After a few moments of gasping for air, Yan managed a tense reply. "Coolant… bottles… in… propulsion storage…"
Luna turned and stalked off in the direction of the engineering storage rooms, satisfied. With one hand clutching his bruised dignity, Yan painfully and slowly pushed himself up and limped back to his own room. He paused, turned around, and took a detour to get a canister of the proper engine coolant solvent from storage himself, remembering the other woman who was now using his shower.
At the door, Amelina greeted him, but her response was much more reserved than Luna's. She was wearing only a white towel and, to Yan's surprise, was calmly examining her newly purpled skin in the mirror. Showers seemed to be a popular morning activity. She grinned as she turned to face him. Yan was still cautious, still expecting a blast.
A pitying "don't kill me," he begged.
She said, "Heck, no," and looked back at the mirror. "This is actually kind of cool."
Yan blinked, a little taken aback.
"Just stay far away from Luna for a while," stated Amelina in a practical manner.
"I'll keep that in mind," Yan remarked mockingly. "Damn right," his inner voice said, "you'll remember it." That knee will stick in your memory for a very long time. Yan sank onto the bed after hastily locking the door.
The only other people who had Luna's purple destiny were Nayla and Okani. After pulling a practical joke on Yan's underwear, Nora had been wary of taking a shower. After tinkering in the sensor monitoring room all night, Kieran was warned by a similarly afflicted Okani to avoid making the same mistake twice. By midday, Okani, Luna, and Nayla were already quietly preparing their joint retaliation.
The three prank victims moved covertly throughout the ship, carrying out their revenge plans, while Kieran, Yan, Amelina, and Nora slept in the late hours of the next day. Even from one another, they kept their separate plans a secret as they worked independently. Okani worked with Luna in the ship's chemistry lab; although he concealed his work, Luna saw that the sulfur and fluorine gas storage containers were now considerably empty when he left. For two hours, Nayla hunkered down at a computer terminal and painstakingly created a string of sporadic, system-wide errors intended to disrupt almost every computerized operation on board the Kyara. Meanwhile, Luna made a batch of a special non-lethal incapacitating gas that she had used on Tyran Station in the past.
The following ship 'day' was bound to be a wild one. In their subconscious minds, they all agreed that Kieran would enjoy cleaning up the mess.
With no external clue that the day would be anything but ordinary, the ship's internal lights illuminated the simulation dawn as the next cycle started. Kieran was the first to stand up, as usual, but this time he was almost terrified. He opened his eyes and swung his legs out of the plain, cloth-lined niche that was his bed. What he saw made him instantly shake his head violently, squeeze them shut, and open them again. The issue remained.
Stunned, he thought, Someone is way too good at this. All the colors in his field of vision were perfectly reversed. His armor's well-known crimson paint, safely kept in its polycarbonate case across the room, now looked a pale, cold blue. A strange blue radiance seemed to emanate from his own skin, as though he were extremely radioactive. The majority of Kieran's tools and equipment were unpainted metal, so it was a lucky coincidence that the only items that looked normal were those that were grey. He also had a normal-looking mechanical forearm resting on his workbench. After retrieving it and securing it firmly, he made his way to the shared fresher unit. Hold on... Yan's dye canister was never taken out by me!
With his typically erratic memory saving him at the last minute, Kieran rushed down the hallway to the water recycling unit, swiftly took out the purple dye filter, and swapped it out for a regular carbon-ceramic one. To be safe, he also started a complete system purge. He turned to return to his room for a shower, satisfied. Okani, the only other crew member usually up this early, passed him in the hallway.
"Hey, Okani," said Kieran. He stopped in his tracks when a sound came from his throat. His voice was a strange croak that hardly sounded English, and it was unnaturally deep, lower than the deepest bass singer imaginable. Kieran took a deep breath and attempted to speak once more. The same outcome. I now sound like a bullfrog attempting to sing opera because of my inverted color vision. What a fantastic morning.
Okani began to laugh, a deep, rumbling sound that was much lower than Kieran would have imagined the small martial artist could produce.
"Okay, what did you do?" Kieran let out a croak.
With an equally abysmal tone, Okani's response was hardly comprehensible. "SF₃."
Kieran gave a slow nod of comprehension. The gas sulfur trifluoride is much denser than ordinary air. By temporarily coating the vocal cords, it significantly reduced the pitch of one's voice when inhaled. Helium's exact opposite effect. "Bloody brilliant, but confusing chemistry," Kieran admitted to himself. As he walked past Okani and returned to his room, a grudging smile appeared on his lips. He was aware that Okani was on his way to the simulator in order to reserve it for one of his notorious all-day training and meditation sessions before anybody else did. Interruptions were infamously disliked by Okani.
Kieran had already developed his own contribution to the ongoing prank war by the time he arrived at his own cabin. The details were solidified by a hot shower. Even though he might have to break up Okani's session, the fun that was about to begin seemed worth the inconvenience.
Luna dropped low and swung out a sweeping kick at Okani's ankles after ducking beneath his lightning-fast swinging fist. A few minutes earlier, she had joined Okani in the simulator, and they had promptly decided to spar. Not because of his overwhelming strength, but rather because he was frustratingly elusive and nearly impossible to hit cleanly, Okani was a formidable opponent. He might be staggered by a single solid blow, but Luna had so far only been able to land glances. On the other hand, Okani took hit after hit, most of them taps and grating jabs rather than really damaging blows. Luna fought calmly, intending to use her superior endurance—a strategy that rarely failed her—to wear him down. She had not yet faced a foe who could outlast her endurance in a long fight. The first person whose torso touched the sparring mat was the loser, according to their established rules.
Luna finally noticed her opening. Okani attempted a long-range hit by slightly overextending his arm. Using his momentum against him, Luna grabbed his wrist at once, turned abruptly so that her back was to him, and yanked his arm forward with all of her strength. Okani's whole back struck the cushioned floor as he landed softly but firmly. A buzzing sound from the computer filled the simulator room.
"Luna wins round two," said the voice synthesized. "Score: Luna gets one point, Okani gets one. Should we go on?
"Yes," Okani said, standing on the ground. In one fluid motion, he pushed off the mat, tucked his legs smoothly, and jumped back up. Kieran's voice suddenly crackled over the shipwide communication system, thick with barely contained amusement, just as the computer started to announce the beginning of the third round.
"Your captain is speaking now. Some shipboard systems appear to be temporarily experiencing technical issues. Intermittent shutdowns may occur for certain functions. Enjoy your flight and thank you for your patience.
After three seconds, Luna suddenly became aware that her feet were off the ground. She was weightless for the first time in her life, and it was not nearly as enjoyable as she had thought it would be. She could feel her last meal threatening to return as her stomach rumbled violently. Okani, floating close by, seemed to be experiencing the same negative response. Almost everyone in the ship felt sudden, severe nausea at the same time. Being the only one with formal zero-gravity acclimatization training, Kieran was probably the only exception, probably expecting this.
The artificial gravity was turned off by that bastard! Luna became enraged. Crucially, neither she nor anyone else except Kieran knew the location of the ship's gravity generator controls. She and Okani decided to end the simulation together because she was feeling extremely nauseous. After shutting down the machinery, they started the difficult task of navigating in the direction of the bridge, which was probably where the criminal was. There was no simple 'up' or 'down' in zero-G; movement was difficult. Carefully pushing off surfaces was necessary for propulsion, but staying too close to any one object caused it to drift away from it slowly, causing excruciatingly slow, uncontrollable drifts until it hit the next awkwardly positioned solid object.
When they finally arrived at the bridge, they saw Kieran idly reclining against the ceiling paneling with a furious smile on his face. Like giant tumbleweeds, the command chairs floated aimlessly throughout the compartment. The whole scene was incredibly confusing.
Luna swore and looked up at him. "Fucking hilarious," she said.
Kieran calmly said, "Next time someone pulls a stupid prank," his deep voice lending an unnatural air of menace. "I backwash the entire sanitation system directly into the water recyclers." He paused to make a point. "Understood?"
Behind her, Luna looked back down the hallway. She had somehow been followed out of the simulator by a few tan, free-floating globules of her own partially digested lunch, which now hung mockingly in mid-air. It seems that Kieran was not amused by the growing prank war and had a firm plan to put a stop to it. Suddenly, Luna remembered her bed, her cabin, and all her personal belongings that were not secure. It was going to be interesting to get everything back on the floor.
Kieran declared, "Gravity will be restored in thirty minutes," pulling two vomit bags out of a pouch on his vest and throwing them at Luna and Okani like a Frisbee. The bags drifted slowly away from the wall, but they were caught by the slight motion. With a sly smile, Kieran pushed off the ceiling and sped back toward the engineering area.
After drifting until they collided with another bulkhead, Luna and Okani pushed off once more, returning to their individual cabins to try to secure their possessions before gravity suddenly returned. Just thirty minutes later, the artificial gravity field came back online, slamming everything—and everyone—ungracefully back to the deck plating after the victims had just managed to anchor the majority of their free-floating belongings. They quickly evacuated three more meals into vomit bags. Kieran's voice came back over the intercom a few moments later, brimming with phony joy.
"Your captain is speaking now. Our highly qualified technical staff has successfully completed a few small calibrations to the gravity generation system, and all systems are now operating as intended. In about two days, thirteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes, we expect to dock at Doryn 7. I appreciate you flying, Kyara. His statement ended with an overly cheerful musical chime.