Embarrassing Moments: A Humorous Scene from "Somewhere Out There"
Story by Spiders Thrash on SoFurry
Here's a more light-hearted scene with some of the characters exploring an ancient, mysterious space station they discovered in hyperspace. We get a bit more of Shakira's background, a little more of Otto ... being Otto ;) ... and the characters just generally having a little fun before the shit hits the fan again.
The full ongoing story is serialized on Tapas Media: https://tapas.io/series/Somewhere-Out-There1
And if you enjoy my work and would like to "buy me a coffee" you can do that here: https://ko-fi.com/feel_boss
^_^
"Our helmet spotlights aren't gonna be enough," Roger grumbled as he settled to the floor. Sparse dust flitted through other helmet beams dancing around as the rest of the team tried to get a look at their surroundings. The attempt resulted only in fleeting glimpses of a structure around them, but not a complete picture of the environment.
"I should've thought of that." Kamala drifted into his spotlights, settled to the floor, and flopped against it to propel herself upward.
"Any of us should have," Shakira said. "Astra mentioned the power being out, so it should've been the first thing on my mind."
"I guess we just got caught up in the moment and didn't think." Otto chuckled. "The teenage hormones make it difficult to stay focused at the best of times, let alone times when we've got all these weird distractions going on."
"I'm prepping three drones to send over to your location," Astra said over the comlink. "They will be carrying packs of lamps you can attach to the walls as you go, which will double as a trail leading you back to the hull breach through which you entered. They are also equipped with scanning devices and micro-laboratories to build on the information my probes have collected. They will arrive in under five minutes."
"Thanks, Astra. We'll just wait here for them." Kamala came to rest on the floor again. "Hmm. I'm gonna try adjusting my suit thrusters and see if they can help me maneuver in here. Trying them at ten percent capacity."
She fired a quick burst and rocketed upward. Roger tracked her with his spotlights and his heart twitched when she thumped into the ceiling and let out a startled grunt.
"Gahhhgh!"
"Are you okay, honey?" Roger stared at her as the impact bounced her back to the floor. She giggled.
"Well, that was embarrassing. I'll dial it down to one percent and use a shorter burst." She fired the thrusters again and rose into the air. She floated back down and fired another split-second burst to stay up. "Sweet. If I keep this up, I should be able to move around without flopping on the ground like a dying fish."
Roger laughed. "Somehow, that reminds me of the Leviathans in The Avengers."
Kamala snickered. "Now I know what I'm doing for Halloween!"
The others chuckled and then fell silent for a moment.
"Well," Kamala finally said, "I've just had my first and, hopefully, only embarrassing moment for today. Since we have a few more minutes to piss away, anybody wanna help me feel like less of a doofus by sharing their own embarrassing moments?"
After another quick round of laughs, Otto shrugged.
"It's not embarrassing now, but at the moment it induced a brief panic and would've been humiliating if anyone had witnessed the first time I ever jerked off."
Shakira cackled, snorted, and then laughed again as he continued.
"It got all over my laptop. I guess the embarrassing one would be the time my mom caught me whackin' it, but this one had the potential to be far worse if I wasn't alone. The laptop was borrowed from a friend and I almost ruined it."
Shakira laughed again. "He's, uh, capable of some pretty impressive pressure as well as volume."
"Like a firehose, eh?" Flynn said, reminding Roger abruptly that anyone aboard Astra who wanted to listen in and watch the feeds from their helmet cameras were doing so.
"More like a rapid-fire lawn sprinkler." Otto mimicked the sound, prompting another burst of laughter from several on the excursion team and on the ship.
"I'm pretty sure he's nailed my cervix a few times," Shakira said once she'd caught her breath.
"Aren't you worried about getting pregnant?" Muzzy chimed in. "That's why I only have sex with aliens. No need to worry about it when you're not biologically compatible."
"I'm sterile. Found that out the first time I had a battery of scans done before the rift thing happened, and Astra confirmed it during tests she did a few hours ago. I shoot nothing but blanks. No 'live ammo' at all. Which was a huge relief to both of us. I doubt I'll ever want kids, but even if I did, I know it'll be a long time before I'm ever ready for it. I'm definitely not ready now. And as it turned out, Shakira never wanted kids and never will."
"I'd still be getting shit for that if we weren't stranded so far away from home," Shakira said. "Been trying to have my ability to get pregnant eliminated, one way or another, for over twenty years. Tried to get my tubes tied, tried to get everything involved in the process yanked out, even tried to get permanently sterilized. Couldn't find a doctor or a clinic that was willing to do it. They all kept saying, 'Oh, you'll change your mind someday and then you'll regret doing this.' Um, no, I fucking won't!" She sighed. "Family, friends -- they all acted like they knew me better than I knew myself and were certain that I secretly wanted children or was just being rebellious or something. The more adamant I got with them, the more they doubled down on crap like, 'Thou doth protest too much.' Made me want to punch 'em all in the neck ten or twelve times."
She glanced around and cleared her throat.
"Sorry. Heh. That kinda turned into a rant, didn't it? It's just something that's been driving me nuts for years. I mean, that and people telling me I'm 'selfish" for not wanting kids."
Heh. Well, few people can get under your skin like your own family. Roger shrugged. "No worries. We all need to vent every now and then."
"Well," Otto said, "I figure this is just another sign that Shakira and I are perfect for each other. I know tons of people who, for reasons I'll never understand, actually want a small army of their cum-devils running around, others who have trouble with relationships because one of them wants kids and the other doesn't, and still others who get pressured into it by their friends and family. I'd really started to think I'd never find a woman who felt the same way I do about it until a little over a year ago."
"You're definitely lucky you found Shakira, then," Roger said. "Just about anyone else would've been disappointed to find out that you're sterile."
"The drones are arriving at your location," Astra said, and Roger jumped slightly.
"Thanks." Kamala fired one of her suit thrusters and rotated slowly to face the hull breach as the drones floated through it. "Oh, that's so cool -- they're shaped kinda like flying saucers."
Shakira laughed softly. "Yeah, they remind me a bit of the N'Kaam-class scout ships in Star Trek Online, but with a darker paint job and without the rainbow lights around the edge."
Hitomi nudged the floor and drifted up to the dark red drone. She reached into a compartment on its side and pulled out a small, cone-shaped lamp. She clamped its base to the nearest wall and activated it, illuminating the whole chamber.
"Much better." Roger took a slow look around and found himself in a chamber perhaps twenty meters across and filled with debris from the impact that had breached the hull.
"Ah-hah." Hitomi pointed off to the right and Roger turned to see what had caught her attention. He found her pointing at a second hole ripped through the inner wall. "That was probably caused by the same object that punched through the outer hull."
Kamala took three lamps from the dark blue drone, held one in each hand and her ultratool in the fourth, and propelled herself toward the inner breach. She scanned it, reached through and clamped one of the lamps to the wall inside, and switched it on, lighting up the area on the other side of the wall.
"It's clear aside from more debris." She grasped the jagged edge with her upper-left hand and pulled herself through. "Let's see what we can find!"