"Did they tell you how big the bunker is?" Chris inquired to the intercom in his hand, idly staring out the window of his porthole. In the blackness of space, he could see his balding, overweight reflection, though his gaze was transfixed on the looming atmosphere of Ember. He looked away for a moment, grabbing the highball glass from the cup-holder of his chair. He figured Hartford wanted him to feel special by putting him in a Dionysiad-Class dropship -- a ship used as a status symbol rather like one of Earth's early "Rolls Royce" automobiles -- a very [i]Hartford[/i] final farewell before embarking on such a mission, though the separation between himself and the pilot immediately made him feel more lonely than luxurious. He was about to spend years of his life on an empty, alien planet, and somehow, in the back of his mind, he had assumed somewhere down the line Hartford would give him a partner, a fellow prospector, a lonely spinster to help him populate the planet, [i]something[/i]. [i]Someone[/i].
He began to pity himself for the loneliness he lived in, and was now imprisoned in, before quickly being interrupted by the pilot's southern drawl.

"Big enough for two, if you count the robot as a two." The pilot chuckled through a speaker alongside the dropship's starboard wall, nestled between the coffee maker and the mini fridge. Chris rolled his eyes, having all but forgotten about the android in the dropship's storage compartment. Hartford had only told him the model, which he had eagerly researched before his final flight to Ember. It was not a robot buddy, by any means, but a glorified home security system with the conversational capability of a two year old. Hartford did not mean to send him with a partner, perhaps because that meant to doubly invest in their mission with GeluCo, though it was not beyond their kindness to give him something more to keep the giant molerats at bay than a pistol.

"I actually knew one of the guys who helped build the bunker [i]waaay[/i] back when, before the war." The speaker mentioned once more, the pilot perhaps having sensed the loneliness in Chris's voice. "He said it was a pretty secure place to hunker down, with enough dried food in the pantry to last a lifetime. Said he left a few Jugs mags in the rafters too, that son of a gun." The pilot chuckled once more, with a timbre that seemed warmly amused even through the metallic whine of the intercom. It did little to console Chris, who had staved off the realization of his impending loneliness until the last minute, when the dropship was literally making its way to the sunny savanna bunker he had been promised. 

"Thanks for the heads-up." Chris responded, bringing the intercom to his mouth. "I'm gonna get some shut-eye."

"Good idea, catch some Z's. Interplanetary jetlag's no joke, and the upcoming turbulence might make you puke. Lotsa people puke through the storms if you wake up, though. No shame in that. First aid kit's in the can if'n you need some [i]Tums[/i]."

Chris gave the intercom a nod, as if it could sense his appreciation. He stood from the decidedly "Wall-Street Looking" leather chair provided within the Dyionisian and took a few steps to the bed -- An equally over-the-top water bed. He slumped into the bed, careening with the motion of the mattress, trying to block the existential loneliness he was about to face from his mind. Surprisingly, after a few minutes of shielding his eyes from the light on the undulating mattress, he was successful, and drifted off to sleep within the hour, before any of the tumultuous storms his pilot had mentioned.
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It was a far cry from the wake-up call he had expected. He had only woken when gravity lifted him off of the mattress and slammed him into the back of his cabin's wall with a deafening, grinding, scream of a sound unlike anything Chris Murphy had ever heard. The blaring red lights at the small monitor at the front of his cabin were all he could focus on -- everything else, from the coffee machine to the mini fridge, to the torn water bed's spraying mattress, flew around the cabin like a snow globe. The ship lurched forward, flipping Chris flatly onto his face with a concussive force not unlike the spine-breaking half of a mousetrap. Chris's last waking memory, after the flashing red letters, was his blood on the carpeted floor of the Dionysian.

When he awoke, he was no longer bleeding, though his chin and his shirt were covered in a crusted layer of blood. His head hadn't ached like this since his days as a high school runningback. For a moment, his concussion-induced haze caused him to question if he was still a runningback. Had he dropped the ball before making a touchdown? More than anything, Chris needed to know if he had made it to the end zone, and so he rolled to his side, looking idly around for the football. His hand pressed itself into the carpet, which glittered in the blinking red emergency lights with broken glass, which Chris did not seem to notice. His other hand blindly pawed through the grass for the ball. Why was this grass so thick? [i]Who threw all this garbage on the field?[/i] Chris fell to his opposite side, rolling onto his back and reaching a glass-splintered hand toward the sparking, crackling, fluorescent sun, for one of his teammates to lift him up. Something was wrong.

Chris wasn't playing football. Chris was on a spaceship, and something had gone wrong. Something about a robot, or throwing up, or...

Whatever it was, Chris did not have time to remember before passing out once more.

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