Amongst Us

Prolouge

Life was hard. That's an absolute fact of the universe. However it is especially true in the case of Amanda Evergreene. Her mom left and her dad drank, then gambled. Not a great start. But then her father starts betting money that he didn't have.

Amanda was sad when he finally passed away, but deep down, some twisted part of her was glad that the debt would stop going up. Unfortunately, by the time that happened, the debt was so high she could have built a ladder all the way to the moon with the amount of money she needed.

Then she found an advertisement for MIRA (If anyone has an idea for what that stands for, post it and you'll get a mention), the first space exploration company. She visited their site and the pay check made her eyebrows disappear into her hairline. She supposed it was fair enough that the guys who cracked the code for space travel and set up a lab on another planet, would have the guys upstairs shoveling over money. Since she had no qualifications, it was either a trip to space and learning how to maintain a spaceship, or flipping burgers for the next 500 years. Not a hard call to make. She had everything packed in an hour.

Before she left, she decided to do some research about her potential new employers. If she was going into space she wanted to know about the company. Amanda did some basic googling, how it started and a short biography of the CEO, but then she stumbled on some more... disturbing material. Dead bodies, mutilated ship mates, whole ships found empty. It was really creepy. Then she saw the link at the bottom of the page for an article about the connection between flat earth and lizard people and she completely disregarded it. This was a site for crazies.

She threw everything into her beat up pick up truck and had her phone display a route to the nearest MIRA headquarters. On the way there she turned on her radio, and her potential new boss was doing an interview.
"Excuse me, mister Rancis, what do you say to the allegations that your crews are regularly killed by creatures of unknown origin?"

"Excuse me for being frank ma'am, but that's ridiculous. Currently MIRA only has one interplanetary outpost and there have been no signs of extraterrestrial life of any kind. These allegations were made by people who watch too many sci-fi movies. That'll be all."

After she arrived she looked over the ornate building with awe. She was going to be an astronaut. A poor astronaut but still. That'll look good on her resume. She quit her day job and packed up to go to space. Life may be hard, but it's also unpredictable. You never know when you'll get an opportunity to change it. So when one pops up, take it.

She walked in and spoke to the receptionist. "Hello? Amanda Evergreene. I'm here to interview for the crewmate position."