Lunam Natis: Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Into Venusian Orbit

I wake to the bright morning light as my father pulls open my blackout curtains. I groan and roll over, not wanting to get up.

“Good morning, Kasia,” he sings, the fluff of fur at the end of his lion’s tail twitching back and forth. Wow, he must really be in a good mood.

“It’s to early,” I complain, trying to burrow deeper into my covers. He laughs and pulls my blankets- and me- off of my bed. He leans close to my ear.

“Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey,” he whispers, his mane tickling my cheek. I smile in spite of myself. Ever since Mother disappeared, we’ve had a really good relationship. I get up, and he leaves the room, so that I can get dressed, and so that he can wake the twins. I hear their complaints as he wakes DJ by tickling him, and Hayden by throwing a glass of ice water on him. You can’t wake him any other way. He is such a deep sleeper that if you threw even lukewarm water on him, he wouldn’t so much as bat an eyelash.

Breakfast is a delicious feast of DJ’s eggs, my pancakes, Father’s toast, Hayden’s banana muffins, Joy’s waffles, and donuts from Bella’s Bakery. No one else helps make it, but they all help to devour it. Ursa, our dog, eats the most. At one point, she jump into my lap. I push her off and continue eating.

“Aw, c’mon! Just a little food…” she begs.

“No,” I tell her. “You’re already overweight as it is.” She gives me puppy dog eyes, and I shake my head firmly. She trots off, sides wiggling. When she was younger, we would call her Misha, which is Russian for Little Bear. Now, she isn’t so little anymore, so we call her Ursa, which is Latin for Bear.

“Why is it so warm in here?!!” Mila Mousina complains. “It’s getting hotter by the minute!!”

“Or maybe you’re just a little hot under the collar,” Rita jokes. Rita is our resident rhino-human. She’s part rhino horse and part human, except the traits are that she just has one rhino horn on her head. I’ve heard that in other worlds, rhino-horses are called unicorns, bird-horses are called pegasi (singular is pegasus), and rhino-bird-horses are call alicorns. To me, that just seems confusing. Why not call things what they actually are? I’m pondering this when I hear a yell from the living room.

“Stupid TV!! It’s not working!! All I’m getting is static!!” I hear DJ yell, then a thud as he throws the remote on the floor.

“That’s weird,” I say, getting up to go check on the TV set. Everything’s in place, I don’t know what went wrong. It must’ve been something with Terra’s artificial TV satellites. Luna doesn’t have any of its own, so we can always blame it on Terra. “I’ll go over to Stargazer’s later on and check on it,” I reassure him. Stargazer’s is a restaurant and the only observatory open to the general public. Because of this, it’s actually highly exclusive, and you have to have a membership to get in, and getting a membership is hard. Plus, they have really high prices. They kinda defeated their purpose there, I think. Thankfully, due to my smarts and good grades, I have the all-exclusive membership, which is not normally offered to people my age.

"But I wanted to watch the game!!" My brothers are obssessed with football.

"It'll be fine," I say, finishing getting ready for the day. I help clean up the kitchen, then head out with Joy. She doesn’t have the all-exclusive pass, but since she has the level below, she can piggyback on mine. I’m responsible for both of our actions in this case, of course.

Stargazer’s is packed when we arrive. It seems as though all of the Stargazer’s members are here at the same time. I hear whispers passing through the room, coming from the direction of the observatory and spreading.

“Is it true?”

“Did Terra disappear?”

“Is the TV out of service??”

“Are we drifting into empty space?”

“No, we’re going to slam right into Venus!!”

“I heard that a meteor shower hit us out of orbit!!” I survey the confused room, and take the quickest path to the second observatory, the one reserved for those with the special pass. I put in the keycode and Joy and I slip into the room. Inside are a few professors and geniuses, and a few astronomer hobbyists.

“What’s fact and what’s fiction?” I ask. They look up at me.

“Well, Terra didn’t disappear. We got knocked out of orbit by those impacts we felt yesterday, which were actually a meteor shower that we protected Terra from. They didn’t hit us, but they hit the closest colony to us, Luna Trabem,” one of the nicer professors summarizes. I bow my head. I had a good friend in Luna Trabem, whose namers where a bit more creative, Moon Beam. Poor Lia.

“Where are we going to end up?” Joy asks.

“If we continue on the course we’re on now, we’ll end up in Venus’s orbit, and will end up stabilizing their axis, and protect them from meteor showers. Terra will start to tip, and wobble, and will miss us badly. I expect that we’ll be in range of Venus’s satellites in a few hours,” one of the younger men, in his mid thirties, who studies the stars in his free time. He has huge glasses and pale skin, on account that he never goes outside, for sake of studying. He’s jokingly called Stella Discipulus, Star Student, because of his passion. I rack my memory for his real name. Oh yes, Carbry Queen.

We rush home to tell the gang what we’ve learned. They’re none too pleased to find out that all TV and movies are gone until we reach Venus, and then, what if Venus doesn’t have the ones they want to watch? Everyone has questions that even I can’t answer. I finally just go up to my room to escape everything. I work on some U homework and take a catnap. Before I know it, everything’s working again. It’s unbearably hot, but the temperature has stopped going up.