Moondancer raced back towards the cockpit as fast as her PSI could carry her...for as long as her PSI held out. However, another shockwave of PSI from there sent her tumbling, rolling across the floor before coming to a halt. She tried to tap her PSI again to levitate, only to find the sheer PSI pressure in the environment made it impossible to concentrate. Rather than wasting further time in futile attempts, she instead took to her hooves as she raced through the ship. She cursed just how long the corridors were that it took her so long to get there, worried that whatever was happening to her father would be finished - and horrible - before she got there.
The ship continued to shake as she ran, and she could feel various systems flickering on and off as numerous parts of the ship became damaged, the computer systems crashing. She had to get there fast. Seeing parts of the paths she had to race across collapsing in front of her, she desperately tapped her magic instead of her PSI, letting her do short range teleport jumps across the gaps. While not as simple an effort as using PSI to teleport, PSI Teleport only worked for vast distances - like from one end of the ship to the other, or from this ship to another - while her magic based teleports worked excellently for short hops, the same way Starmen used their Flashporter Engines to move around rapidly.
Despite her best efforts, she'd only made it to the flight deck when she felt a primal scream through her PSI, and the sound of shattering glass and torn fabric. She staggered against the wall as she felt that, then pushed herself upright just as she saw the door to the cockpit open. Seeing the floating alien that came out, she rushed forward. "Fa-" she started to call out, only to freeze.
Giegue looked more or less the same, but his PSI aura felt drastically different. The air of compassion that had always been there whenever he looked towards her was gone. The patience in his gaze had vanished. His yellow eyes now glowed red. He swept past her through the air without a second glance.
Moondancer slumped back into the floor, her eyes wide in disbelief. "D...Daddy?" she whimpered, unable to believe that in one moment she had been so summarily and definitively rejected by the center of her world. She could feel her mind, her Magicant, starting to crumble from what had happened, and she felt something deep in her mind stir. For a brief moment, she felt a crack within her psyche, and red energy filled her gaze.
"Moondancer..."
That voice snapped her out of her reverie. Turning, her jaw dropped as she saw who was standing there. "N-Niiue?" she gasped in surprise. "But...but you're supposed to be inside Daddy's Magicant! You're a part of him!"
"A part he could no longer handle having in his mind," Niiue explained as he walked up to her before kneeling beside her. "The damage that had been done to his mind...it was tearing him apart. He held on, staying whole, for as long as he could...but finally the only way he could keep you safe was to remove himself from the equation. And so, he took the conflict in his mind and split it down the middle. The aggressive, angry aspect that blames humanity and himself for everything that went wrong is what you see going off to continue his plans to 'fix' things. And I..." He sighed softly. "I am his heart, the part that remembers the love of his parents and still loves them, Ninten...and you. And now, as a separate entity, I will keep my promise to take care of you."
Moondancer glanced between Niiue and the path Giegue had taken. "Is...is this the path that Apple was talking about in my dreams?" she asked worriedly. "Is that the part of Daddy...destined for destruction?"
Niiue shrugged his shoulders. "It may be," he admitted. "I know for a fact that one of the things he intends to do now is seek out the Apple - a sentient artifact we've identified as the Apple of Enlightenment - to get the fullness of its prophecy. I...I'm afraid if its prophecy is that, then...learning of it will cause it to become self-fulfilling. So I want to see what I can do to stop him from getting ahold of the Apple...without confronting him directly."
"What...what happens to you if he's...?" Moondancer couldn't finish the thought, not wanting to say anymore.
Niiue sighed softly. "We're still linked," he explained. "I exist as a discrete part of him. If he dies...I will cease."
"Then we have to save you both," Moondancer declared firmly. "How can I help?"
"That I do not know," Niiue observed sadly. "For now...we will just have to wait and see what he does, and what happens with the rest of the solar system. There are forces at work easily as powerful as we are, and we need to be ready to act as guided...and ready to find a way to tweak events if possible so the future we want comes to pass. If the Apple communicated with you directly, I can only assume something about you is significant to the way events are going to play out."
"The figures in my Magicant?" Moondancer asked curiously. "There's a circle of eight statues in my Magicant, but I only recognize you and Giegue..." She shivered, not liking that she now had to mentally classify 'Giegue' and 'Daddy' as separate entities. "You think I'll somehow be guided to the others, and that might help me save Daddy?"
Niiue smiled sadly, worriedly. "We can only hope..."