Fading Handprints.

Tristan Pork was an artist and a professor. Everywhere he looked he found inspiration, setting his eyes on the heavens he bathed in light and colour. With his paint brush he splashed such things on canvas and with his words he tried to invade the minds of his students with the beauty that stood so bold in front of him. Unfortunately, recent years had brought with them harsh times and even harsher judgement of his work. Paintings were no longer being sold with the fervour of old, and now his teaching was at risk. Who wanted to employ a art professor who wasn't any good at art?

Gripping the podium of the lecture theatre on that first fateful day, Tristan tried desperately to put nagging, insecure feelings to one side and get through to his students. He could just about remember the days when there was not an empty seat, his fame enticing hundreds to enrol in the course, with many other students turning up just to hear his inspiring words and see his new work. Now, however, it was the absences that were most obvious. Row after row of abandoned seat stretched out in front of him, making those students dozing off in the early morning sessions so clear. Finishing early because of soul crushing disinterest, Tristan sighed his now routine exasperated sigh and walked out the door. Looking out across the sky those flashes of inspiration still poured into his mind, but instead of exciting him with promises of glorious creation, he let the images fester in the basement of his mind, until no inspiration could be garnered from them. 'It used to be so easy' he thought, placing his hands on the cool glass, creating a stark image against the orangey-red glow that radiated from outside. Picking up his lessons and examples from the cold metal floor Tristan decided that it was time to stop focusing on the aspects of his life dictated by a couple of cynical critics and to begin to move forward on the areas he abandoned for the sake of art.

Tristan did not realise that he was not going to have that chance. His footsteps along the corridor of the space station were leading towards complete and utter chaos. Beyond his fading hand prints on the transparent chamber you could see a storm crossing the surface of Jupiter and on the planet's horizon, a strange vessel emerged, heralding wonder, beauty, destruction and death.