The planet was pulling them in before they had a chance to make the decision on their own- and the ship was hurdling through a wave of circulating beams way too fast.
Trixie rammed against the wall dragging her space suit into the utility room snootily, the door sliding shut behind her. The three were changing as fast as they could. “Buckle up,” Paka roared.
Bursting through the outer layers they found themselves around something that was almost too comfortable, in an eerie way. They were dropping at a rapid rate toward an enormous chunk of sand and the clouds had hardly obscured their vision. The shoreline led to a beautiful ocean with tiny wrinkles for waves, growing nearer and nearer until there was a jumping swoop and the ship had descended into the bulbous mist. The water thundered below, threatening to lift a powerful hand and crush the ant of a vessel below its endless mass.
A vast block of square cement sat in the middle of the sand, plain and a seemingly waste of land- until they recognized its use. “That is where they want us to land,” Paka said. Once buckled straps were unclipped, cupped hands encircled the glass they had grown so dependent on. Paka finished by drawing the shift to the right as the ship slowed at a steady tilt, hovering over the flat rock.
Rather than a gentle bump, a sharp creak ripped across the ceiling as Paka grasped tighter onto the control lever. Their vessel tilted forward as the weight seemed to slide it back. Below them, the engine room gurgled, rumbling the floor. Now Crip was grabbing the wall for balance. The slope sharpened and Paka pressed harder on the lever, but even then it continued to fall back.
Trixie and Crip lost footing, and Paka was sweating so bad as he pressed the lever as far as it could go, cursing under his breath. “Turn off the engines!!” Crip hollered.
“But we’ll crash!!” Paka protested.
“Turn them off or we’ll crash and EXPLODE!!!”
Trixie was staring as far as she could down from the window, despite Crip immediately screaming at her to get away from it.
Paka slammed the motor off and dove under his chair.
“If I crash once, it will try to find its way back into my life. Again, and again…no matter how far I run from it..” Trixie mused.
The ship swerved around and heavily clanked into the cement. The living breath was whipped out of their lungs, Crip yelling at Trixie to take cover as she entered her freeze response in the worst timing possible. Metal screeched all around them. As the power source broke off, the ship tilted to its side and finally came to a stop. Steaming furls of scarlet and black rippled into the blue, gusts of gray smoking the air.
The door flew open, suspended for the their eyes to all move toward the opening. Inside was only half as bad as the exterior. Crip rolled over and groaned, “Is everyone alright?”
“Don’t you mean is everyone alive...” Trixie said calmly.
The steam continued to hiss and sputter, leaking out of the barbed wires and nozzles. Crip steadily wobbled to his feet. He looked around, seeing shapes and red in his eyes. “Paka!” Only the red was his own.
“Crip you’re bleeding!” Trixie had snapped out of her daze in horror at her brother’s injuries.
“Where’s Paka?”
“Well,” a gruff voice rose through the quiet, “It seems that when I was trying to land the ship it tilted too much to an angle, and caught to the cement, which dragged us down across the ground at four hundred miles a sec for about two acres and then when the power wire snapped we went scerming into the air and spinning to a sideways smash.”
“Everyone is alive, so that’s good,” Crip sighed. It was still triggering, to even assess survival, because of how many had not survived.
Two minutes later they were scrambling to meet each other, finding a shard of glass wedged into Crip’s forehead and a gory welt sticking through Paka’s hairs. Trixie heaved herself over to them on hands on elbows, immediately moving to carefully pry the glass from Crip’s forehead with the first thing she could find, which were tweezers. “We..” Trixie pushed herself onto her feet and brushed the residue off her sleeves, “We have to treat this and then leave the ship immediately in case it explodes”
Once they had applied the disinfectant, bandaged their wounds and grabbed the emergency supplies they could, they hurried to make their way out into the planet’s fresh air.
The ship had sunk into shattered rock. The trio wandered out onto the hard ground, each coming to a point where they hopped off the cement’s edge and onto rolls of sand.
Clear of the acreage behind was a thin path that led from the sand’s border into a crowd of murky blue trees.
A seagull flew by, trawling for fish until it head into the forestry area and turned into- a squirrel. “This is not the real climate,” Crip deduced.
“They don’t trust us yet,” Trixie added.
Paka shuddered, “Well.. We should just, follow the path or something. It’s not like we have anywhere else to go.” A large yellow crab crawled by his feet, looked up with beady black eyes, and croaked.
“Let’s go!” Trixie seized Paka and Crip by the arms and they set out for the broken path.
They passed the breach of razor straight sand and followed the winding path into tall blue trees.
The three vanished into the woods, only the slapping sounds of their shoes against the mud left behind. They had wandered up, down, and around the curves and grooves of the path, where each side stayed parallel the whole time. Trixie hopped off the bending slope to see two large red apples bloom in front of her.
Before she knew it, before her stood some sort of a soft white haired fox- the size of a horse-with powerful unicorn wings and--bunny ears? --She blinked again and the thing was gone. Crip emerged through the image, “Don’t fall behind Trixie, we aren’t there yet”
She nodded and stumbled back up, catching pace with them. They passed a bridge and all the birds and chirping disappeared. Once they got into an area of vines, the birds and chirping reappeared. In a rapid sequence they found themselves weaving through flying monkeys and dancing trees, “Sure is a hyper diversion here,” Crip commented, “I still don’t get how one moment I’m struggling through barbed vines, being attacked by monkeys under a dark blue sky-and the next I’m prancing through flowers with lizards greeting me!!” Trixie laughed at him, their setting did seem absolutely ridiculous but they were both having fun.
After a long while the three finally arrived to an odd shaped hill, with no grass or dirt but just a slow upward and sloping green. They looked down to see the path was now a soft gray stone, leading up the hill over a grand row of white steps onto the porch of a red wood cabin, shaped like a wrinkled fruit. “Whoever made that thing sure has a lot of talent.” Paka commented.
Trixie and Crip realized what they were looking at and eagerly declared they made it. The person who had constructed all of this, this was the entry point where they could find who had sent them the signal. The door opened immediately.
All three stepped back. Diamond slippers stepped onto a dazzling red rug that uncurled its way toward them. “Is that a Princess?” Crip blurted in a daze.
A glistening bridal gown came out of the doorway and slipped down the carpet as the woman paused on the third step, her presence overwhelming and bright. The woman’s skin was a brilliant orange, deep and healthy like the skin of the fruit itself. It was a stark contrast to their pale blue skin, where both demons and angels had different shades and tones evenly divided throughout their species of blue hues. In fact demons and angels had resembled each other so closely that it was only the planetary borders that had once separated them. Both the inhabitants of Cyber, X, and Hell had dark and light shades of blue alike.
The darker orange eyes of this woman moved across the environment, and finally landed upon the three standing before her. Her hair was short, and yet it was golden- feathered like golden leaves themselves falling upon each other in a layer that perfectly framed her features. “It’s nice out here, don’t you think?” she said fluently- in their language. They knew the chances of speaking in their same dialect was near zero, so now they were all thrown back.
Crip found himself absorbed by the woman. He gawked at the diamond fan and interwoven jewels in her long gown. The beauty stroked her hair with imperial gloves covered in charms, letting her hands run down her sides and behind her. “She is beautiful..” Trixie marveled.
“My name is Miss Mayor. You can just call me the Mayor… of this entire world,” The woman finally spoke, “I am not a man or a woman, but a Deity. In several lores I have been known as Maya- or a veil. Essentially, I am the illusion between life and death. This is the form I choose to take, it’s pretty” She said simply, then continued, “On this world, death has been overcome. In this world, everyone can see clearly between life and death. My illusions are celebrated, rather than feared.”
“I adore you even if this is not your only form” Crip blurted, “I want to know you” Trixie looked over in shock at her brother’s loss of composure. It was one thing for him to be pulled into whatever empowered him but this being was literally a cosmic entity and he had no shame declaring his love for it- or her, as her form presented as.
Crip felt more alive than he had ever felt in his life, he wanted to be around this symphony of the total unity of life and death every moment for the rest of his life. The Mayor’s orange eyes surveyed Crip, and she couldn’t help but crack a small smile. Trixie side eyed her brother, wondering how far he would be applying his own inspirational speeches in his own life. Not your same materials- D-e-i-t-y, Trixie wanted to spell out. However, she herself had once said nice things to Death. Maybe this was a family issue.
“Where you three come from is very archaic..even what you three have been through, it is the product of very archaic systems. Many of the galaxies you explored, though they be radically different species, even they were advanced beyond your galaxy. What I mean to say is, none of you are evolved. Our technology cannot save you from your fates, because you are from so far back.”
“But we are literally angels!” Trixie insisted. Translation, their ship had crashed and they definitely had no way back now. They were angels though.
“Not here you are not,” The Mayor replied, “This is one of the rare places Death has been overcome, because the people are here for each other- not only for themselves. It took them centuries to become this way. You can not jump ahead of your evolutionary status..which means the Death of your galaxy has also arrived here with you.”
That stalled the three from any reaction, even Crip got shaken back into the weight of his own reality. Miss Mayor could see that they knew their Death had no chance of defeat from them- none of the three asked about his whereabouts or how he arrived. They were aware of how powerful Carris had been, even as a child.
It was then that a buff man in a green battle suit emerged, patched and spotted with badges and awards. “Ah yes, the Jens. I’m Governor Demosh.” The man said, nodding firmly to Paka and Trixie, while keeping a level stare with Crip.“ You three are presumably the escapees of Cyber from the Hell-Light? One of the prison galaxies.”
Since when did their galaxy become labeled as a prison galaxy? Exchanging expressions, they nodded carefully. Knowing Carris was here somewhere shaped them up fast. “How intriguing” Governor Demosh said, “Well, is this at all the way of your environment? Miss Mayor worked hard to produce this image. We clearly have your language on point.”
The two Jen men stared ahead, processing what had just been said. “All of this is some kind of virtual reality,” Trixie stated plainly. “Your actual environment is nothing like this.. Got it. Are we the only prison galaxy?”
“There are worse galaxies than yours..any galaxy in combat with itself is assigned by the rest of us as a prison galaxy. One of them has spotted us before, but there is no way they could reach us,” The Mayor replied softly, “The MOST imprisoned galaxies bomb their own planets, rather than interplanetary war. There’s not too many of those though.”
“Wow” Crip replied, “That’s stupid.”
“If we are so unevolved can’t we be here as pets or something? And so what about Death? Is our Grim Reaper your Death too?” Trixie asked.
“No,” The general said plainly, “You really have arrived to a place where our Death has been outgrown, of the many galaxies you have been through. Death is a historical force of nature. The many galaxies you have visited still have their own Grim Reaper, though their self destructive natures are FAR beneath yours now. The line between life and death cannot evolve without the inhabitants of the galaxy evolving first..Our people have evolved so well that we do not even know who or what our assigned Death is anymore, being that everyone is fully aware of who Miss Mayor here truly is.”
Miss Mayor surveyed them once more, then followed up on the general’s words, “We work hard to protect the evolution our people have made. We have to make sure your influence here does not pull us backwards. You do not have to be pets.. You can live here, IF we can be certain you all can cooperate here. We will show you our real world. You will not live anywhere near forever like us though. As angels OR demons from your galaxy- both of your species are only evolved enough to live your short courses of life. Your assigned Death will still find each of you at the end of your lives, or be near you during any close calls.”