Snippet #1434032

Now that her thoughts had taken a turn to the gloomy and taciturn, as they so often did, Brihan sat for a few minutes brooding on the nature of existence and the condition of man. Needless to say, she didn’t feel very optimistic. After a while she had the self-awareness to realise that she was falling back into her old familiar pattern of negative thoughts, and that she needed to do something to snap herself out of it.

Deciding to get some air, she rose from the table, exited the dining room and wandered the corridors, her mind full of confused, buzzing fragments of cognition. Normally when she felt like this she would go and do something nice and calming, like lab work, but that option wasn’t available to her at the moment. Doing lab work would mean going back into the mess of the supplies they had brought with them from Armada HQ, and that would mean facing up to the unpleasantness of their current situation and all the unfinished tasks she had to work on, which was not something she needed to do right now. She kept wandering along, and somehow she found herself in a section of the bar occupied by a number of young men and women, dressed up in what looked like the latest fashions.

Brihan’s first instinct was to retreat. She was a bit frightened of these shiny, trendy-looking people who resembled the figures she had seen in popular media. She didn’t know anything about their world except that it was governed by a strange set of rules far removed from her own experiences in Armada, but before she could escape, a group of girls at the bar called to her.

“Oi, bubby! Come on over!”

Cautiously, Brihan approached. There were four teenage girls, with shockingly-bright coloured hair in shades of green, blue, purple and orange. Their faces were decorated with strange sigils and their clothes looked like someone had made them out of artfully torn strips of tinfoil.

“Hey bubby, why you all tanhayee?” asked the green-haired girl. “Come get some sake.”

“Isn’t it a little early to be clubbing?” Brihan asked. For some reason, the girls seemed to find this hilarious, throwing back their heads and clutching each other as they shrieked with laughter.

“Clubbing?” said Purple. “Like, who jigs clubbing anymore? Kay?”

“My grandma jigs clubbing,” added Orange. “She habs like you too. Don’t be sunny, but your habs went outta wise in 2050.”

“My habs?” asked Brihan, mystified by their slang.

“Habs,” Orange insisted. She gestured at Brihan’s body. “Habs, ladki. Get some neo habs, you look baroque.”

“It ain’t early,” said Blue. “It’s late. We ain’t gone home yet.”

“Hey! That trevor over there be desking you!” announced Green.

“Oooh!” The other girls tittered. “He’s jammy! Ladki, he is jammy! Kawaii!”

Brihan had never felt older or more stupid. Her brain seemed to be disconnected from reality, and the effort of translating these young people’s speech wasn’t helping. She briefly considered asking what a trevor was and what desking involved, but then she decided she might not like the answer.

“I love your hair,” Blue told her. “It looks bueno. You should dye it pink.”

“And get some neo habs,” added Orange, who seemed to have a slight fixation.

Despite herself, Brihan sat down at the bar and decided to stay for a few minutes. Being surrounded by vapid young people obsessed with shallow pop culture was just the cure she needed for her introspection.