Chapter 5
After much screaming and freaking out, Derek finally regained his composure and started to analyse his current predicament .
The first thing that caught his eye was a huge hole in the space suit at the chest level . The contours of the hole had burn marks all over it and there was a lot of purple jelly on both his suit and the dead bodies .
That meant the purple jelly was coagulated alien blood . Derek turned his head to see the spot where he had woken up, noticing a lot of blood and even something that he found safe to assume were some kind of splattered viscera .
"This makes no sense . " He thought . "All the evidence points to the fact that this body was dead as Julius Caesar until I somehow happened to inhabit it . And for whatever reason, it's also fully healed . Oh man, this means all religions are dead wrong! Luckyly I never believed in any mumbo jumbo, otherwise I would be really disappointed right now . "
Derek then proceeded examining his new body . It had four arms, only two legs but all the limbs were long and skinny . The legs were reverse jointed, like those of a cat . Both hands and feet had only three fingers each .
Derek was really curious about his facial features but there was no reflective surface in sight . So, he tried feeling his face with the fingers, but the suit turned out to come with a helmet, which did not impede his senses though .
The only thing he could establish was the shape of the helmet, and based on it Derek's new head should have been something similar to a shark's dorsal fin .
Then he tried to speak . "Test, test . Derek Esposito . One, two, three . " He could somehow do it, but it was still English . That meant that he did not inherit neither the muscle memory nor the intellect from the body's previous owner .
Derek tried getting up, but the centre of gravity was too different from his old body, so he had to give up and proceed crawling like a baby .
So, he started examining the corpses to make heads or tails of what was happening around him . Judging from the suits, there were two factions at war .
One had a red coloured space suit, and the other, which Derek was donning, was grey . He had no idea which side was winning, but it would not make any difference to him anyway .
Unless the suit was equipped with a universal translator, he was uncapable of communicating . Enemies would kill him on sight, allies would probably ditch him like garbage .
"Who would ever want a rambling idiot, incapable even of walking during a life or death situation? I'm not even here from a day and I am already as good as dead . "
Refusing to give up, Derek managed to get up by leaning on the walls and started exploring .
The corridor had many doors, yet his choices were painfully limited, since he could only go through the open ones .
Derek had no idea how to open the doors nor how to operate the control panels that he found along the way . He tried pushing buttons at random but nothing happened .
And he was starting to get hungry .
"Will I die like this? Starving in a goddamned space ship, alien planet or whatever the f**k is this? I don't know what this useless pile of flesh eats! Even if I stumble on a mountain of food, I have no way to know what is what . And even if I did, I do not know how the heck to remove this helmet . "
After walking for several hours, hunger and frustration drove him to hysteria . Derek screamed an kicked whatever was within reach, until exhaustion made him fell asleep .
When he woke up, his mind was clear again .
"This is a nightmare . I am all out of options, to the point that even if I wanted to kill myself, I would not know how . " He banged the back of his head against the wall to keep frustration at bay .
"I never thought about this, but being reborn in a sci-fi environment is truly the worst-case scenario . Alien body, alien customs, complete lack of the new species common sense . And to make things worse everything here is so high tech that I cannot even operate a door . Heck, every god damn button could be tagged and it would still be useless to me since I don't know their language . "
His hunger was rising and he was feeling weaker by the hour . Having no time to lose, he started wandering again, this time banging and screaming at every door he met, trying to draw some attention
Derek was on the verge of fainting again due to hunger and exhaustion when finally a door opened up .
The shock was great enough for him to lost his grip and fall to the ground . On the other side there were grey suited aliens in a wedge formation .
Note : Please download the sponsor's game to support us!
okay i think i like this story