Oasis

If anyone in the universe thought this couldn’t get any worse, they were wrong.

“You’re telling me that most of our supplies have been destroyed!?”

After smashing their way out of the ship through the back exit, they found themselves on a never ending land of red sand and no sea. Hide knew Saois V would be plain, but this!? This is beyond plain, this world is empty. No plants, no mountains, no creatures, nothing. Just sand that goes on for miles. It’s frightening to say the least, and even though he’s holed himself in his room for days back home, he finally understands the term isolation. Even though he’s with two others, it doesn’t matter. They are just three little people on one big planet.

And they don’t really have a way of leaving it.

“Yes, we don’t have much left.” Akira holds up one bag containing all the food that she managed to salvage from the ship. “Which means we either have to fix the ship before they run out or scavenge.”

“I don’t even think there’s life on this planet.” Amon sounds slightly apprehensive. He is sitting with his back against the side of the ship with one foot, which Hide had to bandage due to a shard of metal somehow finding its way through the boot, resting on his other leg. “Let alone actual food.”

“Then how are we meant to fix that?” Hide motions to the horribly ruined spacecraft. There were tears all over it, the black paint chipped to reveal the silver underneath. The tip of two of the wings had broken off, the pieces nowhere in sight and the ship’s front was very much buried in the sand. It’s not like they could just push the ship back the right way around.

“The power crystals.” Amon answers easily. “They don’t just serve as fuel; they are the best resource for repairing anything and everything.”

Hide scrunches up his nose. “How? Don’t tell me their magical or something.”

“I don’t know. I thought you studied them.” Amon crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow at him that Hide finds himself glowering at.

“I’ll let you know that I-” Akira clamps a hand down on his shoulder, silencing his defensive explanation. He has studied the crystals. He just… can’t remember any of it (it wasn’t important at the time okay!). Procrastinating and messing around on his phone during class seemed like a much better thing to do.

“Anyway~ first and foremost, we must find water.” She announces. “All but one flask has leaked.”

“Uh. Do you even realise where we are? This is basically a desert; we’ll be walking for two years before we find a drop of water.” Hide believes that he’s not overstating anything. Unless someone has the power to turn sand into water, they won’t be having a drink in a long time.

“Alright, just sit here and slowly die from dehydration.” Akira utters wryly, striding away from them towards the vast nothingness. “I’ll just find water for myself.”

“Hide.” Welp, he straightens immediately and doesn’t turn towards Amon. That’s not a tone that Hide can argue with.

“On it!” Hide musters as much fake cheer as he can.

Hide has been walking in a straight line, heat of the sun unpleasantly blaring on his skin through the spacesuit, for exactly twenty-three minutes before he decides to break to silence over the comm.

“Does anyone have any idea why we crashed?”

“No.”

“Does anyone, except for Akira, have any idea why we crashed?” He thinks he hears Amon laugh, but its interrupted by the crackling noise of the signal failing.

“I’m the only other--- here, Hide. My answer is the same as Akira’s, but it is strange that we crashed when everything was fine with our ship.”

“See, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. If there’s nothing wrong with our ship, then it must have been something else that caused it.” Hide puts a hand to the side of his face, out of a habit which he has no idea where he gets from, but his hand meets the side of the helmet instead. “Something that we can’t see, maybe?”

“Y-- mean magic?” That incessant cracking sounds that distort Akira’s voice makes him uneasy, but he ignores it and nods.

Oh right, they can’t see him.

“Yeah, if the power crystals are supposed to be magical heal-y things, the planet might be… weird?” His foot sinks in a little mound of sand and he can feel the burning heat through his boot. He kicks it away absentmindedly. “I mean, Akira, you said that there’s a large quantity of crystals on this planet. The planet could be, like, very magical because of the number of crystals.” There is silence over the comm and Hide can tell Amon and Akira are psychically sharing a look. “It could be that our ship was overcome by ‘magic’. Oh! Or the power crystal that we use as fuel could be attracted to the crystal on this planet-”

“Hide. Whatever happened -- - doesn’t matter. We’ll --- to fix this situation, stop worrying --.” That wasn’t what Hide wanted to hear from Amon, the weak signal causes it to sound even less convincing. There was something extremely creepy about this trip and Hide wants to find out what it is before he goes home, no matter what they say to him. However, he’ll have to just leave his thoughts for now.

“Found any water yet, Akira?” There hasn’t even been a little puddle of water in Hide’s direction, just useless grains of sand. He’s even tried searching beneath the sand. He’s forced to give up, the weather somehow becoming unbearably hot, and its stuffy inside his helmet, but if he takes it off, he fears he might dry out quicker than he can say “Hot damn.”

“Noth--- crsssh.”

“Akira?”

“Signal- al- problem.”

“Wha-” Hide suddenly trips on something, causing him to land on the sand (which really isn’t nice to fall on) with an ‘umph’.

Then he’s rolling, continuously, down what must be a hill of sand that he didn’t realise he had walked on.

“Ow- Jesus. Damn it!”  The spacesuit does nothing against the boiling hot ground. “Ah!” The rolling finally comes to a stop at the bottom and he’s thrown onto his front, his helmet the only thing stopping him from having a face full of sand.

“—de?”

“- -ccccch.”

“Yo. Can you hear me?” Hide groans, pulling himself to his knees. “I feel down a hill or something.” He looks up and said hill, it’s not very tall, but has a large enough slope that he can’t see over it. He really should have been paying attention to where he was going.

“I- - I think you should - strrrrrp- srssss.”

“I seriously can’t make out anything your saying.” Hide doesn’t know whether he should just go back to the ship or continue forward. Returning was definitely the safer, logical option. There’s no point looking for water that doesn’t exist. “I’m just going to come back, okay?”

“Zzzzrp- -” Hide flicks off the switch on his helmet. It’s not going to help him anymore. He exhales noisily, getting up onto his two feet and walking back the way he came. It’s time for this useless journey to end after half an hour of boringness. He’s almost as excited to get off the planet than he was to come on it.

Brushing the sand of his front, he makes his way back towards the hill. For some reason his legs start slowing down, like he’s walking through tar, but he brushes it off as fatigue and the steepness.

Around halfway up, his feet stop moving altogether. He is clueless as to why, they just do.

Turn around.

Hide’s body starts burning, and it’s not from the temperature. His eyebrows furrow deeply as he does as… whatever the hell just spoke in his head tells him to. It came to him like a whisper, yet it formed no words. More like planted the instruction in his brain. It made no sense whatsoever, although Hide complies- is forced to comply.

He wants to turn on his comm again, however something keeps his hand at his side.

When he does spin around, his mouth falls agape.

“Holy shit.”

A decent sized pool of water a few feet away from the base of the hill. He swears on his life that was not there before. He would have noticed.  That luscious blue colour that suddenly turns his lips dry and the soft swishing sounds of the water. It’s enticing and, before he knows it, he is sprinting down the hill, tongue poking out of his mouth, already imagining how the cool liquid will run over the inside of his throat and wet his dehydrated insides.

It’s good to drink.

No shit.

Hide all but collapses by the side of the pond, throwing off his helmet and holding his hand out just above the cerulean surface. He wonders whether he should tell Akira and Amon, they need water as well and he was supposed to contact them as soon as he found some.

NO.

Oh well, they could live without it.

D   R   I   N   K

That sounds like a good idea. Hide’s cupped hands lower themselves into the water, feeling the little waves glide over his skin. He brings the hands out of the water, leading them up towards mouth. The water’s not even in his mouth and even now he can taste it.

No.                                                                                                                                                             

Hide opens his eyes; which he failed to realise he had closed. He blinks, bewildered, and looks down at his hands.

N O.

It’s like the imaginary glass surrounding his conscience shattered.

There is no water. The pool has disappeared, along with the water he was about to drink. It was all an illusion; how could he be so dense? It was like he wasn’t himself for a minute, his mind clouded, something controlling him. Hide throws himself back onto his arms and scrambles away. What the fuck just happened?

Y   O   U

A huge tremor sounds beneath him, shaking the very sand under him. Hide is still for a second and holds his breath, waiting. Waiting to see if it was a one off, waiting for a good time to bolt the hell away. That terrifying feeling he felt before returns and all he can think of are the multiple situations, starting with the mini earthquake that just occurred, and ending with his death.

The noise wasn’t a one-time thing. It happens again, followed by a crumbling sound as loud as thunder.

Hide scrambles to his feet and sprints. Sand isn’t the best thing to run on and just having to lift his legs high enough out of it to take a step uses up so much energy. He almost trips a few times, managing to keep himself on his feet from the major adrenaline rush he’s suddenly having.

He takes another step and his foot doesn’t meet sand.

Hide can only yell as he catches himself from falling right into a massive hole of nothingness that just formed beneath him.

That crushing sound he hears is literally the ground diminishing into a hollow pit that leads into the abyss. His legs sway right above the darkness in which he’s very sure leads to the centre of this world.

Hide tries to pull himself up, only to fall back down. The sand he desperately grips onto slips through his fingers and he feels his eyes starting to sting. One last time, while gritting his teeth painfully hard, he puts all his energy into drawing his knees over the ledge. To his own surprise, his knee gets up high enough for him to climb over the ledge. He crumples on ground, breathing hard, sweat slithering over his skin. He’s alive.

A roar-like sound deafens him. The ground he lies on vibrates erratically, then gives away.

Then he’s falling.