Spacebound Chronicles

Chapter 15: In the Dead of Night

The miner-bots fired from one side.

The pirates fired from the other.

His oxygen escaped through the hole on his glove.

He could feel the temperature dropping to freezing levels on the flesh above his metallic arm.

But he had to keep fighting.

Raising his open hand, he fired twice more, each shot hitting one pirate. Each shot increasing his rotational speed. Things were getting blurry. Whether because of the spinning or the lack of oxygen he couldn’t say. The mining lasers zoomed through him as yellowish red blurs. He had no chance of hitting the robots.

“Logan!” Gash’s voice said over the radio. “I can’t teleport to inventoried crystals.”

Logan kept spinning, resisting the urge to throw up and failing to understand Gash’s meaning.

“Logan, take a crystal out of the bag!”

He pulled a crystal out of the bag.

That crystal turned into Gash Hunter, who readily fired at the bots. Behind Gash… a tow cable… hooked to his waistline.

Logan Spacebound’s sight was darkening. He could not control his limbs or speak. In his gaming rig, Scott had turned into a spectator. A very nauseated spectator.

Done with the hostiles, Gash pulled Logan closer, released the tow cable from himself, and attached it to Spacebound’s ruptured suit. Gash, Logan and the backpack floated away together, until a tug stopped Logan as the tow cable reached its maximum length.

Gash and the bag kept on drifting.

Then Gash threw something… and disappeared.

Reappearing somewhere else, somewhere with a line of sight of the Amphibian’s airlock, he tossed another crystal towards the ship.

Seconds later, the tow cable started reeling in a blind and nearly death Logan Spacebound.

He coughed as air refilled his lungs, or so it felt. Hyperventilating, it took a twelve-year-old girl in the body of a grizzly man to remind him that the danger was over and that none of that was even real to begin with. He gawked at the airlock around them, warm and bright.

Yes, the cold and darkness of space were gone.

The bag of pitch-black gems at his feet meant they had won.

“Snorri?” Logan said between sharp breaths.

“He is on his way. Apparently, he killed all the pirates.”

Logan nodded frantically to himself. A silent reassurance that everything was okay, that the danger was over not only for him, but also his friends.

“Logan,” the gentle giant said. “I don’t know what time it is where you live, but I think we’ve all played enough for today. My dad always tells me to take a break after an intense level.”

Logan stared blankly at the white airlock walls.

Yes, yes, he was right. Or rather, she. That was not Gash Hunter speaking anymore, it was the nameless kid that piloted him.

“You’re right. Thank you. And… thank you for saving me.”

“Don’t stress, that’s what friends are for!” he flashed his sweetly rotten smile. “Go on, you log out, I’ll wait for Snorri here and another day I’ll teach how to teleport like I do.”

Yeah, he would like that.

But without another word Logan Spacebound was gone and Scott Williams was back in his dark living room, the moonlight breaking through a c***k in the blinds. He did not bother turning on the lights, going straight to bed instead.

Still, no matter how tired his mind and even body felt, sleep did not come easy. After almost an hour with his eyes glued to the ceiling and his mind readily returning to outer space, he got up for a cup of water. There was no use fighting it. The violet energy waves, the mining drones, the pirates, the fading senses and the loss of control, the race for the backpack and the heroic teleporting that saved his life…

He returned to bed. Laying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Laying on his chest, closed eyelids that failed to fall asleep. Laying on his side watching the green numbers on his alarm clock mark three hours since he had stopped playing.

In four hours, he had to get up to work.

He stood up, determined to go for another cup of water.

Then stopped as soon as his feet touched the ground. Not all the water in the world would keep the memories away, and he felt an unbearable urge to relive them. Not through the game, though. Gash was right about him needing a break.

To solve that, he bent over and pulled a polished wooden box from under his bed. Its engraved lid was masked by a thick layer of dust, but its content was untouched by time.

Under the weakling light of a lamp, over his dining table, Scott settled the box and dug from within it a large notebook. He flipped through its pages. The first few showed precarious drawings of knights and dragons, depictions of his adventures with Joey on Ruined Kingdoms. As time passed, the pictures became more professional, there was more attention to detail and anatomic proportions, shadow and perspective were included.

At some point, the medieval heroism was interrupted by a marketing exercise from college, and the further he moved into the notebook the more brands and advertisement sketches took over the pages, until there were no more swords and shields. No more magic.

Until there was nothing.

After three blank pages, Scott stopped flipping and fished a pencil case from the wooden box. The clock hanging on the kitchen wall marked three hours to work, and over those three hours his hands flew over the paper, line after line, curve after curve, things started taking shape. First a backpack, then an astronaut reaching for it, then the robot stretching out a metallic claw to try and get it first. Then a pirate, who he refused to draw as seen in-game. No, pirates needed hooks for hands, eyepatches and plumed hats, and that was how he would draw them.

Then came the background, more little robots, a confusing ball of wool he would later color like the Maze, a starship resembling the Amphibian, which he now realized looked like a frog, the distant stars and floating diamonds around the bag, which stood in the center of the picture…

Way earlier than expected, his alarm clock went off back in his room, announcing the start of a bright new sleepless day.

***

“Morning, Sco-oh-wow!” Tony stopped by Scott’s workstation, a very desirable coffee mug at hand.

 Scott sighed, expecting a comment about his larger than ever eyebags or messy hair or overall evident indisposition. Even Tony, in all his upbeat and cup-half-full outlook of life, could not overlook the insomniac devastation.

Still, Tony’s gaze was not focused on Scott’s sleep deprived figure, but on something over his desk. More specifically, he stared at Scott’s drawing notebook, opened on the byproduct of his sleepless night. Something had compelled him into bringing that old thing to work, and he had added a few tweaks to the art piece in between bathroom breaks.

Given how work had managed to take his mind off the excitement of last night’s events, that notebook was the only thinking keeping him from falling dead over his keyboard.

“Where did you get that?” Tony picked up the book, studying the scene of the pirate, the astronaut and the robot struggling to see who reached the backpack first.

“I made it. Couldn’t sleep last night, so I got busy,” he mumbled. Talking demanded thinking, and thinking demanded effort. So much effort.

“This is…” Tony ran his fingers over the drawing. “Give me a second!”

Tony departed, taking the notebook with him. Scott would have usually fought to keep his artwork safe, especially from someone with a mouth as big as Tony’s. Not today. Today the only energy he had was being redirected to fighting off the drowse.

After a blink a few seconds too long, Scott snapped back into the awaken world by the sound of his notebook landing on his desk. Tony had returned, and, if he had perceived the brief slumber, he made no mention of it.

“Good news, Scott,” Tony said, cheerful. “Finish your work for this week. Next Monday you join the Evergreen project!”

“The what?” Scott rubbed his eyes.

“Ah, Scott! Always the joker!” Tony laughed and rested his mug on the desk. He planned on staying. “Wait, you didn’t draw that for Evergreen?”

Scott stared at him in confusion.

“Evergreen!” Tony threw his hands up. “School supplies brand, our client, the one taking up half the Original Ideas Board for the last two weeks! Ring a bell?”

It did not. In fact, it had been well over two weeks since the last time Scott had bothered looking at the Original Ideas Board. On his three years of employment, he had submitted two ideas and none of them had gotten him anything.

“Well,” Tony continued. “Like it or not, this,” his manicured index finger pressed over the space drawing, “this is the face of Evergreen’s new campaign. I don’t know why you drew it if not for them, but something fun, imaginative and adventurous is all we needed! We just replace these black blobs,” he pointed the Dark Matter Diamonds, “by pencils, erasers and sharpies and…”

“Tony!” Scott mustered the strength to almost yell. “Are you saying…”

“Yup! I showed this to my boss, and she loved it!” Tony radiated more joy than usual, as if that was possible.

“Congratulations, Scott! You have just been promoted!”