Chapter Text
Ryley woke up to an explosion. He was up in an instant, his brain immediately registering the fire and sending him into overdrive, adrenaline rushing through his veins. He slammed the restraint release button several times before it let him up, at which point he scooped the fire extinguisher off of the ground and sprayed down the fire. When the fire had been successfully put out, pulled out his PDA and turned it on, hoping to find new messages. He sat on the floor with his back to the storage unit, humming discontentedly as the PDA took its sweet, sweet time to boot up.
The Alterra logo finally popped up with a little intro noise and began scanning the situation, "You have suffered minor head trauma. This is considered an optimal outcome. This PDA has now rebooted in emergency mode with one directive: to keep you alive on an alien world. Please refer to the databank for detailed survival advice. Good luck."
Ryley sighed in annoyance, emergency mode was going to get annoying fast, but it was something.
"The Aurora suffered orbital hull failure. Cause: unknown. Zero human life signs detected within a one-hundred meter range. The Aurora's primary radar systems are offline, you will have to attempt to contact survivors via the communications relay."
Ryley cast a glance at the lifepod's radio, the light was off, and it seemed to be smoking, just like the the open panel on the wall. Ryley pushed himself up and staggered toward the fabricator, his adrenaline wearing off. As he approached it, it opened up and the display popped up, nearly making Ryley faint from relief. He wasn't going to starve out here without any form of technology! He stumbled back to his storage unit. Hopefully his subordinates had stocked the storage of his lifepod correctly. He grimaced a the thought of his crew, but put the thought out of his mind. Ryley opened it up and almost immediately flew into a rage, kicking the storage unit and hitting the wall, eventually slamming his shoulder into it when that hurt too much before hunching over and taking a deep breath, coughing when he inhaled some smoke. He took the supplies that he was absolutely sure there were supposed to be more of before gripping the ladder rungs and climbing out of the top hatch. The Aurora was unmissable. It was a giant landmark across the featureless ocean, smoking and flaming. Ryley rougly sat down on the hull of his lifepod, just staring at his former home, trying to comprehend that the ship he was employed on, that he was sure he would be employed on until he was old enough to retire to a space station on some far flung part of the galaxy, was destroyed on an uncharted ocean planet in the Ariadne Arm. Ryley laid on his back, his mind playing him static.
He couldn't think. What was there to do now? What's the point of doing anything now? Ryley laid there for several more minutes, before finally willing himself to get himself together. He pushed himself up and cast a glance at the ocean around him, only seeing an island in the distance on either side of his lifepod and something small sending up a thick plume of smoke several hundred meters off. Ryley shook his head, he would just have to focus on fixing his radio, then he could contact the other survivors, and they could go from there. He didn't dare think about the fact that this far in the Ariadne Arm, it was incredibly unlikely that any rescue would come anytime soon, and he still didn't know what had happened to the Aurora, if there had been some sort of debris field or if they had been shot down and someone would be coming to clear the survivors. Not thinking about those things at all. So, definitely not thinking about those things ever, Ryley lifted up this hatch on his lifepod and jumped down, set on putting together a repair tool.