"Melvin. Talk. Now," Rania demanded, arms crossed and eyes blazing.
"Fine, fine," grumbled the ship's AI. "But don't blame me if you start hallucinating shadow goats and singing asteroids again."
"AGAIN?!" Kai blurted.
Melvin cleared his artificial throat. "Roughly 82 years ago, a top-secret intergalactic program known as *Project M.U.U.N.*—Moon Unveiling Ultra Nexus—sent a crew to this very crater. Their mission? Retrieve an alien artifact believed to contain a living code. Something that could rewrite matter."
"You mean, like... magic?" Rania asked.
"Worse," Melvin said. "Programmable reality."
The words hung in the air like a floating anvil.
Kai blinked. "So they just… found it?"
"They *thought* they did. The moment they unearthed it, they vanished. Poof. No return signal. No bodies. Nothing but a scrambled distress call and that cursed video you just watched."
Rania glanced toward the window. The moon's surface was too still. Too quiet.
Kai was typing frantically on the console. "Wait, there's something else here. Melvin, there's a second signal."
Melvin sounded nervous now. "That's impossible."
"Then explain *this*," Kai said, pulling up another hologram.
It showed… their own ship. Orbiting the moon. From the *outside*.
"That's… us?" Rania whispered.
"But how?" Kai breathed.
Before anyone could answer, the ship suddenly jolted—violently. The lights flickered. Alarms blared. A metal panel exploded off the wall and smacked into the floor with a BANG.
"What now?!" Rania shouted, gripping a pole as the ship trembled.
"Something's pulling us," Kai said. "From beneath the surface!"
Melvin screamed, "ABORT! ABORT! I didn't sign up to be moon spaghetti!"
The ship twisted, groaning like a haunted whale. A blinding light shot up from the crater below, wrapping the rocket in glowing tendrils of pale green energy.
"THIS IS WHY I DON'T TRUST CRATERS!" Rania shrieked as they were dragged downward.
And then—blackness.
Silence.
Nothing.
For exactly 3.2 seconds.
Then they landed.
Hard.
When the lights returned, they were no longer in space. No longer on the ship. No longer on *their* moon.
They were standing in a vast hall. Towering columns made of transparent crystal loomed above them. The sky? Purple. The stars? Spiraling like liquid gold.
Rania whispered, "I think we're inside the artifact."
A soft voice echoed from the far end of the hall.
"Welcome, travelers. We've been waiting."
Kai whispered, "That's never a good sign."
Melvin whimpered in their comms, "This is why I fake my updates."