A treat for astrangerenters
A treat for: astrangerenters
Cooked up by: A friendly chef
Title: It Really Was Humanity’s Only Chance
Characters/Groups: Arashi, Ikuta Toma (sort of)
Genre: comedy, au, parody/crossover
Rating: PG13
Warnings: implied alcohol use, stupidity
Summary: In the year 3104, the newly-built space colony of Neo Oregon is attracting settlers from all over the Solar System, including five guys from Ganymede. What adventures await them, as they leave home towards the unknown? Featuring AKB48. Written as one episode from a longer (currently nonexistent) narrative.
Author's Notes: This fic is written for astrangerenters. I ended up using two of her prompts - Ohno wakes up in AKB48’s “Heavy Rotation” and a starship adventure.
It was just after dawn over the north side of Pluto. Slim rays of light illuminated its icy surface, revealing a harsh landscape full of craggy mountains. Up above, the orbiting resort satellites twinkled quietly. The largest of these satellites - more like a floating continent than a simple space colony - had a cloud of starships docked nearby. Among these was a large, barrel-shaped one called the Starship Donkey Quong. Inside, the main rec room of the Donkey Quong was silent. It was a huge room, fully carpeted and outfitted with many comfy chairs, televisions and a bar. The high, graceful windows along one side gave a grand view of Resort Town Flamingo and of Pluto below. Ohno snorted slightly in his sleep and rolled over. Something soft tickled his ear, and he batted it away drowsily. There was a rustling movement, and whatever it was suddenly came back to tickle his face. Without opening his eyes, Ohno batted it away again with more emphasis.
“...Stop that...” a small voice mumbled close by. Another rustle, but this time Ohno reached up and pulled hard.
“Eep!” and this time, it was obvious that the voice belonged to a girl. Something human slammed into the side of Ohno’s head, jolting him fully awake.
He sat up abruptly, and saw that he was holding one side of a frilly skirt, which was still being worn by its owner. She opened her eyes drowsily and reached down to rub her hip, where she’d bumped into Ohno’s skull. “What are you doing, Ohno? It’s too earrrrly.”
Ohno didn’t reply, as he surveyed the scene around him. Empty cups, neon feather boas, confetti and streamers were everywhere. A pop song was still playing softly on heavy rotation. A mix of alcohol and perfume hung in the air. Here and there, someone sighed in her sleep and turned over to avoid the sun that was coming through the windows. He was on the floor in a tangle of arms and legs with...
With...
He scrambled to his feet, rudely dropping a girl who was dozing on his lap to the floor. She looked up in a daze through a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. He avoided looking at her, however. Her top had slipped off her shoulders, revealing a lacy push-up bra.
“Is everything ok?”
Ohno surveyed the scene, wide-eyed, before mumbling, “Well, that depends...”
-- A week ago --
“Departure in 5...4...”
Space. It was a cold and unknowable place, despite man’s attempts to colonize it. Centuries ago, civilization left the little blue planet called Earth and scattered artificial stars across the heavens, but the vastness of space meant that it remained the final frontier. It was a frontier that the Oregon state government was determined to own...
...and so when it got a surplus budget one year, they claimed a little piece of sky beyond the Solar System, and called it Neo Oregon.
“...3...2...1. The Starship Ticonderoga is now departing Ganymede Colony Spaceport 37-A.”
The rumbling of the engines grew louder, and there was a slight creak as the coupling holding the Ticonderoga to the dock released. Ohno pushed a lever forward. The red mass of Jupiter, a sight that he’d known for his whole life, slowly began to slip away. He started to set the autopilot course.
“Looks like this ship flies all right after all,” he muttered to himself. The dubious-looking 15-year-old ship officially belonged to Sho. However, Ohno was the only one who knew how to fly it. He was totally fine with being the pilot; that meant he had a bigger right to the Captain’s Cabin.
“I should hope so, since we’re gonna be in the middle of nowhere,” Nino poked his head through a trapdoor in the floor, where a ladder extended to the computer maintenance room below. He was eating a snack of some sort. “Where’s everyone else?”
Ohno shrugged. “Probably checking on Jun. Did you have a nice chat with TOMA?”
The Ticonderoga Operations Management Application, or TOMA for short, officially handled all the deep thinking on the ship, such as life support and fuel monitoring. He got bored pretty easily in the computer room.
“He wants to watch an old musical called West Side Story,” Nino watched as Ohno set the ship’s pace to “steady”. For some reason, shipbuilders decided to switch from horsepower to oxenpower in the last millennium. Nino supposed it was because they didn’t want settings like “trot” and “canter”.
“Never heard of it,” Ohno replied. The autopilot confirmed the course. Relieved of any current duties, he stood up and stretched his arms. “We’ll reach the hyperspeed gate in five hours. After we refuel and stock up on supplies on Pluto, it’ll be a long road to Neo Oregon.”
Pluto and its surrounding area were mankind’s “last hurrah” before the vast wasteland of space. Its orbiting satellites were well known as resort hot spots, frequented by vacationers who take the express shuttles operating on ludicrous speed. This new technology, which could take a commercial starliner from Jupiter to Pluto in 40 hours, was too expensive for most privately-owned ships, which take about 6 Earth days by hyperspeed. The Pluto Satellite Cluster was also a useful place for travelers going beyond the solar system and into the resource-poor frontier. Unlike the exploration of Earth in centuries past, space travelers couldn’t depend on the bounty of the land...especially since it often didn’t exist.
“What’re we gonna say when he wakes up?” as usual, Aiba was making a general racket wherever he went. He and Sho entered the control deck.
“Tell him the truth, I guess,” Sho had a worried look on his face. Perhaps kidnapping Jun in the middle of night after he refused to come with them was a bad idea.
The idea of going to Neo Oregon was really Sho’s in the first place. Realizing that he was getting nowhere as a banker on Ganymede, he decided to seek his fortunes out in space, where development was booming. This plan came closer to reality after he unexpectedly won the Ticonderoga in a raffle. It wasn’t long before Aiba, Ohno and Nino agreed to start new lives on Neo Oregon too...but Jun was most adamant for staying. He didn’t see the point in settling on a faraway space colony.
“I’m sure...Jun will understand,” Ohno patted Sho on the shoulder in a reassuring way, although secretly he was not so calm. The flaw in the plan was more like a gaping canyon, and the four of them would bound to fall in. However, there was no use building nervous energy now. “Let’s just do something else in the meantime and take our minds off it.”
“We can watch West Side Story,” TOMA said plaintively from the trapdoor. Eavesdropping was quite common among management systems with AI.
“Nah, not tonight,” Sho said. “Do we still get TV out here?”
“...How about Samantha the Space Witch?” Nino held up a mini-disc, grinning slightly. He was flipping through a box of movies someone had left off to the side. He flipped it over to read the back. “Who’s is this? ‘Samantha must hide her magical powers from her husband, but what’s a girl to do when she’s the sexiest housewife on Neptune--’ ”
He was cut off as Aiba suddenly came forward and grabbed it out of his hands. “Hey! Sho!”
At the same time, Sho ran up. “No, I thought I lost it!”
Both of them turned to look at Ohno. “You had this the whole time?”
Ohno had a blank expression on his face. The others knew that look; he was trying to think of an excuse. “Well, I wasn’t done watching it.”
“Since high school?”
“It’s a really long movie, ok? And I couldn’t leave it on Ganymede. My mom might throw it away!”
Nino peered over Aiba’s shoulder. He remembered some drama when Sho and Ohno borrowed a “special video” from Aiba but never returned it. However, he never got a chance to watch it himself. “Is it any good?”
“Heck yeah it’s good!” Aiba looked down at the disk like a recovered treasure. “Oh Samantha...how I’ve missed you...and your big--”
“Let’s watch it now,” Sho and Nino said at the same time, the former saying it eagerly while the latter was trying to be causal about it.
The four looked at each other. Ohno shrugged. “Got nothing else better to do.”
Several hours and one encore later, there was a general commotion on board when Jun woke up and stormed into the control deck.
“What the hell, guys!? I told you that I was staying on Ganymede!” Jun looked out the window. The stars were just streaks of light. “Holy shit - we’re already in hyperspace! Meisa!”
He pressed himself to the glass, as if it would get him back.
“Aw, c’mon Jun! Neo Oregon will be great! Who wants to be the boy-toy of Meisa Kuroki anyway?” Aiba said jovially. Ohno thought that he would like to be the boy-toy of Ganymede’s richest and most beautiful woman, but he decided it wasn’t a good time to express that opinion. Aiba went to put a consoling arm around Jun’s shoulders. “We couldn’t leave you behind, all five of us have been together since forever! Remember when all our test tubes were lined up in the same tray?”
“As if your embryo brain could remember,” Nino said sarcastically. Test tube babies were common in the age of space colonization. Sex in zero gravity was hilarious, but it certainly threw the results of a certain swimming contest.
“We’re sorry, Jun,” Sho had his diplomat face on. He’d been preparing for this moment over the past several hours, after all. It almost -- just almost -- affected his enjoyment of Samantha’s adventures on Neptune. “But Aiba’s right...when we couldn’t convince you to come...we had to take matters into our own hands. We really wanted you to come with us...”
Jun recovered from his moment of melodrama and stood up. He folded his arms and sighed. “Ok guys, but seriously. I’m not cleared for travel outside of the Jupiter Moon System. You’ll get arrested for having an illegal immigrant on board.”
Nino pressed on a button on the control panel. A new window popped up on the main screen. “No worries; I got your passport set up. Meisa actually gave me that photo of you.”
“Wha--” Jun’s feelings of betrayal were momentarily stayed as he read the contents of his new passport. To provide consistency, all official documents used Standard Earth Time. However, major systems like Jupiter used their own local time for most things. “...I’m 27 Earth Years already?”
The tense moments seemed to have passed by now, and Aiba thought of another way to further distract Jun. “Anyone hungry? I can cook something up. Beef and bell peppers, maybe?”
Aiba was the only one who volunteered to be the ship’s cook, and everyone was too lazy or preoccupied or asleep to fight for it. However, everything Aiba cooked tasted like pineapple.
Over the next few days, Jun calmed down significantly. To avoid angering Jun more than necessary, the other four had made sure to pack every single thing that Jun owned. He spent a lot of time going through his stuff or listening to music in his room. Everyone generally tried to stay out of his way, or went out of the way to do nice things for him. However, the fragile tranquility was disturbed one day when Jun noticed that Nino was going to the bathroom a lot.
“Nino. Are you ok?” Jun poked his head out of his room as Nino came out of the bathroom for what seemed like the millionth time.
Nino gave him a wan look. “It must’ve been something I ate.”
“But all of us have been eating the same thing,” Jun reached out and touched Nino’s forehead. He frowned. “You have a slight fever.”
“Well, there were those free snacks I got at the Spaceport before we took off...” Nino narrowed his eyes. He’d been eating them in the computer room while chatting with TOMA.
“Hmm,” Jun looked thoughtful. Before spending his days and nights partying with Meisa, he worked briefly as science teacher at some private school. “Let’s check you out in the sickbay.”
It wasn’t long before the others realized what was happening. Sho, Aiba and Ohno crowded in the entrance of the sickbay. Nino laid on a bed, pale and miserable, while Jun read some results from a medical scanner.
“What’s the matter with him, Jun?”
“Well,” Jun looked up with a grave expression. “Nino has dysentery.”
“Oh no!” Ohno rushed forward and grabbed Nino’s hand. “Stay strong, buddy!”
Aiba and Sho followed suit, patting Nino on the head and tucking his blankets around him. Nino seemed to appreciate the fuss. Then Ohno asked, “But what’s dysentery?”
“Bloody diarrhea and other stuff. Fortunately, it’s just a mild case...but it’s still highly contagious,” Jun replied, digging through the medicine cabinet. As one, the others quickly stopped touching Nino and backed away.
“Thanks for making me feel better,” Nino said sarcastically.
“If I get the runs, who will fly the ship?” Ohno replied seriously.
“We don’t have what we need on board,” Jun pulled out a small bottle of pills. “This will help with the symptoms for now, but we should go to a drug store when we get to Pluto. We still have 2 Earth days of hyperspace left, and then a 4 hour flight from the gate...I think he’ll be ok. Probably.”
“What was that?” Nino asked in a panic.
“Never you mind,” Jun shoved a little blue pill into Nino’s hand, glad that he had such good bedside manner. What would they ever do without him? “Take this, and go to sleep. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
Nino was sick of dry toast by the time the Ticonderoga docked at Resort Town Flamingo, the biggest colony in the Pluto Satellite Cluster. In a panic, Ohno had programmed the ship to “grueling”, so they arrived from the hypergate in record time. Jun disembarked almost immediately towards the nearest drug store. Aiba and Sho left shortly after to get supplies, while Ohno stayed behind to talk to the mechanics at the port and keep an eye on Nino.
“I’ll never accept free food again,” Nino said dismally when Jun returned an hour later with the medicine.
Jun smiled, not unkindly, as he read the dosing instructions on the label. “It’ll be a few weeks before you make a full recovery. But really, I think you’re in the worst of it right now, so you’ll only get better.”
Ohno was almost done refueling when Aiba and Sho returned. Both of them had their arms full of food, and they were accompanied by a group of girls.
“Hey,” Aiba greeted happily, dropping his packages on the dock. There were various boxes of noodles and rice, bags of vegetables and instant curry packets. Sho was balancing a bunch of sodas and some eggs over a box of oranges.
“What’s all this?” Ohno asked. Jun and Nino, tipped off by the ship’s outdoor camera, came outside to look too.
“I won it all at the Plutonian Food Rodeo!” Aiba said gleefully. “It’s this casino where all the prizes are paid in food! I won a lot!”
“A whole lot,” Sho added. He set down the box of oranges. “Enough to feed us for two months. But the rule was, we could only take what we could carry back in our arms. No shopping bags or carts allowed. Aiba, I told you to not play that much. It was a waste to win that much food.”
“Oh, no worries, Sho! At least we had something to bring back to the ship, for almost no money!”
“Are the girls part of the prize too?” Nino asked, one eyebrow raised. There were three very cute girls behind Aiba and Sho..
“Oh no, we’re the Quong sisters,” the girl in front stepped forward. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. “I’m Minami, and this is Mayu and Atsuko. We met Aiba and Sho at the rodeo. We’re on vacation with our family in that starship, the Donkey Quong.”
She pointed towards the end of the spaceport, where a starship several times bigger than the Ticonderoga was docked.
“Woah,” the guys said in unison. The girls smiled proudly.
“Will you boys be staying for the party?”
“What party?”
The girls looked at them in shock. “Plutonian New Year’s, of course! Tonight! It’s our only chance to celebrate it! They’re having a huge party in the main square.”
Since a Plutonian year lasted 248 Earth years, it was really all of current humanity’s only chance to celebrate it. Aiba, Jun, Sho and Ohno turned to look at Nino, who just shrugged.
“Go on, TOMA will be here,” he said. It sounded like a good chance to catch up on some video games.
Noticing that Nino looked pale, Minami asked, “Are you feeling sick? Our parents aren’t into partying, so they can come visit you.”
The last thing Nino wanted to do was to meet strangers. “No...I’ll be ok. It’s just a little thing, really...”
The Quong sisters nodded. They turned to go. “Ok then. We’ll see the rest of you this evening!”
As they waved goodbye to the girls, Ohno said quietly, “I feel a little dirty inside.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Sho replied.
“But they said they were 20 Earth years,” Aiba added with a shrug. That seemed good enough for him; he wasn’t going to waste too many brain cells on it. “Besides, Plutonian New Years! They won’t be the only chicks there!”
Aiba was right, but what he didn’t realize was that the Quong sisters still made up a good portion of the girls attending the party. When the guys came out of the Ticonderoga later that evening, they were surprised by a horde walking from the Donkey Quong. Minami waved to them excitedly.
“Hello again! These are the rest of my sisters!”
Sho’s jaw fell open, and he wasn’t the only one. “All of them?”
“So that’s why their ship’s so big...” Jun muttered in the back of the group. Aiba snickered.
Minami didn’t notice, but continued her explanation. “Our parents wanted one daughter born on April 8, but the reproduction clinic messed up and gave them 48 daughters on January 1. Then our parents wanted a boy, so we have a little brother too, but he’s not old enough to come with us.”
“As if 48 kids weren’t enough...” the four of them each thought to themselves.
The girls eagerly led the way to the town square. They were all dressed in various party clothes in neon colors; frilly skirts, colored jeans, knee boots, beaded necklaces, cropped tops and ponytails. Somehow, all of them still managed to look coordinated each other. They were very energetic. “C’mon, let’s go party!”
Jun woke up on his stomach in the control deck the next morning. He lifted his head up and realized that he had a pounding headache. Rolling over to his back, he looked around. Aiba was snoring softly in a chair not too far away. The display on the main monitor showed him that it was nearly 11:00. The door leading to the living quarters slid open.
“Oh, you’re awake too,” Nino said, crouching down. He yawned; it was obvious that he just woke up. The dysentery medicine made patients sleep a lot. “I walked by Sho’s room and saw that he made it to his bed at least. Drooling everywhere, though.”
There was a pause as Nino suddenly looked around. He stood up and walked into the Captain’s Cabin, which was adjacent to the control deck.
“Hey, where’s Ohno?”
“Ohno...” Jun really wasn’t in a state to be very constructive at the moment. “Maybe with the girls...?”
Nino walked off the ship and out into the port. He looked towards the Donkey Quong.
Or, at the empty space where the Donkey Quong used to be.
“Huh?” Nino ran back inside. He went to the control panel and tried calling Ohno’s cell phone. there was no answer.
“TOMA, is Ohno hiding in the ship somewhere?”
There was a pause as TOMA did a scan. His voice floated out of the intercom. “There are four life forms on board.”
“We’re life forms...?” It wasn’t clear if Aiba was hungover or still drunk.
Jun groaned and turned over on his side. “Too loud.”
Nino sighed and transmitted a video call.
“Hello, this is the Donkey Quong,” an unfamiliar man answered, but Nino assumed he was the Quong patriarch.
“Uh, hi. Mr. Quong? We were docked with you at Resort Town Flamingo...we met your daughters last night...” Nino experienced a strange sinking feeling as he talked. Mr. Quong looked like a formidable man.
Sure enough, Mr. Quong’s expression immediately darkened. “Are you looking for that good-for-nothing I found on board this morning? Having a friendly sleepover with my daughters?”
“Uh...” Nino nodded, feeling his legs shake. He was kinda glad that the Donkey Quong was no longer docked here. “Yeah...where is he now?”
“I tossed him into space,” and then Mr. Quong exploded in laughter. It sounded like a bomb going off. It snapped Jun and Aiba fully awake. The transmission suddenly ended with a click.
“What?!” Nino shouted at the blank screen. Was that guy for real? This was just great. The captain was lost in space, the crew was hungover, and he had dysentery. They were thousands of miles from home, and hundreds of thousands of miles from where they were going. “Could this get any---”
“G’morning,” Ohno walked in with a shopping bag. “I got breakfast.”
Nino looked like he’d just seen a ghost. He ran up to hug him. “Ohno! Mr. Quong said he tossed you into space!”
“Unclean, unclean,” Aiba said with emphasis, but sluggishly short of an exclamation. Nino gave him a scowl. “Dysenterrrrrrry...I’m thirsty.”
Ohno just laughed, but also politely and quickly disentangled himself. “No, he just flew into a rage and kicked me off the ship. I guess it was a good thing that all the girls were on my side...he looked ready to kill me.”
Jun and Aiba both held up their thumbs. “Cool.”
Suddenly, footsteps could be heard rushing out of Sho’s bedroom. He ran into the bathroom and the sound of puking echoed back into the control deck.
“The dysentery medicine works for that, too,” Jun mumbled, as he rubbed one eye.
Down in the computer room, TOMA got tired of waiting and started watching West Side Story on his own. “Tell me when you’re ready to take off again.”
“Tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow...” Aiba mumbled. He reached on hand under his shirt to scratch his belly and pulled out a pair of hot pink panties. “Are these Samantha’s?”
End!