CHAPTER 3 --- An Arrival

	Dr. Andonuts and Jeff stood over the metal worktable looking like two grim sentinels at watch over a doomed city. Blueprints and documents were strewn about, along with a few drained styrofoam cups of coffee. It was only the night after the funeral, but dark rings were already starting to line Jeff's eyes beneath his glasses, and the Doctor looked almost to have aged overnight. His wrinkles appeared more like deep grooves, sketching his face into a picture of discontent. Both Jeff and the Doctor had assumed slightly wrinkled lab coats.

	"There's nothing conclusive, even after all the research we've looked at." said Jeff, removing his glasses and rubbing his nose. He quickly replaced them and continued, "As much as I hate to say it, somebody is going to have to go down there and take a look around."

	Andonuts looked up at his son quickly. "Jeff, surely you cannot return to that place after the ordeal you suffered there!" The young genius' face remained implacable.

	"There might be no other way. We have to get a scientific analysis as to whether this is really the vessel of Giygas or not. We still don't even know exactly what that poor dig worker saw that scared him so."

	The Doctor stood up and stretched fitfully before bringing a hand up to stroke his mustache in thought. "Jeff, you know that it could be incredibly dangerous. We could just as easily send a research team down there to do an investigation-"

	"But if it really is what we hypothesize it is, then nobody is better qualified to examine it than me."

	Nodding his unwilling assent, Andonuts unconsciously began to pace. "It's not something I can fully endorse, but as always your logic is showing through my fuddy-duddy emotions, my son." Despite the haggard cast of his face, the Doctor smiled. "If you do go, you know that I will be behind you one-hundred percent."

	Jeff returned the smile with his own. "Thank you, dad. And besides... i've perfected a few of my battle machines in the past four years that i've had no chance to experiment with. If I were to encounter anything dangerous, at least I would be fully prepared." He looked out a nearby window and said wistfully, "If only I had time to complete my project over at the abandoned Stonehenge base... but that's impossible, now. We have to get down to that dig with the utmost haste."

	Andonuts moved to a nearby storage cabinet and began to rifle through a stack of papers. "You can use the Sky Runner to get there, I have the programming around here somewhere that you'll need to enter the directions, and of course you will need some protective equipment as well, and-"

	"Dad." said Jeff, grinning and hefting a rather deadly looking piece of equipment, "I'm nineteen years old. I can definitely take care of myself."

	Andonuts turned and looked fully at Jeff, who stood there across the room holding a weapon that looked like an assault rifle with a two liter soda bottle attached to the muzzle, his stance filled with confidence. The Doctor's face softened, and he said, "Jeff, my boy, you really have grown. It's sentimental, I suppose, but it seems like such a short time ago that you were just five years old at Snow Wood. I wish I had been there to see you grow up... to watch you put together your first invention, or to take your first steps, or make your first A on your report card..." A tear came to one of his eyes, and he swiftly wiped it away. Jeff looked touched, and he carefully placed the weapon on the table before moving over to his father and giving him a stiff embrace. "Jeff," said the Doctor quietly, his voice cracking slightly from the tears, "you have made me proud."

	Jeff let the moment simmer. Times like these had been few and far between since he had been reunited with his dad four years ago, considering all the frenetic research and experimentation they had conducted with the quirky Mr. Saturns, along with their own private research here. To a person like Jeff who was normally a straight-laced, logical thinker, forming a connection with a dad who had been absent for his entire childhood had been difficult. Yet, Jeff had discovered that no span of time could break that inherent bond between a father and son. There were still moments like this when their similarities became crystal clear, when the bond was strongest.

	"You can put away the coordinates, dad. I'm going to go meet someone who definitely doesn't need a dusty old invention like the Sky Runner." Jeff pulled back and smiled slightly once again. "If everything is in order, then he should still be living in Onett. All I have to do is go and find him-"

	"Don't get ahead of yourself, Jeff." said a voice from the doorway. Both Jeff and the Doctor nearly jumped out of their skin and turned toward the voice. Jeff's eyebrows seemed to jump off the top of his head as he looked closer, dumbfounded. The stranger chuckled slightly and said, "You haven't changed a bit, have you?"

	A brilliant smile lit up Jeff's features as he scrabbled around the table to greet the newcomer. He laughed, beside himself with joy; the last person he had expected to show up had defied expectations yet again.

-----

	In a distant corner of Eagleland, near the town of Sigburg, a girl sat and stared at a stone.

	The stone was just a normal gray rock, with nothing at all special about it. In a perfect circle around the rock, with just a small area of grass inbetween, blue mushrooms were growing. To the girl, it seemed like a faint hazy light came from the toadstools and bathed the tiny valley in soft shades. When she watched it for long enough, she started to feel like a part of the scenery, like she herself was growing out of the ground and feeding off that sustaining light. It was the only place she could come to find peace with the way things had been recently. Anywhere else she went had the faint hum of traffic, or crowded streets full of people, or the scream of airplanes overhead for as far as she could walk. This vale and it's ring of odd mushrooms gave her a place to come to feel safe, and secluded from the world. The way the sun slanted into the alcove, it only had natural light for a few hours of the day. The rest of the time it was just Celeste and the faintly shimmering mushrooms.

	She was a pretty girl, by most standards, though some would say that she was a little too thin in the face, that her nose was a little too long, or that her arms were a little too gangly for her slight body. Her wild black hair was half braided into a ponytail in the back, while the rest fell down around her shoulders in waves. Hazel eyes the color of amber and emerald were half lidded as she sat forward on her arms, drifting between daydreams and hazy reality.

	Sighing in contentment, she rolled off the mossy log she had been sitting on and landed on her back. Completely relaxed, she closed her eyes and just daydreamed. She wondered if what her father was doing at work, if he was happy. She wondered if her sister was still at school, where Celeste was supposed to be. Obligations didn't seem all that important when she came to the vale. A slight breeze drifted down into the small valley, pulling at the edges of her brown peasant skirt and green longsleeve shirt. There was nowhere else in the world that Celeste would rather have been at that moment. Sigburg was far away. The school was far away. Her family was far away, and every last one of her troubles was far, far away.

	In the quiet glow of the toadstool ring, the girl named Celeste drifted off into dreamless sleep.

-----

	The boy standing in the doorway of the Andonuts Laboratory was obviously dressed for travel, with threadbare jeans and well worn sneakers, a blue coat with a yellow stripe on the chest, a sturdy looking black backpack, and a red colored baseball cap on his head, the brim of which was blue.

	"Ness!" cried Jeff, rushing forward and proceeding to vigorously shake the newcomer's hand. "It is truly good to see you again, friend!"

	"Haha, same to you, Jeff." said Ness as he returned the handshake with a warm smile. His old friend's face was thinner than Jeff remembered it, the eyes were clearer, if it were even possible, and his entire posture simply appeared as more mature. "You're taller than I remember." said Ness.

	Jeff stepped back and crossed his arms. "It has been four whole years, you know."

	"Has it?" said Ness quietly, looking around at the lab with a faraway look in his eyes. "The last time we were here, we were on the way to Stonehenge to save Dr. Andonuts and the rest-" here he noticed the Doctor to one side and nodded, Andonuts nodded gravely in response to the memory.

	"It's not an event I care to recall." he said, his face becoming even more weathered in the moment. Jeff remembered his own horror at finding Dr. Andonuts, along with some of their close friends, floating suspended in containment tanks deep in the enemy base.

	"But at any rate, Ness! How did you come to be here just now? I swear i'd only just started talking about you when you showed up." said Jeff, fiddling with the material of his lab coat.

	Ness closed the door to the frigid air of Winters behind him and walked further into the stuffy laboratory before responding. "You have to remember, Jeff, i've just got a sense of the right place to be." He turned his head and grinned widely at his friend, "Up until today, I was rotting away from boredom back in Onett. It's been like that, ever since I got back from our journey. The whole fame of being 'The Chosen One' and the 'Savior of Earth' started to fade after a few months... then I was just Ness the teenager again. Sure I still got looks and even the occasional autograph request, but I could barely stand just sitting in a classroom after I had traveled the world, after the raw power of the earth had gone through me in the war against Giygas." At this, he looked at one of his hands, as if remembering a lost feeling. "Four years I went through it. Four years, Jeff, of just being normal teenage Ness. I took off on little excursions every so often, but without Giygas' influence on the world, everywhere I went was totally safe. I mean, it's not like I want the world to be plunged into crisis like it was before, but I just wanted something, anything at all." He looked up at Jeff, his big brown eyes inquisitive. "Do you have any idea what I'm saying?"

	"I know, Ness." said Jeff, sighing and removing his white labcoat. Underneath was a seaweed green suit, with a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. It seemed uncharacteristically sloppy for the usually rigid personality Jeff expressed. He tossed the labcoat over the back of a nearby chair and adjusted his glasses. "It's been the same here. For a while it was interesting enough to perform experiments with the Mr. Saturns, but even their interesting nature started to grate on the nerves after long enough. When we returned to seclusion here at the lab, it was even worse." Dr. Andonuts listened to the two younger men with a clouded expression, considering all that they said carefully. Jeff removed his glasses and rubbed them on his suit coat before continuing. "My father and I have created some fascinating new inventions since our time here. We even went so far as to found a research corporation we deemed ARC, the Andonuts Research Company. It's been rapidly expanding ever since it's inception two years ago. However, even in the light of all of this, after an adventure such as you and I experienced, after all that happened since I crash landed the Sky Runner into the graveyard in Threed, it was hard to adjust to a 'normal' life." He looked into Ness' eyes. "I know exactly what you mean."

	"However..." said Andonuts, "This still does not explain why you came here, Ness."

	Ness nodded and linked his hands behind his head. "Well, I was sitting an reminiscing on old times one lazy afternoon, and all of a sudden I had this urge to come and visit you, Jeff. I couldn't explain it or rationalize it in my mind, but in light of my extreme boredom I decided I would stop by." He looked slowly from Andonuts over to Jeff. 'Stop by' was an interesting turn of phrase, given the circumstances; Onett was more than a hundred miles from the frigid hills of Winters. One of the many psychic powers Ness had developed had been the power to teleport across vast distances in mere seconds. "Judging by your reaction, I seemed to have come at a good time."

	Instantly, Jeff's expression hardened. "I don't believe you could call the situation 'good'."

	Ness quickly dropped his jovial outlook and adopted a serious expression. Jeff was astonished at how much the old Ness had matured. "Is it..." Ness mouthed the name, but he seemed unable to speak it, out of fear that it might bring some sort of life to a long dead adversary.

	"Giygas." answered Andonuts gravely. A tangible pall of tension fell on the room as the three men looked at the floor for a moment.

	It was a few moments before Ness was able to speak. "How is it possible?"

	The Doctor pushed about a few of the papers strewn messily on the metallic table before picking up one document in particular and handing it across to Ness. His eyes scanned the page for a moment, and in only a few moments he understood. "Deep Darkness... far beneath the ground... no, it couldn't be. Tell me it's not what I think it is."

	"The only thing it logically could be. The remains of the Cave of the Past." said Jeff in a tone of utmost seriousness, and masked pain. Ness could only close his eyes and slump forward to support himself by one arm on the table. Jeff watched carefully his close friend's expression of pain at the memory of that place. In his heart, Jeff felt that same pain that he felt he could never recover from. It returned every time he remembered the nature of Giygas, the waves of pure evil that had surrounded them during the conflict, the hate against all living things, the attacks that came from every direction without warning or explanation. It had been a time of total hopelessness, when all of the effort they had put into reaching that point had seemed like nothing in the face of Giygas' unimaginable power. It had only been divine intervention that had pulled them from the brink of death and destroyed the universal cosmic destroyer in turn.

	Even Ness' reaction was different from what it would've been years ago. He had more emotions now, past the sheer determination Jeff had seen at every moment during their journey. The old Ness would never have stopped long enough to let the situation get to him. At length, Ness straightened up and examined the paper again. "But we still don't know for sure, do we? This report says that the site was abandoned, and nobody has tried to explore it yet."

	"Exactly." said Jeff, bringing one hand to his chin and beginning to think, and when Jeff started thinking, you could almost see the wheels and cogs turning behind his blue eyes. "I wanted to find you, Ness, since you and I would be the most capable of anyone alive to explore that abandoned tunnel." Ness nodded, although his eyes were as cold as ice. "If we went to investigate, we would be able to make a conclusive decision as to whether what remains there is anything we should be worried about."

	"You mean the Devil's Machine." said Ness.

	"That's right." Jeff replied. They both remembered in stark detail the shock they had felt when, at the end of everything, at the climax of their journey, none other than the fat face of Pokey Minch had appeared. Pokey had been Ness' neighbor and friend for a time, until the fateful events of 1997 launched Ness into an adventure that eventually brought him worldwide fame. Seeing Ness going about the process of attaining this grandeur was too much for Pokey's outrageously inflated ego. From the moment that the messenger from the future had told Ness he was to be the Chosen One, Pokey had done everything possible to try and get in Ness' way by taking the side of every major enemy that Ness would encounter. One by one Ness had defeated them, and displaced Pokey from his seat of power. With each encounter, Pokey's hate had grown, until he was hardly even human anymore. Giygas' corrupting influence had so taken over Pokey's mind that he had gone as far as to steal the prototype Phase Distorter and, though some means still unknown, had traveled to the past to join with Giygas.

	It had been there that Pokey had fought the four of them alongside Giygas who, at the time, was in the form of a great lidless eye. It was shortly after the battle began that Pokey asked them all if they wanted to see Giygas' "true form". What he had said after that had remained a mystery, "So do you want me to turn off the Devil's Machine? Well, prepare to be amazed!" It was after that moment that the real nightmare had begun.

	"The Devil's Machine." repeated Jeff. "We still don't know it's exact nature, but it definitely has a direct connection to Giygas and, judging by the way Pokey spoke, acted as a container for it's 'true form'. If we have an opportunity to examine it, the results could be immeasurably helpful."

	"So if I understand you correctly, then we need to go to this dig site first of all. Then, if it turns out the discovery is not truly the Devils Machine, we return with clear consciences and go on living our merry lives. In the event that it really is the Devil's Machine, then we will have to examine it to see what we can find." His voice wavered toward the end of his sentence, and he coughed in an attempt to cover it up. Andonuts and Jeff had both heard it, and understood how he felt. None of them looked forward to approaching that unholy place at all. The possibility of discovery was even less appealing.

	"Exactly so." said Jeff. "We will, of course, take the utmost precautions for this trip. Theoretically, however, there should be no resistance to be met." The fact of Bill Morel's sudden death was left unspoken. They would be facing whatever had driven his consciousness to such extremes that his heart had given out.

	Jeff managed to crack a smile. "But Ness, why not focus on happier things? I know we've both got a lot to catch up on, and old times to reminisce. I'm sure there's something edible around here, why don't you stay the night and we can depart tomorrow?"

	Ness nodded, some of the tension slipping away from his own face. "That would be great, Jeff. It's very thoughtful of you."

	Though the three of them attempted to be jovial the rest of the night, the smiles remained forced, the laughter stayed at just a pitch too high, too shrill. The spectre of the job to be done was too dark to permit any sort of relaxation on their part.

	Ness did not get any sleep that night.

-----

	Far, far away, the figure of Celeste lay comfortably in the moss of a shaded valley under the stars, all of her cares far from her.