"Cait? Cait!" Cait woke up covered in sweat, her bleary eyes opening to find Fate shaking her by the shoulders.
"Mhuh?"
"You were tossing and turning in your sleep, looked like you were having a nightmare," Fate explained as he gently lowered her back onto the bed. "Also, Ythmun called us. Some trouble happened."
Cait rubbed her eyes, slipping on her shoes as she pushed herself off of the bed. Fate went to a kitchenette and tended to the eggs he was scrambling on the stove, having pilfered some from Ythmun's stockpile.
"If you have time to make breakfast, it obviously isn't urgent," Cait said grumpily.
"On the contrary. We have about ten minutes before the trouble arrives. Ythmun detected it early."
"It?"
"A spaceship. And not the one we're expecting."
That snapped Cait wide awake, her body giving her a rush of adrenaline as she realized what he meant. "Did they figure it out?"
"No emblems or anything on the ship, from what Ythmun could see. May just be some of those invaders he's been complaining about."
"Hm. I suppose cracking a few skulls isn't the worst way to start the day."
"If these guys even have skulls. They could be a species of boneless blobs of flesh."
"Sounds like the type of species to struggle with space travel."
"It does, doesn't it?"
Fate finished scrambling the eggs and split them up on two plates. He brought them over to Cait and handed one to her before sitting on a bed and scarfing his down. Cait took time with hers, savoring the flavor.
She didn't know if Fate was a great cook, or if it was due to the alien eggs used to make these – the eggs on Ontragna came from a weird cow-dog-chicken mixture, an animal that gave milk, eggs, and was a popular pet – but the eggs tasted amazing.
She took the last bite, sadly placing her fork on the plate with a clack. "That was better than I expected. Now I wish there was more. I didn't know you could cook."
"I had to pose as a famous chef that no one knew the appearance of once. Ended up getting invested in cooking. I memorized the entire cookbook of the guy I was impersonating, and I've used every recipe in there at least twice."
"What'd you need to pose as a chef for?"
"Someone very rich hired that chef to teach them and their friends how to cook, and someone else even richer hired me to kill the man that hired the chef. It was pretty easy; I just slipped in some undetectable poison I bought off of some Fildenen mystics and slipped it inside the food after giving the 'lessons.'"
"And this famous chef didn't pose a problem?"
"We tracked him down and paid him off to let me take his place. He's a real shy type, was planning to turn the target down anyway. We learned about the whole thing because the target had announced on the internet that they were looking for the famous chef. Pretty much everyone in the galaxy knew about it. The guy was a complete idiot, honestly. Didn't know a tablespoon from a teaspoon. Personally, I feel like I did the chef a favor."
"Are you two done talking?" Garrett interrupted, leaning against the wall of the tunnel. "Because the ship will be here in five minutes, and we need to be ready."
"Relax, Garett. Just telling a story. Old folks are supposed to like those, aren't they?" Fate asked, taking Cait's empty plate and placing his and hers into the sink.
He only had to dip them in the bubbly water, and the filth slid right off. He passed them under an air drier before putting them in the cabinet above the sink. After walking over to his bed and picking up his mask, which was sitting next to the bed frame on the floor, he slipped it on and turned to Garrett. "Alright, let's go meet these visitors."
Cait stood, the three of them running down the tunnel to meet with Ythmun. "Any idea what we're getting into?" she asked Garrett.
"Based on the description of the ship that Ythmun gave us, it's Tramolian pirates. Real nasty fellers, like to eat people after taking their stuff. They don't have many strong Embodiments, but their technology could shoot down an Avatar with a single shot. So, you better get ready to dodge their guns," he said, giving a stern stare to Fate.
"But are they a threat?" Cait asked.
"Only to the civilians and the few Embodiments we have on this planet that aren't us three Personifications," Garrett replied. "Despite their tech, Tramolians are very stupid, and never seem to learn the lesson that messing with Ontragna is a bad idea.
"I don't think they care, though. They're content to earn 'honor' and 'glory' by pillaging the villages across the countryside before one of us puts them down. That's why we gotta respond quickly; they'll kill thousands, maybe millions if we don't hurry."
They entered the cavern, finding Ythmun standing with his arms crossed as he beheld them.
"We have two minutes. Come on," the monarch said, breaking into a sprint down the tunnel leading to the surface. The other three went after him, all of them sprinting at full speed. For the Personifications, that was thirty miles an hour, allowing them to zoom down the tunnel in no time flat.
Fate, being just a lowly Avatar, was much slower at ten miles an hour, and was quickly left behind.
He ran out of the tunnel entrance into the forest, a light coating of sweat covering his body. He cast about for the other three, noticing them as blurry dots in the distance. He sighed as he started running once more, feet pounding against the ground as he scanned the sky for signs of the ship they were supposed to intercept.
He found it soon enough, a red smudge far off in the sky that had just entered the planet's atmosphere, as evidenced by the flickering flames around it.