Me: Greetings, mortals! Another chapter is here!
Jerry: After much confusion and consideration.
Me: First Apple wants Egnazol, now she wants an idiot's guide... gah. Naw, I'll do anything for you, Apple. :3
Jerry: Oh my Notch. She just displayed emotion.
Me: SHUT UP JERRY YOU IMBICILE!
Jerry: Too much emotion...
Me: Anyway, I'm a little dubious about this chapter... it seemed a little bland. Tell me what you guys think! Also, I've decided to make this a proper, long AU, so expect another chapter soon.
ᚫᚾ᛫ᛁᛞᛁᚩᛏᛋ᛫ᚷᚢᛁᛞᛖ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛋᚫᚢᛁᛝ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᚩᚱᛚᛞ
(An Idiot's guide to Saving the World.)
ᚲᚻᚫᛈᛏᚫᚱ᛫ᛏᚹᚩ
How not to kill a spaceman.
Lewis was not pleased. Why did stuff like this always happen to him? Not only was he talking to someone in his own freaking mind, now he was paranoid that someone was out to kill him.
His suspicions had begun when he'd had his first visitor. He'd been in his room, recovering from the traumatic near encounter with space, trying to get some sleep after he'd been talking to Simon. There'd been a knock on the metal door, which had opened to reveal Jane, one of Xephos' colleagues and friends.
"Good morning, sunshine," Jane had said upon seeing him lying in bed. "Have a nice sleep?" She made her way into the room without bothering to ask permission, but she didn't need to.
"Thanks for the consideration, Jane," Lewis mumbled sarcastically. "I wasn't sleeping anyway."
"What were you doing then? Talking to yourself?"
Lewis grimaced, though Jane had only meant it as a joke. "At least I'd get a half decent conversation out of it." He tried to pass it off, but he'd never been good at lying. Jane raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment.
"Anyway," Jane said, sitting on the end of Lewis's bed, "We've been doing system diagnostics for the last few hours, trying to figure out how the safety protocols on the airlock were overridden."
"Let me guess," Lewis said morosely, "It was a bug, or a glitch, or something." That would be his luck.
Jane shook her head wearily. "No. there was no record of a bug of any kind… in fact there was no record at all." Here, she leaned towards Lewis and whispered conspiratorially; "Someone had tampered with the records just around when you were fixing the hyperdrive. There isn't any video footage, or coding errors, or anything. Just blank."
Lewis stared at Jane in disbelief. "Are you saying that-"
"Shh!" Jane hissed, slapping her hand over Lewis's mouth. "Don't say it."
Lewis blinked at his friend, bemused. Was she implying that it hadn't been an accident? That someone was out to kill him? What was going on?
Jane stared back at Lewis, her face breaking back into a smile as she stood up. "Well," she said, shrugging, "I thought you'd like to know, anyway. Good health, Xephos!"
Lewis watched, still bemused and shocked, as she marched out of the room and closed the door. She thought he might've wanted to know that someone on this ship was out to kill him? Lewis very much doubted he'd be able to get any sleep now.
"Simon?" he muttered, glancing around the room warily as he spoke, and waiting for the answering thought in his head. But there was no response from the dwarf.
Lewis shrugged, deciding that the dwarf must've gone to sleep when Lewis had said goodnight earlier. He sat up in his bed, thinking deeply about his situation.
One question was loudest in his mind. Why would someone want to kill him? Lewis was an unassuming, humble member of the enterprise, not particularly talented, though he knew what he was doing. He was generally liked by people, though he tended to keep to himself. He didn't have any enemies that he knew of.
He carefully stood up, and began pacing around the room. The doctors had told him to avoid doing so, as his body was still recovering from the trauma of its exposure to space, but honestly Lewis didn't care. If there was someone after his life, collapsing spontaneously would be the least of his troubles.
For a moment, he wished Simon was awake so he could talk to him. It had certainly surprised Lewis to find another entity speaking in his mind, but it hadn't taken long to figure out what was going on. Things like this often happened around the enterprise. He wasn't sure whether Simon actually believed Lewis was real though, as the dwarf had expressed his doubts about his sanity.
Lewis grimaced, shoving the thoughts of the dwarf out of his mind. He had a more pressing situation at hand.
~᛬ᚫᚾ᛫ᛁᛞᛁᚩᛏᛋ᛫ᚷᚢᛁᛞᛖ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛋᚫᚢᛁᛝ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᚩᚱᛚᛞ᛬~
"Xephos! I thought the doctors had confined you to bed rest!" one of the engineers exclaimed as Lewis entered the room.
"Nah, I'm fine," Lewis lied, "I was just curious to find out why the airlock opened." He said this very nonchalantly, hoping the engineer would say something interesting.
"Yeah," the engineer said, wiping he greasy hands on a rag. "It was really weird, wasn't it? I mean, only last week they did a full system diagnostic."
Lewis thought back to the week prior, and recalled the diagnostic. It had taken an entire day, and almost all systems had been down (except for life support, of course). They always did this once a year, and normally it picked up any problems and the ship sailed on for the next year without error. Or at least, an error not caused by living interference. It was all too often that an alien would try to sabotage the ship.
"You would expect them to do a proper job of it," the engineer said, standing up to leave, "Well, good to see you back on your feet, Xephos. I'll be seeing you later." He walked past Lewis and back into the hall.
Well, Lewis decided, He's certainly not trying to kill me. After all, he could have just killed me right then and gotten away without suspicion.
Lewis sighed, and began to walk down the corridor in search of another person to question. Unfortunately they all seemed to be congregated at the deck rather than in the rooms- Lewis wasn't sure why, because he'd been out of contact with the happenings on the Enterprise since his accident.
It was after looking around for a while that he finally found someone. It was an explorer on break, and when he heard Lewis' approach, he turned to look at the fellow spaceman. Lewis noticed with alarm that the explorer's face was very pale, as if he hadn't slept for a good week.
"Xephos?" The explorer croaked. Perhaps he had a cold.
"Yes?" Lewis replied, wary of getting too close. He really didn't need to catch a cold on top of everything else.
The explorer stared at him for a moment, eyes oddly vacant.
"Did you want something?" Lewis prompted when the soldier remained silent.
"Oh, yes." The explorer blinked rapidly as he spoke, "Jane. She wanted to see you at the carrier bay."
Lewis frowned. "Why?"
"I don't know."
Lewis stared suspiciously at the man for a moment. "Are you sick?" he asked slowly.
"Just a cold." The explorer confirmed.
Lewis grunted confirmation that he'd heard, then turned and began making his way to the carrier bay. It bothered him that Jane hadn't mentioned this when she'd come to see him earlier- it must have just come up now, he supposed. Perhaps she'd worked out the identity of the person who'd opened the airlock? With that thought in mind, he sped up.
He attempted to come back into contact with Simon a few times as he walked, but there was no response. Apparently that dwarf slept like a log- or like a dwarf, really. Well, talking to Simon could wait, he supposed, even though he was curious to ask more about the dwarf.
He marched into the control area of the carrier bay, and halted in surprise when he found it empty. It was really weird- usually there would have been one person supervising the space craft. Lewis noticed that a piece of paper was sitting on one of the consoles, and he went and picked it up curiously.
"Lewis,
Sorry about all this. I got an urgent call from command about a fault in the system, so I've had to go get that sorted. not sure how long that'll take.
Anyway, the reason I got that guy to bring you here- I realized that the emergency shuttle might have a record of what happened during your incident. I would've done this myself, but as I said, I'm indisposed. you might find this interesting anyway.
The code is 285PH0X. Type it in, and send it to my private server.
Good luck, Jane"
Lewis put the note down, thoughtful. Trust Jane to come up with something as ingenious as this, he thought. She'd always been a bit of a prodigy.
He carefully walked down into the bay, not bothering to put a space suit on or anything. He wasn't planning on actually using the emergency shuttle, after all. He spotted the correct shuttle towards the back of the bay, behind the fighter-pods. There was only one emergency shuttle at the moment, as the others had been blown up in one of those almost-the-destruction-of-the-universe scenarios the Enterprise was often faced with.
He opened the shuttle by entering his own security code, and hopped inside, closing the door behind him. The emergency vessel was quite large, actually; it did need to fit a large portion of crew on it, in case they needed to evacuate. Lewis made his way to the front of the ship, where the control panels were.
Carefully he switched on the interface, and took a chair in front of it. The screen took a few moments to turn on, and then blinked dutifully, waiting for a code.
Eagerly, Xephos typed it in. 285PH0X.
The interface processed the sequence for a few moments, then blinked, and turned itself off.
Lewis frowned at it with confusion. How was he supposed to see the records when it was off?
As soon as he thought that, he heard the roar of the shuttle's engines come online. He tried to dart back and check what was going on, but somehow the emergency seatbelt protocol had been initiated, and he found himself firmly strapped to the chair.
As Lewis tried to wriggle out of the harness, he noticed that the bay's door was opening. The air whooshed past the shuttle and into space, but the ship Lewis was trapped in remained pressurized. One of the great advantages of the shuttle was that its life support systems where held in a different part of the ship, and couldn't be turned off by anyone (barring the system's actual destruction), so whoever was in the ship was safe from sabotage. Unfortunately, Lewis doubted if this advantage would stay this way for long.
The shuttle's engines whined a higher note, and then they were moving. The shuttle shout out of the bay doors and into the emptiness of space, moving at break-neck speeds to some unknown destination.
This was surely the continuation of the attempts on his life, Lewis realized. They'd failed to kill him by the hyperdrive, so they'd used his curiosity and caution to hijack the emergency shuttle with him in it. It was odd, he thought, that the shuttle's systems had been hacked- it was supposed to be the most secure system on the ship, after all. It had back-ups and protocols meant to stop just this kind of thing, but they all seemed to be non-functional.
That was when Lewis realized what had really happened. The system hadn't been hacked remotely, or by some outside force- Lewis had hacked it, when he'd entered the code he'd gotten from Jane. This of course led to the terrifying idea that Jane had been the one who had tried to kill him, but after a moment's thought he realized that she'd had plenty of opportunities to kill him without suspicion, so she'd probably just been manipulated by some other's plan. The pale, sickly explorer probably had been too, come to think of it. The idea that there were hostile people on the Enterprise made Lewis worry even more, particularly as Jane was involved.
He looked back into the window when a glimmer caught his eye. The shuttle was nearing a solar system now- well, kind of. This solar system had a single sun and only one planet rotating around it. Lewis realised that this was where the shuttle was headed for.
It was going to crash into this planet and kill him in the process.
Lewis dimly wondered what he'd done to deserve this, and congratulated his to-be murderer. Thank a lot, man.
Quietly, he observed the planet he was approaching. It was small and green and blue, indicating that it probably had life forms on it. Indeed, when Lewis looked to its darkened side, he could see the tell-tale glow of technologized civilisations blinking from its surface.
Absently he wondered if this was what his home planet had looked like. Like all spacemen on the enterprise his age, he had never seen the planet from which they'd originated from. It was supposedly beautiful, with mountains and lush vegetation, interwoven with sharp-angled technology; but of course the spacemen were bound to remember the best bits rather than the mistakes they wanted to forget.
By now, the planet was taking up the entire window. Lewis could see it was speckled with biomes and cities, and wished he could look closer at them.
Then they hit the atmosphere.
The shuttle jerked and a roaring sound filled his ears. His heart was pounding and adrenalin throbbed through his veins, but he remained strapped to his seat, watching his killer approach with wide eyes.
Lewis. Lewis?
It was Simon. Lewis wanted to answer, but his mouth wasn't working anymore. He was stuck staring as the planet whooshed towards him.
The shuttle rattled and bumped as it navigated the atmosphere. Lewis had no doubt it would make it through, if just barely- but it was another matter for hitting the planet's surface. Lewis knew that the shuttle wasn't going to slow down and give him a gentle landing; it was going to ram into the earth and kill him.
He was going to die. He was going to die.
Lewis, please talk to me.
He wanted to. He really did. But he just… couldn't.
Please be real.
Simon still didn't believe in him. When he died, Simon would slowly forget about the strange voice in his head, thinking that he'd just been going mad. He'd never believe that that voice had once belonged to a spaceman who had tried his best to make Simon feel better.
He'd just be a figment of the dwarf's imagination.
Lewis opened his eyes and saw a stone complex zooming towards him, tiny faces peering up at him. He closed his eyes again and waited for the end.
I'm sorry, friend.
~᛬ᚫᚾ᛫ᛁᛞᛁᚩᛏᛋ᛫ᚷᚢᛁᛞᛖ᛫ᛏᚩ᛫ᛋᚫᚢᛁᛝ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᚩᚱᛚᛞ᛬~
Lewis? Hello?
Lewis… wait. Are you Lewis? I don't know whether there are more than one spaceman. Do you know Lewis?
Are you planning on responding anytime soon?
No?
I have pork. You must like pork. Everyone likes pork. If you wake up, I'll give you some.
… You really are a selfish bastard. Can't you see I'm desperate? I'm talking to an unconscious body in the hope you'll know a spaceman who's been talking in my head.
...
Lewis was dead. Probably. But if this was what happened in the afterlife or whatever, it was really weird. Why could he still hear Simon? And why was it dark?
Perhaps he could respond. Did he still have a mouth, if he was dead? Perhaps he could just project his thoughts.
Simon?
Lewis?! Oh thank god, I was beginning to think I was going mad and I really didn't need that on top of everything else and- wait. But this spaceman isn't talking… he must be someone else, I suppose. Oh well, I've probably saved him from a terrible life with dwarves.
Life with dwarves can't be so bad if your one of them. But how did you save a spaceman? Tell me what happened.
Well, I was being dragged out of Khaz Modan when we saw this comet coming through the atmosphere. But it wasn't a comet- it was a spaceship, just like you told me about! I went inside and found this weird man, and I dragged him out and took him away with me. I thought he might be you, because you're the only spaceman I know.
Oh. Wait. Describe the spaceship.
Well, it was long and angular. It was mostly white, but it had a bright red stripe along the side-
The emergency shuttle.
Lewis opened his eyes. "Bloody hell."
"Ah, he's awake!" a voice cried. Lewis looked around to see a short, bearded man smiling down at him. "Maybe I can ask who he is, and you might've heard of him."
Resting his face in his hands in exasperation, Lewis groaned. "You idiot, Simon."
"Wait, what?" the Dwarf, who Lewis knew as Simon, said, "How the Nether do you know my name?"
"Because I'm Lewis," Lewis sighed, impatient.
Carefully, he took stock of his surroundings. He appeared to be lying on some soft grass under a large oak tree, in the middle of the forest.
Simon stared at Lewis suspiciously. "But I was just talking to Lewis, and you didn't speak."
Apparently I don't need to speak out loud, Lewis told him through his thoughts, frustrated.
"Oh my Notch!" Simon said, now dancing around the room in excitement, "It's you! I'm not going mad! I'm telepathically linked with a spaceman!"
Lewis laughed at the dwarf's relief, studying him as he did so. Simon was quite a bit shorter than him, but not quite as short as you might expect a dwarf to be. He had a bright red beard and corresponding hair, most of which was disguised by a metal helm with short horns coming out either side. His chest was bare, except for a thick leather strap connected to two metal shoulder plates he wore. He also wore thick grey pants.
Simon was laughing hysterically now, and Lewis too the chance to sit up and make sure he still had all his limbs. Apart from some bruising and a nasty cut to the head, he seemed to be fine- particularly considering that the crash had been supposed to be fatal. He looked around at the forest with interest.
"Simon, where are we?"
For anyone who was wondering, I honesly have never watched Startrek or played World of Warcraft, so I have no idea what I'm wiriting about. I'm just making it up as I go along (and using spaceship knowledge from Stargate. I love Stargate.)
SO THERE.
And also, sorry if i didn't elaborate more on what happened to xephos. I can give him a flashback in the future, if you like.
Guest number 2: This story is one of the best things I've read. Even though this is the first chapter, it's the best thing ever.
Wow. Thanks!
Guest number 1: This is one of those stories that make you rethink on how it all began. I would like to see Xephos' point of view for the next chapter, just to know what happened. And if you plan on doing another, do a mix of the two.
Yeah, this plot bunny's been bouncing through my head for a while. I like to think it's unique.
BlackPanther10: OMFG THIS IS SO AWESOME YES TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO LEWIS YOU ARE AMAZING YAY EPIC STORY THUMBS UP GIVE US MOARMAORMAGsnnkKKdksjcoskqll ckOALXKXKQMDKQLVLS
...*ahem* Great work, can't wait for moar (MOARMPSRMFMLWQPPXFKEM), woo bye!
HEAR HAVE SOME MOAR. rkjn;ewstrujnerjnMOAR IN FUTUREwlagrubaejbav
BlessedMC: :D IT'S BEAUTIFUL. And yes, doing the next chapter from Xephos' POV would be amazing. -Wish out!
IT IS. AND IT IS DOUBLY SO NOW YOU HAVE SAID THAT.
WildcatInk: Definitely do Xephos' point of view next chapter! This is definitely one of the more unique origin stories I've read!
Thanks! I like to keep things interesting.
Sorry if I forgot anyone (I know I did) but it's so laaaatttee...