For part one, navigate backwards or click here I guess.
Crash accomplished. Now for the second part….
I took a deep breath. A new habitable planet? Those didn’t happen often. The landscape looked… a little strange. I could see mountains kicking up ridges not too far from where I had rolled to a stop and hear the sound of a stream nearby but I couldn’t see much over the knee-high vegetation that grew thickly over the ground. Well, everywhere but in the black-soiled swath that my escape pod had torn across the landscape. Actually… that was odd. The debris looked more like I’d hacked my way through thick brush than through tall grass. I leaned over to look closer. The whole land was covered with trees. Actual trees. I’m not a botanist so I don’t know what type but there were some with rounded heart-shaped leaves and others with leaves with rounded edges and… you know what? It doesn’t really matter, this is a new planet and there’s no reason to expect the trees to be familiar at all. Frankly it was astonishing I could recognize the trees in the first place. But the height? It was like an entire forest of fairly large bonsai. They weren’t still growing or anything, they were fully formed at about two-and-a-half feet tall.
I walked closer, looking into them. To an extent, I was full of the classic wonder and curiosity but that was sitting back of the mind for the time; the biggest thing I was thinking was how I was going to get something to eat. These trees weren’t berry bushes and if they had fruit, it’d probably be similarly tiny. I can’t eat the stems or something. Maybe if I was lucky the animals wouldn’t be tiny? I felt like some sort of enormous Robinson Crusoe or Ngabe Starwanderer, but at least those characters were shipwrecked somewhere with edible plants, not just… wood. And also they were fictional, so they were more likely to get rescued. Lucky ducks1. At least I’d crashed on a planet with breathable air… but that meant it had an atmosphere which would scramble my signal and make it harder for me to be located. Yay.
While I was wandering along the brand-new treeline, thinking such grim thoughts, I saw something confusing. There was an abrupt gap in the… well, I guess forest is still accurate even if you could nearly see over the tops of the trees while on your stomach. Anyway, this gap looked peculiarly like a road, and as I looked back across my new trench, I saw a continuation of the gap. But if it was a road… it was about the right size to travel my fingers along. Maybe some sort of animal trail. No, I thought, kneeling for a closer look, that was far too regular and even to be an animal track. And if I squinted, it almost looked like the little markings on the sides could be cart tracks…
A wagon turned a bend in the road. The two men sitting in it looked at me and screamed.
I mean, to be fair, my face is taller than their whole body, I thought as they wheeled their panicked tiny horse and bolted away from me, a cloud of dust coming up behind them. It’s still a little insulting to be considered so terrifying.
I looked back at the escape pod. I had a decision to make here. I’d come across an uncharted, inhabited planet. Should I start taking notes? Forget rescue and try to go native? Well, super-sized native? Should I try to stay out of their way and not, I don’t know, introduce them to gbellium engines before they’d even started developing steel, or whatever it was irresponsible space travelers did on primitive planets? Or was that even a choice I needed to make right now? Actually, you know what, no. It’s not a choice I need to make right now. The first choice I need to make is am I hallucinating things because I’m sleep deprived and starving. Or, hey, maybe the air here causes hallucinations. And there was only one place that I knew of here that had human-sized, fabric-covered, stuffing-lined seats, even if they weren’t “bed.” Plus a few packs of dehydrated rations just calling my name2. I closed the door, scarfed down some, uh, “pasta,” and laid down to rest.
I woke up when the dragon bit the tip of my nose.
Looks like I’m going to make this a three-parter! Tune in to this same channel next week for the thrilling conclusion!
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- Were I writing this in a book/edited story, I’d probably put “lucky [metaphor]” here instead of “ducks.” It doesn’t feel fully appropriate to the situation and I’m not gonna put in a swear here but this is a good opportunity to come back to it later and think of a turn of phrase that furthers worldbuilding. But I’m not planning to come back later, so we’re sticking with ducks. ↩︎
- This is the point where, were I editing more, I’d go back to last week and point out how the character is keeping rations low to last longer; only eating enough to keep their energy up for all the sitting and staring they’re doing. Then I can set up this beat better. ↩︎
