Snippet #2261355

FSS Salient
Lower Decks

Hyena frowns lightly as Clyde neglects his meal and stands up, looking like he'd gotten the bad end of a pub crawl. She stands as well, pondering, for a moment, if she should help him get to Medical before he ended up loosing his footing and meeting a bulkhead face-first. But he recovered enough to walk, and Jess didn't want to intrude upon the personal problems of a Bridge Crewman she only knew in passing.

Besides. The blur at the edges of her own senses suggests that a much smarter choice would be to seek out the welcome embrace of her bunk. Better to be locked behind a door where Victor couldn't get to her when he figured out most of her 'electrical troubles' were manufactured solely for the benefit of getting a rise out of him.

Chuckling at the image of the Controller's face - red with embarrassed rage - Hyena deposits her tray and slips out of the Mess, moving in the opposite direction of Clyde's line of travel.

Halfway to her destination, the pilot is thwarted. Angry red emergency lighting and yellow caution tape, combined with a very stubborn civilian contractor, bar her straight-line shot to the decks that housed the pilots' quarters.

"Decompressed?! What do you mean decompressed?!" She throws her arms wide in exasperated disbelief.

"I mean just what I said, Lieutenant." The contractor was singularly unmoved by the pilot's animated plea, "We're doing structural work on this corridor, and you're gonna hafta detour."

"We've been walking this deck for a week and you're telling me the whole time-"

"That it coulda come down on the lot of ya? Yeah. That's what I'm tellin' you. Detour's that way." He jabs a stubby, dirty finger down a ladder well, supremely secure in his position as roadblock.

Creatively lamenting fate's fickle timing, Hyena tromps down into the depths. There are many other passageways in the Salient that are in a similar shape, and diversion after detour after misstep soon leads to one lost pilot in the deep structural spaces of the massive warship.

Sure that she's passed that set of pipes at least 3 times now, Hyena takes a different turn and ends up in a dimly-lit room that seems to have been used to store all the odds and ends that the onload crew just didn't have another place to stuff. Extra power packs, a gunboat engine, crates and crates of oil, grease, and powdered eggs... And not a comfortable bunk in sight.

"... Damn it to Hell in a dainty little handbasket..." She growls, giving a swift kick to one of the many nondescript crates.