beyond orion

Um.

So those crystals? They grow from the backs of giant beetles. Giant, iridescent, nocturnal beetles that chill out under the sand during the day, then suddenly surface at night to scare the shit out of innocent space explorers. The effect is akin to all the buildings in a city suddenly growing legs and wandering blindly around, bumping into each other and singing. 

You heard me. Singing.

When these giant beetles wake up, they start to generate a sort of bassy, wailing music. I don’t know how to describe it -- I feel it almost more than I hear it. It vibrates through the ship, nearly too low to detect. Rations hates it -- he’s gone and huddled in his little bin, looking orange and grumpy.

Anyway, here’s the (arguably) weirdest part: this music seems to be... pulling the sand up from the dunes. It looks like those schools of fish you’d see in old movies about Earth 1, moving together as though controlled by one mind. Great clouds of glittering sand, twisting up from the ground and funnelling toward the beetles, which seem almost to be fighting each other for control. It’s bizarre, like the most mysterious, sparkly, cosmic guitar battle.

And what is the point of this display, you ask? Well, whenever a cloud of sand reaches a beetle, it condenses, adding itself to the crystal on the beetle’s back. I guess the beetle with the tallest crystal wins? I may have taken a few unlucky bastards out of the running with my little mining expedition. Whoops.

Well. Rations is now shouting at me to get us out of here, and I think perhaps he’s right. I can hear the crystals I collected rattling around in response to the vibrations, and I kind of don’t want them to go tearing out of my ship. You know my motto-- “let it be”. Let’s get to the sky with our diamonds, Lucy. Something about a walrus?

This has been a strange one, folks.

━━━━━━━━━━

A desert planet. It’s a classic! 

“Now why, oh Great Explorer, would you choose to land on a planet made of hot sand?”

That’s a fair question, dear stranger. Planets like these do have a certain reputation for great, swirling, ship-destroying sand storms. But I am a captain, and captains take calculated risks.

Here’s the calculation I made: It’s shiny. I want it.

Yeah. See, this planet isn’t just made of sand and wind. Even from orbit, I could see enormous crystal formations jutting out of the dunes, sparkling and batting their eyelashes at me. Depending on what they’re made of, these crystals could earn me a good chunk of cash. Maybe even enough to buy a globeScanner, so that I can tell whether a planet will try to kill me before I decide to land on it.

Speaking of landing, we’ve had our first smooth descent! I even settled the ship upright! Probably a good thing, considering I don’t have a cat-sized seat belt for Rations. I’ll have to MacGyver something for him soon. I don’t think he liked being stuffed into my escape pod.

He seems happier now, though, perched on my dashboard as we skim along the surface of the dunes, collecting bits of crystal -- just as this little mining vessel was meant to do! The sand is fine and white, and melts in my wake. Another planet, scarred by my white-hot skid marks.

It’s actually sort of beautiful, here. The sun is setting, casting the dunes in a red-orange light, which the crystals catch and scatter into rainbows. The effect is mesmerizing-- so mesmerizing that if I stare at a crystal for too long, it almost seems to move...

Anyway! The next few hours should be pretty boring. I’m just gonna blast some Bowie, grab some rocks, and zoom out of here before a giant worm bursts out of the earth and swallows my ship whole.

I’ll check in once I get my rocks off!

...you know what I mean.

━━━━━━━━━━

There is now. A cat on my ship.

At the moment, it’s alternating between licking its own butt and staring accusingly at me. I have no idea what to do with it. I wasn’t the one who stuffed it into a container labelled “rations” and shot it into space. I was just the unfortunate -- and now bleeding -- asshole who was unlucky enough to bring the container onto my ship and open it.

I can take one of two things from this: either the Hekki eat cats, or Wilmukk thought I looked lonely enough to send me a friend. I’m not sure which to hope for.

━━━━━━━━━━

Ok. I know it’s been a while, but here’s what happened: I froze myself. ON PURPOSE -- I froze myself on purpose. 

My go-to Hekki trader was several thousand light years away when I pinged him, and unwilling to make the trip just for me. I couldn’t get to him what with my limited fuel supply and inability to land to, y’know, refuel, so. I had to wait.  And, rather than slowly lose my mind suspended in deep space, I decided to pull a Walt Disney. Thank the gods this boat has a kryoPod.

When he finally arrived (how many Earth-months later?) my boy Wilmukk pinged my ship, my ship unfroze me, and we got to bartering.

And let me tell you, it was mission success. 

I guess Wilmukk has a special interest in alien goop, because I’d hardly finished describing the effects of the Super Aloe when he’d opened his doors to trade. He launched my shiny new landing gear into space along with some bonus fuel and rations, and I returned the gesture with four out of my five tubs of goo. 

Yes, you heard right. He likes to conduct his trades ship-to-ship in deep space. I don’t know why, but Wilmukk refuses to meet his customers in person. I’ve never seen his bottom half, because he handles all his haggling over visuComm. 

My favourite part of all of this is that his ship isn’t rigged with fancy robot arms like mine is, so he has to do some seriously impressive maneuvering to sort of… swallow newly acquired goods onto his ship. Honestly, these bulbous Hekki ships should not be able to dart around like that, let alone get off the ground. My theory is that they’re sort of like bumblebees-- powered by belief and sheer force of will. Not that I’ve ever met a bumblebee.

Anyway, it’s strange-- once Wilmukk had that Super Aloe safe on his ship, he looked… happy. Thrilled, even. I’ve never seen one of the Hekk look anything but moderately peeved. Maybe he was constipated.

Well! It’s time for me to get some shut-eye. Tomorrow, I’ll install this new landing gear. Then it’s back to my precious life of planet-hopping idiocy.

━━━━━━━━━━

I think I might be in shock. At least, I hope I am– because if I’m not in shock, I’m just an idiot.

Here’s reason number one: when I climbed on top of my ship to escape the green ooze I’d landed in, I didn’t put my suit on. You know, the thing that allows me to breathe, protects me from radiation, keeps my temperature regulated? Yeah. I noticed I was burning literally seconds after I suspended my last log. I mean, of course I was burning, this planet has two fucking suns. I’m just lucky the vegetation here produces oxygen instead of, I don’t know, carbon monoxide.

Here’s reason number two: When I saw my skin starting to smoke, I panicked a little, and uh… jumped into the green ooze. Shut up, we’re blaming shock, remember? But here’s the thing– it fucking worked? My skin cooled off immediately. When I clambered back onto my ship and shook off the goo, my skin was smooth and whole again, and probably better moisturized than it’s ever been before. I mean, I look fantastic.

I’m gonna call this stuff Super Aloe.

Anyway, my suit is back on, and I’ve managed to pull the ship out of the lake. It wasn’t actually that difficult– the Super Aloe is only a couple feet deep, so I was able to wade to a tree at the edge of the lake and tether my ship to it. After that, it was just a matter of using the ship’s robotic arms to pull her to dry land. The tree bent a little under the strain, and when I went to free it from my tether, I saw the same green goo oozing out of the broken trunk. While I watched, the bark knit itself smooth again, and the goo dried to glass in the sun.

Maybe all that vegetation I destroyed when I landed will be ok, after all. Strange seeing nature forgive, for once. Earth 1 could’ve used a bit of that.

At any rate, even with my suit protecting my skin, I feel dangerously close to combusting in this heat. I’m just working on getting the gunk out of my engines, and then I should be able to get off this sweltering planet. Before I go, I think I’ll dump my rations into my escape pod and use the containers to collect a bunch of Super Aloe. It’s not as shiny as the Hekk tend to prefer, but still– magical healing goo has to be worth something.

At least, it had better be. I’ve had the sinking realization that I can’t land on another planet until I get my stupid landing gear fixed, and if I can’t visit alien planets, then what the hell am I doing? No, I worked too hard for the freedom to be an asshole in space just to lose it all to a hardware malfunction. If the Hekk don’t see the value in Super Aloe, I’ll make them see it.

I’m just glad I won’t need to land on a planet in order to conduct business with my go-to Hekki trader. He prefers a more… remote approach.

Anyway, this is me signing off for now. I’ll check back in after I get what I need.

━━━━━━━━━━

Well. I’ve fucked up.

Let’s go to a jungle planet, I thought. It’ll be fun, I thought. Warm weather, twin suns– I could treat it like a tropical vacation! Land, tan, drink a piña colada, pilfer something shiny to trade with the Hekk for ship parts… what could go wrong?

As it turns out, the answer is plenty. Plenty.

It started with my landing gear. Now, for those unfamiliar with such high-brow technical jargon, landing gear is the part of the spacecraft that allows it to stop plummeting toward the surface of a planet, before it hits the ground. They’re really quite helpful–vital, one might say–and so when mine went up in literal smoke approximately 500 feet from the ground, I did what any good and dignified explorer would do: scream like a panicked goat.

I know, I’m two for two– my second case of Highly Controlled Plummeting in as many planets. Since it keeps happening, I’ve decided to turn it into an acronym: HCP. If you want to pronounce it, just hiccup.

Anyway, I’m still alive to deliver you this peppy monologue thanks to the fortuitous arrangement of my crash site’s topography– if you’ve ever heard of the ancient mobile game “Flappy Bird”, you’ll be able to picture fairly well what happened. I belly-slid down the side of a very steep mountain, through a valley, and up the slope of a neighboring hill. My momentum carried me into the air, where I hung for a moment like the first star in a dusk-bruised sky… and then I toppled into a lake of green ooze.

Now, you may be thinking: “That’s great, oh Magnificent Explorer, but I thought you said this was a jungle planet. How was your ship not instantly dashed against a tree, and your guts flung like toilet paper over its branches?”

First of all, ew. That’s super graphic. I’m kind of worried about you, honestly. If you need a therapist, I can recommend a few dozen.

Second of all, let me explain something about my ship: it’s an L-14-66N. It was built to be shat out of a larger ship, land on the surface of a planet, blast rocks into smaller rocks with its shooty shooty laser guns, and collect the goods with its Doc Ock robot arms. The laser guns jut straight out of the front of the ship, and can generate enough heat to cut through solid metal. They can also, as it turns out, carve an L-14-66N-sized path through alien vegetation, if the big red button is pressed with enough panicked fervor.

So now I’m sitting on top of my smoking ship as it sinks, staring at my own mile-long smoking skid mark, and wondering whether alien trees feel pain.

I think I’ll check back in a bit. For now, I need to figure out how to get my ship back to dry land and out of this… goop.

Fun.

━━━━━━━━━━

This is it– log number one. Log? Entry? Account? Eh, I’ll figure it out later. What matters now is this:

My first planet.

It’s not made of rock, as I’d first thought. And before you start, shut up. I’m operating without a globeScanner, so I’ve got nothing but good old-fashioned eyesight to go on.

From orbit, the planet looked like a damned marble, perfectly uniform in its stoney grayness. But when I tried to land, I sank straight through what I’d thought was the ground. Several seconds of Highly Controlled Plummeting later, and I landed on the actual ground to find myself surrounded entirely by fog. I couldn’t see shit from the ship, so I suited up and headed out.

The visibility isn’t much better out here. The air is a thick, cloying gray, and my suit is heavy with freckles of condensation. It’s not water, because it doesn’t behave like water. The droplets chase each other across the glass of my helmet like they’re driven by some kind of fickle magnetism. Occasionally, one will lift from me altogether and twist upwards through the air, splitting like a cell until it disappears into mist.

Perhaps the droplets are cells, and this fog is a very large, very moist organism.

I’ll try not to think too hard about that.

There are other things here too. Shifting, blurry lights that pulse from purple to green to blue in the distance, their glow just bright enough to reach me through the fog. I’ve tried to chase them, to get near enough to see the shape of them, but I keep running out of cord. If I untether myself, there’s no way I’ll find my way back to the ship… so I’ll have to settle for watching the lights, and wondering.

Sometimes I wish I were a real scientist, equipped with government-issued navGear and a ship that doesn’t rattle when I land. But then I’d be stuck in a tiny space boat with a bunch of academics whose idea of “exploration” is to find the nearest planet, plop down a permaCamp, and proceed to catalogue every alien fly down to the way it farts.

I prefer my way. I’ll just get the parts I need to fix my landing gear at the next Hekki outstation and get on with it.

But first, I’ll need something to trade. Exploration alone doesn’t pay the Hekkin’ bills.

Let’s hope the next planet has more to it than fog and pretty lights.

━━━━━━━━━━