Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to First Lines 1000's Challenge #6.

When you get your hand stuck in a jar, you know you're about to have one of the worst days of your life.

I know, I know – how'd I manage that? And it's not something I'm proud of. I'll just blame it on the fact that coffee was long gone from Eta Vulpeculae and I'd stayed up too late the night before looking at the forums. So when I went to get breakfast, I wasn't thinking very clearly and snaked my hand into the jar to get the last two pickled eggs.

All the jars here are recycled, and have been many times – it's too hard to mass-produce things, so anything leftover from the Exodus is used alongside locally-made containers. This one was Earth-made, with one of those narrower necks, and I had to sort of fold my fingers together to get my hand in, and then, well, you can kinda guess what happened.

And no, it wasn't one of those monkey-trap things, the kind where the monkey can't get its paw out of the trap because it won't let go of the goodie inside. I just couldn't get my hand back out afterwards. That sort of thing brings a person to full consciousness pretty quickly.

Now came the next problem: What to do about it? Dean was already out at work, he'd gotten a new job, and that left me with nobody to help who wouldn't tell it to the entire planet afterward. Let's face it, we've become those kind of small-town gossips I didn't think still existed back on Earth - the kind whose lives are so circumscribed by where they live and the people they see daily, that anything and everything that breaks routine becomes a hot topic to discuss.

I really, really didn't want to become a topic on the forums. Dean's head wound had managed to fall off the radar, so to speak, and it was nice to sort of disappear back into the crowd when someone else's problem came up – in this case, talk that someone was developing bioweapons in their kitchen, as dopey as that sounds.

I was due to get to work, too, which didn't help matters. How was I supposed to do work with my main hand stuck in a jar with two pickled eggs rattling around inside?

Which is why I finally snuck out the building when nobody was looking, trying to look like I was using both hands to carry the toolkit, hoping to find Jack before he went off on his rounds. I figured I knew Jack well enough to trust him not to spread the word about this mess.

Jack wasn't in, of course – he'd already left. So I tried to ask where he might be, and the other R&R tech there just waved a hand and said, "Oh, wherever he's most needed." If I'd had something other than a glass jar on my hand I might've given him a knock on the head with it.

Back outside, into the start of the rain. Another rainy fall season. At least Whitehills now had enough sandbags and levees and whatnot to protect the community, even if we had another so-called "century storm" come through, which was unlikely. But hey, what did we know – we'd been on the planet nowhere near 100 years, so how would we know if what we'd been through was a century storm?

Dean seemed better since the big storm, though – more relaxed, more like his old self. Don’t know what happened, but it's a relief to me.

I tried to take cover under the small overhang, but the wind was starting to gust and I really needed to get to work... except I couldn't work with this damn jar on me. I was about ready to just break it and hope I didn't cut myself too badly. It sounds weird now, looking back on it, but I was a little obsessed, I guess, with the fact that the thing came from Earth and therefore it was one of the better-made jars Dean and I owned. It even had the original lid (currently on the kitchenette counter). And we – all Androsynth – had gotten into the mindset that recycling everything was a big help (true) and therefore we should try to avoid unnecessary wear and tear or breakage (mostly true, if not always obeyed). Which is why I had the jar stuck on my hand instead of just breaking it. That, and I didn’t want to add another scar to the collection.

My hands are messed up enough as it is. I'm lucky they're just covered in white scars – each of which I can remember exactly when, where, and how I received it – and there was no permanent damage. Lucky, and beneficiary of genetic modification performed on all Androsynth, making us tougher than Earthlings, among other plusses.

Back to my incredibly bad day: Standing under the overhang, getting rained on from more than one angle, hand in a jar with two pickled eggs. At this point I realized I'd never actually eaten breakfast, since the jar preoccupied me from the moment of capture onward. So I could add "hungry and getting hungrier" to the list. Of course, if I broke the jar, I could at least eat the eggs while going to get my hand stitched up. This presumed, of course, that I could get the whole jar off my hand and the neck didn't remain on my wrist like some decopop bracelet.

At this point I was actually, seriously considering just slamming the jar against a wall and hoping for the best when the tech from inside stuck his head out the door and saw me. "Oh, hey, Nick! Since you're already out, can you get up to the commissary? The dispenser's broken again." "Again?" I couldn't believe it, and at the same time I could. That thing had never worked right since we made planetfall. Still, I thought I'd finally been the one to fix it, this last time. "Fine. I'll do it. You owe me, Larn."

"Sure, no prob, 'kay, thanks." Larn disappeared back into the building before he even finished speaking. I just growled and thought maybe the commissary might have something to help get the damn jar off my hand. And if I got over there fast enough, maybe there'd be the between-shift lull, and I could work on it in peace and relative privacy.

But life has a funny way of interfering with plans, doesn't it?

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com