"Giant! Robot! Anime!" is Nuray's contribution. "Also if I ditched this jerk he might forget what food is."

"Love you too," Akira says, rolling his eyes.

Pidge contributes an eye-roll of his own at all the dramatics.

"When else are we gonna get a chance to visit an alien planet? Let's go already." 

Blue lion? He'd like to take you home, now.

And if he grabs that joystick, they can go whooshing forward like this, and burst right through the rock and out into open air. 

The lion lets out a joyful roar as they make for the upper atmosphere, at a speed that forces Akira back against his seat and throws the other four around the cockpit. 

He warns them to grab onto something when he realizes they're about to move.

He's flying for real!

He is! ...sorta. At this stage, the lion is basically doing warmup laps around in the sky while Akira gets the hang of which controls do what. There's a sensation in his head, in the way he's learning to recognise as the lion's communication, that calls to mind the feeling of standing up and stretching after a while of sitting still. 

But that's enough of that, it tells him after a minute, because there's a hostile alien ship entering Earth's atmosphere. Like the rest of the lion's communication, it doesn't come in words, just a sense of impending danger and a direction. 

"Incoming hostiles," he snaps, moving to intercept.

The alien ship is black with purple lights, like Shiro's crashed shuttle from yesterday, but vastly larger. It's long and thin, with strange protrusions that make no aerodynamic sense, and big enough to fit the blue lion inside it ten times over. 

As soon as it comes into view, it starts shooting at them, little bursts of laser fire in the same purple. 

Then they'll take evasive maneuvers. What are their attack options?

Wheee aerial acrobatics!

The lion informs Akira that it has a laser cannon in its mouth! He can fire it like so. 

This is perhaps more fun than it should be.

Laser canon! They are smaller and more maneuverable than their opponent, that has to count for something.

It counts for quite a lot, actually! (The lion is of the opinion that Akira is having exactly the right amount of fun with this.)

Specifically, it means that while they haven't yet taken more than a glancing blow, the lion's cannon is producing some quite satisfying (although soundless) explosions along the length of the enemy ship. 

On the flip side, all of this dodging means that some of the blasts meant for them are instead turning patches of the desert into glass.  

Not good. Can they take out their enemy's weapons specifically?

"We have to get it further away from Earth!" Shiro shouts from where he's clinging onto a handhold at the back of the cockpit.

"We can't let them endanger innocent lives." 

If he retreats will the alien ship follow him?

Yep. 

It also sends out smaller fighters, little swooping black and red things that add their own laser weapons to the fight. They're all focused on the blue lion, ignoring the planet that rapidly falls behind. 

He'll let them keep up for a bit, mostly picking off everything that gets close to him and taking pot-shots at the bays the fighters are coming out of.

With the added sources of attack, they've started taking hits. Nothing serious, yet, but damage warnings start flashing red in the corners of Akira's attention. 

The lion suggests that they put a little more space between them and the enemy, then shows an image of the same alien planet as before. 

He'll set a rapid course for that, now that the enemy seems safely away from Earth.

They speed up until the stars in the distance blur into streaks and the enemy ships are far behind.

Pidge, looking out of the viewscreen, gasps. "That's Pluto! It takes our ships months to get out here! How fast are we going?"

Not much further past the edge of the solar system, the lion slows back down to a comprehensible speed.

Opening its jaws wide, it lets out an echoing roar, and a glowing ring of energy opens up before them, expanding until a ship the size of the enemy cruiser could fit through the swirling vortex in the centre. 

In Akira's mind, a series of images play out: the lion going through the vortex, emerging from a different glowing ring, and then the alien planet it keeps showing him. 

Onwards.

Through the swirly glowy thing they go. 

On the other side, the stars are different, and the planet from the visions spins below them. The lion swoops down towards the planet's surface, seeming to know exactly where it's going. 

"Was that a wormhole? Did we just go through a freaking wormhole?!"