Automation again proved to be an ally to Fox McCloud in his blindness. He could listen to the raging storms all around him as his Arwing made its own controlled entry into the atmosphere of the planet. Part of him was glad he couldn’t see, as the lightning crackled around his ship and the rising winds shook him. “Computer, scan for heat sources on the surface and try to pinpoint Arwing wreckage.” Silence.
“Damn! Too much interference from the storms.” Fox maintained his high-atmosphere altitude to avoid crashes. The Vissago’s scanners were magnitudes more powerful than what they had on the Arwings. If he could somehow get help from the ship, he stood a real chance of finding her. But he didn’t dare go back up. They’d never let him fly back down in his condition.
… … …
“So why’d he do it?” Slippy asked, back on the bridge of the Vissago.
“Who knows?” Falco sat in a pile of salvaged Arwing parts, flipping through a technical manual. “Maybe the painkillers we gave him messed him up. Maybe he’s gone to try to find…” His voice trailed off.
“Could she still be out there?” Slippy’s voice took a hopeful tone. He still didn’t want to feel that he’d accidentally played a role in the vixen’s death.
“…No, Slip. I don’t think anyone could have survived what happened out there.” Seeing that he wasn’t helping the situation, Falco tried to change the subject. “Uh, but if she is still alive out there… he’ll find her. I just hope he makes it back.”
“You want to try to call him again?”
Falco considered trying to contact his friend one more time. He paused for a moment in indecision. “… Nah, he won’t answer. Let’s just get back to work. We still need to find more parts. If we could just get a makeshift generator together and get that Arwing back, we could stabilize orbit and go scavenge parts on the planet.”
“Wait a sec…” Something was beginning to dawn in Slippy’s mind. “We might have spare engine parts!”
“What!? Where?”
“In the boxes!” Slippy intercepted the most obvious rebuttal to his idea. “Sure, the old owners took anything of value, but who’d want some decades-old spare parts? I mean, they don’t even make the engines the Vissago uses anymore. Why take them?”
“Yeah… that’s true.” Falco rubbed the underside of his beak, in thought. “But they’d be in the engine room.” He sighed a little. “And the engine room is probably in another galaxy by now.”
“No!” Slippy hopped to his feet. “Fox made us clean out the engine room, remember? He said all the boxes were a fire hazard, so we put them somewhere else!”
“You mean we put the-” Falco tore the top off the nearest box and rummaged through it. “Where’d we put ‘em?!”
“I don’t know!” Slippy joined his friend in tearing open the many unmarked boxes that littered the bridge. “We just sorta tossed everything wherever we could fit it. We never even looked at what was in them…”
“You check up here, I’ll go check storage and the hallways!” Falco darted for the door, but froze at the tiny beep of the communication system. Someone was trying to call them.
“Is… is that Fox?” Slippy asked the obvious.”
“No, it’s your grandma, calling to check up on us. Of course it’s Fox, who else would be out here with us?” Falco opened a communications channel. “This is the Great Fox… er, this is the Vissago, Falco here. Come in!”
“Falco!” Fox’s voice faded in from the static. “I finally got through! Hang on a sec, I’m setting down where the signal’s good!”
“Wait, what? You’re on the planet? How’d you get down there?”
“Long story, I’ll tell you later. For now, I need you run a planetary scan for me. Search for anything that might be Arwing wreckage, any heat sources, and stuff like that. My scanners aren’t strong enough to penetrate all the storms down here.”
“That… is gonna be a problem.” Falco was glad to hear his friend’s voice, but the looming planet outside was weighing on his nerves. “There’s kind of a, uh, situation up here right now.”
“What? What happened?” Fox only knew of the crash he’d been in.
“At some point, we had some kind of freak accident with the Vissago’s engines and warp drive; we’ve lost power for good this time. Our orbit’s decaying and if we can’t cobble together a power source or some sort of thrust, we’re gonna burn up in the next few hours. So, as much as I’d like to get you that scan…”
“… Understood. I’ll keep trying the Arwing’s scanners. You guys work on fixing the Vissago.” Fox quietly sighed to himself. He hadn’t realized his friends were in danger or he’d never have left the ship, but in his state he’d be of no help to them. Krystal needed him more, and she was the only one he could help.
“Understood.” Falco answered back. “…and you keep looking until you find her. Bring her back, okay?”
“You got it. Fox out.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to come back? Slippy inquired. “Don’t think he’d do it?”
“Other way around. In light of how bad we may need that Arwing, I think he would have come back, if he could. But he’s not giving up on Krystal…” Falco paused, finally nodding to himself. “So neither will we.”
“Why is it you don’t like her, Falco? It was no secret that the blue bird was reserved around his same-color teammate.
“Well, it’s not that I don’t like her…” Explaining his feelings had never been one of Falco’s strong points, and his friends often mistook his more complex feelings for irritation or dislike. “I mean, sure, I don’t like how she’s just up and on the team on Fox’s say-so, but it’s got nothing to do with her. Either way, she’s part of the team and if it were any of us out there missing or dead, she’d come looking for us. I don’t see how she could be alive, much less how she could make it down to the planet after that crash, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“…I hope he finds her.” Slippy said quietly.
“Me too, Slip.” The growing image of the planet loomed in Falco’s peripheral vision. “But we can’t waste any more time. Come on.”
… … …
Fox sat in the sheltered cockpit of his Arwing, listening for anything that could help him. Outside, the storms that now ravaged the planet continued to rage violently. On occasion, faint sounds echoed through the cockpit, strange noises that didn’t belong out in the storms. Always distant and otherworldly, never staying long enough to be identified. Fox tried to make sense of the eerie sounds, when suddenly one very clear noise rang out; a male voice.
“All right, those Arwings are providing cover fire! Reform the ranks and charge that monster! Go, go!” An explosion sounded all around him, as if it had come from inside the cockpit.
It was then that Fox realized what the strange sounds were. They were all voices and sounds of battle. Grunts, screams, gunfire, the hissing shrieks of the Aparoids; all of it was from the battle at Katina, months ago. It was all taking place where he was, but not when he was.
On board the Vissago, Fox had heard Krystal’s thoughts, and she had heard his. He’d felt her down on the planet while he was still in space. All of it was thanks to the profound psychic presence of the Aparoid Spire that dominated the surface of the planet. He’d seen the beginnings of it being built during the battle of Katina, and it still stood mostly intact. It was responsible for the sounds, the feelings and smells that he was experiencing in his mind. All the despair, pain, suffering and hatred felt by those who’d lived and died in the terrible battle had carved a psychic groove into the surface of the planet, and the spire, like a gigantic stylus, dragged it all up and played it back again and again in mental echoes, like a broken record. Fox was no psychic, and it was frightening to him even without his eyesight. It must have been horrifying for Krystal.
That realization was enough to spur him to action again. He couldn’t wait for the scans, if they ever came. He released the cockpit and bailed out the side of the stationary ship, sinking to his ankles in the mud. Pulling his jacket over his head to keep the rain and wind out of his ears, he took hold of a latch on the fuselage of the Arwing’s nose. With one hard pull, the towing winch deployed from behind its panel and he took the long cable in his hands, walking with it in whatever direction he chose. It was his line back to the ship, hundreds of feet long. With it in hand he could explore on foot in a large radius and look for Krystal the old-fashioned way.
He called for her by name, announced himself, and simply shouted as he made his way through rubble, mud, and junk in every direction. When he’d exhausted his search in every direction, he went back to the Arwing and set out for a new location. Three times he repeated this process before at last, he heard a sound that gave him hope. Surprisingly, that sound was her scream.
He heard the vixen’s scream clearly in his mind, even over the storm; the sudden sense of anxiety, the smell of smoke, the sensation of a sudden, hard impact, and pain. She’d crashed near here, that much was certain. Her own personal tragedy was playing back to guide him on the right direction. After a desperate search through the mud and debris, he ran his hand over a smooth surface. A quick search of the large object revealed a raised StarFox team insignia he could make out with his hands. This was it. Krystal’s Arwing had undoubtedly made it to the surface at least mostly intact.
Hurriedly, Fox scrambled to the cockpit and felt through broken glass for what he feared would be a cold and lifeless body, but his reaching hands found only a torn, but empty seat. “Krystal! Where are you?!” She had to be close, her Arwing was right beneath him, and she wouldn’t have gone far from it if she wanted to be found. “It’s me, Fox! I came to get you! If you can hear me, answer!”
A soft hand reached out and touched his, making both he and its owner yelp in surprise. A female voice came from beside him. “It really is you… I’m sorry, Fox. I thought you were a hallucination. I… I was afraid you were dead.”
Fox slid off the nose of the ship and ducked under the wing where she’d been taking cover from the storm. “I was afraid you were dead, too. Falco tried to find you, but he must have missed you out in the debris field.”
“Oh, your eyes…” Her hand reached out and touched his blindfold gently. “Are you…”
“No, no, I’ll be okay. I need better medical care than we can get on the ship, but I’m sure I’ll see again.” A smile came over his face as the shock of finding her alive faded from him and his feelings returned. “It’s okay, now.”
Krystal gently led him under the wing, out of the rain, and put her arms around him hesitantly. “Thank you for coming to find me. But… how did you do it? How did you make it down here, through all this, if you can’t see?”
The sound of battles long past died down, and only the storm was audible above. It was soothing, now, in a way. “Losing my eyesight has made me see things a lot more clearly, Krystal. I couldn’t not come here.” Fox returned her hug firmly, tears mingling with the rainwater that soaked his blindfold. “I was so afraid that I’d lost you… I was scared that I’d put off telling you how I felt for so long that I’d never get the chance. Every time I try to say it, I start to worry and I lose the nerve, but I promised myself that if I found you, I’d finally tell you. I…” His nerve faded again, and he choked on the words he was so frightened to admit to anyone. “I…”
Krystal had known, but had always let him try to say what he thought out loud. She had wanted him to be ready, to really commit to his feelings before she could accept them, but his actions, his determination spoke louder than any words. No one was perfect, and if he couldn’t bring himself to risk rejection and say the words first, it was time to finally help him.
“I love you too, Fox. So very much.”
They tightened their embrace beneath the sheltering wing of the wrecked ship, no longer alone, no longer afraid. “Thank you…”
It was a long time before they moved again. The storm had picked up, and the wind now blew the cold rain into their pathetic shelter. The time had come to go, but it was much harder to blindly fly out than in. “Krystal…” Fox began, “I think we should get out of here before it gets any worse. I can get back to my Arwing, but I’m not sure I can fly us out of the atmosphere without my eyes.”
“I’ll be your eyes. But I can’t walk with you. I hurt my leg in the crash.”
“Then I’ll be your legs. Come on, let’s go home.” Fox put his jacket over her and gently helped her out from beneath the wing. Once they were free to stand, he picked her up and carried her back to the waiting Arwing. The cockpit screen lowered and the raging storm was at last muffled. Somehow, they had made it to relative safety at last, together. Krystal sat in his lap in the cramped cockpit and helped him navigate the ship up through the hot atmosphere.
“Pull up a little more. More. Just a little more.” The heat around them faded as the rumbling of the ship became a smooth glide. “That’s it, now level it out. We’re in space.”
Fox breathed a long sigh of relief, happy to leave the ghostly world, and his emotional baggage behind. “Do you see the Vissago? Does it look okay?” Better to not worry her with everything else that had gone on if there was no need.
“I see it! It looks fine, turn us to port about thirty degrees and we’ll be headed for it.” As they drew closer, Fox could feel her lean forward. “What’s that? Someone’s on the hull in a space suit, they’re welding something to the hull. It’s Falco!”
“Good work, Falco…” Fox whispered to himself. If they were working outside the ship, then they’d found the parts they needed, somehow.
“Looks like some kind of small thrusters he’s attaching… I’ll put him on the magnifier.” There was a pause. “He sees us! He’s staring… He’s smiling, he’s waving.”
Fox and Krystal waved back, smiling as they drew slowly closer to home. The communicator beeped, and Fox reflexively flipped it on. “Hey, Falco.”
“Unbelievable.” Falco laughed, a rare sound. “Totally unbelievable, and who’s that you got in there with you?”
“You know who.” Fox put his arms around the vixen. “Where’d you guys find all the stuff to make that thing?”
“Eh, let’s say we found an inheritance. Guess you were right, afterall. Just don’t get any funny ideas while you’re in my Arwing, okay? I want it back when you land.” Falco paused. “Oh, and… it’s good to see you’re okay. That goes for both of you. You seeing this, Slip?”
“I am! Welcome back, guys! I’m glad you’re okay, Krystal! I… I can’t believe you made it back!” His sigh of relief was audible over the communicator. “We haven’t been slouching off up here either! You ready out there, Falco?”
“Yeah, let me get clear.” Falco climbed away along the hull’s hand-holds and looked back at the thrusters he’d installed and wired. “Hit it!”
The ship’s lights came back on and the thrusters came to life, slowly stabilizing the Vissago’s orbit and pushing it towards safety. “That’s it! We got it! Roast bird and fried frog legs are NOT gonna be on the menu today! Now let’s get Fox and Krystal home!
“You got it.” Slippy’s voice came in again. “You’re clear to land… and welcome home.”
