I wake up and the first thing that strikes me as peculiar is there is grass inside my ship. Dirt too. I wonder to myself "How did that get in here?". Then I look around the grass and see what once was a spacious helm room is now concaved and obliterated. Somehow there is a little bubble right above my head where the roof did not collapse.

I place my hand to my ear and speak to AhziRa's AI connected through my neurolink, "Arlea, what happened?" No response. "Arlea, systems report." Silence.

The straps holding me in are caught, and I use the blade at my hip to cut them away. Shakily, I slide through the foiling metal of my ship, and slip out a crack I didn't design.

The sun pours through eyes. I reach my hands out as if to touch it, and my fingertips dance between the shadows of trees. I smile. Something warm and sweet drips down my head and into my eyes. I wipe it away and marvel at the bright beautiful red.

Naivety is a beautiful thing before its ripped away. It took me some time for the dots to connect again in my mind- This is Blood. This was my ship. I've crashed. I'm alone- as far away from anyone I could be. I rip myself from the ground and take a step back to look at my ship. I feel my stomach fall out in a color of despair I can't process yet. My head is spinning. Why am I so wet?

I turn around to get my barings. I'm in a forest surrounded by tall pine-like trees, in a valley between two large white cliffs.

"Arlea, Where the hell are we?!" Still, no response. I crawl back inside to grab the control panel within the Helm. I pull it into the light outside and see the entire motherboard is fried. It's melting, with green ooze, like puss, pouring out its motherboard, twitching, spasming, still undergoing some chemical disconfiguration. I feel my heart collapse. I'm totally fucked.

I set Arlea aside and laid my eyes into my knees while time echoed on. Shock is a strange fog where nothing happens, some core part of consciousness checks out, goes to another place, disassociates, and the skin vessel goes on autopilot.