Darkness

Ch.16 Just a Lot of Stress All-around

Merry-late-holidays! Look at that, a chapter hot off the press. Very cool, very neat :)
I definitely planned to get this out after the new year, definitely not before. I'm just impeccably on time. I always am. (Also, I definitely wasn't editing/writing this during the holidays with my family. Oh no sir. That would be crazy.)

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The tube and I zoomed through darkness, I was tossed left and right, or at least that's what it felt like. The stasis field was doing its job to keep me perfectly in place, but that didn't stop my internal organs from deciding to reshuffle themselves. The hiss and scream of compressed air were muffled by the glass, occasionally I'd see a speck of light zip by unbelievably fast, and every so often during one of our many turns my container would strike some unseen edge and rattle me. The nausea was bad, but being jolted around blind did tend to do that to a person.

Why would I think this was possibly going to be fun?

Then amazingly, it was. Things calmed down, and I could feel myself zooming by at an incredible speed. It was actually sort of exhilarating, like I was backseat in the world's fastest racecar.

Then amazingly, it wasn't fun anymore.

The twists and turns resumed full force, and I tried my best, both to not have a panic attack, and to avoid having my stomach flip inside out.

I wasn't sure if it had been a single minute or ten, but the sound of air died down, and dreamily everything drifted slowly to a stop. I opened my eyes. Still all darkness—oh

The blackness clicked open, grayish light fell in, and I was looking out of another hole in the wall, but in a very different place.

I noticed two things at once. Firstly, my glass tube had just slid open. Secondly, I was upside down.

I braced myself for impact.

But slowly, gently—with my shoulders still squeezed against the sides of the glass—I slid, anticlimactically, down, to the bottom, of the tube. The top of my head tapped the bottom.

Huh. ok.

The room I had arrived at was empty. There was a table, an open door, a long blacked-out window or mirror thing on the wall, and that was it. The lights seemed dim compared to the Medbay, but not dim as if the bulbs were crappy, dim like someone had made them dim.

Blood was rushing to my head.

I wiggled, squirmed, and shifted. My legs swung forwards, flipping me upright, and I toppled from the tube.

My feet hit the floor, my knees buckled, and I fell in an ungraceful heap. I groaned. That fall had definitely been a few seconds too long. I rolled onto my back and groaned again, the panel I had dropped from looked at least a story off the ground, maybe more. The metal panel had stayed open, and I could still see the glint of the tube within, but it was entirely inaccessible to me. A problem to figure out later. Ravage first, then consequences later. Still, I took an extra moment to stare at and mourn my inconvenient escape tube.

Count my blessings: I didn't break a bone or twist an ankle from the fall. Tell me to jump off a roof at home and I was certain that horrible injury was guaranteed, but if I was learning anything from this nightmare of an experience, it was that the human body was resilient.

I sat up, rubbing my bruised head. Or, maybe I had resilient luck. Actually, yes. I deserved some resilient luck after this ridiculous scenario I had found myself in. If I had told my past-self that I'd be rolling around an alien spaceship within the same 24 hours that I had taken a precalc quiz...