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~ Outer Space before back
on planet Earth ~

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Now that she was in space and away from Iredescent, Tori took to studying the Iredescent ship she hijacked and stole in order to take herself and the two dead Iredescents back to Earth.

The Glowing Radar's interior was lush red and gorgeous, very luxurious in appearance. The exterior was shimmery lavender purple. I guess Adrezo was what made it the Glowing Radar, Tori thought as she walked through the hallway. Evana's enere was tucked away in her tote bag, her Heckler & Koch leaning against the wall.

The Iredescent ship looked and felt more advanced than human spaceships. There were sleeping areas with complete showers and bathrooms, a full-size kitchen, and a fuel reserve that held enough fuel to last for a hundred years. Each Iredescent ship had essentials: a Meh, invisibility camouflage technology, food, water, and other things.

Tori went in the kitchen, awed at how modern and chic it looked with all the glistening sparkles. She opened the sparkly purple fridge and ate Iredescent food for the first time, marveling at how even their food sparkled. Iredescent water tasted like Swiss Alps water, fresh and clean from the mountain springs. It sparkled the most brilliant white, reminding Tori of how snow sparkled in the sun.

Iredescent food was amazing, flavorful and surprisingly very similar to Earth food. Among the standard chocolate chip cookies (unknown to Tori, chocolate chip cookies were mandated on every ship), milk, fruit, yogurt, cereal, even steak, there was an emergency kit with tea packets of a tova fruit.

Tori inspected the tea packet, unsure what a tova fruit was. She put it aside, trying out the mint tea instead, and found a Meh among the other ship's belongings and essentials. She used it to scan what those foods were, what they were called, who were Adrezo and Evana, and many other information about Iredescents.

She learned much from the Meh, finding out the tova fruit was a contraceptive fruit that prevented pregnancy, grounded up and consumed into the form of tea. She learned that the lemon slice looking food called leyn was medicine that helped the immune system, and that the persiki fruit were like an apricot/peach mix. Iredescent candy was like a burst of glitter, its taste like caramel. And the chocolate was truly out of this world.

Tori continued to explore the ship, finding other random things that belonged to the Iredescents. One of them was a book with Iredescent myths and fairytales. It was written in the Iredescent language, so it was totally foreign to Tori, but it intrigued her regardless. She touched the pages softly as she admired the glittering pictures, the pages feeling like tapestry with words woven into the story, with pictures that seemed so lifelike that Tori wondered whether the characters would actually jump out of the book, for the pictures were made of a moving hologram design that changed when you moved the page, the lenticular prints giving off a really cool 3D effect. The Iredescents evidently put much care into their books.

Among those myths was a winged Iredescent man with black roses all over him, a woman in white that looked like moonlight, and a man clothed entirely in darkness with sunlight above him. Tori had no idea what that myth or legend was, much less aware of how it would influence the world. She had this ominous feeling about it, so strong to the point where she firmly closed the book and stored it away, never touching it again.

Hours passed before the need for sleep arose. Tori chose a bedroom closest to the cockpit. She changed into sleepwear, picking out Iredescent clothes stored in the ships' cabins. After admiring the silky shimmering fabric for a moment, she got under the covers, knowing she needed to get some sleep before she arrived back on Earth.

Sleep evaded her for several hours as Tori pondered over her successful journey to Iredescent. I am the first human to ever see planet Iredescent, she thought excitedly. I saw the planet with my own eyes. I saw how beautiful it is. I saw the Iredescents, how powerful and stunning they are. They look like they're made of diamonds, their skin shimmer like Swarovski crystals. I want to be like them. I want to sparkle and have wings. I want to fly and reach higher than the stars. I want to become an Iredescent. Tori fell asleep, dreaming she became an Iredescent with sparkly skin and brilliant white wings.

Her alarm woke her up an hour before the ship was predicted to approach planet Earth. Tori showered, had toast with eggs and blackberry tea for breakfast, and eagerly awaited the sight of planet Earth. When it appeared within radar, Tori turned off the hyperspeed and navigated the ship towards Europe. Locating her German mansion via latitude and longitude, Tori pressed the button that made the ship invisible. Such awesome technology, Tori thought, highly impressed with the Iredescent ship. Mine now.

Tori had meticulously studied and taught herself a crash course on how to pilot spaceships, but nothing prepared her for how to pilot an alien spaceship. Earth spaceships had a control panel with about a hundred different buttons on them. It looked like a difficult, complex math equation you had to take special college courses for. Iredescent spaceship control panels were simple and easy to understand, like button functions on a Smart refrigerator.

It's very much like driving a car, Tori thought strangely, looking at the control panel in surprise. Though she didn't understand the Iredescent language, she was familiar with the picture symbols that stood for things like gravity control, auto set or manual, and other such functions. Tori chose manual.

With auto options, you could set your flight path. With manual, you had a steering wheel that operated very much like the steering wheel of a car. Up in outer space, Tori felt like a ship captain at the wheel rather than a car driver. As a young girl, she often watched Space Pirate Captain Harlock anime and always wanted to fly a ship like Captain Harlock did. Now she was finally living out her childhood dream, but without her childhood crush, and with an urgency that matched Captain Harlock's urgency in battle. She felt like Queen Emeraldas navigating a large alien vessel, though Tori was navigating a stolen Iredescent ship.

Sometime later, Tori landed the Iredescent ship in a cleared area right beside her German mansion. It was disguised as a huge tennis court almost the size of a football field, but it was really a landing lot she had devised. Feeling exhilarated, Tori walked out of the Iredescent spaceship, breathing in the forest air combined with scents of pine, evergreen, cypress, and wildflowers. She vaguely remembered Iredescent smelling like vanilla, a pleasant scent that surpassed most other scents.

Tori set to work intensely studying the two dead Iredescents, learning everything she possibly could about the Iredescent body. She learned most of the information from the Meh, since there was no guidebook or anything else she could go by. By comparing the Iredescent body to the human body, Tori was able to figure out what was needed in order to turn a human into an Iredescent.

It took an entire month for Tori to figure out how to effectively turn a human into an Iredescent. She used her own skin and hair samples to test how long it took for the n-r element and Iredescent blood to dominate and reconstruct human cells into Iredescent cells. Once she determined the exact amount of time it took to do so, she determined the overall time it would take for an entire human body and predicted it would take approximately an entire day.

It would be a painful process, as evidenced by how painful it had been when her fingers accidentally touched Iredescent blood, so Tori designed a knock-out gas intended to keep a human unconscious for a little over the estimated amount of time it took to turn a human into an Iredescent. Tori was proud to have personally outdone herself, wishing she could patent her own inventions and creation, but that would mean revealing her secret work. In due time, she promised herself, designing the cylinders next.

Though the construction workers were the ones that built the glass building, installed lighting, plumbing, and such, it was Tori who built the cylinders herself. Tori spent day and night at work in the glass building, taking time off work to do so. She used all she knew about science, physics, math, and engineering to create her lab and the cylinders. She wanted to make everything fully ready for what she intended to do.

Materials were the hardest part. Tori had to carefully determine how much of each material was needed to turn a human into an Iredescent. Once she figured it out, the supply part was a non-issue; Tori replicated the materials by cloning them so that they would never be out of stock. She cloned the n-r element and Iredescent blood, stole moondust from a facility in Japan, and used various liquids and gases and compounds. The moondust was essential for bonding certain elemental components and keeping them in place during the transformation process. The various liquids and gases and compounds kept the human alive with plenty of air to breathe during the transformation process.

Cables connected to the cylinders from underneath, snaking back towards a large flat rectangular box on the wall near a table. A lamp stood on the table, peering over notes and drawings on how to turn humans into Iredescents. Tori stood beside the notes, excited to have finally figured out the complete process.

I will call my creation....irangel. Iredescent angel.

And I will be the first.

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Music:

"My Secret"
by Klee

"alt_Human (3FORCE Remix)[Instrumental]"
by Circle of Dust
<<Tori's theme>>

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