G'ana awoke in Pechi's room, in Tabai's grip. In fact, six for seven of them were in the room, which looked as it had when G'ana had last been in it. Suspiciously as it had looked as G'ana had last been in it. She got up to her paws, then remembered she had paws, and for all she'd ever hated her body, how much did she love it now, without a rusty metal rod stabbed through it or without it being an incorporeal substance stretched around the exterior of the ship, which made it impossibly difficult to manifest! Even surveying her corrs, those long, draconic whiskers that had set her apart for so long, she found she loved them, two, giving them a nice, long lash. She smiled, perhaps too sunny of a gesture for the situation, then rolled herself back into Tabi's grip, her fragile paws giving up at her at last. She'd get used to having paws again later! Now was the time for breathing, and potentially consuming food, oh no, that would be tricky if she couldn't get up.

"What... oh," said Cassie. "Oh. Oh."

"Hi, Cassie!" chirped G'ana. "It's nice to see you! Wait, what's the last thing you remember? The last thing I remember was-- oh, wait, the ship's restored! It's really neat that it doesn't have a big hole in it from the hyperspace hole. Does it? Does anyone see a hole, actually, because if so, this would be a great time to tell us, you know, just so we don't go outside..."

Pechi shook her head. "M-my room didn't even l-look like this w-w-when I last left it. S-something must h-have happened... it's a-almost like w-we've gone backwards in time. Y-y-es. I remember. These were the precise readings f-f-from the day of..." Pechi kicked out a cube, and with a ferocity G'ana had admired (oh, so much. Even when she got to feel Pechi's feelings along Pechi, all that guilt and fear... she'd been in all their minds, by now, but she missed Pechi's speed, greatly. She guessed she'd have to get used to having one body, now, too, one mind, all that. Not that she minded!) Pechi was already up adjusting her pinboard. "Th-that w-w-was a lot of progress," sighed Pechi. "W-wasn't it."

"Yes, as in we were all petrified and the ship almost imploded several times," Dusty said. In a less severe voice, he added, "I'm glad to see you, though. Outside of the core."

Pechi gave him a soft, sincere smile. "Live and let live," she said. "I th-think that's go-going to have to be our principle g-g-going forwards, at l-least for the next few beats."

G'ana frowned, already thinking about Alexa. The Canis was nowhere in sight.

Tabai jumped to her paws, tails flowing out behind her. Her pale green fur ruffled up with fear. "Oh-- I-- I--" For once, the soothespeaker was entirely speechless.

"We know," said half the room.

"And we're going to help you in any way possible," said G'ana.

"F-f-fully agreed," Pechi interjected. "E-e-even if you r-r-really hurt my feelings, th-there."

"I don't know. What do we know? Wait, Tabai was a Nyuhenge? That wasn't just wild speculation?" asked Cassie. When Tabai leered at her, Cassie added, "Not a bad thing! I am so, so happy we finally get to meet the real you. Not that the previous you wasn't genuine. I mean-- sorry?"

"Is Benn awake?" asked G'ana.

Tabai prodded the sleeping Canis, who cast up an incredulous glare at the whole group. "Yes. Not fond of waking. Are we home yet? I have to report all of you for insubordination."

"We might want to have a talk about that," G'ana said. "I mean, assuming we did... do this correctly. We need to check downstairs. I can't find the seraph horns anywhere."

The group wandered, far too close to each other, down the halls in two separate groups, away from the elevator. G'ana ended up with Dusty and Tabai, neither of whom seemed particularly enthused by each other's presence. Still, Tabai said, with a purr that almost sounded teasing, "I see everything's fixed. Does this implicate that I might go and engorge myself on food from the fridge? The functional fridge?"

"There were ten fridges and there was no point at which less than five of them were operation. Please stop giving me grief," Dusty said.

"Five? You all really let yourselves go when I left," Tabai said.

As they entered the elevator, Dusty asked, "Can we joke about that?"

Tabai looked at the ceiling. "We only have so long, and I was petrified in a good mood. I want to say that we can joke about that."
"Cassie, though," started G'ana. "Or Benn."

"Whatever out we've been given, some things aren't going to get fixed right away," Dusty said. "Possibly ever, if we want to be especially needlessly grim about it."

The elevator released them into the main room at the same time as the other group. All six Sentients entered to find a golden grown, glimmering with seraph power, at the table, and in the front of the room, Alexa on the controls, as if nothing had happened. The room was still slick with blood, the only indication besides the crown that today was not the day that the day they'd first passed the point of no return. Alexa turned around, revealing the still-chipped horn and a missing leg. She looked at the group, her voice dead in her throat, and all seven of them stood in silence.

"You're welcome," said Alexa, turning back to her work.

While everyone else shied back, Dusty put his head against hers. "I don't know what happened after we went out, but I have a feeling we need to thank you, sincerely."

"Also the feeling that she owes us an apology? Is that in there somewhere?" asked Benn. "I might want one."

"You'll have it," Alexa said. Her mane had practically taken over Dusty's head at this point, with his horn up in her face, almost poking her in the eye. She swung away from him on the chair and announced, "I'm sorry to each of you. We may discuss this more in private, if you'd like, cliched as it is, but for the meantime, I argue that we focus our efforts on returning home. We are past the point of no return again, going back the other way, and about to make the jump again."

There was another ensuing silence.

"Whenever the captain feels ready for that," added Alexa.
G'ana nodded. "I, for one, am ready to return home to our own world."

"Our... seraph controlled world," said Dusty. He closed his eyes. "When we get back, we never left. We surround ourselves with others in our fields, whatever those are, and we hold on tight as death to whatever we can find meaning in. We are never coming out here, mentally or physically, again. We save the world, and then we live in it. Otherwise, I don't think I'm going to be able to get this out of my head."

"F-f-fully agreed," Pechi said, before Cassie laid a hoof on her paw. "P-partially ag-g-greed."

Alexa looked to Dusty, but the Canis refused to turn his head her way. He stayed rigidly attentive to something off in the distance, though there was nothing but the deep darkness of space. "Alexa, you're going to explain how you lost your leg, right?"

"Perhaps while you make me a prosthetic," Alexa argued.

"That's a deal."

"And you're going to explain how you managed to defeat the seraph? That's not a knife you've contained it's magic in," Benn interjected.

"Well, long story, but I think they'll need to add 'ramming into it while making a hyperjump with a phantasmally enhanced spaceship' to the ways you can kill a seraph and attain its energy," said G'ana. "Not that it'll come up very often."

"It's Omnia. There's a non-zero chance," said Tabai. "I'm going to hope there's a non-zero chance of several things occurring upon my return."
There was that silent, pesky reminder that it was that their time was coming to an end, and at that end of it, they'd never really been the family G'ana had imagined. For all the wonderful things she could say about each of them, from long periods of watching and even an intimate view of their psyches, she had never found the brilliant warmth she had expected from a new family. She had found them broken, she would leave them broken, but there was a change in each of them, slight as it was, and when the pieces settled, maybe they'd find them in a different order.

"We'll protect you," Alexa promised Tabai.

Tabai looked to Alexa. "You have changed."

The sun shone in the distance, in passing. The heat of it still travelled from thousands if not a million miles off, and the light refracted on the visage of a bloodstained, ash-tainted, tilted, shredded tapestry.

G'ana prayed for Lucil.

"Do you all want to go home?" asked G'ana.

For the last time, with a quick backwards glance at each other, each member of the crew got into their respective pods. For the first time, they all filled perfectly, and the mechanisms within stirred to life, as if they'd never been broken. Perhaps they hadn't? Nonetheless, G'ana craned her neck out, trying to look back at the nine planets to see if anything had changed, and only received a nice view of the airlock. It was easier on the neck and the eyes to look forwards, and up ahead was all of space, lying in wait.

The darkness stretched into a tunnel of light as the familiar stars welcomed their children back, and in a ship that was in a condition like it had never left, they came to a world that in some inexplicable way, had began to change.