It all happened so fast.

  One moment I was cruising along safely in my small, garage-built spacecraft headed towards the next habitable zone, and the next. BANG. I was falling through an unknown planet’s atmosphere like some random piece of space junk. Granted, there was a wormhole in there somewhere and some weird funky lights, but I don’t remember much of that since I was unconscious for most of it. To be entirely honest, I don’t know if the wormhole was real. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination. But there really wasn’t another explanation for my sudden and imminent descent towards a planet that never appeared on my radar.

  My pod fell through the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Of course, I had landing gear, but such things only worked when you’re prepared to use them. And while the violent shaking that came with said alleged wormhole had roused my alertness from its virtual reality gaming binge; I was also immediately knocked unconscious by the forces involved and couldn’t make any preparations. Alas, such is life.

  I tried releasing the parachute, but I was making such a flamboyant entrance that it seemed the release panel had gotten stuck. I tried several emergency release options, only to give up after exhausting every method I knew of. If entering the atmosphere of a planet prevented the major way to land, that would have been a severe design flaw, and I was confident I would have caught it during my thorough examination of my dad’s handywork. So, I decided, something must have happened. Not like I could do anything about it.

  I resorted to another method of slowing my ship’s rapid freefall: using the engines. I tried pushing the thrusters upwards to slow our descent and that had—some effect.

  …

  I had forgotten to transition from the regular space travel ion engines to something that worked in atmosphere and, as a byproduct, had any sort of tangible thrust against these forces. The engines did absolutely nothing; it would have been more effective for me to open the cockpit and blow downwards to slow my fall.

  No, like actually.

  In the final moments, I flailed wildly and somehow successfully transitioned the thrusters over in time for them to slightly cushion the impact. And thus I “landed” with a loud crash, a lot of pain, probably some broken bones. I think a concussion given the way that everything just kinda—

  So.

  Definitely a concussion.

  Smoke filled my lungs and dried my throat. I coughed and covered my face with my brown and white teddy bear, Gin, who had accompanied me thus far on this journey. I took a breath through his cloth and stuffing, the air much easier to breathe through him.

  I opened my eyes with a groan. Everything hurt and I didn’t know how long I’d been out. Though, with the way the pretty pink fairy was dancing in my vision, I had a strange thought that maybe I should have considered head trauma much earlier.

  The answer to that strange thought was a definite nope. The pink fairy was, in fact, a spot in my vision and while it got to run away and disappear behind the veil of my barely conscious mind, the rest of the pain stubbornly stayed.

  The pod was a complete mess. The reinforced glass that served as the cockpit window was, for lack of a better word, annihilated. It hung on with hope and the special adhesive that my dad used when he made the thing, though it was clear that I could give it a tiny little push and it would pop out like a token from a new board game. The control system was fried, there were all sorts of warning notifications in my augmented reality view which I promptly dismissed. This thing was going nowhere fast and I needed to get my own bearings before I tried doing anything with the ship.

  I turned my head to see how stable the life support module was, only for a wave of nausea to rush over me. My eyes didn’t quite focus but I could see that my guardian angel was only damaged, not destroyed. That was lucky because there was no guarantee the planet could support my existence. Granted, if it couldn’t, I was probably already as good as dead since there was little chance my spacesuit survived unscathed, and a spacesuit with holes in it didn’t do me much good.

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  I wasn’t thinking straight. Or thinking much at all, really. My head had this feeling that my brain was just a bit smaller than the space that it inhabited in my skull and any time I turned my head it jostled around a bit and bounced off the sides. I felt like I was at sea, or as close to at sea as I knew, given my only experiences with such vast bodies of water happened inside virtual reality. Also, someone was performing brain surgery on me, and they were not being gentle.

  I took another breath of air in through Gin, and I noticed the stabbing feeling from my ribs. I tried examining the state of my body, but honestly? It was just too much effort. So, I might as well just rip the band-aid off and find out if I was a dead woman.

  I tried to kick the pane of glass in front of me, but found as I made the movement that the pain was not only in my ribs, but also my right leg. My left leg seemed fine though so I raised it instead and gave the cockpit a nice hefty thwack with my onesie covered foot. I didn’t have as much muscle as I remembered and I only rattled the window a little with my kick.

  Curse this garage-built spacecraft and its lack of a cryosleep chamber, or a gym, or basically anything else I’d have needed to stay in shape. Sure, we only had weight capacity for the Faster Than Light Drive, or a gym. And only one of those gave me the opportunity to reach my destination before I died of old age, but… Never mind.

  I had to brace myself against the seat and give it another three kicks before it gave out and fell away, revealing a spectacular sight.

  Directly in front of me was the setting sun.

  I think.

  It could have been rising too, I didn’t exactly have an idea of how the planet rotated or which direction I was facing. If someone asked me, I would simply tell them I was facing “that direction” and gesture broadly.

  Very helpful of me.

  Actually, replace all of my previous singular references to fiery celestial bodies with plurals. Suns.

  One was quite a bit duller than the other so, at first, I had only seen the brighter one. The first was a bright yellow-orange that brought with it a warmth that I hadn’t felt since I was a small child on Earth-2. Earth-3 had been habitable, but never comfortable, and the warmth of a sun was more harsh and unforgiving than gentle and welcoming. The red dwarf that danced with the sun simply complimented the view. It was too cool to match the warmth of the larger star and too old to match its luster.

  The next thing I noticed were the colors. There were so many, I could only gawk at their splendor. The sky was a bright blue, with white clouds. The suns colored sections of the sky with reds, yellows, oranges and purples like someone trying out a color palette before they started painting. The water was the deepest blue I’d ever seen.

  My pod cra—I mean… landed on a cliff of sorts overlooking a massive body of water. I’d never seen the ocean before, not in real life anyways. I’d seen pictures from Earth-1, but I hadn’t been born yet when the collapse happened. The water was gorgeous, the way it moved, the way it sparkled, the way it invited you to just stay for a while. It was like someone had spilled glitter all across the horizon and the waves were bringing it back like a loyal companion.

  The ground in front of me was a rocky gravel, with speckles of different colored grasses dotting the area like weeds. A patch here, a patch there, but they stood out to me since blue was not a color I usually associated with plants. Well, most of the grasses I saw were green, or greenish, so I could give the blue patches a pass for their creativity. It made sense though. With the addition of a red dwarf as a light source, trending closer to blue was the natural progression for a plant to absorb more light. That was my opinion.

  I could see the edge of the small crater that had formed from my grand arrival which started a few meters out from my position. The rocks were a dull yellow, though the area closer to me transitioned into some sort of grey stone that seemed more uniform and intentional. Like someone or something had added extra rock as some sort of pavement. I hoped that I hadn’t landed on someone’s stuff. That would be an embarrassing way to start my life.

  “Hi, I’m Io, sorry about your house.” I said under my breath. “Maybe I’ll get a fancy pair of silver heels.”

  That’s when a realization hit me, and that last thing I noticed was probably the most important. No, not the heels. “Start my life”—I wasn’t dead. Yet. And I was considering if other people lived here. So, the atmosphere must be at least somewhat breathable and the planet habitable. I could definitely work with “not actively trying to kill you for existing” as the environment I would be living in until I repaired my craft. If such a thing was even possible.

  I noticed the air. It was clean and fresh; humid and salty. It carried scents I’d never smelled, ones I’d only read about in books or games. Earth-3 was more desolate than anything, even with the terraforming the place wasn’t exactly friendly, so I didn’t have much reference for greenery. I assumed what I was smelling was some sort of forest scent. It was like pine and honey, but I only caught whiffs when there wasn’t a gust of wind blowing the sea air into my nostrils. The air was so clean and filled to the brim with oxygen that I momentarily forgot that I was still inside a smoking pile of rubble that I worried might explode at any point.

  "Right, let’s take a looksie from the outside.”

  This was when I found out that jumping down a “short distance” with a broken leg, some broken ribs, a concussion, and a severe lack of muscle from being stuck in a tiny spaceship in virtual reality for a few years, was not a good idea.