Phoebe saw it first, distrusting the aqua shade of the metal that covered whatever or whoever was within.
"Everything about this feels wrong," Juno observed.
Phoebe reflected on the day's events. Juno had seemed sceptical of everything that had happened so far, he had seemed in quiet fear of everything. Even more so than her sister.
"Okay, I'm going to enter," Kate called out, gripping her energy blaster and stepping up to the door. The others followed behind her, cautiously with excitement they had never before felt.
No one and nothing was contained in the first room. Behind Kate, they stood, checking every corner with a torch in one hand and an energy blaster reserved for the other. They passed through another door, into an even larger room. Phoebe presumed this was a cockpit of some sort. There were arrays of dashboards and controls and tinted windows they didn't see from the outside. Considering the size of this room and the craft as an entirety, Phoebe reconsidered her description of the room. It was a bridge, faintly resembling the ones she saw in sci-fi movies about a distant future—the main station for piloting the ship through the darkness of the void of space, for planning attacks on enemies, and for organising key operations within these futuristic armies and the high technology worlds they existed in.
Were they living in that future?
They moved on, checking each compartment of the labyrinth that was this ship. It was empty, with no one and no loose objects around. And yet it felt like someone had been here recently.
But that's when they heard it.
A faint humming sound leaked out of the ship's mainframe, echoed across the walls, and bled into their hearts. The sound felt unnatural and artificial.
No human could ever produce such a soft and dangerous noise, so calming and malevolent. It didn't have a focal point, and they could all hear it equally and regardless of their position on the ship. Purity opened a quiet door in the centre of the spacecraft and a blinding white light shone all throughout the spaceship.
Purity was mystified by what she saw. Perhaps she was the first human to ever see such a thing.
"PURITY!" Kate responded to the extraordinary brightness the ship had fallen under, running to the last place she saw her, "Don't just wander off like that, it's a dangerous time. You need to listen to me…"
Kate stood right behind Purity and became transfixed at what she was seeing. This couldn't be real. The others shortly caught up to them and together they stood, the first humans to observe such a majestic sight.
It was a glowing white orb, radiating infinite energy across the large circular space where it floated, in a mesmerising fashion, it hovered in the vertical axis slowly, beautifully, up and down eternally, the magical aura like waves of an infinite ocean, and the sphere a benign wonder bobbing up and down, forever. It was elegant, majestic, and held a sense of supernaturality, an atmosphere of power and the impossibility of something being so complex and foreign to the human mind, but also tremendously simple.
It was, for lack of a better word, magical.
Another sound could be heard emitted from its sphere of energy, but this sound was more gentle, more golden and flowing with momentary nostalgia.
Did it power their ships? Did it power themselves? Phoebe wondered through the captivated expression she held. But her expression, as expressions often were these days, was fleeting.
The air thickened and the sense of divine magical presence collapsed into a feeling of supernatural malice.
Long-lost echoes suspended themselves in the atmosphere around them, unsettling the air particles and stimulating a hidden sense of Phoebe and the others – the feeling of someone looking or staring at her. Of course, however, there was no one there, only the five of them and their thoughts.
Wispy trails of white light erupted around the ship, like ancient messages being passed through history to this very time and place. The golden humming sound corroded away into a terrible almost-silence of dread. The type of noise one would hear in a sudden nightmare when the façade of dreamlike rest decays into deep fears and embedded horrors of human imagination.
All five of them were deadly frozen. Phoebe realised that none of them had spoken in a while. What were they doing again?
The white stream of particles began to grow, circling faster, and converging on the white ball in the centre of the main room. Phoebe felt a dark power in her chest, tugging on the corners of her heart. This dark power emerged, spreading to the rest of her body like veins giving her life, or a system of roots supporting a forest. She glanced around timidly at her friends. They were in place, unable or unwilling to move or speak. She began to feel an unknown emotion in their situation and in her own. Every part of her body felt heavy, almost as if she was being fundamentally drawn down to the centre of the Earth, by some force other than gravity. A force that was pinning her down to the floor beneath her, pinning her down to this point in time, to this thread of fate she existed upon.
It was too late to escape now.
Phoebe's future had already begun.
* * *
White light spread out into every corner of everyone's vision. Astonishingly strong rays shot through the chamber, their energy radiating out in a fierce and brazen manner.
The spherical orb of magic power had exploded.
The last thing that Phoebe saw was her friends collapsing limply to the ground as the tremor shook the air and the earth alike, all the while she herself sank to the ground. Her vision was obscured firstly by bright sparks of the light, as it consumed her scene and their minds, their thoughts and feelings.
That was before everything went black.
Her vision.
Her mind.
Her heart even stopped for one moment as a natural reaction to the magic forming within. The light inside of her that was spreading and conquering the farthest corners of her abilities, of her psyche.
Leonel Smith, Purity and Phoebe Evans, Juno Martin and Kate Chambers all fell unconscious when the glowing orb of another civilisation was obliterated by some unknown force for some unknown reason—and when they woke up from their short-lived slumber, they realised a world very different from the one they had previously known.
That was the day they were all changed, forever.