Wally and Guybrush both smiled.
"Great!" said Wally. "Now we can get down to business."
A few minutes later, a table had been wheeled in, along with several pieces of paper. They sat around the table.
"Let's start with what we know," said Guybrush. "One, there's likely to only be twelve portal stones in our solar system."
"Unless Simon brought some with him," said Wally.
"Hmmm," said Guybrush. "But why would he need to steal more portal stones, then?"
"Maybe he lost them," suggested Elaine. "Or maybe they were about to hatch, and he destroyed them in deep space."
"Good point. Wally, next time you get a chance, program the ship's computer to search for any large monkey-shaped objects. Could be a clue."
Wally noted this down on the piece of paper, next to 'Eight portal stones left?'.
"That reminds me of something else," said Elaine. "Suppose we were to collect all these portal stones. How are we supposed to destroy them?"
Guybrush thought about this. "Put them out in space and shoot them from a distance?"
"They'd just teleport."
"But we know how to direct them," said Wally. "What if we sent them into the sun?"
This sounded like a good idea to everyone. "Can we shoot an energetic enough shot to get them the distance?" asked Elaine.
"It'll probably drain the batteries a bit," admitted Wally, doing a mental back-of-the-envelope calculation. "But I think we can."
"Besides, what's the worst that could happen?" asked Guybrush.
"We could teleport the sun right out of the solar system and kill all humanity," said Elaine.
It didn't take long for them to get organised. Everyone headed to the
cockpit, where Guybrush used the controls to eject one portal stone into
space. Meanwhile Wally was routing all nonessential power to the lasers and
doing rapid-fire programming on the maintenance computer. Five minutes
later, Guybrush had rotated them into position. Wally had
set the controls to the heart of the sun. Elaine volunteered to press
fire. The shot disappeared into the portal stone several hundred metres
from their ship, which glowed red in outline and then disappeared.
The sun was just as visible as before. "Seems to be okay," said Elaine.
"Don't forget, it takes a fair while for sunlight to reach us here," said Guybrush. "We won't know if anything's wrong for just under four hours."
"There won't be anything wrong," said Elaine. "I can feel it. One down, nine to go." She looked at them. "So, where's our first port of call?"