The Rebellion. (GKND fanfiction)

Chapter Eight

All six operatives slept in by at least one hour. Most of them already had enough trouble getting to sleep, but to be woken up right as they had drifted off made trying to get back to sleep again unnecessarily difficult.
Abby and Kuki tended to XWSI10s neck once he had awoken. As any child would, they all wanted to feel around the part of his neck that had no fur left on it.

"Eulgh, it's so... Weird!"

Abby raised her eyebrow at Kuki, "it's just like our skin, what's so weird about it?"

"I can feel hairs poking out!"

"Well, what did you expect it to feel like?"

"I dunno," she shrugged, "normal!"

"Oh, honey... Wait until you touch a sphynx cat."

Rachel was positioned on XWSI10s back and had been examining his neck to check for any other issues, besides the friction burns and loss of hair. He was so big that he barely felt Rachels weight on him. An unusual feeling, sure, but he didn't mind. If anything, he was glad that things that should be heavy felt as light as a feather to him now.
While Rachel examined his neck, Hoagie sat in front of him and was pointing a magnifying glass in his eye. He didn't get the chance to study XWSI10 for the three days Nigel had held him captive, so he wanted to get up and start studying as early as he could. He had already made notes on basic information, such as his height, fur type, fur length, and more.
He was too amazed by the close-ups of XWSI10s eye to care about what anyone else was doing. He wasn't exactly an expert in biology, but it was still fun to study.
Chad, however, stood away from all of the commotion. He watched the stars through the window of the cockpit, holding his hands behind his back. His way of passing time was rather... Boring. He didn't care. He could do something "fun", like play video games or do a puzzle, but spending time alone with his thoughts felt much more rewarding to his mental health. He thought the others were too loud, anyways. He hated loud noises.
As he watched out the window, he saw that one of the stars appeared to be moving.

"I need to work on my paranoia..." He thought, squinting his eyes. "All these hallucinations are screwing with me."

Despite having rubbed his eyes and squinting, it still appeared to be moving. He was only in disbelief because of how often this seemed to happen with his vision.
After one minute of trying to fix his vision, he realized it wasn't fooling him after all. The "moving star" came closer and closer, revealing itself to be a ship. Judging by how it was coming at their own ship, they weren't there for a play-date.
He stumbled out of the cockpit and began alerting every operative to the situation, causing a huge panic. Hoagie and Rachel made their way to the cockpit to begin moving their ship away while the others clung to anything stable. They knew they were gonna be in for a ride.
The ship began to move as fast as it could right as the unknown ship started firing at them. Lasers could be seen flying past the ship from the main room, which everyone but Hoagie and Rachel were in. Even seeing the lasers miss brought them all deeper into their panic, as no one had tried attacking their ship when it was idle.
Things were just as hectic in the cockpit as Rachel called out instructions for Hoagie to follow. The two were under immense pressure, despite being perfectly fine a minute prior.

"Try to get closer to that planet there! It's one of the inhabitable locations - if we're gonna crash, we should at least crash on a planet we can breathe on!"

"Right. The last thing we need is for the ship to depressurize if it were hit."

Hoagie began pulling towards the planet Rachel pointed out to him to ensure a greater survival rate if they were struck down by the enemy ship. As soon as he was within the planets space, he pitched the ship into a brief nosedive to get themselves closer to the surface. It didn't matter whether or not they had oxygen if they were too high up to survive the fall.
One of the wings of the ship broke off as a laser shot through it. The ship was only at around 1,000 ft when this happened, making it lose altitude and eventually crash only 3 seconds later.

...

Everyone had survived the crash. They had just begun pulling anyone stuck in the wreckage out as the enemy ship landed 50 ft away from them. The enemy ship was much smaller, due to it seeming to only serve as a means of transportation and shooting down other ships. The singular door on the side of the ship swung open and metal stairs began to slide out from the bottom to allow its occupants to leave. Two familiar faces exited the ship and stood just below the steps of the aircraft.
Nigel, of course, was one of them. However, much to the groups surprise, the other familiar face standing next to Nigel was Fanny - an operative they all knew very well.

"You guys just have to run away... This isn't a game of tag, you know!"

Nigel put a hand on Fannys shoulder to silence her. "Now, now... You know they'll always run away. It's much more entertaining than just... Capturing them immediately."

Fanny scoffed. She wasn't about "having fun", she wanted to get things done. Nigel said his ex teammates were interfering with their goal, but it felt like he didn't care as much as he said he did with how insistent he was on making it "fun". To her, they clearly weren't that big of a threat if he wanted to make it some sort of game.
Nigel took a step forward and was pounced on by XWSI10. He growled as loud as his voice could let him, snapping at Nigels face.

"Perfect," he smiled, "I needed you specifically for this part of the plan."

Before anyone could react, Nigel began reciting some sort of peculiar phrases to XWSI10. Once he finished the phrases, XWSI10 yelped and howled in what sounded like pain, kicking everywhere and stirring up dust. A few seconds later, they all heard a thump - the kind of thump a body makes when it hits the floor. No one could see what was going on to know for sure what had made that noise, but they all suspected it was XWSI10.

"You know... It was kinda funny, watching you guys speculate this to be some sort of mutation," Nigel chuckled. "I didn't mutate him... I just got tired of the injections killing the subjects so I cursed him instead! A little inconvenient that he'll never be a full human again, but I wasn't gonna let you have him on your side as a full werewolf."

Rachel coughed a few times before she spoke, "I-... What are you talking about?!"

"Your friend's gonna be mostly human again, isn't that fun? Well, not fun for you five. He's a lot less powerful now."

"We were already trying to cure him! You're telling me all we had to do was say a bunch of stupid words?!"

"Well, yeah. What, is that disappointingly simple? This ain't a sci-fi movie."

The dust stayed in the air for minutes, and no one was able to see anything but a red-brown color. Nigel and Rachel went back and forth about what exactly was done to XWSI10 but all fell silent when the dust finally settled. They were met with an unexpected sight, something that filled each and every one of them with multiple emotions at once...

They couldn't believe it.

To be continued...

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Of course I can't end this chapter without providing the reference sheet for Fanny, since of course she's gonna be a key character (like every other character with a reference sheet)