A/N: I wrote this for NaNoWriMo 2008.
This story is based on the tabletop game "Vampire: The Masquerade" by White Wolf, and various mythologies randomly thrown into space for some reason.
The lights of the sensor tower flickered on and off against the starlit sky of the Midgard night. Jannika cursed silently under her breath as she tweaked with the machinery, but despite her best efforts, the tower refused to function properly. Stubborn things, anyway. This simply would not do. The Midgard sensor grid would be very effective if it weren't for the fact that half of the towers weren't working right.
As she hung from the tower, a light in the sky caught her attention, and she looked up. At first she thought it might be another meteor, but it was too bright and close for that, unless it was heading straight at her. Then she realized that whatever it was, was heading almost straight for her, and as it grew closer she realized that it was a spaceship.
"Ack!" Jannika cried out, flinging herself off the tower as the spaceship came barreling into the ground near its base. Sparks flew, and the tower collapsed with a sickening crunch as she hit the ground with a grunt, quietly thankful that the sensor towers weren't particularly tall. At least she didn't think any of her bones were broken, but someone was going to be pissedabout the damage here.
Jannika slowly climbed to her feet again, still a bit stunned, brushing herself off and coughing at the dust kicked up by the landing. Squinting and rubbing her eyes, she tried to take a closer look at the wreckage, to see if there were any survivors, but it was quite dark with the lights on the tower having been put out again. She pulled out a hand-held light from her waist belt and shone it in the general direction of the crashed vessel.
It wasn't like anything she had ever seen before, and she gasped softly as she examined it. The technology used here had to be hundreds of years more advanced than anything built by humans, but it was definitely a human design and not one of the weird bio-ships that the Squids would use. The twisted and sputtering metal hadn't taken to the crash particularly well, as was to be expected, but surprisingly the ship hadn't exploded upon impact as she might have thought it would. Either it had been very short of fuel when it crashed, possibly the reason for its crash, or whatever technology it used to powers its engines was less prone to explosions than those she was familiar with.
She scrambled over to the ship and pried open the hatch, which came loose in her hands and she dropped to the ground in a twisted heap. "Is anyone alive in here? Are you alright?" she called out in standard English into the smoking cabin, coughing slightly, hoping that whoever might be here spoke English.
Turning her light toward the front of the cockpit revealed two women in the seats. One of them was moving to remove her seat restraints, while the other appeared to be dead or unconscious. "I'm... I'm alright," replied the dark-haired woman. She finished fumbling her seatbelt off and climbed over toward the blonde woman. "Nastya? Nastya, are you okay?"
Jannika moved over toward the blonde, stumbling a bit on the uneven footing and sloping floor. The blonde woman groaned softly, and blinked into the light. "I... I am alive," she said in a strained voice. "I could not tell you just what hurts, though. I hurt all over." Her English was fluent enough, but she spoke it with a thick accent, perhaps Russian.
"Let's get you out of here," the first woman said, glancing to Jannika. "Can you give me a hand here?"
"Of course," Jannika replied graciously, hanging the light from her belt again and going over to help remove the seat restraints and get the woman free. Her dress was scorched and burnt in places, but she didn't appear to be visibly bleeding or have any obvious broken bones. "Was there anyone else on board?"
"No, it was just us," said the dark-haired woman as they maneuvered the blonde out the hatch and onto the ground nearby. Unlike the blonde one, her accent was closer to the baseline English accent taught throughout the galaxy.
"It was a miracle the two of you survived that crash. My name is Jannika, by the way. Welcome to planet Midgard." She smirked faintly.
"I'm Tasha, and this is Anastasia." Tasha examined the other carefully for signs of injury, and seemed relieved that there didn't appear to be anything too serious.
"How did this happen, anyway?" Jannika wondered, turning to look curiously at the ship again. Just from a quick glance inside, she could tell that her immediate assessment was correct. It was like something from a science fiction movie had dropped right out onto her front yard. "Where are you from? Where did you get this ship? What does it run on?"
Tasha chuckled lightly. "Slow down, slow down. One question at a time. It's something of a long story, so bear with us for the moment, please?"
Anastasia smirked. "This happened because Natasha fails at piloting a ship."
"Hey, do I look flight certified to you?" Tasha said with a wry grin. "We're just lucky that the emergency auto-pilot kicked in at the last minute and managed to slow us down enough to not be turned into a steaming pile of goo."
"We should get you two inside," Jannika murmured. "And what's left of this ship, for that matter. At least nobody's going to notice you came in, seeing as you just hit the only sensor tower in this area. I'll just claim it was another meteor impact, no big deal."
"Why the secrecy?" Tasha wondered. Anastasia groaned softly and was slowly trying to bring herself to her feet again, albeit a bit unsteadily.
Jannika looked over at them. "Do you want everyone to know that you're here with a heap of advanced technology? Do you two even have a sapience record?"
"A what?" Tasha said.
Jannika smirked. "Thought so. I took a wild guess, judging by your ship, to figure that you're not from around here, at the very least, wherever you might be from. If you haven't taken the Sapience Test, you're going to be considered Class-X, and Class-X entities have no rights or priveleges. You're not even considered sentient beings until you take that test. Anyone could steal from you, kidnap you, even murder you without repercussions."
Tasha frowned, looking a bit worried. Anastasia turned toward the ship and said, "I see. Do you have someplace we could keep our ship until it could be repaired, then? And how might one take this Sapience Test?"
"Yeah, it'll fit in the hangar near my house, easily," Jannika said. "It's too big to move manually, of course. I'll take you two to the house and show you some spare rooms where you can rest and get cleaned up, then I'll fire up the heavy lifter and haul it inside. Okay?"
"Sounds good to me," Tasha said, nodding.
"After we are settled in, I believe we will have a number of questions on both sides which must be answered," Anastasia commented.
"No kidding," Jannika said. "I'd love to take a closer look at this thing. But it's not going anywhere for now, so come on, let's get you girls inside. I'm sure you'd love a shower at this point, and I don't know what you might be used to, but we've got real hot-water showers at my place."
"That sounds nice," Tasha said. "Lead on."
Jannika stepped around the wreckage of the sensor tower, pulling out her hand light again to shine along the path back to the house, and grinning eagerly at the prospect of getting her grubby little fingers into their technology and seeing what made it tick, so to speak. "It's almost midnight, so I doubt anyone's still awake at the house," Jannika said. "But don't worry about accidentally waking my mom. The walls are pretty soundproof and she could sleep through an earthquake anyway."
"Do you have a basement?" Tasha asked. "Or someplace else that could be sealed against the sun?"
"Yeah, we've got a spare room in the basement, why?" Jannika wondered, glancing over at her curiously.
"I've got a, er, skin condition," Tasha replied a bit uneasily. "I have to avoid direct sunlight, or I get really bad sunburns."
"Right then," Jannika said. "Basement it is." She glanced over at Anastasia. "And would you like another room, or would you prefer to bunk with Tasha?"
"One room for both of us will suffice," Anastasia said.
"Mkay then." They arrived back at the house, and Jannika flicked off the hand light and tucked it away, and took a left and headed downstairs. "This used to be my great-uncle's room, until he passed away a few years ago, so don't be too surprised if you come across anything we forgot to clean out. It won't bite you, honest. He was a tad... eccentric."
"Thank you, Jannika. You have been most kind," Anastasia said. "Do you, by chance, have any spare clothing that we could use?" She sheepishly indicated her burned dress.
"Ah, um," Jannika replied thoughtfully. "I'm afraid I don't have any dresses, and my pants would probably be too small for you, for how much taller you are than me. You'll have to ask my mom in the morning, sorry. Tasha could probably fit into my pants, though."
"That sounds good," Tasha said. "Crash landings do not make for a good fashion statement." She smirked.
Anastasia chuckled softly and nudged Tasha. "We just met her, and you're already trying to get into her pants? Tsk, you aresuch a cad."
Jannika cleared her throat. "Right, I'll bring you down some clothes after I get the ship safely tucked away, before somebody decides to come along and run off with it or something."
"Thank you again for the help," Anastasia said, and she and Tasha went to head for the bathroom as Jannika left.
Such strange, strange people, Jannika thought to herself, shaking her head slightly as she headed out toward the hangar. She would dearly love to find out more about just where it was that they were from, and what it was like there, and not the least being what sort of neat gadgets and gizmos they'd brought with them.
She climbed down into the underground hangar and flipped a switch. A rumbling noise could be heard above as the large hangar doors slowly slid open to reveal stars in the clear night sky. The little ship wouldn't have any trouble fitting in here, and she wouldn't even have to move the two aircars parked in the hangar. Once the doors were fully open, she went over and climbed into the lifter and powered it up. It was primarily intended for moving crates of supplies, but it was perfectly capable of carrying something about the size of a standard aircar, and the strange futuristic ship wasn't much bigger than that.
As she flew off to pick it up, she had to wonder to herself if they were really from the future, and what sort of ramifications that would have. But if they were from the future, shouldn't they know something about the Sapience Test? It was something of a big thing, and had been for quite a while now. Maybe they just had studied their history about as well as they'd studied piloting. She couldn't say.
When she got back to the crash site, thankfully there still wasn't anyone else about. The sensor tower had been only sporadically active anyway, so its suddenly going out entirely wouldn't attract too much attention. She landed next to the wreckage of the ship and maneuvered the lifter's arms around it carefully, trying not to damage it anymore than it already had been. With it safely in hand, she flew back to the hangar to drop it off.
That taken care of, she closed up the hangar again and got on the comm. "Central control, this is Jannika Kai. Sensor tower 87 is offline for the immediate future. Meteor impacted right on top of it. It'll be at least a week or two before I can get it online again. Kai out."
Jannika then headed back to the house, stopping by her room to pull out some clothes for Tasha on the way to the basement. The two women weren't in the bedroom when she came in, so she assumed they were still in the shower. She set the clothes on the bed and turned toward the door and was about to leave when the bathroom door opened. Jannika glanced over to see Tasha standing there with a towel draped around her shoulders and nothing else, not particularly concealing herself very well.
Blushing, Jannika looked away and said, "Sorry. I brought you some clothes. Your ship's safely in the hangar."
"Thanks," Tasha said, then came over and poked Jannika in the shoulder. "Relax, we're all women here, right?"
"Suppose," Jannika said with a faint shrug, though she didn't turn around. "How about I go fix you two something to eat and we can discuss things over dinner? Unless you girls would rather just get some rest first."
"I'm not hungry, but I'm sure Anastasia would love it," Tasha replied, glancing over toward the bathroom door as the blonde woman came out, wearing what looked to be one of Uncle Jarl's old bathrobes, and seeming none too pleased about it either. "How's dinner sound, Nastya?"
"Sounds good to me," Anastasia replied with a faint shrug.
"It's real food, too, and not those horrible space rations," Jannika said, turning around tentatively and seeing Tasha finishing pulling on the shirt she'd brought. "Unless wherever you're from you've actually got rations that taste like real food."
"Well, not precisely..." Tasha said. "Lead the way, dear Jannika. I doubt the world will collapse if we don't exactly look gorgeous with our hair neatly brushed."
"It won't?" Anastasia said jokingly.
Jannika chuckled and headed back upstairs and down the hallway to the kitchen. "Bear with me, as I'm not the best cook in the world, but I can guarantee it will probably be edible!" She opened up the kitchen cabinets and poked around a bit. "Make yourselves comfortable, and do tell me everything. I'm all ears. Are you from the future or something?"
The other two women took seats around the kitchen table. "Not... exactly," Tasha said. "We're from an alternate universe."
"Two alternate universes," Anastasia corrected her.
"Right," Tasha said. "In my universe, it's currently the thirty-first century, while in Anastasia's universe, it's the twenty-third. What is it here?"
"The year is 2508," Jannika replied, putting some water on to boil. "So, alternate universes. You're not from the future, but you're from the future, sort of?" She scrunched up her face and peered over at Tasha.
"Sort of, not really," Tasha said with a shrug.
"Although our universes bear superficial resemblances, the timelines may have diverged centuries in the past," Anastasia explained. "Nothing like the events in my universe happened in the history of Natasha's universe, and I expect the same to be true for here as well."
"Thank you, Nastya," Tasha said with a smirk. Jannika was a bit surprised. With Anastasia's thick accent, she hadn't expected the woman to have such a fluent grasp of English, especially with regards to obscure technical matters.
"Okay, so no needing to worry about accidentally changing the past or anything if I take more than a passing glance at your spaceship," Jannika said wryly. The water was starting to bubble, so she turned and dumped the noodles in and stirred a bit at it absently. "You don't mind if I do, do you?"
"Not particularly," Tasha said. "It's not even exactly my spaceship. As you might have guessed, I'm not really the technical type."
"Heh," Jannika said in amusement. "You wanted to get it repaired, but neither of you has any clue how to repair it, I take it?" They nodded slightly. "Well, not to worry, I'll be your resident grease monkey, and I won't even bill you for it!" She paused thoughtfully for a moment and added, "Provided I can figure out how it works well enough to fix it, anyway. And provided it's not so badly damaged from the crash that it's still worth repairing and not just building a new ship from scratch or something. I haven't really taken too close of a look at it yet."
"That's okay," Tasha said. "I'm sure we can figure something out. So, can you tell us a bit about this place? Where are we exactly?"
Jannika dumped in a packet of seasoning into the pot and stirred it up a bit. "You're on the Norse colony of planet Midgard. You don't happen to speak Norse, do you?"
"Uh, afraid not," Tasha said, and Anastasia shook her head as well.
"That's going to be a problem. A lot of people speak English around here, but Norse is the primary language of the colony. We're all Norse here."
Anastasia looked at her a bit oddly and said, "You don't really... look Norse."
Jannika chuckled softly. "Yes, I'm sure my skin tone would be much more common in lattitudes considerably further south than old Scandinavia, but I'm Norse. Really. If only because I was born on planet Midgard. Honestly, I've probably got about as much Scandinavian blood as anyone else here, anyway." She poked at the pot and said, "Here we go, food's on." Jannika dished out some for herself and Anastasia, and glanced to Tasha and asked, "Are you sure you don't want any?"
"No, I'm fine, thank you," Tasha said. "Besides, ramen noodles were never really my thing." She smirked faintly.
"Hey, I did say not to expect gourmet cuisine," Jannika said, chuckling softly and settling in to eat. "So what's it like where you two are from?"
Tasha leaned back in her seat and looked off thoughtfully at nothing in particular. "My home universe calls itself the Karzan Galaxy. It went through way too many events of galactic proportions in a relatively short period of time for me to even get used to how things were, before they changed again. When I got out of there, it looked like things were taking a turn for the worse. I didn't like the looks of things and I feared my life was in danger, so I got myself out as soon as I could."
"Sounds fun," Jannika said dryly, turning to the other. "What about you, Anastasia?"
"It was not a pleasant place, either," Anastasia replied. "If you've seen any movies or read any books about post apocalyptic dystopias, you have some idea what it was like. Society had collapsed, most people were living on the streets or in rundown buildings, and a lot of information and knowledge was in danger of being lost forever. There was more going on than was immediately apparent, though, and the arrival of Natasha and her crewmates really stirred things up."
"You had a crew?" Jannika said, glancing aside to Tasha.
"The starship Perplexity, of the Karzan Exploratory Brigade," Tasha explained. "Its mission was to explore other universes and learn what it could about them. However, I... had a bit of a disagreement with the captain and some of the crew, and decided to go our own separate ways."
"Right," Jannika said, smirking. "So, did you steal the ship, or did they just put you on it and give you the boot?"
Tasha cleared her throat lightly. "Well, we didn't exactly ask permission to use it beforehand, but they didn't protest too vehemently or really try to stop us..."
"Do they even know which universe you wound up in?" Jannika asked.
"Probably not, no," Tasha said. "We're pretty much on our own here and completely at your mercy." She smirked wryly at Jannika. "You're not going to kidnap us and steal our ship, are you? Oh dear, you already have! Whatever will we do?"
Jannika laughed in amusement. "Heh, you don't have to worry about me. I'll help you out here any way I can. Sure, I've got a bit of an ulterior motive in that I'd really love to poke around at your ship and see if I can learn a thing or two from it, but at least I'm honest about it. I'll bring you in to take the Sapience Test in the morning so you can at least be considered sentient beings."
"Is after dusk good?" Tasha asked.
"Right, skin condition, forgot about that," Jannika said. "How's nineteen hundred hours sound?" At Anastasia's confused look, she added, "Seven o'clock?"
"Sounds good to me," Tasha said. "Just be sure not to come in and try to wake me before sunset, please?"
"No problem."
"So are we going to have to take a crash course in the Norse language if we're going to want to get by here?" Tasha asked.
"Well, probably, if you wanted to hang around on this out-of-the-way planet for very long," Jannika said with a shrug. "English should be enough to get you by for the most part, though. But the only place you could reasonably get a job with only English would be the Midgard Research Center. English is the language of science, apparently. Did you have any particular plans when you decided to come here, or were you just glad to get away from trouble no matter where you were ending up?"
"The latter, more or less," Tasha said, chuckling softly. "While I liked the idea of exploring the universe and seeing new things, I liked the idea of not being screwed over by one thing or another better."
"Not to worry," Jannika said. "Things are pretty quiet around here, for the most part. Midgard's something of a backwater colony. You shouldn't run into too much trouble out here. I'm sure you'll at least get a breather before someone starts trying to screw you over." She grinned at Tasha.
"That's reassuringly," Tasha replied dryly.
Seeing that Anastasia had finished eating, Jannika went to clear off their plates. "I should probably get some sleep, myself," she said. "It's late, and I was out there all afternoon trying to repair that sensor tower before your ship slammed into it. Feel free to make yourselves at home if you're not tired yet. I'll see you tomorrow evening?"
"Yes, thank you, Jannika. For everything," Tasha said. "Sleep well."
Jannika left them there and headed off to her rooms to take a shower herself and get some sleep. She wasn't too worried about them getting into any sort of trouble at the moment. She didn't really have any reason to believe that they were anything but what they claimed to be, as incredible as it might seem. Sure, people had theorized the existence of alternate realities and how they might work, but nobody had ever actually proven anything. Until now. And just one look at their ship made her inclined to believe them. They might be working on some pretty out-there things over at Pandora Corp, but if they had stolen a prototype of some sort, she'd like to think she'd have heard something about it long before they'd turned up here.
She was overthinking things again, she told herself. She was still going to get a damned good look at their ship. But it could wait till tomorrow.
Jannika woke late that afternoon, and headed down to the kitchen to get a bite to eat of something resembling a particularly unhealthy breakfast. She'd go out and take a look at the ship afterward, figuring she'd have a few hours to poke over it before waking them up. Interdimensional jet lag must be hell even if it weren't for Tasha's whole sun allergy thing.
Unfortunately, her mother was in the kitchen when she got there. "Jannika!" Mom said. "Don't tell me you just woke up? When did you go to bed?"
"I was out late working," Jannika said, sighing internally in resignation. Mom would definitely force her to eat something healthy instead for breakfast. "And I've got a lot of work ahead of me, too. The sensor tower is down, and I mean down as in laying on the ground."
"And that couldn't have waited for daylight?" Mom said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. "There now, sit down and let me fix you up some eggs and toast. Eggs are good for you. You should eat more of them."
"Eggs are good for you again?" Jannika replied, reluctantly taking a seat at the table. "I thought scientists were saying they were bad for you not long ago."
"The latest studies indicate that eggs are quite excellent for your health," Mom insisted, working on preparing some food and munching on a slice of toast herself as she did so.
"But I don't even like eggs," Jannika muttered miserably.
"You're going to eat your eggs, young lady, and you'll like them, too," Mom said.
Jannika sighed softly and resigned herself to her fate. She was twenty years old, hardly a little girl anymore, but she tolerated allowing her mother to live with her still. It would feel wrong to kick her own mother out of the house she was raised in, even if Mom did nothing useful and it was Jannika who paid the bills now.
"So do you have another party tonight?" Jannika asked.
"Not tonight, honey. I'll be home tonight. Or did you want to go see a movie or something with your dear mother?"
"No, no thanks, Mom, I do have a lot of work to do," Jannika replied hastily. "Central will kill me if I don't get that tower up and online again soon."
"Oh, alright, but try not to stay out too late tonight. Here's your breakfast." She scooped the scrambled eggs onto a plate and slid it in front of Jannika. "Be sure to eat all your eggs." With that, Mom quickly washed her hands and headed out of the kitchen again.
"Eat all your eggs," Jannika muttered. She went over and grabbed a jar of salsa from the fridge, smothered her eggs in it, and then proceeded to dig in. "Much better."
Once dinner was done, she headed out to the hangar and flipped on the lights. The wrecked ship was exactly where she'd left it. The damage looked even worse than it had from last night's cursory examination. A more thorough look revealed that the systems appeared completely fried.
"This thing is totalled," Jannika murmured to herself. "I don't know how I'm ever going to get it to fly again." Well, if not, she could at least try to learn something from it. Curious as to how it worked, she climbed back into the warped wreckage of what appeared to be the engine compartment. There was the faint yellowish glow of something still intact inside, and she expected it to be the crystalline wiring from the ship's AI. However, what she pulled out was a large crystal, almost as big as her pinky finger. "Now what in the universe is this?" she said softly, turning it over in her fingers.
She could have sworn it looked like luminite at a glance, but she had never seen it in the form of a crystal so large before, only in the hair-thin wiring used in the circuitry of an artificial intelligence. Could this be what they were using to power their engines? There didn't appear to be anything else even remotely resembling a fuel supply or power source, and so far as she could tell, all the power conduits seemed directed to be taking energy from the crystal itself. Very interesting.
The drive itself was far more advanced than anything she had ever seen, and she really doubted that even Pandora Corp could have managed something like this by now. This was obviously not a prototype, but a stable design that had probably been mass-produced for some time. There must be something back here which allowed them to jump between alternate universes like that, but at the moment, damned if she could figure out just what it was, or if it was even separate in any way from the normal functionality of the interstellar drive. She couldn't even be certain if the ship travelled through hyperspace or used some other method entirely to go from one place to another.
"I feel like a caveman trying to make sense of a pocket calculator," Jannika muttered. She would have to ask them for what information they could tell her, even if it was just the basic functionality that any peon would know.
"Jannika!" her mother's voice called from the entrance to the hangar. "I'm heading to town to go to the store, do you need anything?" As she approached, she said, "What is this piece of junk?"
Jannika swore under her breath and severely hoped that her non-technologically-inclined mother would fail to notice that there was anything particularly out of the ordinary about the vessel. "Oh, this thing?" she said innocently, crawling out of the compartment as she quickly tried to think up a story. "Some friends of mine brought it to me to fix, like I didn't have enough to do as it is. They'll be staying over at the house for a while. I put them down in Uncle Jarl's room."
"I really wish you would tell me beforehand when your friends from the internet decide to drop in," Mom chided her. "Well, have fun, but don't let it get in the way of the work you actually get paid for. I hope, now that you've got real life friends here, that you actually go out and do something instead of work all the time, too. How long will they be staying?"
"Don't know, it might take me a while to get this fixed, but I promised them I'd fix it," Jannika said. "Might be a few weeks."
"I'd better be sure to bring extra groceries, then," Mom said, shaking her head a bit. "Don't work too hard, you hear me?"
"Yes, Mother," Jannika said in exasperation, smirking as she climbed back into the compartment again. There was much yet to be done, and while she'd certainly need to try to get the tower fixed soon, she found this far, far more interesting at the moment, even if she didn't understand everything. She felt like a kid in a store full of bright and shiny toys... all of them with no instruction manuals.