New A/N: January 10th, 2010. I started on this story and posted it August 8th, 2005 and finished it October 19th of 2005. I was very happy with this story when I first wrote it but going back and re-reading it... not so much. I'm in the middle of the 6th installation of this series - Reflections of Marcus McCloud. I only write stories that are requested by readers. One about Marcus was requested, as was the sequel. The only two stories I wrote that were not by request... let's see, THIS ONE obviously... and Reflections of Peppy. Why? Because it helps with writing the back-story. In this series, a "REFLECTION" is the name Krystal's people gave to the psychic vibrations her race felt in their frontal lobe. They call it such because they see things the way we look into a mirror. It's two-dimensional images like one would see on a flat glassy surface. I call the Peppy story a "reflections" story as well but there are no telepathic people in it. Instead, I change the story format and start each chapter with him as an old man, reflecting on his past. Okay. for those of you who are fans of this series, I really appreciate you taking the time to read my material. I plan to make this story a little longer, too. There will be a few small sections of stuff that I'll remove but mostly I'm editing this story to fix things and add stuff. Don't worry even though there are sections I dislike I'm not changing anything major. Falco still fights his old rival gang, Krystal still rescues Fox on Meteo, Star Wolf still abducts the Prime Minister to keep him from getting killed.

Okay! I'll do my best NOT to simply erase and re-write this story. It would come out very different if I did and I wouldn't write entire paragraphs of passive-tense narrative if I re-wrote it... but it would be very time consuming and this story will be five years old this year. I like looking back and seeing how I've progressed over the last half-decade. If I change EVERYTHING I won't have that anymore. So yeah... I'm just going to do some editorial and add a little stuff. I'll TRY to write in my old writing style to keep this story fluid but... yeah. Stuff. Okay, I'll shut up now - happy reading.

My current email address is KitKaramakATgmailDOTcom. Feel free to say hi! Feel free to re-review this story if you like. If you've already reviewed a chapter and it won't let you post again, you can always log out and post an anonymous review and write in your name and email address so I can thank you for your review as I do with EVERY review I receive. THANKS AGAIN FOR STOPPING THROUGH!!

REFLECTIONS OF KRYSTAL

By: Kit Karamak

Chapter -1- The day after the 'Adventure'.

Krystal paused. She needed a moment to reflect on all that had happened over the last few days. With her damaged shuttle sitting on the flight deck of 'GreatFox,' her search for answers on Cerinia would be placed on the back burner for a while. She remembering landing on Sauria when her mind sensed a call of distress and during that escapade, her shuttle was damaged and lost power.

It barely managed to break orbit of the Dinosaur planet that her new friends called 'Sauria'. She was lucky to have caught up with GreatFox before its departure from the area and now she was at their mercy for help. It was odd, really. The red furred vulpine pilot named Fox McCloud had helped her but she didn't yet trust him. She pondered the red-furred man with the masculine voice. She'd never seen red fur before. It was exotic by comparison to the sapphire hue of her fur coat but their bodily similarities were otherwise astonishing. Standing in the guest quarters on the dreadnought known as GreatFox, Krystal held her belongings in her paws.

Her flight suit was ripped across the side and burnt in the back. The threaded remains were worthless, crumbling in her palms. Damaged during the initial Sharpclaw attack, an aggressive tribe of upstanding dinosaurs, Krystal was forced to begin an alliance with the other prehistoric beasts on the planet. They helped her and she acted as a diplomat between two local tribes. In exchange for bringing peace to the Lightfoot raptors and a quadruped tribe known as the Thorntail tribe, Krystal was rewarded with trinkets. They provided her with cloth, seashells and even sandals that she was able to tailor to meet her needs. Even now, the day after meeting Fox McCloud and his friends, Krystal wore the scant outfit, giving her a tribal appearance. She wondered if they judged her by her appearance. Perhaps they thought her to be some troglodyte cave-woman? Nothing could be further from the truth. Her eyes moved to the weapon staff she owned. It was a technological marvel, hosting various computer-controlled programs designed for offensive and defensive applications.

She recalled that her side-tracked mission for answers seemed to coincide with occurrences on this planet, and the sooner she got to the bottom of things, the better off she felt her mission would be. Her heart ached in memory of her home, the planet of Cerinia. With its lone moon, Meredith, it was a beautiful world – a perfect balance of elegant urban structures that blended into lush fauna teaming with wildlife. Immaculately clean, technology made her home world pollution free and wonderfully simplistic in so many ways. Her eyes moistened at the memory of all she'd lost. The system's central star collapsed, destroying Cerinia. For all she knew at this time, she may very well have been the last of her race.

Krystal tried pushing her memories back to her time on Sauria to keep from dwelling on the loss of her family and her home. During her stay, she learned that the Sharpclaw tribe was starting a war with the other tribes. The one known as General Scales was receiving unknown technological help and, for the first time ever, was making headway against the rest of Sauria. Krystal vowed to stay and help. After about two and a half weeks on the planet, she'd integrated herself with the locals and became a valuable ally to the peaceful dinosaurs. Scales was growing more dangerous and she promised to find him and head to the source of the initial distress signal in a temple high in the clouds, known as Krazoa Palace.

She befriended a pterodactyl named "Kite" and disassembled a plasma blaster lens from her shuttle to use as a weapon when flying on Kite's back. She'd prepared herself to catch up with the airship, from which the planet's dictator ruled. It seemed like extraordinary technology when compared to the rest of the planet. However, regardless of the technology used by Scales, it seemed archaic when compared to the ancient rulers of the planet, who were now extinct. The 'Krazoa' had been dead for a million years according to the dinosaur tribes. Only a handful of their spirits remained, providing the essence of life to the planet in its current state. Her drifting mind wondered over the events that led to her capture. She lost her staff in a heavy thunderstorm while on Kite's back. General Scales' airship had attacked the two in the middle of the awful weather.

The front of the airship was fitted with a living, breathing bioweapon designed to look like a lizard. Using the blaster lens from her shuttle, she attacked the airship and disabled its propulsion systems. She managed to exhaust the battery supply although she was successful in slowing the airship. Krystal even boarded it and retrieved a key which came in handy later on at the Krazoa Palace. But it was on that airship that she met General Scales. The encounter was disconcerting – she learned he was quite the tyrant. He even through her over the side in an attempt to kill her. Lucky for her, Kite remained nearby and dove to catch her. From there, she headed to the source of the initial distress signal that led her to Sauria in the first place.

When she arrived at Krazoa Palace, the Earthwalker tribe's best warriors were strewn about the palace grounds. All of them were fatally injured and incapacitated. The Sharpclaw army had already left, leaving behind signs of their technology – fuel canisters and other such things. It was there that she met Doctor Andross Oikonny. He captured her and there she stayed for several days in virtual suspended animation. She remained there until she was rescued by Fox McCloud yesterday afternoon.

Krystal looked around the quarters of her guest room, finally coming to sit upon the floor, folding her legs and placing her hands together. The one downside of telepathy was that it required meditation to block out the jumbled thoughts of others so that she could hear herself think. Her soft sea-green eyes fluttered shut and she cleared her mind. She had so much to reflect on now that the ordeal was over. Her thoughts and memories ran together from her overactive mind, making sleep difficult. Again, the attack on Scales' airship ran through her mind.

She recalled that the skies opened up and a heavy summer rain soaked her fur. Thunder bellowed across the sky, lightning occasionally lancing out from the sea of clouds, causing a cacophony of turbulent weather. The cloud runner was afraid to fly in such conditions but the staff weapon she'd brought from her Cerinian shuttle had the ability to reverse a positron charge and neutralized electrons around her body. The shield was powerful even in the hands of an inexperienced user of the staff.

Essentially, to the person who was skilled in the use of her Cerinia-made tool, she could use it as the opposite of a lightning rod, to make herself less attractive to energy attacks. This would keep the two safe from lightning. She had left the pterodactyl behind, sliding across the water-drenched galleon of the airship. Her attempts at diplomacy failed miserably with the ship's captain, who she recognized as General Scales even before he announced his name to her. She shuddered a second time at the reoccurring memory.

Krystal owed her life to Kite who had stayed in the area to catch her when the tyrant threw her body over the side. She prayed that Kite was doing well back on Sauria. She recalled that her luck at the sacred walls of the Krazoa Palace was scarcely better. She ran into the man who had visited Cerinia only eight years ago. She remembered that he was dying and his escape pod crash-landed on her home world.

Eight years ago… it seemed like another lifetime. The first news of an alien visitor from another system, it was completely swallowed by the Cerinian media. He was some sort of overly evolved ape, tall and intelligent. He was saved by the natural healing abilities of Cerinia priests and doctors. The ape, calling himself Andross Oikonny, began to show the Governing body of Cerinia how to revolutionize their energy consumption and make advances in their industrial technology. It was a technology that caused pollution but her people welcomed it at first because it provided energy beyond their wildest dreams.

Cerinians couldn't see into his mind. They vaguely knew of a neighboring alien race from a nearby system known as the Kew. Like the Kew, they couldn't read the thoughts of Andross. His mind was too clouded. Being the first alien that her people had come in contact with since the Kew she thought it was natural that Cerinians couldn't read the thoughts of his breed.

Rumors suggested that he had begun making a biological weapon on the system's sun, but he told the Cerinian media that it was a harmless science experiment; he told them he'd already created such a being on SOL, one of the two stars in his home system. The experiment was designed not only help the sun last longer, but to make solar power panels more efficient. He even went so far as to say that the being on their sun's surface was necessary because the star was in poor shape – something Cerinia could not verify. She never determined if the rumors were true or if they were simply gossip, but the people of Cerinia quickly discovered that he was … for lack of a better world… evil.

Shortly before his expulsion, Andross designed an amplifier that used the exposed and innocent means of telepathy to reprogram naïve, untrained members of the population. Krystal was shielded by her parents, both members of the senate. She was unable to verify Andross' intentions or even his actions from the sanctuary of the senate complex. Disaster happened. There was a small battle on her planet. It ended with Andross Oikonny being badly beaten. He was mortally wounded and the people of her home world put him back in his capsule and jettisoned it without delay. Most of the injuries he'd sustained from Lylat before arriving on Cerinia returned, leaving him on his near-deathbed.

Only a year later, the central star of her system burned out and went partially super nova. Cerinia turned cold, icing over in three days. Her people held a lottery for young scientists and qualified telepathists to board shuttles and either search for help or find answers. Krystal was one of the chosen people to leave Cerinia to find help because she was the daughter of senators, one of which was a retired scientific explorer. It was her father, Marcus, who once traveled to Kew to create diplomatic détente. Krystal took her father's shuttle, clothes and food, and a great deal of science gear. She was armed with her ship's plasma gun and a proton utility defense weapon rod, or PUDWR. It was given to her as a gift by Cerinia's oldest living being, a woman known only as The Oracle.

Most of the Cerinian explorers and scientists that were given the very same mission chose to start their journey for answers at the collapsed star. They traveled to the center of her doomed system. Krystal, on the other hand, had a different idea of where to begin. She wanted to follow the path of the escape pod that was banished from the system last year.

She had made it no further than the edge of her system, where other planets, due to a lack of gravity pull, lost their orbital patterns. In fact, two of the planets near the edge managed to collide. They caused a massive concussion, littering the system with asteroids. She decided to check in at the edge of her system's known boarder and relay her findings but there was no reply from Cerinia. An hour later, the brightest flash conceivable engulfed her system. Even though a polarized canopy, she had to look away.

Her ship's computer had logged an artificial intelligence hypothesis that the floating rock that was once their sun had either completely collapsed or the rumored bio-weapon on the darkened rock caused an implosion that devoured Cerinia, its moon, Meredith and, most likely, the small fleet of science ships.

Her journey turned into a pilgrimage, following the last known course of the banished Andross. She stopped by Kew and was relieved they took pity on her. They gave her food and supplies. She explained her experience with Andross Oikonny and, to he surprise, they pointed her in the direction of a system known as "Lylat". She plugged the coordinates into her navigation system and continued onward but lost his trail in the next system. At the outer edge of the Lylat System, she sensed the distress from Sauria She remembered her sensors showing that every planet in Lylat had a life-supporting atmosphere in place. She chose to follow the distress pattern to Sauria, a veritable dinosaur planet. Once she was inside the Krazoa Palace, the unthinkable happened. She ran into Andross, personally.

She could remember snarling. She said something to the effect of, "...You!" before his massive paw swished forward and knocked her into a beam of spirit light. It came from where she had transported one of the Krazoa spirits to a statue on the wall. Krystal recalled the dizzying sensation of incredible ecstasy when the spirit left her body and became one with the statue. Behind the statue was a reverse polarity tractor beam. When Andross threw the still-dazed vixen into the beam, it pushed her back with tremendous force. She was thrown through the liquid-like force field at the opposite end of the corridor then elevated by another mechanism up to the top of the palace. She was placed inside of a crystal prism that resembled a prison.

The worst happened. The grotesque man known as Andross Oikonny was using this machine to steal energy that made up her physical body on the atomic level. He was very slowly killing her to save his own life. But a factor that the ape never accounted for became her benefactor. The Krazoa spirits still had their consciousness, and with each one that eventually joined the one she'd released, they sustained her for as long as they could hold out.

It was only a few days inside that glassy prison before she was freed. Her metabolism was slowed to a near state of hibernation. Then, as of yesterday, the crystal chamber around her dissolved. She wasn't even ready for it. She could remember squinting through the glass at an orange-furred being that had been coming to visit her every so often. Suddenly the crystalline structure vanished and she began to fall back towards the Krazoa Palace. Surely such a plummet would kill her from that height.

She reached out, groping for something to hold to stop her fall. That's when her paws wrapped around the end of her staff that she'd sworn she had lost. Her head lifted and her eyes met an orange visage… one of the most incredibly wonderful images she'd laid her eyes on in ages: he was her hero, her savior. His name was Fox McCloud. The memory brought a smile to Krystal's face.

He was gruff and strong, hoisting her up onto the ledge, which was still host to heavy rainfall. Krystal reflected, in her meditative state, what transpired on the roof of the palace. She had snatched her staff back and the two nearly broke into an argument over it. It was cute on his part, very boyish.

She ignored his grousing and began a worthless attack on the stone-like ship that she originally thought was part of the Krazoa palace. It turned out to be an offensive weapon pod built by that arrogant fool, Andross Oikonny. The other being, the vulpine pilot named Fox, dashed off. He had a fighter resting on the roof of the Palace. He quickly boarded the machine he called 'Arwing.'

Above her, the Krazoa shaped head ascended into orbit, causing a flashy, unstable gravity ring to open. The fighter quickly pursued the giant weapon pod. She watched from the roof of the Krazoa Palace, built upon one of the planet's highest mountaintops. Krystal recalled placing the staff in her harness and watching as the tiny dot – the vulpine's fighter – attacked and ultimately destroyed the escaping Andross.

She sent for Kite, using an astral projection of her telepathic mind and begged for his assistance in returning her to her ship, miles from the foothills of the Palace, itself. She remembered feeling clever for powering it with the power gems that grew on plants around Sauria.

Now, one day later, she found herself on board GreatFox with her damaged ship now exhausted and powerless. Once more, Krystal looked around the guest bedroom that was lent to her. It would now become her temporary home. In her state of meditation, she prayed to the Creator to give her an answer to her plight. She was the last of her people that she was aware of… her deepest concern was that she, like Cerinia, had no future.

Original A/N:

I decided to write a little short story about what really happened to Krystal after "ADVENTURES", and who she was as a woman.

Disclaimer: StarFox is by Nintendo. Nintendo is neat. The characters ain't mine. They ain't yours. This story doesn't pay me, and I can't copyright it, so if you steal it and repost it, what am I going to do? Nothing! So I don't care if you steal it, it's just a posted bunch of words for entertainment purposes! YAY! Oh, and if you do, at least be nice enough to fix all the grammar and spelling mistakes! xD

-Ken Weaver

Something more legal sounding:

This story is used for entertainment purposes only; you may not resell or redistribute this story without the expressed permission of the author and a license from Nintendo, with whom all characters are places do belong. The intellectual property of all objects, characters and places mentioned are part of the StarFox Franchise which are all Trademarked and are copy-write, Nintendo. There, that's a little more legal sounding, I guess. Wee.