Moon Over... Just Over (Space: 1999)

[FairySlayer]

Oh, wonderful ending to this! Short, sweet and light on moon dust...perfect. You packed quite a bit into so few words, and I'm positively envious.

Thanks for saying, and for being a bit jealous. I really wanted to do only a drabble, but the first cleaned up version came out to exactly two hundred words, so what the heck? The idea itself was just floating around in my head from years of trying to think up better "Saturday Night Live" skits than they usually have.

How does one run out of moon dust unless there is no more moon to turn into dust? Never seen or heard of the show, but you managed to include enough in that short story that I was still able to understand the premise!

Now I feel really old and geeky, but that's okay. The show was pretty good for the characters and special effects (one of the two highest-budget shows of the 1970s) but a lot of the plots were overburdened trying to tell some "higher message" that was supposed to lift humanity or something.

It was much better when a glowing octopus creature was trying to eat them or something.

Ow, that would reek. Guess they're gonna make for a museum when they all die for some primatives to puzzle over as they pass through another system.

Yes, they should spend their last few months writing journals to both leave on the base and beam into space. Better yet, throw in some fanfiction while they're at it.

The title is brilliant. Best title I think I've seen for a while. I don't honestly know why it appeals to me so much, but it does! Fits the story well, but beyond that it's fantastic word play.

Sounds like they're screwed, unless maybe they could use the moon dust they have less to make jackhammers and make some more? Presumably the process would be too inefficient though, so they'd still die...

Once in a while I get The Drew Carey Show theme song stuck in my head, "Moon over ..." something. It's an upbeat piece and humorous. It's so common in lyrics that it seemed like a good start to a working title. In my mind, I read it as a song starting then a shrug, a shaking of the head: "Just over." I always make at least a working title because a sucky one inspires me to work harder for a good one. So thanks.

Jackhammers would make sense, or perhaps the tunnel boring machines lying around from when the base was made. Maybe we could use technobabble to explain that they can only use the ³He (Helium-3, which is a potential fusion fuel) trapped in the moon dust, but this wasn't meant to be serious. (Me, serious? Seriously?)

However, as above, there's probably some hyper deistic intelligence which will decide to help them out — but only at the last minute.

[FairySlayer]

Hahahahah, wow, that was a funny one. I have to say I didn't get it. I mean, if the station is called "Moonbase Alpha," how can they be running out of moon dust? Unless they had been in the moon when it blew up and they were now drifting in space? If that's the case, OUCH, that looks very bad. And highly ironic, too.

Either way, I liked the hilarity and the cliffhanger ending, which worked really well, for a drabble. I can't really comment on much, since anything I might suggest would be outweighed by the unimpeachable word count. One of the disadvantages of these prompts, I suppose. Still, the writing itself was good, managed to convey the setting fairly well (and as usual, I'm sure I'd have got a lot more if I had ever heard of the show, hah!).

Mostly it was meant to be silly, though as I wrote above it could be only something rare in the moon dust... if I wanted it to be technical. Nah.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by how few people know about the show. It still has a loyal following, but it was pretty much "Sunday afternoon filler" and was messed with a lot. (One example was that the networks showed them in whatever order they felt like.)

At least I'm glad you got a laugh out of it.