rocketships to other spaces

MEDUSA'S A SHITTY PLANET, with a shitty landscape and even shittier people. Jin had been born here, but that didn't mean he liked it or had to like it. It is probably the smallest planet in this solar system and most of it is desert, with the few cities it had scattered about disjointedly. He'd wondered why the first people thought it would have been a good idea to colonize here, the air was a little toxic, made people a little crazy (maybe that was it then, he supposed, the air had gotten to them before common sense and reasoning could).

Most of the cities are ruled by gangs, who terrorize the streets daily. Jin's neighborhood, in Chrysaor, is probably the worst of them all; everyone knows the mayor had been bought off a long time ago by Bloody Mary, a terrifying woman no one has ever actually seen and the reigning crime boss. Jin hates her on principle for adding to the misery that is his life, the way he hates the mayor for being so spineless and how he hates the corruption that exists, still, it's not as much as he hates this shitty planet.

And the thing is, Jin had seen a glimpse of a better life—through pictures mostly, in a magazine he'd found in a desk at school. "OCEANUS: VOTED NUMBER ONE PLANET TO VISIT" the title had read and was followed by photographs of busy cities, smiling faces and fashionably dressed people but it was the waterfalls that stood out to him the most—grand and magical looking things that lead to calm glowing blue lakes surrounded by ghostly white flowers. It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

Places like that don't exist on planets like Medusa.

"Look," Jin is saying to Xavier, "It's that blue one right there." He points out a small blue orb in the jet black of the night sky. He sees Xavier nod slowly from the corner of his eye.

"Cool," he says even though he doesn't sound all that impressed, but that was Xavier—perpetually bored and frustratingly nonchalant about everything.

They sit on the rooftop of Xavier's apartment complex—their main hang-out spot, where they can see most of the neighborhood on one side, while on the other there's just miles and miles of desert; red sand canyons littered with tall cacti that make up most of the planet.

Jin has been talking about Oceanus for the past twenty minutes. He can almost feel Xavier getting bored with it, but he can't stop himself, it's all he can think about. Oceanus is the ghost that haunts his dreams.

"If you could see it," Jin tells him and his hands ball into fists, fingernails slicing into the skin of his palm, "I mean, really see it, you would think that it was." He wishes he could show Xavier what he sees in Oceanus, not just the pictures in the magazines because he'd tried before but he still didn't understand and—

"I believe you man," Xavier says, momentarily cutting into his thoughts, "It's super cool. I get it." He stretches; arms reaching out and above his head, brown fingers grasping at sky, and yawns.

Jin hates Xavier a little bit too; for being so apathetic, because, well, Xavier is smart—certifiable genius kind of smart. Jin tells him all the time that if he wanted, he could do anything, really (because it was the smart people who actually had all the power, whether they were in the foreground or not), to which Xavier had responded that he doesn't want to because he doesn't care. Instead of doing anything really productive, Xavier spends most of his time smoking, or selling things that people can smoke and chatting up attractive people he meets in the crowds of the drag-races he frequented.