ODETTA wasn't going to lie. She had just found herself in the seat of defeat and had seen that she needed to tell the truth to the members still alive.
"Attention all crew members, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that our unfair comrade, BB, has passed. But on the upside, I've figured out how to make milkshakes in the eating spot."
Different reactions were what drove the group together. Five remained.
"When I get my hands on that core!"
Scott was talking with Alexandria as he had found himself in a situation where he wanted to play therapist and needed someone with trauma. He knew that BB would've wanted him to be the man of the house when he was gone.
"Looks like I'm going to be working overtime."
"What?"
"Come on, we have work to do. This machine is going to be a big problem."
Scott knew that the destruction of ODETTA was something he needed to work on. He also knew that he needed Joey's support.
"What are we going to do now? We're alone with a sociopathic time machine and our smartest guy is gone!"
"Calm down Joey. We're going to get out of here soon. We just need to stay close to me for several days. She has to let us out eventually."
Scott had a strong mind. He had used it to sense around the place for where the core was at. BB gave him lessons in basically everything, but he was a horrible student. He knew that there was some kind of main core to the ODDETA, he had found himself in a spot that allowed him to break the machine.
"What are we going to do now?"
"Nothing much. I wonder if I could sense around to control which room we end up in."
There had been an idea inside Scott's head. All of the crew knew he was the darkest bulb in the box.
"Actually, I think BB said something about that."
See, BB planned ahead. He knew he would pass and decided that he was going to find a way back after leaving hints to how to escape.
"Then let's go to his room!"
Mistress and Scott had charged through the door before they reeling back through the door in the hallway. None of the rooms in the ODETTA were connected like in a house. See, they were boxes that simply snapped on and then they would make a coherent path. But when someone wasn't traveling, the ship became a stack of boxes that was nearly impossible to navigate.
"Alright, he has to have a journal."
Scott began by throwing things about and destroying everything that looked like a monitoring device.
"Found it!"
They opened up his journal and began to read through it before eventually, they got to the end. In it was a hypothesis about the place.
If this place is really one interconnected building, the rooms must be constantly moving. This means that the next room could move over like a Rubik's cube.
"There we go."
"Aren't Rubik's cubes hard to solve?"
"Yeah, but BB could solve them pretty easily."
Mistress smiled. She liked to tease Scott and had a thing for joking about in a subtle sense of humor.
"Wasn't he a genius."
"Yeah, and I'm a conman."
"Close enough."
Scott and Mistress sensed around the outside for some time before they found the breakroom in the Rubik's cube that was the ODETTA.
"Now, we just need to solve the puzzle."
Navigation of the place was next to impossible for lesser people because imagine you have to solve a Rubik's cube. Now imagine that you were shrunk down to the size of an ant and you had to solve a normal Rubik's cube. Now imagine that the Rubik's cube is actively trying to fight you and you need to arrange the cube in a way that makes the center open without harming others or yourself. This task was next to impossible.
"I think we got it."
Although he was also a psychic, Scott was supernaturally lucky. BB developed a theory believing he was using his psychic abilities subconsciously but that turned out to be wrong. Scott's luck came to his rescue and saved him from the likes of his demise as he was back in the break room.
"We got lucky this time."
"Yes you two did. I don't know how you two did it but I will stop that from ever happening again."
Drinking a glass of sparkling water in the corner was Sears who had planned numerous ways to escape. He'd planned an escape from a pow camp in his glory days but had found this place impossible to escape.
"Great, we made the big dumb machine angry."
A chuckle was released from Scott as the air slowly warmed like it was a holiday.
"Nice to know we still have some sort of happiness in this dusty excuse for a vehicle."
What could only be thought of as a laugh came from Joey. He wasn't one to laugh at his own jokes or to laugh at all, Joey let out a laugh. His black hair fell backwards as his face looked to the roof and he laughed as loud as he could. ODETTA tried to quiet it out with the sounds of her screaming over the intercom previous to her realization of this being a trap.
"Will you two stop with the tomfoolery for a second to help me find us a way out of here?"
"Actually, we already figured that part out."
Scott explained how the ODETTA worked and moved forward with the plans of escape. His plan was to head towards the center of the place. He needed to do the plan without causing the end of the machine and the crew so their best bet was to move the cube until they ended up making the right tunnel. If all went well, they would end up in the center. But the ODETTA had a contingency plan for the likes of this. See, every person in the files of the shuttle had an AI based on them and placed in the core. When one AI got hacked or the core would be destroyed, another one would come about and take their place before restarting and rebuilding the core. Another way of survival in this case is to remove the core and to place the shuttle in a random spot in time. There was a final contingency plan, if the crew mutinied there would be a message sent back to them in the past. Little did they know, there would be lots of messages sent backwards through time as all of the other AI's in the ODETTA were destroyed by BB when he burnt the files because in order for them to make decisions, it took upon their previous life experiences of which were stored in the library.
"I hate puzzles."
"I want a pony but not all dreams come true."
Scott and Mistress were looking through the puzzle for they needed to find the core. The creator had made the place with the hopes that it would be able to be found by the crew on the off chance that they needed to repair the machine.
"How long is this going to take?"
Joey and Sears had smoked themselves into a stupor whilst Alexandria was tidying the place up. She had a thing for cleaning scenes after she performed a hit. Sometimes it would take days for them to realize what she did so she would stay at the place for a while when she was running low on cash. That seemed so long ago to her.
"Just take a nap. I'll let you know when we're done with this. Believe me when I say that this is a lot harder than it looks."
The constant whining from the likes of Joey had almost sent Scott into a frenzy but he was able to survive.
"Let me know when you're done."
At that moment, ODETTA received a message from the future. Upon decoding the message and finding a new course of action to combat the mutiny, she got a new message. After about four more tries she finally landed on a plan that didn't get a distress signal from the future. At that moment, she had realized the amount of danger she was in as the machine felt an emotion other than frustration or joy at the horrors her crew committed, fear.
"Hello everyone. I would like to admit a new wave of adventures has come to the people of the ODETTA and formerly Tempest Tide."
Scott had a confused face. How does she know about the Tempest Tide? She must have been spying on us the entire time.
"Buckle up. This could get messy."
Everyone stood and readied themselves for the battle of a lifetime, but it never came. They instead were treated to finding themselves falling onto the ground. They were right outside the D.O.W.N office building. The place looked like a doctor's office but behind it was a remodeled warehouse and an airstrip. This allowed it several cover businesses whilst also giving way to cover up their larger affairs.
"What on the green earth could that be?"
"It's pretty simple. A doctor's office. Now, my head hurts so you bunch can sit out here while I get this checked out."
Joey ran towards the building and was followed by his subordinates. He'd had a rough day, and all knew that they were only there for the machine wanted them to be there.