Chapter Text
Your version of vacation certainly did not match your mother’s.
It made sense, though. She was a infamous engineer, widely known for… whatever it was she did outside of drinking. You never really cared enough to look into her work.
And you were her prodigy child.
(Only by default.)
Of course you had to join her on this trip to build a new phase gate in whatever part of space Alterra had decided on. What kind of parent wouldn’t use this as the perfect learning opportunity it is for their child?
Well, that was the excuse Mom had used to get on here. She wasn’t actually necessary on this trip, but if it got her up another rank in the game of life…
Fortunately— or maybe not so fortunately —she left you alone the second you boarded the ship. She had muttered something about not causing problems before disappearing into some random room, probably to take a swig from the flask she managed to sneak in, leaving you a little more than lost.
Thankfully, your, ahem, “child-oriented PDA” had directions to your dorm— one you had to share with the only other kid on this ship —and you spent the rest of your day there, playing games.
Then the rest of your week.
Then the rest of your month.
Then half a trip had gone by of rarely talking to anyone outside your roommate, taking food from the cafeteria and eating in your room, and not seeing your mother before something interesting happened.
Your roommate's parents, who would visit every now and then like actual good parents, had gotten concerned with your behaviour and forced you to at least take a walk around the ship to stretch your legs. It wasn’t as if you couldn’t listen to them. They were so nice.
But instead of walking halfway across the Aurora and back, you managed to get distracted by an especially fascinating sight just out the window.
You forgot the ship’s course went through this system. Yeah, they provided everyone with a little map of the course on their PDA, but it wasn’t as if you spent much time looking at that sort of stuff.
4546B has always been pretty cool to you, being a category-3 ocean planet and all. The ocean, on your home planet or not, has always been incredibly fascinating. Nobody dared to explore the dark, crushing depths like they had space, and it made you wonder if that was because of water pressure or because something always lurked in that darkness.
Already forgetting your previous goal, you leaned on the edge of the window, staring at the massive ball of blue. It looked so pretty from here, with little clouds here and there. It was a little hypnotizing.
In fact, you were so distracted by that beauty that you didn’t see the strange energy pulse that came from the planet, hitting the Aurora.
Everything lurched to the side.
The lights went red, and the alarm felt loud enough to make your ears bleed.
“Attention,” a voice rang out through the alarms, “hull failure imminent. Abandon ship.”
Well this was fucking great .
Before you knew it, you were waking up in a dim life pod.
Something sparked from the large dent in the wall opposite from you, and light poured in from the hatch above, making your head pound even more. The taste of blood was also prominent, making you notice that you’d bitten your tongue after presumably smacking the back of your head against the wall.
It took a few minutes of waiting for the fogginess in your head to dissipate before you finally managed to get the seat’s safety bar off of you. As you stood up, you noted how you could hear waves crashing outside the pod, yet it was completely still.
Despite this, your first half-baked instinct was to open the bottom hatch. You weren’t about to go on the death trap that was a ladder in your state.
You were met with sand.
Still a little dazed and dizzy from the bruise on your head, you wondered if the floatation device on the life pod hadn’t managed to activate yet, not questioning the fact the sand was completely dry.
You hummed in confusion, before finally surrendering to potentially finishing yourself off on the ladder.
The hatch hissed as you pressed it open, filling the pod with salt-scented air as you managed to heave yourself onto the top of the pod.
At first, your eyes were immediately drawn to the dark blue abyss that was the ocean. You felt exhilarated by the sight, remembering the few days you had to yourself at the pool. When your father was still around, he would often join when you had an especially bad day, and afterwards you’d get ice cream together.
But.
You also felt… terrified.
You couldn’t see the Aurora anyway near you, meaning you’d landed an alarming distance from the initial crash.
Which, in turn, most likely meant you were completely and utterly alone.
Not that you had many people you’d want to be stranded with. Your mom sucked, she’d probably make you do everything for her until you built up enough courage to throw her overboard to the shark-equivalent predators, and even if your roommate and their parents were there you weren’t exactly too close to them. Still, you wouldn’t wish this sort of isolation upon any of them. Well, maybe your mom, she needed to learn a lesson on suffering one of these days.
You finally moved your gaze downwards.
“Why the fuck am I on land !?”