OGENUS EARTH 🌎 🌊 {Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure}

Cast No Shadow

"Morning sleeping beauty!" Midge called out from the single stovetop. She was stirring something in a battered old pot that did not look sterile enough for humans to be eating from.

"How did you sleep?" Big Joe teased from a few feet away from where he was hovering over the woman who had control of the food.

"Like a baby," Olivia replied, fighting the urge to stick out her tongue.

"Maybe we'll make a sailor out of you yet!" Harrison laughed from his seat at the front of the ship.

Meg watched, as was customary for her. Her initial dread in this voyage was seeping away, replaced with agreeable warmth for the dysfunctional family dynamic they seemed to form. Even Olivia was growing on her, though, she was pretty sure those feelings weren't returned.

Meg had managed to rest after the others had settled in for the night. At first, her mind had buzzed with unanswerable questions, but the senselessness of the exercise had only exhausted her further, and she finally succumbed to sleep.

Midge basked in the happy sounds of people all around her while she prepared a pot of gruel. All the noise had stirred Arturo, who was shuffling their direction with a crooked smile.

"Good news! They have raisins. Do you want some in your porridge?" Midge asked Arturo, turning enough to see the displeasure on his face as he fit himself on the bench next to Meg.

"Please, no." He said, shaking his head against another breakfast ruined by those sickly sweet little bursts of fruit in his mouth. "I'll eat my paste plain."

"More for me!" Big Joe exclaimed with a joyful hoot.

"Do we have anything other than...that?" Olivia pouted, her stomach growling its protest.

"There's some kind of pickled fish in the fridge." Midge offered, knowing that this wouldn't be what Olivia was looking for.

"Ew, I'm better off with the bland, tasteless muck." Olivia snorted back.

"Well, we have that in spades." Harrison cracked, shutting her up and pulling the group's attention. "So plug up that hole in your face with food so I can think."

"So sorry to have interrupted your critical thinking process." She murmured, working her way into the nook next to Meg and Arturo. "We wouldn't want that, now would we?"

"Trust me, sweetheart, you wouldn't" Harrison snapped back, ignoring her with his actions.

"Can you please stop calling me that?" Olivia complained, pinching the skin above her nose as if she had a headache.

"What, sweetheart?" He asked.

"Yes, it's demeaning." She answered, giving him a cursory glance to be sure that he was still listening. "I have a name."

"Whatever floats your boat, doll face." He replied, clomping away to check on the below deck sensors.

"He does that on purpose, you know." Midge sang from the stove as she portioned out a small bowl of gelatinous stuff for Arturo. "You're like children in a schoolyard, you two. He's going to start pulling your pigtails soon for more attention."

Olivia hated the shiver of excitement that this simple warning had produced and shoved it away violently to rebuff the suggestion.

"If he pulls anything," Olivia began her threat, but couldn't find anything in her vocabulary to really substantiate it, "...I'll kick him."

"I'd pay to see that fight." Big Joe bellowed through tears of laughter.

Then, the floor lurched out from under them, as if trying to escape some terrible danger, tossing their bodies around like rags.