"Cute," said Elaine.
Guybrush glanced at her, caught by surprise.
"Most interesting," she continued. "Rocks that flash when you shoot them, before jumping into the air and spinning around a bit. Neat party trick. Now," here her voice grew more serious, "why the hell did we have to do that?"
Guybrush pulled her back to the doorway. It had worked, and Guybrush was feeling better now. They still had this woman, but at least they were out of danger. "Come on, I'll show you," he said, "Ms. Marley."
They went back up the ladder and along the passageway. In the cockpit, they found Wally checking the various controls. Everything looked fairly normal.
"So, where are we, Wally?" said Guybrush.
Beside Guybrush, Elaine suddenly stopped, and raised a hand to her mouth. Right in front of her, out of the viewscreen, was nothing but empty space. What had happened to all the pirate ships? The huge bulk of Pael? "What... happened?" she said.
Guybrush looked at her, waiting for Elaine to piece it together.
"You mean... when I shot the portal stones they... they're some kind of matter transportation system?"
"That's right," said Guybrush. "And they've already saved our neck twice."
"Uh, Guybrush..." said Wally.
"Wow!" said Elaine, suddenly seized by a overwhelming vision. "Imagine what you could do with this stuff! You could save a fortune on fuel... set up rapid transport between the planets..."
"Guybrush, I think something's wrong," said Wally.
This got their attention. "What is it, Wally?" said Guybrush.
"I don't know where we are."
This shouldn't have been any cause for alarm. As far as they knew, the portal stones sent them to entirely random locations in the Solar System. Of course they wouldn't know where they were... at least, until they'd had a bit of a look around. But some intuition made Guybrush look up, back out the viewscreen. And he felt the first stirrings of alarm.
The stars were unrecognisable.
To someone on earth this might not have seemed very ominous, but on earth the view of the night sky was affected by latitude and rotation. Out in the freedom of space there was just one backdrop, the Milky Way as seen from this small far-flung corner. Because the stars were so far away, there was barely any parallax as you moved from Mercury to Pluto. Space Pirates, those that spent their lives out in the deep of space, soon knew the backdrop of stars like the back of their hand.
Now, this familiar vista was nowhere to be seen. Confronting Guybrush were constellations and groupings of stars that were completely unfamiliar. He started to get a very bad idea.
This was lost on Elaine, who hadn't spent the same amount of time in space. She was merely confused. "What do you mean you don't know where we are?" she asked Wally.
Wally looked up from the controls. "Uh, the portal stones take us to a different location each time. It's randomised somehow."
"But we are in the Solar System, right?"
Wally looked uncomfortable. "Well, we should be..."
Elaine's mouth dropped open again. "What do you mean should be? Where are we?" She looked to Guybrush, hoping for some sanity, but the blank look on his face didn't help at all.
"The onboard computer is just calculating the distances to the stars on the viewscreen," said Wally. "Once it does that, it'll be able to pinpoint our place in the galaxy."
"In the GALAXY!?!"
"It's just coming up..." There were five seconds of tense silence, with Elaine and Oscar staring at the computer readout, and Guybrush somewhat lost beside them, staring out into space, trying to puzzle out the stars.
A figure flashed up.
"We're forty thousand light years from Earth," read Wally.