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Merelisa Shaynore     It turns out to be a more reasonable choice than expected to leave two teenage girls stranded on an alien planet alone for a bit. Lala explains that she actually lives in the spaceship full time, and Hikaru has a fully-stocked room inside it too, barring anything that might've been lost in the crash. Between your own efforts and that of the army of tiny vegetable men that Hikaru's recruited (they're surprisingly strong), it's easy enough to lift the spaceship out of its impact crater and flip it right-side up.

    They won't be scavenging for food, either: apparently, those shooting-star shaped gummies that Lala keeps in her belt pouch are complete meal replacements, though she's not thrilled about eating them daily. Once the Precures are set up, the Elites can get back to the sparkling wormhole in the sky with the fusion-powered trampoline, and the girls can get back to poking around in the forest for whatever parts they can recover.

BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txbB55zKFyw&

    Now that they're aware of what's on the other side of the wormhole-warpgate (that being, nothing), the Elites can better prepare for the drop when they return a few days later. Hikaru and Lala seem like they're better prepared too; even though the pink and yellow spaceship is still battered all over (there's a large band aid over the crack in the primary star-shaped window), there's evidence of the repairs they've managed to make on their own. In particular, a glitter-covered radar dish affixed to the back of it whirrs around to face the Elites as they fall/fly/sparkle-drift their way back down into the clearing, and makes a little ping that superhuman hearing can pick up.

    Lala and Hikaru pile out of the ship in response, waving up at the Elites as they come down, and hurriedly scrambling out of the way if any elect to just fall the whole way. They only look a little worse for wear, considering they've been living in the forest for a week: Hikaru is wearing an oversized pink hoodie with a star on it, now stained with dirt and grass, and Lala is in the same outfit as before, with plastic caps attached to the bulbs on the ends of her antennae that seem to have drill bits in them. They're both brightly excited to see everyone again, and they babble over each other in a rush to update them until figuring out their order.

"Hi!!! Welcome--"
"--been hard at work--"
"--a HUGE mouth--"
"--with two more--"
"--'pikmin', apparently--"
"--oh, sorry--"
"--sorry, Lala, you go--"
"--no, you first, lun!"
"Okay!"

    Hikaru plants her hands on her hips, twintails swinging. "Welcome back, everyone! Thanks for lending us your help a second time!" Hikaru presents two fingers to the Elites in combination with proudly announcing, "This time, we've found where *two* more parts landed!"

    "Meaning, two we can't get on our own, lun. Even with the help of Hikaru's..."
"AI says they're called pikmin!"
"Lun, even with the pikmin."
"Oh! And come look at this!"
Merelisa Shaynore     Around the rear of the spaceship, Hikaru leads the Elites to show off the red onion, now hauled all the way over to the crash site. All the pikmin are blankly clustered between its tripod legs, like they're standing at attention in a loose blob. Hikaru sticks two fingers in her mouth and whistles loudly, and the pikmin react by all swarming around her legs to follow her.

    "We brought 'em over here! And I've been learning how to tell them to do stuff. Isn't that *super* twincool? AI says that the onion uses whatever sugar's in the stuff you give them to make more seeds for these guys. It's like symbiosis!"

    Lala turns away to whisper "what's 'symbiosis' mean?" to the digital display on the back of her glove. She nods at the answer, then says at normal volume, "Lun. It's like that."

    "We've been going slowly, since it's hard to see very far outside the path that Brawl made, lun. We haven't found the X-ray Detector for tracking down where Yuma ended up yet, but these parts are still *mission critical*. This first one's stuck in a tree, but it's too high for us to reach, lun...."

    After everyone's done with whatever preparations they want to do around the spaceship-- including potentially feeding whatever they might have on hand to the onion!-- the group can go forth into the woods, straying off the torn grass and earth Brawl left behind fairly quickly.
Corona Arclite Like they say, watch that first step, it's a doozy.

But this time they can come prepared from the trip... So it might seem a little odd compared to last time when Corona comes through the wormhole/warpgate without a vehicle despite the drop. Just her goggles down to protect her eyes, one hand holding onto her hat, and the other arm out to stablize herself while jacket and tails (one fox tail, and one ponytail her hair is tied back in) flap about in the turbulence of the drop. There's the brief point where everything seems to slow. And then the plummet resumes. And that's when the wily vixen deploys the portable glider she was actually holding in that hand, using it to slow her descent to a reasonable landing near the crash site.

With boots safetly on the ground Corona dusts herself off. Then clicks the device to collapse the glider back down into the comparitively tiny tube in her hand, and tuck it back away on her utility belt. Between the upright ship, the gathering of pikmin, and that the Precures have managed to at least establish themselves some manner of stability, she just nods a bit. "Looks like y'all managed to make due for yerselves."

Then turns her head to look off into wilderness. Gives her hat a tug by the brim to settle it back into place. "Guess there ain't nuttin to do but get to it then. Don't worry, we'll find yer other friend soon 'nuff. Even if we gotta find a few other things first t'do it."
Lilian Rook     Lilian, who has quietly worried about these girls all week, has thought of several realities facing the two of them already. Having actually been trained to scrape by in much shittier wilds than this (which has come up oddly often lately), she thinks immediately about the things she misses on the odd occasion she has to. Food, soap, shampoo and conditioner, a pillow, chargers, and so on. She already knows there are bedrooms in that bizarrely charming spaceship, so . . .

    Lilian arrives with a backpack! It is a care package of sorts. Inside are enough shower supplies to last another few weeks (she presumes they must wash if at least one of them lives there), a battery bank with conversion cables, two flare guns (in case they get separated), two whistles (plastic survival issue; totally accidental that it's relevant), two compasses (redundant from AI uplink), chemical handwarmers, and . . .

    For most of it, a cooler crate of various sandwiches, boxed lunches, canned soups, dry pasta and noodle goods, fruits, yogurts, and candy packs (she doesn't actually know what they like), along with a few comforting bottles of soda (too young for alcohol!). She squeezed in a pair of playbricks with a few games she actually likes, and a couple of board games too, because they must be bored shitless when they're tired of exploring.

    Lilian is quick to hand it all off and be firm about them telling her what they've used. Bravely, she declined to bring them Two Guns. They're magical girls.

    '--sorry, Lala, you go--'
'--no, you first, lun!'

    "Goodness they're so well-behaved." Lilian says, quietly, but accidentally out loud. "And they get along so well . . ."

    'what's 'symbiosis' mean?'

    Lilian looks slightly surprised. She'd taken Lala for the scholarly one.

    'but these parts are still *mission critical*. This first one's stuck in a tree, but it's too high for us to reach, lun....'
        "That would be difficult for these little . . ." Lilian stares at the pikmin. She's not really a 'little guys' type. "Creatures? Can neither of you fly?" she says, then pauses. "No, I imagine it's too heavy to push out. What are these two items?"
Echolalia Echolalia, as usual, brought a fruit basket to the adventure. She is, strictly speaking, a famine ender and so long as you are fine with veggies and fruits she can satisfy nutrition for a long while. In this case, Lala can eat those star gummies! But wouldn't it be nice if she didn't have to? So when Echolalia returns, she has a big bundle of oranges, apples, papayas, durians, pineapples and some carrots and broccoli, and cabbage in a large box she is carrying on over her head which she sets down nearby.

"Lala! I figured while you're working here you might get hungry! I know you have those supplements but this is something of a specialty of mine so I can keep bringing some over whenever we come by to help!"

"That's 'Pre Cool' huh?" She adds, having decided to add these little complimentary puns into her lifestyle.

"

''This time we found where *two* more parts landed.''

"Oh nice! We can help you find those! That's... Planeterrific, right?" She's enjoying herself.

''AI says that the onion uses whatever sugar's in the stuf you give them to make more seeds for these guys.''

"Huh." Echolalia says. "Is that so...?"

She grows out an apple, breaks off a piece, and sets it down by the pikmin experimentally.

"I've never seen an onion like this before..." Echolalia murmurs. "Is this where pikmin come from? The onion?"

''The first one's stuck in a tree, but it's too high for us to reahc, lun...''

"Oh! Then I'll help with that one!" She says, since she thinks she'd be a good pick for that sort of scenario. But first she gives a few more fruit pieces for the onion out of pure fascination, drawing out a little notepad and taking notes on the process as she does.
Hiromi     Hisako continues to lack a means to fly. Jumping the whole way is a possibility, for sufficiently large sizes of wolf, but at her size, it's safer to meet up with the Combaticons at a Concord-affiliated waypoint and ask to hitch a ride (which she does very politely). So it is that she arrives hanging off the side of Vortex, up until she feels confident in jumping off. It takes one or two false starts as they near the crash site before she leaps out, hits her feet on the side of a tree, and parkours the rest of the way down.

    She could certainly have just waited for her ride to stop moving.

    She's brought food! Specifically, a huge bag of rice. Only rice. It's probably enough to feed a small family for months, if they rationed it and ate nothing else. Rather than take this to the onion straight off, however, she brings it to Hikaru, to express concern about their meal situation. If asked, she'll say that distributing food is "a regular duty for wandering miko," whatever that means. If Hikaru wants to feed a lot of uncooked grain to the onion, the dense bag of carbs should work well as an organic energy source in that fashion, too.

    Either way, Hisako's happy to be back. Or, maybe 'eager, excitable, and a little anxious' is a better descriptor. She lifts one hand from the straps of her rice-backpack to wave right upon arrival, noses around the outside of the ship to take in the changes, and then goes to give the pikmin an inspection she didn't have time to, last time.

    Grabbing one to lift up, she says, "Probably not food...?" and puts the little guy down again. Plants in alien environments are dangerous that way. Even if they're not poisonous, they could just be worth less than the effort to digest. "Full of water, probably...?" Good to keep in mind if they run out.

    That's all the preparation she needed.
Combaticon     Vortex descends from the portal in the shape of a large black helicopter once again. This time, at least, she has a lot more control over herself, circling overhead briefly before setting down and spinning down her rotors with a slowly descending whine. The red canopy splits to slide back and forward. Gripping the side, Depthcharge hauls herself out of her seat and hits the ground with the faint, heavy metallic noise. Behind her, the much bulkier Brawl disembarks with a crash that shakes the ground slightly. Only then does the helicopter fuselage split open and start folding up, compressing and rearranging into Vortex's robotic humanoid form.

    Brawl raises one hand to greet the two Precures; Vortex actually speaks up, "Hey. Good to see you two are managing. So you really did recruit those little organics?" She considers this new information, tapping her faceplate with a faint clink-clink, "Sugar is just chemically bound potential energy, but they didn't seem all that interested in the energon I had. I'll be more prepared next time." Depthcharge, meanwhile, just walks right up to the ship itself and flips up her scanning hologram to verify any changes from before.

    "Mission critical, huh?" Brawl's already considering the job of fetching spaceship parts. As Lala points out how high up the first one is, she leans back to peer towards the canopy, "I guess I could stick one of you in my cannon. Who's feeling like an impromptu flying lesson?"

    "I think we have options that don't involve scrapping each other," Vortex mutters.
Futaba Nuki With the spaceship upright and a food source confirmed for the girls, Futaba doesn't have to feel as bad about leaving them alone for any period of time. She still feels kind of bad, though, since the wormhole's right there, but...

Well, they have their reasons for not leaving that way, too. She'll just have to make sure to come back with something more satisfying than those gummies!  Thanks to an opportune trip through her home city, Futaba returns here days later with a big plastic shopping bag filled with fresh fruit sandwiches and not-so-fresh rolled tacos with beans and some kind of meat cheese substance.

This time, she's also prepared for the fall, and Futaba already has her flappiest scarf on to billow dramatically with her sparkly descent. Spotting Lala and Hikaru on their way out, the ninja grins widely as she raises her hand in a quick wave while stretching her legs out all the way to the ground so she can touch down faster. "Yo, Lala! Hey, Hikaru! You been doing okay down here? You look like you've been real busy."

"Goodness they're so well-behaved."

Futaba doesn't realize it's an accident, of course, and she nods firmly in agreement. "That they are... God, that's adorable. Aah. Anyway. Down I go!" She announces while shrinking her legs back to their normal size to get closer, then holds the two sides of the bag open so they can see the assorted sandwiches and taco rolls inside. "I didn't know if you'd rather have somethin' familiar or somethin' new, so I got both! Now what's this about two parts...?"

Following the girls to the onion, Futaba looks over at the pikmin first, then whistles lightly when Hikaru's able to rally them around her. "Whoa... Wait, sugar? So that means these could...?" Popping a third, smaller arm out of her bicep, Futaba takes out one of the fruit sandwiches to feed to that strange onion. "How much do you think we could get with one of these?"

When it feels like nobody's paying too much attention, Futaba also scooches over to Lala to take a look at the display as well. "Symbi...? Ohhh. Got it." She murmurs, giving Lala a quick thumbs up before slinking away to her original spot. "Anyway. Let's get at that tree and find the... Uh. Whatever this is!"
Rita Ma      Rita- I mean, Cure Glow!- handles the drop the second time around by...

     Swooshhhh-- pah!!

     Landing in a three-point crouch so deep her little white jacket's lapels graze the clover. Which could mean nothing.

     "--a HUGE mouth--"
     She guiltily pops back upright so fast she almost totters over backwards, catching herself by sticking out her arms in a dual-function palms-out apologizing gesture. The pink shirt she's got might be a Natsuki-inspired touch, and her skirt's a little brighter green to compensate. Short sleeves and sneakers promise she's here to work hard!

     "Ah! Um! Lala and Hikaru! I'm sorry, Iiii..." Wait, they weren't talking about me. "... should've brought you food too!" she swerves, glancing at Echolalia and Hisako's offerings. And then at Lilian's extravagance, with a bit of real guilt.

     "What's 'symbiosis' mean?"
     Rita's just as intrigued by that as Lilian is, but for slightly different reasons. After leaning forward to peep the wrist-device past Lala's shoulder, she says "You're used to using all sorts of things. Was the spaceship yours to start with?"

     "AI says that the onion uses whatever sugar's in the stuff you give them"
     "Oh!" She waves in the spaceship's general direction. "Thank you, Mr. AI! That's really helpful. I'll bring some sugar cubes next time, maybe."

     Rita is, unlike Lilian, deeply a Little Guys type- well, more often a Big Guys type, but that's adjacent. So she gives whistling a little try too: hweh-hweeee! Do Hikaru's pikmin respond to it, or just the ones Rita herself helped grow last week?

     Either way, she sets off for the tree under Lala and Hikaru's guidance- "Don't worry! I'm a good climber!" she insists. If flying is something Precures are supposed to do, she might be in a little trouble, but...
Natsuki Nuki Natsuki had committed to the strange pair (trio? quartet?) of Precures out in Too Tall Forest, even though she'd still excuse the interest as something that was part of first-contact exploration. Once she helped flip the ship upright, when the girls made motion towards having things handled, Natsuki didn't push further - fully believing the pair if they said they were set.

She didn't really need an excuse to want to keep going, anyway, as Futaba was sure to stick to her 'ninja way' and keep assisting the girls. So, of course, to 'get Futaba', Natsuki would simply have to keep going!

Floating down from the sparkling warpgate-drop over the trampoline on a falling fogbank of bad weather that doesn't quite get to more than bratty crackles and damp humidity, Natsuki makes her entrance with less uncontrolled falling than the first time. Stepping off the gentle sweep of her cloud wearing a white top under a rich purple jacket and black skirt, Natsuki seems more ready for a boardwalk than a forest adventure, but the tiger-eared and peeking-tailed chimera woman is at least proven capable of light platforming challenges. She carries a fragrant-sweet wooden barrel that's wax sealed and corked at one end, heaving the cargo over to the red onion.

"Pikmin, huh?" Natsuki asks, eyes tracking between Lala and Hikaru as they trade off speaking priority. She's about to get dizzy - or annoyed - when Hikaru takes the lead.

"It's nice to be back." Natsuki offers back semi-formally, nodding in lieu of bowing, and laughing at Hikaru's moving explanation as she does the science of if local Earth *small bees* can make honey with big enough energy for the onions!

"That you can turn sugar to seeds might just be all the way to twincool, that's right." Natsuki admits, warm towards Hikaru's excited explainer before Futaba starts smushing fruit sandwiches in her periphery and the big sister is forced to turn and engage in a brief squabble of 'sandwiches? really?' and an ear tugging session with gentle grumblings of Futaba being an 'irredeemable goober'.

With barrel of honey applied to the minion-making power of the Red Onion, Natsuki is ready to depart. "If you've gotten the locations already scouted out this should be fast."
Sarracenia      Even though she could have gotten back to the wormhole without it, Sarra is not about to pass up on a ride on something called a Fusion Trampoline! She even goes so far as to 'miss' the wormhole at least once to enjoy the ride both up and down before returning home. She would have suggested to the two cures that they come home with her to rest, but they seem like they would not do that since they basically live on the ship anyway. So instead, the princess leaves a selection of bento boxes and sweet drinks before she leaves.

     When it is time to return, the princess happily skydives her way back to the ground. Though unlike last time, her long copper hair is tied up in a long braid with smaller braids forming a sort of circlet around her head. Instead of using a leaf and the flight powers it grants, this time she pulls out a cloud shortly before hitting the ground and tosses it down to land on it. It catches her and then she floats lazily down the last hundred feet or so to ground before hopping down.

     The exuberant and cheerful greeting from the magical girls has Sarra smiling cheerfully in return. She curtseys to them politely in an outfit a bit different from her usual red royal gown.

     It's a long, flowing gown made of red denim with thin golden embroidery like little ivy vines are growing up from the skirt of the dress. Naturally it zips up in the back, and like most all of her dresses it shows no skin below the neck with the exception of her arms. The sleeves of this dress are short enough that even with the jean bracers that she is wearing along with her black gloves it still shows a bit of her upper arms...and the surprising amount of tone there. She is certainly no Hiromi, but there is some modest definition visible.

     She is even wearing stylish but durable red heeled and laced up boots. Perhaps not as 'royal' as her other outfit, but much more likely to endure the strenuous activities of search and rescue and exploration! And of course her crown and her favorite hair decoration are still in place.

     Sarra had presumed that since these girls live in their ship and did not seem to be in need of baths that they must have proper care supplies inside. And so...despite how adventure ready and stylish she feels in her jean dress, the princess feels quite embarrassed and sheepish when Lilian brings them everything they might need for a month's stay in a shelter.

     In an effort to regain some of that damaged pride, Sarra pulls out a pair of clouds for the magical girls. "Here~ With these, you should be able to fly most anywhere!" Sarra demonstrates by hopping back on her cloud and surfing off into the air, once again heedless of any giant birds. And she is happy to provide such clouds to anyone who might want one.
Futaba Nuki Is honey stronger than fruit sandwiches? Probably, but Futaba's still curious to see how the two compare to each other. "Think they'll come out different with these two?" She comments with an excited little jump in her step as she looks over at Natsuki, peering at the barrel and raising an eyebrow. "Where'd you even get something that big? Must've cost a fortune, huh?"

And then she starts making all manner of mildly squawky noises at getting her ears messed with. "Wawawawhaaat? I thought they'd want somethin' tastier than meal candy!" She yelps in amused and clearly faked protest, shrinking herself just enough that she can dangle off of Natsuki's arms without touching the ground herself. "Come ooon, I'm just a little gal! Lil' brithday girl!" She calls out, laughing even while she's trying to do the bit.

Her birthday was a month ago.
Merelisa Shaynore     Lala's eyes widen in excitement at the enormous bag of rice when Hisako plops it down, so much so that she clenches her fists and her antennae spark with excess energy. As more and more food gets piled on, she looks incrementally more lost and overwhelmed, dizzy-eyed and teetering backwards from the huge stack of supplies, still diligently thanking people each time they bring something new. Hikaru steps up to take the pressure off of her when she's reduced to mumbling "And thank you for... taquitos...?", giving everyone a collective bow and earnest "Thanks for taking care of us!"

    "Look at all that new Earth food to try, Lala! I bet we'll find something you really like in here." Hikaru turns to Lala, who's dubiously inspecting a durian and holding out her wrist device for AI to scan it. "It's all so colorful, oyo...."

    Lala closes her eyes and touches her antennae together in front of her, causing a short pulse of light. "Earth has so many more types of food than Samaan does. Back home, everything's like the cosmo gummies, just in different shapes, lun. Because that's the most efficient way to eat, lun."

    "But onigiri is suuuuuuuuuuper tasty, riiight?!" "It is, lun!!! I'll do my best to try them all!"

"That's... Planeterrific, right?"

    Hikaru stares at Echolalia with disbelief, before laughing delightedly. "It's planeterrific! That's a good one! *You're* planeterrific!"

"Sugar is just chemically bound potential energy, but they didn't seem all that interested in the energon I had."

    "What's that? Energon?" Lala looks wayy up at Vortex's face, trying to discern if she has a mouth. "Is that something AIs can eat, lun? You're AIs, right?" Oh, of course that'd be her context for vehicles that can talk.

> Depthcharge

    Depthcharge can notice a few of the extra parts the Precures have restored to the ship, in addition to that radar-- an Asteroid Detection Dish, apparently. They also recovered a temperature regulation unit, and a backup thruster, though that one is *just* unsteadily installed enough to maybe be worth a professional look-over before leaving them to their own devices. It *was* reattached after a catastrophic crash landing by children, after all.

"... should've brought you food too!"

    Hikaru glomps onto Rita with tackling speed to wrap her in a hug before spinning away, the moment she's stood up again after landing. "Gloooowwwww!~ It's been so longggg!~" "It's just been a week, lun!" Lala looks simultaneously consoling and apologetic at Rita. "It's okay, Rita, we have so much already."

"You're used to using all sorts of things. Was the spaceship yours to start with?")]

    "Lun!" Lala nods, proud, but with a cloud of complication on her face that's hard to place. "I was given it so I could leave-- when I left Samaan, to go searching for the Star Drop. AI's always been with me since I was a baby, though. Everyone's got one, lun."

"Probably not food...?"

    Lala gasps and snatches the pikmin out of Hisako's hand, placing it back on the ground where it totters away blankly to rejoin Hikaru. "You can't eat them! They have eyes, lun!" It's entirely possible that Lala doesn't know where meat comes from, though ambulatory vegetables are something of a gray area.
Merelisa Shaynore     Everyone's prodding at the pikmin reveals varied results, almost strictly plotted on a gradient of 'glucose density'. Most people's offerings get grabbed by the knee-high goobers and carried over to the onion, where they get sucked up and spat out as a seed or two of new pikmin that they can unearth. Natsuki's *barrel of honey*, on the other hand, has a near-flawless conversion rate of sugar-to-little-guy, and each handful globule of sweet, sweet glucose results in a handful of seeds being spewed out of the onion. If she drains the whole barrel, she might have even more than Hikaru does.

    And on that note, it is *her* that has them. Rita's whistling can detatch a clump of pikmin from Hikaru's horde-- probably the ones she was responsible for feeding-- and the others who've provided food all have a couple of little guys loyally ambling around them now. A couple pikmin aren't worth too much in the grand scheme of things-- they're only strong in numbers, and no one but Hikaru and Natsuki have bulk, but they're obedient little tools, if you can ignore the fact that they look like tiny men.

    "Woah... solariffic! Everyone's got some now! I wonder if we could take the onion with us?" "I still don't know how to whistle, lun...."

"Creatures? Can neither of you fly?"

"We can fly!"
"But only when we're transformed, lun."

    They seem to think it's self-evident that they wouldn't transform for the mundane task of carrying heavy objects around. Hikaru claps a hand to her bicep and adds, "I tried throwing them! But I couldn't aim well enough to get enough of them up there."

    And then it's just a short romp through untamed wilderness to get where Lala's guiding Hikaru to guide the rest to go. Pushing through tall stalks of grass, giving each other a hand up (and anyone else who needs it) when climbing a steep rock face, getting a long running start to leap over a crystal-clear stream, and then they're there, as the supersized forest opens up to another small clearing.

    Roaming around the clearing is a bunch of waist-high beetles with huge snapping mandibles, guarding a nest burrowed between the roots of one of those huge trees. They look hostile, and as Hikaru explains, "Those'll bite you! And they eat pikmin too, I think."

    Up allllll the way in the tangled tree branches, though, is a bright blue cylindrical gizmo covered in dials and buttons. There's a nest of forearm-thick twigs beside it, too, though there's no bird present at the moment that you can see from the ground. Lala takes a deep breath and points up at it. "That is... the Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine! It cooks rice!" "And makes donuts!" Lala declares this with utter sincere urgency, eyes fiercely sparkling with determination.

    She lets it out a moment later, suddenly stricken with embarrassment. "Eheh... the other one's more important, lun. I promise, sorry."

"I guess I could stick one of you in my cannon. Who's feeling like an impromptu flying lesson?"

"I--!"
"No!!"

    Lala cuts off Hikaru's enthusiastic raised hand volunteering with an arm bar across her face, holding her back with a stern expression. "That's way too dangerous! It'd be like missing a fall on the trampoline!"

    "Ehehe... you're right, you're right...."

"Here~ With these, you should be able to fly most anywhere!"

    "Lun! That's much safer! Thanks, miss princess."

    Even with the Precures able to fly up there, it's still a heavy object, and just heaving it out might make it fall directly on one of those beetles! They might be evil-looking, but the amount of goop an insect that size must have stored in them is awful to think about.
Corona Arclite Corona Arclite just rolls her eyes at the commnet and taps the controls of her arm device to mute it. If there's any actual important information the signal monitor will alert her. But there's more important things needing her attention than people having a bicker for no other reason than to have a bicker.

Like the fact that their objective is up in a tree.

Normally this wouldn't be an issue. But normally trees ain't as tall and big o' round as the gigantormeous flora of this peculiar planet. And a forest full of them from this viewpoint after the short climb up the rocks, which Corona had little issue with. For a few moments she just stands her, tapping at the side of her goggles. Which is switching through telescopics and a few other settings until she finally spots the indicated tangle of branches and device... and raises a brow, not that anyone can see it behind her goggles. That counts as essential?... then again, most of the food is going to the Pikmin... foliator. Or whatever you call it. Or something.

"Ah reckon it'd be best to get a better look at things." Corona takes out a small clockwork drone and sends it buzzing out towards the forwards, just beneath the canopy of the trees. Then syncs up the viewer of her analyzer to see what it sees, focusing it towards the cluster of big beetles. And what they're clusterin' around. "That looks like some sorta nest dug under the tree there. So yeah, they's gonna be a wee bit territorial. Best iffen we avoid botherin' them."

A pause.

"Or worse comes to worse, give 'em a distraction."
Hiromi     'You can't eat them! They have eyes, lun!'

    Hisako needs a few moments of concerted effort to process this. She's trying to understand. She's really trying.

    Finally, a lightbulb moment. "Oh! Like potatoes." She whispers, "poisonous." The artificial spirit Lala calls 'AI' must have already warned her.
Lilian Rook     'Thanks for taking care of us!'

    "I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I didn't do at least this much." Lilian says. "I don't know what being a Precure is like, but my own work is quite dangerous. I wouldn't feel comfortable out in the wilds on an alien planet like this without at least that much preparation."

    'Earth has so many more types of food than Samaan does. Back home, everything's like the cosmo gummies, just in different shapes, lun. Because that's the most efficient way to eat, lun.'

    Lilian lingers on that. Chewing on the word 'efficient' for a while, to see why it tastes wrong. This time she's more hesitant than her previous attempt at 'lun'. "What do they do, then, with the time saved? If eating 'efficiently' is so important, they must have other things they care about more." Lilian says. "Refusing to engage your senses isn't healthy to do in the long term. That includes taste."

    'AI's always been with me since I was a baby, though. Everyone's got one, lun.'

    "What does a baby do with an AI?"

    'We can fly!'
    'But only when we're transformed, lun.'

    Lilian does not seem to think it's terribly obvious. "Is that especially taxing?" she asks, pretending to analyze Hikaru's gun show. "And they didn't mind that? That's surprising." She glances back at the space ship. "Well, you've done well installing the necessities so far."

    A little ways into another wilderness hike; long enough to take Lilian's mind off things with the pleasant familiarity of idly dancing through a forest; even a giant one . . .

    'Those'll bite you! And they eat pikmin too, I think.'

    Lilian opens her mouth, then closes it silently. She is stricken by suddenly having no idea where these girls are in regards to desensitization. Does pikmin dismemberment not bother them? Would chopping up the beetles be over the line? Even if they're bugs, it's still sort of blood and gore and violence, right?

    Lilian decides to err on the side of caution, without being unhelpful. Standing on a higher vantage, she takes her time assembling interlocking rings of black-gold magic, drawing overlapping orbits and assembling them into a complete series of circles with her hands, as if they were physical things.

    Turning the individual components as if calibrating something, aligning points of light into a calmly rotating system, she finally spins up the array and begins hosing down the beetle blob beneath the birds' nest with a steady stream of constant magical firepower, dragging it back and forth like an extremely bright(dark?) and hot eraser tool. It's overkill for the problem, but that makes it a barely family friendly death ray! They mostly just disintegrate or turn to glowing charcoal!

    'Eheh... the other one's more important, lun. I promise, sorry.'

    "Well how are you going to cook all of that rice without a rice cooker?" Lilian says. Her actual reasoning is different. The ship appears to be very safe, stretching rations is a perfectly fine justification, and these girls will probably keep being psychologically taxed the longer they go without their comforting familiar things. It'd feel awful to leave anything of that sentimental value, borne of being used regularly by two friends in a cozy space-treehouse, stranded and forgotten on some wild planet. Or so she projects anyways.
Combaticon > "What's that? Energon? Is that something AIs can eat, lun? You're AIs, right?"

    Vortex glances down, patting a few spots on her chestplate before she finds the right storage compartment to produce a small glowing pink object about the size and shape of a poker chip. Holding it up between two fingers, she explains, "It's basically food for us, yeah. Though we're not-- well, we *are* robots. I don't know if 'artificial' is right. We mostly draw a distinction between mechanical life like us and organic life like you two."

    She holds out the energon chit, "Take it if you want, I have a bunch. It's stable and it's not harmful to humans; if you don't eat it, maybe it could be a decoration or something."

> "I tried throwing them! But I couldn't aim well enough to get enough of them up there."

    Brawl perks up when Hikari mentions this, only to deflate when Depthcharge shoots her a look. Her shoulders slump further when Lala shuts down Hikaru's attempt at volunteering for the Bullet Express. By the end of it, the big robot falls to the back of the group, tapping her fingers together with a faint metallic clink-clink, "Right. Uh. I'll-- guard the ship, and Depthcharge."

    "I hardly need a bodyguard," the blue robot lady hisses in annoyance. Only after speaking does she glance aside, taking in the dejected look of her teammate. Eyes closing, she lets out a static-filled sigh and returns to her work, "Do whatever you want." After another few moments of examination, she closes down the holograms and flips her left hand into her wrist, extending the multitool, "Here. Make yourself useful and hold this while I fix the linkage."

    Well, that'll keep the tankbot from getting too depressed, anyway.

    On the short hike, Vortex spends most of it on her feet, though when climbing is required she spins up her rotors and flies in robot mode, helping pull others up as necessary. Reaching the base of the tree is a fairly simple endeavor when one can fly or even if they're just athletic enough, it seems.

    Lilian leads the way in dealing with the beetles at the tree's base. Being a rare asset as a flyer in this team, she opts to accompany the Precures and Sarracenia up into the tree itself. She stays in robot mode this time, as her vehicle form is much bigger and the wash from the propellers might make those dainty clouds unsafe to use. She surveys the part, circling a bit with a synthesized hum of thought, "This is a... 'food processor'? It looks pretty heavy. I could probably haul it down in vehicle mode but I don't think I could carry it back to the ship on my own."
Echolalia Echolalia beams when thanked for the food but this is the sort of stuff that's just expected of her, so she's mostly gracious rather than smug in this case.

''What does a baby do with an AI?''

"Babysit?" She offers.

The cosmo gummies actually sound like they taste a little good, but she figures anything would get old after a while. She almost asks Lala if she'll be okay going back home and eating the gummies forever again since it didn't seem like she would but then thinks that's kind of a mean thing to ask her, isn't it? So she just presses her lips shut and mulls miserably on it for a moment.

''*You're* planeterrific!''

"Eheh..." Echolalia grins, rubbing at the bridge of her nose with an index finger in exactly that way you know. "I couldn't stop thinking about them. Do you got any others?"

Echolalia, once she has a couple little guys, uses some vines growing out of her back to give rides for them up to the top of her shoulders like she's the minion giving THEM a ride around, in defiance of the natural order. But really she just wants to keep a closer eye on them.

And maybe protect them from getting eaten.

''And they eat pikmin too, I think.''

"That's Black Holerrific." Echolalia says solemnly.

''That is... the Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine!''

"It does both??" Echolalia gasps. "...Nah I getcha. I mean, you don't want to rely on us for food that isn't those gummies THOUGH I'd like to try one sometime if that's alright!!"

''Just heaving it out might make it fall directly on one of those beetles!''

Echolalia sees this as an opportunity. She reaches out to the tree and the branches that have entangled continue to grow out and provide a nice kind of thick protective slide to make it easier to guide that heavy machinery down. Without bug murder! Because bugs are friends, Echolalia knows, even giant bugs.
Rita Ma      Vibing along with Hikaru and Lala's bounciness means that, when she's glomped, Rita makes an "ahwa-!!" noise she ordinarily never would. After a second, she "mm-hmm" settles down into smiling and patting Hikaru's head.

     "Cure Milky! Cure Star! No, I get it. It feels like a lot longer, right? I'm so glad to see you two again! Even though I shouldn't be, I was a little worried all week..."

     "What does a baby do with an AI?"
     "No, I think it's really cute, Ms. Rook!" she says, swaying forward to look around other people while they walk. "It means that they're like childhood friends, right? And that's really sweet! I'm still sad I missed out on those..."

     "O-ni-gi-ri," she sounds out under her breath, later.

     "You can't eat them! They have eyes, lun!"
     Rita stares at one of her tottering-along knee-height companions. It stares blankly back. Should she? Could she? It'd be so useful to command them- but it'd horrify the Cures- but she could just take a little nibble out of the leaf- but it'd ruin the vibes. (And, anyway, is a little veggie guy too far from 'raw meat' for her palate?)

     She frowns and pats the little critter on its leafy head, leaving it blissfully oblivious to how close it came to death.

     "We can fly!"
     "But only when we're transformed, lun."
     Got it. Suspended death sentence, then. She has until they transform to figure 'genuine flying' out. Therefore it's in Rita's best interests to keep them from needing to transform. Therefore--

     "That is... the Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine!"
     "I'll get it, Cure Star! Rita maybe overcompensates a little bit in her eagerness to help- the way she gracefully zip-zip-zips right up the tree with an armful of pikmin, vertical wallrun into limb-hop-hop-hop into swishyfast scrabbling, is about an order of magnitude out of scale for even the omnipotent archetype of 'athletic cool oldergirl'. Surely this is normal for a Cure, though!

     If there's nothing threatening or intriguing in the nest, she can just get her pikmin to help her with the awkward leverage of hoisting the thing up, put it on her back, and then clawmarks-in-bark firepole slide allllll the way down with it. Girls do this!
Lilian Rook     'That's Black Holerrific.'

    "That doesn't sound great to me." Lilian says. "And careful now. I believe I'm the only black hole here. You might make a certain someone upset."

    'It means that they're like childhood friends, right? And that's really sweet!'

    Uneasily, Lilian says, "But it doesn't have a name?"
Futaba Nuki "Oh. The lady at the store said to eat those in the bag." Futaba clarifies for Lala, sounding somewhat uncertain herself. Has she evr even eaten those things before, or did she-she totally got the taquitos because they looked weird.

The durian gets her looking a little more worried, but the more mischievous side of her also really wants to see the girls' reaction to that thing being opened. Futaba's pretty torn up over that, but not so torn up that she'll ruin the surprise.  Instead, she focuses on the little pikmin coming out from all those offerings, confirming what she had assumed would happen with Natsuki's honey. "Good pick...! Heh. It's gonna get crowded down here if we let 'em all run loose, though. Don't wanna step on 'em or nothing, so...!"

Futaba turns her arm into a little passenger car like on a ferris wheel or ski lift or something, then sets it down. "All aboard!" She calls out to the pikin, whistling like Hikaru had a little while ago to try and rally them into it. She'll be a little disappointed if she can only get her guys in there, but not too surprised after seeing how much the first set was sticking to Hikaru.

Heading through the wilderness with the crew and pikmin in tow, Futaba moves with extended and dainty legs so she can minimize how much she has to actually step down each time. It's another precaution for not accidentally stomping on everyone's new buddies, and she goes back to normal size again once the group reaches the tree with the-

"Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine... Siiiick." She whistles lightly as she looks up at the big blue thingamajig, planting one foot on the tree to find her footing right on it. "Wonder if we can... Nah, the little guys would just get smushed under it, huh? And-"

She looks over at the beetles, then furrows her brow when Hikaru mentions their willingness to eat pikmin. "They'd get squashed, too, but that might not be so bad... Wait. Wait. Maybe we can use 'em to help bring it down!" Futaba guesses as she approaches the beetles, turning around briefly to give Hikaru and Lala a big thumbs-up to try and inspire confidence in them!

Moments later, Futaba turns into a beetle not unlike those hostile ones. Her coloration is a little off with a leafier-looking shell, and there's little holes every now and then scattered around her shell at the tip of each leafy marking. When she reaches the beetles, she clicks her mandibles together, gestures at the Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine with those same mandibles, then...

"Yo! Come on, let's get on outta here!" She calls out to the beetles in her normal tone, then starts walking away while glancing back to see if they'll actually follow a strange new beetle away from where they're set up.
Hiromi     Hisako is perfectly at home in a giant forest. She still can't fly, but she can run straight at a vertical surface in such a way that it almost seems as if gravity forgets her for a moment, and she's sure-footed on giant grass blades even as they bend. She isn't very helpful to anyone else, but it's not intentional -- she's just assumed that no one will need any help, and therefore isn't looking.

    Except, maybe, for the pikmin. She does watch them move about, noting that they don't really quite keep up with the kind of mobility some others have. They're throwable, sure, but there are a lot of them...

    Once faced with the straightforward issues of a far-up birds nest, and some hostile giant beetles, Hisako pulls on her gauntlets, tightens them as they tighten themselves, and brings her fists together. Okay! "I'm going!" And she's off.

    Her approach is only reasonably quick, slowing when she's close, but once she gets into aggression range of one of the beetles, and it focuses on her, it's Hisako's last step that's like a bear trap going off.

     She was in one position, and now she's in another, grabbing the beetle by its horn and twisting. She completes a full revolution, turning in the air and landing on her feet, but slamming the beetle down on its back. In that position least liked by anyone heavily armored -- gravity reversed and without leverage -- it's simple for Hisako to follow up by grabbing, spinning, and tossing the beetle far from its nest and somewhere into the forest. It'll possibly be fine, when it lands. Insects usually are, when thrown hundreds of body lengths, but scale matters, so maybe it won't be.

    She looks very pleased with herself for all of a few seconds, before her ears stiffen straight up, and she leaps back away just a couple moments before Lilian's magic is ready to rain down.
Echolalia ''And careful now. I believe I'm the only black hole here.''

Echolalia gives Lilian an uncomprehending stare, having absolutely none of the context. She's at first skeptical about Lilian being a black hole but the more she thinks about it the more she supposes that she can't be entirely sure she isn't one. If stars can be people why not black holes?

"Are you really...?" She asks, totally willing to buy it.
Sarracenia      All of this not fighting the enemies is a bit vexing to Sarra, but she goes along with it for now. She would not want to cause trouble for the others, and while she did not even consider she would be grateful for the suggestion if someone mentioned how messy squashing some giant bugs would be.

     Flying up to the top turns out to be easy. Getting the device back down safely...that is going to be harder. Joined by Vortex, Sarra's eyes widen a bit and sparkle slightly at the idea of... "Does that mean we can ride in your helicopter form on the way down?" Is that insensitive to ask a transforming robot? She has no idea. She just assumes a vehicle is meant to carry things even if it is a person.

     'That's Black Holerrific.'

     Sarra giggles lightly. "Perhaps...Black Holerrible?" she suggests. Though her expression goes flat at the warning that someone might get upset. "Well, the whole theme was my idea..." she says a bit grumpily.
Natsuki Nuki 'Where'd you even get something that big? Must've cost a fortune, huh?'

Prior to departure, Natsuki leans proudly on her barrel, dangling Futaba off of one arm while patting the top of her wooden sugar cache with the other. "What," The white-blond haired older sister smarms in opening while waving about the birthday girl. "Jealous you didn't think of it? Well, it just goes to show that you aren't ready to realize opportunity, baby sister."

Natsuki had been immediately taken by the little red men but didn't want to admit it for appearance's sake. The cute little nose sent their profile completely over, like dippy birds or little gachapon characters that were too common to have details but were still figh-ting.

Being so fierce was important, and earned immediate grit approval from the chimera while she minded the slurping-and-production of Honey into Little Red Men until there's a little gang of them around her!

Discarding Futaba to the side after peeling her sister off her arm, Natsuki drops into a crouch and gets eye level with the gang of Pikmin. Intense red eyes meet beady black dots on white pools. Rita tries to whistle for the whole group of them, but only gets her posse and Natsuki understands the generative - and magically henchitudinal - magic of the red onion.

"You're choosing me, just like that?" Natsuki asks, not expecting a complex answer - and not requiring one.

Getting underway, Natsuki doesn't quite have the talent for finger whistling, and after trying a thumb and index projecting whistle once and failing just starts tweeting and chirping like a laughing bird. Able to produce a whistling 'hyoo-hyoo!' thrush-call instead to get her Pikmin clumping up about her, Natsuki is amateurly practicing birdcall whistling along her red little hench-friends through the off the Brawl-beaten path and into the forest path around the tangled tree branches when the evil of a small nest of beetles is revealed! Guarding the path to rice - and doughnuts!

"Alright then, stand back," Natsuki declares, and may sound like she's talking to the rest of everyone. Arm thrown wide out to ward back anyone real close to her wake, Natsuki takes a step forward...

... and her little whistled army takes a little wave of steps...

And Natsuki is forced to crouch and turn around. "Hey. No. I'm gonna go smash them, and then come back for you. Come on, this isn't high school."

Natsuki reaches out to grip the frontmost red pikmin under her command, holding the narrow face with both hands to cup the plant's nonexistent cheeks. "I know you're smarter than a high schooler. And definitely smarter than Futaba. So, just--" Natsuki turns to leave again and the wave of pikmin surge at her heels and the chimera-gal stops mid-step to drop into a squat with arms across knees to exasperatedly sigh and tweetle-chirp.

"No, no, I have to go erase the prob-"

> It's overkill for the problem, but that makes it a barely family friendly death ray!

Natsuki watches as her whole first battle stunting opportunity is struck via magically called artillery that was woven while she faffed about with a salad of minions. Conflicted of emotion, Natsuki rubs her own face and sweeps back her bangs.

'I'm the only black hole here. You might make a certain someone upset.'

Still squatting, Natsuki looks up at Lilian high above. "Is that an emotional thing, or is that *your* demon magic?"

Standing up, Natsuki pats off her knees and leads her pikmin force personally into the charcoalized beetle area to see if the little snappy guys had stolen anything else of interest.
Sarracenia      How to get the piece back to the ship is presenting a bit of a conundrum. But, Sarra...has an idea. And a perfect tee spot. "Hmmm...this thing survived a crash and re-entry, right?" Sarra muses out loud as she pulls her giant hammer from her purse. "You all might want to stand clear~" she says in a happy sing-song. She hops to a spot just above the rice-and-donut maker, then lines up her hammer with the back of the machine. She raises and lowers her hammer like someone ranging a golf swing, then winds up. "Fore!!" Sarra has quite a bit of experience launching things with her hammer without destroying them, so...she gives that a try here! If her aim is good, it may just fly clear of the clearing! If her aim is bad or there is not enough power, though...
Lilian Rook     'Are you really...?'

    "In several manners of speaking." Lilian says. She's trying to be coy, but it's half-assed.

    'Is that an emotional thing, or is that *your* demon magic?'

    "What? I'm not demon. I'm obviously human." Lilian says. "Pretty much."

    'Fore!!'

    "What the hell is wrong with you?! Treat that gently!"
Corona Arclite On one hand the tanuki goes for distraction.
On the other hand, the hovering drone has a front row seat, and Corona through it, of Lilian's magical death ray.

After a moment Corona just shakes her head a bit. "Welp, they always said it still counts as stealth iffen no one's left livin' to report you.

Corona goes to maneuver the drone towards helping with the device, but has to quickly retreat it when Sarracenia starts swinging her hammer 'round to dislodge the combo cooker.
Merelisa Shaynore "What do they do, then, with the time saved?"

    Lala pauses to consider that, and not having any answer off the top of her head is kind of damning in itself. "Er... well, it gets it over with quicker. And there's always more work to be doing. And our AIs scan us to make sure they have balanced nutrition...? It's a little different for me, maybe, since I'm not doing the job I was supposed to be given...."

    Lala sighs again, antennae slumping, back to being glimmeringly guilty. "Hikaru's taught me to like eating, lun. But... there's lots of stuff to do, like... work, and AI entertainment, and...."

"What does a baby do with an AI?"

    "To get used to having one, lun!" There's definitely an extra assumption being made there that Lala hasn't thought to question. Lala holds up her glove device and taps her antenna to the display, synchronizing glowing, and the AI's synthesized voice pulses out of it. "I have been assigned to Miss Lala for thirteen years, two hundred and fourty one days, six hours, fifteen minutes, and two seconds."

    "AIs can fly their crawl-boards and make sure they don't get into any trouble, too. Babies don't know what's dangerous, but Mother teaches the AIs everything, so even new ones know what to do, lun. It's basically practice for being an adult."

"I'm still sad I missed out on those..."

    "You did?! Me too!" Hikaru shouldn't be saying that with as bright of an expression as she is, though that might be because of cameraderie, because her smile relaxes into a more sober one after that. "Well, I have Lala now, at least. I bet in fifteen years it'll seem like we've known each other forever. I'll be your friend too, Rita!"

"Is that especially taxing?"

    Hikaru hums and takes a pink star-themed pen out of her pocket (oh no Rita there's another greeble take note) and twirls it between her fingers, holding the tip close to the pendant around her neck. "Not *usually*, but... our magic comes from wanting to protect Yuma and help them grow up healthy. What if we... have a 'battery' of it, when they're not around? We could end up helpless, or something, before saving them...."

"Take it if you want, I have a bunch. It's stable and it's not harmful to humans; if you don't eat it, maybe it could be a decoration or something."

    Lala is about to politely decline Vortex's gift, as is instinct, but Hikaru dashes in to snatch it up before she can. "*Lunaradical*! This is from a robot planet? And we can eat it? And it glows? What's it made of? Where's it come from? Does it go bad?"

"I couldn't stop thinking about them. Do you got any others?"

    "You have to say what feels right!" Hikaru declares authoratatively, maybe implying that she just spins all of them off the top of her head.

"That's Black Holerrific."

    "That one didn't feel right!" Apparently there *are* criteria, though.
Merelisa Shaynore     With the combined strength of Rita, Vortex, and the (admittedly minor) addition of Hikaru and Lala floating up on Sarracenia's clouds (there's no objections raised to Rita's scampering. After all, they're flying, in clouds! And it's cool to scamper!), the Twincool Combination Device tumbles down the vine slope that Echolalia created. With the clearing emptied of bugs by a combination of politely deceptive removal, impolitely forceful throws, and a carbonizing death laser, there's plenty of free time to huddle up around the device and figure out how to lug it back to the ship.

    Meanwhile, Natsuki finds that the beetles weren't much of crowlike hoarders for shiny things. The ship part crashed there, after all, so they didn't need to go out and collect it. What they *do* collect, apparently, is a stash of dinnerplate-sized crystallized nectar nuggets, which her pikmin instantly go wild for. They make tiny little cheeping noises and flurry around her legs in excitement, waiting-- despite their enthusiasm, waiting-- for the command to pick them up and carry them back to the onion. What kind of survival instinct has a creature ignore food until it's told by a tall scary woman?

"I believe I'm the only black hole here."

    "That was a really cool laser, Miss Lilian!" Hikaru hops out of her cloud with a puff of vapor still clinging to her and soaking the hem of her hoodie and slides up to Lilian, waggling her eyebrows. "*And* it was really well color-coded... *and* you're like a black hole... are you *sure*...?"

    "She already said she wasn't one, lun! Please don't bother her with unneccessary questions like that." "I know, I know. But can't you imagine? The Black Hole Precure, Cure... Horizon. Isn't that *astrordinary*?" "It is really cool...."

    Lala looks around to assess the collective carrying capacity of the party, though given the natures of practically every person here, she'll end up missing the mark by a couple orders of magnitude. Or, rather, her AI will, and while she's asking it to 'estimate whether the weight of the device could be lifted by all the pikmin here', Sarracenia tees up and smacks it hard with her hammer. The clang sends it flying, but also stirs up a flutter of wings and birdcry from the noise alone, and when it hits the ground, there's a scurrying of beetles in the underbrush. Hikaru rushes over (it *did* go a long way, at least) to it, and says to Sarra with an awkward smile, "... I think we can try carrying it the rest of the way!"

    It might've survived the crash landing, but it wasn't without its share of dents. Who knows who much repairs could already be needed on its internals, and even though it's pretty sturdy metal, being smacked around all the way back to the ship would take a toll. There's quite a few strong members of the party, at least, and between them and the pikmin it's no issue at all to carry it now that it's accessible.
Merelisa Shaynore     The next place Lala guides the group, with assistance from waypoints from AI, is a wide river, shoulder-deep and burbling along at a relaxed, but still dangerous, pace. There's a convenient tree branch (at first glance, it's a trunk, but glancing upwards at the canopy it's actually perfectly sized to be one of those branches) bridging the gap, but it's slick with water, and it's a worrying distance to have to balance anyways. The real problem, and the ship part the Precures are trying to retrieve, is across the river, though.

    A big bean-shaped maw thing with legs totters around a jukebox-looking thing with an antenna. It's eyestalks go above even Vortex's head, and its mouth encompasses enough of its entire body size to potentially do the same. Lala crosses her arms on the near side of the riverbank, one antennae tap-tapping on her shoulder with the intensity of her thinking.

    "Whenever we try to cross the log, that thing-- AI called it a 'bulborb'-- tries to snap at us, lun. And it's really scary to run backwards across the log! And the pikmin can't swim at all, so we wouldn't be able to carry it back anyways ourselves...."
Lilian Rook     'Er... well, it gets it over with quicker. And there's always more work to be doing. And our AIs scan us to make sure they have balanced nutrition...?'

    Oh. That's the single worst and most worrisome answer. Lilian's brows furrow together and her lips twitch sideways in apprehension. "Gets it over with?" she repeats. "It's something you're supposed to enjoy. What's the point of approaching a leisure activity like that?" Now worrying she's pushing again, Lilian says "I'm glad that you have the opportunity. I think it'd be too sad not to try it. Surely that much work has to be more than enough."

    'I have been assigned to Miss Lala for thirteen years, two hundred and fourty one days, six hours, fifteen minutes, and two seconds.'

    "You're . . . thirteen?" Lilian is definitely thinking back to Lala complaining to Hikaru that she's an adult. The image of a horrid little sci-fi industrial revolution London planet crewed by overworked Victorian orphans eating gummies on five minute lunch breaks and toiling away all day for the Master AI is forming in her head. "Y-your mother, right? Teaches the AI?"

    'Not *usually*, but... our magic comes from wanting to protect Yuma and help them grow up healthy. What if we... have a 'battery' of it, when they're not around?'

    "That's . . . a surprisingly rational concern." Lilian says. She is audibly taken aback by someone around her actually considering that, rather than taking the approach 'idklol' and 'fuck around to find out'. "That's something that may be best to test on your own, later. It seems too important to not know."

    'That was a really cool laser, Miss Lilian!'

    "Thank you?"

    '*And* it was really well color-coded...'

    ". . . Um. With?"

    '*and* you're like a black hole... are you *sure*...?'

    "Th-that's very complicated to explain." Lilian says. She is absolutely not even trying to start from the beginning. Hikaru can learn about that when she's older. "The short version is . . ." Lilian looks around a little frantically, then having a sudden idea, she picks up a random pebble from the ground. Really kind of a grain of silica, here. "Due to certain reasons that involved . . . Ah . . . Contact? With? Relating to? A . . . Well, all you need to know is that it's because my powers do the things black holes do." Lilian says, holding out her little rock. Little black-gold sparks of harmless (to a rock) temporal magic appear, and--

                -----[stop]-----
    Lilian just puts it in her pocket.
                -----[start]-----

    "See? Gravity, radiation, special relativity, that sort of thing. Maybe you could come see it sometime. The black hole." That's almost entirely true actually! Now she doesn't have to explain anything! Definitely nothing about 'devouring' lovers! "My apologies. It's actually very difficult to go over in such a short amount of time."

    'The Black Hole Precure, Cure... Horizon. Isn't that *astrordinary*?'
    'It is really cool....'

    Oh nooooo now they have a cute name for iiiiiit!

    'estimate whether the weight of the device could be lifted by all the pikmin here'

    This being the fourth time Lilian has seen Lala muttering to that AI, she can't help but lean a little bit to sneak a glance over her shoulder.
Lilian Rook     . . . . . .

    'Whenever we try to cross the log, that thing-- AI called it a 'bulborb'-- tries to snap at us, lun.'

    "Oh dear god what is that?"

    Despite the number of monsters Lilian encounters regularly, from the eerily beautiful to the genuinely horrific, it's the bulborb that makes her instantaneously uneasy. She stares at it as if it can't possibly be real, even stopping to rub her eyes. "Why is its mouth so big? Where is its stomach? Why are its legs so tiny? How does it balance? What could it possibly need that jaw span for that would fit inside it?" Now she's the weirdo, for being the one freaked out by a googly-eyed critter.

    "You were right not to fight it. This thing . . . something's wrong with it." Lilian says enigmatically, clutching her pendant. "The pikmin being able to swim would make this far more convenient. I doubt they can be taught, however."
Echolalia ''That one didn't feel right!''

"Hm... So it's only for positive stuff?" Echolalia asks, apparently seeing that as the big difference between the various options she's seen so far. "I think I get it. Haha, Lunaradical. That's pretty... Twincool!" She heard that one before but she thinks it's okay to use ones you like from others too. This is something you can share, it seems like.

Lilian says she's only a black hole in several manners of speaking and also that she's a human, pretty much. But she remembers that Lilian pretty much sees everybody as human if they're humanesque enough so this doesn't tell her anything..! She cups her chin thoughtfully. To be on the safe side she'll have to keep her eyes open for any particular black hole-like activities. Though the trick is...how could she? She holds out a hand near Lilian Rook, thinking--if she IS a black hole, then it's probably super hot right outside her range right? But she doesn't feel it. MAybe it's other criteria.

''I'm not doing the job I was supposed to be given...''

"This Pre Cool stuff sounds really important though," Echolalia says, forgetting to change it to PreCure. "So it's not like you're not contributing."

She looks at the pink star-themed pen. "What's that?" She asks, because it seems like it's more than just a pen.

She gets her own kind of joy out of being helpful and doing her part so she's thrilled when the device comes down here.

''Are you *sure*...?''

Echolalia glances at Lilian again, thoughtfully. "Cure Horizon..." She murmurs.

She also glances to Rita thoughtfully, no doubt weaving a tale in her head about how Rita mastered her techniques because she didn't have friends to distract her from her training. It's a terrible story, she thinks, she'll have to try super hard to be HER friend too..! Gosh, she thinks, no wonder Rita doesn't like admitting she's a master. Her strength probably kept potential friends at arms' length.
A determined expression crosses her features and she turns back to the task athand.

"Hm... Let me see..." She summons up another apple and just tosses it towards the bulborb's mouth experimentally.
Hiromi     'I have been assigned to Miss Lala for thirteen years, two hundred and...'

    Returning in time to hear this, Hisako says, "Oh, I'm older than you." Why hadn't she considered that, previously?

    "Who is Mother?" The significant capital letter is well-recognized in tone. "A teacher?"

    'What if we... have a 'battery' of it, when they're not around?'

    "Your... determination, might run out, if you're away from its... source, for a long while?" Hisako thinks about that. "If your motivation is low, but your reasons are still there..."

    More thinking. "You're probably not eating well, then. You have to start from eating well, and then you'll have energy to work until you sleep." She nods, satisfied with this wisdom.

    She'd go on to say something about moving around to increase your heartrate after eating breakfast, if she thought anyone here didn't. That one's just too obvious, compared to starvation risks.
Corona Arclite "Welp. There's one problem." Corona jabs a thumb in the direction of the log. "That bridge is hardly up to safety code, swimmers or not."

There's enough people present that can handle monsterous indigenous lifeforms. So Corona strolls over to the log to tackle what she sees as an engineering problem. Something that's going to take more brains than guns to solve if they're going to use it to get the device back across the river once the fearsome critter is dealt with.

She holds up her arm to direct her analytical scanner at it and fiddles with the controls with the other hand, getting a good measure of the log's length and width. Exact measurements aren't required she just needs the approximations to work off of. Accomidate for the clearance needed to life and carry the device back across.

Then Corona goes into her inventory of gadgets and gizmos and extracts a pair of the extendable panels that are normally used for barricades and other on-the-spot field structures. A little fiddling with it's settings, then she braces it next to the log and activates it. To which the panels extend down the length of the log and lock together to form a guard rail. Another extending panel is positioned on the other side of the log to do the same thing.

At which Corona takes a step back to admire the simple but should be sufficient solution. "It ain't purdy but it oughta get the job done making the retrieval a bit more safe."

She glances across the river at the 'bulborb'. "Once the big-mouth critter is dealt with 'course." The bulborb is indeed wonky looking. But hardly the most hideous thing Corona has ever seen.
Combaticon > "*Lunaradical*! This is from a robot planet? And we can eat it? And it glows? What's it made of? Where's it come from? Does it go bad?"

    Vortex has made a mistake, "Luna...radical?" but she doesn't have much opportunity to object. One can almost see the static in her eyes as she fumble through the rapid-fire questions, "It doesn't hurt humans as far as I know-- yeah? It's glowing right-- it's like...refined energy--? I said it's stable--!"

    It's this flustered Vortex that wanders back into the encampment around the ship while Brawl holds the support thruster in place with both hands. Depthcharge is out of sight, but the telltale buzz and flashes of light common to welding indicate she's behind it somewhere, hard at work.

    "Oh, you got it," the beefy Decepticon lets out a series of beeps, "That was fast. We're not done with this yet."

    "Put it over there," Depthcharge's hand emerges, gesturing near the big red onion Pikmin producer, "I will inspect it when I am through with this repair. These connections are delicate and I would rather not interrupt this." The welding resumes before she's even done talking.

    Once that's arranged and the party departs again, Vortex regales Hikaru with some more Cybertronian lore, "That energon, we all use it to function. Our planet had a huge war that lasted a long time, and almost all the energon got used up. Now that the war is over, each of us is doing our part to conserve and help rebuild everything." She raises a hand, fingers spread out, "Before I reformatted, I was ten meters tall. But being that big uses a lot more energy. A bunch of my people decided to be smaller to help out."

    She buzzes softly in thought, coming to a stop by the... river? It feels like one, but when she glances up, she realizes this must only be a puddle or at most a tiny creek, compared to everything else here. Her optics dim as if she just closed her eyes, bobbing her head from side to side. Out loud, she mutters, "Everything is relative."

    The rotor 'wings' on her back extend, then shift up and down to become perfectly spaced. Spinning up, the robot takes to the air with the telltale *twhop-thwop-thwop* of any helicopter, just quieter. She still has to shout to be heard, though, and she directly antagonizes the Bulborb in an attempt to lure it away. She swings to the side, steering well clear of the 'bridge' branch that non-fliers would have to make use of.

    "Hey! Get over here so I can pull your pistons out through your own exhaust port!" . . . "And void your warranty with excess wear and tear!"
Hiromi     Hisako spends a little while watching Lilian make sparks, not watching her put something in her pocket, but seeing the result of it being gone. She doesn't know anything about gravitational collapse, so the entire conversation is going over her head, though she does think 'black hole' is a rude thing to call someone.

    'Why is its mouth so big? Where is its stomach?'

    "Maybe it's a shapeshifter, a-- a spirit. Or, maybe it's like a starfish." Hisako offers, hesitantly. She's definitely concerned, but the idea that it eats pikmin (even if no one actually said that) makes her a little more confident. If it eats plants, it's not that it's a specialized predator, and a spooky spirit or devil wouldn't need to gobble ambulatory grass, either. There must be a way to deal with it... and if it is a wronged spirit...

    'And the pikmin can't swim at all, so we wouldn't be able to carry it back anyways ourselves...'

    Standing up straight. "If that's the problem... I can help with that! At least, this once."

    Hisako pulls out a couple of paper talismans from where they were folded into her miko attire, and walks up to the bank of the river, by the water-slicked log. After making several passes with her fingers of some mystical significance, she tears the first talisman in half, and stamps her foot on the ground. It rumbles, then rises, stretching -- not out of the river bed, but out from the bank, an implausibly solid mass of earth and stone that anchors itself to the bridging wood.

    She has to rip the other talisman to finish getting her floating-land bridge all the way across, exhausting her supply of earthshaping magic for this trip, but making a dry way across without actually damming the river.
Futaba Nuki EARLIER

"Jealous you didn't think of it?"

"Psssh. As if! I'll leave that kind of thinking to you and Takeshi." Futaba laughs with a little waviness in her voice while NAtsuki's shaking her around. "I just figured the girls would be bored eating nothin' but those gummies. Also, try one of these taquito things. Gross looking, right?"

NOW

"... And heeeey. I'm way smarter than a high schooler!" Even in beetle form, Futaba somehow manages to look like she's puffing up her cheeks despite not having them and only opening up her mandibles some. Luckily, the ploy helps to get the beetles out of there alongside all the throwing and melting, and she takes a roundabout path back to the group sans beetle form. She lets out an intrigued noise at the sight of all those pikmin scurrying around the nectar nuggets, too, then slides on over to one of the carbonized beetles.

"Whoa.. You really did a number on 'em, Cure... Horizon, eh? You really got a knack for comin' up with these, Hikaru." Laughing freely, Futaba looks over at Lilian curiously for a moment to gauge her reaction to that, then snickers and scoots away a second later. Instead of making a thing of that, she instead just gives the carbonized beetle a light tap with her knuckle just to see what'll happen, then backs off quickly to instead join those pikmin and Elites carrying the Rice Cooker and Donut Maker Twincool Combo Machine. She gives Sarracenia some space to smack at ahead, though, whistling lightly at the distance it gets.

"... You ever been to a batting cage, princess? Might be able to get some scouts' attention on ya if you ever want to change careers."

Once she's back at the blue cylinder thingy, Futaba transforms her arms into those of a gorilla to aid in the transport. It's a fairly straightforward process, too, as she goes as far as slipping hereslf partially under the device to keep it off the ground so it doesn't get sanded down on the way to the ship.

Being shown the bean creature has Futaba furrowing her brow agian. "Another big guy.. Just the one, though? Good thing you two backed off, then. Can't imagine things going great for-" She gestures at the pikmin. "-them, if they really had to tangle with it on the river. But if falling off and them not being able to swim is the problem..."

Futaba holds a hand up, and it flattens out into what looks like a giant(ish) paddle board with handrails. "This should keep 'em safe and on board! Or..." She looks over at the bean creature, then starts putting her hands together for rapid hand seals while she's still in view of Lala and Hikaru.

"Let's see if I can't pull this off twice in one day." Futaba reshapes herself again, slowly growing larger until she's a smaller version of the large beany mouth thing. Approaching it without the slightest hint of concern, Futabamaw raises one leg in greeting and waggles her eyeball stalks a few times before glancing off to the side.

"Hey. Hey. Come on this way. Gotta show ya something." She doesn't know what it's supposed to sound like, so she just sounds like herself talking even with the giant maw.
Sarracenia      'What the hell is wrong with you?! Treat that gently!'
     '... I think we can try carrying it the rest of the way!'

     Sarra hmphs at Lilian. "It survived a crash! A hammer hit is not going to-" But then, there is that awkward smile from Hikaru. Sarra hesitates, then mmphs and looks apologetic. "If it requires extra repairs...I will happily pay for them." she says, holding her hammer behind her back.

     'Cure... Horizon.'

     Okay, now Sarra is starting to get a bit annoyed. But, she can't yell at kids for being enthusiastic about things and that beam was kind of cool. Sarra might be muttering about 'should have blown the bugs up' and 'could maybe perform a magical girl transformation' as they continue toward the river.

     Sarra does not really know what Lilian's powers are, and so when Lilian seems to singularity a pebble Sarra is almost as amazed as the magical girls. She only shows it for a few seconds before catching herself and coughing. "Lilian is definitely a black hole. She denies it, but she is. She is mar-...dating a sun. And mercilessly crushes any who get in her way."

     Sarra doesn't seem to think that is a good thing, but she's a bit biased.

     When it is determined that Pikmin cannot swim, Sarra ponders a moment before she reaches into her purse and pulls out...a small frog plush! She calls over one of the few pikmin that are following her, then squishes the frog against it. In a puff of smoke...the pikmin is now in a frog onesie with a hood. She picks it up. "There, you should be able to swim now." she says, then walks over to drop it in the water in a place where she can pluck it up again if it still cannot swim.

     The others might be freaked out by the bulborb, but to Sarra...this looks not unlike some of the creatures from her own world. Piranha Plants have only slightly more body in proportion to their mouths. "What is so odd about it? Creatures often have mouths that big in relation to their bodies on my world. It allows them to swallow creatures almost as large as themselves."

     '... You ever been to a batting cage, princess?'

     "A batting cage? No. What is a batting cage? I do not think I would want to change careers from heroic princess, though." Sarra replies to Futaba.

     Feeling jealous and outdone and like she owes the girls something after the stunt with the rice cooker, Sarra decides -she- should deal with this thing. "I have just the thing for this." she says, then pulls a large metal box from her purse. She sets it down, and pushes a button on its top. It starts unfolding. And unfolding. And unfolding.

     Until it is a box-shaped cannon big enough to fit a car inside of. There is a hydraulic whine and a heavy KA-THUNK as an appropriately sized shark-faced projectile slides into place. "Stand back, and I shall clear the way!"

     She hits the back of the cannon with her hammer, and the Banzai Bill fires, heading right for that big mouth. Whether eaten or not, when it hits it releases a series of rapid and growing explosions, the last one slightly delayed and bigger than the rest and releasing a mushroom cloud.
Natsuki Nuki Natsuki's adventures in responsibly handling a gang of li'l guys becomes less and less patience straining as each little habit and tottering-attentive snap or wagglingarmed run in her wake or excited wobbles as they find interesting things.

Being assigned the treasure of 'a gang of guys' maximizes the big sister's responsibility and sibling-minded instincts despite the black-scaled sway of annoyed eyes from her snake tail throwing a cold-bloodedly 'really? we're doing this?' in silent judgement over the gang of red pepper pals.

But 'this' is indeed what they do, Natsuki easily leading the brave expedition into the fried beetle area. "You liked sugar and don't like fried beetle. Okay, good to know, same, but--" Still talking to the little reds like her own gang of slightly listening deficient punks while she scowls at Futaba.

Surely, her sister's idiocy has rubbed off on these poor angels, by example! She'll get that Nuki back yet. . .

The excitement of her gang of Pikmin that still remain completely at heel draw Natsuki's rapt attention, dropping back down to a squatting crouch and looking at Pik-level at the nectar blocks. "You want these?" She intuits, laying a hand on the big disc. "what in the world made such a weird disc like this, is it a part?"

As it turns out - it isn't a part, but makes the Pikmin excited all the same. Doing her best impression of Hikaru's 'go' whistle in awkward forced-chirp, Natsuki gently pushes some of her obedient henchpeppers towards the nectar discs with her palms to add a teaching impulse, and then sees where the little gang goes with their prizes.

'The Black Hole Precure, Cure... Horizon. Isn't that *astrordinary*?'

"Okay." Natsuki admits, huffing and biting her tongue to not emit a bunch of whistling laughter and order her pikmin around. In her wake is the whole beetle-loot expedition of tumbling-tottering Pikmin carrying discs in alongside, Natsuki doing more supervising than directing. Pleased to find an immediately respectful *and* almost-more-intelligent-than-her-sister native lifeform on a planet had given her strut to her step.

After her quick save and releasing tension, she continues. "That one is pretty good. I bet *you're* the bold powaa type, ah? You must be." Natsuki 'implies' (outright states) while letting the excited reds in her care handle the pucks of nectar as they wish. Watching them as much as she follows the conversation, it's a pleasant detour from watching her sister be the biggest doofus even at this absurd scale.

A bit later, when looking at the bulborb while backed-and-surrounded by a whole held-back penumbra of red eyes and a peacock frill of pik-sprouts waving from the numerous gang of reds covering behind the chimera-gal, Natsuki sucks on an eyetooth and scowls down at the bulborb.

"That's a real messed up frog." She decides, before reaching over besides her and grabbing to heave Futaba out into the water as a distraction!!

Unfortunately, her hand closes on air, and all the pikmin follow her extending-out arm to grab. . . nothing (a dot-outline of Futaba Not There) while the younger Nuki is already doing the absolute dumbest thing possible at any given moment via direct face contact. It was... almost reliable!

It was also insanely stupid-feeling. Feeling stupid by proxy, Natsuki closes her fist completely around empty air and whistles her Pikmin to attention about her.

'If that's the problem... I can help with that! At least, this once.'

Hisako's paper talisman bridge gets a palms-together nod in passing from the birdsong-marshalling chimera-gal as she jogs her crowd of Pikmin across the dry earth bridge towards the part while Futaba. . . Futaba's.
Lilian Rook     'Maybe it's a shapeshifter, a-- a spirit.'

    "God I hope so."

    'Lilian is definitely a black hole. She denies it, but she is.'

    "I suppose that would seem the inevitable conclusion to you." Lilian says. Her voice drops a half-octave into eerily relaxed fry. "You can't discern anything inside, and yet you're utterly helpless to escape my orbit. You're trapped in this spiral, watchng the whole world pass you by, and you'll never understand why." Tilting her head up, she smiles at something a million miles away.

    'That one is pretty good. I bet *you're* the bold powaa type, ah? You must be.'

    "I prefer to think of myself as elegant, rather than bold."
Rita Ma      Cure Glow puts a hand under a corner of the rice-maker! Ostensibly she's just helping steady it. In reality, her footprints have gotten about an inch deeper.

     "Ms. Rook is really 'astroardinary'!" The newest Cure says that word with barely a hitch, though one might sense she's switched languages for the pun to land. "I've been with her on a lot of her cool adventures, you know. She's been through a lot... but she's still dependable and kind, and even when she's having a hard time, I think her biggest wish is for everybody to be friends with her."

     Is that really okay to say when Lilian's right there? Of course it is! That kind of honesty is just Cure Glow, lighting a way in the darkness! "And she definitely does have 'boldo powaa'."

     "And our AIs scan us to make sure they have balanced nutrition...?"
     Oh. Rita trusts the AI about twenty percent less, knowing that.

     ... Should I be taking multivitamins? Am I going to get scurvy someday?!

     "You did?! Me too!"
     Dusting off her hands after setting down the Twincool Combo Rice-Maker and Donut Fryer, Rita is unexpectedly pierced through the heart. Her breath catches in her throat. "You don't have any childhood friends...? But you're only-- and you're so sweet, and--"

     "I'll be your friend too, Rita!"
     Second pierce. This one feels cooler, instead of hot sympathy-anguish. "Ah..." Hands that had been up-and-out clutch her chest against the chill, now, with a guilty smile. Dry-swallow. "... I'd be really happy if we were friends, Hikaru. Thank you. We could be pen-pals! And I could show you the cute island where I live, and..."

     Which is the truth, and leaves out the other truth, that I'd be shocked if she still wanted to be my friend at the end.


     Oh thank goodness there's a big hideous scary frog. That's a great thing to think about, instead of feelings.

     "It's a monster," she says patiently to Lilian and Natsuki, while pointing at it, as if that explains totally everything. "Of course it'll be like that. But, the eyes... and if 'pikmin' can live in an ecosystem with it..."

     Rita rolls a thought around in her brain. When Futaba distracts it (hopefully), she slips across Hisako's bridge with her small gang of pikmin in tow, and hurls one-two right for those eyestalks from behind. "Hmp- ha-! Good luck!!"
Lilian Rook     'I've been with her on a lot of her cool adventures, you know. She's been through a lot... but she's still dependable and kind, and even when she's having a hard time, I think her biggest wish is for everybody to be friends with her.'

    Lilian catches herself halfway through a sigh. The sheer weight of ambiguity falling off of her all at once is too much to resist. Tamping down on it, she tries to make it look like a yawn and stretch. She hasn't even put her arms back down again before she freezes up and says "R-Rita. Come on . . ."
Rita Ma      Rita looks back and up at Lilian--

     --then remembers that when she hears Lilian's voice, she needs to look down--

     --and then smiles, shoulders pushed in-and-up, eyes shut, and a third pikmin dangling by its leaftenna from her politely-behind-clasped hands.

     "Oh! Sorry, Ms. Rook~! But it's not polite to eavesdrop..."

     She pretends not to notice the relief, warmly.
Sarracenia      'She's been through a lot... but she's still dependable and kind, and even when she's having a hard time, I think her biggest wish is for everybody to be friends with her.'

     Sarra hmphs at that. "Not everybody, it seems..." she murmurs. She doesn't think she has any blame in that matter, after all.

     'You don't have any childhood friends...? But you're only-- and you're so sweet, and--'

     "I mean...I had my servants, but-..." Oh wait, Sarra is not the one being talked to. She clams up quickly and tries to pretend she said nothing. Lilian and Rita are being cute, and the cute magical girls are being cute, too. Sarra is unsure she can handle all of this.
Merelisa Shaynore "You're . . . thirteen?"

    "Lun! Almost fourteen!" "I'm just a month younger!" "That's still younger! And besides, it's *different* on Earth, lun."

    Lala puffs up her cheeks lightheartedly at Hikaru, with the airs of it being a faux-argument they have pretty frequently. Still, she seems defensive of her status as an 'adult', even though it meant she got sent on an intergalactic mission at thirteen....

"Y-your mother, right? Teaches the AI?"
"Who is Mother?"

    Lala crosses her arms over her chest, but it's AI that responds in her place, emitting from her wrist. "'Mother' is the core AI of Samaanian society. She is the archetype that every personal AI assigned to each Samaanian child is based on, and each week, we return to her to synchronize our personal databases with hers." The wrist display pulses twice, before saying in a much more 'robo-tone' voice than the comparatively fluid feminine voice it usually synthesizes, I am [[Twenty-Five]] weeks overdue for data synchronization."

    "... I know, lun. It's not that easy to travel back, especially not with Yuma.... So please be patient and wait a while longer, lun."

"Hm... So it's only for positive stuff?"

    Hikaru hadn't considered this before, but when Echolalia suggests it, she pounces on it with an enthusiastic nod. "That's right! Because space iiiiiiiiis... astronuts!!!"

"If your motivation is low, but your reasons are still there..."

    "Then eat more...." Hikaru nods gravely, brow furrowed in contemplation of Hisako's wisdom. She grabs Lala's shoulder and wiggles her a bit, eliciting a shocked 'oyo--?!'. Lala, Lala, what if the cosmo gummies are bad for our magic? What if they don't give us enough motivation to transform?"

    "Oyo... I never thought about that...." Lala mirrors the exact same forehead-scrunched look of serious contemplation. "I'll do my best to try all the Earth food, lun."
Merelisa Shaynore "You liked sugar and don't like fried beetle. Okay, good to know, same, but--"

    Natsuki's pikmin don't seem to recognize the fried beetle as food at all, but they *are* basically carbon char at this point, so it's hard to say what their meal preferences are. Besides the fact that they go *wild* for that sweet plant stuff. When she gives her hyooting whistle, they pour forth in a tide over the nectar, assembling into neat pairs and groups to lift up each nugget of it. It might be her imagination, but it seemed like they were responding a little quicker to her not-quite whistle that time, like they were adapted to *specifically* her tenor of command.

    Either way, their destination is clear, and their march is mindless. The train of nectar-movers winds its way out of the clearing and back towards the ship, completely oblivious to any beetle or ramp in their way, with pathfinding deficiencies rivaling Futaba's when she has to walk on the street instead of the rooftops.

"Well, all you need to know is that it's because my powers do the things black holes do."

    This might simultaneously be the worst and most exciting thing Lilian could've possibly said to a terminal space dweeb. Hikaru's smile and eyes widen with delight when the rock disappears, and she starts darting around Lilian, partly to look at it from all angles, but mostly because the demonstration filled her with so much energy that it has to be vented as extraneous motion.

    "For *real*?! Twincooooooooooool! Like a real black hole? Can you pull things with gravity? Can you stop time? Does it actually release Hawking radiation? What happens if you cross the event horizon? What *actually* happens to stuff that a black hole eats? Would it hurt me if I went in one?"

"You really got a knack for comin' up with these, Hikaru."

    Hikaru, for the second time, says something kind of heartbreaking with way too much pride in herself. "Yep! I spend a lot of time thinking about what it'd be like if I had more friends."

"She is mar-...dating a sun."

    Hikaru doesn't quite know what to make of Lilian 'crushing everyone in her way', especially not with Rita giving the exact opposite assessment, but *that* part she latches onto. In the most damning way possible for Lilian.

    "... A star? Like Yuma?"

This being the fourth time Lilian has seen Lala muttering to that AI,

    ...Huh. The calculations shown on the screen for Lala's benefit, before announcing the result out loud, are just basic multiplication?

"You don't have any childhood friends...?"

    Hikaru's small smile stays steady, expression softening. She keeps her eyes on the Twincool Combo Machine while carrying it together, rather than meeting Rita's eyes. "Well... until recently, I was always happy doing my own thing. I'm a little surprised that it's changed for anyone but Lala, but I guess it must be because I've been meeting so many twi~incool new people, right?"

    "I'd love to be pen pals... do you live near here? I don't. I..." Hikaru lifts up her head, perturbed by something she hadn't thought about until now. "I don't know how often Yuma would be able to bring us this far. It was really hard on them."
Merelisa Shaynore "Now that the war is over, each of us is doing our part to conserve and help rebuild everything."

    "Okay! Do your best!"

    On the way back to the spaceship, Hikaru doesn't have a ton of insight on the economic resource strain of a multi-million year long war fought by giant robots. She's happy with the energon, though!

"Before I reformatted, I was ten meters tall."

    "I think it'd be twincool to be ten meters tall...." Hikaru bends down and lifts up one of her pikmin, holding it by its stubby little arms and waggling it around. "I'd be soooo big and scary. I could run through the streets and knock buildings down, and everyone would be *super* tiny just like the pikmin. I must be like Godzilla to them! Or King Ghidorah!"

    Miming a kaiju, Hikaru snaps her teeth at the blank-faced pikmin in her grasp, and for a terrifying moment it really seems like *she*, of everyone here, is going to be the first one to take a bite out of one of them. She doesn't, though, instead drawing back and smiling at the silly little man.

"Maybe we should build tiny houses for them, Lala."
"They won't care about them, lun."
"Yeah, but then I could go knock them down, like POW!"
"Oyo...."

"That's a real messed up frog."
"Oh dear god what is that?"

"I *told* you it's ugly, lun!"
"It's really ugly! But it's still an alien, so I didn't want to be mean."
"But now we know it's ugly even to the people that live in this galaxy."
"Except to Miss Princess?"
"Maybe her planet's nearer, lun."

    With almost everyone contributing to a different part of the plan to retrieve the radio, everyone's disparate efforts fit together without a hitch, for one of the first times ever. The bridge is widened by Hisako's earth-shaping, then reinforced on the sides by Corona's handrails, enabling Natsuki and Hikaru's pikmen to begin their march across. Before they get there, Futaba guides the bulborb away from the radio (it snaps at her a few times with its big terrible mouth, making it unclear if it's being territorial, or if her disguise totally failed), and Vortex's swarming gives Futaba enough time to slip away before Sarracenia's Banzai Bill blasts the awful frog clear off the island and into the river, tumbling downstream. Then there's no more obstacles for the pikmin army to haul it up and back to the ship.

    NEW SHIP PART UNLOCKED: +Q!
Hiromi     'What if they don't give us enough motivation to transform?'

    Hisako nods seriously.

    ...it must be because I've been meeting so many twi~incool new people, right?'

    "Oh..." Hisako struggles for a bit with whether to answer this. "I don't know... if I can say, 'that's like me, too,' since that..." It helps, at this moment, to remember that Hikaru's actually younger than she is. It's okay to be a little more confident and relaxed, and on realizing that, she immediately is.

    "I can't say for sure if it's the same. But for me, too, I didn't have any, um, childhood friends. And then, my big sister brought me to the Pack. And now, I have a lot of sisters... most of them bigger. And they're twincool, too." She only has a vague idea of what 'cool' means, but it's that, right?

    Hisako glances at Lilian.

    'I think it'd be twincool to be ten meters tall...'

    "You can keep growing! I'll do my best, too." Hisako says this like it's a competely reasonable goal and not at all childish or insane.

    A little later...

    She isn't actually tired out by building earth bridges using talismans, since the energy was all prepared beforehand, but she still stands on the other edge like she's just finished some important work. Everyone here could have gotten over just fine at this point, except the pikmin, but... Natsuki passing by with her mob of little guys cements that 'I helped!!' feeling in the wolf-miko's mind. This becomes immediately visible via tail-wagging as she stands there, though with her facial expression unchanged, it's almost as if she doesn't realize.
Lilian Rook     'And besides, it's *different* on Earth, lun.'

    "I-is it?" Lilian nearly keeps the incredulity out of her voice. "Well . . . I suppose you wouldn't normally entrust a spaceship to a child. Humans aren't allowed to drive a car that early in their lives on Earth. Not for years. So I suppose it must be the impact of that AI on development?" Lilian says, at first only rationalizing it to herself, then becoming genuinely curious. She hasn't managed to stay disengaged and businesslike for more than five minutes around these girls. Some adult she is. "Or a different speed of mental maturation versus . . . ?" Lilian squints. "No I don't like that one. I'll stick to my first guess."

    ''Mother' is the core AI of Samaanian society. She is the archetype that every personal AI assigned to each Samaanian child is based on, and each week, we return to her to synchronize our personal databases with hers.'

    Oh dear god. The Victorian Orphans in Sweatshops are being raised from birth to work in factories all day by a Master AI. It's somehow worse.

    'I am Twenty-Five weeks overdue for data synchronization.'
    '... I know, lun. It's not that easy to travel back, especially not with Yuma.... So please be patient and wait a while longer, lun.'

    Lilian looks at Lala's AI doodad with faintly obvious misgiving. It's not something you'd fail to notice if you were paying careful attention to her, but not something that'd necessarily grab your attention either. "I couldn't live like that." Lilian murmurs. "If I had a personal companion like that, I couldn't bear them reporting every single thing I do to a master version. Even if . . . no, especially if I'd known them for a long time. It'd never stop wondering if they were really 'mine', or just an extension of the whole." A moment passes where it seems like she's going to mysteriously apologize again; then she decides not to. "Things really are quite different on Samaan." she concluds.

    'That's right! Because space iiiiiiiiis... astronuts!!!'

    "I rather like space. I've had one or two bad experiences, but most of my memories are happy ones." Lilian smiles wistfully to herself, thinking of Sapient Heuristics. Her visits get to be twice weekly now, but it sometimes still feels so far away. "At least, happier than when I was trapped on Earth."

    'I'll do my best to try all the Earth food, lun.'

    "I wonder if I can bring you something new to try every day . . . Ah, but that might not give you an opportunity to try what I already brought?"

    'For *real*?! Twincooooooooooool! Like a real black hole?'

    Lilian, who was wearing an intentionally black hole themed dress (unintentionally) last time, reacts to this suddenly energetic scrutinization with the audio cue corresponding to "?!" She ratchets up her posture and subtly leans back like the equivalent of a cartoon cat poofing up. "A-ah, miss Hikaru . . ."

    'Can you pull things with gravity? Can you stop time? Does it actually release Hawking radiation?'

    §Huh. Maybe I should take that comparison a little more seriously?§

    "Okay-- hang on! One at a time!" Lilian says, putting up her hands and doing her very best to sound accommodating. "A lot like that, yes. And I'm better at some things than others; at least while staying 'like this'. Yes, but it's usually harmless, because it's a very small amount, and most of it isn't ionized, unless it's vented on purpose like earlier," Well now she has her eyes turned upward in recollection, counting on her fingers as she goes.
Lilian Rook     "You can't get out once you do; not without faster than light travel, or you slowly fall into the singularity while watching the whole universe play out before your eyes in fast forward, which is really something to see. And it's still there. Ultimately, everything in the universe has a pattern that can be decoded if you work in reverse. If you had a computer good enough at calculating, you could reconstruct a letter from the smoke it let off from being burnt. So black holes aren't the exception, but it's very strange. It's . . ."

    Lilian doesn't remember where she knows this one from. Or she isn't sure why she has the idea. ". . . encoded, onto the singularity itself. But it all exists together, in the same infinitely small place. There's no such thing as empty space inside. Where you are only really exists in what your information is touching and what you have to trade places with to touch something else. Everything is joined together so intimately that it feels like where you end and begin is fuzzy and difficult, but you also know everything else there is in a way that's impossible with your five senses; you touch in a way that you can't with your fingers. It's frightening and incredible at the same time."

    Lilian stops, blinks twice, and says, "Oh, absolutely. Please don't go inside one. It's like falling so fast that you're being pulled apart. You could get very hurt. You could even die." Some part of her wants to tell Hikaru that this isn't all literal, but Lilian has been suddenly made uncertain that it isn't. "So don't go flying your ship somewhere dangerous, okay? My case is a special one. The 'black hole'-- she's a part of me and I'm a part of her."

    Well now she's the annoyingly responsible one, and sort of holding something over poor Hikaru too. Lilian squishes her lips into a half cheek-puff, wracks her brains, and says, "If you promise to steer clear of any black holes you find out in the wild, I'll show you. Okay?"

    'Yep! I spend a lot of time thinking about what it'd be like if I had more friends.'

    "I recall doing the same at your age." Lilian says, sighing.

    '... A star? Like Yuma?'

    "Um . . ." Lilian squints at thin air as she recalls the photo of Yuma. "Isn't Yuma something like a baby star? Like, they're a tiny little creature that you carry around?" Lilian shakes her head. "No, not like that. She's a full grown adult. And she's a star but a person at the same time? Or rather, she's all the parts of the star 'that are a person', I suppose. It's complicated." Lilian is so wrapped up in trying to make this remotely comprehensible that she's forgetting the obvious. She doubts Hikaru has much interest in shinto.

    'I think it'd be twincool to be ten meters tall....'

    Lilian, busily examining the AI output in a way that looks like casual glancing, worries enough about what she sees that she only says, "Right?"