Umatani Gift Fest

“Oh, no! We’re getting knocked off the hyperroad!”
“So what will happen?”
“There’s no telling where we’ll warp out!”
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Entering and leaving hyperspace always brought with it that specific feeling of split-second freeze of all cells in one’s body when every single atom was forcibly pushed to jump to another, higher or lower dimension of existence. It was possible to get used to it – besides, all modern spaceships had proper shielding against it, so travellers never really suffered any real consequences as long as they stayed in the designated areas. This, however, applied only to controlled hyperspace travel, as Hatchi very soon found out when the wild chase on Dontsu’s hyperroad suddenly ended with them being thrown off their course.
It no longer felt like a split-second freeze. No, it was more akin to being crashed head-on by some force – if he thought about it, it was very similar to that one time when he was young, still learning how to swim, and fell flat onto the water instead of diving in.
“Ah!” he gasped when the impact pushed air out of his lungs – thankfully only for a moment – and bent forward to cough. Around him, the lights of Nagaya Voyager flickered and died, shrouding the cockpit in unusual darkness. Everything was silent. Too silent – he couldn’t quite pinpoint it immediately, but after a short moment Hatchi realised the always-present soft humming of engines was out too.
Hyperroads clearly weren’t meant to be exited this way.
“Everyone alive?” Robby wearily asked somewhere from the right. “I’m okay.”
“Operational,” Ikku grumbled in response, his voice coming from below – maybe the robot fell down. Very soon, some weird scratching followed, as if he was trying to do something.
“I’m fine, I think.” Hatchi raised one arm in front of himself, then the other – yes, it seemed he was alright, two arms, each with the correct number of fingers of thumbs if he was feeling them right. Then he shortly laughed to himself, slightly amused. “It’s an adventure until the very end, isn’t it? And it looks like praying on Isekandar already shows to be effective!”
“Huh?”
“You know,” he went on, “the previous recorded case of uncontrolled exit from hyperspace comes from Galaxy Century 0047, when a Pioneer-class spaceship failed to repair the damages dealt to it by a loose meteoroid – the crew probably ignored it because they thought it was too small to cause any real harm – and embarked on a journey with their hyperdrive not at full capacity. Of course, we can never be sure about all of those who seemingly went missing in hyperspace, but this Pioneer-class spaceship managed to exit, only uncontrollably, and so the crew-“
“Hatchi.”
“…right.” He sighed. He went off again, despite his teachers telling him so many times not to.
“Later.” A hand suddenly hit him lightly on the head, then moved to his shoulder instead to squeeze it as Robby managed to locate in the darkness where exactly he was. “Let’s figure out what to do now and talk about Surveyor-class ships from the previous decade later, okay?”
“Pioneer-class,” Hatchi corrected automatically, but then nodded, even though the movement couldn’t be seen. “All I meant to say, we were lucky to make it out in one piece!”
“We did, but I’m afraid the Nagaya Voyager didn’t.” As soon as Ikku said that, the cockpit lit up – very slightly, compared to the usual brightness, but at least it wasn’t pitch black anymore, though the only source of light was a single screen that reluctantly turned on. The robot smirked triumphantly at this and went to tap at it to run some diagnostics. “Let’s see…”
“Can you fix it? We need to go back to Earth.” Robby leant forward to look at the displayed information, but was quickly smacked away.
“That’s what I’m trying to check. Get out of my personal space and wait!”
“Not like I understood what that read anyway…” the man muttered under his breath, but sat back as asked and started to idly roll his shoulder back and forth, as if it fighting some stiffness in it. Apparently ‘okay’ didn’t really mean ‘in perfect condition’.
For the next few minutes Ikku studied the multitude of warning messages, columns of numbers and charts with some parts marked in red, all while quietly humming to himself and somehow managing to ignore the fact the screen was constantly glitching with different colours and at times switched to different alphabets for a few seconds before reverting. Eventually, he tapped on some last warning message and the screen went empty.
“So. Can you fix it?” Robby repeated his previous question.
“Sort of.” The robot turned back and shrugged. “Not completely, but I think I can get it up and running well enough for us to be able to get somewhere where they can do a full servicing. Can’t do it while we’re in space, though. We need to land somewhere.”
“Great.” The man exhaled and leant back in his chair. “At least we lost Yang and the Luna guys, we’d know already if they were here. Where is here, anyway?”
“That’s a good question.” Hatchi moved closer to the sole working screen and tapped the radar icon. Then he tapped again when the device refused to work, and for the third time when it just showed him a glitchy error message.
Finally, the program opened – with yet another warning message that some functionalities might be impaired due to unresolved system issues, which eventually flickered to some language Hatchi didn’t speak before glitching to alien runes – and the radar started to scan for their location.
“It’s taking quite long, huh,” Robby commented after a minute with no result.
“Guess the radar is damaged. It’s a good thing it works at all.” Ikku looked rather defeated, probably already thinking about all the repairs he’d need to do. Suddenly, something appeared on the screen.
“Oh, there!” Hatchi leant forward excitedly, trying to read the displayed text. “We are an hour at regular speed away from…” The screen glitched. “From, uh, Neznámá Planet- ah!” The screen glitched again before he could finish reading and shut down, once more shrouding the cockpit in darkness.
“Neznámá? I’ve never heard of it,” Robby commented out loud. “Ikku?”
“No idea.” The robot made an annoyed sound and tapped on something, trying to get anything to work again. “You two, get out of here and let me work. I’ll call you when we can actually land on this… Neznámá.”
“Fine!” Hatchi felt for his smartbracelet and from memory managed to locate the torch function – now they at least wouldn’t be completely blind. As soon as they exited the cockpit and left the robot to his attempts to get the Nagaya Voyager at least partially back up, he opened TripSunvisor and typed in the planet’s name. “Let’s see, while we wait for Ikku we can decide what we can see there- huh.”
“What now?”
“It says there’s no results.” He lifted his arm, presenting the holographic display – ‘0 search results matching Neznámá’.
“Some error, maybe?” Robby stared at the text for a moment. “Try again when we land.”
“But then what do we do now?” Hatchi resignedly closed the app and looked around. There wasn’t much to do when the power was off.
“You can tell me about that Pioneer-class ship from before. The one that went to hyperspace when damaged.”
“Wait, really?” He perked up. This was the first time someone actually asked him to follow up on something after cutting him short when he started to ramble. But even though Robby didn’t look particularly deeply interested in the topic, nothing in his expression said the request was not genuine.
“Yeah, sure.” The older man shrugged. “We have time to kill. So, what happened to the crew?”
“Well, you see…”
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“…erm… hello?” Robby said to the group of aliens who showed up as soon as they landed on the surface, the damaged Nagaya Voyager displaying the grace of a drunk human trying to do yoga. The Neznámites, gathered around them in a semi-circle, all looked like haystacks with eyes peeking from between the straws and no visible limbs nor mouth, but from what he could tell at the distance – still a guess at best – it was probably just lots of long fur. Furstacks, then? Was that even a word?
“$%cvtbv v%ctwv# vt%cvy?” replied one of the aliens, but it was impossible to say which one. Though the words were unintelligible – seriously, in this age? Everyone and their dog knew and used the universal tongue! – the tone was rather concerned.
“Don’t worry, we’re just stopping here for a bit.” Robby raised his hands in a calming gesture, though he had no idea if the group even understood him. “Uh… Ohayo? Nǐ hǎo? Good morning?” No reaction. “Hatchi, I’m running out of languages to try, give me a hand.”
“There’s no network in here,” the younger man just complained, continuously tapping at the display of his smartbracelet, something he’d been doing ever since they landed and went down the ship’s ladder. Finally, he stopped and looked up with a very frustrated expression. “How come there’s no network?!”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah, how am I supposed to know which places on Neznámá are worth seeing?! I thought maybe we could stop and grab something to eat, too, but which places are even good?!”
“^%$w h#$%wbv,” one of the aliens said. This didn’t really help.
“Right, right.” Robby still nodded solemnly in agreement, then turned to his friend. Truth be told, he found it somewhat funny how the younger man was almost comically distraught by being unable to consult any reviews, but it wasn’t like they could do anything about that. “Let’s just go and see what catches our eye, we don’t have lots of time anyway. Ikku told us to come back in an hour.”
“Not like we have any other option.” Hatchi made a face at the TripSunvisor app displaying a network error, still clearly bummed out, and turned the display off.
“And maybe we will find some nice girl who actually speaks universal? She could give us some pointers.”
“Can you even tell which one of those are women? They all look the same. Literally.”
Robby blinked, confused, then pointed to the nearest alien – he thought it was likely this was one of those who spoke up, but he wasn’t quite sure – then to another, and, after a moment of consideration, to a third one. Hatchi just stared at him. “What, you can’t tell?”
“I give up.” The younger man shook his head and started to walk in a randomly chosen direction. Robby followed, and the Neznámites moved away from them, still clearly keeping their distance.
“^b$%v^b$ bg*%$b%&nq...” one of them said, but it was again not clear which one.
“It’s starting to creep me out that they just talk like this, really-woah!” Robby was cut short when suddenly, Hatchi disappeared into thin air. The older man was too slow to stop his own steps and so immediately after he felt like something pulled at him, he fell forward, and in a blink he found himself in a completely different location – the middle of some city, from the looks of it. There was something wrong about the buildings, though, and only after a moment he realised they, for some reason, all lacked any windows or doors.
“…was that a mini wormhole?” Hatchi slowly asked, carefully looking around, seemingly unfazed by the weird event, but then turned towards the other, eyes glowing with enthusiasm. “Amazing! I thought this technology was still being developed, but now we could travel through one! I never thought I’d get to do something like this!”
“Great, but where are we now, even? And how do we get back to the ship later?”
“Maybe we can just go backwards through the same wormhole? You know, like a two-way tunnel.”
“But how do we even find it?!” Robby gestured at nothing, for this was exactly what they could see in the direction they came from. Even if the wormhole lead in the other direction too, it was invisible. “What, do we walk around here at random and see if we can accidentally get back?”
“We’ll worry about this later.” Hatchi was already several steps ahead. “Let’s go and see if we can find something interesting!”
“This guy…” The older man sighed and rubbed his right shoulder – it was still quite stiff after the uncontrollable hyperspace exit but he tried not to let it show too much. “Wait, don’t get lost!”
During their walk, they accidentally travelled through three more invisible wormholes, each one throwing them in some new random place. Robby didn’t find them particularly pleasant, the weird pulling sensation always made him stumble forwards, but Hatchi was overjoyed. However, apart from the wormholes themselves, it very soon turned out it was not exactly easy to figure out what could potentially be interesting to see on Neznámá – due to the lack of windows and doors they couldn’t look inside, and even if – as they both agreed after a short discussion – every building could potentially have its own wormhole leading inside, they couldn’t randomly walk in in case it was someone’s home.
All the time, a group of Neznámites followed them, still keeping the same distance and murmuring among each other in their weird tongue.
“Where’s our pretty guide who speaks universal?” Robby loudly complained without any real hopes at this point, but then stopped. One building had a poster on it, and though the writing was all unintelligible, the picture… “Hold on.”
“What?”
“I think,” he said very slowly, still staring at the poster, “they might be selling souvenirs here. Want to take a look?”
“Oh, sure!” Hatchi trotted back excitedly, but then stopped. “Do we just walk at the wall, or…?”
“I guess.” Robby eyed the building and took a step forward. Nothing happened. He patted the wall all around – feeling increasingly stupid in front of the aliens observing them who surely knew how to get inside – until his hand eventually went through something and he all but fell down inside – damned wormholes! A moment later someone bumped into him – Hatchi followed his lead.
“Candles!” the younger man exclaimed happily when he saw what was sold in the store – indeed, the shelves were, among other things, full of colourful candles in decorative jars.
“Haven’t you had enough? One day you’re going to set your whole palace on fire,” Robby grumbled, but without real vitriol. “Go wild, pick something. Think of it as of a parting gift or something.”
“…yes.” For a moment Hatchi looked dismayed, but he quickly put on his usual smile and almost ran between the shelves.
What followed gave Robby solid flashbacks about all the times he went with his girlfriends to do clothes shopping and spent hours waiting for them to decide on one dress or another, both of which looked good on them but honestly he was more interested in getting the dress to land on the floor at the end of the day so who cares, really. He didn’t check how much time they’d spent in the souvenir-slash-candle store, but at some point he definitely zoned out and slumped against the wall, not in the slightest interested in candles himself, but not wanting to hurry – let the other guy have some fun while it lasts.
“b&qv$%b n$%#$v &%^$%cvby v$c$?” a Neznámite whom he assumed to be the store owner asked him sympathetically at some point.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Robby could only reply, having no clue what that was supposed to mean. The alien seemed content enough and slid away and the man went back to playing snake – about the only game that worked with no network – on his smartbracelet.
After what seemed like forever, Hatchi peeked from behind a shelf and presented a relatively big jar.
“This one. I like how it smells.”
The older man stopped himself from groaning a loud ‘finally’ and got up from the floor, game forsaken, then walked to the other. The candle had a label on it – it was of vb^#xwe! fragrance, as the small piece of paper very unhelpfully informed. He wordlessly reached for the jar and unscrewed it – it smelt exactly like his shower gel.
He decided not to comment on that.