I Like It With a 2% of Methane.
Admiral Sunset Shimmer looks over the bridge of her flagship, psyching herself up for the oncoming battle.
The bridge is a hive of activity. Officers and bridge crew, all of whom are exact duplicates of her sit at their stations and stare at consoles covered in blinking lights and switches, twisting valves, flipping switches, and tapping the same keys over and over again. Some push oversized flashing buttons whose only purpose is to bleep and bloop loudly. A few engineers fix pipes and splice cables that are only there for decoration.
Sunset snaps her fingers. A subordinate pops into existence and hands her bowl of popcorn. She reaches in, grabs a handful, and starts scarfing the starchy kernels, then turns to the viewport. Outside, suspended in the void, is her objective, a blue-green (and frankly, kind of boring) sphere, surrounded by the ships of the vile Blue Fleet.
This is not going to be easy
The Blue Fleet englobe the planet like drones protecting their queen. In orbit, swarms of disposable gunboats and destroyers zip about, bullet catchers for the fleet, while the cruisers, battleships (and their glass-jawed cousins, battlecruisers) provide the main offensive punch. In the center of the fleet is the massive wedge of armor plate and guns that is their mighty flagship, the nerve center of this Fleet. If she can take it out, the Blue Fleet will have no choice but to retreat.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty big “if”
An officer presses a finger to her headset. “Ma’am, incoming message. Audio only.“
“Put it on.” Sunset mumbles through a mouthful of popcorn.
The speaker crackles, hissing with static for a moment before clearing up. “Ya sure you wanna do this?” The Blue Admiral says in a tone dripping with smugness.
Sunset swallows a mouthful of starchy, buttery goodness “Heck yes!”
“Really sure?”
“Yes.”
“Super one hundred percent sure?”
“Yes yes and also yes!
“Fine, it’s your fleet’s funeral”. There’s the sound of knuckles being cracked over the comm. “Let’s start this mutha’ with a command card: Missile Barrage!”
With that, a swarm of fat, cigar-shaped missiles emerged from the Blue Fleet. Point defense lasers open up, stabbing at the swarm with spears of light.
“CRAP!” Quickly, Sunset snatches her dice from a convenient aid, gives them a good shake, then rolls them onto the deck, fingers crossed. A five and a one. Well, she’d rolled a lot worse.
She’d also rolled a lot better.
The defense lasers stab at the flock, thinning it out a little more than she’d feared, but not as much as she’d hoped: the swarm smothers the fleet. In an instant, five destroyers and two cruisers are burning hulks completely smothered by missiles, with varying degrees of damage to the rest of the fleet.
Sunset tugs at the collar of her dress uniform. Her carefully-planned battle just hit an unexpected snag.
The comm crackles again. “Order up! One helping of pain! Hold the onions!” The Blue Admiral says over the ship’s speakers, followed by the rattling, clicking sound of dice being rolled.
A solid wall of lasers, torpedoes, and missiles slams into the Red Fleet, The Battleships manage to absorb some of the fire, acting as an umbrella against the rain of death. A few shield rolls manage to save some of the smaller ships but the Fleet still takes a thorough thrashing; half of her cruisers and all of her destroyers are turned to incandescent scrap.
The flagship takes a beating as well. Hits rock the vessel. Consoles overload and explode in fountains of sparks. Crewmen tumble out of their seats, careening all around the bridge because Command forgot to issue seatbelts. A crewmember lets out a Wilhelm scream. Another goes “Wheee!” as she flies through the air and slams into a bulkhead.
“I’m, okay..” she groans before a console wrenches itself from the deck and slams into her.
“Still okay!”
Sunset picks herself up and brushes herself off. Thankfully, no one in this fleet ever dies. They just get big booboos
“Report!” Sunset barks, placing the tricorn back on her head.
“Shields at 50 percent!”
“Turrets one through four are offline!”
“Polyunsaturated Riboflavin Masticaters offline!”
“Heavy damage to the port Quantum Flux Capacitor Modulatorium.”
“Liquid Alkaloid Stimulant Dispensers offline!!”
“Aquatic Waste Disposal Units backed up on decks three through eight!”
Sunset picks up her hat and surveys what’s left of her fleet. She groans. Great. With one very unlucky roll, her carefully thought-out battleplans were just hurled out the nearest window and onto a manure cart.
Frantically, she shuffles through her command cards, looking for something, anything, that might upright this upset. No dice. No matter how many cards she uses, There’s no way she can win this battle.
A smile slowly spreads across her face. At least, not conventionally...
“Your turn.” The Blue Commander says with more than a hint of smugness.
“Alright...alright...” Sunset reaches into her pocket. “You see that damaged cruiser there?” She points to a cruiser with several large gashes in its hull. “Well, I’m…” She pulls out the card in the most needlessly dramatic way possible.”...going to use ‘Warp’ on it!”
The moment the card is drawn, the cruiser vanishes in a flash of electric-blue light as it plays Cat's Cradle with space-time, then instantly reappears deep inside the Enemy fleet, within fondling distance of the Blue flagship.
“Really? One dinky little cruiser against my Flagship?”
“I’m not finished.” Sunset pulls out another command card, smiles, then turns it around, thrusting it into the air for dramatic effect.” I’m also activating Self-Destruct!”
The moment she announces her move, the little cruiser fires its engines and hurls itself toward the command station. A jet of flame shoots from its engine block. The ship begins to glow a bright orange.
“Time to roll.” Sunset scoops up the dice, mumbles a quick prayer to Lady Luck and her colleague Admiral Awesome, then rolls the little cubes onto the floor.
“Yes”, she pumps a fist. Double sixes. Exactly what she needed.
The orange glow turns blinding white...
-
“Oh come on!”
Rainbow Dash looked down at the game board, a goddess overseeing her servants. “That is so cheap!
“Hey, you know what they say..” Sunset said, plucking the game piece from the board “All is fair in love and Space Wars”
She looked over at the terrarium on her desk. “Isn't that right, Ray?
From his glass universe, the leopard gecko just stared for a moment with that perpetually smug look on his face, then licked an eye. If he had something to say, he was keeping it to himself.
“C’mon, Rainbow...” Applejack called from the kitchen, rummaging through Sunset’s fridge and pulling out a bottle of Purpleberry Punch soda. The geode around her neck glowed as she wrenched off the cap. “Play nice..”
The blue-skinned teen groaned. “Fine…” She grumbled, consigning the little game piece to a tray alongside other fallen pieces, consigning it to a plastic Valhalla where they would wait for the goddesses to call upon them once again.
“Cheer up, sugarcube,” Applejack sat down, patting her friend on the back, “‘Yah still got Neptune and Pluto.”
Yeah…” Rainbow glares. “Fine.” She scowled. “But from now on, that move is banned. Got it?”
“Whatever you say.” Sunset
Now, I’ll spend ten command points for a command station. “ She reached into the tray and plucked out a piece, then planted it on the cardboard firmament. “And with that, Uranus is mine!”
“Pffft…” Rainbow’s face scrunched up.
“What?”
“Can you...say that again?” Rainbow said, a soft giggle escaping her mouth.
Sunset raised an eyebrow. “ Uh, Uranus is... mine?”.
Rainbow held her hands over her mouth, cheeks puffing out. Applejack just rolled her eyes and took a sip of soda.
“Yep, now it’s Ur-anus! Rainbow giggled.
“Okaaaayyy…” Sunset said, reaching into her pile of tokens. “Now I’m going to spend some command points...” She picked up a few of the cardboard counters and dropped them into the tray. “...To scan the planet for resources.”
“Heh, yeah, you’ll wanna take a good look at...Uranus.”
Sunset scratched her head. There it was again. “I’ll launch some mining probes and build a gas refinery…”
That earned another suppressed giggle from Rainbow. “Wow, you’re really probing Uranus. Really penetrating it.” Another muffled giggle. “Good thing it’s so gassy...and huge.”
“And... while I’m at it, I’m going to buy a few destroyers, and an orbital defense platform, and a spacedock just in case.”
“Good move, you’ll need to...PREPARE URANUS!”
That childish pun was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rainbow shook and shuddered, then broke in an uncontrollable fit of raucous laughter. She pounded a fist against the card table, rattling the battlefield, knocking over pieces’. From upstairs, a neighbor pounded on the floor, yelling at them to keep it down.
For a moment, Sunset just sat there, wondering what her rainbow-haired chum found so amusing. Even after two years in this world of hairless monkey people, there were still times when she fell afoul of their culture's norms.
Oh well. At least it wasn’t that time she learned about their “nudity taboo”
Profusely perplexed and puzzled, Sunset turned to Applejack. “Uh, Aj? A little help?”
Applejack finished her soda and sighed. “Think about it, Sunset. Uranus. Yorr-Aye-Nuss.”
“What about it? It’s the name of an ancient god, what’s so…” Something clicked inside Sunset’s head. She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Grow up, Rainbow...”
“Ah, lighten up,” Rainbow said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “It’s funny!”
“Rainbow. “ Said Applejack in a monotone voice, “That joke’s older than mah Granny Smith.”
“And it just keeps getting better every time!”
“Next time we’re playing Monopoly” Sunset muttered under her breath.