Two bumblers this way come

White Wolf and Candice came dashing out of the flaming ruins of the Starbug. As they came to a halt a distance away from the wreckage, White Wolf caught the angry look Candice was flashing him as she quickly put out several patches of her burning clothing.

"Well don't blame me, that wasn't even one of my farts!" Exclaimed the Six foot, one inch hamster pausing to lick a paw and casually put out a smoldering peak of fur on top of his head.

Candice sniffed the air for a moment then replied, "It doesn't smell like one of Phil's."

"How can you tell? It smells like rocket fuel to me."

"Phil's farts have a very specific Hydrocarbon content." Replied Candice while straightening & smoothing her skirt, "Besides, I now understand that it was a SAM that caused the explosion."

"Sam? He isn't supposed to arrive on the Blue Dwarf for another few hundred years yet..." said White Wolf rather puzzledly.

"Not the person, the Surface to Air Missile." Admonished Candice while gesturing towards the side of White Wolf's fur as some more of the Starbug continued to explode noisily behind them, "You've got a piece of it stuck in your fur there."

White Wolf winced at the loudness of the explosion as he reached up and plucked the offending piece of shrapnel out of his fur then worriedly glancing back towards the sky high pluming flames, "I hope nobody else was hurt!"

"I doubt anyone else was in the Starbug but us ever since we started discussing the practical applications of dimensional shifting drive technologies on the Blue Dwarf's main drive. Which brings me to one rather disconcerting question since we just took a direct hit from a missile and I already know that I being a fairly resilient Roo SemBot that makes a Timex look like a tinker toy, why I'm not dead - But, if you don't think it's just a little too personal of a question, would you mind telling me why you're not dead?"

White Wolf stopped for a moment, looking as if caught out for a second and then shrugged, "Um... I'm kinda immortal... you know, like Captain Jack Harkness..."

"Are you saying you're a single point in time?"

"Well no, not exactly... But something rather similar... It all started way back when Dean accidentally killed me & I met this inter dimensional penguin named 42 you see..."

"A penguin?!?" Injected Candice almost laughing.

White Wolf facepawed in exasperation, "Oh boy. It's a very, very, long story. I really don't think it's the appropriate time to explain it all to you right now, Okay?"

Candice glanced around at their surroundings for a long moment as if she were expecting to find something and then slowly nodded, "Your right. Perhaps we'll get into this topic another time." Candice paused again, as she thought she saw a indistinct shimmer off in the foliage around them and peered at it questioningly, then continued "We'd better find out where our fellow crewmates have gone off to right now. They might be in danger from whomever fired that SAM."

White Wolf was intent upon searching through his fur with his paws as he answered, "I was just thinking the same thing, but I can't quite remember where I stuck my Apad."

Candice lets out a little sigh and reaching up, she quickly jams her hand into White Wolf's left side mouth pouch and fishes out his Apad.

"Hey!" Exclaims the oversized hamster in surprise.

Wiping some of his saliva off the Apad, Candice quickly tapped out a query on it's display, "I'm getting several human biosigns. But, I'm quite sure we didn't have that many crewmates come planetside with us from the Dwarf."

Using his paw to gingerly rub his mouth where it hurt a little, the huge hamster instructed, "Just turn on the optional Darkover sentient species tags and you'll see which ones are from the Blue Dwarf in the readout."

Candice made the adjustment on the Apad as instructed, while she inquired, "So the most powerful enemy the Roo has ever battled with, has all the Blue Dwarf crew tagged, why? Plus why haven't you gotten rid the tags?"

"It's sometimes useful for moments like this. And the Darkover tags aren't for tracking per se, even though we can use it for that purpose on the Apad, the Darkover pretty much only use it to mark important Dimensional and Temporal causality components that they've previously encountered for cataloging purposes. And the most important reason of why I haven't bothered to remove those tags is because if I did, there's the distinct possibility that a Darkover operative could stumble upon them in that unmarked state and then would know that somebody with at least Roo level tech had performed that removal and would then start a more intensive investigation into things on the Blue Dwarf and thus discover my presence amongst them, which would make things very bad, very quickly." Replied White Wolf as he glanced over her shoulder at the Apad display, "Looks like Jay and the rest are heading towards a pyramid of some sort, their probably seeking fortified shelter now that the Starbug is gone."

"Well, we'll just have to summon another Starbug from the BD in the meantime." says Candice as she ticks several additional scan options on the Apad, "Wait a moment, scans show this whole area is populated by several augmented human cyborgs and a insectiod like race, possibly one of the many Hymenoptera species offshoots. I think some of the them are using some kind of cloaking, because several of them seem intermittent on the display."

White Wolf reaches over her shoulder and makes a couple of more adjustments to the Apad, "They are using stealth tech! That Pyramid also has lots of psychic technology. Plus, there's a cloaked missile bunker not far away. While it is of human origin, possibly JMC equipment and approximately a few million years old, it seems to be targeting technology and spacecraft at the moment."

"So we can't bring another Starbug planetside just yet." Summarized Candice gloomily.

"We've been detected!" Exclaims the ginormous hamster pointing towards two figures suddenly decloaking in the distant foliage and firing some kind of rocket at them.

With inhuman speed Candice responded, making rapid fire changes on the Apad, and suddenly both her & White Wolf were standing in front a large group of High Schoolers singing a song outside on a immaculately kept schools grounds.

The huge hamster glanced around cautiously before demanding, "What the smeg did you just do?!?"

"Ew! I think I just dimensionally shifted us into pimple purgatory!" replied Candice making a face, while quickly typing away at the Apad some more, and their surroundings changed once again. This time to Sahara desert landscape.

"Actually, I think that was a scene from High School Musical 2." Commented the outsized Hamster, taking in the new landscape, "And this isn't helping our friends any - Get us back, Candy!"

Blushing with extreme embarrassment while being flustered, Candice punched in some more changes on the Apad, "Ohhh... I'll fix it! Just gimme a moment."

The landscape around them shifted to a barren frozen tundra, then a jungle, then a forest, then to a wild west stampede.

"Oh for crying out loud! Give me that!" Yelled White Wolf snatching the Apad away from Candice and quickly adjusting it. They popped back to where they were on the planet, but the two figures were now gone.

"There. I think I've returned us back to the right dimensional coordinates, thank goodness I took the time to memorize them since our last traipse around the dimensions. Though, I suspect you accidentally changed our temporal coordinates a bit while you were shifting us around, it appears several hours has passed and the dwarfers are now inside the missile bunker." Said White Wolf while reading the Apad display, "Now I want you to promise you'll never do anything that rash again! You could have got us lost in one of the many parallel dimensions and we might not have been able to get back to help these specific dwarfers."

Candice nodded, "I should've remembered that attack probably wouldn't have hurt either of us. I was simply acting on my programming to protect my companion. This whole 'you're immortal' thing is going to take some time for me to get used to."

The rotund hamster tenderly patted her on the shoulder, "I understand. I'm sorry I overreacted."

Candice stood silently for several moments, then let out a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Alright. We need to turn our attention to situation at hand - We're going to have to evade the hostiles and make our way back to the others, provide any assistance to them if they need any, and somehow ensure that we can safely summon another Starbug planetside without it getting blown to smithereens."

White Wolf gave a quick smile, then pursued the Apad display, "We can easily use these scans to route ourselves around any hostiles whilst making our way to the bunker. We'll need to make a wide circle around to the east first."

{A short time later, close by the bunker.}

The huge hamster put away his Apad, "Just as I suspected. All we have to do is crawl through one of these sections of deflated JMC ship passageway which the JMC often used as replacement parts during their cost cuts."

"The JMC used inflatable plastic bits in place of whole sections of the ship?" inquired Candice with a rather puzzled look on her face as they ran up and dove into the deflated plastic tunneling.

"Yep and most of the JMC crews usually didn't even notice. Though, I did have a theory once that Dr. Keto purposely got the Blue Dwarf lost - because he knew that the cost cuts were coming in the future and didn't want a inflatable medibay, since it fit in very nicely with him later going off into space with it. Which wouldn't have worked so well with an inflatable medibay because all it would've taken is one stray micrometeorite to deflate it all. But that theory was disproven when I realized it was just another one of Phil's grand scheme's for additional alcohol storage on the JMC's mining ships." Quietly replied White Wolf while scuttling through the deflated plastic tunneling, before quickly exiting and standing up in an open corridor, "Okay, the scans shown the crew being kept some distance that way, just beyond the missiles. We'll need to find out if we can safely disable those missiles or if our friends need our help first."

{Tag}

OOG - I'm back. I really apologize for the long delay before returning though. My inspirations unfortunately just weren't coming, and I think that was mostly because I really had no idea at just how much being forced to give up my dogs (one of whom I had for basically a fourth of my life and whom was family or a child in sense of the word) and losing their love & emotional support would effect my wife & I so. We both still experience grief sometimes, so it's really hard to describe. You really don't realize just how much being a pet owner is a part of your personality until you lose it and then find out the hard way exactly what effect upon your life they had.

As things in our lives have slowly come to a "new normal" now that I'm actually getting inspirations to post once again, (though, I obviously can't make any guarantee's on it), hopefully the inspirations will keep on coming! :)
~ WW