Stranded

I wrote the following story as a speech for my CST-100 Public Speaking Class at Virginia Western with Richard Ware.

Stranded

Captain Zee rolled over in his bunk and glanced at the display mounted on his wrist. The display read 06:00, November 26^th of the year, 2630. It had been three long days since his ship had crash-landed on this strange planet. He was extremely cold, but not as cold as he would have expected considering the generators had not worked since they landed. He looked out of his window onto the cold rocky landscape that surrounded his ship. He wondered if this seemingly inhospitable landscape would support life. They would find out soon enough, he thought.

He rolled out of bed and pulled on his flight suit and headed to the command deck to find the rest of the crew. The first person to greet him was, Dev, the ship’s resident electronic genius. “Captain, while you were sleeping, I managed to reverse engineer the cabin’s gas sensors, and orient them to the outside atmosphere. Initial tests indicate that the atmosphere could be hospitable.” From across the room, Dr. Grey looked up from his video game and lamented, “Captain, make him stop! I’ve spent the entire night trying to talk some sense into him. Just because his precious sensors aren’t detecting any gasses that we know are poisonous doesn’t mean that the outside atmosphere is safe. There could be any number of poisonous gases in this atmosphere that we can’t detect for the simple reason that we know nothing about them.”

“He has a good point, Dev.” Said the captain to his friend. Dev started to protest, but was cut off by the entrance of another crewmember. Kat stormed onto the deck in her usual way, throwing the doors open with a bang. “Captain, you’re finally awake! I thought you were going to sleep all day! It’s time to get moving.” “Not so fast, Kat.” Said the captain. “Where are the others?”

“Liv took off as soon as Dev started messing with the gas sensors.”, Kat explained. “She was afraid he was going to make a mistake and kill us all. I think she’s on the other side of the ship taking pictures of the surface.” “And how about Tex?” asked Zee. “No idea.” Replied Kat. “Last time I saw him was at mealtime. He’s probably roaming the ship somewhere, getting into mischief.” “Well, call them both here, we have an important decision to discuss.” said the captain.

Several minutes later, all were assembled on the ship’s command deck, and the captain addressed them. “Crew, now that we have been here several days, we have a decision to make. The food and atmosphere in the ship are running low and we are faced with the decision of whether we should risk entering the surrounding atmosphere. Preliminary tests indicate that there is a possibility that it could be hospitable, but nothing is certain.”

“Well”, said Liv “I think we’re safest inside the ship, where nothing can get to us. While we’re inside, there might be a possibility of repairing the thrusters and getting off this accursed planet, but once we open that door, there’s no going back. You know High Command will not let us back onto Htrae once the atmosphere of the ship has been contaminated.”

“But we have no other option!” Broke in Kat. “If we stay here and can’t get the thrusters working, we have doomed ourselves to a slow death either by starvation or suffocation! I say, better to die quickly if we are to die! Besides, we are all commissioned Adventurers are we not? This could be a great Adventure!”

“I second Kat,” chimed in Tex. “I’m ready for some action!”

Dev then reported a few statistics on the likelihood of repairing the engines, but eventually said “I trust your decision captain.”

Lastly, Dr. Grey, the eternal pessimist of the group, weighed in. “Well, I don’t see that there’s much hope either way. But, Kat is right, we are Adventurers, so I say we might as well go for it.”

The captain pondered all of these words for a minute or so, and then came to a conclusion. Slowly and deliberately he walked over to the door, took hold of the handle, and proclaimed, “IT’S ADVENTURE TIME!”

© 2012 Ezra Richards