The Great Galactic Score!

26

26

Demi didn't die. Which was comforting. She had landed on something that, on the one hand, felt soft and fluffy and, after a fashion, soothing. On the other hand, she felt something gooey, warm, distressingly viscous that, after another fashion, felt more than a little dead. That hand squelched free from that slightly vomit-inducing thing and she found herself tumbling a further distance until she landed upon ground that was both featureless and glowing. A soft glow that allowed her to see where she had landed and she really wished it didn't do that.

She sat in the midst of a slaughter. Another slaughter and she had the distinct feeling that, perhaps, she had angered a god, or something, because this whole Finding-herself-among-dead-things thing had started to become something of a regular occurrence. She didn't like that. At all. She preferred things and people not being dead around her. She also preferred continuing to wear an EVA suit that had its own, personal, force field, but the fall appeared to gave dislodged it and now she stood on a planet populated by carnivorous flora and fauna with only a Gal-Navy sweatshirt and jogging bottoms for protection.

Rabbits. Several of them. They lay upon the ground in pools of their own blood, entrails flopping from bodies ripped open by methods that Demi could imagine, but tried not to. To the side, she saw Lap patting the flopping ear of one of the dead, enormous rabbits like a cat batting at something dangling from a piece of string. To the other side, Briyun picked at her teeth with one of her long claws upon her stubby fingers. They made it look like a nice day out at a fairground, though one with the most grisly attractions imaginable. There were other creatures, too, but none that looked like anything Demi wanted to even begin to think about describing.

Looking further afield, she could see that she had landed in a clearing among a series of plants that looked absolutely furious with her. If they had eyes, she didn't doubt she would see murder in them and, if the plants could walk (and she prayed to every god she could think of, even those gods that no-one even made churches for (which made those gods very angry indeed, she could imagine), that those plants could not, in fact, walk and remained rooted to their spots, far, far away from her), they would certainly enact those murderous thoughts.

"What ..." Demi couldn't finish the question, as something hit her on the head, curled onto her shoulder and made her scream like her life depended on it. On this planet, it probably did.

She scrambled away, flapping her arms, saying 'no' and 'nope' and 'I don't think so' every inch of the way until she managed to wrap her arms around Briyun's leg, hoping that, if she couldn't protect Demi, she could, at least, be the first thing anything hungry would see. Briyun patted Demi's head. That gave Demi no comfort whatsoever until she peered out from behind Briyun's leg to see what had attacked her.

It was a rope.

Three ropes, to be exact. All dangling through the canopy of the fog, the ends bouncing as they came to rest, knots made at regular intervals along their lengths. That was fine. It was good, but Demi wished Friss had given her the opportunity to actually use one of those ropes to reach the surface, rather than sending her flying into who-knew-what awaited her on the surface. A Schtem Bolt fell to the ground, tried to bolt something, failed and grumbled to itself, sealing nothing.

A second or so later, something else dropped through the fog bank and bounced several times before starting to swing and turn. Something attached to string with a piece of Repli-paper attached. Demi, deciding that hiding behind Briyun's legs wasn't helping her to look like the kind of strong, capable, iron-willed female protagonists she enjoyed watching in movies, rose to her feet, stopped the thing with the paper from spinning and read the message.

"Keep string tort. Put cup to ear." Assuming Friss meant to keep the string taut, rather than identifying it as an infringement of someone's rights, Demi removed the Repli-paper to see a plastic cup.