station72 | (no subject)

CHARACTERS: Sam and you
WHERE: The Bearings
WHEN: day 46
SUMMARY: After the b&e on Public Security, Sam's distraction efforts have been noticed...by the extranet.
WARNINGS: Memeloving shitposts.

[ So. It's...definitely not bright and early the day after the break-in, because some hosts were up way past their bedtimes. (Some hosts will deny up and down that bedtimes are a thing they should ever have to consider, because oh my God what do you think he is, six years old or something.)

But he's slept in, he's finally stumbled into the shower, and Sam has parked himself in the common room with the news on, a few extranet feeds up in front of him, and a bowl of something vaguely like Cinnamon Toast Crunch drowning in something vaguely like chocolate milk, because researching what everyone knows and what everyone thinks about their highly illegal activities is an important activity and working out that scroll button works up an appetite.

And then he stops in the middle of a bite, spoon still in his mouth and one eyebrow shooting up, as he takes a look at what's actually going on in one of those windows.

It's some badly captured footage of his light show from last night - a bright blue blur doing a few loops and barrel rolls, and some text in a loud, annoying font slapped on the bottom: YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN THIS. Another one, this one just a still cap of the same: I DON'T KNOW, THEREFORE ALIENS. A few others, with text with varying degrees of ironically poor grammar... ]

-hmgd.

[ Right. That spoon was still in his mouth. He takes it out, swallows his mouth full of cereal, and tries that again: ]

Oh my God. I'm a meme.

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Yep! Lots of tentacles and everything.

[ She gives him a big smile before she takes a mouthful of coffee and swallows it. ] But that, and I don't think I know how to swim.

Mom made me take swimming lessons at the YMCA when I was a kid. Which is kinda funny when you think about it, because we live in the middle of the desert.

[ Yeah that's pretty weird, all things considered, but then again, she shrugs. ] Well, if Pandora taught me anything? Just because it seems unlikely to happen, doesn't mean it won't still eventually kill you, somehow. So better to know than not.

Okay, fair. If someone told me a year ago what my life was gonna look like now...

[ He'd have laughed them out of the room, probably. ]

[ she looks vaguely contemplative for a moment, as she takes another mouthful of coffee. ]

... There are less cannibals?

[ A blink.

A pause.

And then: ]

I'm not sure which part I should be worried about, the part where your home has so many cannibals or the part where that's "less" but not necessarily "no."

[ she shrugs, like, ah, what can you do. ]

You haven't heard about what Petre's diet entails? Trust me, better me than you. I stopped even being grossed out by it when I was well - probably your age, I think.

[ What. ]

I, uh.

I haven't.

[ Well, uh, shit. ]

He's a demon. Like, teeth and all, firey, crawled out of hell, that kind. So I don't know if it's really cannibalism because he's not exactly human? I suppose so, if you define it by sentience rather than species. [ huh, a question for one day. ] But... it definitely seems to be one of his required intakes.

Wow.

[ This is news. ]

That's, uh. Special?

Also kinda gross.

[ And if it ever really shows where she came from - it's now. There's no recoil, no disgusted noises. Though she keeps the fact that she knows she craves meat more than she has any right to these days to herself. ]

Yeah, definitely gross. But it is what he is. He keeps it fairly well contained, given what he could probably be like otherwise. [ Presses her lips together, and maybe she really has thought about it too much. But then again, she's seen it enough that she's had to if she were to need to explain it. ]

Has he had to do that...like...

[ Ugh, is there even a polite way to ask this. ]

What does he do on the station?

[ He's trying not to think too hard about what those dietary habits mean on a planet full of other people, but the station is...just the nest. He can only assume that Cathaway isn't too keen to let him chow down on other hosts. ]

Oh, well you know there used to be more of us, right?

[ She says it with a perfectly straight face and everything. ]

[ A very long and uncomfortable pause, before he comes to a decision about what to think: ]

Bull.

[ She shrugs gently. ]

I mean I'm safe, brood and all that. Aoba too. But we couldn't decide otherwise. So we just sort of wait until he's hungry, and everyone has to run, and whoever gets picked off first.

[ But hey, at least a real statement, rather than an open-ended question intended to provoke an assumption, is really easy for him to contend with, because he knows that just the idea they're discussing wouldn't get him that queasy. ]

Screwing with me doesn't work that well, you know.

[ Damnit. ]

Really? Why not?

Because I drew the short straw when they were handing out powers.

[ Not that spotting lies isn't useful, it's just.

The nausea part. That kind of sucks. ]

Something to do with lying, is it?

[ Curious, now, but granted, her symbiote abilities were an extension of what came to her naturally as a siren to begin with. She loved them, really. ]

Yeah. It's...really obvious when people do it, now.

[ Hilariously so. ]