Wait... this isn't right.... The Watcher looked up from where he'd been floating cross legged above the floor, meditating on recent events, to see the swirling essence of hyperspace snapping back into pinpoints of a starfield's light through the viewport. He jumped up and moved to the cockpit to slip into the copilot seat beside Phaanan.
"Why are we stopping?"
"The drive's glitched, we're stopping at the Spaceport to get one of the Taainers to check it out."
"How long will it take?"
The clone shrugged, "Dunno."
"Did it occur to you that perhaps I'm on a tight schedule, here?"
"Hey, I didn't sabotage the ship, I just fly it."
The Watcher sighed and leaned back in the seat. "Sith."
"You're kidding me."
"No, I'm not," a Kell clone wiped his hands on a rag. "It'll take me at least a day to get that drive fixed. I don't know what you two were out there doing, but you're not going anywhere else until I get this corrosion off and the part replaced."
Phaanan looked at the Watcher apologetically. The tall man simply sighed, and turned to walk away. "Where are you going?"
"I don't have time for this - I'm going to get some Rent-A-Rogue transponder codes from Faace for Raven's Omen, and just go down myself."
"You might have a problem, there," Taainer called to his retreating back.
Slowly, he turned. "A problem?" he raised his eyebrows.
"Yeah... We kinda were doing a bit of exploratory-" he broke off as the Watcher turned and ran from the berth. Confused, he looked at Phaanan, "Was it something I said?"
"This isn't happening...." The Watcher had skidded to a stop before the door of the docking berth where he'd left his ship so many months earlier, when he'd first returned to Terra.
Within, he could see his ship, the Raven's Omen, sitting with her boarding ramp down. She was a small ship, about the size of a mid-sized Terran tourbus, and did not look like anything one would be familiar with. She was a special ship, one he'd spent roughly ten years building from scratch, and entirely non-ferrous, mostly made of Beryllium. Her paint was such an opaque shade of matte black, that when out in space she was virtually invisible, seen only by the disappearance of the stars behind her sleek form. She could handle only three passengers comfortably, though more could possibly fit should the need arise.
And she was virtually in pieces.
His jaw fell slack as he observed the sight before him. Sitting around the base of the ramp were several systems... one wing had a panel disengaged, and several wires hung down like ribbons from a seamstress' table.
He yelled in frustration, and at the sound three Kells hesitatingly walked down the ramp. The first one to reach the floor looked a him warily. "Back so soon?"
"Soon?!" he cried. "I've been gone for months, and I come back to find my ship in PIECES!"
"Uhm..." the second Kell smiled, "We wanted to know why we couldn't read anything on her with our scanners."
"We thought maybe she had some advanced tech we could borrow for the new 'bago," the third shrugged.
Griinder, appeared at the top of the ramp and made his way down, "We got tired of waiting."
The Watcher gripped his hands into fists at his sides to refrain from doing something he would most likely regret. "Put. It. Back." he growled. "Everything goes back the way it was, immediately. Understand?"
"But..."
"NOW!" he roared as a small small lightning sphere formed in his hand, and he threw it to explode, like a firecracker, at the quartet's feet before turning on his heel and stalking off. He still needed to speak with his cousin's clone.
Perhaps he could get something else taken care of in his unforeseen layover as well.