What took you so long? (Leviathan)

"What took you so long?" is the second episode of the third season of Leviathan: Distant Stars and the twenty-fifth episode in total.

## Summary

### The Spirate captain

The Spirate captain, an Anguilin and therefore a telepath, makes her appearance: she will negotiate in person on the Bat'leth to retrieve her pod and she will bring Heinz along with another officer.

Before she makes her way to their cargo bay, the crew of the Bat'leth open the escape pod that takes a big part of it and convince the eight slaves inside that they are friends and that they need to hide before the captain arrives. The slaves confirm that Conrad/Jeremiah has been friendly and hint that the Anguilin has messed with his head.

On Theea's suggestion, Kika proceeds to booby-trap the pod so that it seem to contain eight people and cause a mild explosion when opened. Buying the slaves is not an affordable option.

The pirates are granted access, the airlock opens up. The 6'5" Anguilin slithers on her tail, posturing herself up. Jeremiah, at her side looks menacing in his piratey way, with his blond, spiky hair and space-leather pants. The third individual, a shorter man with scale patterns, also wears Maera-Like attire, complete with strapping and buckles and neon lights. Everybody in the room is armed. Conrad doesn't answer to meep-meeps.

Xe'anna starts negotiating with her counterpart, who tightens her grip on Jeremiah's mind. The conversation sours as Xe'anna demands surrender. Fighting starts when Rachel purposefully glances the Anguilin's head with a bullet. Theea uses a new ability that makes her essentially disappear, Jeremiah opens fire on Xe'anna then gets hit by Rachel. The intense pain makes Conrad resurface but he keeps behaving as if he were still mind-controlled.

The battle lasts for a while. By the time Xe'anna kills the other captain, Conrad has shown his true self, which includes a grapnel gun popping out of his arm. The remaining spirate, failing to land any shots, keeps fighting. Rachel, still uncertain of Conrad's side in the fight, despite his attempt to shove a meat-o-stik'ko down the spirate's gullet, decides to *shoot at both of them and I don't care which one is hit*. Rachel hits both, and the goon shoots him point blank in the gut: time for Xe'anna to pull him behind her. Conrad ends up doing the killing shot.

### Kika's adventure

Meanwhile, Kika has made her way to the other ship and *consequenced* herself down a slide to land on the searing top of its engine. Once there, she sets out to create a fake malfunction in the spirate ship's life support system, say a radiation leak in the air stream, that would get them to *jettison from the ship*.

Unfortunately for her, there is an engineer in the engine room, and she grabs Kika who is shocked that anybody else than her may be in any engine room. Her mostly human assailant is fairly short, has green hair, a tinge to her skin, a scar on her face, a cute little button sort of nose and pointy ears. Another person confiscates Kika's multitool (Toolie) after she changes it into a little welding torch.

### *What took you so long?*

After the death of the goon, Conrad deadpans: *What took you so long?* and asks Xe'anna if she realized she is a princess. For his part, he was trying to come back and, to be clear, he wasn't infiltrated: He was the one doing the infiltration.

### A split party

Xe'anna then realizes that Kika is missing, and Theea meep-meeps her as she is being dragged, squirming, and thrown into a room where she is locked with other people. Xe'anna, coiffed with the dead captain's hat by Rachel, carrying the dead captain's body, leads the way to the airlock. She uses the body to intimidate the whole spirate crew on coms and, more directly, the first two spirates they meet, into surrendering. The show ends with one of the two spirates, Kika's abductor, drily remarking:

> *You don't look very good in that hat. Besides, captain's dead: I'm the new captain then.*
>
>

Xe'anna's answer:

> *You are the next to die!*
>
>

## Notes

1. ↑ Spelling for the name needed.
2. ↑ Anguilins have only one gender. Lauren referred to the captain as *She*.
3. ↑ They're not leather but you wish they were.
4. ↑ To grapple on the captain's unexisting feet. He ultimately fails to get a good grip on the end of her tail.
5. ↑ Says Dan: *I regret nothing.*
6. ↑ *NftE*: my notes say 8, the number is more like 4 in the following episode.
7. ↑ Which has a slit to let its previous owner's fin through.