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THE CHRONICLES OF FINALGAMER Tails of the Stars

"The stars are the street lights of eternity." Rosicrucian Proverb

Space has always become a marvel to those residing amongst the planets and moons. Seeing other worlds as tiny twinkling stars among many other similar looking stars. Realising that their own worlds look the same from that far away, offering a strange sense of hopefully mutual equality amongst the denizens of the universe. The space around the stars was nothing but a blank darkness where only light existed, travelling onwards eternally towards infinite eyes everywhere at once. Eyes seeing what had become the past, through the eternity of space. Far away in another universe laid one solar system, where galactic unions had become traumatic of late, and were only being resolved by one covert mercenary group. In the Lylat System, a galactic battle was raging, making the worlds more brighter than the stars around them with flames of war. Amidst this chaos was one small tear in the universe that went unnoticed, except for one ship detecting it. A body had been thrown through it in a blur of brown and blue. It writhed maddeningly in a panicked futility, the oxygen sucking from its body in the vacuum of space. Nothing to take in, nothing to breathe into, choking and screaming a gargling anguish only to be swallowed by the silence of space. Had that body been picked up perhaps 15 seconds later, it would surely have suffocated far beyond the point of saving, like a diver that had surfaced too quickly.

The raptor awakened within a metallic room, a monotonous hum forever emitting its single-chord song throughout the place as he laid on a bed. Fluorescent lights beamed into his skull to make him squint and cover his eyes sorely. He tried to get up, examining the place around him. It appeared to be a medical bay, judging by the look of the sharp liquid-emitting instruments around him on various cabinets, all of which kept the same colour motif the room gave. Clinical grey. About a minute later, the door opened, sliding away with a fwish to reveal a short-looking frog with bulbous blue eyes. He was dressed in an oil-stained shirt and beige jacket with a red cap, speaking in an oddly childish voice that sounded like extremely rapid gibberish. James looked at him perplexed. "Uhhhh...what the hell's wrong with you?" The frog spoke again in the same gibbering voice. "Are you lost or something? Stop speaking like a retard and tell me where I am!" This only brought another round of jabber, making the raptor clutch his head. He was already feeling rather dazed and weakened from his experience. "Stop talking like that, you little bastard, I have no time to play with you!" The confusion and the pain in his chest was not helping his mood. Thinking that maybe this was an actual language, he calmed down a bit and tried to sign out his next words. "I. DO NOT. UNDERSTAND." He signed this to the best of his ability with the loud slow patronising voice everyone used when meeting those of another language. "WHERE. AM. I?" Something seemed to have lit up in the frog, as he summoned a robot from down the corridor, a classic-looking thing on treadwheels with beady white eyes and a square "mouth". Unfortunately, it spoke in the same sort of gibberish as the frog, only with a metallic twang. James watched the robot move to a cabinet and bring out a small device. It spoke to James, who only replied with a confused tilt of the head, but the frog helped by signalling to lie down onto his side. He did so, and he felt something placed on the back of his head, something like a needle. It soon latched on with little hooks at the base of his neck, sending a strange electrical tingle through his skull that made him pass out without realisation.

The next time he woke up, his eyes blinked at the now more familiar medical room. The frog was still there, watching him before saying: "Hey, you're awake finally!" His words had suddenly become perfect English, much to the raptor's amazement. "Can ya...uhh...you know what I'm saying now?" "Y-yeah...I do now...um..." He wondered if the frog knew what he had said to him previously, but decided not to draw attention to it. "Wha...how'dya do that?" "Do what?" "Make me understand what you're saying, you were just talking total gibberish before!" "Oh that's just a li'l language codex in yer spine, though seems ya got one in there already with a really weird design. So I had to modify it a teeny bit, that's why ya had to be knocked out, so I could work on it. Sorry 'bout that, but on the plus side, now it'll be pretty open-ended for mostly any language you come across. But I warn ya, it's only ones you hear, not stuff you'll read." "So...I'm gonna instantly know what someone says in another language, but not what's in a book written in another language?" "Weeellll," and then the frog began his technological diatribe. "It works with yer ears which do lotsa complex stuff like context analysers an' emotional transcribers to give the best estimate for what someone else is saying, which then manipulates the soundwaves of certain vocal sounds slowly into yer own language which is already in yer head, as the language ya think in. Not perfect but yer not gonna get anything better. "It's like having a really really smart guy in yer head figuring out every language ya hear, kinda deducing it an' breaking it down. Then after a while of hearing it, it'll be just like yer own, as well as transmitting out the same language to anyone you talk to, like feedback without you realising it! Like right now, yer actually speaking my own language without realising it, it's all subconscious to ya. "Actually it was kinda in there already but I just tweaked it to our language and give it a really open easy language codex interface instead of the one language it was built with. Hope ya didn't need it." ".......right. That made absolutely no sense at all." James pinched the bridge of his snout and closed his eyes in frustration at the wall of technobabble his ears had smashed up against. He decided to quickly move to another topic to distract the frog, clutching his head as he sat up. "So where am I?"

As he stood up, a nauseating bruising feeling on the inside came to him, as if something heavy had sat on him for two hours. "And why do I feel sore inside so much?" "We found ya jus' floating alla sudden in space! It was a good thing we were nearby or else you'd have just choked an' froze!" "W-wait...in space?" "Yeah! Maybe yer ship got blown up, you're REALLY lucky yanno." "I...guess I am...um...so..." He tried to get off the bed, standing a little off-balance as he let his body sort its feelings out. "Okay, that's three questions for you then. One, who are you? Two, where am I? And three, where am I in a more larger scale?" "Huh?" The frog looked confused at this so he tried to answer. "Well, my name's Slippy. Slippy Toad! I'm the mechanic aboard the Great Fox, which is where you are. And we're floating between Aquas and Katina at the moment." "I...never heard of those places." "Huh? So...you really aren't Lylatian?" "Lylatian? Sounds like a place in Europe, where the hell's Lylatia?" "Europe?! Hmmm...okay, you better come with me, you're a real weird one we picked up." And so Slippy lead him down the corridors, filled with various coloured circuits and panels everywhere he looked, with signs of another language and realising more and more he may well be much further from home than he thought, even with the planet of Zebes he had been to before, but despite his accidental interdimensional travelling it still hadn't sunk in him that he was not even in his own universe anymore.

Eventually they reached the bridge and upon seeing two creatures on either side of him, with one's ears barely visible from a stately captain's chair, he had a flashback to the last time he saw one, full of Space Pirates that gave him an unsavoury experience to say the least, and getting some sort of electronic language guide implanted into him only made him feel more panicky. "Here he is guys!" "Thanks Slip," said an older looking hare in a cream-white jacket to his left. The hare sat at a map of the space around them, rubbing his chin before gazing on James with cautious curiosity. He spoke to him with a drawling accent that reminded the raptor of farms somehow. "You're very lucky we picked you up, young 'un. What happened to ya?" "Well..." James replied tentatively as he tried to think on how to best phrase his explanation. "I just found myself floating in space, I can't really remember how it happened but I just sorta fainted back on Zebes." "Zebes huh?" The hare turned to his computer and looked through the data on it. "Mmmmm nope, don't know the place. What system is it in?" "Uhh actually, I dunno, see, I was running away from someone and-" "Ohhh yer a criminal are ya?" said a brash arrogant voice from his right. It belonged to a blue-feathered falcon with wing-like hands and red feathers around his eyes, staring at the raptor with distrust. "If there's a ransom out for ya, you got no place here!" "Wh-what? No, no no no, I'm not a criminal, I'm just...oh...wait, no place here? So...you...you're not space pirates at all?" "WHAT?!?" The bird rushed towards the raptor with incredible speed and stared down at him along his beak. "Don't even think of mixing us with them, pal!" "Falco, back off." The one in the captain's chair commanded such with the voice of a young strong leader. "The poor kid's just confused and scared." "HEY, I'm not scared!" barked James as he stared back at the bird with reinforced bravery. "I'm just a stranger here, that's all, I didn't mean to offend ya but your reaction's made me glad you're not one of them. Besides, you don't look like them. Less fur and feathers they had on them." Falco sneered incredulously. "Hmph, well I'm glad yer a fast learner. But you make one wrong move and I'm blasting ya out of the airlock back where we found ya!" "Pfft fine, if you can even do that, but I warn you, I'm fucking fast..." Trying not to become unwelcome amongst the crew so quickly, he switched the subject and returned to a state of anxiety in an unfamiliar place. "...though I dunno what you guys do." "Well," said the hare who was thankful of the topic change, "we're mercenaries, young 'un. We help out anyone who asks for our help." "As well as some who can't ask." The captain spoke once more as he stepped up from his chair, and walked towards the raptor.

A young green-eyed handsome fox of an light orange-red fur colour, who smiled and offered his hand for shaking. "Name's Fox McCloud, captain of the Star Fox Team. Sorry about Falco, he's just a li'l hot-headed." "Oh uhh, no need to apologise Captain, he's gotta be a little suspicious in this kinda work, fair enough." Much as James distrusted most authority, he felt a good vibe from this fox somehow that gave him a feeling of trust. Young, spirited, hopeful. Not old, tired and disillusioned of the world like usual figures he knew. "Well, true, but anyways, we picked you up near Aquas and wondered where you came from. ROB said you were a space anomaly, some kinda...well he could only guess it as a black hole. Did you get lost in a warp?" "A warp...nnnnno, no, can't say I was. I was on this planet called Zebes, last thing I remember was seeing stars in the sky and then blacking out. Maybe the Space Pirates threw me out into space." "Well, space pirates or not," replied the hare navigator, "we found no trace emissions of any ship near you, or of this planet Zebes on any of our maps." "Maybe they were from REAL far away and warped here!" answered Slippy trying to be helpful. "Yeah," said Falco sarcastically, "you really think a buncha pirates would go across a universe to dump some poor kid off? They're way lazier than that." "He's got a point," said the raptor. "I don't think they were the kind to go so far to get rid of me. Also, they could have done something worse to me than throw me out into space. And I'm not even sure if they DID find me or not, I was running from them on this Zebes. I mean I did escape from them, they couldn't have found me...and it couldn't have been that Samus woman..." "Samus who?" Slippy asked purely on fascination by the name, as well as pretty much everythng about the stranger. "Samus, she's this bounty hunter, a human, she was on Zebes too hunting down these pirates I think. They really hated her." "...uhh...human?" asked Slippy. "Whatsa human?" "Wait, you never heard of humans?" The four of them looked confused by the word.

"You know, hairless, fully flesh without fur or feathers or scales, have hands with five fingers, she was in a big suit though so not sure what her skin colour was." "Mmmmm...nope!" replied the hare in curiosity. "That's another new one to me! You're turning into quite a fascinating one, spouting about some unknown planet and unknown creatures...but whatever the case, you must be new to this part of the universe so, welcome to the Lylat System! Hope you enjoy it and don't cause any trouble." He chuckled as Fox smirked at this, before turning back to the raptor. "Listen, we'll drop you off at one of the Cornerian bases in Katina, they'll look after you. But I gotta admit, you look like you're from Sauria." "Sauria? Why, where's that?" "Oh, just it's full of creatures like you, reptiles mainly. That strike anything familiar in ya?" "Uhhh...no...nnno I don't know any place called Sauria. I come from Earth, but I dunno if you know that place at all?" "Mmmmm nope, pretty sure that's not on our charts either. Alright then, we'll drop ya off at Katina nearby, they'll look after ya...uhh...didn't get your name, what is it?" "Oh, sorry, it's James. James Campbell." "James?" The fox had an odd look on his face, a face that was of surprise and increased intrigue, before replying: "Huh...well you can go to the med bay you were sleeping in until we get to Katina. Won't take long, probably just a few hours or so." "Sure, sure that's fine. Um...thank you, Captain, for rescuing me and all." "No problem...James." He walked back to his chair and Slippy guided him back to the med bay, leaving the raptor confused at everything around him. An unknown system far far away from Zebes, that has never heard of humans yet there were four anthros like the ones on Earth, another planet they knew nothing of. Even the Space Pirates knew of Earth, but where was the Lylat System? Was it even in the same universe? All these questions ran through his head as he sat onto the bed he was on before and tried to straighten his thoughts.