Orbit Ever After is one of those strange shorts that gets you thinking but is just simple enough that you can obviously understand it. A young man stuck on a spaceship orbiting the earth with his parents and slightly senile old grandfather is leading a rather droll life that is less than fulfilling. The only good thing in his life is the fact that a ship that he’s seen more than once continually orbits the earth in the opposite direction, and a young woman that he’s seen every time looks out at him and smiles. It seems to be the highlight of his day.
His parents however are content to settle in and simply exist in their dingy ship subsisting on gruel and having nothing other than each other to pass the time. Nigel is not content and wants more. So he continually dreams of the young woman and lives to see her pass by each day. One day however when she passes he notes that she’s standing atop her ship, holding something back as though to throw it. He readies himself for the throw, but the force of the incoming object nearly dislodges his air hose, which is also his tether to the ship. Somehow Nigel makes it back, but is disoriented and thinks that he lost the message. Upon finding it however his mother quickly sees that it is a plan made up by the strange girl to get Nigel to come with her, or so it seems.
She attempts to destroy the message by tossing it in the “soup”, which is the vat that melts down whatever they find into the gruel-like substance that they consume. Only when she begins acting sketchy does Nigel find out that she put the message in the soup. Fishing it out he finds it almost destroyed, but there’s enough of it left to allow him to figure out that the girl wants him to jump from the ship to meet her. Nigel goes out ready and willing, but as the grandfather begins to eat his own gruel he coughs up a metal piece of the message that had been deposited in his meal. The father quickly finds out that this small piece has one word written on it near the picture of a person standing on their own ship, and that word is “you”.
Nigel was never meant to jump from his own ship, the girl meant to come to him. However Nigel is already out on the surface of the ship, where he can’t hear his parents or grandfather yelling at him to stop, that the girl is going to jump from her ship. As he sees her craft coming around for another pass, Nigel leaps, only to suddenly realize that she’s also jumping from her ship at the same time. They collide but manage to hold onto one another, but without any tether or any nearby ship to hold onto they begin to tumble into the earth’s atmosphere, burning up as they go.
It’s kind of an odd way to end what could be a very interesting love story, but ah well.
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