What the hell have I done?
29 Mar 2019Samuel L. Bronkowitz
Have you ever had one of those mornings where you realize that you did something terribly foolish the night before, but you have no idea how in the world you woke up with a piece of anatomy drawn on your forehead in permanent marker?This has been one of those mornings, except instead of waking up with a crudely drawn penis on my scalp, I'm sitting on an airless planet somewhere out past Sag A. It appears I've signed up for some sort of expedition, and my crew is particularly nonplussed about the whole situation. I have these vague recollections of things like spending days running a mining operation, a detour to Colonia that somehow seems to have given me a weird itch in a *very* unpleasant place, and a particularly lucid moment of staring into the abyss of Sag A.
My second engineer is swearing about missing a date he had scheduled four months ago, one of the systems technicians has decided that I'm to blame for the fact she had to remove a particularly ugly hangnail by herself, and I think the ship's cat has started to go through Centauri Mega Gin detoxification. (I never should have taken Mittens to Hutton Orbital, my bad)
But now I'm sitting in a valley surrounded by other ships with even worse paint wear than my own "That's Armageddon!" has, and wondering why the hell I'm this far from home in a moment of clarity that I don't think I've had since a particularly rough night at my favorite bar on Griffin Dock back home in Svara. Looking at the ship's logs, I appear to have signed up for this "Distant Worlds 2" expedition, and I guess it's too late to turn back now. Well, I could certainly turn back but if I'm this close to Beagle Point I might as well go see if they have a Camp Snoopy. (I think the gentleman I heard that joke from originally had either gotten a bad case of freezer burn from a few decades too long in an escape pod, or was just generally mad)