"Hey Will, would you like to go to the creek to celebrate your victories, or should we just head back home and play some games? I feel like challenging you to a game of Super Smash Bros for some reason," Matt asked.
Zoey added, "Is that because you're hoping he's still concussed and you can finally win?" She tried to stir things up while Joe thoroughly examined my head with a flashlight, searching for any bumps. I swear she was going through my hair, strand by strand, in her search."
"Does this hurt?" Joe asked, "Ouch, only when you claw at it with your nails, Joe." I answered, "You can never be careful enough." Joe suggested, "Why don't we wait for Maeve and Raulin? I don't know why they didn't come with us anyway. Raulin has been acting weird since he fixed that old clunker he calls a truck," she added.
"Let's go home for now. I'm sure they'd like some time together after tonight and can join us later," I suggested.
Zoey asked, "What do you mean?" while Matt grinned at me, clearly understanding what I was talking about. Joe went shotgun and waited for me to enter. She continued to go through my hair with the same caring attitude. You had to give it to her; she was committed to her "mama bear" persona.
After Zoey and Matt were in the car, I started driving back to Papa Olaf's farm, our home.
After leaving The Barn BBQ House, I told my friends that Rauling would ask Maeve to officially become his girlfriend. Joe stopped examining my head for bumps and fell silent in her seat, looking at me as if I had just delivered some bad news, like the death of her dog Spot."
"Sorry, what did you say?" Zoey asked, peering through the car's rear window as if trying to see the people outside. She bit her nails nervously, a habit she had when anxious. "Zoey, please sit down. It's not safe to kneel in the car," Matthew said, trying to calm her down so I could provide them with more information.
"I just wanted to let you know, Miss Jackson, that after we received our share from Barry and were on our way to meet up with you all, Raulin asked me to take you away to give him and Maeve some privacy."
"Looks like it's serious," Matt said, more as a rhetorical question than anything else.
"Yes," I replied. "I've never seen Raulin so serious about anything like this before.
"Don't worry, Joe, our group isn't ending. Everything will be the same, except now Raulin and Maeve won't be too shy to talk to each other anymore. Instead, they'll be a happy couple like Zoey and Matt over here." I told her, reading her body language and trying to calm her down.
Joe grabbed my forearm and squeezed it slightly. "So that means you think she'll say yes this time? I'm happy for them," Zoey said. "Yes, this time, he's not just asking her out. He's asking for a committed relationship, and I'm proud of my little brother," I sighed. "They grow up so fast..."
"Aww," Zoey exclaimed with a big smile on her lips and dreamy big eyes that had already revealed her plans for future double dates, running like a slideshow in her mind. "I hope you are right – no, I know you are right. This has been brewing for years, and I'm happy he finally decided to ask her for real. And yes, Joe, there's nothing to worry about. Our cozy little lives are not going anywhere. They will only improve."
Joe turned on the silent mode and crossed her arms and legs, gazing outside the car window. She was lost in thought, reflecting on everything that had happened that night. Meanwhile, Zoey and Matt retreated to their own little world, which they called "Narnia," whenever they felt particularly affectionate. In the back seat, they were engrossed in each other's company.
I turned on the radio in my old CLK compressor Benz, a car I had saved up for my whole life, and prepared for the 90-minute drive back to the farm. Sir Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)" began to play.
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Space, the final frontier, this is the voyage of a small manned scouting craft, with a complement of two, that was about to enter the inner Van Allen radiation Belt; the crew was doing everything in their power to retain control of the craft, since the flight AI stopped working altogether after passing through the outer Van Allen Belt. They had a sinking feeling that passing through another one would further damage what could be considered a space dinghy. No armor or weapons to write home about, essential life support, outdated sub-light quantum drives, it was a scanning array with a couple of seats slapped onto an engine and a flight AI to keep most space phenomena out of the dinghy's course. It looked like an avocado.
They were an early reconnaissance science team tasked with performing routine astrography scans of our solar system. The mission was expected to last up to a few weeks. However, things took a turn for the worse when the navigation computer detected data suggesting a potentially habitable planet in a small solar system. As per the Horde protocol, an orbital scan was required, and they proceeded to perform it without even reporting back to the mothership stationed outside the Oort cloud. Such scans were considered regular and routine, a "bag 'em and tag 'em" deal. Therefore, they planned to deliver a complete report with all the data upon completion of the scan.
They didn't expect to find multicellular life forms, animals, or a budding advanced civilization on the planet at such an early stage of space travel. Their ships didn't have radio receivers installed as default. If they had, the mothership would have been able to receive decades of radio and TV transmissions, which would have alerted them to what they could easily consider a significant discovery. No new intelligent species had been added to the catalog in thousands of years, with the last being themselves, discovered by an Eldarin mining vessel about two hundred thousand years ago. Some living Eldar Highborns even remembered the days before the Galactic Horde became what it is today.
And most importantly, radiation belts are not typical for life-bearing planets. In fact, they are not even considered rare. This makes the blue planet's two of them an anomaly. The discovery of these belts could significantly boost the careers of the scientists who made the discovery. Numerous night lights suggest that there may be not only life but intelligent life on this planet.
The big moon and the inner asteroid belt are also anomalies in their books. The vast cloud of icy planetesimals that surround the star, up to a distance of over three light-years, further adds to the mystery of this place. The sheer amount of objects surrounding the star and the highly dense and diverse types of background radiation inside the cloud render the mothership's long-term scanners useless. All these factors combined could make one think that this place was meant to be discovered by something other than conventional means.
The two ensigns were the newest science officers in their war-clan. They were smaller and weaker than regular grunts. They were assigned science stations, which was already considered dishonorable in their society. This may be why science vessels didn't even have energy shields that could have easily defended them against the radiation belts. They were so small that these two, in particular, were considered the runts of their generation and could have been summarily disposed of at birth. As a result of the constant scorn and bullying, they never complained, not that anyone would have given them any mind, regardless. But that was the thing; the constant ridicule made them really good at what they did. They still knew what they were doing even if no one would ever give them credit for it.
"Calibrating manual thrusters for forced atmospheric flight."
"To enhance manual navigation flight resolution, we will temporarily disable the AI and remove it from the processing pool."
"We're entering the inner belt in three, two, one... brace for turbulence."
"Out of the radiation belt, main power is offline, backup power is online, and emergency power is on standby."
"Factoring optimal atmospheric attack vector."
"Yes, please guide us towards a piece of land. I want to avoid drowning."
"Do you think I'm an idiot?"
"I never thought that, my friend. I know you're an idiot, haha!"
"I hope we can still laugh even if we crash land on a hostile planet without the technology to fix our ship."
"Target an area without lights or with vegetation. Cities are usually not green unless they are Eldar."
"I found a remote place with useful tech, far from cities, to avoid detection."
"We will survive this; we just need to land, deploy our emergency beacon, and wait for the mothership to lay claim to this planet and everything in it. Then maybe they'll come for us."
"Engaging front thruster burst to reduce terminal velocity. Without main power, we'll be left out of juice afterward."
"Go ahead and do it, buddy."
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"Come on, Joe, let's go inside and wait for Raulin and Maeve to return. I'm sure Papa Olaf made your favorite lasagna tonight," I told her as we exited the car and arrived home.
"Don't you want to hear the good news directly from them? It will be alright. This will tie Raulin here to the farm. As you know, Maeve would never leave," I said confidently, giving her a smile.
She finally smiled and replied, "Okay, but I am staying for the lasagna more than anything."
I knew I had to make her smile because she had been stressed lately. "I know, I know. I will never understand where all the food goes inside of you. Do you have two stomachs or something?" I joked.
"William 'Evelyn' Hagen, did you just call me a cow?" she asked with a mischievous smile. I knew I had made a mistake. Whenever she used my "official," unofficial middle name - I don't have one so she took notes from an old sitcom about a dude who could never get a real girlfriend but somehow had children in the future and gave me the same mock middle name the gang of that show used for the protagonist - I was done for. I had awakened the savagery of Josephine Sa, the nuggie machine. No one stood a chance against it.
As I rushed towards the porch of my house, a sudden bright light and a loud boom filled the air, almost as if a massive jet engine had exploded in our backyard. A few seconds later, a series of noises that resembled tractors being thrown around repeatedly hit us, only to subside into silence soon after. As a result, our main power went out.
Dad and Papa Olaf stepped out of the house. Dad was the first to check on us, and a few minutes later, Papa followed with the hunting rifle and his gas-pumped Russian-made shotgun. They exchanged a glance before turning their attention to us. I was in front of them while Matt had taken Zoey to the back of the garage. He stood in front of her with his arms open in a protective gesture. Joe was gripping my arm firmly but not too hard, conveying her reluctance for me to move.
Papa Olaf was the first to speak. "William, take Rusky here and go find out what happened. Go on foot and be slow and deliberate about it. Do not take risks; just survey what happened and return to wait for your brother."
"I will check on everyone else and bring the workers and their families to our admin building. Joe, Zoey, and Matt help me gather everyone while William goes and figures out why we lost power," my dad said after Grandpa.
It seemed like a well-considered plan to send a reliable, armed youth, the oldest among the farm's youngsters, fast on his feet for scouting.
Meanwhile, gather everyone else in the central administration building and have the other youngsters assist my father in gathering all the elderly, women, and children living on our farm. However, the plan triggered Joe's protective instincts and made her angry.
"Papa Olaf, Mr. Hagen," she never called my dad Mister; they were on a first-name basis, she was pissed. I cannot do that. If William is going, I am going as well, and no amount of arguing around will make me change my mind. You both know me well enough to understand that you can do nothing to stop me," Joe said.
In the background, I could hear Zoey telling Matt to hold Joe down, as she had a bad feeling about the whole situation. Matt replied that he would try his best, but he wasn't confident in his ability to hold her down for long.
"Joe, my dear, you have been a blessing to our family since birth," said Grandpa Olaf. "I would never put you in danger. However, it's time to trust our boy here. He's man enough to go and check on a busted electrical transformer. There's no need to overreact."
"Why do we need guns, then?" asked Joe.
"Well, one can never be too careful," replied Grandpa Olaf. "It's dark tonight, and our power generators are close to the forest. The sound was loud enough to scare off anything that could have emerged. But still, it's better to be safe than sorry, don't you think?"
Dad was preparing the golf cart we used to drive around the farm's living compound. Matt and Zoey were waiting for Joe and Grandpa's conversation to be resolved. I turned to Joe, grabbed her shoulders, looked into her eyes, and said, "Josephine, it's going to be okay. Why don't you wait for Raulin here on the porch? You can make sure Grandpa Olaf is okay and send Raulin's sorry ass to help me out with the hunting rifle once he arrives. I'm sure he won't be long."
She grimaced and started glancing between Grandpa and myself, a single tear running down her cheek. I knew I had just delivered a crippling blow by asking her to 'make sure Grandpa was okay.' There was no one she was more attached to than the old man. "William, we will have words after this, you hear me?" She replied and hugged me quickly, which was uncharacteristic of our resident tomboy.
As soon as she let me go, she went to Grandpa, grabbed the shotgun the old man called 'Rusky,' and then gave it to me with a nod. "Be careful, William Hagen, or you will never hear the end of it," she said as a final farewell.
"My dad had already left in the golf cart with Zoey and Matt. I went back to the garage to gather some supplies. I grabbed our big emergency portable UV light, a small flashlight, and a portable FRS two-way radio transmitter. I noticed three were already taken out of their charging station, so I took a fifth one to give to Grandpa on my way out. I equipped myself with a utility belt to carry the radio and some extra ammo for Rusky, put on my hunting coat, and then headed toward the far side of our farm. It was a cold and dark night.
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