Chapter 4: An Ending on Aether

"Personal Reality"

Samus Aran sluggishly stirred from slumber, despite a feeling deep down that vehemently wanted to stay just like this for, oh, forever? She literally could not dredge up a time that she had ever been this comfortable. Warm, soft, enveloped… enveloped? At an uncharacteristically sluggish pace she forced her eyes open bit by bit, only to find that she had a guest in the bed she'd laid down in. Silica had taken a spot right behind her, was currently embracing her, and given how big-bodied the gynoid was she was almost completely "eaten…" It didn't feel bad though, unusually cool for being hugged… Not that she had any recent experience to compare it to…

From the other direction, 'ahead' of her, came a now familiar voice. "I know, shocking how comfy it is, right?"

If she weren't so comfortable right now, she would have jumped. But as it was she just quietly glared at the unflappable man. Naturally, he didn't seem to care.

Jacob held up her power suit by the scruff of its neck, with all the apparent effort of a piece of paper. "Ready to get going? Got a spot all picked out for us to explore that shouldn't be out of your depth." The smallest flash of a scowl crossed his face. "That sounded really, really condescending. Sorry."

She let out the smallest of sighs, incapable of feeling properly angry right now. "You do have that right, given, things."

That same smile. "You know, I did have this whole melodramatic spiel prepared for your first words to me, but you spoiled it by talking to the girls first." He laughed, intimating that he was again not bothered at all. "Now? I'm just gonna leave this room so you can get dressed." Jacob stood up, gave her a wink, and walked out. And then half a second later poked his head back in. "Don't keep me waiting too long, or I might just leave you here."

She grumbled quietly, a voice in the back of her head making a very strong case for taking him up on that if she could just, lay right here for a lot longer… One of Silica's hands started gently petting her head. "Don't worry, I'll still be here if you come back."

That reassurance, plus the visor of her power suit silently judging her moment of weakness, drove her to actually drag herself out of bed. How she had never thought that thought would cross her mind…

Planet Aether: Sanctuary Approach

Jacob marched along, Samus at his side, humming the area theme from the games softly to himself. His favorite bounty hunter… his favorite lady bounty hunter, hadn't said anything else since he'd led the two of them out of his Reality, but he had expected as much given how much work it had taken for the girls to get words out of the blonde. But hey, she could talk, and that was good enough for him. If she wanted to do so more, he'd let that happen at its own pace now. Besides, he had, what, eight something years left in this galaxy?

He mumbled to himself. "Damn decade always takes too long. Only so much fucking around you can do till aggravation sets in…" He heard a sound, and it took about three seconds to realize it was a word. "Yeah Samus?"

Slowly, falteringly, she spoke. "So… them."

Despite how completely nebulous the statement was, he figured he didn't have to be a genius to figure out who she was talking about. "The girls? What about them?"

At the same glacial speed, five whole seconds later, Samus 'elaborated.' "How, did you meet?"

He 'hmmed' dramatically, coinciding with rolling his head. "WELLL. Now that's one heckuva story." He slung his gun, bringing up his fingers to count off. "Well Lusamine, you now, Mrs. 'impossible hairstyle,' she's my first wife. We met early into me getting kicked off across the multiverse and…" He chuckled a bit. "I mean, I figured you've got it by now that I'm not from here, your universe, at all. Extradimensional space, tech that outshines the Chozo…" He shook his head once. "I'm getting off track. Anyway, Lusamine. She got possessed, and I stopped her from destroying the world." He shrugged. "I mean, it's understandable, but people start walking on eggshells around someone when they 'almost destroy the world' whether it was their fault or not. Me? I'm crazy." He laughed. "And I mean, you got a look at her right? Isn't she just a dish and a half? More importantly, I saw her off on her own and was like 'she looks like she could use a friend.' You can see where that led. And considering that her former husband vanished into a digital nowhere there was no guilt on either of our parts!" Samus was giving him a very obvious, wide-eyed 'what the fuck am I hearing' face. But, she'd asked the question, and by jove he was going to answer. "Everyone else: Solei, Silica, Zephyr, Vanessa. I know this is going to sound super horrible, but I got a package deal on them. Spent some time as a space-faring ner-do-well and I beat up and board some pirates. All of them were slaves." He paused. "Ok, well, technically Silica was deactivated in a junkyard, and I just kind of stumbled upon her by accident. But details."

Automatically, given how intimately he was familiar with this particular hallway out of the many, many hallways on the planet, he shoulder-checked his way through the hatch that opened up to the front of Sanctuary Fortress.

He made a grand, sweeping gesture with both his arms, presenting the place to Samus. "Past details of mine aside for a second, behold! Techno-fortress of awesome! Robots, 'living' data drones, and the front door of the Ing Hive." He paused, remembering that he was the one with the Dark Suit and the one whom had technically purchased the 'Light Suit' before he'd even entered this universe. "But we won't be going there. The Dark World would kill you just for standing in it." He chuckled awkwardly. "Yeah, uh, just, don't think about that part. The Hive's a boring place anyway."

To her credit, Samus looked absolutely jaded about his whole speech about the Fortress. So he didn't figure he'd bungled his social-fu all that badly. Then again, thinking about it inside the privacy of his own head, he was struck again by the chain of contrivance Metroid Prime 2 operated on. Without the 'Energy Transfer Module,' which he'd naturally snatched up long before Samus had arrived on-planet, any old Ing could just possess Samus at their leisure. And Samus would never have encountered "pure" Ing until both acquiring the module and entering the Dark world for the first time in the Agon Wastes, by which point she was already immune to Ing possession by virtue of having picked up the big macguffin. Who the fuck thought any of this was 'organic' storytelling?

Sanctuary Fortress: Hall of Combat Mastery

Samus Aran quietly walked along at Jacob's side, alert, wary, but at the same time distracted. Paradoxical, of course, but warranted. The machines littering Sanctuary Fortress were formidable, requiring a two-step process for her to destroy them. Blow up the head-module, and then bait the leg module into spinning so she could disrupt and break it with the Boost Ball. Well, that was her process for them, anyway.

"Scrap another one!" She looked over to see Jacob joyously proclaiming another victory as he bodily ripped one of the leg modules apart, grabbing it mid-spin before violently pulling in opposite directions. The man was sandbagging, she knew that, and she was rather sure he knew that she knew. Instead of that terrifyingly powerful bullet weapon, either of the two he'd shown for that matter, he was using the 'nova beam' analogue to her power beam. And he was bothering to engage in melee, period. He'd gotten into a boxing match with one of the larger 'Ingsmasher' robots for no valid reason beyond 'it seemed fun.' She felt that she should be insulted… but Jacob was just having such a grand time she couldn't be angry about it. Honestly, it was rather enviable. She would have figured being so powerful that nothing on-scale you could encounter was even remotely a threat would be, boring? Annoying? Her power suit required her to maintain a serene mental state for it to function properly, but she would be lying if she were to say that getting bogged down by, say, a swarm of insects, wasn't a massive chore at the best of times. Jacob didn't have to do any of this, he could probably walk from one end of this fortress to the other able to utterly ignore anything attacking him, but he chose to engage, simply because he found it fun.

Savagely hurling a broken leg unit like it were a throwing knife and impaling a head module, incidentally disabling the last of the local threats, Jacob stopped and started looking off left and right. "Ok, so… it was this way?" He took two steps, stopped again, and turned around. "No, this way…?" Jacob glanced left and right again before quietly cursing. "Fuck…"

The man's left hand came up, and a holographic image emerged that slowly expanded, and then expanded some more. She wouldn't claim to be an expert on the area, but she had the sneaking suspicion that display was a map of the fortress. Why he hadn't been using such a thing religiously up to now was an inscrutable mystery.

Unused to the notion of asking questions, it took her a moment to make her point. "Where, exactly are we going?"

Irritably spinning, zooming in, and panning out of the 'map,' Jacob answered. "I forget what the place is called, 'dynamo works' maybe. Anyway, somewhere off the main temple of this place. If I could find the fucking thing…" After about five more seconds the man remarked aloud. "I fucking suck at reading maps…"

She had to quietly ask herself this, was he faking incompetence to give her an opportunity to feel useful? Because that seemed to be the point of this whole venture right now. But… if he wasn't… She slid her way over, keeping herself in Jacob's very large shadow to try and do this quietly. The map, if map it was, was a convoluted mess. None of the 'chambers' were labeled, and the only point of reference was a big arrow she would assume was a 'you are here.' Yes, she figured Jacob had every right to be confused if this was his 'map' software, and the idea that her Chozo inheritance was superior in at least one small way momentarily painted a smug grin across her face.

As she was about to speak up, offer a possible destination, Jacob jabbed one of his armored fingers into the display, singling out a large chamber in the holographic fortress. "Well fucking duh." The man looked to where she had been standing, paused long enough to locate where she had moved to, and spoke with a pleased lilt to his voice. "I got it, figured it out." He pointed off to his left. "This way."

The giant of a man made a rather obvious gesture inviting her to go first, and… had she just been had, or was she looking too far into things?

Sanctuary Fortress: Dynamo Works

Jacob quietly waited outside what he knew to be the 'boss zone' of the Spider Guardian, whiling away the whatever length of time it took for Samus to kill the augmented pill bug by looking off into the techno-cloudy sky that surrounded Sanctuary Fortress. He fully expected that she would win, not just because of who she was but, honestly, from what he remembered of the "boss" a monkey could beat the damn thing. Technically speaking he wouldn't even call it a boss, just a puzzle with a roaming, predictably moving hazard. But, hey, hindsight was 20/20… was it appropriate for him to think that when he hadn't designed the game/world he was currently living in?

He laughed to the empty sky. "Cheap words from me when I come in with all the practical meta-knowledge I need to run roughshod on everyone."

Seated on the edge of one of Metroid's ubiquitous hovering platforms, albeit this one being one of the significantly chunkier ones, he idly swung his feet over the abyss. He couldn't help but think, given the context of the Aether situation, Samus really didn't have anything else to do here with the Spider Guardian dead. Without the Dark Suit, currently solidly fused into his armor, Samus could not survive significant sections of Aether's dark world. Pointedly, in what would normally be the 'imminent' future, the Quadraxis fight would be absolutely impossible for her to live through, by that simple omission from her arsenal. Even if she didn't get hit by anything, the atmosphere by itself would kill her. The Emperor Ing? Not even worth considering. So, how was he going to broach that conversation?

He mumbled to the same empty sky. "She's pretty stubborn. I mean, part of why I like her but, going to complicate things. How am I going to tell her that the only thing really left to do on this rock is go on a giant scavenger hunt across the dark world for twelve fucking keys?" He let out a long sigh, one that sounded like a bear growl due to his armor's voice-filter. "Padding, time padding is all that fucking was…"

Back to his problem, and it felt like an insult to Samus to technically be calling her a "problem," how did you tell the protagonist of a franchise, essentially, 'fuck off, I got this?' On the one, she was probably more than rational enough to grasp 'yeah, I'm not needed here anymore. In fact I'd be an active hindrance.' But, at the same time it just felt, disrespectful… Well, typical Jumper problems he would reckon. Ever since BROFORCE he'd been basically immortal, and while at the time he just been one of the BRO's, everything after had benefit from being nigh impossible to keep down. Fiat-backed 'can't die unless decapitated, and respawn three times anyway' went a long way, even in a universe as hilariously off-the-chain as Warhammer 40K. And he'd experience that universe of war twice, both for unprecedented lengths of time because he was a greedy madman. "Extended Jump Duration?" His patron offered as a "Drawback?" He said, "Free Points."

He heard the soft, rolling sound of metal on metal and let out a sigh. "Well, let's have this chat then…"

He stood, fixing his gaze upon the tube Samus had gone down to face the Spider Guardian. Naturally, given her almost narrative-assured predilection for victory, she emerged seemingly no worse for wear… pft, probably hadn't even been hit. The power of plot-armor was strong. He couldn't help but chuckle a little, in spite of himself. As he again was reminded that, left to her own devices, Samus would literally never lose to anything or anyone in any established chunk of lore.

He cleared his throat to refocus. "Well, you got your toy then. Fished out the energy tank in the back too?" Samus nodded once, hesitating only a moment, because of course she was just as much treasure hunter as bounty hunter, and he went on. "Good, good. Uh, so, real talk for a second. The rest of the critical stuff just, you know, happens to be in the Dark World. And, uh…"

Samus finished the thought for him, in her typical, borderline monotone voice. "I don't have the equipment to survive the Dark World, so I'm a hindrance."

He pursed his lips for a moment, glad for his helmet, and responded. "Well, yeah. I wasn't going to put it that way but, sure."

The blonde nodded once, eyes revealing nothing of what she was feeling about the matter. "I'll head back to my ship then, go inform the Federation about what happened to its troopers."

Samus took three steps away before he barked, "Wait." His hand extended towards the bounty hunter, he awkwardly elaborated. "Ah, let me walk you back."

Samus's eyes again told him nothing, but her tone dropped a little. "You, don't have to do that."

He shrugged and walked up beside her. "I know, I just want to."

Samus half-turned away from him, not responding for a good long while. "You, don't have to. You have nothing left to apologize for."

He did a small double-take. "Wait, you think that, you think that I was, you think I wanted to be nice to you out of self-imposed obligation?" He couldn't help but let out a short laugh. "Lady, you are the same bounty hunter that's saved the galaxy a couple of times, right? You don't think that's earned you a bit of goodwill? A little bit of your own happiness? Come on. Least I can do is pony up a small measure of what you deserve."

There was another long pause before Samus responded. "Is, that what this was?"

Confused for a moment, scratching at his helmet as if it were his scalp, he answered. "Yes? You do deserve more than just getting paid."

Yet another long moment passed in silence, and then Samus voice sounded, and her words were cold. "I can find my own way back."

Confused again, he stood there and watched Samus march off back the way they had come to this chamber with one hand and one finger raised silently after her, his mouth hanging open. He considered for a moment, and determined that she would be able to get back on her own. The various "locked" doors that might have otherwise been in her way had been smashed open by him, so, that was that for this encounter?

He scratched at his head again before shrugging. "Well, that could have gone better? I guess?" He glanced off into the techno-sky for a few seconds, and shrugged again. "Well, I'll run into her again for the events of Prime 3. Then I can figure out what the hell that was." He started walking, incidentally in the same direction as Samus. "Now where the hell were those twelve keys... Fuck, gotta fight the giant robot first…"