[i]Must be that time of the month again.[/i] Dawes thought to himself as he removed his arm from Mutan's vicinity about as calmly as he could. Surprisingly, Adria was giving him a similar cold-shoulder treatment while Mortimer simply grabbed a cup of coffee and went to hiding in the med-bay.

He then realized he was the only one left sitting in the lounge just as the PA blared from Mutan's stateroom:

>"Whomever is still in the mess should cut off the stove for me, [i]please[/i]."

The starship's pilot, a former water-taxi pilot for a leaky seagoing boat, who had clawed his way from peasant to the personal-pilot and chauffer of the system's nobility; was also that same noble's personal steward on her bad days.

He slowly climbed back to his feet and flicked the gas off on the stove, just then it seemed as though a knot grew tight in his gut, movement difficult... then with a very queasy sensation, it was completely gone in such a way he could tell he'd just bounced off the floor for a second... Adria was playing with the gravs on him, and had he not been standing perfectly still, could likely have been jackhammered at three times the force of gravity until his legs broke.

[i]Only one [u]soft[/u] bounce, this was just a warning.[/i]

Some days those girls could be scary. One call to his contact back at the bar to meet-up on Stigma with the merchandise  later and he was off to the showers to prevent himself from causing further mishaps this morning.

[hr]
[@Murasaki](compounding anagathics; req: Education; formidable, 10 minutes; phys [i]and[/i] life sci)

Doctor Mortimer Knell sipped his coffee as he poured over the data on the resources he'd gathered for compounding Miss Godie's treatment this month. Making anagathics nearly from scratch was the practice of the day. Although it was simply a matter of finding the right parts of animals and mashing the right quantities together in under the right conditions, he was taking his time due to the risk involved. Like any life-saving profession, he'd only get one solid chance.

He had one hour.

[hr]

Adria privately smiled a bit to herself at teasing Isaac with the gravs as she went to the clothes she'd laid-out for meeting Mutan's parents. Nobody else was in the room and he couldn't prove anything besides a minor stomach-upset; even if caught, she did tell them she was reseting the grav-settings on the entire ship... wouldn't be too hard to convince the others that she simply adjusted the wrong deck.

The ship's diagnostic on the fuel-pipes complete, yielding nothing... again... she wondered if she was a bit too reliant on the agent-program when she finally realized... the security-protocols for the J-drive computer-banks hadn't been updated in years. It would have only been a simple matter to hack her database through a comm-link to totally mess with the j-drive programs; since nobody here was an expert in J-drive operation, tiny mis-calibrations could easily be missed... she would have to get Mortimer to run a diagnostic on the programs and update the drivers...

With that done, Adria could take a sigh of relief as she peeled out of her working-clothes and took a much-needed warm shower, knowing full-well that Isaac wouldn't be using a drop of it if he knew what was good for him.