"You sure you're gonna be okay alone for 40 minutes?" asked Marley. Lawg looked confident.

  "You kidding? The Lawgman thrives on solo missions. I'm one man army!" he bragged.

  "Yea, you sure are, and we're proud of you. But, the taxi is early, Greg and I need to go pick up the new shuttle and since the girls are not back yet, you need to stay here and man the big lever. When we get back, just pull the lever and we can land, then push it back so the big door closes. Can you handle that? Lever open, we land, lever back." Marley asked slowly.

  "Just go." Lawg said looking insulted. "Freaking 3 instructions, like I'm some kind of moron." he scoffed.

  "Alright, that was easy." Marley said, reaching altitude. Simple matter of buying a new shuttle online and taking a taxi to get it, bring it back to the ship. I'm sure glad it only took 15 minutes so we didn’t have to talk much or make it awkward." Marley nodded.

  "Yep, just a couple of coworkers getting a new ride, not saying anything to each other, keeping it masculine…you got a red light there." he said pointing at the panel.

  "That looks like a warning light. I'll have Duffy look at it when we get back. She's the shuttle mechanic." he shrugged as the lights flickered and the steering went out. "Well that's not good." Marley nodded.

  "Try radioing the Taste-E-Turd for a tow. I think we got duped on that shuttle price." Greg sighed.

  "Radio's dead. We could be drifting for a little while. It's fine, I mean when the girls get back with the working shuttle pod they'll see the beacon and pick us up. Just a problem with an annoying little wait time. Probably between 15 minutes and an hour tops. We don’t even have to talk." Marley said, getting comfy.

  The other shuttle drifted silently in space as Duffy tinkered with the engines.

  "Nope, it's dead. Can't be fixed, trust me I know shuttles, I lived in one for 18 months…was it actually this exact one? I dunno." Duffy sighed.

  "How screwed are we?" asked Izzy.

  "It's fine. We're close enough for radar and already late, so the boys back on the ship will see the blip and get us with the new shuttle pod. 40 minutes tops. You wanna listen to music or just chat?"

  "No point doing too much conversation of we'll be back with the boys within the hour." said Izzy.

  "Captain Lawg's Vlog-Log: It's been 3 hours and nobody is back. I'm a little worried, and the AC knob broke off when I turned it, so it's getting chilly in there. Duffy fixes that stuff, but they may not be here for hours. I'm trying to fix it but the manual is half in Spanish and the other half is upside down. I can't read Spanish or upside down English. I don’t know why they can't just use regular English and upside down Spanish like most manuals. I may be able to just glue it. I'm also really thirsty and Greg stole my 1982 Chavez. I still have liquids but I'm out of booze. Duffy was supposed to bring me my monthly supply with the shuttle, but she's not back yet. It's getting very nipply in here. Perhaps I could construct a rudimentary hearth." he said shivering to himself.

  "We're gonna die." Marley said flicking the nest of loose wires he pulled from the power panel.

  "Why do you always immediately resort to giving up?" Greg asked.

  "Space is brutal. Only the strong survive. I'm a 4 foot furry runt with the muscle tone of a PB and J sandwich…awe man, now I want a sandwich. Why did I skip lunch?"

  "Strength isn't everything, intelligence counts more than strength out here." Greg shrugged.

  "Says the biggest strongest survivor of all time." he scoffed.

  "Bad example, I'll admit that. However, it's not my strength that makes me great, it's my intelligence. I just happen to be both, and very overpowered. That's why I'm double great. I'm a very heavily unbalanced person. You could realistically be half that great if you tried. Also, while we're stuck here with nothing to do but talk, what the hell are you exactly?" Greg asked. "Government Lab experiment like that movie raccoon? Regular bunny they overfed GMO's for a school 4H project?"

  "So that's how I became a shuttle drift-racing champion, third year running." Duffy said as Izzy looked fascinated.

  "Wow. That's a lot of backstory for 10 minutes of conversation. Did you ever pay off that debt collector or is there still a bounty on your head?" She asked.

  "Well, when the ship exploded it took out the book keeper's computer so I'm Scott-free. That's also why I swore off ever relying on a man to take care of me. Men are great for an hour or two but then they just let you down. All the smart ones have thin pretty wives they cheat on, and the hot ones are always dumber than a brick." She shrugged, holding up a brick.

  "Why do you have bricks in a shuttle pod?" Izzy asked.

  "I assume someone is pranking me. They just keep showing up."

  Lawg steadied his brick, lightly tapping the screwdriver to hammer on the temperature knob he glued together wrong. He gently tapped it, and the knob crumbled.

  "Crapfart." he huffed. Okay so I don’t wanna freeze to death. If I just unplug the AC, the reactor should just warm it up in here naturally. If it gets too hot, plug it back in. a thermostat is just a little guy turning the AC on and off. I can do that myself." Lawg shrugged, grabbing his pliers and following the plug to the wall. He clamped on and tugged it out. The lights went out across the ship, the AC kept running.

  "Captain Lawg's Log Vlog, the yellow wire is not the AC unit. Now all the wires are black. Everything is black. It's still getting colder. I must fight the cold the way my ancestors did…with manly power and a mighty bonfire." said the voice in the darkness.

  "Arranged marriage, sounds terrible." Greg nodded as Marley warmed his hands by the heat of Greg's ambient body heat.

  "Delmarians usually get arranged, that or you win a wife or husband if you kill someone in Sanctioned Fupar. You win, you get the other guy's shit…house, wives, game system. It's a very brutal society. You'd be a king there in like 30 minutes or less. You ever been married?" Marley asked, chewing on some rations.

  "Half-dozen or so times before I decided it wasn’t for me."

  "Couldn’t keep them satisfied or they couldn’t keep you satisfied?" he joked.

  "They're all dead."

  "Kay. That's horrible…you didn’t just like…eat them?" he asked nervously.

  "No that was back when I thought I was the only one left of my species so I married mortals for lack of options, and they just got old and fell apart. Mortals do that. Not worth the emotional connection." Greg shrugged. "Make a life-vow that's good for what? 60 years? Pointless blink of an eye."

  "So with that horrible depressing thing out there, I'm gonna divert by changing the subject to something fun. You like Pandas? We had a Panda for a little while. Smoking hot, tall, fluffy, and I like Asian girls, so that kinda worked." Mar smiled.

  "You really avoid subjects well, don’t you?" Greg asked.

  "Oh yea. Coping Mechanism. That and some good weed just keeps me from exploding into panic all the time. That and video games, food, stamp collection."

  "I hate video games." Greg sighed.

  "Shocking. What does Greg NOT hate, that isn't booze or women, or violence." he asked.

  "I like a good bloody steak." he shrugged.

  "Mkay, so still kinda passive-murdery. Other than eating dead flesh and groping live lady-flesh and hacking off enemy flesh, and booze…what defines Greg?" he asked.

  "That's definitely the bulk of it. I like violent music too." he yawned.

  "Captain Lawg's Vlog Blog: day 15. The fire suppressant halo thingy put out the fire before it spread to B-deck, but the air is very contaminated. I successfully located the AC wire, it's not a plug-in, just goes right in the wall. I can't unplug a plugless plug that doesn’t plug, so have no choice but to cut it with these scissors. They should handle the electricity well, being made of solid metal. I can't imagine them possibly melting, they are way sturdier than those thin rubber handled ones in the tool box. Rubber melts. You can't expect rubber to survive that much elecrical-tricity. The manual said not to make contact with any ground, fortunately this is a spaceship, and the ground is several hundred kilometers below. I've soaked my gloves in cold water to make sure the electrical heat doesn’t burn me." he said reaching and squeezing the handle. He let out a girly yip as sparks flew and Lawg went flying across the dark kitchen by the light of the wall-fire.

  "The Maffia?" asked Izzy, shocked and stunned, still less than Lawg, obviously.

  "Space-Maffia, and technically you can't be a Don if you're a woman, so I never showed my face. Scariest 3 weeks of my life. I still have the ring." Duffy said digging in her pocket, prodicing a gold ring.

  "That's just such a complicated story that I'd never believe it if you didn’t provide those incredible details." Izzy said, shaking her head.

  "I've lived a rough but entertaining life." Duffy humble-bragged. "And that was before I got married to Mark Whaltberger…" she said, producing the wallet of pics that made Izzy's eyes widen.

  "Oh wow. He was somehow even more white back then."

  "Thank God for Cryo-freezing." Duffy chuckled.

  "It's just so hard being tiny." Marley complained.

  "Everyone's tiny." Greg scoffed.

  "Let me try this example. Imagine you were on a ship with me, and I was the size of a shuttle craft, and you were a sentient carrot."

  "Right, that would be hilarious and terrifying. I like Hilarifying imagery. I see your point. You do realize I'm not actually going to eat you?" Greg assured.

  "I'm not fully convinced, actually. You genuinely worry me. You did literally eat that goat, and that goat was about my size. God, I'm so hungry. Why did I eat my one ration right when I got nervous?" he regretted.

  "I can just print some food."

  "Power is out, computer is down, food printers need a lot of energy." he shrugged.

  "Should still have the memory of the last meal it printed in the solid state drive. If I just gave it a power boost, it should work. You'd have to be willing to eat whatever it was, and most of us eat meat."

  "I have a high metabolism, I eat constantly or I crap-out, so it's getting desperate. How you gonna power it?" he asked. Greg grabbed the plug and stuck it in his mouth. His eyes flickered blue and the printer fired up and started lightly smoking.

  "Neat…don’t print just one though you're gonna burn the thing out, so print until it dies and I'll ration the food out." Marley said excitedly.

  "And Javier still writes me letters." Duffy explained. "It's almost poetic because when I was in the joint, I had mad fan-mail piled up and wouldn’t even read it. Those Delmarian guys just love a fat girl with a criminal record. But when you get released, the bad-girl vibe goes away and they stop writing. Except Javier." she said looking nostalgic. "But they never did find all the cocaine, so they eventually let me go. You won't believe where I hid it…you might, but you don’t want to. Actually I'll just tell you." Duffy said looking hyper and sweaty. Izzy was getting concerned.

  "No, that's fine. I've seen enough pictures for a while. You seem nervous. Are you overheating, or just worried?"

  "Maybe a little claustrophobic being in another broken shuttle pod. I'm fine, really. Did I ever tell you about the Blue Heart-shaped diamond I found in the debris field?" she said, looking fidgety.

  "Urmegurd." Marley said looking hooked. "This is amazing. What is this?"

  "Pizza: Mushroom, olive, and Fetta I believe. Duffy's last creation."

  "And there's no meat?" he asked.

  "Nope. You lucked out for a vegan." Greg noted.

  "This crumbly stuff is incredible…is this made from a cow's boob milk?" he asked hesitantly.

  "No…honestly I can say there is no meat or cow's milk in this item. That's called Fetta. You luckily got the 1 in about 8 kinds of pizza without meat or cow-based dairy." he nodded on technicality.

  "Where have you been all my life?" he said lovingly, to the pizza. "So yea anyway I wanted to be a doctor but my mom made me go to bounty hunting school. She said I was too weak to survive on Delmar but there are plenty of inferior species out there that even a runt could shoot with a net or dart-gun in the back, and then turn in for cash. My cousin got me the job and I botched it so bad I ended up with the Lawgman and the chick he was trying to bang who eventually got pandified and hot, but then left to live on the panda planet. It's fine. Duffy's a good cook, both of us manage to fix the ship and Lawg…well he owns the ship. It all works out."

  "You could probably take him, take over the ship, make him fix and clean stuff." Greg shrugged.

  "Na, he's too dumb to fix an AC knob. Plus, if I wanted violence and mutiny I'd have stayed on Delmar with the wife. Glad we didn’t have kids or they would be about my size by now. It's custom when a Delmarian child reached his father's size and weight to challenge him to secondary Fupar. Me being half the size of most males that would be about when they were 5 or 6, and I'd probably lose."

  "I get that. My eldest son kicked my ass and exiled me to a prison planet for years. Ungrateful shit." Greg grumbled.

  "Right? What's with that crap? Respect your elders, even if they are smaller. That's why I'll never have kids. Too dangerous. That and the women that find me adorably cute are always non-Delmarian. Delmarian women usually just find me pathetic. It's like a broken record, you buy them a juice, flirt a little, they challenge you to Fupar and you have to leave town and change your name."

  "So Fupar is basically just thunder-dome?"

  "Yep, to the death, except secondary Fupar, like when the kids challenge their parents. Instead of to the death and you get their entire life's possessions, it's just first blood drawn on the torso and they just get to be called a man. It's a right of passage that bumps them to adulthood and bumps you to elderly home. They usually just put you in a retirement village. Sometimes they come to visit, or finish you off."

  "That's basically what Christophe did. He proclaimed himself the big man and stuffed me in a strongbox, shipped me to a retirement home. Prison planet, but just for me and the people that cook for me and stuff. He didn't even fight me legit, it was a trick. He just outsmarted me and lured me into a holding cell." Greg growled.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "That's cheap. If you can't fight someone, at least challenge them to a game of rules and strategy or a bake-off competition or something. Fupar is barbaric but at least it has honor. I would prefer some choices of competition like maybe a fighting video game or a chess match but still. Rules. Dude, we're so much alike. The Multiverse just kinda effed both of us in the tail and got us stranded with idiots and cheats. Granted you got immortality and a groupie, and I got shot down by a panda, but yea kids suck. At least de-throne your elders with respect." he said grabbing another slice. "But seriously though, you'd really never eat me even if I pissed you off something?" Mar asked.

  "Nah, only if you died from natural causes already, and the meat would be wasted otherwise, so it's eco-friendly like you do."

  "I guess that kinda makes sense in a gross carnivore way. Just donate my game-buddy to some sick kids and blow all my remaining money on cool fireworks for the funeral." he nodded.

  "I'll blow up a small moon in your honor, or at least a very large space station resembling a moon."

  "Captain VLog's Blog Blog: day 92." he said breathing heavily as he ladled water over his head and wheezed. "With the AC off, it's getting really hot in here. I tried opening the window…doesn’t open. It's like they designed it to not open or something stupid. I tried to convert the hot tub to a cold tub by plugging it in upside down so the electricity makes the water un-heat. Just made it hotter. I may have double reversed it by mistake, I dunno. The space-badger is back. I think he may have never left and we just didn’t know, because he was hiding under the deck and eating the toaster pastries I often drop between the slats. I assumed the squeaking sound was just them rubbing together when the ship moved. Nope…badger. I was going to fashion a weapon from one of the weapons in the weapon locker but it's locked. We don’t have a key. I think Duffy has the key because she doesn’t trust me with the weaponry. It's a good idea but currently unfortunate for me right now, with a formidable space-badger plotting my demise. God it's so hot." he said standing up and pacing bare-ass naked in front of the webcam. "If I can just get one window open and let in some fresh cold space-air, I'd be fine." He wheezed.

  And then THAT ship blew up and I got stuck on another shuttle pod. It's hilarious how that keeps happening!" Duffy chuckled while excessively sweating and turning very red.

  "Duffy if you need to take a nap or something, It's fine. You do not look okay.

  "What? Like space madness, from getting stuck on multiple shuttle crafts? If I didn’t go crazy then, I'm not going crazy now, you're crazy for thinking I'm crazy." she said suddenly moving like she saw something.

  "Just gonna take a closer look at that brick you got, yea good, here with me. No more brick for Duffy" Izzy smiled nervously. "Why don't you tell another fun story."

  "Like the time I got trapped in a shuttle pod, or the worse time I REALLY got trapped in a shuttle pod? The third time is really interesting but you were there too, Izzy!"

  Marley sighed, a little bored. Greg looked bored as well.

  "You know this is just filler" Greg yawned.

  "Dude, this is totally not filler, this is important stuff."

  "Okay, but it's filler. It's absolutely just bullshit stuffed between bits that are important, so as to stretch it all out. Someone was probably half-assing it at their job and trying to get paid for nothing. It's filler, and it's removable."

  "Fine, then you remove it." Marley suggested.

  "I'm not gonna take that chance. I'm about 90 percent sure it's filler. That ten percent results in something very important being lost, so I tend to not act on my theory."

  "Because you know it's valuable material. Us being in this shuttle pod, entirely because of this need for additional material. It's probably karma."

  "I'm just saying, they could have trimmed it back a little." Greg shrugged.

  "And lose something useful? What about lighting? If we trim this insulation, we could overheat the wiring." Marley said, now pointing to the panel they removed to fix the ship, stuffed full of what looked like bed-foam.

  "It's foam filler, it doesn’t keep anything cool, it's just shot between the important material so wires don’t get tangles in zero-G. It's all filler!" Greg assured.

  "So cut it." Mar said, handing over the snippers.

  "There could be wires inside the filler, you're the tech-guy in this universe, you cut it. I prefer to not explain that I killed the bunny because I was proving a point and missed a ground wire or something." Greg yawned.

  "Captain Vlogs Blog Lawg: day 33." he said in the darkness, huddled around a small candle for warmth with ice in his oddly long beard and nose hairs. "I got the window open. The emergency reactor blinky thing activated and now it's not too hot anymore. I think the badger is dead, he may just be frozen to the deck, I don’t know. Though the window did solve the heat problem I now have only hours or minutes of air left so I need to make air somehow. I have studied documentaries of brave men stuck in space alone, and how they survived. Apparently I just have to science the shit out of something and then bury potatoes in that shit I just scienced. This Mike Whatburg guy that got lost on Mars made oxygen from just water and fire. I'm fairly sure there are still small fires smoldering in the cardboard insulation around the ship so I just need water, and if I can open a water pipe near the warmest parts of the deck, I can either make air or just put out the fires. Both are good and I'll do that. Then I just need to start shitting on some potatoes and I'm fine. I can do this…Lawgs never give up. Lawgs never lie down and let things take them over like creeping moss or mushrooms. A Lawg always stands tall like a towering tree before they cut it down. damnit I'm monoLawging again. What does a plumbing pipe look like?" he asked the frigid darkness with a breath of fog. The darkness responded with a very badgery-squeak, and a shrieking Lawg followed it, as the candle went out. There was more screaming.

  "You sure you're okay?" asked Izzy. Duffy smiled with a profusely sweaty face and continued to rock back and forth. She giggled maniacally, fading into a frantic run-on speech.

  "It's fine, I love shuttle crafts. I usually sleep in this very shuttle craft. Did you know I once spent 18 months in a shuttle craft by myself? Just me and the little flickers of light. They're not bugs, there are no bugs in space, silly fireflies, you don’t exist, you're just rogue neutrinos passing through the shielding that clearly isn't beta-7 rated like it says on the panel or the particles wouldn’t be getting though and hitting the back of my corneas like freaking 4th of July rockets. OH SAY DOES THAT STAR SPANGLED…BAAAAANEEEEEEERRRR-"

  "I guess my biggest fear is everything." Marley said casually munching on another pizza slice.

  "You can't be afraid of everything." Greg scoffed.

  "Oh yea. public speaking, public Fupar. Getting Fupared while giving a speech in my underwear, while in school, I have that nightmare all the time. Space, space itself is horrifying and Delmarians can survive in space for almost 30 minutes before it becomes permanently damaging and we swell and boil and explode. These chin danglies here…that's what they do."

  "How does that work?" Greg asked.

  "No idea, I never went to med school. I studied how to shoot people with darts and then tie their hands and feet with tape. It's like a 3 week course. Most of it is just always having tape and a huge dart launcher handy. I got like 5 roles of tape in the console right now."

  "Dart gun?" Greg asked.

  "Oh, I sold that for snacks and weed. I enjoyed those Jalapeno cheesy crunches way more than the stupid dartinator 4000."

  "You don’t eat dairy." Greg noted.

  "You really believe that powdery orange dust has any cheese in it?"

  "It might." Greg suggested.

  "I know my snacks. Don’t badger me about snacks, bro."

  "THE BADGER IS BACK!" screamed Lawg, frantically swimming past the floating laptop webcam, as he desperately whacked the badger with a whack-stick he found in the closet. "It won't die, badgers cannot be killed!" he sobbed as he suddenly vanished, pulled aggressively beneath the surface waves, as the ship slowly filled with water from the open water-vale he broke earlier. And then alarms sounded. A combination of the big butt song and twinkle-twinkle in E major echoed solemnly like an anthem of an ironically lonely and comical, yet dark watery grave.

  "Stop hitting the battery with the big wrench, Duffy!" Izzy yelled.

  "I'm not gonna die in a freaking tin can shuttle pod, with another chick and no pizza. If I have to die, I should at least be given the freebie of one last pie and a skinny dude with great hair to feed it to me. This is unacceptable and lame. Why do I always get stuck in shuttle crafts? Why do I keep getting back into shuttle crafts, and why do I keep getting into shuttle crafts without emergency dudes and pizza!" she cried and frantically whacked the battery. "DUDES AND PIZZA!!" she screamed.

  "Dude, this pizza…this pizza, dude." Marley said kicked back and getting fat.

  "You literally ate 3 days rations in 2 hours." Greg informed.

  "Bro, I panic-binge. I'm riddled with insecurities and coping mechanisms. When I was a kid, my mom would just feed me like crazy to get me to have a growth spurt. All I did was get wider but it's fine because I'm a space-bunny, so chubby works for me, but I never got taller. Lame!"

  "Being taller isn't always better. Yea, it's great to be slightly taller than everyone else, but when you pass the 6 foot 4 mark at 15 years old, it just gets problematic. Now I run into doorways, every ship looks tiny to me. Humans hunt you down with pitchforks."

  "Humans suck. They make your life miserable if you got one little weird thing like a big nose or red hair or you're a half-scale space bunny or something. They're always all "go into the vents, scrub the vent fungus. Like why murder the poor fungus. Space fungus isnt even bad for you, it's just a lil thing trying to live and humans are like "naw, gross, kill it with lemon spray!"

  "Or shoot it in the eye when it's sleeping."

  "Bro…damn." Marley sighed. "Really?"

  "Oh Yea, that's a thing. When you're invincible and they know it, they always assume you have vulnerable killspots. Eyes and crotch, every time. You know how many arrows I've had fired at my face and nuts?"

  "Not cool, they ever spray you with cleaner?" Marley asked.

  "I did wake up once from hibernating and Nazi's had me in a tank of electrified Acid. That sucked."

  "THOSE GUYS SUCK EVEN MORE!" Marley said getting riled up. "Did your universe have a Hitler? That guy sucks the most. We stole our Hitler's pants and left him on Delmar 7." he bragged.

  "Nice…did you dip him in honey or anything so the bee's would swarm?"

  "No but Delmar 7 is like 80 percent huge, Jewish Delmarians, so…he dead."

  "I can respect the ironic humor. See, you do have a warrior side, you just use your brain as a weapon because you got mental power. I got mental power and also just physical power, so I alternate between psychological warfare and just retaliating with axes and stuff. Axes are more fun, so I tend to lead with that. It's easier to enjoy the vengeance when you can't die."

  "This is how I die." sobbed Lawg, his head now inches above the water and the ship's roof inches from his head. "The reactor heating up the water is kinda nice, so at least I drown in a giant hot tub with all my things around me…except hoes, I could use hoes but otherwise kinda okay." he said to the laptop. "You are my only friend in the end Captain Blogs, Blog Blog. You listened when nobody else was around but the Badger. He died a fighter. I respect that. Since this is the end of my spectacular adventure and there is no surviving it, I give to you my most deepest darkest secret, slightly deeper and darker than the part of the ship below me, now filing with warm water and trash debris. I should have cleaned more. Duffy was right. Anyway before I die, I want you to know I will soon be the way I was when I was a kid…swollen and bloated. This wispy lean statue of a man that bobs before you, was not always the prime epiphany of sex-appeal that you see bobbing before you, as the epiphany of sex appeal. I was once the fat kid. They called me Stumpy, because I was a Lawg and as wide as I was tall. They used to trip me in the bathrooms and laugh. They called it dropping the Lawg. I see the Irony now that I will also die like a dropped Lawg: bobbing in some nasty water and either sinking or floating till I am flushed into space. It's fitting but also pretty gross.

  Part of me wishes I could spend this moment with someone else…ideally random floosies, but then maybe if not that then Duffy. I don’t know why I find her so hot. Maybe her shameless fatty strength reminds me of myself when I was younger, and I am really, really, ridiculously good looking, so anything resembling me has to be at least doable. I always said if I ever had to do a guy…it would have to be myself…but again, too gay so ideally more floosies. It's so strange and freeing to say that out loud to a computer. I see why trolls do this now. That weight lifted off me, maybe just the weightlessness of space or the water I'm drowning in, but it's like I've been given a few more sweet moments of life. Like the water has stopped rising, or slowed down to give me a chance to make my peace with Space-Jesus and my many mistakes…most of them being not banging that Uka chick we had onboard before she turned into a gross panda. The water is giving me one last moment to breathe and enjoy life…and it was a glorious life." he said bobbing silently in his triumphant glow of self awareness. "Wow this is taking forever to fill. I really underestimated how much time I had left to say that. This is awkward…maybe the water just hit an air pocket and oh, oohp, there it goes again. We're moving. FREEEDOOOOOOMM!!!!!!!! He yelled to himself, ready to die.

  "Sorry about that little freak out." Duffy said as Izzy restrained her in a full body lock, waiting for her to stop moving before letting her go. "I swear I'm cool now."

  "Okay, but if you go for the wrench I'm gonna knock you out with this brick, mkay?"

  "I'm fine." Duffy nodded as she let her go. "Why do we keep finding these bricks everywhere?" Duffy asked.

  "It's a good question. So no man in your life? Doesn’t that get lonely?" Izzy said kicking back casually as ever as if she wasn't just wrestling a wrench from a crazed Duffy.

  "You'd think, but you just need a good set of wrenches and you can get the same satisfaction." she shrugged. Izzy's eyes got wide and she blinked.

  "Oh, wow…yea didn’t need to know that part."

  "No, not like…you just tinker on engines and stuff and it takes your mind off the loneliness until it goes away."

  "Right, like what the thing wrenches are made for, I got it now." Izzy sighed in relief.

  "I mostly just bottle up the horniness and pretend the shuttle craft is a guy and I can make him all shiny and sexy and he listens when I rant and never forgets my birthday because it's programmed in the calendar, and he never disappoints me until I get stranded for the 3rd time in a shuttle craft adrift in space…again. But the Tast-E-Chill get's terrible gas mileage and we have to stop for fuel every week so I got this app on my phone that let's me know when we stop at a fuel station with some truckers who like fat chicks." she said handing Izzy her phone.

  "FuelandFlubber.com, yep that's a real thing on your phone isn't it?" Izzy nodded awkwardly looking at the screen.

  "Lotta lonely skinny guys with great hair and a secret fatty-fetish that hang out at stops. So I manage, and it's not a bad way of living until you get stuck on a shuttle craft without men and pizza for the third ti-no I'm good, no brick. I stopped myself." she backpedalled as Izzy lowered the brick.

  "So Lawg is your type?" Izzy asked with a face of sadness.

  "Visually yes, stupidity no. He's a dumbass tool with no personality but he looks nice." she admitted.

  "I don’t get it. He's a complete jerk."

  "From the woman doing Greg." Duffy noted.

  "Okay yea, you got me there. None of us are right in the head." she sighed. "Why is nobody rescuing us, can't that Lumberhead see the radar blips or is he just floating around in his stupid hot tub?" Izzy scolded.

  Lawg bobbed silently in his giant tub. He looked more disappointed than scared.

  "Captian, blobs blob whatever. It's been easily an hour. Water hasn’t moved. I've realized the ship must be slightly larger by volume than the volume of water on the ship. So I guess I'm not drowning until I get too tired to tread water. I think Lawgs float so maybe I'll die from lack of booze as I bob here like an olive in a giant martini. Temperature is nice. The amount of cleaner in the hot tub has diluted in the rest of the ship so it's actually decently fresh in here. I did find an olive. That was okay." he yawned.

  "No, this is great. I may die in here, but I get to hang out and eat snacks till the oxygen runs out. Just fall asleep. It's toasty confined this close to a big nuclear demigod. My game buddy has a ton of batteries so I'll die way before it does. This is basically how I live normally." Marley shrugged. "Less junk food and weed, but whatever."

  "Okay, fair enough, but if you decided you wanna go quickly, I can do that so fast you wont even know it happened. I could surprise you while you play your game." Greg said casually.

  "No it's cool, but thanks."

  "You know…I was saving this because I didn’t want you to binge eat your rations, but you already did that anyway so…merry Christmas little guy." Greg said removing a thick joint from his jacket.

  "Niiice. I get to die baked with a friend."

  "I get to die boiled and alone." Lawg said to himself as the water temperature rose and the water level didn’t. "And there is no shame in what just happened, no shame at all. Everyone has done it. Fish pee in their bowls every day and they can't escape that. Fish seem okay with it. It's a natural bodily function and this is a lot of chemical-filled water, so it's fine. No shame in this. At least I didn’t rip ass and have to smell it, confined in this tiny little air bubble." Lawg sighed in his own urine.

  "Oh for the love of Odin, Duffy!" Izzy said fanning frantically. "We're in a small confined air-bubble, and I have heightened smell receptors." she yelled.

  "It's a natural bodily function, there is no shame in it. At least I didn’t piss myself or something. That's way worse. Everyone farts, Izzy, it just happened to be a 50/50 chance and it was me." Duffy defended.

  "Not everyone farts!" Izzy yelled back.

  "We just…don’t do that." Greg laughed as Marley wheezed and cackled hysterically in the foggy air bubble.

  "Osirians don’t fart! That's amazing. Where does the fart go?" he rolled, laughing.

  "We don’t metabolize anything, our ancestors just ate radioactive rocks and now we use antimatter fuel cells that last 50 years. The food just burns up under the reactor heat. It's entirely unnecessary!" he laughed. "We don’t even need oxygen, breathing is just a vestigial habit from being raised around humans who do it. Every time we exhale it's just vented elemental plasma and the bio-mass just comes out as odorless heat. It's like belching out toaster air!" he wheezed.

  "My best friend is a fart-less toaster!" Marley wheezed hysterically.

  Lawg bobbed like a log, silently and dumbly.

  "Maybe I could find the toaster. People die from being in bath tubs with toasters. That might be quicker than starvation." Lawg pondered. Suddenly the water level began falling rapidly.

  "No, no no, delete floggly's log blog!" Lawg yelled, paddling for the laptop frantically as it drifted away with the water and his confessions.

  "MY FATTY CONFESSION!" he squealed.

  Marley and Greg stood ankle deep in water, in the cargo bay, as the room pressure stabilized.

  "Good thing we were already pointed towards the ship. No way we could have manually steered to the shuttle bay and opened it with the remote otherwise. Duffy's gonna be really mad about this mess though. We're super blaming it on Lawg!" Marley said with buggy eyes.

  "Oh definitely." Greg agreed as a light "bunk" sounds pinged off the hull.

  "That's probably the girls running into the outside of the ship. I'll go fire up the grabby-arm thing and bring them in. I can't believe I forgot these shuttles have auto-steer. I super thought we were gonna die." Marley chuckled.

  "Whacky fun. I guess that Chafee-luck has something to it. Well this thing's ruined." Greg said picking up the soppy laptop with the fatty confession. He tossed it in the trash to be ejected into space where nobody in the next season would ever randomly stumble across it or anything. That's impossibly unlikely.

  "How much do you think it's gonna cost to fix this disaster up?" asked Greg.

  "Probably just slightly cheaper than a new ship, so we still end up in the exact same place we were before it happened. Everything always seems to wrap up that way, so we're always still on this junker, and never get a new one, and we're always broke so we have reason to do the next bad idea to make money. Purely to keep eating and whatnot. Circle of life." Marley yawned. "Anyway my bunk is waterproof so I'm gonna nap this off." he yawned.

  "Alright, good hang-out." Greg said, shuffling to the door to seal the airlock before the grabby arm loaded the girl's ship. He wanted to greet Izzy when she got in.

  "Good day." Greg nodded with his arms patiently crossed. "Is that a dead badger?"