Prototypical Prototype Piracy

The seas lurched violently that evening, as a storm brewed over the Eternal Ocean. The crew of the Lancaster, a huge cargo ship that regularly made trips in and out of South City, was well-used to this kind of miserable weather. A ship of this size could take far fiercer winds, and far higher tides. But still, there was an air of tension to the trip, that every hand from the Captain down to the boatswains could feel. The ship was loaded with all the usual merchandise, intended to restock South City's commercial district. But there was something else on the ship this time, as well: in a large cargo container emblazoned with the emblem of a prominent engineering company from West City lay a prototype claw mechanism, intended to be fitted onto the front of a spaceship to allow precision boarding, without the need of conventional docking.

The device was still in its early phases, but it had passed most of its tests in West City. Now, it was en-route to a rocketry lab in South City, where it would be tested just above the atmosphere on a scrap starship: a smaller vessel of Tuffle design, acquired many years ago. The crew weren't intended to know about the device, but rumours travelled quickly within a tight-knit crew, and the added security on the ship only helped to verify those rumours. By the time they had been caught in that very storm, everyone aboard knew there was a risk of theft.

What they couldn't know was that the source of that theft would be an alien.

It happened at midnight, as the crew was caught in the middle of a change in the guard. A flash of purple energy appeared on the horizon, and before the guard could so much as register what he was seeing, a bolt of yellow ki pierced through the window of the sentry tower, striking him clean on the side of the head. He collapsed backwards, his limp hand falling away from the alarm he would never manage to ring. He wasn't dead: the invader made sure of that. But he wouldn't be getting up anytime soon.

Still, the ploy only bought the apparent pirate a couple extra minutes. A purple-haired Saiyan garbed in sleek black battle armour raced along the main deck, her scouter flashing an alert once it located the prototype. It took her mere moments to arrive at its container, and within a few seconds, both of the on-duty guards had been knocked clean out before they knew what had hit them. It seemed almost like a clean operation, until Cato blasted the hinges off of the container, at which point--

-- alarms blared across the ship, and a distress signal immediately pinged out to local monitoring stations. The Saiyan cussed under her breath, knowing full well that this would mean the Earthlings would scramble reinforcements. But if all they could muster was their paltry coast guard...

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