Chapter 001 - Leaving the Nest

"Hand me that wrench over there, kid" said the old man underneath a broken down space cruiser. The scruffy-haired boy did as he asked, although he had to clumsily rummage through many drawers to find the wrench. 

The boy, Hermes, had been working for the old man, Scraps, for as long as he could remember. Scraps had found Hermes and his younger sister in an abandoned spacecraft with no other people in sight. He searched around the nearby city hoping that their parents had simply wandered and possibly forgotten about the small children. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know anything about the children, so Scraps deemed it necessary to raise them as his own.

While Scraps was a father-figure to Hermes and his sister Athena, his beard as white as clouds and his visible old age made Hermes call him Gramps. 

"If you wanna become a pilot you gotta learn to find things faster, Socks my boy." grumbled Scraps. Scraps originally started calling Hermes 'Socks' as a way to get back at the boy for calling him Gramps. He got the name from almost never wearing socks throughout his childhood, however Scraps eventually forced him to. Hermes lived with the mindset that you only had to do what was either necessary or made you happy, and he felt that wearing socks didn't fit either of those roles. 

"I should be in space by now anyways, you said I could start flying on my 18th birthday and that was yesterday." snarkingly fought back Hermes.

"I said you could fly once you were 18 if you were ready and it's very clear to me that you're not yet."

"Just because I don't know how to fix a ship doesn't mean I can't steer one!" yelled back Hermes rebelliously.

Scraps took out a phone-like device and it projected an image of spinning holographic coins, "Fine then, this should be enough Holo-Coins for pilot lessons."

Hermes began to shed tears of joy, "B-But how can you afford that? You're giving me too much!" This caused Scraps to chuckle to himself.

"Oh please, if I fix one rich guy's ship I could get him to pay this back in no time," he replied, "Now get your rest, you'll need to go to the academy bright and early in the morning."

Hermes had to do as he was told or else he might never achieve his dreams of flying, so he went upstairs to his loft and shifted around in bed for what felt like hours before falling asleep.

The next day he awoke to the feeling of his body hitting the hard, metallic floor. Before he could realize what was happening, Scraps said something to him that he was unable to fully comprehend.

"Get up-- late-- --ademy"

Hermes looked at the clock and saw he only had 2 minutes until the class, so he rushed to put on his shoes, unable to put on any socks or even eat, and rushed outside the front gate. He threw himself onto his hover-scooter -- which he wasn't even legally allowed to drive -- and put his foot all the way down on the pedal, hoping he could somehow beat the clock.

When he finally arrived he looked at his phone to see the time, it read 8:08… 8 minutes after his class was supposed to start. The front gate had been locked, most likely automatically due to a programmed schedule, but there was no barbed wire nor did it seem electrical so Hermes decided he would try to jump it. Thankfully there were no guards around, but even if there were, they would be unlikely to catch up with Hermes. He rushed through the hallways and up the stairs until he reached room 104; the flight training class.

"You're late," angrily grimaced the teacher. Hermes was afraid he would be kicked out after all his effort until the teacher spoke again, "take a seat."

He hastily sat down in the only seat available and listened to the teacher, although she had picked up midway through a lesson. He nodded off to sleep quite a few times but always managed to wake himself up, he was determined to learn how to fly. The only issue was his inability to focus, even while awake. Taking in what little information he remembered, he dreamt of flying a ship of his very own for the month that he took the classes, until finally it was time for his piloting test.

At 8:00 A.M., on the dawn of the next month, Hermes took his possibly final step through the front gateway and into the shipyard at the side of the building. Just as he arrived, another ship had landed, slowly and smoothly. The pilot's perfection made Hermes' nerves begin to tense up. He began to shake like he was in the coldest place in the universe. He moved his shaky legs towards the instructor and waited his turn to board the ship.

The interior was white and spotless. Hermes wondered if it had some sort of automated cleaning system, as he was unable to find a speck of dust or a dent in the metal. The ship looked pristine until he got to the pilot's deck; there was still a deep indent on the chair from the previous pilot and both the chair and the controllers were drenched in sweat. When the previous pilot had left the ship, he looked completely confident in himself, so it was hard to believe he had been this nervous. The thought only made Hermes' nerves worsen.

He looked at the instructor, hoping that she would clean the area or at least acknowledge it, but she just stared back at him until he sat down in the damp seat. He scanned his hand as he had been taught and the screen read 'VALID PILOT IDENTIFICATION DETECTED' which was followed by the smooth roaring of the ship's engines. He turned a digital knob slightly and it began to slowly elevate itself off of the ground.

Once it had raised itself far beyond the height of the academy, Hermes quickly turned the knob back, causing the ship to jolt to a complete stop, causing both occupants to jump a few inches from their seats. The instructor gave Hermes an infuriated glare. Hermes tried to play it off and very carefully turned another knob, this time the ship was moving forwards far too slow for his instructor's patience. He could see her writing notes in his peripheral vision but did his best not to look and stay focused on piloting. 

The academy had constructed large, floating rings to act as objectives for the students to fly through. Sensors on the rings detected various statistics such as the speed of the ship, the time it took to travel between rings, the distance from the ship to the ring and how smooth the ship was traveling. Hermes' nervousness caused him to shake the wheel slightly but otherwise was steering fairly well.

Once he had gone through all of the rings, he slowly lowered the ship back down and only had a relatively bumpy landing. When he turned off the ship's engines, the instructor jotted a few more notes down then simply nodded and went into the building. Hermes, left confused on what to do now, simply went to his home at Scrap's workshop.

When he arrived back at the workshop, Scraps was standing beside a girl in a cot, it was his younger sister, Athena. Athena's skin was unusually white, almost the same shade as her snowy hair. While it seemed artificial, her hair had been that way since Scraps had originally found her.

Scraps wasn't expressing his usual emotions; immense anger or laughter, but instead wore a melancholic expression on his face.

"Hermes, we need to talk," he said quietly, "about why I really let you start flying… Your sister, poor Athena, her condition has gotten worse over time."

Athena had a condition called Diselapholia, which made nearly every body part of hers weaker, including her muscles and skeleton. It had affected her largely in spurts up until now but this time it looked like she'd be experiencing the effects for a while.

"Why has it gotten this bad? Is there anything I can do to help?" Hermes asked loudly, hoping for some answer.

"That's exactly why I finally allowed you to fly, even if I still see you as ill-prepared; you need to go to Comasyn."

Comasyn was only two planets away from Hermes and Scraps' planet of Polasty but most pilots avoided it, as it was nothing more than a barren, yet dangerous wasteland of nomads and black market traders, who didn't stop at simply trading inanimate objects. As to why Scraps would need Hermes to fly to such a strange planet was a mystery to him. Thankfully, Scraps quickly answered the question floating in his mind.

"There's rumors of a new medication circulating through the black market on Comasyn. It should be able to help Athena's Diselapholia at least a little bit."

"Can't we get it here on Polasty, or at least just go to Sazawa?"

"No," he continued, "this medicine is… untested. You can't get it anywhere legally and Comasyn is the only place where you can reliably get it anywhere near here. This is the only chance we have to help Athena recover before it's too late."

"I had to do it," Hermes thought to himself, "I had to cure Athena's illness by any means necessary."

"When should I go?" He asked.

"Tomorrow morning, as soon as possible."

The next day Hermes woke up before the sun had even risen and saw Scraps sitting on the couch downstairs, with a fairly small ship in the workshop.

"This ship was a passion project of mine. Took me almost 10 years to complete, but I think it should be ready for you to pilot," he said proudly, before using a much darker tone, "so if you ever break it you'll have to pay an arm and a leg."

Hermes hopped in the ship and heeded Scraps' warning, making sure not to touch anything that he didn't have to. He did his best to replicate his routine during flight lessons at the academy, minus any of the mistakes he had made before. Luckily, he made it outside the workshop without a single scratch or dent. Now for the big problem; properly flying the ship away and out of the planet's atmosphere, as well as landing on Comasyn without crashing.

Suddenly, Hermes got a notification on his phone, it was his piloting grade. He hesitantly decided to look at it. He had gotten barely enough to pass, which definitely did not help his nerves. "It's just like the test," he thought to himself, "just this time, it's real. I'm really leaving the planet."

He turned the knob to move upwards and simultaneously began to move forward, doing his best to angle the ship properly. Before he knew it, he had begun to fly through the air, soaring above the clouds and then finally breaking through Polasty's atmosphere and entering the expansive void of space. Lastly, he put the ship on autopilot and went to his small bed near the rear to take a nap.

Unfortunately, he wasn't sure how to see an alarm, and was instead awoken by a shaking cabin, with the sound of the metal rumbling filling up his ears. He ran to the front to check his flight status and saw what was happening; the ship had not navigated around a meteor and had struck it, changing its course and causing it to fly towards the planet between Polasty and Comasyn; Sazawa.

He tried to turn the wheel, turn the knobs, and press any button available, but the ship's autopilot prevented any movement to be manually inputted. He had to first disable the autopilot feature before doing anything himself, which he had completely forgotten how to do. He began to curse under his breath before running back towards the rear to get the pilot's manual. He flipped through the hundreds of pages until he saw it, bold letters for a title reading "ENABLING AND DISABLING AUTOPILOT'. He quickly skimmed through the many paragraphs, hoping he could remember it all, then ran towards the pilot's station. Halfway through the ship was a slight step upwards, which he had forgotten about under the extreme pressure, causing him to trip and land directly on his face onto the hard, metallic floor.

A long, high-pitched ringing sound cut through his ears. Even if he were to plug both of his ears, the harsh noise would still plague his eardrums. A pain like a gunshot wound spread throughout his entire head, most likely his skull too. In less than a second, everything around him turned to black and he fell unconscious.