Once all the laughter stopped, Twilight looked up. "So next you went to check out the Valhalla, right? Since the Aurora gave you its coordinates?"
"Nope," Samus countered. "It was a derelict, so there was no rush. But Gandrayda was still on the Pirate Homeworld, and the Aurora Unit had gotten a communication from her."
"So now we had the Pirate homeworld's coordinates, knowledge that a Leviathan had crashed there before the Pirate invasion of the sector, that the planet appeared to be transforming into pure Phazon, and that this was the last message sent by Gandrayda before contact was lost," Spike explained.
"Yeah...that trip wasn't pleasant," Gandrayda admitted ruefully. "Had to hide a bit too much, which put an excessive drain on the PED and my own abilities..."
"Corruption," Ghor and Rundus chorused.
"Exactly," Gandrayda confirmed.
"Anyway," Samus continued, "the Federation were planning a full scale invasion of the Pirate Homeworld, but the 40g environment and heavy defensive artillery made a massed approach suicidal. So they asked us to go in, disable the defenses, and find what happened to Gandrayda."
"It...wasn't exactly easy," Spike elaborated.
The Pirate Homeworld was a forbidding looking place. The sky was dark orange with black clouds, and the rain was acidic as it poured from the sky. Nearly the entire Pirate settlement was shielded against the acid rain, save areas where giant blue tendrils of pure Phazon swayed in the air as they stretched up from within the planet itself.
Samus' ship was small and fast enough - and the cloak effective enough - that it could slip unnoticed through the planet's defense grid, flying over a river of Phazon through a large waste disposal tube to reach a viable landing site.
As Samus and Spike disembarked from the ship, Spike grunted, feeling weighed down for the first time since his original growth spurt on Tallon IV. "This is...really strong gravity..." he grunted.
Samus rubbed her faceplate in thought. "...could you handle the Phazon radiation from that river we flew over on the way in?" she asked.
"Yeah, pretty easily," Spike replied. "Despite the amount, the radiation level's rather low."
"Then get back in the ship," Samus instructed.
Once they were both back in the ship, Samus flew back out over the river of Phazon before opening up the hatch. "Take a swim and catch up," she instructed before guiding the ship back to the landing site.
Once Spike was in the Phazon, he immediately swam out to where the acid rain was falling. While it did hurt, the amount of Phazon he was swimming in healed him too fast for the rain to injure him too long. As he floated in the Phazon, his scales hardened, taking on a crystalline sheen. When he lifted himself out, the acid rain pinged off his scales as easily as normal rain, with about as much effect.
"This adaption didn't actually increase my defensive strength," Spike hastened to explain. "All it did was change the mineral nature of my scales to render them immune to acid and other similar environmental hazards." He flexed his body slightly, making the light reflect off his scales to show what he was talking about.
"Much like the Hazard Shield I didn't collect till much later," Samus elaborated.
Spike turned to continue the story, a bit flustered at how Rarity was cooing over his scales. "Once I was at full strength again, I flew out to meet up with Mom, staying low. Thankfully, all the defense turrets recognized me as Ridley, for some reason. Probably because they knew I wasn't immune to acid." As the group laughed at that, he and Samus continued the tale.
Samus carefully stepped into an open area, finding it deluged by acid rain. She saw a Pirate open a force field at the opposite end of the clearing, the field closing behind it. A message from the Aurora Unit confirmed that this path led to a cargo supply route which led directly to the Leviathan. However, she currently didn't have the tech to interact with it.
"Mom?" Spike called out over the comms. "You there?"
"I'm here," Samus replied quietly. "Where are you?"
"Above," Spike replied. "Trying not to attract attention. Everything okay down there?"
"Yeah. I'm going to start exploring, see if I can find a safe way through."
"Good luck."
"And that was a good portion of exploring the Pirate Homeworld," Samus continued. "Spike lending spotting and ocassional assistance from above while trying to avoid drawing attention, and me down below exploring the interior of the facilities. First priority was finding a way past the acid rain."
Spike chuckled. "Not going to mention the three hours it took you to spot that one Morph Ball tunnel above the grip ledge?" he asked.(1)
"I wasn't planning on it, no," Samus growled as many present laughed.
"To be fair, the Pirates were quite good at hiding things like that," Gandrayda indicated. "And they got better at it while dealing with me before I...lost control." Her face fell as she thought about that time.
"But I fixed that," Spike hastened to reassure her.
Gandrayda smiled mischievously at Spike. "Indeed you did," she purred.
Spike quickly backed up from her, much to the amusement of many at the table. Celestia, however, noted that it seemed to upset the confident energy being in a way that struck her as somehow familiar. An inkling of suspicion began to worm its way into the Sun Princess' mind.
(1) My own experience at that part of the game my first time through.