Alien: Isolation

Chapter One: Wakeup Call

    The first sound she heard was the hiss of atmosphere being exchanged, and as her eyes opened, she could see the blurry motion of a transparent hatch moving up away from her. Letting out a soft moan as she started to move, her body felt sluggish and heavy, but this feeling was slowly starting to lessen by the time she was able to sit up. And sit there she did, spending the next two or three minutes remaining where she was, while her vision slowly focused on the well illuminated room around her.

It was a hypersleep chamber that Amanda Ripley found herself in; a large one that contained several pods like the one she currently occupied, but the others were all vacant. This was good, since she had never been thrilled with the idea of big groups of people seeing her in nothing but her underwear, even though for some reason it was part of the standard procedure involving long-term space travel. The company claimed that it was necessary to achieve stasis safely, but more likely it was simply the idea of whatever lonely man had created the devices, in order to get a free peep-show.

By this time her body was responding almost completely, so Ripley used the pod as support so that she could get to her feet, and took it slow until there was no longer a risk of falling over. The short trip to her locker was good practice for this, since she had to go there anyway in order to get her clothes, and also because it was only a few steps away. So far everything was working again, and the last of the lingering fatigue was fading away as she stepped into her jumpsuit, zipping it up and remarking how much her face looked like her mother's when she caught a glimpse of it in the mirror.

Well, at least how she remembered her mother's face the last time she had seen her, but that had been a very long time ago. It had actually been during a brief video call, in which her mother had promised to be home in time for her eleventh birthday, but this was a promise that would not be kept. Shortly after, Ellen Ripley, along with her ship, the Nostromo, and the rest of the crew... simply vanished. No traces of the ship were ever found during the searches along its original flight path, and eventually all efforts were stopped, as they were not profitable for the company.

But that didn't mean that the younger Ripley was going to give up, and that was one of the prime reasons for her presence onboard this ship, the Torrens. Now in her mid-twenties, Ripley had become an engineer for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and as the expansion of colonized worlds continued to spread, she requested any assignment that would take her along the Nostromo's flight path in the hopes that she would one day find something; wreckage, a flight recorder, anything that would give her some answers about why she had to grow up without a mother, especially after her father had walked out on them when she was three.

She had been working the late shift, not that there was any real difference in space where everything was always dark, doing a patch-weld on some old pipes that honestly didn't have much life left in them, when she had been approached by a man named Christopher Samuels. Well, he wasn't a man, technically... he was one of the latest models of Synthetics; androids who worked for the company. He had been polite and friendly when he approached her, but after the company had done basically nothing to help find her mother, Ripley's first instinct was to give him the cold-shoulder and return to work.

However, this attitude was changed when the Synthetic revealed that the long-lost Nostromo's flight recorder had been found floating in space near an old mining station called Sevastopol. One of the work crews had reportedly recovered it, and reported the discovery to the company, so naturally a small recovery team was organized to retrieve it, and Samuels wanted to offer her a spot. So the next day she, Samuels, and a Weyland-Yutani Executive Administrator named Nina Taylor boarded an old M-Class commercial freighter, the Torrens, where the Captain, Diane Verlaine, and her small crew would transport them.

The funny thing about hypersleep was that it allowed no perception of time passing, so for Ripley, it felt like only a couple minutes had passed since climbing into the pod, and waking up in her current location, which she presumed was near this Sevastopol Station. Now dressed, and no longer feeling fatigued, Ripley left the hypersleep chamber, and moved into the corridor, where the lights were already on. This meant that there were people moving around somewhere, since these ships had motion sensors that automatically turned the lights on and off in order to save power.