Daughters of Yzeria

Caesia's not a good pilot

"First question; How do we get on?" I ask Caesia, a hint of excitement in my tone. "Do not move. At all." She commands. I feel a force, pushing me up, I get lifted up about 40 feet up before I grab a handle on the cockpit. "Use your middle finger to push the lock open!" She shouts from the bottom of the vessel. I do just that.
-whoosh-The door opens up, steam rushes out and I climb in. "Get in the first seat!" Luminia shouts. "I grab the handles on the side of the cockpit as the entire cockpit is only about 4 feet wide, but very long. I use the handles to get to the first seat on the top, I struggle to get myself into the seat. I get the straps on and I'm locked in safe. "Howaboutyoutwo?" I ask them, shouting. As soon as I turn my head to look behind me, I see both of them, Luminia and Caesia, second and third seat respectively. "WHAT IN THE-" "Yeah..., don't ask." Caesia cuts me off.

The cockpit slowly closes over us, a glass dome keeping us safe. I hear Caesia flick a switch and as she does that, the entire vessel hums to life, buttons, gauges, meters, maps, they all light up. "Everyone, stay silent for lift off." Luminia commands. Caesia starts to flick switches in sequence. Once she's done, the engine slowly revs up. All of this techy stuff, but... my stuff! I look back to the ground, the engine flames spread and my tent goes to lockdown. Good, my stuff's safe. The engine blasts into full throttle and we jerk up into the air.

I look at our speed, 150 m/s, 250 m/s. It slowly rose up to 490 before we started what I remember as "gravity turn". I kept a steady eye at the meters. As we slowly turned, we turned horizontal, upside down. Our feet were facing up. I looked to the purple skies of Vayde, the purple moon of the green planet Ssion. I looked back to our speed, we were steadying up on 3229 m/s. "That concludes our flight to orbit over Vayde." Caesia says in that pilot voice you would usually hear from airliner pilots. You can see the purple glow of Vayde's atmosphere on the metal vessel, a gentle glow. I look to my front and grab the stick. I push the stick a little to the side, as such, the entire vessel slowly rotates 180 degrees upside down. Vayde is below us and now Ssion is directly above, replacing the purple glow with a soft green shine.

"Ready for transfer?" Caesia asks me eagerly. "I nod my head and she acknowledges by nodding back. I feel the hum of the engine slowly get louder as we start accelerating. The engines cutoff and we slowly drift into a retrograde orbit around Ssion. The green thick atmosphere isn't thick enough to drown out the surface, but thick enough to give off a soft gassy glow. "Hypervelocity landing included." Caesia adds. She fires the engines retrograde to slow us down in orbit, soon enough, I can see a small square on the lower left corner of the HUD. It's showing our orbit slowly intersect the ground, at intersection point, I hover my finger over it and it shows a crash velocity of 6,821 m/s. Are we seriously going to crash the thing? "How do you plan to stop this thing?" Luminia asks her little sister. "Simple," She says. "Reverse directional velocity on every molecule here." What? I just roll with it. I start to see flames appear on the vessel. You can hear all the flames and air grinding out on the metal frame. The flames then slowly turn blue. All I can do here is look, observe. Everything starts shaking hard. I struggle to find the altimeter on the HUD, once I find it, our altitude is fast going down. The 189km high atmosphere is wrecking us. Our speed slows down its ascend and caps out at 3019 m/s before decreasing. 15km up and we see through the clouds, our landing site is a forest. Our speed slows to 1982 m/s. The flames are still here. We descend down to 9km, the flames are going away. We're at 1201 m/s. We slow down even more rapidly once we reach 5km, our speed is 421 m/s.

I look to my left, through the flames, something else, a big something else. A roar pierces the sound of flames against metal. Soon enough, something rams into our vessel. I hit my head and my vision gets blurred. After moments, my vision gets clear and I look around to familiarize myself with the situation. there's a really big hole to my left, not just that, there's blood. Through the hole I see the trees below. The 1km tall trees are daunting. We descend down to 1km, we hit something. Lots of some things. Our speed goes down to 100 m/s then 50 then 10 before the HUD shuts down due to damage and overheat. The glass cockpit cracks at the top as we fall, eventually, we reach terminal velocity, not even halfway to the ground. Then, BANG, we impact the ground hard, a shockwave is visible at impact. My straps keep me safe as it did the entire time. "Craft's on the ground, we're alive, we're at our destination, SUCCESSFUL!" Caesia exclaims.