"Well, that..." Olimar began. He had never actually known Anna's back story, as she had always dismissed it when the topic came up. It all made sense now, and 'all' included far more than Anna's hostility to Mia. It was the kind of painful back story that explained Anna's closed mouth.

"Explains a lot, I know," Mia chimed in, "I... I don't really know what to say. On one hand, I almost destroyed a sentience I created. On the other, I thought I was merely repairing my computer."

"Look, Ambrose was right, I don't need Anna to protect me from you," Olimar replied, "We might as well let 5 years ago remain in the past, and continue our work collecting the shards."

"Whoa, wait a minute. When you were talking to your daughter, didn't she say something about a vacation house?" Mia asked, "I remarked about hearing about that."

"It was nothing, just something to do on this vacation," Olimar said, "I thought it might be fun to build a house on the planet, maybe somewhere around the Perplexing Pool. Just so my family and I could enjoy the planet better."

"Well, Sage, how would you feel if the two of us took a break looking for shards, and began working on that house?" Mia asked. Sagittarius' laugh could be heard through the suits' radio.

"Well, I don't think..?" Olimar began to ask. A certain gleam appeared in Mia's eyes.

"It never hurts to ask," She remarked.

"Nice suit," Mia remarked, back at the camp. She had given the protein re-sequencer basic instructions on how to build the suit, but had allowed Ambrose to design the suit's appearance. The result was something of a cross between Olimar's and Mia's suit. The suit was primarily covered in chitin(Orange overall, but covered in sand-speck sized blue dots), but the various joints had a margin of exposed white silk. Most of the joints were paired, such as those for the shoulders, elbows, and hips. The neck, however, was completely silk, and though the back of the head was encased in chitin, Ambrose's face was left exposed. Ambrose's hands, as well as the holographic display on his arm, were likewise left unprotected, leaving him with a degree of vulnerability, though one Ambrose considered an acceptable sacrifice for functionality.

In light of the discovery that Ambrose was incapable of sending pikmin into battle, Ambrose took it upon himself to include a few barbs on his arms and legs – theoretically preventing him from being shaken off of a beast while attacking. Upon noticing the barbs, Mia became a little uneasy at the thought of Ambrose participating in battle - though with the suit, that probably wasn't a problem.

"Ambrose, can we ask you to find something?" Mia asked, after looking over the suit. Ambrose cocked his head, eager to be of assistance. Mia walked over to her ship, and grabbed chunks of bauxite(The ore from which aluminum is derived), copper, and platinum – all of which Olimar had said he wanted to build the house with. She gave them to Ambrose, who then proceeded to scan the area with his orange pulses.

Upon finding what he was looking for, Ambrose activated his holographic display, and displayed a map of the area. He highlighted three spots on the map, marked them with the chemical symbol corresponding to each metal, and listed the mass of each metal present in the spot. Sagittarius had the display scanned, and updated the Sentinel's feed to list the locations.

"Well, it seems the closest of the three is Aluminum," Mia stated, nodding to Olimar, "Might as well start there."

The Dolphin began to lift off of the ground, bringing Olimar, Mia, Ambrose, and 4 orange pikmin with it. Olimar had no intention of working at the ground with pickaxes, and instead fitted his ship with the technologies used in his pre-Hocotate Freight job: a space miner. The main mining mechanism, still the main device used for mining, was almost as old as the Hocotatan Vector beam on which it was based. All it really did was break apart the substrate at the surface of the site to be mined, inhale it, and put it back after whatever was to be mined was retrieved. There were faster techniques available, but those generally involved high-yield explosives. With its high yield and low ecological impact, Olimar, and every Hocotatan mining engineer, could not conceive a better machine.

With Ambrose navigating, and the Dolphin's exceptional speed, the ship quickly arrived at the mining site. Olimar selected the area of earth he was going to mine, and activated the mining device. Five small red dots, in the appearance of an hourglass, appeared on the ground, as the ship activated the vector beam. Thin cracks began to appear on the ground, and small pieces of dirt began to be picked up by the vector beam, condensed into a spot on the Dolphin's nose. More and more chunks of dirt began to be picked up, eventually leaving the space from the ground to the Vector beam source more dirt than air.

Ambrose tugged at Olimar's suit. After gaining the captain's attention, he displayed an image of a switch in the 'On' position, with the Dolpin hoovering dirt beside the switch. An animated Olimar flipped the switch, turning the vector beam off.

"What for?" Olimar inquired. Ambrose created a video with Olimar giving him a clock. And then letting him off of the ship. Olimar shook his head, and powered down the device. As Ambrose and his four pikmin stepped onto the platform granting access in and out of the ship, they were lowered to the ground.

"Wait, what does he want to do?" Mia asked.

"To be honest, I have no idea," Olimar admitted. Curious, he stepped onto the elevating platform, and lowered himself to the ground as well.

As you can probably imagine, the mining operation had left a sizable hole in the ground, though it bothered Ambrose little. He and his four pikmin hopped into the hole, and landed with almost no injury. As Olimar and Mia crouched down to peer down the hole, the five red dots expanded, and grew orange. Ambrose ordered two of his pikmin to step on two of the spots, and then had two more stand on the remaining two spots on the outside of the hourglass. Once his four pikmin were on the outside spots, Ambrose himself stepped on the center circle.

The spots began glow with an increasing intensity. Anyone paying any attention would notice that the dirt in the center of the ground was constantly changing, as if it was being constantly replaced by the ground underneath. As it turns out, that was exactly what was happening. The cylinder of Earth, the bottom of which being the lowest part of the bauxite vein, was constantly being lifted up. This, as could be imagined, would create a vacuum between where the bottom of the vein used to be and where it was at the time. To compensate for this, and to discard of the pillar of unwanted Earth above the material to be mined, the ground at the surface was being teleported to the bottom of the shaft. This had three main advantages over Olimar's mining mechanism. For one, while Olimar could move dirt at once centimeter per second, this technique was moving the ground at 3 feet per second. Yet another advantage was the fact that Olimar's method would leave the material at the bottom of the shaft, while this brought the material to the surface. The final advantage became evident as a sparkling mass popped out of the ground.

"It's... it's fully purified," Mia remarked, "Way to go Ambrose."

As the Dolphin's Vector Beam lifted the aluminum mass out of the hole, it logically carried Ambrose and his four pikmin with it. Upon reaching ground level, the pikmin hopped off of the mass. Ambrose was then able to display a picture of tethers attached to both the Dolphin and the Orange Onion, both entities lifting the aluminum mass off of the ground.

"What the hell is that thing?"

Olimar and Mia froze in fear. Ambrose emitted a single orange pulse, and turned towards the source of the voice. A Hocotatan stepped out from a small fissure in the earth. In many respects, he looked similar to Olimar. There were a few differences, though. For one, the Hocotatan had a far darker, redder complexion. He had a triangular beard, and a thin mustache; and his hair, unlike Olimar's three spikes, was black crescent-shaped mass. The man's large nose was a beet-red, down-pointing triangle, and though he shared Olimar's oval-shaped eyes, his were vertical, and had a small maroon pupil. Olimar wished that it had remained dark. Wosber's face was not something he wanted to look at.

Well, you know, I think I'm going to take a long vacation from this. I've got something else I'd like to work on – actually, a few other things. Major cliffhangerage, I can imagine, so sorry.

I'll try to come back to this once I've got something else done.