GETTING IN THE PODS

“I hate to ask another dumb question...” Mark was standing in his pod, in his underwear. I need to get some fresh underwear. Especially if I’m going to have people crawling all over my body. Momma Robin bent down was attaching the electrodes to his legs.

“If you don’t want to ask a stupid question, don’t.” Momma Robin smiled. Mark looked a little stricken. The smile got bigger. “What’s your question?” He waited until she stood up. He didn’t want to talk to her when she was eye to eye with his crotch.

“If we, uh, don’t know how long we’ll be in there….” his voice trailed off.

“Yeah?” She prompted.

“What about food and the bathroom?”

“Oh. I’ll explain it later.” She closed the capsule door and everything went black for Mark. It was a comfortable black.

Those few seconds between being awake and being asleep. That place where you are warm and safe and slowly getting your bearings. That’s what entering the Space Opera Game Universe always felt like to Angie. Peacefully transitioning into another reality.

This time it was different. Lights flashing, alarms sounding along with a horrible roaring. The escape pod was shaking, she hoped that it wouldn’t come apart. Behind her somebody swore. No, it wasn’t just behind her, everybody was swearing.

And somebody was in her seat, dammit. When they originally got into the lifeboat Mike had taken one seat and that XMAN235 from team MyndBendz had taken the other. Angie had been distracted by a gunfight while the guys got the escape pod ready. Now it would be bad form, and difficult, to yank XMAN235 out of the chair.

Angie gave into the inevitable and strapped herself into one of the acceleration couches. She wanted to stand over the shoulders so she could see what was happening, but being strapped in seemed like a really good idea in a crash landing.

She checked the public properties of XMAN. It didn’t show Angie anything exciting or surprising. Like everybody else on any of the teams in the competition. He was a level 1 Private. He had his attributes and skills hidden. That was normal too. Angie made a mental note to ask her team to share attributes and skills within the team. They should know as much as they could about each other. Of course at this moment everybody had pretty much the same skills.

Soon, she imagined, Mike and XMAN would have some piloting skill. You could learn skills by taking courses or “instant updates” or by doing. Instant Updates were modules you could buy for an exorbitant amount of credits, but they gave you the skill immediately. Training courses took time, sometimes it was almost instant, like when you leveled up, and sometimes it took ALOT longer. You could also learn by doing. Sometimes there was a high mortality rate learning some things by doing. Learning to fly an escape pod by doing it might just be one of those fatal things.

Angie looked around the pod. Heather was strapped in. Next to her was Southaven from team MYNdBendz. Southaven and XMAN235 were teammates on MYNdBendz. I bet they had an interesting conversation during the programmed hold. I’ll have to ask them. Half their team was missing or dead. How the hell do you let your team get split up on the ship?

She saw Mark in the back of the capsule. He wasn’t strapped in and every time the capsule shook, he bounced. Mostly it seemed like he was bouncing off of the dead TESTTESTQWERTY. TESTTESTQWERTY was from another different team. His team was dead. Or at least never left the ship. Poor bastards.

She watched Mark slowly crawl to the nearest acceleration couch. Finally he made it to the white acceleration couch. Everything is white. Is that supposed to be comforting? White walls, white seats, light gray floor. It’s more antiseptic than comforting.

The roaring noise was horrible. Angie ported the view from Mike’s helmet into her own visor. On another portion of her visor’s HUD she connected to the ship’s information readouts. Another part had a map open. Quickly, Angie closed the map. It wasn’t adding any extra information and it made the “Mike cam” and info readouts too small.

There were no arms on her chair, couch, whatever. The seats were big, like they were expecting space marines in armour or crew in space suits to be in them. By not having arms on the seat, a bigger body could fit in the seat. Not having chair arms meant Angie couldn’t clutch them. Instead she tightly clutched onto the captured TU’COn laser rifle. She was very careful to keep way from the trigger. A stray shot in here would be a tragedy.

The Pod jerked again. The developers wouldn’t kill us in an escape pod. What kind of competition would that be? They’ll wait until we land and then slaughter us. But, maybe they'll kill off some stupid people. She watched Mark finally get strapped in to his escape couch. Idiot. Thinking that the competition wouldn’t kill her right now was a sure way to get killed. She turned her attention back to her HUD screens.

“I have no idea where we are going,” Mike reported.

“Down,” XMAN235 replied, “we’re going down.” Mike looked over at him and then back to the controls. Both of them were fighting with the control yokes.

I wonder if there’s an autopilot. She wanted to ask. It’s better not to interrupt. As long as they’re not the stupid people who are going to get killed off, it would be fine.

The crash landing continued.