First Cause • Spider-Man: Homecoming [Unedited]

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Throughout the seven-nine hour high-speed voyage to the Yrissen asteroid belt, home to the Craad outpost currently under an illegal siege, Gadea sleeps for maybe twenty hours.

The artificial intelligence of the ship activates its autopilot function and oversees the operation of the vessel, as was her instruction. Ever having the kicked up dust of an evading sleep slap against her cheeks and never quite being able to secure it in her grasp is not a novel concept for her, though the reasons for her perpetual insomnia have grown exponentially since the last time she was in deep space.

She finds her latest nightmares tap more and more into that secret, hidden away shelf in the back of her subconscious where her more unpleasant transgressions reside. Buried. Repressed.

Dreamscapes mimic the endless, lifeless, technology-spliced Sitigog scenery, and out-of-focus faces of distant relatives and family members whose features she can't conjure up when lucid to save her life, flood the phantasm.

During those maybe twenty hours, Gadea awakens in pools, lakes, rivers and oceans of alarmed sweat more times than she has fingers and toes. During those maybe twenty hours, she has encountered the wraith of her long deceased sister Odara more than she has in the five years since her passing.

Sometime in the nineteenth hour, Odara sits next to Gadea on the forest floor in the middle of the Red Wood, the one behind their family manor. The very one in which she met her end at the hands of her younger, panicked, desperate sister. After that dream, Gadea sprung awake in her cot and refused to shut her eyes for longer than a blink since.

Seeing these resurfacing memories, these rogue dreams inspired by deviant recollections, seeing these as weaknesses in her fortitude fills her with anxiety. In herself and her ability to accomplish what she has set out to accomplish.

Thus, in an effort to distract from the brewing volcanic eruption pushing madly against the walls of her stomach and intestines, she throws herself with wide open arms at micromanaging the AI.

It's in this neurotic, aimless state that she encounters the visage of the Craad outpost. And its dire countenance is enough of a slap in the face to pull her by her ears out of the muck of her own musings.

Just ahead of the worst of the belt lies a stately yet humbly sized collection of constructions. They crowd the flattened surface of the biggest asteroid the Craad conquerors could find t colonize all those decades ago.

The bottom of the asteroid is usually shapeless and diffident in order to hide the state-of-the-art artificial gravity generation system. But now, it's perforated with a myriad of craters that even from this distance, a trained eye like Gadea's can conclude is as a result of hyper-energy canons. Like the kinds mounted firmly on the hull of the Black Ash.

The near-opaque plasma dome over the district of connected buildings that make up the outpost is dotted with holes and gaps. Without fail, they will disrupt the ecosystem that won't function quite as smoothly with that kind of exposure to the void of space.