The Adventures of Lewis Warth

C1E1 - Scrape by, start afresh

Flying in a jet, is for most people, a fun experience.

It's a chance to spread your wings and fly through a heaven of blue skies and fluffy white clouds, an oxygen mask strapped to your mouth – life support in this different world.

Flying in a spaceship, however, would be even more interesting. Well, it would certainly be different: instead of flying through the skies one would float in the endless black-bath of space. In the year 1980 (human time) spaceships were already taking course billions of light-years away, crumbling into one another in war. Shooting off comical green-lasers at fleets of spaceships. Oh, how fun it was.

So you can imagine a pilot's distress when he wakes up in a yellow desert with his own spaceship in flaming pieces around him, stuck into the sand like spoons in sugar. And just how stressed he becomes when he realizes that he can't remember a thing: not his name, not how he got there, nothing.

Lewis Warth, woke up with this stressful approach on life. Blood stung his black alien lips, and god how his stomach was cramping in on itself: he was starving. As his eyes flickered open, he took account on just how beautiful the sky was: a piercing blue pool with four mini suns slowly orbiting one another in the corner of it. It gave off strong rays of golden light which intruded his eyes, but for some reason, everything just felt so cold.

He stood up – not easily, might I add, he stood up as easily as an alien in a black tuxedo could when shrapnel gave painful greetings from the underside of his arms.

Lewis turned his arm slowly, and sure enough out of it came small spikes of metal. Seeing it made it a reality, and with reality came the pain. It hurt enough for his black scaled hands to shake more than they already were.

He grunted under his breath and decided that maybe it would be a good idea if he just left the shrapnel in there for now. Then, he gave the horizon a full 360 sweep, looking for any signs of civilization – of potential help. Eventually, he had turned around and found himself staring at the remains of his ship, only to discover that it wasn't a ship at all, but an escape pod.

Let's decipher some clues, shall we? An alien, in a rather formal suit, finds himself washed up on a strange planet after he had crash-landed in an escape pod, now, just what had he escaped from?

The escape pod had once been a shiny green orb with glass paneling coated around it, filled with medical supplies and comfortable bedding – all of the necessities for living a while in the barren nothingness of space. Now it sat half-submerged in the sand, upside down, with broken glass scattered around it, it's shape crumbled from a sturdy impact with a small glacier which sat proudly underneath.

That's strange. He thought, addressing how there were massive glaciers of ice lodged randomly into the sand of the desert, like a battlefield of hot and cold. A desert of sand and ice... consider me dumbfounded.

Lewis would have scavenged the remainders of the escape-pod for medical equipment, weapons, anything weird that he could fashion into some sort of use.
He would have done that if it hadn't burst into flame right then and there.

He stood there, spike-laced arms at his side as he watched tendrils of flame lick what was left of the medical-supplies into a crisp.

"No." He muttered. "No, no, no no no." The desperation was sinking its teeth into his neck, forcing a sick feeling down his throat which churned knots into his stomach.

He ran – more correctly limped – to the pod, trying to reach in but the flame burned his already injured arms, and the pain was so excruciating that he almost went into shock. Instead, he just staggered back and fell into the sand, clutching at his wounds as glowing orange tears tore at his dark-blue eyes. The alien fell to his knees, proceeding to stare into the flames of the escape-pod, every sizzle and crack of it's raging heat stripping Lewis of his hope.

And that was when he noticed a sign of civilization. As the pathetic alien squirmed in the sand, screaming at the top of his lungs, something caught his eye: amongst the wreckage of the shuttle, there was smoke beaming in the sky above the flame. And no, it wasn't the smoke of the escape-pod (there was quite a lot of it, now that he thought about it); there was a thin trail of smoke that could be seen, much smaller and finer than the fumes of aircraft-kindling. He blinked, sending the honey-like tears down his scaled cheeks, his mouth held ajar at this new discovery, and he was that distracted that he didn't bother wiping them away.

He stood up slowly, still eyeing down the thin trail of smoke as if the moment he looked away it would simply disappear, and he took a long sidestep to his left. Sure enough, the white smoky stream stayed.

He gave it a moment, the same dumbfounded moment that one would give when they adjust one the lotto: staring at the ticket, waiting for it to disappear. Only to find that today was your lucky day.

That was how Lewis Warth started his true adventure, a shrapnel porcupine wrapped in a torn pilots suit. No memory of who he was, how he got there, but going by the sheer thought of the smoke meaning something.

It's funny, isn't it? How people can get to a state do desperate, that something as simple as a stream of pollution can orchestrate every action you take and every thought you think. Lewis wasn't your typical person, but he was close enough to cut it.

Despite the fact he would be encountering a society with slave-like robots in two hours, a small sci-fi meth-lab in two days, and a universe at his fingertips (if you can call them that) in two weeks,

Lewis was feeling pretty good about himself.