Board Thread:Roleplay/@comment-28718853-20200409224613/@comment-27666783-20200421224747

Not good enough...

Arvin's eyes scraped open, a translucent blur hovered over his vision, like sandpaper on his eyelids it hurt to blink. Moving his left arm earned a sharp deafening jolt of furious agony. His right arm, while unnaturally sore, was still able to come to his eyes, and address the faint disorientation. His nomex restraints held firm, as a matter of fact, it held all his weight. Arvin leaned forward and inspected his legs dangling forward, slumping him into a bent L. The feeling of gravity steadily registered in his mind again, slowly he put together why this was happening. His 'Re-enter from Orbit Pod, Emergency' or ROPE, offered a dusty porthole to offer him an upside down view of the surly bonds of earth. A hard landing indeed, chutes deployed, caught the ROPE and brought to earth at an irregular tumble.

Quickly, habitually, his eyes wandered around the pod's instruments. Minor fire from the retrorocket motor, extricate from pod, move. Arvin first considered to release the straps, but a quick look up... 'downward' toward the roof of the ROPE changed his mind. With a broken arm, sharp needles in his chest iliciting broken ribs, and a possible concussion, it was simpler to get the hatch open now. Reaching for the emergency release handle, Arvin pulled and earned only a small clinking noise. Again he pulled, another clink. Again, clink. No sign of the hatch giving way. But the ROPE had redundancies, and a quick pulling of the emergency jettison blasting caps before hitting the trigger would earn him... a dead detonator.

"Piss." Arvin hissed, a duel failure would have required him to find some tools presumably at the bottom of the access compartment of the escape pod. Luckily... Arvin had a better idea, and a non-broken Athleta arm. He rifles about, hiking his legs toward the latch and laying a boot over it. Reeling back the leg, he launches it like a spring, striking it with a crash. Biology enhanced by the sciences, sinews like coil-cables, defeats the latch and launches the panel away. Fresh cool air pours into the pod, cooling the sweat on his brow.

Arvin does his greatest to brace himself before releaseing his restraints, only one arm would prove difficult to break his short fall, his shoulders awkwardly hunched would have to suffice. He turns the wind-up release from his chair, and collapses with a thud.

The ROPE was very much like a metal can, engineered to be a catch-all vehicle to pull a Space Jockey out of a craft and hurl them back down to earth in the quickest, presumably safest way possible. Though 'safety' is relative when beyond the stratosphere. It cannot garauntee survival, it could still burn up in the atmosphere, the retros could fail to fire and you hurl into the ground like a flaming spear, the parachutes could catch around your capsule and fail to slow you down. All possibilities, but it was better than the icy embrace of a tomb in the Deep Black, floating ever preservered. A chance, only a chance.

Arvin grunted as he heaved himself away at last from the confines of the ROPE, its bright green fluorescence encouraging him to face away it and slump on the exposed dirt and wooden splinters from destroyed trees below. The elation of survival quickly awashed him for a wonderful little second or two, and the dread of his adrenaline at last receding brought him back.

Not good enough... off all the preparations, of all the very enhancements to an Athleta's optic nerves to spot, process, interperet warning data. Of all the capabilities of his central nervous node refined by scientific advancment to enhanced his reflexes, of all the training, the hypnotic preparation, the redundancies, the machine assistance, and his teammates... it could not stop chance.

It must have been a heat sheild failiure, must have been. It probably when on the Flight Engineer's screen microseconds before they broke apart thousands of miles up. Another pang, like an alarm, empathy. Did his fellow crewmates make it out? Surely... Probably... If an Athleta like him could have his ROPE seal and fire, then theres could would as well?

The Retrofire rocket's flame had steadily begun to spread, it was no use attempting to retrieve the transponder or equipment. The best he could do is wait, listen to the different spectrums, dead. It wouldn't have mattered if he could get to the transponder, it was destroyed already. The best he could do for now was what was on him, tearing off a small tree branch, he hiked his boots off and retrieved his socks, fashioning a splint and sinching his damaged arm straight.

The faint crackling of distant thunder reached Arvin, company? Mamono? Locals?

He twists his head, the growl of metal on metal reach him. It was in the air, it was large, the sound ever distant become steadily less so. Something was traveling this way. Arvin would require to get to higher ground, or out of the forest canopy to observe it, but intuition would remark it was best to make tracks. In a squint, he opened his pinholes, the world went from its visible spectrum to the glow of white and grey and green, the fire of the escape pod was illuminated in white. No heat aside from small animals on the forest floor. In a quick stumble, he jogged away and parallel to the noise.