Chapter 4:

All back in the bridge, Chronos and the original four crew members were all heading towards the space station. Without the navigation system up and running, the crew had to manually pilot the ship towards their destination. Silence filled the artificial air within the bridge as each crew member aside from Chronos sulking about the stolen items from the sixth bay.

"You know," Chronos broke the silence, "I thought the sixth bay would contain money or diamonds or something like that. You know, something actually valuable."

Without a split second to add anything more onto his statement, Chronos instantly felt a wave of depressed, angry and irritated comments yelled at him by the other guys.

"They were all important!" They simultaneously yelled together before returning their focus to the large window in front of them and silently sulking all over again.

Chronos thought back to the sixth bay and really couldn't understand their emotions. It's wasn't like they were robbed of money or gems or even the important equipment for the ship's maintenance.

Each crew member, except for Chronos, dived into the mess of a pile within the sixth cargo bay, desperately hoping that the things stolen weren't belonging to them. Chronos just stood back and enjoyed watching the four men scramble across the mountain of valuable things as they searched desperately for their belongings.

"Oh no!" Luciel cried, lifting a box and dumping everything in it onto the ground, "part of Agravity Boy's volume 2 is missing!"

It appears that Luciel's manga collection was partially stolen as he wept over the remaining chapters that were sprawled across the cool, metal floor. Similarly, Kennie started yelling and crying over his basketball collection. Chronos couldn't really see what was missing or tampered with.

"What's wrong with your stuff, Kennie?" He asked, only for Kennie to reply with more cries and tears.

"My-my limited edition signed basketball shoes were taken along with my basketball magazines." He managed to choke out.

"What the hell?!" A sudden scream from Marcus interrupted Kennie and Luciel's crying as Marcus began vigorously counting the stacks and stacks of space and physics books that he brought along. "Someone actually dared take the eighth volume of Describing Physics from my collection!"

"It's not as bad as what was taken from me." Ren sobbed as he lifted up his gaming console and his hundreds of video games that came along with it, "they took some of the wires and a controller. Not to mention the Doom series! Monsters!"

Chronos just remained out of the way of the depressed crew members, feeling slightly embarrassed that that was what they were crying over and not over something thay he believed was more important and valuable - money.

Just thinking back to the scene gave Chronos second-hand embarrassment, but then again, he supposed he could understand. It was like when his brothers would bully him and take his DVD collect and hide it somewhere he could never reach.

"Ah, we can land now," Ren said, interrupting Chronos' trail of thoughts.

He didn't even realise that they had reached the tremendous silver torus-shaped space station. Quite a few ships were docking and leaving the space station and apparently, according to Ren, they gained the okay to dock. It didn't take too long before they had settled into a comfortable space within the space station and were able to leave their ship to search for the missing parts of the navigation system and find someone to fix their communication system.

"Alright," Marcus said as they hopped off the ship, "Luciel, Ren and Kennie can go find the things needed while Chronos and I will try to find someone to fix our comms and nav system."

With everyone in agreement, they split off into their two groups. Chronos began to feel slightly awkward and uncomfortable being stuck with Marcus alone, especially since he had never really spoken to the eldest crew member before. Plus, in Chronos' opinion, Marcus was quite stuck up and by the book kind of person.

"How're we going to find someone?" He asked, as the two filtered through the masses of species that wandered in the opposite direction to them.

"Firstly, I want to find a map of sorts, just so we can find out where in the galaxy we are," Marcus said, searching around, "then we'll try to find someone who can fix the systems."

"Alright," Chronos replied, as they continued making their way through the wide corridor, passing several different shops along the way, "ah! There!"

Marcus snapped his head around and instantly locked eyes with the thing Chronos was pointing at. A map. The two guys quickly sped towards the map, that thankfully pointed out where they were.

"Asatina System," Marcus explained, "and from this map, I can make an educated guess that our Solar System is around..." He took a moment before he pointed towards the bottom of the map, "here."

"That's kinda far, don't you think?" Chronos mumbled, "we'd need to travel in light speed to make it back any time soon."

"Yes... Speaking of," Marcus said, "you seem to know a lot about these things."

Chronos expressed a confused looked, "what things?"

"The chaos from before mainly." He replied, "but also the idea that you were quite certain that we were very far from Earth."

"How'd I show that?" He asked, clasping his hands behind his back.

"I think you tried to cover it up with your first statement about Astrea, but you seemed quite certain about being far far away from Earth." He explained further, "regardless of whether we heard of the planet or not, no one could be that certain about being too far from Earth."

Chronos thought back to when he said that, "but didn't I only say that we must be far from Earth. I just made a guess. I wasn't sure myself."

Marcus hummed and partial agreement and ended the slight argument, though, it didn't mean he was done. Chronos picked up on this and asked him to not hold back whatever he was wanting to say.

"Alright then," Marcus said, "Chronos," he turned directly to face him, "are you the one behind everything that happened? The missing pieces in the nav system and the broken comms. Even the fact we suddenly went into light speed. Did you do it all?"

Taken slightly aback by the bluntness of Marcus' accusation, Chronos took a moment to reply, which was only interrupted by the shouting from Ren and Kennie. The two turned back around to face the other crew members and began making their way over to them. As they wandered away from the map, Chronos whispered to Marcus.

"Don't you already know that answer, though?" He whispered before jumping up and waving and shouting, "you've already found everything? Wow! So quick!"

Marcus was taken slightly aback by the sudden change in Chronos' tone when he rhetorically answered his question. He kept his distance from Chronos as the group began to wander around the space station in search of someone who could repair their systems. Marcus remained quiet, his trust in Chronos swiftly began to decrease the more he observed the young lad. Despite being much younger than the rest of the crew and not having gone to the academy, he seemed to know about the same amount of things as everyone else, possibly a bit more.

"Hurry up, Marcus," Kennie called out as they made their way towards a repair shop, that looks to reliable, "we've got someone to repair the systems."

Marcus hastily caught up with everyone else as they made their way back to the ship. Kennie and Ren were together in navigation, fixing the issue in there, which didn't seem too difficult, and Luciel and Marcus, along with the helpful repair being, were in the room beside them dealing with comms. Kennie seemed to be able to fix the issue in nav fairly quickly now that they had all the equipment necessary and the being who's currently sorting comms out didn't seem to have too much as a problem with it.

As the original four were split between the two rooms, Luciel noticed Chronos' sudden absence. Be double-checked that he wasn't in navigation with Ren and Kennie - which he wasn't - and then glanced into the bridge to see whether he was there.

"Something wrong, Luciel?" Ren asked, appearing out of nav, "Kennie's finished with navigation."

"Oh, that's good," Luciel replied, a soft smile on his face, "I think comms will be back up and running soon."

"Yeah, Marcus said the guy's only got a couple more things to check out before it's all sorted," he said, leaning against the doorframe, "but, aside from that, what's up with you? You look lost."

"No, nothing wrong." He hastily assured, waving his hands about, "just... Chronos seems to be missing."

"He's missing?" Marcus appeared out of nowhere with Kennie right behind him, "that's perfect. I need to talk with you guys without him being about."