Mick's egg-like ship descended in a spiral towards his training base and the rectangular landing pad whose clipped corners gave it 12 sides instead of 4. The ship’s raised twin tails produced enough drag for the ship to make a safe landing without power, in theory.
Mick had a problem with the approach of his pilot-in-training, the swordswoman Celestia who came from a late medieval world and was still wearing her archaic plate armor. "You're coming in a little heavy. I'm going to turn on antigrav." He reached past Celestia’s shoulder to operate the holographic control.
The red helmet of Alex Smith leaned in to to take a look at the numbers. Acceleration was close to zero, and the power-armored mercenary did not see a problem with their velocity. "We'll survive."
Mick chuckled. "Oh, it'll be a little bump but it would be uncomfortable. I prefer a soft landing. Nice and soft."
The egg hovered forward onto the landing pad in a slow descent towards one of the two spaces marked in white paint.
"Nice and slow." Mick guided Celestia's landing. "Now set her down gently." The ship shook slightly as it hit the landing pad. "You did it!" He patted her on her armored shoulder. "We're home." He turned to his new hire, Jill Ross. "Get your stuff. I'll show you around."
The four of them walked onto the landing pad from the ship's rear ramp. There was enough room on the pad for another ship of the same size. A walkway at the northwest corner of the pad led to a three-story building that was attached to the side of a larger rectangular structure that Mick had called the Death Box. This big, apparently concrete box loomed ominously behind the building. From their angle, one could see spikes on its roof.
Mick carried a tote bag with the perishables from the ship's stores. Celestia carried one of Jill's shopping bags of new clothing along with a tote bag of her own dirty clothes that needed cleaning. Jill wore her softsuit – light armor from Alex’s dimension – over her clothes rather than carry it, and carried two bags in one hand and her huge gun in her other, balancing it against her shoulder. Alex carried Jill's remaining shopping bag, wondering how she had been talking into doing that.
Mick turned around to introduce Jill to his base as he walked backwards. He waved his hand in a wide arc. "This whole planet is uninhabited. It's just us here. This area is in a mild D-class environment. Very nice during spring and summer, although it can get a little cold during the winter. There's a nice beach about a mile north of here. A big forest to the south that goes on for hundreds of miles before it hits the mountains. If you get lost in there, just head to the northwest until you reach the coast. Do you know how to find your way without a compass?"
"No." Jill shook her head.
That would not be a problem. "Tia can teach you."
"It is easy," Celestia said. "The only trick to it is that some planets spin backwards, so the sun and shadows will guide you in the direction opposite to what you expect. This is not one of them."
There were two sets of doors at the corner of the building. The outer door and the nearby wall were transparent with a slight blue tint. A small silver box with a speaker and buzzer hung off the transparent wall on one side of the door. The outer door automatically unlatched itself as Mick walked toward it. He slid it open horizontally, and it continued sliding under its own power until it was fully open. The next door looked like it was made of metal with a split down the middle. Mick held a finger on the wall-mounted console to its left. The door slid open along the split, each half of it hiding in the wall.
Mick turned around to address his guests as he walked backwards through the inner door. "Jill, remind me some time that I'm going to have to register you in the computer so that the door will recognize you. If you get locked outside, use the intercom that's by the door. He stopped to give directions. "Okay, first things first. Toilet is in that corner, straight ahead. Here is the kitchen. Past it is the break room." He held up his bag. "Let me put this stuff away and I'll show you down the hall." Mick walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, shoved the bag inside without bothering to take anything out, closed the door, and walked back. Jill curiously took a step into the kitchen, looked around, and stepped back into the hallway as Mick returned.
Mick gestured down the hallway which ended in a stairwell and a wide break in the wall that led to the lounge. "Living quarters are upstairs. Second floor is yours. Third floor is mine.” He turned and pointed to the nearest cabinet. "Here we have some closets and storage spaces for anything we might want to grab on our way to the ship." He took a step up the hallway and and pointed to a cabinet with an electronic lock on it. "This one's a gun locker. Yours won't fit."
He walked to the next cabinet and tapped it with his knuckles. "Extra stuff for the kitchen that we don't have room for in the cupboards." Continuing onward, he pointed to a door. "This goes to the maintenance tunnels for the Death Box. If it breaks again and we have to call in someone to fix it, this is where we’ll send them. Don’t go in there if you don’t know what you’re doing." As they passed by the entrance to the break room, he pointed to another cabinet. "We have some games in here. Maybe we'll play dominoes later."
Mick led them up the stairs to the second floor. He took a few steps into the hallway to give the others room to enter before he continued the introduction. "Here is the washing machine and the dryer. Down the hall there are two toilets, two showers." As he spoke, Jill immediately walked into the side room where she saw a bunk bed. Mick noticed that she had left the tour and followed her in. "I see you've found the bedrooms. We have new carpeting, redid the walls, the mattresses and pillows are new. We had smokers on the team last year."
As Mick spoke, Jill dropped her bags and her gun in the middle of the room and climbed into the lower bunk. The pillow was soft! The mattress was... bouncy. She could hardly feel it while wearing her softsuit. She stood up, stripped out of her softsuit, and dived into the bed again. The mattress was comfortable. She smiled and pressed the side of her head into the soft pillow. "It's nice."
Alex was annoyed. "I was staying here."
Jill continued smiling. "You can have the upper bunk."
Noticing the tension, Mick decided to stop them from having a fight outside of the arena before they could have their fight inside the arena. "Heyyy, there's another bedroom right over there. Why don't you try that one out? You might like it better! ... Jill, that means you."
"Alright." Jill got up and walked into the other room through the open door between them, leaving her things in the floor behind her. Alex looked at the mess and shook her head. Mick quietly joked about it. "Maybe we should have gone back and gotten her mother." After chuckling at his own joke, he made another one. "Nah, it wouldn't have helped. Jill was a college student."
Celestia put both of the bags she was holding in one hand and held her free hand over Jill's gun. The gun slowly lifted off the ground. Mick noticed what she was doing and hurried to her side. "Uh, Tia? Nuh-uh. You don't know what your magic is going to do to it."
Celestia did not foresee any problem. "If her world has no magic, then the items from her world should behave as ordinary items."
Mick shook his head. "No, that's not how it is. Sometimes when you take something or someone into a magical world, it starts behaving in ways you didn't expect. You don't want to risk it with something like that outside of a controlled environment."
Celestia slowly let the gun back down to the floor.
Mick and Celestia entered the southern bedroom where Jill was enjoying the soft mattress. Mick explained the floor plan. "The idea here is you can have one room for men and one for women and lock the door between them--"
Celestia interrupted him with the voice of an experienced commander whose troops had attempted similar living arrangements. "That is not going to work."
"It worked before!" Mick pleaded. "Okay, the guy was fifty-five and the girl was twenty so nothing was going to happen unless she really wanted it to, but it worked out. Once. As far as I know."
Behind them, Alex stood in the doorway of the northern bedroom, looking in.
Mick continued on. "How it's working this year is I'm going to be upstairs and you girls--" Without looking, Mick could tell that Alex was glaring at him. "You count too, Alex." Alex crossed her arms as Mick continued. "-- are going to be down here, so nothing funny is going to happen. Now if the next recruit is a guy then someone might end up sleeping on the couch downstairs or on the ship. Or we can hop in Alex's ship and she can sleep there. She's used to it."
Alex gave her opinion. "I like the beds too." Her voice distorter gave this innocent statement an ominous tone.
Mick continued on. "We'll figure it out when we get there. Somebody might need to roll out a sleeping bag. I might end up sleeping on the ship. One of you might end up sleeping in my bed. Who knows what'll happen." He shrugged innocently.
Jill opened her eyes and looked toward Mick in surprised disbelief that he would say something to them with such lewd implications. Celestia, with whom Mick had attempted to flirt in the past, blushed and walked away to dump her dirty clothes into the washer in the hallway. Alex quietly and slowly shook her head.
Noticing the mood change, Mick changed the subject, "So, let's continue the tour as soon as Tia has her laundry in."
Alex spoke to Jill. "And you can put your things in your room," further staking her own claim to the northern bedroom.
Jill sat up. "Okay." She stood up and walked toward the northern bedroom.
Mick brought them to the third floor. The stairs stopped, but in their place there was a circular platform on the floor, like the stairwell inside the ship, to provide access to the roof if necessary.
The hallway was gone. To be more accurate, its eastern wall was removed to make an open space into the northeast room. Where the first and second floor hallways had continued to the south, there was a wall in the way as the master bedroom took up this space.
The northeast room was a spacious brightly lit quarter-circle with many long, wide windows running down its angled ceiling from the roof to the northern and eastern edges of the room. Jill was drawn to its beauty and walked into it immediately. The room contained a kidney-shaped table with six simple chairs, and two soft recliners.
Mick was happy to show off this room. "This is a nice room to just relax in. You get a great view of the ocean from here and you can see the stars at night. If you ever want to come up while I'm around, just yell or something. Or contact me on a communicator. We need to get you communicators, but we'll handle that later."
Jill stood at a window looking out to the seashore a mile away. She could see the waves lapping at the beach. "I want to see the ocean."
Mick put a hand on her shoulder. "How about this. Win a match and we'll head out there to celebrate. You'd like that?" Jill smiled and nodded. "Good." Mick stepped away to continue the tour. "Okay. Big table here. My bedroom's past that door." Mick pointed toward the closed door at the south, then he turned and pointed to an open door at the west. "And in there is the control center for the Death Box."
Jill got a little nervous at hearing that name again, but Mick was so casual about it that it calmed her down.
Mick clapped his hands. "Okay! That's about everything unless someone really wants to see my toilet."
Celestia and Alex spoke at the same time. "We could show her the basement." "There's the basement."
"And the kitchen," Jill added. "I'd like to get something to eat."
Mick smiled. "Alright, let's get you something to eat. Besides, the basement is boring."
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