Fat girls can't run, let alone fly.

So in my last entry, I kind of lied about being able to fly like Frying Man! I can't fly. In fact, I can barely walk. I have this thing against exercise; it's called, I hate it. What I can do is a lot less useful. I can light up dark rooms with my bare hands. I can make lekos and gobos dance with photons when they're not plugged in. I can shoot pretty streams of colored light from my fingertips and make a boring dark room go from this:

To this:

Completely useless power unless you're in the lighting, electric, or theatre business -- which it just so happens I am.

One thing us theatre techies lack is tact. I shoved my way through the crowd to get to where I was supposed to be going. Hmm. Not so much shoving as I was moving people out of the way with my chest. It precedes me by quite a large margin. I think I smashed one poor guy against a wall on my way rampaging towards the launch tubes. Oops!

I quietly observed the launch tubes. They looked like something my grandmother must have seen on the Space Station Mir. Yeah, like I was going to fit through that. But I had to do it. It was in my mission statement. I wondered if these smaller ships were OSHA certified. I had to get in. The only thing that was keeping me going at this point was knowing that if I, Svetlana Smith, succeeded in my task, I might just have a chance with at least holding my own in a conversation with the man I secretly worship. Oh, and it would make my family proud. But mainly it would just satisfy my obsession.

I got into the smaller race pod with my grandmother's voice ringing inside my head.

"LANA, YOU REMEMBER IN SOVIET RUSSIA, SPACESHIP DRIVE YOU! YOU GO BRING GRANDMA VODKA FROM STORE, BUT NOT CHEAP KIND, ONLY GOOD KIND!"

Ah, those words of wisdom. I wonder if there were laws against driving these things while intoxicated. Probably. And what the hell were all of these buttons for? I can hardly drive a car more modern than my precious white baby. I tried to remember what grandma had told me about flying spaceships. Old people tell the silliest stories!

By the grace of God, I managed to fit into the race pod, and started pushing buttons and pulling levers. The ship lurched forward into space and stalled. Great, I thought, it's like learning how to drive a stick shift all over again. I started the ship up again, and tried to remember my mission objective. Six buoys, around the moon, through the asteroid belt, and back. Well, I mused, it could be worse. I could have had this guy as my pilot.

Once I got the hang of it, the ship was running pretty smoothly. At least this one wasn't spewing smoke out its back end. Getting around the buoys, fine. It was like driver's ed, only this time I wasn't half drunk while trying to parallel park and drive through all the cones. Bob (my ship -- hey, it needed a name, and there's nothing wrong with Bob) and I were doing quite well. We were just out in space, chillin' and having a good time, watching the stars go by, when I felt something squirming around behind me. A hand appeared to my left and started flailing around. Another hand appeared a moment later. Whoever I was sitting on pulled themselves out from under my weight and started coughing and gasping for air.

"Oh, hello! I didn't see you down there." I said cheerily to the green-haired woman, how recovering in the chair next to me. "Oh, you're the one Kirrock was talking about!"

"Kirrock? He's alive?"

"Yes. And he wanted me to tell you that your entire past is a lie."

"He's just saying that to get back at me for making fun of him and calling him a clone. Name's Kayruah. You ran into me in the hallway. I was on my way to go join the Emperor on the Death Star."

"Do you know how to fly one of these things?"

"I can try. I'm better at flying Y-wings."

At least I'd already gotten us through the buoys.

"I snagged some Corellian whiskey on my way here," the green-haired woman pulled produced a bottle filled with amber-colored liquid from under her seat. "May as well get drinking. Flying through asteroid fields makes me worry. Koma went flying through an asteroid field once -- thankfully, she was wearing her short bus helmet, but there was still blood coming out of it by the time we got her to the infirmary."

"Who's Koma?"

"Old friend. Tall, busty, dark hair. Kind of always in a bad mood. Can't spell the work 'joke' to save her life. You'd know her if you saw her." Kayruah shot the race pod around the moon and into the neighboring asteroid belt, taking a large swig of the whiskey. "Come to think of it, I might have been flying that craft. Blood never did trust Koma to fly the damn things. Errr...does this thing have shields?"

I took the controls from her as she continued to drown her sorrows in whiskey.

"...n' then, Kirrock, he say t' me, 'whuz thuh Jedi have tha I dun't'? N' I tell him, I tell him--"

Whatever she told him was drowned out by the sound of an asteroid clipping the rear end of the small pod. Thankfully it was enough of a hit to knock us clear out of the entire belt.

"...I tell him, 'thuh Jedis, they don't have Anakin.' Ah ha ha. Anakin. Anakiiiiiin. He's such a whiner. I turned him down fer a date once -- cuz I really wasn' too keen on the 'Obi-Wan is holdin' me baaack' thing, ya know? Frellin' whiner. You know what he needs?" Kayruah asked me, drunkenly flailing her arms to prove a point as I carefully flew the craft back to the landing pad. "He needs a good kick in the teeth. Man if 'e were 'ere right about now, I'd innerduce him to my two friends." She held up two wavering fists, and the bottle of Corellian whiskey dropped to the floor of the craft.

The ship came skidding to a halt on the landing pad since I couldn't find the brakes. Do these things even have brakes?

I started punching buttons again until I found the button that opened the hatch. Kayruah stumbled out of the ship first, managing to say something about, "takin' a l'il nap" under the fuselage. I rolled my way out of the ship and stood back on (mostly) solid ground. Well, that was one challenge down. Now I was really in the mood for some Twinkies.