A pressing sensation took hold of my head, as if there was a thick goth girl trying to squeeze my cranium with her thighs. I pried my eyes open and pushed myself away from the floor, only to find myself gently floating toward the ceiling.


    A blaring alarm slowly creeped into my awareness, and I suddenly shook awake.


    “Right… The ship was attacked while I was taking a dump!”


    Fear and urgency washed over me, but I still took a second to offer a silent prayer to the Lady in White for allowing me to finish putting my pants back on before the crash.


    Scared as I was, my brain went into survival mode as I surveyed the situation: I was in the airlock room, which conveniently linked to the toilet --- likely as part of some lazy scheme to use the same mechanisms to eject waste.


    I would soon find that those lazy engineers had saved my life.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    “How long was I out…?” On a wall-mounted control panel, a warning let me know that life support was offline, and my time with breathing privileges was running out.


    I rushed to the closest door, and saw the void through a tiny transparent window on it. There was a massive hole in the hull... No, it’d be more correct to say there were a few bits of the hull splattered into the darkness.


    “Holy shit…” I felt a knot in my throat as I realized that, if I hadn’t decided to step out and use the bathroom, I’d be a floating corpse by now. Realizing my life had been at the mercy of the tiniest of coincidences filled me with a dread I couldn’t hope to fully describe.


    But I grit my teeth and I put myself to work. It was going to take some serious effort, but I had no plans to die in space tonight. I turned to the airlock --- the door that was supposed to lead into space, and then to one of the two EVA suits firmly secured to the walls.


    I barely remembered how to put on one of these, but I managed to pull it off and the HUD came online, running a few safety checks. I took a deep breath of relief, and the system warned me to conserve oxygen.


    “Right…” I checked the oxygen timer at the corner of my sight. “Four hours.”


    “If I don’t figure something out, those may be my last four hours...”