[color=crimson][u][b]Huenster System, Hocklyn Home System[/b][/u][/color]
[@WilsonTurner]
June blinked. Her wings would have fluttered in surprise if they weren't held tight by the suit. She hadn't expected a ride. With that much technological activity coming out of basically nowhere, surely the Path would have relocated by now. That meant she'd have to wait for the radium to wear off before she could sense the Path and then head home. So her choices were to either accept the ride, or stay hidden. At least the suit was (apparently) working. Titania knew which alien species had made it.

June glanced behind her at the cave entrance. Something on her suit unhelpfully went [i]ping![/i], and clattered to the ground. Smoke wafted up from her thigh, and she suddenly popped into full visibility. [i]'Well, that just figures,'[/i] she thought. It was a miracle that the suit had worked at all. She turned around to face the interloper.

"I'm June," she said. Her brain finally kicked in; if the Hocklyn knew her name, then Lady Ruby must have arranged something. That made things... simpler? Maybe she could overtly determine the Hocklyn's strength. If nothing else, they were certainly industrialized. She walked over to the transport craft and stepped aboard. It was uncomfortably iron-filled, which seemed like the beginnings of a trend. This close to the large alien, she could feel the pulses of radiation he used for sight. It was like a carpet regularly brushing against her skin - unpleasant, annoying, but not that harmful.

"I'm guessing," June ventured, "that you're going to take me to meet with someone important."


[u][color=MediumSpringGreen][i][h3]Finn's[/h3][/i][/color][/u][@urukhai]
The Path grumbled in a way only a sentient-magical-hyperspace-tunnel could. It was uncomfortable and confused. It [i]missed[/i] the planet Faerie, and now it had a strange pain in its nodes that never quite went away. Once it knew a tiny-thing that could calm it down, but now all it had to look forward to was the periodic great reliefs that happened in its nodes. The tiny-thing was severed, off in another room with the planet Faerie. 

Maybe another great relief would happen soon. That would make the Path feel better. Then it could think again, and do all the normal things that magical-sentient-hyperspace-tunnels do - like frolic with the spacetime Eddies.

Out of pure irritation and a little spite, it lashed out at one of the Great Big Flashes that lived such brief lives in hyperspace.

It grabbed the Great Big Flash - this one wasn't all that interesting - and decided to stash it in one of its nodes for safekeeping.

Maybe it would help the pain, a little.
~o~0~o~
Without much warning, the scout ship was trapped in hyperspace. It stuck for a few minutes, shifting with a gravitational wave not unlike peristalsis moves a bit of food down a throat. Suddenly two craggy earthen pillars, crowned with a pleasantly normal grove of pine trees, surrounded the ship. It was the entrance to a bay, supposing that air took the place of water. A wooden sign was tacked to the end, with a crudely drawn mug of beer and an arrow pointing down a dirt path. 

The ship had appeared in one of the natural zero gravity "space docks" surrounding Finn's, on the outskirts of the boomtown.