Trigger waring: depression and suicidal thoughts

Back when the shuttle was still considered the pinnacle of space travel technology, Shuttle AE-912681 was dubbed the Imperza by its original crew and captain after his beloved ex-wife. The ship had since passed through many hands, and now, the old Cajaran-made shuttle traveled a dry ten-month route from the boonies of the Lond solar system to the bustling hub of Nol’s capital, occasionally making a stop on Zental and Ceis if chance allowed. Their route was so remote and obscure that the large passenger ship was always far under capacity, and this trip followed a similar trend. Save for the crew and five passengers from Granda, the ship was unoccupied, making Liza’s job as a hostess incredibly easy and horribly boring.

She had accompanied the Imperza forty times on its long-suffering journey, attending to a variety of passengers. Most were young intellectuals from Granda hoping to gain deep knowledge by wandering the galaxy, some gourmets from Frild searching for their next delicacy, and once, a reserved and quiet Dargeian. There were never any passengers going from Central to Lond, at least not on the Imperza. Anyone traveling from the galaxy’s hub of power to Lond would be wealthy enough to own a private vessel or to afford the popular cruise shuttles with live performances, large private suits, and silver-plated food. The Imperza could only offer its passengers patchy sheets, stale bread, watery soup, and a communal holo-screen by a bar that served cheap alcohol.

Liza sighed as she removed the sheets from the carrier auto-server and put them into the cleaning system. Typically, such a menial task would be done by another auto-server. Her job would be to manage them and serve as the front-facing representative of the crew to the passengers, but with the meager sum that the ship made, buying a more advanced auto-server was unlikely to ever happen. In fact, maintaining the ones they had now was only possible because she had a background in engineering and robotics, which was the reason Sumarin, the captain, had given for hiring her all those years ago. That, and the fact that she’d agreed to work for free.

She sighed again as the now empty auto-server kept banging itself against the wall without course correcting and going through the door just four inches to its left. She nudged it with her foot, and it beeped twice, then went through when the door automatically opened for it. It would now go to each of the passenger’s rooms and collect any trash they had. Well, hopefully, it would do that. More likely, it would get stuck again somewhere else. Liza irritatedly brushed wisps of her dark hair away from her face, then started to follow after the auto-server to complete her other tasks. She stood in front of the door, and right before it opened, she caught sight of her reflection in the old polished metal, and her breath caught. It was her usual dull black hair, green eyes, and pasty skin that was beginning to wrinkle from hard bygone years. Her antenna, drooped like limp vegetables, had lost most of their natural glow. All this she was used to, but in that brief second where she saw herself at that specific angle, she was struck by her resemblance to her mother, and the effect of it almost brought her to her knees. If her mother saw her now, she… Liza closed her eyes, let out a breath, and walked out.

She walked through the corridors that had been her home for eighteen Standards with familiar ease and an underlying and growing disdain. Over the long years traveling on the Imperza, she had grown weary and tired ancient shuttle’s drag, its loose panels, peeled paint, uncontrollable temperature fluctuations, faulty gravity modulator, and the incessant whining noise from its bowels that seemed to weep in mourning of its former glory. She was still fond of the crew: Jumin, the bartender. Ardon, the chef, occasional shuttle technician, and navigator. And, of course, Sumarin. Their meeting had been pure coincidence, or maybe fate.

The Imperza had needed some repairs, and Sumarin had happened to choose the workshop Liza was apprenticing at to have the work done in. He’d chosen it simply because it was the only one in orbit, and so he wouldn’t actually have to land the ship planetside. Liza, on her part, had chosen to work in that particular garage because it was in orbit around her home world, which by then she could no longer stand to be on. She had wanted to leave the system altogether, but she couldn’t bring herself to take that step. In any case, the ship had pulled in, and Sumarin, in all his decadent and unrefined glory, had stepped down. His deep green scales glistened, but even then, the dullness of age had begun to set in in some areas. His long tail swung behind his back, and the deep red fur coat he wore drew every eye, especially because it paired so badly with his neon pink shorts. It was the first time in a long time that Liza had felt anything, and what she felt was annoyance. Liza smiled as she remembered their first contentious interactions.

She would never have guessed then that he was such a kind soul and that he had immediately spotted that she was on the verge of losing her will to live. Now that she knew him and his past, she understood how obvious her feelings must have been to him because, in spite of the differences between species, grief was easy to spot. Yes, if not for the crew and captain that had taken her in all those years ago, she probably wouldn’t be here today, but now she felt an itch in her heart that signaled she had lingered too long. The air of the ship had become stale, and frustration clogged her throat and dimmed her sight. What made it worse was that everyone could tell and made efforts to help her through it, but to her, what it all was — from the very beginning- was delaying the inevitable. Her time on the Imperza had not healed her in the least. It had only held back, for a time, the unavoidable fall.

Her depression was so severe that even when Sumarin announced that they would be making a rare stop on Ceis, the first time in all the years she’d been on the shuttle, it did nothing to lift her spirits.

“It’ll be exciting,” he said, scratching his now gray scales. “And the passengers will love it.”

“Oh, for sure,” Jumin added, “I’m going to bring out the expensive stuff, you know, the draft we got from Ionil. I’m sure our wonderful passengers will be willing to open their pockets now that this has turned into a… a….” He scrunched his face, and his pink eyes rolled upwards.

“A spectacle?” Ardon offered.

“Yes. That works. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle to see Ceis.”

“I’m not sure what’s so exciting about it. It’s not like we’ll actually get to land on the planet,” Ardon said as he braided his hair into two braids, one pair of hands working on each side.

“Well, no one can land on Ceis, so this is as good as they are ever going to get. If I knew our course would align with Ceis’s orbit, I would have charged more.” Sumarin said, then laughed.

“If you had listened to me and updated our navigation systems, you would have known,” Ardon grumbled.

Sumarin smiled and rolled his eyes. “Of course, of course…” he said, then his yellow eyes turned to Liza. “…and what do you think, Liza?”

Liza was leaning her head on her hand and staring absently into the waves of light that flowed through dimension Pillsin. The travelers’ dimension, as it was commonly called, allowed shuttles to bypass lightspeed travel limitations through the galaxy. She didn’t look away from the window as she answered.

“It’s just another stop,” she said. Sumarin started to say something, but stopped himself, and the three continued the conversation amongst themselves, while Liza just watched the moving lights.

She had no doubt it would be a novel experience, something she could tell people, although the only people she spoke to was the rest of the crew, so really she would tell no one. The energy throughout the shuttle lifted significantly from the news. The passengers talked animatedly and discussed theories and ideas about what ceisites were like. To them, the watery soup suddenly seemed flavorful, and the old ship was now quaint and charming. A certain lightness and anticipation filled everyone aboard the Imperza, and to Liza, it only served to highlight her own lack of feeling about the whole thing. It was just another stop. In another time, she may have shared their excitement; after all, seeing Ceis was so rare, and the unimaginable powers ceisites were said to have was something she knew herself as a child would have been filled with joy to discover. As she was now, she simply continued to do her job as usual.