fandomweekly | [#061] Wrong Turn (Original)

Theme Prompt: #061 – Shortcut
Title: Wrong Turn
Fandom: Original.
Rating/Warnings: PG / None
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 500
Summary: Navigating through space can be fraught with problems. It’s so easy to take a wrong turn.
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“Idiot!” Thoom Gleef slapped her bondmate across the back of his braincase with her left tentacle. “You said it was a shortcut! ‘It’ll cut eighty-seven light-years off the journey home,’ that’s what you said! Now look at us! Are we home? Of course not; we’re on some ugly little backwater planet goddess knows how many light-years out of our way!”

“Calm down, scrumptious one,” Thoom Nizdef soothed. “It was an honest mistake. I thought I was taking the southbound express hypervortex tunnel but you know how confusing the vortex junction off Delbrex minor is. I’m always saying if they’re going to keep adding new hypervortex channels willynilly then they need to improve the signposting. It’s too easy for people to take a wrong turn.”

“That’s all very fine,” Thoom Gleef grumbled, coiling her tentacles tightly in annoyance, “but what are we supposed to do now? Do you even know where we are?”

"The navigation computer is working on that; we should have an answer any moment.” Thoom Nizdef gave the navcomp a thump.

“Ow!” it complained. “Thumping me won’t get you anywhere; I can only work so fast!” That was the trouble with organic technology; it got idea above its station.

“Just tell us where we are!”

“Fine. Far as I can tell, we got caught in one of those damned wandering space rifts. You’d think someone would tag them with warning markers. Anyway, seems this is a planet called Dirt, or something like that. I’m not too familiar with the language, but that’s what you get for being stingy with my upgrade packages. If you’d got the deluxe universal translation edition last time around like I wanted…”

“Shut up. For the amount of travelling we do the standard edition was perfectly adequate. How do we get back on course?”

The navcomp remained silent.

Thoom Nizdef thumped it again. “I asked you a question!”

“You told me to shut up.”

“I just wanted you to stop complaining, not stop talking completely!”

“Then you should’ve said so. I only got the standard upgrade package last time, remember? You can’t expect me to always know what you mean; I can’t read you mind! Which is probably a blessing.”

“Which way do we go from here?” Thoom Nizdef was fast losing patience.

“That way,” the navcomp said.

“Which way?”

“Oh, right, you don’t have the helpful three dimensional holographic display, do you? Sorry, I must’ve forgotten.”

“You think you’re so clever, don’t you?”

“Not really, but I could’ve been if you’d just been willing to spend a little extra on the upgrades. You get what you pay for.”

“Don’t I know it. I never should’ve had organic technology installed.”

“If you hadn’t you would’ve crashed. You could at least pretend to be a bit grateful. Getting past all those nasty little asteroids wasn’t easy.”

“Well, now you can get us past them again, going the other way.”

“If you insist, but you might want to ask someone for directions first.”

“I hate you!”

The End

[#061] Wrong Turn (Original)

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