When he woke, nothing made sense.
As in, literally, nothing that he saw around him; he had been so close to comatose, and his surroundings were so astonishing.
But piece by piece, as consciousness slowly drifted in, he began to reconstruct his context.
He was nestled in the cockpit of a badly damaged starship. The controls were useless, the life support systems were running on emergency back up for emergency back up systems, and he was just….drifting…through open space.
How did he get here…
That was still foggy. He knew vaguely that he was beyond fortunate to be alive. How much longer he might stay that way seemed also up to fortune, for the moment.
After what seemed like eons, he felt the first subtle tugs of gravity.
Opening eyes that he hadn’t realized he had closed, he was surprised to see a somewhat normal looking planet looming before him. Green continents spaced out with blue oceans between, signs of settlements at the deltas and river intersections.
Unfortunately his ship was entirely devoid of flight control, and was pulled helplessly in line with the planet’s gravitational pull.
In contrast, strokes of impossible luck had left a fortunate amount of hull and emergency mechanisms intact to allow the occupant to survive atmospheric re-entry and then deploy from the free-falling spacecraft, successfully opening a parachute to land on the planet’s surface with something between grace and surviving.
The place he landed was a sort of tropical area, as compared to Earth. Tall plant-like organisms very similar to palm trees swayed in the breeze, waves of what seemed to be water lapped at the shores, and sounds of things that might be birds echoed from the trees lining the tops of the cliffs that lined the beach. It was idyllic, at least from this perspective. Now what planet could this be though?
