Sean woke up in his room, or rather his room aboard the Feather Fall, on one of the most uncomfortable beds he had ever slept in. He stood from the cot-sized slab of dense foam and stretched his hands over his head, a loud pop sounding from his shoulders met with a relief from a tightness that seemed to have settled in while he slept. Sean bent over at the waist and touched his toes, feeling his tendons pull tightly with a familiar and almost pleasant strain.

“Good day, captain,” Jacobs cockney accent floated through the air as Sean continued his half hearted exercise routine. “Did you rest well?”

“I did. I actually did. Could have used a bigger bed though and I think being all wound up gave me some wicked dreams.” Sean looked for his clothes from the previous day and discovered a small container at the foot of his cot.

“Glad to hear you are rested, captain. I took the liberty of cleaning your clothing for you.” Jacob said as the container opened itself and a set of neatly folded clothing rose smoothly on a floating disc the size of a dinner plate. The disc floated to the table on the other side of the room and gently touched down without a sound. Sean strode over to the pile with an excited grin and plucked the fresh laundry from the stack and said, “Thank you, Jeeves!”

“Jacob.”

“Huh?”

“My name is Jacob, sir, not Jeeves.”

“Oh, my bad Jacob. Ooo these smell nice.”

“Thank you, sir. I have also created a personal data device for you. It will be able to show you your location on the ship and allow you to contact any member of the crew should you need to along with a plethora of other conveniences we can address together at a moment that is to your liking.”

Another disc floated from the container carrying a small box made of white material that had a glossy shine to it. Sean opened the box as it landed and revealed a triangular piece of thick natural material attached to a long piece of cordage. The triangular cloth had a circular green lens trimmed with a golden metal protruding from its center. Upon closer inspection, the lens appeared to have a repeating pattern under its surface that reminded Sean of the way insect eyes looked up close.

“Woah, thank you Jev.. I mean, Jacob. How do I,” Sean asked as he attempted to fasten the device around his neck and then around his wrist, “How do I put it on?”

“It is designed to fit over your eye, sir.” Jacob replied as the wall behind the table shifted and warped until it was a full body length mirror.

“Sick, '' Sean said as he held the device up to his eye. Once the device made contact to Sean’s face there was a sudden suction from the eyepiece and the cords freed themselves from Sean's grasp. The ends cinched together around his head and pulled themselves to a firm yet comfortable degree of tightness.

Sean blinked a few times as a series of different colored lights and shapes flashed before his eyes. Quickly the lights ended and he was able to see clearly through the eyepiece. In the lower left corner of his vision was a small circular map, displaying his current location on the ship, his upper right field of vision showed the word contact and his remaining view was unobstructed. Sean turned his head from left to right to get a good look at the newest addition to his wardrobe. As he focused on his visage in the mirror, his vision magnified a few times drawing his perspective even closer to his reflection. When he relaxed his focus his vision returned to a normal distance.

“This is epic!” Sean said as he practically danced on the spot.

“Glad to hear you are enjoying it, sir.” was Jacob's response. “Will you be continuing your tour of the ship? I must warn you we are still in the process of repairs and cleaning up debris from the attempted capture so there are still a few areas that are inaccessible.”

“ Capture?” Sean asked as he began to dress himself.

“Yes, sir. We were in the process of being captured and boarded, if you recall, by a group of Annurians.” As Jacob said the name of the alien species, a small see-through image of the reptilian hunters was displayed in Sean’s eyepiece, which elicited a small involuntary shudder from him.

“Oh yeah, those things.” Sean commented, finishing dressing by giving the heels of his boots a final experimental tap. “You know, one of those things was in my dreams last night. Last day?” Sean sat back on his cot and looked listlessly to the other side of the room for a moment before approaching his door.

“Anyway, the dream started off great. Lots of happy shit and colors, then out of nowhere, boom! Big, scaly and ugly right up in my face! Eyes were glowing and shit too.” Sean shook his body remembering the dream as the door to the captain's quarters gave way to the hall.

“Well that was fucked, but I woke up. Which way to the cockpit?”

“I’m sorry?” Jacob asked as Sean chose to head to his direct left and start walking.

“The cockpit, the bridge, the main deck, where you steer the fucking ship from. I wanna go there.” Sean responded as his magnetic bots clunked against the tile flooring.

“Ah! Of course, sir.” Jacob called out excitedly. “Just follow the lights, captain,” Jacob said as a small ball of pink light began to hover silently in mid air.

“Sweet,” Sean said, “Thank you Jacob.”

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Gently and soundlessly, the ball of pink light moved down the hall for a few feet and wound its way around a rightward corner with Sean following it close behind. As he turned the corner, Sean was greeted by an assortment of automatons waving or saluting as he passed. Man there are a lot of these things on here, Sean thought as he counted five of them in every room he passed. Finally the light ended its journey at a large archway and began to flash, indicating this was the desired location.

Sean stepped through the archway into a completely empty room, the walls, floors, and ceiling covered in what looked like squares of multicolored shag carpeting. As Sean crossed the threshold, the center of the room began to darken, a perfect sphere of black that spread out rapidly to cover the entire area. Slowly, thousands of points of light began to shine, floating and swirling around Sean, taking the forms of multiple galaxies and vast cosmic clouds of multicolored stardust. Sean was standing on the edge of what looked like a pocket sized chunk of the known universe, laid out bare before him in all its glory.

“It’s beautiful,” Sean whispered as he marveled at the map before him. There came a sigh from behind him, and what sounded like a contented voice spoke in agreement to Sean’s statement. It was a high pitched and scratchy voice speaking what sounded like Pidgin. Sean turned to face the voice and his gaze fell onto the Velmure (a short, stout, bipedal avian) representative of the refugees.

“Oh!” Sean shouted as he fell further into the star lit room. He landed on his rear and began to crawl backwards continuing to shout.

“Son-of-a-bitch! What the fuck?” The Velmure puffed its gray and purple feathers, squawked loudly, and threw itself backwards landing flatly on its back.

Sean stopped crawling and shouted “Jacob?”

“Yes, captain,” Jacob’s calm, cockney accented voice called back to Sean from the outer hallway.

“What is that Skeksi looking mother fucker?”

“That is Neeptin, sir. He’s a Velmure. I found him on the Annurian vessel and he volunteered to help in the operation of the Feather Fall along with several others.”

“What?” Sean asked, still panting from the shock of the surprise meeting. As the pair stared at each other on the ground, a metal cart being piloted by one of the automatons coasted to the archway and stopped as the five man crew hanging on to and in the bed of the cart stopped their task and saluted Sean. One of the automatons spoke up in a similar voice to Gunner, but in a much deeper tone.

“Ahoy, captain! Fine work at the core, sir.”

“What?” Sean asked as he slowly stood from his position on the floor. With a creak and a heavy clang, the side of the cart fell open displaying its contents. Inside the cart was the broken and pulverized remains of the Annurian that Sean had fought earlier, he assumed, in his dreams. One of the Automatons in the cart picked up the remains of the undamaged hand of the corpse and shook it in a morbid wave of greeting.

“Turning it into a pulp like that made the clean up mostly spray work. We salute you for your kindness.” The Velmure looked from the cart to sean a few times as they spoke and called out more of its unfamiliar language. Jacob began responding in the same language over the Feather Falls speakers in the outer hall. Sean was unsure of what they were talking about, but the conversation seemed to calm Neeptin and the shock in his expression turned to excitement. Neeptin stood from the floor and saluted Sean as best it could and prattled off more of its unfamiliar language. With another slow creak, the side of the cart closed back up and the automatons took their positions once again. The leader of the small group slapped the side of the cart a few times as a signal to continue their journey and continued to speak as they left the area down the unseen remainder of the hallway, “Damn fine job, sir. Damn fine job.”

Sean simply stood in a cluster of stars, mouth agape in shock and in horrible realization. He did not respond to Neeptin for a few seconds, but could only muster a louder and more concerned, “What?”

Neeptin lowered its salute and strode into the center of the room, waving its hands around as it moved, changing the scenery as the galaxies appeared and disappeared in a linear motion from left to right. Neeptin threw up its hands and the room zoomed into the image of the Feather Fall, floating in the reaches of space within a ring of debris.

“Flimhun!” said Neeptin, excitedly pointing at the Feather Fall. With quick waddling strides it strode across the room to Sean and poked him in the chest saying, “Grokit.”

“Grokit?” Sean replied,questioning the word and his sanity. Neeptin shook its head in affirmation and continued, “Grokit shalla Flimhun.” Neeptin pointed from Sean to the image of the ship and repeated the phrase a few more times slowly.

“Okay, so you know I’m the captain,” Sean said as he began to walk around the projection of the Feather Fall, “the Grokit. So can you show me where I came from? Can you show me Earth?”

Neeptin stared at Sean for a few seconds before beginning to repeat the phrase it was trying to teach him earlier.

“Well,” Sean said with a sigh, “that was dumb. Don’t know why I thought that would work.”

“Is everything alright in there, captain?” Jacob asked from the hall, his voice tinged with concern.

“Yeah, “ Sean replied dejectedly, “Just trying to overcome a language barrier. No big deal. Is there any way I could get, like, a translator or something?”

“I am not able to affect or enter the navigation room, sir, but I will see what I can send to help.” Jacob responded with a chipper tone.

“Gro~kit. Fli~mhu~n.” Neeptin continued as he pointed between the ship and Sean. Neeptin waddled over to a set of bright stars on the edge of the room and pointed at them and continued his lesson. “Wee~zma~. Weezma, strip?”

Sean nodded with a welcoming smile on his face and repeated the alien language back to Neeptin, internally annoyed at the situation. You’d think they’d have some kind of universal translator or something for shit like this, Sean thought.

Neeptin waddled around the room, continuing to try and teach Sean the alien words. He gestured to a nearby planetoid and gave its name and then pointed to its moon and defined it as well. Sean did what he used to do in school and just smiled, nodded and repeated the word as if it was the most interesting thing in the world while his inner monologue continued. Okay, Sean thought, I fought an alien killing machine bare handed while all kinds of fucked up. I fought it, and I won. I’ll just add tough and rough as hell to my growing list of new things about me. I am still trapped on an alien ship, but now with new aliens that I can’t understand. Only other positive thing to come out of this was a cool new eye thing.

Sean paused in his thoughts and regarded his eye piece’s interface. He shifted his focus from Neeptin who was stirring his hand through a nebula and giving the word for it while making excited ooh-ing and ah-ing sounds between repetitions of the alien language. Sean turned to the image of the Feather Fall again and gave it new scrutiny through his eye piece. Rather than growing in size, a white line began running over the surface of the projection, showing the owner of the eye piece that the projection was being scanned from top to bottom. The projection of Seans ship blinked white three times before data points about the ship began to float around it, designating the parts of the ship with little white lines reminiscent of a textbook diagram. In bold white font floating above the ship was its name and current captain, Feather Fall and Sean Davenport. Sean turned in Neeptin’s general direction and asked,

“You seein’ this?”