All of these powers are secondary to his sonar ability, which he has used as the primary means of advancing his study of nature, the environment, and the cosmos. He’s a foremost expert on biomolecular engineering, geology, and astrophysics, and his super-sonar abilities allow him to detect and analyze the chemical or elemental makeup of any gas, liquid, solid or plasma.

But while Wavelength’s detailed knowledge of the universe stokes his curiosity, it also makes him extremely aware of all of the dangers of the universe around him, which is one of the reasons it took such a great effort by NASA to recruit him for the Stratalight. He would have much preferred to barely leave his lab, let alone fly out into that vast unknown with all its dangers and mysteries.

After crash-landing on this monstrous planet and becoming stuck here, it would seem that his worst fears have been confirmed. And while he has continued to serve valiantly despite the loss of our engineer Smolder and the deaths of Captain Noble and our lead pilot Aphelion at the hands of the powerful warrior Ominous, it is clear that he is coming more and more unhinged with every passing moment. A new revelation has made things exponentially worse.

A few hours ago, after our navigator Marco Crux used his cosmic powers to attack the monstrous planet by calling down hundreds of stars, a little girl named Constellation appeared. She wields enormous cosmic power, but apparently cannot fully use it until she further matures. She told us the story of her creation, then insisted that we help her get off the planet and back to Earth to meet with the Zhibdean Master Hosho who, like her, possesses cosmic powers. And then she revealed to us that our communications officer, Placebo, may be responsible for the entirety of our treacherous predicament.

I turned to Placebo, and demanded that she tell us what is happening. I was half expecting her to deny the words of the child, but instead she looked at me defiantly, and uttered a set of sentences that suggested we couldn’t possibly understand. My extreme shock was quickly muted by my startling realization that our encounter with Ominous was indeed marked by the fact that he and Placebo seemed to be having their own meeting of the minds. Furthermore, during every battle we’d had against the planet’s elements and its creatures, while Placebo certainly inserted herself into the physical fray, it was clear her primary engagement was in the psionic realm against the planet itself.

Before I could repeat my demand for her to explain herself, it was Wavelength who began shouting and pleading that she spill every secret that she had apparently been keeping from us. After a few more minutes of his panic-filled petition Placebo finally spoke up and admitted that she had seen this moment many times before. Wavelength asked how she could have seen the future, because despite her plethora of powerful psionic powers, precognitive abilities are not among them.

She responded that it wasn’t a precognitive intuition that was responsible for her knowledge of the future, it was the fact that she was responsible for orchestrating every detail of her own future, of which we were all a part of. In other words, she set this whole thing up. We were all, of course, completely and utterly stunned by this, but as Wavelength would continue to press, we needed to know why.

Placebo then explained that it all started with the death of her father when she was just a little girl. We asked if the planet had killed her father. She responded that the planet had not killed her father; she had, along with her sister, who would grow to become the mighty Magnifica. It was an accident, as the two little girls awoke one night to find their father screaming in pain. Placebo told us that her powers manifested that night for the first time, and the dream she thought she was having about her father was actually a psionic attack against her father. The young girls tried to comfort him, but her sister’s powers also manifested for the first time, and when she tried to hug him she accidentally enveloped him in a force-field, which constricted tightly until he had suffocated and died. The incident had left them as orphans, as their mother, who they would later find out was the Everlife celestial being we know as Galaxias Kyklos Force Major General Delilah Fray, had been away on an intergalactic mission since they were babies.

Placebo expressed that at the moment she lost her father she felt no control at all. And so she made up her mind to not only never lose control again, but to take absolute control of every aspect of her life. And as her powers grew to near-cosmic levels, it allowed her to manipulate entire sections of the universe. Wavelength asked if that included the sentient beings inhabiting those universes. She responded that it did, and told us that by the time she was 21, her powers had grown to the point where she could almost act as a god.

She then further explained that after several years of pushing the limits of her powers, she wanted to find a way to truly test the extent of what she could do, so she spent some time traveling throughout the cosmos, going to the furthest reaches of the multiverse looking for psytanium, the one thing in the universe that she actually had to exert effort in order to control. She collected all of the psytanium she could find, and formulated it into a living sentient being with psionic abilities that could match her own. Hence the monstrous planet we now find ourselves on. She claimed that the two of them had been practically playing a cosmic game of chess against one another, but in the midst of their back and forth, Placebo had lost the ability to influence the actions of the entity. She had anticipated that would eventually be the case, but she did not anticipate that the entity would attempt to consume the rest of the universe. With that goal in mind, it began formulating an army of elite warriors to work on its behalf. These warriors have been responsible for wiping out obstacles that could potentially stand in the way of its goal. One of those obstacles was Placebo’s own sister and leader of the Diamond Alliance hero team, Magnifica, who had reportedly met her demise at the hands of Denizen Supreme warrior known as Carina.

We could not believe our ears. And while we all expressed our anger at what we’d just heard, it was Wavelength who lashed out with the most emotion. He vehemently berated her, asking her if we are all truly just pawns. He demanded to know if our fallen comrades were just pawns in her game; if she ever really cared about any of us at all. I felt the force of his chastisement was useless in our current situation – especially with the true level of power we now know she wields. Wavelength finished his tirade, then stormed off the ship.

Despite all the furious glares and the indignant thoughts she could no doubt hear in her mind being directed at her, Placebo kept a steely, mostly unphased look on her face. After a few moments, she uttered that she had tried everything to stop the planet from growing more powerful, but had realized that traveling to the planet and confronting it head-on gave her the best chance to defeat it. And coincidentally, (or maybe not too coincidentally), the Stratalight, with its advanced integrative hyper-technology, was one of the few things that could pierce the psionic shell surrounding the planet. But now, after 10 days of constantly clashing with it on both a psionic and physical level – even with the help of her other powerful crew mates – it would seem that destroying the planet is impossible. We all agreed it was time to leave.

I ordered the others to begin preparations for immediate departure. With Smolder still missing we will be forced to harvest lava to feed into the ship’s magma hyper-core, thus inciting another attack from the planet. But at this point we have no choice. As the others got to work, I went outside to find Wavelength.

He was sitting nearby with his face in his hands. He lamented the fact that knowing that a huge portion of his life, if not the whole thing, had been orchestrated by someone else, made everything he’d ever done feel totally insignificant. He talked a bit about how he had worked very hard to reconcile his vast knowledge of nature and science with his deeply held religious beliefs, eventually making the determination that humanity toes the fine line between free will and predestination, and that those of us who find that middle ground are truly the lucky ones. Then he said that up until just a few minutes ago, he counted himself among the lucky ones.

And though neither my faith in an all-powerful supreme being, nor my faith in the inherent good will of humanity have never come close to matching the level of Wavelength’s, my heart truly breaks for him.

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