on his to-do list today. But he couldn’t really refuse Suzi at all. And if someone innocent was being hurt by someone more powerful than themselves, he couldn’t help but want to intervene.
“Alright, fine. But you’re gonna have to disable the electric door and the machine first,” he told her.
“There’s no individual switches for cells. I’ll have to disable the power to the whole brig.”
“Do that, then! I can handle the guards!”
“Be careful, Jojo!”
After a few seconds, the lights suddenly shut off. The hum of electricity disappeared, and the brig was silent. Joseph was able to use his lockpicking tools to safely break the lock without getting zapped. As he stepped into the room, the emergency generator lights turned on behind him, dimly illuminating the dark cell.
Joseph walked up to the chair-device and began taking off all the electrodes and sensors. He carefully removed the tubes, and the prisoner stayed still all the while. If it wasn’t for the slow rise and fall of his chest, Joseph wouldn’t have known if he was still alive. With a thin knife from his sleeve, he cut the straps and caught the prisoner as he slumped forwards.
“Oof, this is gonna be tricky,” Joseph complained. “Should I just sling him over my back, or- What the fuck?!”
Joseph’s complaints had turned to shouting as the prisoner suddenly seemed to gain energy, reaching up to scratch him. Joseph took a few steps back, letting the prisoner fall to the ground. A groan came from the man as he tried to drag himself up again with shaky arms.
“Hey, quit that! You’re gonna hurt yourself!”
Joseph’s warnings didn’t seem to dissuade the prisoner, who forced himself to his feet. At this rate, Joseph wondered if he was going to have to restrain this man before he could rescue him.
The prisoner looked up at him, and Joseph could see the barely-concealed fear behind his fierce eyes. “Get…get away…” the man hissed, and propelled himself forward to slash at him with his nails. His attempt at attacking was slow and weak, and Joseph was able to dodge it easily. He did notice feathers covering the man’s arms from under the sleeves.
“Cool it! I’m not with the guys who put you here!” Joseph exclaimed. “Is that what you’re worried about?! I’m not with them! I’m a prisoner here too!”
He held his empty hands up (his lockpicking tools slipped carefully back into his sleeve) to show he didn’t mean any harm. The prisoner looked at him skeptically, tense like he was still ready to strike. They carefully waited for the other to move first, frozen in a standoff.
The standoff was broken almost immediately afterwards as an impact from an explosion made the ship tremble. The prisoner lost his balance and fell to the ground, but Joseph only stumbled a bit before regaining his footing. Alarms began blaring through the ship, and Joseph quickly put his hand to his earpiece again.
“What the hell was that?!” Joseph yelled into the comms. “I thought we weren’t at the checkpoint yet!”
“The ship was moving faster than expected, it reached the checkpoint twenty seconds ago,” Lisa Lisa informed him.
Suzi hummed, “Oh, Speedwagon’s Special Forces are really timely with these things, huh?”
Joseph was forced to agree; it was part of their job to be timely. The Speedwagon Foundation was originally an interstellar ‘humanitarian’ organization (despite the label, they helped a multitude of species) that was the first to step in when disaster struck a planet. But with the expansion and destruction the Hashira Empire had brought, the organization had sided with a coalition of civilizations aiming to stop the empire. However, the Speedwagon Foundation could only interfere using guerilla warfare and sabotage - the latter being Joseph’s current assignment.
“Intelligence says that the battleship might jump to light speed to escape,” Lisa Lisa warned. “Joestar, Quatro, hang onto something.”
“Shit,” Joseph swore, looking around. The cell was pretty small, and if he put himself at the back of the wall over there, he’d probably be fine…
His scan of the room reminded him that the prisoner was still there, limbs unsteady from the machine’s siphoning. Joseph went to him and wrapped his arms underneath the other man’s chest, ignoring his squawk of alarm as he dragged them both to the safe corner.
“Hey, quit struggling!” Joseph demanded. “The ship’s gonna jump to light speed, so unless you want to be thrown against the wall, you gotta stay put, moron!”
Joseph got a harsh shove in the gut for that, but besides that, the prisoner miraculously stopped struggling. Huddled against each other in the corner, the pair continued to wait as the alarms blared around them.
And they waited, and waited.
Joseph eventually couldn’t take it anymore, and he pressed his earpiece again. “Hey, didn’t you say the ship was going to light speed?” he questioned.
“It’s supposed to, but, uh…” Suzi responded, and Joseph could hear the light pattering of her footsteps through her audio. “Oh! The faster-than-light engines are offline!”
“What?!”
“Well, it technically says they’re still activated, but they’ve completely lost power!”
“Strange… No, it both answers and raises more questions,” Lisa Lisa joined in. “The Hashira Empire continues to make claims that they power their FTL engines using the enslaved gods of their defeated foes. Nobody had any reason to believe it… Joestar, you said that the prisoner you found was ‘high priority’? Just who did you rescue?”
“I’ve got no damn clue. Uh…” Joseph turned to the prisoner. “Hey, who are you, anyway?”
The prisoner squinted, as if he was trying to find out if Joseph was trying to fuck with him or not. Finally, he answered, “Caesar.”
“Cool. Mine’s Joseph Joestar, but you can call me Jojo.” He pressed his earpiece against and told his comrades, “He said his name’s Caesar.”
After a moment of silence, save for tapping on a keyboard, Lisa Lisa replied, “I don’t recognize the name. I don’t have any information on him either.”
“Damn. Well, we might as well not sit around if the attack’s starting.”
“Joestar, I’m going to be taking the comms offline. There’s a chance the Hashira Empire might try to track you through them. Contact Smokey to reactivate them only after you and Suzi have safely evacuated the battleship.”
“Roger that.”
Joseph quickly got to his feet, and he wrapped his arms around Caesar to pull him up too. As Caesar stumbled and had to keep himself upright against a wall, Joseph wondered just what it was the battleship was trying to siphon from him. Was the story Lisa Lisa heard true, that the Hashira Empire was enslaving gods?
Well, it didn’t matter right now.
He turned to the other man. “Listen, we gotta get to the electrical grid in this ship,” Joseph told him. “One of my coworkers, she’s waiting there for me. Well, for us.”
Caesar slowly nodded, and tried to step forwards. With a yelp, he nearly fell forward if not for Joseph catching him.
“Okay…okay.” He didn’t know how he was going to get through everything while supporting someone else’s weight. But Joestars weren’t quitters, and Joseph bent down a little. “Here, put your arm around my shoulders, I’ll support you.”
“I don’t…need your help…!” Caesar hissed, trying to disentangle himself. “You’re just…just trying to humiliate me…aren’t you?!”
At his words, a spark of irritation lit itself inside Joseph.
“Humiliate? You think I’m trying to humiliate you?” he repeated. “If you want to stay on this ship when it gets blown to smithereens, then go right ahead. But I’m here to find my friend, grab this ship’s secret plans, and go. I didn’t want to leave you here since you don’t have a hand in any of this. It wouldn’t be right. But hey, it’s up to you.”
Caesar’s eyes widened as he took in the cold words, then narrowed his eyes and glared at the ground. With a low growl, he tightened his arm around Joseph’s shoulders.
With a smug smile, Joseph began guiding them both towards the exit of the brig. “There we go. Alright, let’s go find the electrical grid.”
Joseph brought them to the door of the brig, and he pressed his ear against it to listen to anything. He couldn’t hear any guards - then again, he could barely hear shit from the blaring alarm anyway. Joseph opened the door and found that the guard from earlier was gone. Probably left to defend the ship.
Joseph looked left and right. “Alright, so where the hell is the-”
“To the left,” Caesar answered for him.
Joseph turned to look at him in surprise, but decided that maybe the long-term prisoner of the ship would know his way around. “Okay. To the left, then. Lead on.”
The pair began traversing the corridors of the battleship, with Joseph supporting Caesar’s weight as the other man gave him directions. Joseph had to press them against the wall a few times to hide from the guards running around the ship to combat the Speedwagon Foundation’s ambush, but they slowly moved to an area where the walls gradually stopped being lined with smooth metal and were replaced by pipes instead.
“Through that door,” Caesar directed, motioning his head to a door on the right. “That’s where the electrical grid is. Panels and open wires are everywhere.”
“Knowing Suzi, she must’ve shocked herself by now,” Joseph muttered, and he pushed open the door to let them in.
True to Caesar’s description, electrical appliances lined the room. Panels to certain rooms and functions lined the walls, and blocks of technology made rows down the length of the area as if it were a locker room. And standing in one of the aisles was Suzi herself, un-electrocuted, whose expression lit up when she saw them.
“Jojo! You’re alright! I thought the guards were going to see you!” she exclaimed, running up to the pair. She then noticed Caesar’s state and began to fret over his haggard state. “Oh, you poor thing! I can’t imagine what you’ve been through! Don’t worry, once we get off the ship, I’m sure Commander Lisa Lisa will-”
“Yeah, that’s great. How about we focus on the ‘get off the ship’ part first?” Joseph interrupted. “I don’t know what the foundation’s planning, but I think this thing might get blown to kingdom come pretty soon.”
“Oh, right! Okay, so what’s the plan?” Suzi asked. Joseph knew she hadn’t been informed of the plan, having only been sent as extra hands to help him here.
He began to explain, “We gotta find our way to the bridge and snag the ship’s copy of their military plans. The empire only sent one battleship, so there’s definitely instructions left for them. And then, we gotta find an escape pod and get the hell outta here. Speedwagon’s guys will pick us up. We can’t use the comms right now or else Lisa Lisa will kill us before the bad guys do.”
“Got it!” Suzi whispered with an enthusiastic nod.
Joseph looked over her janitor’s jumpsuit and frowned. She might have gotten herself hired here somehow, but he doubted that she remembered to make sure to know the layout of the place. “Do you know where the bridge is?” he asked, just in case.
Just as he predicted, her smile fell as she shook her head.
“I know where it is,” Caesar spoke up.
Both heads turned towards him. “Really?!” Suzi exclaimed. She quickly clamped her hands over her mouth, and the trio was silent as they waited to see if anyone would come. When the door stayed closed, they resumed their talk.
“They took me through this ship a few times,” Caesar explained. “Well, the same model of ship. On and off, constantly. I know the way.”
“I trust him. He’s the one who led me to the electrical grid,” Joseph agreed, turning to Suzi. “If you support his weight, I’ll be able to defend us. And he can lead the way.”
“Right! Let’s get out of here, then! I don’t want to be in this creepy place!”
Suzi stood up, and Joseph helped Caesar get up before draping him over her. While they got situated, Joseph got his hidden gun out of his uniform. Originally, two people were sent so that they could have each other’s backs in the middle of a warzone. But they didn’t account for a prisoner needing rescue, so it was good that Suzi came along; if it was just him, Joseph didn’t think he could carry Caesar and shoot at the same time.
They left the electrical grid and began sneaking down the corridors. Joseph held his gun at the ready as he stayed at the front of the group, occasionally glancing behind him for the other two. Caesar gave them the directions to the bridge, just as he said he would, which made Joseph’s life so much easier.
On occasion, they ran into some guards in the halls that weren’t panicked enough to miss that the man with a gun was not one of their own troops (and that the girl behind them was half-carrying one of their prisoners). In those instances, Joseph quickly shot them before they had the reflexes to draw their weapon. Joseph might not have been the fastest draw in the west, but he was good at taking advantage of his enemies’ shock.
As they turned a corner past a locker room, the low vibrating thrum beneath their feet began to disappear. Joseph stopped, then tapped on the ground with his feet. “What the hell…?” he muttered.
His companions noticed it too. “The engines. They’ve turned off,” Caesar muttered.
“First the FTL engines, and now the actual engines…” Joseph wondered. A sudden realization struck him, and he turned around to Caesar and Suzi. “This ship’s losing power. You weren’t just powering the FTL engines, were you? The empire was using you as a living battery for the whole ship!”
Suzi let out a gasp. “Is that why the empire’s battleships don’t have a fuel tank?! Because they take the energy from their prisoners?!”
“That’s not important right now,” Caesar dismissed. “We have to hurry. If the power goes out…”
“Then there will be a blackout! We won’t be able to see in the dark!” Suzi fretted. “Or, or! What if the battleship has a self-destruct mechanism when it loses power?!”
“That’s probably not likely. Otherwise, it’d explode whenever they turn it off,” Joseph argued. “What we need to worry about is the escape pods. If the ship loses power, the escape pods won’t launch.”
The trio wasted no time in resuming their course to the battleship’s bridge. It took a few more turns around the corner, a few pre-emptive shootouts, and a couple trips up the stairs before they could finally get there.
Joseph opened the door and raised his gun, not hesitating to fire at the soldiers and commanders there. Many went down instantly, but some managed to quickly hide behind the desks and panels while preparing weapons of their own. Joseph walked further into the room, with Suzi and Caesar peering around the edge of the door.
And then it happened. The energy gun started to click, its power having run out.
Joseph took a step back as the soldiers raised their guns, preparing to make a run for it. All of a sudden, Caesar pushed past Joseph, standing on his own before the soldiers.
“Caesar, what are you doing?!” Joseph shouted, getting ready to grab the prisoner and pull him away. But he froze when he saw something shining.
A pair of marks high on Caesar’s cheekbones began to glow in a bright, golden light, and a ball of light of the same colour began to form at Caesar’s chest. As he manipulated the ball of light with his hands, the soldiers stood dumbstruck and transfixed at the sight. Joseph looked to Suzi, who only shared his confusion and alarm.
The ball of light exploded into rays, shooting across the room and aimed at the soldiers. Each soldier's chest was pierced by a ray of light, and the room became filled with their screams. Joseph felt his blood run cold as the panicked soldiers helplessly flailed in place before falling down, one by one.
When the last soldier had dropped dead, the light disappeared and Caesar’s marks lost their glow. He stared at the carnage for a few seconds, then fell to the floor as well.
That shocked Suzi and Joseph out of their stupor, and they rushed to Caesar’s side. “Hey, what the hell did you do?!” Joseph shouted, shaking his shoulders to try and wake him. But a flickering of the lights above made him re-evaluate his priorities. He rolled Caesar onto his back and told Suzi, “I’ll look for the plans, you need to revive him quickly!”
“Right!” Suzi began to roughly shake Caesar and lightly slap his face, anything to get him up.
Joseph ran further into the room, only pausing to get a look at the soldiers’ bodies. There was a hole burned through where the light had pieced through them, with the surrounding flesh completely cauterized. The soldiers’ deaths were quick, but not immediate like with an energy gun. He could imagine that they could feel the heat melting their insides before they died. The thought made him shudder.
Getting back on track, he went up to the bridge’s main deck and searched a few desks for papers. Eventually, he found a bunch of charts and papers, along with what looked like a USB. He examined the papers, finding that they were maps with some instructions. Good enough, he decided.
Running back to Suzi, he shouted, “Did you get him up yet?!”
“I-I think so!” she shouted back, moving her body aside and letting Joseph see Caesar. He hadn’t noticed before, but more of those pale yellow feathers had fallen around his body.
Caesar was looking at them through bleary eyes, as if he was barely keeping himself from passing out again. That attack must have drained the last of his energy, Joseph guessed.
“Caesar! You have to tell us where the escape pods are!” Joseph exclaimed, pushing the plans into Suzi’s hands. He knew they wouldn’t be able to keep him awake for long. “Come on, where are they?!”
Caesar’s brow furrowed, not enjoying being ordered around as soon as he woke up. Nonetheless, he told them, “On the E deck, past the commanders’ quarters.” After his directions were given, he passed out again.
Joseph quickly grabbed him and maneuvered him so that he could carry him on his back. Adjusting to the sudden weight, he and Suzi shared a glance before they left the bridge.
Thanks to Suzi’s cover job as a janitor, she knew where the cabins of the ship’s commanders were. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised Joseph that the escape pods were located near their rooms; of course the commanders would try to save their own skins first in a crisis.
Thankfully, when they arrived at the escape pod launch room, it looked like it hadn’t been used yet. Joseph and Suzi ran inside an open pod, and Suzi inputted the route coordinates while Joseph buckled Caesar into his chair. She activated the escape sequence, and she and Josepj buckled themselves into their own chairs as the doors slid shut.
The motors of the pod grew louder and louder, then the escape pod was suddenly shot out from the ship like a cap of a shaken carbonated bottle. The battleship began to grow smaller as they sped away, along with the Speedwagon Foundation ships ambushing it. Once they got a good distance away, enough that the entire ship could just be seen through the small reinforced window, the lights of the battleship suddenly went out.
Joseph felt his muscles turn to jelly in his seat at the relief. They’d gotten out just in time.
He touched his earpiece again, turning on his radio. “Hey, Smokey? We got out. Tell Speedwagon and his guys to come pick us up,” he reported, knowing he wouldn’t get a response from their operator.
It felt like they were in the escape pod for hours as they waited for rescue. Caesar remained unconscious, with Suzi slapping Joseph’s hands away whenever he tried waking him up, and the awake pair played small games with each other. It was pretty boring, which was why Joseph's heart kicked up with elation when he heard distant rumbling.
At last, another SPW ship had come, this one labelled “Tender 11-2”. A support ship that wasn’t a part of the Special Forces. A docking area opened its doors and a gentle magnetism pulled the escape pod inside, seeming almost like it was being swallowed by the bigger ship. The doors were closed as the escape pod was set on the concrete floor of the docking bay, and everything was tightly sealed to prevent the dangers of outer space from harming the starship’s staff.
Suzi opened the door of the escape pod and exited first, stolen plans in hand. Joseph was slower to follow, as he was carrying Caesar in the most awkward piggyback ride in his life. In the bay, they could see their commander Lisa Lisa walking up to meet them, alongside the founder of the foundation, Robert E. O. Speedwagon himself.
Lisa Lisa skipped the greetings, getting to the point before her companion could say anything. “Do you have them?”
“Right here, Commander!” Suzi chirped, handing over all the papers they’d gathered, along with the USB-like device.
Lisa Lisa unfurled them and looked over them for a moment. She rolled them up again, with nothing but a quirk of her lips showing her pride. “These are the right plans. The mission was a success.”
“Excellent work, you two,” Speedwagon agreed, more free with his smiles and praise than she ever was. Joseph knew that he certainly wasn't the “rule-by-fear” type that Lisa Lisa was. Even before they allied themselves with the coalition, he’d always been like this. Speedwagon turned to Lisa Lisa, telling her, “Please get these analyzed, we’ll need to make copies and send them out.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, tucking them under her arm.
“U-Um, Mr. Speedwagon?” Suzi piped up, and everyone’s eyes turned to her. “Can you call the medical team? I’m worried about Caesar.”
“About who- Oh, is that this person’s name?” Speedwagon asked, gesturing to the man on Joseph’s back.
Joseph got on his knees, getting Caesar off his back and lying him face-up on the ground. “He was in the brig of the battleship, listed as a high-priority prisoner. They had a machine siphoning something from him. After I got him out, the power on the ship started shutting down. He’s got some sort of light-ray power, but he passed out after using it,” Joseph explained.
“A light-ray power…the ship shutting down…” Speedwagon repeated, stepping forward to get a closer look at him.
“You know of the rumours, don’t you?” Lisa Lisa asked him. “Or, at least, of the Hashira Empire’s claims?”
There was silence for a moment, then Speedwagon’s eyes suddenly went wide. “Oh, I do know of this man!”
“You do?!” Joseph exclaimed. “Who is he, then?! Come on, spill!”
Speedwagon turned to the rest of them. “If my suspicions are right, then this ‘Caesar’ is from the Zeppeli Clan. They had evolved from a human colony and became part-avian, and had worshipped a minor god of light. The clan had been wiped out by the Hashira Empire because they’d stolen and recorded state secrets. The foundation was investigating their demise to see if there was anything left behind!”
Lisa Lisa sharply inhaled. “If this Caesar is the same minor god, that means their claims are true…” she remarked. Another thing suddenly came to mind: “It also means that he might know something about the state secrets. We’ll need to interrogate him.”
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Suzi worried.
Lisa Lisa shook her head. “His time with us will be considerably better than his time with the empire.”
“For now, we’ll need to take him to the medical bay. And after that, we’ll need to make up a room for him.” Speedwagon turned to Joseph and Suzi. “If he receives an all-clear from the medical team before we get a room ready, would you mind housing him until then?”
“Sure!” Suzi agreed before Joseph could say anything. He tried to scramble for words, but he realized that he had no opinion on the matter either way. In the end, he gave up and just nodded along.
Speedwagon began to smile. “Excellent! Elizabeth, please call for the medical team.”
As their commander alerted the medical staff on her walkie-talkie, Joseph and Suzi decided to wait around until Caesar was taken for help. Until then, they passed the time by listening to Speedwagon’s stories. Another day was saved, and a new ally had been found. Hopefully, they would know the ally better in the future.