When I woke up the Alabaster Lion was already wide awake and fiddling with the controls.
“Good morning,” he murmured. I checked my watch. It was 9:30 am. “We’re about to land,” said the lion.
“You don’t seem all that excited about it.”
“That’s because we’re not landing where I expected. I expected us to have already landed in a remote part of the Arizona desert by now, but we’re way off course. We’re floating through the outer reaches of the trinary star system, Alpha Centauri.” (Trinary means three stars orbiting around each other). “I need to find some way to change our course before we get too close to the stars. I believe that due to the excess heat provided by three stars that we might find a sentient life form on a planet very far away from the three stars.”
“Yippee, more aliens,” I said sarcastically.
“I don’t understand why you’re so excited,” said the lion.
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Oh.” I started to get nervous as we got closer and closer to the nearest planet. I started pacing around in circles in the small pod. I got even more anxious as the lion told me to put on a space suit. I grabbed one of the space suits hanging in the corner of the pod (you may note that a circular pod doesn’t have corners, but you know what I mean). I continued to pace until I tripped over a handle in the floor. An airlock came tumbling open and I was pulled out of the pod by the immense vacuum of air trying to escape the enclosed place.
Suddenly I heard the lion’s voice over a radio. “Bbbzzzt Don’t worry- you have a heat shield on your space suit that will protect you from the atmospheric changes as you enter the atmosphere of the planet.”
“What?? You mean I’m going to be on fire?” I heard more buzzing on the radio, then there was a bright spark and a small flurry of sparks and the radio emitted a loud pop and started smoking. Fortunately there was a filter in my space helmet or I would have choked to death on the smoke. Just as the lion had predicted, I was unhurt as an incredible ball of fire formed around me. I hit the ground on the planet with a loud thud. It hurt a lot but I didn’t embed myself in the surface and make a crater. I suspected the lower gravity and thinner atmosphere were the reasons I hadn’t embedded myself in the planet.
I stood up and surveyed my surroundings yet again. What I saw was a bluish craterish surface with strange mountains spiking up in the distance. I was in some sort of space desert. I didn’t have much time to look around though because I had to fling myself to one side as the escape pod came crashing down. Due to the lower gravity and thinner air I traveled much farther than I would have in normal circumstances. I skidded in the blue dirt, sending a cloud of blue dust up into the air.
The lion stumbled out of the ship wearing his very strange lion space suit. I saw the lion moving his mouth but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because my radio was broken. The lion looked confused but then made an “oh, I get it” sort of face and went back into the ship and for the first time stood up on two legs and picked up a whole squadron of paper planes and threw them at me. When I unfolded them I read, “this is a really bad way to communicate. Take off your spacesuit. The atmosphere may be thin, but it’s safe.”
So I did and I noticed two things: the first was that, just as the lion had predicted, the atmosphere was safe to breathe. The second thing was that it was warm. Because you could see the stars in space and three stars circling each other in the distance, it was warm. The stars were emitting so much heat, that even though combining their light didn’t produce a higher amount of light, it did produce a higher amount of heat.
The lion took off his spacesuit as well and said, “well, this is where we’re staying for the time being.”