3rd Person POV

"Let's get baldy back to Xandar and retrieve that bounty!" Rocket announced almost upbeat as he started to fly the Milano off of Sovereign. After Gamora, Peter, and Drax went to go do their own thing, JJ and Gora joined Rocket and Groot on the bridge as he piloted and Groot plastered himself on the window looking down on the planet.

"Argh! My boots busted again!" JJ thumped her foot down several times, trying to get the orbs out, but they started smoking and sparking up to where she had to pull them off and use the fire extinguisher on them.

"At least they worked during the fight, now we know the tech works." Rocket noted before adding, "Thanks to my genius contribution."

"If I recall, JJ designed most of the inner workings, all you did was supply the explosives." Gora critiqued as she preened her tail before Groot peeled himself from the glass to try to catch her tail.

"Yeah the same explosives that ended up savin' our hides."

JJ rolled her eyes at that before continuing to try to fix her boots before a thought occurred to her and she asked,

"Hey Gora? Why did they hate our people so much? I mean, I get why we hate them, but why do they hate us?"

"For starters, our people had no quarrel with them, not until the day they attempted to launch an attack on the planet, luckily they couldn't get past the atmospheric storms and declared it a lost cause."

"So in addition to narcissistic nutcases, they're also cowards?"

"In any case, because no two Chrysintheans looked alike, even within families, the Sovereign viewed our people as imperfections, and with all the 'Observers' that would leave the planet to live and report on those planets, we became known to them as a virus to be rid of."

"That's messed up." Rocket commented from his seat.

"Yeah..." JJ added, already having lost interest in the subject as she managed to fix her boots with a triumphant whoop of joy before standing up and flipping her goggles over her face with a quick nod.

"Think fast!" Rocket threw a wrench to JJ, who thumped her boot down and sent a few orbs out, directing them to hover in front of her face and create an energy barrier, stopping the wrench from hitting her and repelling it back to where it came from.

"Ouch!"

"Should've thrown somethin' smaller." JJ commented before calling the orbs back in and saying, "Imma go see if Gamora wants to practice spar."

Heading down to the part of the Milano where Gamora was about to lock her sister up, said sister noticed the recently filled bowl of fruit and demands,

"I am hungry. Hand me some of that yaro root."

"No. It's not ripe yet. And I hate you."

"You hate me?! You left me there while you stole that stone for yourself. Yet here you stand, a hero. I will be free of these shackles soon enough, and I'll kill you, I swear it."

Her threat goes untaken as Gamora calmly responded,

"No. You're going to live out the rest of your days in a prison on Xandar, wishing you could."

Nebula jolted forward making JJ flinch but not Gamora as an alarm started to sound from above.

"Come on, let's go see what's up." Gamora patted JJ's arm before heading up, JJ staying behind long enough to notice the death glare that Nebula sent her way specifically.

"This is weird, we got a Sovereign fleet, approaching from the rear." Peter announced as the two came up to sit in their seats in the cockpit.

"Why would they do that?" Gamora questioned.

"Probably because Rocket stole some of their batteries." Drax answered straightforwardly.

"Dude!" Rocket called out in a betrayed tone causing Drax to respond in an expressionless tone,

"Oh, right. He didn't steal one of those. I don't know why they're after us. What a mystery this is."

Right before shots were fired from the space crafts and Peter did his best to maneuver the Milano around them before he yelled to Rocket,

"What were you thinking?!"

"Dude, it was really easy to steal."

"That's your defense?" Gamora deadpanned.

"Come on. You saw how that high- priestess talked down to us! Now I'm teaching her a lesson!"

The ship was spun around to avoid another round of shots before Peter snarked sarcastically,

"Oh! I didn't realize your motivation was altruism. A shame the Sovereign have mistaken your intentions and are trying to kill us."

However the sarcasm was lost on Rocket as he responded,

"Exactly."

"I was being sarcastic!"

"Oh no! You're supposed to use a sarcastic voice! Now I look foolish!"

"Can we please just put the bickering on hold until after we survive the massive space battle?!" Gamora reminded them of the more pressing issue at hand.

"More incoming!" Quill announced as more ships appeared in front of the ship.

"Good! I want to kill some guys!" Rocket started to yell as he fired the ship's weapons at the ships, decimating them faster than they were taking shots.

"You're not killing anyone. Those ships are all remotely piloted." Gamora pointed out and they all saw that the fronts of the ships were essentially screens and the pilots displayed on them were mostly likely safely back on the planet.

"Golden wusses..." JJ muttered from her seat where she was monitoring the damage that the Milano was taking.

"What's the closest habitable planet?" Quill asked as he continued to navigate the ship around the blasts as best he could.

"It's called Berhert." Gamora pulled up a planet on the screen in front of her.

"How many jumps?"

"Only one. But the access point is 47 clicks away. And it's through that Quantum Asteroid Field over there."

Everyone looked to the side where Gamora had pointed and saw a huge field where glowing asteroids were disappearing and reappearing in random, unpredictable patterns within space. Without hesitation, Peter flies the Milano straight into the field, much to everyone's worry.

"Quill, to make it through that, you'd have to be the greatest pilot in the universe." Drax points out as Peter smirks and starts to say,

"Lucky for us"

Before Rocket cuts him off with,

"I am."

"I-"

Rocket switches over the manual controls to his seat as he begins to steer the ship around the asteroids that appear directly in front of them only for Peter to steal them back a few seconds later.

"What are you doing?!" Rocket asked with indignation.

"I've been flying this rig since I was ten years old." Peter argued.

"I was cybernetically engineered to pilot a spacecraft!" Rocket counters before switching the controls over again.

"You were cybernetically engineered to be a douchebag." Peter switches the controls back to him.

"Stop it!" Gamora tried to interject but was ignored as Rocket told Peter,

"Quill, later on tonight you're gonna lay down in your bed and there's gonna be something squishy in your pillowcase and you're gonna be, like, 'what's this?' and it's gonna be because I put a turd in there."

Before he flips the switch back to him.

"You put your turd in my bed, I shave you." Peter threatened.

"Oh it won't be my turd, it will be Drax's."

To which Drax laughed and announced

"I have famously huge turds."

"We're about to die, and this is what we're discussing?" Gamora deadpanned and JJ responds with a mild,

"Just like back in the Kyln."

"Only then we weren't flying for our lives."

"Mmm weren't we though?"

"Fair enough..."

As they were chatting, Rocket and Peter were still fighting over who would steer the ship resulting in them getting hit hard enough by an asteroid in the back that it smashed through and the harsh vacuum of space threatened to suck everyone and everything out. Nebula was almost sucked through the hole if she hadn't been shackled to a post and up on deck, Groot was almost taken by the winds after he lost his grip on Rocket's ear if Peter hadn't caught him and tossed him back to Drax, much to Groot's dismay as he started kicking and punching him so he was passed off to Gora as she kept a tight grip on him with her spines as Peter quickly typed in a command to make an energy field cover the damage left by the asteroid.

"Idiots!" They all heard Nebula yell up from below deck.

"Well, that's what you get when Quill flies." Rocket comments, earning a whack to the head with another wrench from Gamora.

"Ow! Again?!"

"Uh guys? We still have a Sovereign craft following us and our weapons are down!" JJ announced from the video feed she was watching from the ship's rear.

"Twenty clicks to the jump." Gamora reported right before a blast from the Sovereign craft took out a large chunk of the wing.

"Come." Drax thumped a hand on JJ's shoulder, prompting her to follow him as they went down to the ship's lower bay where they both saw Nebula trying to get a hold of a yaro root, but Drax kicked it away saying,

"It's not ripe."

"What are you doing?" JJ asked as Drax attached a cable to himself and grabbed a spacesuit from the rack before pulling down one of the larger guns Rocket stored down there and held it over to JJ.

"Fine." She understood what he wanted her to do and touched a hand to it to supercharge it with some of her electrical energy before he went over to the energy field and hit a button to create a second one behind him as he disabled the first one to go flying out into space, tethered to the ship by the line by still swung around wildly as the ship is still maneuvering around the asteroid field.

"Die, spaceship!" Drax fires once and hits the bullseye as the remaining Sovereign craft is blasted to pieces.

"Alright time to come back in." JJ walked over to the spool of line that was keeping Drax tethered to the ship, but was tossed to the ground as the ship righted itself after making it out of the asteroid field.

For a few moments it seemed like they were home free until dozens of crafts came out from the sides, having gone around the asteroid field and JJ looked out at them from inside the ship before uttering,

"Crap..."

And the ships began to fire on the Milano, but seconds later a huge light went off like a firework and decimated every single ship. Squinting at the view through the window, JJ could've sworn she saw a giant white ship with a tiny man on the top of it.

"What the heck is going on up there?!" JJ yelled up to the others until she hears a creaking noise coming from the cable spool and sees that it's about to break off.

"Nonononononono!" She darted over to the spool and grabbed a hold of it as the cracks around the base kept growing.

JJ screamed as it completely detached from the wall and almost took her out until she felt something wrap around her wrist as she held onto the spool with one hand and the other had been caught by Gora's spines as she struggled to keep a grip on JJ before Gamora rushed over and took another of Gora's spines in her hand.

At the same time, Rocket and Peter managed to get the ship through the jump point and were trying to make a controlled crash landing, but they were only slightly successfully as the Milano skidded along the forested surface of the planet, mowing down the trees while Drax was harshly bounced off of them before the ship made an abrupt stop and dropped down, more or less in one piece.

Outside the ship, Gora had latched herself to JJ's torso and used her spines to enclose JJ as best as she could to protect her as they both dangled from one of the trees that hadn't been flattened by the ship by one spine. Meanwhile Gamora and Drax were both on the ground before the silence was broken by Drax's chuckles and exclamation,

"That was awesome!"

"I would call none of that 'awesome'." Gora spoke up from where she and JJ were being lowered to the ground before starting to lick herself clean right before one wing of the ship completely broke off and crashed to the forest floor, startling them all before the silence was broken with,

"Again I say... Crap..."

2022 Words