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[FICTION] Rygaard | Landing

     Leon awoke in a fog, pierced only by the bleating alarms from the escape pod. The last he could recall was the escape pod [PAINTED] alert going off, and then the bursts began. In a daze, he managed to ignite the door charge, blowing the sealed hatch off, in addition to his eardrums. He slowly began to drag and lift himself out of the crashed pod when an intense pain shocked through him-- a piece of metal from the console was lodged in his abdomen, and had hit the frame of the blown hatch while he exited.

    He tumbled out of the pod, and into the small crater of his entry; at first belly-down, to which he mustered what little strength he had left to flip himself. The pain was nothing he had felt in years. Not since he crashed his first suit when he began his test pilot career, but how long ago was that even? He thought about these things as he stared at the snow falling down on him from the very heavens he just fell from.

    He began to fade in and out of awareness, half-dreaming of the boreal landscape he found himself in, and half of his prior life. He dreamt of his old unit, of his mother, and his girlfriend. He wondered in his dream whether or not he still had a girlfriend. But then he began to dream of something very different. A cold metallic hand lifting him, attached to a large black frame with red eyes, and it spoke, but not to him; "Pod and passenger have been found-- do we terminate?" a deep voice asked to another present, nowhere in sight. "No", a staticky, crackling voice stated flatly, "Add him to the others-- we are behind quota". "Understood" the deep voice replied sharply, and then Leon dreamt of nothing more for some time.

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