I threw my weight against the door and opened it to be almost swept away by the roaring wiping waters that zipped by at high-octane speeds.

"Whoops!" I say in a dizzy voice as I slam the door back closed, but not before getting absolutely drenched with pitch-black water, my adrenaline reaching a fevered high as my entire body began to vibrate.

I don't even know how I'd closed the door, with such massive amounts of force pushing against it once open, but I just knew that I did.

I literally felt like Hercules in this moment, able to do anything without so much as breaking a sweat.

But also at the back of my mind, I knew I was on a ticking clock.

So instead of Hercules, I was more comparable to Popeye. All this strength, speed, and power, was temporary and VERY unstable...at best.

Assess the situation, react.

Those were the only coherent thoughts racing through my head as I rushed back to my computer to get vital statistics before making my next move.

It didn't help that my ship currently tipped at a 45-degree angle, but I made it and the stats weren't looking good.

The front and sides of my ship had already tipped into a nose dive, and the ever-fast-growing currents were about to rip me to shreds or completely pull me under. Or both.

"Computer, calculate current water speeds and set up a navigation trajectory to steer me out." I call out as I enter in a manual command to deploy my two liferafts to give me some buoyancy and steal a couple more minutes for me to stay afloat.

"Current-water-speeds: 120-miles-per-hour. Predicted-to-max-out-at-300-mph-in-the-next-3-minutes."

"Gawd dayum!" I whispered under my breath.

"Best-likely-chance-to-escape-Titan's-water-current-gravitational-pull-apply-thrusters-and-aim-North-West."

"North West!?" I yell back at the computer. "But that's heading INTO the eye of the bloody thing!?"

"Once-apex-is-reached-immediately-aim-North-East-then-full-East-and-engage-boosters-to-escape-imminent-doom."

The look I gave my computer would've made it blush in shame if it had any sentience.

"You're basically telling me 'turn left to go right'! This isn't the bloody fucking Pixar Cars movie!! It's been 2 decades and I STILL don't understand what they meant by that!!!!!" I yell.

"The math checks out." Carol gives me a thumbs up with her glasses on while looking over her notes where she quickly did the computer's math to probably double check.

"HOW!?"

Freaking NASA scientist and their inhumane ability to do computational maths on a dime!

"You know what, fuck it. Just do it anyway." I turn around and start locking down shit so items don't start flying around from such an insane manoeuvre. Shutting cupboards, putting away plates and other sharp items, locking my bathroom door, and shutting off the water valves to not burst a pip leading to my reverse (treated) water tank.

"System-navigation-disabled-due-to-heavy-damaged-sustained."

I froze.

"WHEN!?" I bellow the question.

"2-minutes-ago-from-water-current-picking-up-speed-to-250-mph."

I suppress the murderous urge to scream.

"You know what? Just kill me. LET me die a horrible death in peace." I resign as I look up at my chat. "All this effort just IS NOT worth it!!"

[💛Mel, no.💛]

Comment has been deleted.

"I swear it's not me!!" Carol jumped in to defend herself from the comment vanishing.

Raising an eyebrow I check the list of people currently viewing me, which was in the hundreds of thousands currently, but I digress.

"What the-!?"

Leo's comment history was...gone?

Not just that...but his entire account's existence just vanished before my eyes.

In an instant, he was there and suddenly...snap! He's gone.

I dreadful feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.

But I had no time to dwell on that as another sharp justle to the ship brought my attention back to my imminent demise.

I push myself away from my control panel and beeline to a cabinet drawer next to my bathroom door and started pulling out egregiously long lines of rope.

"The fuck are you gonna use THOSE for!?" I hear Carol call behind me from the screen.

"If the ship's navigation is busted, then I'm just gonna have to manually steer the ship!"

"Fucking how!? You gonna tie some flimsy ass string around the ship and steer it like a goddamn horse!?" She cries.

I turn around and give her a mischievous grin.

"MELISSANDRA, NO!!!"

"Too late," I reply as I finish strapping two bundles of ropes around each of my arms and head for the door.

Not forgetting to grab my live stream visors to allow me to see chat, and give chat a front-row seat to the madness about to unfold.

"Alright, guys!" I say, jumping back into my online streamer personality as I strap the visor glasses to my head. "We're about to stare the jaws of death right in the face. Any potentially last words?"

[Nothing to it, BUT TO DO IT!!!]

[*Insert closing battle speech from the 300 movie here*]

[WE'VE FACED WORSE AND LIVED!! THIS IS JUST A REGULAR TUESDAY!]

[GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH!!!!!]

I crack the smallest of smiles and pull the door open.

An absolute living nightmare waited for me on the other side.

                                                                 *                    *                    *

I instantly hook my arm around my metal edge rail before the high wind speeds rip out of my door and into the water.

I squat down and turn up the magnetic field of my space boots to max capacity to ensure I don't slip and fall. It may make walking harder, but it's better than then flying off the ship.

Speaking of the ship it tips drastically in the opposite direction at 35 degrees, almost sending me tumbling back into the ship.

"Aaah!" I scream out as I forcefully untangle my arm being bent in the wrong direction as I shimmy across my edge rails to a spot just to the middle and side of my ship.

Pushing myself down while balancing next to the ship, I tie the rope along the lower edge rail, and engage the rope's own magnetic charge and latch the end of the rope into a small charging-shaped hatch at the bottom.

"Now to just repeat this on the other side, and we'll be halfway done!" I cheerily boast.

Several groans were typed out, and obituaries written on my behalf in the chat room.

[💛The current is about to change in 5 seconds. Brace yourself!💛]

Comment has been deleted.

I turn on my glove's magnetic fields then and press it to the side of my ship.

Not a nanosecond later the ship violently tips towards me and I contemplate if i could've survived the sudden shift with my boots alone.

No time to ponder near-death experiences, we have several more to face!!

A good chunk of my rope was thrown off the edge. But good thing one half was already attached, so I spent 3 minutes pulling it back up with one hand and my thighs. As I preferred to at least keep ONE hand and two feet magnetically attached to the ship just for good measure.

By then the ship had equalized and I made my way back to my main door, and reached out to close it cause my dumbass forgot to, thankfully nothing seemed to have fallen out cause I'd properly stored and locked everything away. But something told me not to close my door fully.

So I listened to my gut intuition and left just a slight crack open and continued walking till I reached the metal ladder stairs that led to the roof of my ship.

Disengaging the magnets on my hands for just a moment, I reach up and climb to the top and fully got a look at what was going on around me.

Good lord, I wish I hadn't looked.

I climbed back down the metal ladder to gather my thoughts from what I just saw, and contemplated if throwing myself into the water now and ending it all would probably be a more merciful death.

[🎶Fuck this shit I'm out! 🎶🚶🏽‍♂️💨]

[Mel. Sweety. What did you do in a previous life to deserve this!?]

[I still bet $200 she'll make it. Crazy hoe is like a space cockroach. She just WON'T die!]

[I'll take those odds!! 🎲🎰💸]

Scuffing at my chat, I climb back up and look into the eye of the maelstrom.

It swirled down into an endless pool into the very depths of Titan, probably a 50-foot drop at minimum.

The sight of which looked like a blackhole collapsing in on itself and eating itself whole when it has nothing left in the universe to consume.

And that wasn't even the scariest part.

No. The truly nightmarish part was the one...two...three??? Large tentacle monster(s!?) emanating from the peak of the whirlpool, as if its large mouth was consuming the very ocean and the strength of its hunger was causing all this.

"Pfft! Imagine if it was causing all this destruction, trying just to eat little ol me..." I joke out loud.

[💛.....💛]

Comment has been deleted.

I pause.

"IT'S NOT TRYING TO EAT ME...IS IT!?" I then yell.

[💛You'll definitely survive this! I believe in you!! Also, Dion says "hi 🤍"💛]

Comment has been deleted.

Internet connection to chat has been disconnected.

"Mother-FUCKER!!!"

Something or someone was messing with my communications with Leo.

Was it someone from Leo's end? Or did the old farts at NASA finally decide to cut me off???

No time to think. We gotta act fast!! I chide myself

I quickly grab and hurl the rope over my shoulder and slide down the other side of my ship to tie it down.

With no contact to Leo, I had to predict the ship's tilts on my own.

I played it safe at first and did my two legs and one-hand magnet trick.

But then I realized a side of my ship was too far gone into the current as it permanently tipped at a left 45-degree angle.

Propping my shoulder against a loose railing, I use my teeth to get a grip of the rope and pull it tight, before finishing the job with my hands.

I spit out the harsh taste of rope burn as the ship justled while the rope was still in my mouth. Tis a miracle I still have teeth left.

And they didn't all get violently yanked out just then.

I wonder what my audience is thinking right now? People must be a nervous wreck clutching the edge of their seats.

It was weird not having a livestream chat yelling at me their every waking thought.

How was I supposed to know how people felt or reacted to my actions!? WHAT WAS THE POINT!?

I took a sudden deep breath and made a mental note to evaluate my borderline unhinged codependency with my online chat in the near future if I lived to see it.

"Okay, done with the straps. Now for the fun part!!" I say aloud, imagining what the replies would be.

I shimmy up the side wall and make my way to the top.

The subtle taste of iron overtook my mouth, and I dabbed my fingers against my lips for them to come back bloody.

Yikes.

That doesn't look good....

I grab onto the tethered rope that now wrapped around the ship. Wound my arms around it like a coil, and began to tip to the right to manually navigate the ship.

My system navigation sensed the slight shift in pressure and adjusted its course accordingly.

Now to just do this however many more times till I'm out of this mess.

A LOUD beeping almost murdered my eardrum.

"Answer call!!" I yell over the spraying water as I struggle to see where next to manoeuvre.

"THERE'S A HUGE TENTACLE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!! VEER LEFT!!!" I heard Carol scream at me.

"But what if I tip!?" I cry back.

"JUST DO IT!!"

"YE-AAAARGH!"

Slamming my foot down on the roof, I yank with all my might as the ship sails on the very edge of its helms across the water.

The immediate vicinity around me was misty and hazy with all the water splashes. But Carol was right.

A tall massive column of a singular inky black tentacle reaching up from the depths of the black water careered by me.

The gelatinous surface looked viscose and...alive.

Suction cup-like objects bubbled black ooze along its surface, as if waiting to trap its next unsuspecting victims.

I feel my legs begin to slide off the side of the ship and I lose my balance. I acted quickly and slammed my knee into the metal roof to stay on top.

I swallow the sharp pain that swiftly ran up my body and pulled the ship back towards the right.

My eyes had apparently been squinted the whole time, cause when I fully opened them again my chat was back up on screen and going feral.

"Omg! You guys are back!! I missed you so mu- hold on one sec!!" I yank the left rope and tip the ship's nose, barely skidding around the edge of a tentacle slowly wiggling on the right.

Chat was flying by in a haze but all I could catch was.

[Doing great-]

[.....focus!!]

[My grandma,]

[STAY STEADY, STAND FIRM!!!]

I wasn't sure what was happening, but my money was on Carol reconnecting my internet and my access to chat.

"Someone's fucking with our communications!" I hear her growl next.

"I NOTICED!" I yell over the growing ringing in my ear.

"I'm able to keep things up and working for now through my remote server at home, but I swear to CTHULHU if I catch the bastard who did this, I don't CARE what species they are, they're going extinct!!!"

I cackled.

"I don't doubt you for a second." I smirk. "But I require some assistance right now." I casually remind her. As if I wasn't straddled atop my ship trying to navigate it as I stared into the very heart of Tartarus.

Speaking of unholy sights.

Why was the giant bloody monster suddenly........in front of me!?

"SHIT!!!!"

I throw all my weight back and point my nose at the sky.

"Engage boosters at 10-second intervals, and begin charging main thrusters for aerial ascent!!" I scream at my computer.

Engaging-boosters. Charging-thrusters.

"What are you doing!??" Carol yelled-asked.

I feel the boosters engage, and I begin to lightly skip across the ocean water like my ship was a pebble tossed across the surface of a lake. But instead of skipping a rock, I was skipping an entire spaceship.

Several smaller tentacles appeared, curving above me like giant nightmarish archways, and around me like venomous jungle vines.

I skipped over and through them as I was still relatively small enough to pass through.

"It's caging me in," I say back to Carol. My focus lasered in on the path I was carving out in front of me.

"WHAT!?"

"The both of us aren't stuck in the whirlpool.....it IS the whirlpool."

I steeled myself hard, and swung my head to look in the direction I'd been avoiding this entire time.

It looked back at me.

I swear to God Almighty it looked back at me.

It may not have eyes, or any identifiable features that looked like such.....but it was looking at me.

And it wanted to feast on me.

I could feel an aura of raw hunger permeate out of its appendages.

I could almost feel myself get hungry as a result.

That's how badly it wanted me.

"Navigation-system-back-online." My computer informs me.

"Engage ALL thrusters in 30 seconds. Reroute all power to the engine if necessary. Use my manual navigation input to lay a course."

I steel my feet against the metal roof and wrap my arms around the rope several more times, tight, and bunch several loops at my wrists.

"Carol?" I call over the deafening noise around me. Which is an oddity to the usual pristine silence of Titan.

"Yes!?" Her chair squeaked as she was perpetually sitting on the edge of it from what was unfolding in front of her through my end of the screen.

"I need your lightning-speed NASA maths skills," I call out.

"What do you need me to calculate?" She immediately responded and I hear the rustling of paper.

I couldn't take my eyes off the water for even a nanosecond to look at her or chat.

"Which of these tentacles do I need to hit and ride up for me to get the best chance at lift-off? And at what angle of degree?"

I heard furious scribbling.

"There's a path you can take that DOESN'T require you touching the live-action nightmare tentacle porn, but if we MUST use it as a launch ramp it creates more options-"

Carol cuts out as static beeping interrupts, as if our call was being corrupted.

"DON'T....MAKE CONTACT!!! IT'S DEADLY!!!-" The voice immediately cuts out as soon as it came on.

It was Dion.

I feel my throat close up.

Whatever was happening, the boys were trying to help me.

But for whatever reason something was hell-bent on stopping them.

"Well, if no-touchy, that leaves us with one possible path to take with a 33.5% chance of survivability."

Carol doesn't even question the interruption and takes the variables presented into account.

"I like those odds!!" I loudly boast, slamming down my most obnoxious and cheerful persona to ease the unrelenting fear etched across her face and seeping from her voice.

It was the tone of her voice that made me spare a glance at her.

Which also resulted in me seeing the betting odds of my chance of survival going up to a $50,000 prize pool.

"Hey, hey, hey! Y'all can bet on me and LEAVE ME outta the equation when the money's that high!? Some put me in, I don't care how much."

[💛Putting you down for $1,000. Saying you'll make it💛]

[You're disgustingly way too confident in her ability to survive this, fish boi]

[Ya, your support is cute or whatever. But how are you so confident she'll make it? Lol]

[💛I know she will.💛]

The feeling of warm honey melted down my throat and into my chest. Filling me with a sense of confidence like never before, and something else I hadn't felt in a long ass time....

No time to process that second feeling though as the final thrusters engaged and Carol was instructing me on how to manoeuvre this final obstacle before I was, hopefully, home-free.

The life raft at the bottom of my ship that I used for extra buoyancy had been ripped to shreds at this point, and the exposed metal of my ship slowly began to skin into the water and get pulled back by the sheer force of the water current.

It no longer felt like a whirlpool, but like the monster was sucking in the very water currents to try and consume me. A blackhole truly pulling in a helpless planet or star across the event horizon.

Like a forest giant taking in a mighty breath and inhaling all the trees and mountains in its path. Uprooting them from the very earth if need be.

And my feelings only get strongly reinforced when I feel my hair whip back, as the effects of a gravitational force begin to yank on it.

I make the executive decision not to look back and just focus on the task ahead of me.

Anything behind me wasn't real anyway. Yes, that was the lie I chose to tell myself in this moment, otherwise, I fear my sanity would legitimately snap from all the chaos unfolding.

I puffed out a small sigh of relief when I heard my computer's voice again. I was also out of this. I was going to make it!!

"All-thrusters-will-engage-in.....3.....2.....1-"

Then I heard it. I deep primal sound that coated the entire surface of the planet but also rang out demonically in my head.

"F̸̛̩̜͙͍̝́ǫ̷̧̖͉̑͆̒͆͜ȯ̸̯̝̘̗͚̺̃̆͝͝ḍ̴͑"

"Blast-off!"

My ship zoomed out from under my feet so fast I almost left my soul and skeletal structure behind.

I felt something pop! and crack around my wrist region, as the rope tugged tight and pulled me along. The only thing keeping me attached to my metal ship as it navigated its way across the water, like a hot knife cutting through helpless butter, charting it's own path to freedom.

Multiple large tentacles suddenly lunge out of the water and into my path, as if to try and interrupt my escape.

But unfortunately for them, they were just too ginormous, and more importantly slow, to catch up to me and make any kind of proper attempt to hinder my flight exit.

The motion of the water between the monster sucking back the water, the tentacles desperately trying to grab me, everything! The water made an almost funnel-like tube that aimed directly for the sky and I tugged my ship one last time to point it towards this newfound exit and launched myself out.

Jettisoning myself into the sky at Mach speeds.

Had I not wrapped the top around my arms the way I did in several loops, everything would've sure come loose and I'd long since have been yeeted clean off the roof.

Even my magnet boots had come of and I struggled to slide my legs back onto the ship's roof to reattach them as my hands were SCREAMING at the sudden violent pressure inflicted on my wrists.

But I can't complain too much as that is the only thing keeping me alive right now!

I feel nausea rise up my stomach, but I fought it back with the will of Mount Olympus as we took off higher and higher into the sky.

The high shrill of wind whipping past my ear made me fear going deaf. My ear popped several times over, only enough pressure finally built in my eardrums again and stayed stuck. Creating a sort of built-in natural, DIY noise cancelling.

Normally, I'd be inside my ship when launch myself into the stratosphere. But experiencing takeoff from the outside at the highest takeoff intensity?

Yeah, my body will not be handling this well later.

But the thought of there actually being a later, and knowing I survived another unsurvivable moment had me breaking out in laughter as my ship slowly descended to a halt as it broke through the slightly acidic clouds and fully came to a stop.

The laughter grew strong as I break out into uncontrollable cackling.

I undid the ropes around my wrist and triumphantly bellowed into the heavens-

"I LIVED, BITCH!!!!"

The echos of my scream felt so powerful, as if it shook the very planet itself to its core.

My hair danced in the wind, after having come undone through all the madness. Gravity was very low up here, so it had a majestic quality to it as my locks weaved around me, as if celebrating their own victory party.

I was then I had enough clarity to focus on chat again.

[WE WOOOOOON!!! ✨💃🏽✨🕺🏽✨🪩✨]

[I DON'T BELIEVE IT!! OH MY GOD!!! OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!]

[Was literally on my knees with my whole family praying for your survival. Dear sweet baby Jesus!!]

[SHE LITERALLY STARED INTO THE ABYSS AND 👏🏽DID👏🏽NOT👏🏽BLINK!!!👏🏽]

[THIS SHIT IS RIGGED!!! I LOST MY LAST $50, YOU CHEATING B-]

Comment has been deleted

[I KNEW YOU'D WIN!!! Now excuse me while I go claim my winnings]

[🤍💛Never doubted you for a second💛🤍]

I felt tears rise up at that last comment.

I did it.

I lived.

The effects of my drug were quickly wearing off as I remembered,

"Oh yeah, that's right. I'm sick."

And I collapse onto my roof in pure exhaustion.