“I can save everyone a lot of trouble and pick up those astronauts. And I can ask them if they know of any good restaurants while I’m at it, and I can probably get one to pick up the bill. Everyone wins!”
Ranma rubbed his hands together in anticipation. He stopped for a moment to wipe a bit of drool off the corner of his mouth; he needed to do the job before thinking about the reward.
Most people would have worried about such things as the velocity of the shuttle making accurately picturing its position extremely difficult, or the difference in relative speed rendering them into a splatter even if they did somehow end up on board the shuttle. Ranma did not consider these things, and was therefore very lucky that the way divine beings teleported cared for none of these issues.
Ranma simply imagined where he wanted to go, pulling up the image he had seen of the inside of the shuttle on the television, and shifted from his previous position.
The transition to the shuttle wasn’t immediate however, as he hadn’t have a proper destination in mind when he released his pre-existing connection. Ranma couldn’t quite describe the experience. It was something like drifting in a void, but bright and energetic rather than dark and cold.
Even though this void was strange, Ranma felt some instinctive understanding of it. He had enough knowledge of his destination to limit the region where it should be relative to himself, in this case passing over the United States, and there wasn’t much there to have to look through to find his destination. It was easy to find his target against the emptiness of space. It was as if he could see the astronauts and less clearly the shuttle... but it wasn't exactly sight at all. He wasn't sure sight worked in this place. It didn't really matter though.
He grasped the destination in his mind and rematerialized on the shuttle only a few seconds after having disappeared.
The sudden lack of gravity was somewhat disorienting, but the place in between hadn’t really had an up or down either, which helped to mitigate it. Additionally, Ranma was very well acquainted with the sensation of free fall.
The shuttle was quite a bit duller than Ranma had expected. He had seen pictures before, but had honestly expected a real space ship to be a bit more… futuristic looking.
The astronaut rubbing his eyes with a comical expression of disbelief made Ranma realize something. He had formed no plan on introducing himself whatsoever. Ranma thus had his own equally dumbfounded look.
“Where did you come from!” the astronaut shouted. He realized that yelling at figments of his imagination was likely to get him grounded permanently, but the astronauts had had little to do, and a lot of time to think. No one was saying it, but the shuttle program wasn’t likely to survive this. Two incidents so close together over the same issue would end the program. Even if they had proved the patch idea could work the program would have been in serious trouble, but they weren’t even giving that a chance. They were going to send up another shuttle to take them all down.
“Does that really matter?” Ranma replied. He knew English well enough to hold a conversation, if he kept it fairly simple. “The better question is, do you want to leave?”
“No, no it isn’t the better question. Not when someone just appears in front of you out of thin air!” the astronaut wasn’t hysterical, astronauts usually having a higher than average mental stability, but it was close.
“How about this, we go back to Earth, you take me to a good restaurant and we can talk it over there?” Ranma figured it a reasonable enough proposition.
At this point the astronaut came to the most logical conclusion: he was dreaming. After all it wasn’t like there were any hallucinogenic drugs onboard, and there would have been plenty of alarms going off if the life support were somehow malfunctioning. The fact that no one had come in or contacted him on his radio to see why he was shouting was further proof.
It was perfectly reasonable logic. Except that his radio had malfunctioned, a coincidence certainly. NASA was tracking the change in his vitals which indicated stress, but had no camera angle on where Ranma was, and could not contact the astronaut. The rest of the crew had actually been in the space station, and had crashed into each other on their way to investigate. They were quite embarrassed by this, but were getting into the shuttle.
“You know what, sure. I know this great steakhouse. Set the shuttle down at Kennedy, I’ll get my car and we’ll go get some food.” He might as well enjoy the dream while it lasted.
“No problem,” Ranma boasted, though he was internally unsure if he could handle such a feat. The shuttle was a big thing to move. He did know where he was going this time though.
His father didn’t encourage much learning, but geography was something even Genma could see the use in. If you don’t know where you are how will you ever get to the best training sites? Ranma had been teasing his pops on the way to Jusenkyo mostly because it was so rare for them to get lost for any reason.
Even if he hadn’t been as good as he was with geography, their training trip had been as much a tour of the world as training, and the Kennedy Space Center had been one of the few places they visited because Genma wanted to see it rather than for training. Not that he had said that, but who was going to believe that lame excuse about ‘investigating the chance of taking their training trip into space’?
Ranma shook off those thoughts quickly and focused on the shuttle. His destination was firmly in his mind, and he shifted positions instantly.
Gravity was suddenly observable again. Gravity could be painful. Ranma had just enough time for this observation before darkness closed in upon him.
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(Posted Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:02)
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