Turbulence at 36,000 feet.<br/>Despite sounding like the opening credits to a B-movie, that was the situation of the small commercial plane. Not enough people boarded a flight due up the ass of Alaska come 6 AM, not when that same airline had attempted a two for one special to Barbados that weekend…  yeah, Jack wiled away a few hours looking into every aspect of the journey she could, including where the hell else she could be instead—what kinda shit-kickin’, discount airline pulls a two fer one, nohow?!<br/>It wasn’t that she was complaining (a good portion of their budget had gone on her own cameras, one had even made it through to hand luggage after a word with management. Thing of beauty!) just… well, it worried her when seats for something so big and metal and HIGH UP were being given the same sales pitch as a pack o’ pork rinds…<br/><br/>Anyhow, ground control hadn’t deemed its ticket sales worthy enough of a bigger set of wings for this route. Or, more to the point, a<span style="font-style: italic">better</span>set of wings.<span style="font-style: italic">This</span>craft and all its passengers, bobbed through the stormy altitudes like a message in a bottle…<br/><br/>It turned Jacks stomach, like milk fermenting into cheese.<br/><br/>She sat on the furthest back [see ‘closest to the emergency escape exit] seat of the group and wore a face like thunder. Jack didn’t ‘sit’ on the pokey little chair so much as occupy it in protest. Damn thing was pokey enough to battled the poor sonova next to her for the elbow rest and their soul, she had won already, and that her knees kicked the back of the seat ahead like an angry toddler. She had since flung both boots up onto the headrest of the thing, much to the relief of the fellah in front who’d prefer the company of her dyke-lookin’ boots to her goliath, footballers knees in the small of his back.<br/><br/>Jack opened the handheld’s display monitor with a muted click and thumbed through the last few days of video bloopers. Just her and the family playing around until she got to grips with her new toys…<br/>Here was Steve, the eldest of the seven siblings, teasing/ helping Ma as she fought with the stove…. There was Buck showing off with a guided tour of the motocycles he’d par-built, Donnie and Dickhead smoking a cheeky joint on the river bank (Donnie was the dog, Dickhead the brother who, despite clearly wearing a student ID badge that said ‘Richard King’, was universally known by his loving pet name. Even Ma occasionally tripped up and hollered,<span style="font-style: italic">‘Dickhead, food’s ready!’</span>), even a few short snippets of her own irritable face as she fluffed up its settings…<br/>Jack thumbed through them and started to systematically delete them, pausing once or twice to watch a sneak peek, grin to herself before continuing. Now was the time for a new start! Like the memory card in this here camera, Jack was more than ready to wipe away the past and start on some new memories…<br/>--No, fuck memories! Maybe even a career! How suhweeet it was!<br/><br/>----------------------                    -----------------------------------------                   -------------------<br/><br/>One significant jolt and Nino flinched almost three inches from his own skin. Blind panic flooded his system and for a moment he shakily struggled to adjust his own glasses, before glancing wildly at his fellow travellers and cabin crew to see if anyone else was a startled as he was, tragic looking dreads whipping out around him like lazy snakes waking from night terrors.<br/>Travelling, man… travelling rattled him to the bone…<br/>What if they weren’t reaaalllly going anywhere?<br/>Oh god, this could be like a Truman Show experience! The planes windows could be just images on a screen, it’s not like you could open them and feel the cool breeze ripping off your cheeks, what if you went up that walkway and the pilot simply drove you to a new set… or maybe the best team on earth simply built the new set around you in the X hours you’d spend hugging the sick bag until the colour fled from your knuckles…<br/><br/>Maybe… more research was needed before he could start betting good money on this one, but it was a nice hypothesis… a little crazy sounding, but then reality had a dreadful habit of being fifty shades more bizarre than reality…<br/><br/>“Ugh,” a low, guttural noise rattled up the broken drainpipe of a throat and slipped past his lips, he grit his teeth and clasped his scrawny knees together. Already his skin was clammy with misery and a cold sweat sucked his shirt into the small of his back, further prohibiting his ability to breath.<br/><br/>Right now, Nino had ceased to be human, he was now only so much claustrophobia and acrophobia (a fear of heights) sinking into a seat made of various high-poly plastics… WHICH CAUSED CANCER!<br/>This was useless! All he was doing was mulling present anxieties in a gumbo of old conspiracies!<br/><br/>“H-h-hey…” he attempted gingerly, carefully leaning through the small window between seats and into the space of his only recently introduced team mates, if only to distract himself from the current situation, “I d-d-don’t think we were properly introduced at the buh--” a sudden wave of nausea swept over him and he had to clutch the chair, clench shut his eyes and swallow back a dry heave before continuing. Nino groaned and added a quick, humiliated, “Sorry… I… I’ve never flown… b-before… erm,” a quick pause as his mind regained control again, “At the briefing… we, uh… I got your name, but I also have an awful memory,” he shot them a sheepish, awkward grin, all crooked and full of sharpened teeth, “I’m Nino! Science guy!”