Saul Jones was your average NASA comms director. All he ever does is sit at the console waiting for the deployed astronauts to check in. He hates listening to all those glorified bus drivers talk about how great it is in space. He especially hates it when they say "Houston, we've got a problem." So imagine how he felt when he was assigned to listen in on an attention hog kid for nine months.
"There are so many places I'd rather be," he mumbled bitterly.
"What was that, Saul?" his nosy coworker asked.
"Nothing, Sally." Yet another thing he hated about his job.
"Shouldn't Daniels have checked back in buy now?" she pointed out annoyingly. "Wasn't he supposed to check in every half hour?"
"He probably just got distracted and forgot," he snapped, "just let me do my job and you do yours."
"Okie dokie, Saul!" she said ever so perky.
As much as he hated to admit it, Sally was right. It had been almost 45 minutes since he last checked in and he had never missed one before. Saul checked the systems to see if they were still receiving a broadcast from Daniels' ship.
They weren't.
Saul panicked. No signal meant no ship. No ship meant no Daniels. No Daniels meant no job!
Saul quickly checked to see how long ago they lost the transmission. 20 minutes.
"20 minutes!" he accidentally yelled.
"What?" Sally asked, startled at the sudden outburst, "20 minutes till what?"
Saul realized his mistake. If people knew that he wasn't paying attention to something as important as this for almost 20 whole minutes, it would ruin his career and his reputation.
"Nothing, Sally. Don't worry about it," he said nervously. Saul was a bad liar. Sally noticed his monitor and saw what he had discovered.
"We lost transmission from Richard Daniels' ship 20 minutes ago?" she said loudly. "That's awful!"
"I'm dead," Saul said with his face in his hands, "and so is Richard Daniels."
. . .
8.4 million miles away, a very not dead Richard Daniels was flying towards Earth at an incredibly high speed. In about 20 minutes, he had covered half the distance to Earth.
"This is incredible!" Richard said with amazement, "imagine all the things I could do with this power. All the people I could save. All the bad guys I could stop." Ever since he was a little kid, Richard had wanted to be 2 things: an astronaut and a super hero. He never thought he'd be both.
"Almost there. I can feel it." Richard could see Earth now and was about to enter the atmosphere when he saw something dark purple out of the corner of his eye.
It was the same dark creature as before!
"What!? But I killed you." At least he thought he did. He couldn't be sure of anything anymore.
"GIVE IT TO USSSS!!!" the creature hissed. Before Richard could think,The creature rammed into him and sent him spiraling toward Earth.
His wings were gone and the impact made him to dizzy to think to make more. As Richard drifted in and out of consciousness, all he could do was fall away from home.
