Enjoy?An Entirely Different Place.
Chapter One: Voomf.
The day started with a very loud, distinct ‘Voomf’ sound. Captain Stevenson did exactly what he had been instructed to do in case of a possible emergency; shout orders, demand status reports, and generally look busy until someone managed to take the right lift to the bridge and, through much stuttering and barely concealed panic, tell him what went wrong. Precisely three minutes later, Senior Technician Crawley burst out of the lift doors and shoved a computer monitor into Stevenson’s hands. He was somewhat taken aback by this, and raised an eyebrow at the poor technician, who, starting to look shifty, promptly gave an explanation. “We couldn’t find a Portable Media Displayer! And all the paper printers are broken! What did you expect me to do?” Somehow, the Captains eyebrows managed to raise upwards another notch. “Do you mean to tell me you trailed four hundred meters of video adapter cable through the ship?” Crawley nodded.
(Meanwhile, in a completely different section of the ship, Petty Officer Fleese tripped over four hundred and forty four meters of cabling, grabbed at an emergency access panel in a futile attempt to right himself, and accidentally disabled the automatic oxygen refreshers.)
“That’s terrible! Against almost every single health and safety regulat- Where the hell did you find four hundred meters of cabling?!”
“It’s not important. Anyway, we, uh, have a slight problem. Well, not exactly slight. It’s actually, uhm, sort of major. Really major. Apparently. “The Senior Technician continued to ramble like this for several seconds, until rudely interrupted by the Captain.
“What happened, for god’s sake?!”
“Well, uhm, Junior Technician, err, Martin accidentally installed the Schrodinger drive backwards into its housing, and, well, long story short, and we’re stuck in a parallel universe.”
“… Is that it? These things do happen, and it isn’t exactly major. We’ll just hit the reverse button. But, god, the paperwork I’m going to have to do.” Stevenson dramatically slapped the heel of his hand into his forehead, and turned towards pilot, who so far had been trying to ignore the entire conversation. Halfway through telling the pilot to hit reverse, he was once again interrupted by Crawley. “It, uh, won’t be quite that, err, simple. We lost the, uhm, engine room.” The Senior Technician gulped, now being stared at by the entire bridge crew, all wearing slightly amazed, slightly shocked faces.
The captain however, was now staring at Crawley with a low, dangerous expression. “And how did you survive, Senior Technician?”
“Well, uh, I had to, err, use the bathroom, so…” He trails off awkwardly, and starts to edge back towards the lift. “I’m just going to go, uhm, try and work out how to find the, err, engine room.” He dashes into the lift and slams his hand against the down button, his ashen face slowly hidden by the closing doors.
Now, this may raise a few questions. Such as ‘What on earth is a Schrodinger drive?” and “Where the hell is the ship now, then?” or even “Four hundred meters of cabling?”. Well, let’s start at the top. The Schrodinger drive was probably the best invention of the 22nd century. It is also named completely inanely, Schrodinger having absolutely nothing to do with the way the drive actually functions, but Scientists, being the un-inventive sort, left it up to the general public to come up with a name for the drive. The general public being mostly idiots, they immediately named it after Schrodinger. Presumably because they heard the name from a recent documentary that had been mistakenly given a prime time slot. It works like this. At any one time there is a small chance that an atom may not be exactly where you expect to be, but is, in fact, in an entirely different place halfway across the universe. All the drive does is manipulate that probability slightly. As a result, everything inside the field suddenly finds themselves somewhere else, virtually instantly. Unfortunately, you can never know both the speed of the ship or the position of the ship at the same time while the drive is in use. This has the knock on effect of simultaneously disabling every single GPS and speedometer on the ship.
As for location, most of the ship is currently floating upside down in some sort of pink gloop. The engine room, however, is embedded at a slight angle into one of the famous nude beaches of Rigel Six.
And the cabling? It isn’t important.
The bridge was in a relatively calm state, considering the current situation the crew found themselves in. With the engine room missing, all of the ships considerable engines failed to function, rendering the ship immobile. So it was something of a shock when the entire ship rocked on its axis, and cast Stevenson into the far bulkhead, dropping the monitor in the process. “What the hell was that?! Activate the viewscreen!”
The communications officer spun round in his seat, affixing the captain with a ridiculous expression. “Sir, we don’t have any viewscreens. We have windows. Do you want me to raise the blinds?”
“Ah- Yes! Of course. Raise them.”
The blinds in front of the main window slowly rose, revealing the utter pink landscape outside, which suddenly shifted at a sickening angle as the ship rocked once again.
“Tell me what’s causing that, already!” Stevenson cried as he was flung towards the opposite wall, tripping over the monitor and landing face first on the deck. As he spoke, what can only be described at a gigantic squid floated in front of the window, peering into the bridge with a single, huge eye. “Emergency! Red alert! Fire cannons!” The captain screamed from his vantage point on the floor.
This time it was the tactical officer that turned to glare at the captain with a worried look on his tanned face.
“Respectfully sir, we don’t have any cannons. Sorry.”
“What do you mean, no cannons? This is a battle cruiser! We have to have weapons! Yes?”
“That would be where you’re wrong, sir. We are in fact a mail ship.”
This time, Stevenson could not hide the tired expression that crossed his face. “Do you mean to tell me that we’re facing a gigantic squid with countless tentacles in a parallel universe with no means of escaping it, destroying it, or indeed, causing it any harm at all?”
“Precisely Sir. “