He doesn’t realise until the instant that the train swoops out of the Crises bubble that they’re in space. Maybe it should’ve been obvious in retrospect, all that stuff about Arks and Seas - named the same as moon craters, goddammit - but Raiden’s never been one to grasp metaphor quickly. The sky is the sky and the ocean is the ocean, right up til the moment that you’re floating in it and you suddenly understand what the poets were getting at.
Being in space sucks. Mainly because it throws all his speculation as to Aldebaran’s location and the people behind it out the window, but also because it precludes any possibility of a quick rescue. They aren’t in orbit around Earth, so they could be anywhere in the cosmic soup, and even the fastest rockets from Solis wouldn’t be able to find them for months at least. Then there would be the problem of ferrying people home, too. It could take years.
Raiden gets off at the first stop, already weary to the bone - ha - from the path his thoughts have taken during the trip. Interesting. This bubble is very different from Crises, overflowing with nature and greenery. Could be an oxygen farm, but if so it’s an unnecessarily massive one, clearly intended as much for aesthetic purposes as practical ones. Not much visible technology.
“Huh,” Raiden says. That gives him an idea.
Further into the bubble, he finds a suitably deserted grove of trees and shrugs out of his borrowed jacket and pants. Something’s been bothering him since he got here that he hasn’t had a chance to test yet - he’s prepared to put it down to space weirdness now that he knows where he is, but it won’t hurt to test. Besides, this place feels like it runs on Earth-standard gravity, or near enough.
First things first. He drops into a combat stance and levels a solid roundhouse kick at the closest tree. It connects perfectly, drags evenly-spaced claw marks through the bark and leaves the tree a bit lopsided.
That’s... not what’s supposed to happen.
Raiden kicks the tree again. The claw marks deepen; a thick piece of bark slides off the tree and he has to wipe his foot on the grass to remove some of the gooey sap coating the surface underneath. This is weird. A full-powered kick should have annihilated the tree, knocked the thing in half and snapped over a good portion of the trees behind it with the kinetic energy from the blow. His systems aren’t reporting any changes in his power levels.
His optical implant, however, is now reporting movement. Raiden spins on his high-heels to see a masked figure half-hidden behind a tree, watching him intently. “Hey,” he says loudly, hiding his surprise. “It’s not polite to stare, you know. Why don’t you come out from there?”
