The ship burst into real space seven-thousand six hundred and forty two light years away from the planet they started at. They popped into existence with an ear shattering bang (though not that anyone outside of the ship noticed, being the null void of space and all) and a decently powerful explosion, which happened to eviscerate an old man and his dog several dimensions over. Dan blinked, dozens of large colored dots obscuring his vision, and his ears rang from the massive bang that had recently taken place, or so Dan thought, in reality it was probably just his tumor. Dan’s vision began to slowly return as he looked around the interior of his spaceship. He was still slightly dazed from the nearly instantaneous shift through space and time, and the fact that he had a massive hangover didn’t help him out much either. He rubbed his skull, it was throbbing painfully from the aforementioned hangover, and he was feeling decently shitty about everything.
“I need a drink” Dan muttered, several dots still covering up his vision, confusing him even more. He unbuckled his seat belt, and stood up, stretching his back, beginning to float away even as he did so. He grabbed a glass out of the air that somehow survived the wild chase, and poured himself a glass of vodka from a half-empty handle also floating in the air. The liquid floated away and Dan cursed loudly, so he decided to just take a long drink from the handle, coughed, and took another drink, the pain in his head starting to dim with the alcohol poisoning taking over for it.
Behind him Dan heard a groan of pain as Mando struggled in the weightlessness rubbing his own aching skull. Mando was shaking, a little boggled by what had just happened, and still a little in pain from his recent collision with the walls of the starship. Mando also had a massive hangover and a minor concussion and his nose was completely shattered and bleeding from his previous collision with the windshield.
“Ugh” Mando muttered, spitting out a bloody tooth. He was missing a handful of teeth, so he looked even worse than normal. Dan handed Mando the bottle of vodka, Dan’s last one, and Mando took a long swig, feeling slightly better as the alcohol kicked in roughly.
Dan pulled a cigarette out from his pocket, and lit it up using a small silver lighter with the word Burt scrawled on the side. Dan put it to his mouth and took a deep, deep drag on it and smiled. Mando looked over to Dan, and to the pack of cigarettes in his hand. And Dan, knowing instantly that Mando needed to mooch off him, pulled one out and handed it to Mando. Mando looked around the room, and before he could even ask, Dan was holding out his lit lighter which Mando promptly used to light his cigarette with. They both began to feel much better as the nicotine, rat poison, and fiberglass kicked in, their hangovers began to fade, there lungs and livers slowly dying and the recent effects of the space-time jump were beginning to go away as well. Dan sighed, and glided over towards the windshield, grabbing hold of the end of it to look out once he got there. He stared out into space, still only half-lucid.
“Nothing much out there…” Dan muttered, as a large school of fish floated by, followed by a mermaid in a spacesuit. Dan sighed, looking out into the nothingness of space; the stars were all very far away. Dan took a deep drag on the cigarette then threw it on the floor of his ship, or at least tried to as it just stayed suspended in the air, not even bothering too put it out first. Dan continued to stare out the window and he sighed again. “Nothing, not even a white castle” Dan sighed, obviously disappointed. Mando walked up next to Dan and looked out the window as well, a bottle of mountain dew in his hand. Dan looked at the bottle, reading the label on the bottle.
Mountain Dew
Best way to get crunk in the galaxy
Dan raised an eyebrow at Mando upon the sight of the label, wondering both where he got it, and also who the marketing director for Pepsi was, because they were really good.
“What’s that?” asked Mando as he took a drink from his mountain dew and looked out the window at something. Dan narrowed his eyes, peering deeply into the darkness of space.
“What’s what? I don’t see anything?” said Dan, still looking intently out the window, looking for anything remarkable out there.
“No, over there” said Mando, pointing at something outside the window of the ship, practically right in front of them. Dan’s eyes followed Mando’s finger slowly, and he finally saw what Mando was pointing at just a few moments later.
“Oh” said Dan with a pause “that” Dan added, nodding slowly, it was silent inside of the ship for a moment, without even Bob making a sound, as Dan and Mando both just stared blankly at the colossal sun only a few miles in front of the starship. “I must have missed that” said Dan, and they both stared at it for awhile longer, peering intently out the window, there eye’s slowly burning away from the inside out, but that was a problem they would deal with years from now, so who cares?
“Oh” Mando replied, he took another drink from his mountain dew and shrugged, turning away from the window and walking into the ship. Dan yawned and left his viewpoint as well, thinking perhaps he should move the starship before the hull collapsed and they all burned to death in the random depths of space. Maybe later he decided, and followed Mando into the bowels of the ship.
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Dan stumbled groggily back into the main room of the small escort, rotating in a very slow circle as he did so. He reached for the driver’s seat, missed, and cursed even as he laughed, floating past the dashboard Dan reached for it again, missed again, and promptly bounced off the ground, spinning him back into the air. He stayed there, facing the ground, his eyes half lidded as he thought about the plight of the world, meditated on religion, and tried not to puke from all the vodka in his stomach.
Mando followed soon after, his face starkly red, and a stupid smile on his face. He stumbled in, and immediately glided towards the copilots seat more commonly known as shotgun and grabbed hold, pulling himself in and strapping himself down at an odd angle, still looking comfortable somehow in that position.
“That stuff was awful Dan” muttered Mando, though he was still smiling and didn’t look like he really cared too much. Dan just shrugged, and Mando lost interest fast as he picked up a pink guitar-looking thing that was floating by. He looked around while Dan just stayed in the air, lying on his back now staring at the ceiling. The drunken look of victory crossed Mando’s face, and he kicked at a box sitting on the dashboard.
“Hey prick” muttered Dan as the thumping of Mando kicking the box filled the room “That’s my PS4, what the hell?” Mando stopped for a moment, looking over towards Dan as he allowed the words to sink in for a moment. Just an inch away from revelation and a possible epiphany, the play station started up and Mando just grinned stupidly. The windshield suddenly blinked, and became a large black screen suddenly, turning quickly into a fairly nice TV. Quickly the disgusting logo of MTV flew across the screen, soon followed by the symbol of the Sony Conglomerate. Mando was now humming to himself stupidly as he clicked random buttons on the controller, and needlessly hard I might add. Of course, guitar hero had been going downhill since Guitar Hero V: World of Rap but it was still better than staring at the ceiling when drunk, so he now had a copy of Guitar Hero IX: Pointlessly Pop. Mando looked undecided for a moment, and then chose a song. Within just a few moments some random horrible almost guitarless pop song was filling the room. Dan groaned at the sound. Of course, the song was disgusting at best, pop singers had no job playing the electric drums, but Mando playing it made it worse, because, well, he isn’t any good at Guitar Hero. Of course, Mando knew this but making him admit it would probably involve torture. So, Mando just kept restarting the song, again and again, getting even more enraged every time he messed up even the slightest bit.
“You suck” Said Dan laughing drunkenly, which seemed to enrage Mando even more. Mando tossed the controller across the room in anger, and gave Dan the middle finger, which only caused Dan to laugh even harder from his position now facing the floor. When Mando finally did calm down some, he opened his mouth to reply, but his words were cut off. A voice drifted in through the command room, cutting through Dan’s constant, almost retarded, laughter.
“Dude Guys I have the over shield!” screamed an obviously retarded voice out of the blue, semi-waking Dan from his drunken stupor, and giving Mando a reason to calm down… at least for the moment. Dan and Mando were both obviously confused... and the fact that they were both piss drunk didn’t help matters much either.
“Dude guys this is so metal!” screamed the voice again, its sound echoing through the ship like a retard from hell.
“What the hell?” screamed a pissed off Mando over the echoing retard, and still looking around for the voice. Dan looked around, then grinned drunkenly as he pointed to something in the corner of the command room, hidden in the corner, away from anyone’s view.
Mando looked over to where Dan was pointing, almost puked, and averted his eyes as quick as he could. “Jesus Jew! That’s hideous!” screamed Mando, right after taking a second peek at the... thing... in the corner. Because, well, it WAS hideous. It was a person... well, it was sort of a person... The thing looked retarded, more than likely it was, the… thing… had a horrid under bite, and drooled everywhere, making him look amazingly hideous. It was sitting in a wheel chair of sorts, well more like bolted and welded into a wheel chair, and the creatures left arm was somehow fused with the spaceship to the elbow. An IV was inserted in the side of the creatures head, and a feeding tube fed into... it’s... neck. The things left leg was shorter then its right by about eight inches, and its right hand was twice as large as its left.
“Oh that?” said Dan, then shrugged “that’s just Full Metal Mike, he came with the ship.” The tone of Dan’s voice made it seem like this was a perfectly normal thing, when it obviously was not. Lagoon creatures don’t get bolted into every Toyota that comes off the line, it’s somewhat of an odd thing, more than likely it was just a factory error, but occasionally things like this would grow from nuclear rats or even very old can’s of mountain dew.
Mando looked like he was going to puke again “what does... it... do?” he asked, looking at the disgusting creature. Dan just shrugged again
“I’m not sure what it does exactly, it just sort of sits there and drools a lot, I just ignore him.” Dan sighed, then suddenly smiled “Holy shit, I found it!” He yelled, nd clicked a switch on the dashboard, activating the artificial gravity and plummeting him to the ground and with that sudden impact, Dan rolled over, and began vomiting violently all over the spaceship floor. He was throwing up disgusting orange chunks, and did so at least three times before stopping, with puke all over the ground. “What the fuck” said Dan, then he laid down in the puke and fell asleep. Mando laughed some at Dan, then shrugged. Mando decided to take Dan’s advice and ignore the creature, so he sat down in one of the passenger seats, and began to doze off, Full Metal Mike still muttering and drooling in the background.
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Dan woke up later, how much later I’m not sure anyone really knows, but at the very least, it was later then when he went to sleep. Dan got up off his stomach some, coughed a few times, and rolled onto his back off of the puke that he had been lying in. He wiped his face, brushing off the puke as best he could, trying to look at least halfway sober. Then he got to his feet, stumbling, groggy and obviously hung over from the night before, his head was almost throbbing visibly. He pulled out a bottle of pills from one of his pockets, opened it and took one, then shrugged, and dumped the whole bottle into his mouth, most of them pouring all over the floor. He coughed violently, more pills falling out with the coughs, then shook his head as he swallowed the painkillers, the drugs going right to work on his body.
He walked, well he more stumbled in the right direction, over to the coffeemaker, and switched it on, watching in almost fascination as it began to work. Black liquid soon began to pouring the coffeepot from the machine, slowly beginning its work of filling it. Dan opened the cabinet, looked through his assortment of three cups, and took out his favorite teddy Bear Valentine coffee mug. With that, he closed the cabinet and went back to staring at the coffee maker as it did its work. He had the look of a man who is tired, hung over, and mostly phased out on painkillers. And he was all three of those things, so I guessed it worked out now didn’t it?
“Hey man, pour me a cup of that shit will you?” Asked Matt, sitting in the copilot’s seat, feet propped up on the dash. Dan nodded groggily, and took out his second coffee mug from the cupboard. The mug had a nice picture of a gopher on it, on a cute little blue background; Dan set it next to his mug and began watching the coffee again. “Hey, you have cream and sugar?” asked Matt, and Dan nodded, pulling out obviously stolen restaurant cream and sugar packets. “Oh you do?” said Matt “cool, cool... I don’t want any” Dan shrugged, brushed it off the counter, and kicked it off to the side, where he wouldn’t have to worry about it for now. It was silent after that, the only sound being that of Mando's snores, and the sound of the coffeepot hard at work.
The coffee stopped pouring into the pot a little bit later, and Dan began pouring the drinks, filling them with the almost scalding black liquid sometimes known as coffee. He filled both mugs, then handed Matt his mug, the one with the gopher, and lifted his mug, the one with the teddy bears. Dan took a drink from his mug, and sighed happily, the liquid helping with his hangover, and the painkillers really starting to kick in as he doesn’t notices the scalding liquids affect on his tongue. It was quiet for a little bit, Dan enjoying his delectable cup of coffee, when suddenly his eyes sprang open, and he slowly looked up from his mug to Matt. “Um... Hey” said Dan, slowly and seeming confused “Who the hell are you?” Dan asked, looking over a person he had never met before in his entire life. Ever.
“I’m Matt.” He said, with no further explanation of who he was, or why he was there.
“Yeah… How the fuck did you get onto my ship?” Asked Dan, looking at Matt like one would look at a retarded seal.
“I crashed my ship around here, and needed to go somewhere, this seemed close.” Said Matt with a smile. “So yeah, what’s goin’ on?” Mando walked in from the back room, and didn’t give Matt a second glance.
“You crashed your ship around here?” asked Dan skeptically, glancing out the windshield and seeing nothing. “If you crashed around here, how did you get ON my ship?”
“Oh man, I NEED taco’s right now…” Mando moaned as one of his massive stomach growls filled the depths of the ship and he looked down angrily at his rebelling body. “Aw man, I should have checked to make sure we had food before I smoked, son of a bitch.” Then suddenly there was a whirr as Bob floated into the room, and a light sizzle and snap as part of the engine melted and broke off the starship. Everyone looked at Bob for a moment, assuming he had some cynical remark to make about why he was enraged at them or how he knew that they were all going to die. After a moment or four of silence, Dan perked up, just catching Mando’s remark.
“Mando, dude, you had weed?” asked Dan before Bob could interject with something probably far more important now that introductions were all finished with. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you had some of the stuff?” then, Dan paused for a moment “Wait you had money too?” Dan was curious now, Mando never had money.
“Oh, no way man, I just used yours.” Said Mando sheepishly “the stuff you had hidden in your room labeled emergency only. It was pretty tough to break the lock, but I got it eventually.” Dan stared at Mando in awe, or maybe in an anger so fierce that he almost shot lasers from his eyes violently. “What?” asked Mando catching Dan’s look “Dude, I’ll pay you back, don’t worry.” Mando spoke like a man who knew that everything was going to be fine in the end. Unfortunately, Mando tended to be wrong about things involving money… or really just ‘things’ in general.
“Pay me back with what!” yelled Dan “you don’t have a job!” Mando thought to himself for a moment as Dan continued Yelling. “Son of a bitch Mando, you used my dank to wake and bake, how did you even know there was weed in there?” Then Dan blinked, another interesting fact registering in his cute little brain. “Wait a… what the fuck were YOU doing in MY room?”
“Oh, I was looking for some cash. I wanted to rent a movie but I didn’t have anything to pay with, and I don’t know your PIN for your card.” Replied Mando as if that was the most logical thing in the world to reply with. “I mean there was this AWESOME porn on, and I really wanted to check it out but that shit is so damn expensive and I didn’t feel like paying for it. Well, I didn’t want to and I couldn’t. So yeah.” At the mentioning of porn Matt screamed loudly and shot his hand in the air to high-five Mando, which Mando promptly ignored.
“Hey, um Dan?” came Bob’s slightly monotone yet still somehow annoying voice. Dan looked over to the floating monitor that was his friend Bob, hoping to whatever god or drug he could think of that Bob had something better to tell him than Mando or Matt seemed too. “Yeah, I think I know where Matt came from.” Came Bob’s odd partially human, yet still very mechanical voice.
“Yeah, so do I Bob” Replied an exasperated and obviously upset Dan as he rolled his eyes “He crashed, I think we all sort of know that by now. Thanks for nothing, ass.” Dan was rubbing his temple, idly wondering why he made friends with such worthless people.
“Oh, so you must not care about the Oldsmobile impaling the side of our starship.” Came Bob’s casual reply, and Dan turned towards him giving Bob his full attention. “Look, retard” said Bob with too much accent on the e because of his voice processor. “We are in the void of deep space, floating in a massive amount of nothingness all around us for millions of miles.” Dan was beginning to realize what Bob was implying, but he continued listening anyway. “And Matt, out of all possible options, managed to crash his ship INTO us. Not anywhere else. Not on a planet, or in the sun, or on a moon or an asteroid. Not around us, or near our vicinity, There is a fucking starship going through OUR starship. How the hell he managed to hit us IN THIS MASS OF NOTHINGNESS is quite beyond me, but he did. Congrat-u-fuck-u-lations, our ship is fucked.” Bob’s voice was shifting from a large robotic yell, and his normal calculated self. The transition would have been ridiculous and amusing… had he not been talking about tens of thousands of dollars in damages.
Dan’s mouth was agape as complete realization struck him, and in addition he seemed marginally upset for one reason or another. Dan slowly turned towards the windshield while Mando plopped back down into the passenger seat with a yawn, obviously too stoned to care. Dan leaned his head against the glass of the windshield looking out into space, glancing to the side of his ship. With his face smashed against the glass of the windshield, he could make out the shattered and rusty back end of Matt’s Oldsmobile protruding out of the side of his ship. Matt’s ship, the only other spacecraft that Dan could see, the only thing at all he could see besides the sun and the whale a few miles off Getting a good look of the side of the ship probably would have been easier had pieces of the starships not been slowly floating by, obscuring Dan’s vision.
While Dan looked on in awe, only the sound of Bob’s soft whirr and the occasional clattering of pieces of ship falling off and onto the ground could be heard. Mando was staring blankly off into space while Matt seemed to be digging inside of his pockets for something. There was a soft thud as one of the remaining three engines burned out and backfired into space, making the ship slowly begin to turn. Dan’s face slid on the glass as his feet began slipping sidewise, the Vans loosing all sense of traction on the magazines he was standing on. When Dan’s face finally slid fully off the windshield, he turned to Matt who was still digging in his pockets even as he was sliding slowly across the floor from the ships rotation.
“Um… what the fuck?” Dan said towards Matt “How did… you just… the ship is… what?” he sputtered out, making Matt finally look up.
“Oh like you never impaled your starship into another one while trying to drift before.” Said Matt with a roll of his eyes “you’re acting like this is the first time it’s happened, calm down.”
“This is the first time it’s happened!” said Dan, eye’s bulging in the general direction of Matt. “How the hell did you crash into us anyway? We are the ONLY thing out here!.” Matt just shrugged.
“This whole thing is fucking ridiculous” sighed an obviously exasperated Dan as he slowly massaged his temple, trying to ease his head-splitting migraine. “These repair costs are going to be ridiculous Matt, and we’re sitting in the middle of fucking nowhere pretty much waiting for even more shit to go wrong.”
“Nothing much to eat in here either” muttered Mando from his seat in shotgun “I would kill someone for Taco Bell right about now.” He continued, his stomach accenting his point with a loud rumbling.
“I could go for something to eat as well, lets just head over to Taco Bell, I’ll drive” chimed in Matt excitedly as he sat himself in the drivers seat, looking over the dashboard.
“well, as weird as it might sound, there are some other things on my mind besides food, things like how I am supposed to pay for all of the damages you made to my ship” sighed Dan who was still busy massaging his temple.
“I don’t think we have enough to cover this whole thing, or even most of it” came Bob’s robotic voice as he hovered into the room. “These are some serious damages, the Hank-Drive is completely shot, and hull integrity is hanging on by a thread.”
“Don’t worry guys, I have insurance, this whole thing should be covered” chimed in Matt with a smile.
“Oh really? Tell me Matt, who’s your insurance with?” asked Bob turning himself so that he faced Matt.
“I’m with State Farm” replied Matt casually as he continued to mull over the controls.
“Awesome, that’s just fucking convenient, we happen to have State Farm as well, only, just a little bit of a problem there Matt” said Bob as his computerized eyes narrowed. “You see Matt, State Farm is owned by Pepsi, I don’t know if you heard of the third insurance war, but Pepsi won, it’s all there’s.” Bob paused for a moment as Matt slowly nodded his head in response. “Well, we happen to be all the way across the galaxy in the Holy fucking Empire of Microsoft, and they happen to use fucking ALLSTATE! You hear that Matt? ALLSTATE,
“So that…” began Matt before being cut off by Bob.
“It means our insurance is fucking USELESS unless you can find a way to magically get us to PepsiCo-Starbucks without using a Hank-Drive, oh wait, that would be fucking impossible.”
“Don’t worry, we can just fly sub light, how far can it really be?” asked Matt.
“Forty-three thousand light years, so it would take, oh I don’t know, roughly sixty five thousand years to make it there even if we could use the sub light drive for more than a few thousand miles.”
“Fuck that, you haven’t seen my driving before, it’ll just be an hour or so, two tops, so where are the keys?” commented Matt as he looked around.
“Right here” said Dan who was holding his keys up on his index finger, the octopus keychain dangling down “and you aren’t getting them either fuckbag.”
“Are we going to get that food or not?” asked Mando as he lit up another cigarette.
“Working on it as we speak” came Matt’s voice from the ground where he was busy removing a panel from the dashboard.
“What the fuck!” yelled Dan, jumping up off his seat as the ship started up with a low rumble.
“Got it” came Matt’s voice again from the ground where he was happily holding a fistful of assorted wires. “We’ll be on our…” was all Matt could make out before Dan blind sighted him with a tackle, taking them both roughly to the ground.
“What the fuck do you think you are doing Matt?” screamed Dan at Matt from where he had him pinned.
“Starting up the ship cockbag!” yelled Matt back.
“I got it guys” said Mando as he yanked the Hank-drive lever from where he was now standing at the dashboard,
“Son of a…
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