beyond orion

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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 out of my ship to sit on top of it, I didn’t put my suit on. You know, the thing that allows me to breathe, protects me from radiation, keeps me pressurized? Yeah. I noticed I was burning literally seconds after I suspended my last log. I mean, of course I was, 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 slough off, 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 brakes fixed, and if I can’t land on 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 the nearest 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.

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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 brakes. Now, for those unfamiliar with such high-brow technical jargon, landing brakes are the bits on a spacecraft that allow 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 beams, and collect the goods with its Doc Ock robot arms before running back to mommy. 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.

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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 had looked like a damned marble, perfectly uniform in its stoney grayness. But when I’d tried to land, I’d sunk straight through what I’d thought was the ground. Several seconds of Highly Controlled Plummeting later, and I’d 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 brakes 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.

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