This one was written in my *cough* anime days, so it would be fitting, I think, to imagine it as such. It is somewhat of a dark comedy, though I don't know how much it will make all you kiddies giggle.
Hope you enjoy it!
The smell of ruptured glycerol tanks and burning silicone was gagging to everyone still alive on the Colonial Airship 'Staircase Spirit'. Charred debris, spare parts, and exposed wiring cluttered the floors as the crew frantically sped through the ships systems to try and keep the flying can in the sky.
"How much longer?" Said an aged and awkward-looking man out loud as he carefully, but quickly, tore open a floor panel, throwing the rusty metal sheet aside.
A younger man of similar disposition was in front of a small makeshift command deck, anxiously pressing buttons on what looked like the base of a blender plugged into a transistor radio. "My guesstimate, twenty minutes"
"Dammit!" the older man swore out loud for all to hear. "What would the Gods need to give us another cursed pile of fecal-ridden twenty minutes!!!"
He grabbed a screwdriver that was missing the handle and jumped down into the service duct.
"That and you said your guesstimate was twenty minutes forty-five minutes ago, Jamais." commented the young, but sharp voice of a girl in the back of the cabin who was twisting sparking wires together. "If I were to give a guesstimate, I would say that we were already dead and we just didn't know it yet 'cause your sloppy driving got us lost somewhere in-between heaven and hell."
Jamais let go of his button mashing and slammed his gloved hands onto his workstation, giving all the jerry-rigging in front of him a good bounce. "By the gods Emile!"
He swiveled in his patchy chair to face the rear of the room. "If I have to hear anymore of your smart-ass, flea-ridden, man-hating, ship-destroying, team-killing...."
"Jamais!!" belted out the older man, poking his head out from under the floor. His white-bearded face was now smeared in black machine grease "Shut your face and watch where the hell you are taking us for once!!
The young man again swiveled around to face the other. "Seamus, how am I supposed to work when all I hear is destructive criticism? This is an art form, not some mindless science. I mean, good hell, I can't even see outside with the view-port cracked!"
Seamus jumped out of the hole with an agility that wouldn't fit a skinny old crust-bag like himself and wrapped his skeletal fingers around Jamais' faded leather jacket, lifting him foreword.
"In about thirty more seconds, we are all going to be mindless, and you, as you are closer to the front of the ship, are going to die first. Even if that means I have to strap you to the bowsprit, you go first. You get me, boy?"
Before the young man could rebuke, a strange grinding noise started to come from the blender. They both slowly turned their heads and looked at the rusty blades spinning in the open air. Emile stood up from her knees and walked towards the front of the cabin, arcing cables still in her hands.
The short silence was broken when Seamus spoke with a stuttering voice. "Remind me again, what does it mean when the blender starts to blend?" His cold gray eyes turned back to stare Jamais in the face.
"Well..." Jamais said, giving his lips a lick, his eyes never leaving the blender. "Human jelly smoothie?"
"Arrrgh!" whimpered Seamus as he threw Jamais back into his worn seat. He paced around for a couple of seconds, his hands over his face. "Not right. Not right. Not right."
Jamais twirled in his chair to face his instruments. "We've dropped below needed altitude for landing on the Aerodrome strip, and, with no propulsion system to speak of, I'd say we're done for."
Seamus was still walking in circles. "Why today? Why yesterday?" He gasped. "Arrrgh! Why tomorrow?!?!"
"Wait!" blurted out Emile as she dropped her fizzing circuits. "What about the cargo we were carrying for Carnelia?"
Jamais looked puzzled.
"Carnelia???" said Seamus deliriously as he snapped out of his self-pitying trance. "You mean the black boxes that got us into this mess in the first place? What, want to finish us of early do you?............I'm in."
Emile rolled her eyes and turned her attention to Jamais. "How much altitude do we need to make up for to make the air-dock?"
Jamais shrugged his shoulders and stared off into the wild space in his mind. "I dunno, maybe twenty meters. Perhaps a little mo......." Jamais trailed off and redirected his stare to Emile, his thoughts reading into hers. "What is with you and wanting to blow us up???"
"Well, here's how I see it." Emile started to grab miscellaneous tools from around the cabin. "We could try it and be blasted to hell, or we could wait and just fall down. I would prefer a choice of entrance myself." She said as she turned and hurriedly walked over to Seamus' open floor panel and jumped in.
"God." Said Jamais under his breath, turning to the old man gone-crazy. "I guess you were right for once, Seamus. That girl
IS going to get us killed."
"Your on the com, jackass." Emile's voice crackled over the shabby speakers in the room. "Give me a couple of minutes, and then get ready to drop the emergency landing gear."
Seamus stared blankly at the blender and the radio. "What button, knob, switch, or bird whistle is for the skids?"
Jamais glared wildly at his creation. "I....um...I don't think I made one...."
"What?!?!" said both Seamus and Emile simultaneously
"But I can! The wires are here, I just have to find something to bridge them."
"Cripes!" Yelled Seamus as he started to tear the room apart to find some sort of connection hardware, Jamais following suit.
The loudspeaker again blared to life with the cutting voice of Emile. "This is ready to go, drop the gear now....if you can."
"I don't see anything left in here that would be suitable." said Jamais with his arms folded and his left hand under his chin. "If we just tie the ends off, the emergency systems would just short out, and then we'd be truly screwed.
"We need to find something that will absorb some of the power flow."
"God, I thought you were an engineer!" Seamus said spitefully as he grabbed the four wires and shoved the bare ends into Jamais' hands.
The boy yelped with the pain of live wires digging into his knuckles as the 'oh crap we are all going to die' gear settled into a presumably safe arrangement.
Just then, Emile popped back into the cabin with what looked like a remote controller for a kid's mini airship. "Jamais, you have to tell me at exactly what moment we are just a few meters away from the strip, else this will all be nothing but a flashy parade."
Jamais was cringing with the cables in his hands and it was starting to make him shake uncontrollably. "Put it in a memo entitled 'things to do when my vision isn't blurry'."
Seamus slapped the back of Jamais' head with his palm. "Pull yourself together and stop being such a whiney little punk! None of us, probably including you, can read this god-forsaken contraption you call a sensor station."
"Push........frappé." Jamais forced out from his chattering teeth.
Emile gave him a funny look and then turned to the blender. The frappé button had a big red sticker put over it that had 'Under pain of death, never push' scrawled hastily on it. "You want me to push the button that calls the reaper?!?"
"Need....see...DO IT!"
Without another thought, Emile slammed her small, dirtied thumb onto the red switch. Creaking gears and crushing metal could be heard throughout the ship and a slight, vertical sliver of light appeared at the front of the room. At first, it spread sideways very slowly for a few seconds, but then threw open to blind the passengers with light from the sun.
For a moment the view was beautiful to see. Bright blue skies with patches of angelic clouds spotted around on the horizon and, in the closing distance, the safe port of the Aerodrome.
After the blissful radiance the crew enjoyed passed, reality sunk in as a spiderweb crack started to crawl and spread over the entire glass view-port. The perk to instigating their own certain doom was that now they didn't have to rely on Jamais' 'light bulb oven' positioning software.
"Wait for it." said a now surprisingly calm Seamus to the nervous Emile, her death-dealing thumb hovering over a white button effectively labeled 'Turbo Booster'.
They could see an empty strip that would make a good space to crash if they could get high enough to clear the structured wall in front of it.
Seamus took the chance to walk towards one of the now open side hatches. Down below, he could see the gear towing a large net full of black boxes through the air.
He turned to Emile. "Flashy, huh?"
She gave him a weak smile. "Ya....flashy."
The moment the word flashy ended off the tip of Emile's chapped lips, the view-port collapsed, throwing the passengers and all the loose garbage into a whirlwind of debris and bodies. Jamais didn't seem to mind though, as he had apparently passed out, firmly strapped into his chair.
Unable to find anything solid to hold to, Seamus was able to get out one last screech before a wall jumped up and hit him. "Send us to hell, little girl!"
Emile, with one hand clinging to Jamais' swivel chair, took the remote and smashed the white button onto her hip. The resulting explosion, large enough to decimate a small city, propelled the now fracturing Staircase Spirit much higher than any of the three could have guessed.
The air bombardment sent them spiraling over the top of the landing strip, through a high lookout tower, over the city walls, and into a cheap lunch diner, grinding to a halt just before they hit the red and chrome counter.
Jamais awoke from his swirly dream. The power systems on the ship were totally shot so the electric current running through his body had ceased. He pulled the embedded wires from his blackened knuckles, not feeling any pain to his relief and probbable shock. He unstrapped himself from his chair, popped his neck, and stood up in the rubble.
Gingerly walking over to Seamus' hole in the floor, Jaimas carefully lowered himself down, expecting to hit the metal scaffolding below. Instead he found himself on top of a red, sparkly table that had some salt shakers and a jukebox radio on top of it.
"God I would have killed for that radio back there." Said Jamais to himself, only to be answered back by his shipmate.
"Yes, but it would have been the radio that killed us all in the end." Said Seamus who was eating a raw squid-hot-dog sandwich from one of the diner's fridges. "Any more 'I made it me-self' fixes from you probably would have doomed us all."
Jamais chuckled it off and took a seat on a bent barstool. He looked around the wreckage and had a thought. "Where is Emile?"
"Huh." said Seamus, bitterly chewing on his cold meal. "After we
landed, the tramp took my wallet and ran. The death of us, I tell you! The absolute death of us!"