The Unified States of Mana

Before me and racing ever nearer is an endless sea of green leaves and colourful flowers, a veritable ocean of alien life. While it might look soft at a glance, hidden beneath the canopy is surely hard earth that’s more than ready to greet me should I not be skewered by a branch on the way through.

I gave up on screaming a few seconds into the jump, if anyone can hear me, I doubt they’ll be able to leap up and save me.

“Do a flip!”

Scratch that, there’s one person who could save me. I flip them off as I hear their laughter ringing out behind me.

I spread my body out to try and slow my fall, imagining how skydivers do it. Though, I feel less graceful than a duck that’s caught a fistful of buckshot as I fall through the thick, stinging air.

Whether or not the air is somehow slowing me down more than it would on Earth, I can’t really know for sure. In the end a freefall is a freefall, and unless the ground is made of marshmallow this next part is going to hurt.

I pull off my glasses and hold them tight. If I live through this, I don’t want to end up blindly walking into the jaws of some alien T-rex.

“Fucking fuck!”

I close my eyes and clench my teeth hoping for a miracle, but there’s nothing that’s going to stop me until I hit the dirt. A thousand leaves slap against me, a hundred branches whip me, snapping as I pass, and then come the limbs that don’t break.

It hits my guts like a baseball bat at full swing, I black out only to be brought back when the next one hits my side. It’s all I can do to hold my arms up over my head, but that doesn’t save me from the blunt force of a branch thwacking my arms and head both.

The final impact smashes my everything, as I take a body blow from a planet. Screw first steps or leaps, I’m the first bloody human to belly flop on this new land.

“Shit.” I roll over onto my back, a sharp aching reminding me that this trip did not come for free. At least my glasses are still whole, though the frames are a little bent. I put them on, and the world regains its focus.

“I’m still alive.” I mutter staring up into the pink alien sky that shines through the hole I made in the canopy above.

The world trembles underneath me, the roar of splitting wood and crushing weight smashing into the earth resounds through the forest. Splinters, long as I am tall, fly right past me with enough force to embed themselves in the trees.

That would be the ship.

The forest becomes quiet in the wake of the crash.

I push myself up from the ground and brush myself off. Everything hurts, and my skin stings all over, but miraculously I’ve avoided breaking anything.

I stumble to my feet and push through the forest towards where the ship must’ve fallen. Whenever I touch something, a branch, a falling leave, the fucking dirt, it inspires an itching that is thankfully quick to fade when I stop touching any of it.

I can’t keep the air from my lungs though, so that’s a thing.

Whatever fucked up god designed this fibreglass hell deserves to be turned into a comedic caricature, and demeaned for all of time.

Struggling with an overhanging branch, I finally push through to reach the crash site.

Fallen trees surround the hull of a wooden ship which is, quite surprisingly, mostly still whole. There’s no trail to the crash, the thing literally just dropped out of the sky and landed more like a pancake than aircraft.

Aliens of all strange sorts crawl all over the vessel, shouting, screaming, and panicking. The crystal tree that had once stood in place of a mast has shattered, sending branches of magical crystal all over the crash site.

“You’re not forgetting about me, are you?” The red skinned demon says as she slowly floats down after the vessel, throwing knives at the aliens still recovering from the impact.

“Kyra you made it! I told you jumping would work!” She laughs as she pulls the guts out of some sort of sentient insectoid alien, “I’ll finish this and join you in a bit!”

“I really wish you wouldn’t.” She just laughs at my reply.