Abandoned: Lyra/Flash EQG pulp adventure · 8:44am Mar 4th, 2016
So one night I was up too late listening to Queen's Flash Gordon album, and this happened. Briefly. It happened very briefly. Then I realized that I've had very little actual exposure to the pulp adventure genre and it would have taken way too much research to put together any sort of coherent plot. Oh well! One way or another they'd have ended up going to space and having adventures, and that would serve to explain why they were hanging out together in Friendship Games, but it was not to be. But I like the idea of pretending everyone loves Flash, because that feels like it would have been an excellent way to collect downvotes.
“Lyra Heartstrings, do I need to remind you of the stakes here?”
Lyra gulped and nodded. No one could help her now. She stood alone, all alone, helpless in front of her entire high school science class, staring into the chillingly unforgiving eyes of her teacher Bill Neigh. Everything—everything!—was riding on her answer.
“A full 13% of your grade on this oral midterm exam rides on your answer to this final question, Lyra Heartstrings. Would you like me to repeat it one more time?”
“Yes, please.”
“Very well.” The vast, multistory computer behind him buzzed and whirred as the multicolored lights all over its frame blinked in patterns beyond the comprehension of mortal man. A small strip of paper shot from the computer’s sole output vector, and Bill Neigh grabbed it in midair and read it out loud for all Lyra’s class to hear. If she failed this final question, everyone she knew or had ever known would surely judge her for it forever.
“A space station orbits the remote planet Timbereids at an altitude of 250 kilometers and a velocity of 900 kilometers per second. A spaceship with an open airlock with a 3 meter circumference passes by the space station exactly 20 kilometers away, traveling at the same speed in the opposite direction. Is it possible—and if so, how—for a man to jump from the space station into the spaceship’s airlock?”
Sweat covered Lyra’s neck and palms as she desperately tried to bring her entire educational background to bear on the question, weighing in fleeting instants her cumulative knowledge of English, Botany, Relativistic Probability, and half a dozen other fields as well. But none of her teachers had ever discussed jumping between spacecraft, unless that had been the subject of science class the one day she’d been absent with the flu. She was sunk.
Unless… unless that was he wanted her to think! Maybe the reason the question was so difficult was because it was ridiculously difficult! Yes, Lyra had once again unraveled the conspiracy around her life! She stood up straight, dazzled the class with her brilliant smile, and looked her teacher straight in the eye.
“It’s a trick question!”
“Oh?” Bill Neigh glanced down at the strip of paper from the computer, his face unreadable.
“Yes! Timbereids isn’t a real planet, so the entire question is invalid!”
Bill Neigh sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ms. Heartstrings, but that’s incorrect. The planet Timbereids was only discovered last week, but all its major properties, including its radius and gravity, have already been fully mapped. In fact, it’s only seven and a half light years from Earth!”
“Awww.” That didn’t sound all that far away.
“But I am a generous man, so you may have one more chance to answer the question. Do you understand, Lyra Heartstrings? You have one, more, chance, to—“
“Stop the exam!”
All heads turned as one to face the classroom door. There stood Flash Sentry with his leather jacket billowing dramatically in the air around him, only a handsome grin disturbing his otherwise urgent expression. The symbol on his shirt, a lightning bolt inscribed across a blue shield, seemed almost to glow with the force of his dramatic proclamation.
“Flash Sentry.” Bill Neigh immediately took off his glasses and wiped them on his omnipresent labcoat. “Is there an emergency?”
“Yes sir! I need Lyra Heartstrings to come with me right away!”
“Of course. Anything for the boy who saved the entire school against the Everfree Zombie Hordes and the Boogey Woogie Beetle Boys of Company Beta. Go with him, Ms. Heartstrings!”
Aw, this sounds like it would've been fun. Still, I can understand not knowing what to do with the genre.
As for that question, I'm going to need more information. What is the maximum possible speed the jumping man can attain while moving between the station and the ship? How thick are the airlock's doors? Does slipping through those doors and getting pasted by the walls of the airlock count as jumping into it? Am I supposed to account for the effects of the planet's gravity on the jumper? Am I thinking about this way too much?
awh D: do want
3790709 Well, in the climax Lyra would have to save the day by calculating a way that Flash could perform that exact jump in order to escape their alien captors (presumably timberwolves, going by the planet's name), so the information would presumably become available to her at some point.
I imagine Bon Bon would have been involved too somehow, though I don't remember any details. Maybe she would have been doing her Special Agent Sweetie Drops routine in a kind of Dana Scully/Men in Black way, constantly insisting that there was no such thing as aliens, space travel, magic, whatever. (Or maybe that's a common characterization for her these days? I don't know, I think I stopped reading fanfiction regularly sometime before Slice of Life even aired.)
One thing I do remember was that Flash's spaceship would be able to cross the 7.5 light year distance in a reasonable timeframe because of its propulsion system, the Flash Drive.