CHAPT. 3: PREPARATION

115 2 0
                                    

His eyes shot open

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

His eyes shot open. He tried to inhale but his breath caught on itself. All the air had been pushed out of him. Everything was dark in an awful suffocating kind of way that smelled of fire and tasted of metal. He closed his eyes to assess, and a dazed version of what he had last seen began to play back in his head.

The cockpit had begun to crack from intense heat, and he had dashed to slam the bay airlock shut just as the front compartment lost pressure.

The gut flipping feeling of the spin still felt raw in his mind. After hitting the stratosphere his ship had lost its port-side winglet and stabilizer. It was like he could still feel himself falling.

the only thing he remembered less vividly was the abrupt flash of brown and green, right before his memory faded to a disconnected dark fuzz.

Something painful caught his attention and brought him out of his thoughts—His arm was caught behind him at a unnatural angle that suggested it had been twisted that way for hours. He wriggled slightly, feeling pins and needles as numb limbs ached to be brought back to their proper places. After struggling for an aggravating eternity, he finally unlooped his arm from the invisible tangle that held him sideways to the wall. It was numb, but that didn't stop him from twisting it around with a pop.

He paused to rest between woozy breaths as stars flew around his head. At least his organic vision had finally adjusted to the dark. Now that he had a moment to look around, he noticed something odd.

It wasn't completely pitch black in the cargo bay anymore; there was what looked like sunlight streaming through a jagged tear in... the corner of the floor and wall?

He heaved a sigh of both pain and relief. The protogen had survived the landing still in his pod, or most of it, he guessed.

Tangled up in all of the storage webbing with all of his supplies had seemed like one of the most dangerous places to be during a crash, he puzzled. Why hadn't systems check woken him up? He tried to access his HUD, only to get a face full of sparks.
/][SYS*TE+M ~#F?%LURE •<<€~4+#* }]][\

Like a child pulling back their hand from a hot stove, he shut off his visor with a wince.

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
New Horizons: Grounded SkyWhere stories live. Discover now