I never promised you a rose garden | Glowfic Constellation

By the time it becomes obvious that something is wrong, it's too late to abort entirely.

Star skippers do not, in theory, have to be spaceships in the conventional sense of the term. But hopping out to an untrafficked spot in the void is the best way to avoid thaumaturgical interference in a calculation as precise as jumping between star systems, so people tend to anchor the enchantments on airtight hulls with basic intrasystem propulsion.

So when the ship jerks, it shouldn't be more than a distraction; it doesn't matter what untrafficked bit of space you take off from--

Except that it most definitely isn't the case that the ship was hit by a piece of space detritus, this is a glitch in the steering, and the navigation enchantments are chained together for power efficiency.

She can't cancel the jump, at this point. All she can do is shunt all the power from everything non-essential into the safeties and cross her fingers that it works.

...

The jump is more unpleasant than a controlled jump ought to be. It feels as though the gravitational forces from every intervening star are operating on her at once. She's pretty sure that's not how it actually works, but that's how it feels.

They land, and she throws up.

When her breathing slows and she takes her head out from between her knees, she notices that they're under gravity, despite the fact that artificial gravity was definitely one of the nonessentials she cut.

She checks the exterior readings. Breathable atmosphere. Approximately one gravity of force. Temperatures well within the tolerable band, even for a complete inaugment like her. No detectable poisons or hexes. No detectable thaumaturgical field, which is very weird for an inhabitable planet unless they are way outside known space.

She tries to pull up a star chart and fails because it is whatever planet they landed on it is apparently currently the day side of it.

"What the fuck just happened?" Tanya demands.

"I'm not sure yet," Linda replies. "Do you want to try to figure it out, or to try to figure out where we are?"

"Even once we know what went wrong, we're still going to need to figure out where we are in order to get back," Elaine points out reasonably.

"But it's apparently daylight, at the moment," Linda says, frowning at her instruments. "If we sort out the glitch now, and wait until nightfall to try to astro-orient ourselves..."

"Assuming this planet isn't tidally locked," Elaine says, lips pressed together.

"No, it would be a lot hotter then," Linda points out absently. "It could have an inconveniently long day cycle, though, especially if it were currently early in it. But I think we ought to check to make sure there isn't anything in the environment that the readouts aren't picking up but that could prove dangerous on short notice."

The other girls agree with a certain level of subdued alarm, and Linda keys open the hatch. The skipper isn't meant to operate in atmo, but she can climb out fine anyway.

An alien with bright red hair climbs out of the small spaceship that appeared suddenly between two tall buildings and looks around in complete bewilderment.

Total: 432

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 17 18 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 3 of 18 Next › Last »

"Where are you supposed to be?"

"That's one of the questions people say I'm joking when I answer it."

"...look, how about I refer you to my organizer - are you from Tuviri somehow or something -"

"Being referred to someone who organizes things sounds great. I don't know what Tuviri is to answer that question."

"Uh-huh." She taps her pocket everything.

Cool cool cool.

While she waits, she instructs Solace-delta-prime to update Tanya and Elaine on the situation and collect an update in return. They've made a little progress on the glitched ship enchantments while she's been gone but it probably wouldn't be a lot even if it had been her doing it.

"I... am watching kids right now so I can't conduct you there..."

"I promise you that I am not the kind of crazy that cannot follow directions from point A to point B."

"...okay. Go down the stairs and out the door onto to the pedestrian street, turn right, go into the apartment building with the potted tulips in the window, go in and it's the first apartment on your right."

"Thanks!"

She waves and takes the directions precisely in an extremely un-crazy-person-like way.

Then she will successfully make it to a door with some woodburned writing on it that reads Organization Office.

Pretty.

She raps on the door.

"Come in," someone calls.

She opens the door and comes in.

"Hi. I am very, very lost, and there's some kind of cultural gap that means when I try to talk about it directly people think I'm joking or crazy, and finally I talked to someone indirectly enough that instead of just telling me I wasn't funny they directed me here."

"I see. How did you get lost here?"

"I had an accident with my spaceship. It was a little skipper, the nav went wonky and I had to make a random jump."

"Okay. The reason people are thinking that sounds like you're crazy or joking is because reds do not have spaceships, and the people who have spaceships don't land them in red neighborhoods."

"I don't know what 'red' means. When I say random I mean random, I literally do not know anything about this planet, let alone this neighborhood."

"- okay, that's... worse," says the organizer. "So, uh, if you go across the street there's our doc-"

"Kashi!" exclaims somebody, bursting into the room. "Kashi, there's something weird wedged in the alley across from the north garage -"

"Oh, yeah, that'd be the spaceship. Uh, it's not designed for atmo but it's structurally sound, it's not going to like collapse or anything. Sorry about that."

"Did you take a picture," says Kashi, "of the weird something."

He took a picture of the weird something. She looks at it.

"Do you have cloud storage?" she asks.

"- yes," he says.

"Delete it."

"Uh-huh." He does.

"Did I land in some politics or something?"

"Ma'am, if you'd be so kind, it would be very good to know if we should expect anyone with - instruments of any kind - to have noticed your ship crashing."

"Um...it's a skipper, it didn't traverse the intervening space, it teleported, nobody would've seen it. But if anyone had any kind of thaumo sensors pointed in this general direction we'd've lit them up like a fireworks display, there doesn't seem to be anything else in the area."