Sunday, December 3, 2017

Day 2: December Writing Prompt Challenge

She had made a poor job of hiding the damage. Duct tape and cargo bay doors did not go together with any degree of finesse.

Olivia stood back and regarded her pathetic repair attempt. The cargo bay door was silver. The duct tape was silver. The tiny amount of paint she had found to blend the two into some kind of homogeneous layer was silver.

The finished look was three similar yet completely unmatched shades of silver.

“That,” said a strident voice behind her, “is the most half-assed, thrown together, eyesore POS fix I have ever seen.”

Olivia sighed and turned to have the argument that she’d known was coming. Her ship’s pilot, Jeanetta, was standing with her arms crossed over her chest and an expression on her face that conveyed utter exasperation.

“Girl, we can’t take the Litnian ambassador to his galactic shin-dig with that god awful mess inside our ship. We’ll be the laughing stock of the entire Diplomatic Corp!” Jeanetta shook her head so sharply that her braids smacked her in the face.

“You mean more of a laughing stock than we already aaaaare,” interjected Ruhan, the ship’s cook, in a sing-song voice.

Olivia gave the cephalopod a glare which he waved away with a tentacle. “It’s just the truth,” Ruhan said, using several other appendages to sort through the meager rations that he had to work with.

Jeanetta snorted. “Now you know, I wasn’t gonna bring up that incident that broke the damn doors in the first place, but… what the hell were you thinkin’? You just gotta get up in everyone’s business, consequences be damned, bein’ your maverick self and savin’ the whole goddamn universe.” She rolled her eyes and huffed. “I don’t know why I work with you girl, makin’ my life all difficult.”

Olivia tried to plead her case. “Nettie, we’re broke. The ‘can’t even afford ramen noodles’ level of broke.” She heard but ignored Ruhan’s heartfelt, “Thank the gods!” and continued on. “We can’t fly with an unsecured cargo bay. We can’t afford to have someone fix it. If we don’t take this job for the ambassador we can kiss both flying and feeding ourselves goodbye.” She paused for a beat and then against her better instincts added, “And if I hadn’t intervened in that bar fight last week that whole place would have been destroyed.”

“Yeah. So instead, our cargo bay doors were destroyed,” Jeanetta pointed out.

“At least we weren’t in there at the ti…” Olivia tried to counter.

“And the peace delegation’s gift to the Galantans of those priceless shiny little marbles was stolen,” Ruhan helpfully added.

Olivia gave him another glare. “It wasn’t all *that* ba…”

Jeanetta continued, “And then dumped, ruined but still identifiable, on the grand staircase leading to the the chamber where the peace talks were taking place.”

Olivia opened her mouth to interject, but Jeanetta bulldozed on. “Arranged to form the letters ‘F’ and ‘U’.”

“Okay,” Olivia grudgingly agreed, “that didn’t go over so well.” At Jeanetta’s snort Olivia conceded, “Fine! It was a dumpster fire!”

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***Much like this writing prompt, LOL! I’ve done what I can and I’m waving the white flag for this one.***

Day 2 Prompt: Random first line generator - “She had made a poor job of hiding the damage…”

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