Sophia’s shoulders sagged, and she barely caught herself from producing a sigh of relief when the room emptied. It occurred to her just how stuffy the chamber had been, and how fresh the air felt now that the overbearing stench of humankind had lessened. Yes, she was a doctor and it was her calling, nominally, to help people. And help them she wanted to – but that did not mean she had to like people. Especially not the kind of freaks the MOS seemed to produce on a regular.

Hopefully she would not have to endure much more of their kind, now that she was accepted into the away team, a factoid that did not surprise or elate her in the slightest. [i]Of course[/i] she was accepted; there had never been any alternative to this. Rejection was but an inconceivable impossibility, something that had never crossed her mind for even a second.

When approached by the able-bodied and terse Fuertes, the comparatively frail-looking woman flinched just a bit before reason caught up with her. Flashing a fake but well-trained smile and a courteous nod, she accepted the files handed to her and began their perusal. Within moments of studying the document, she was already beginning to notice dozens of things she once considered indispensable to be missing from her provisions. Clearly, work on the MOS was going to be a very different matter from working in a high-tech lab on Earth.

“Any questions?” she heard coming from the front where Mavriq, the de facto leader of the team, roused himself from his desk.

“Actually, yes,” Sophia chirped up, her voice high-pitched and prickly like a bird’s. “There’s a significant number of absolutely critic-“

“Holy shit!” someone exclaimed behind her, too close for comfort. She cringed and glared over her shoulder to see Cass staring wide-eyed at her own folio. “Is this real? For that kind of money I’d do absolutely anything you want me to.”

She might even try to be nice, she thought. While she was not able to do the math on how long it would take her to pay off her debt on the quick, the raw number of the paycheck absolutely dwarfed what Mercury was paying her for their jobs. Though excited, the nagging knowledge of how badly her employer was exploiting her, made manifest in numbers, was beginning to really piss her off too. Either that, or it was the lack of any nicotine in the past hour.

“Would you mind?” Sophia snapped, exasperated. “I’m trying to-“

With fate itself seemingly aligned against the pristine-haired woman, she was cut off again, this time by the sharp sound of the mechanical door opening up. Sophia, with eyes that could murder, glared at the three androids bumbling into the room, unaccompanied apparently, as if they had every reason to be there.

As the robots introduced themselves, their purpose and their need for input, the room fell awkwardly silent. Sophia was seemingly not the only one caught off guard by the sudden visit. Not far from her, Cass visibly tensed up and found herself absentmindedly reaching for her hip, grasping at an empty place. In the lack of a familiar steel grip, she suddenly felt rather naked. Then she chided herself, gently easing up on her posture again. They weren’t on Derelict, and these weren’t alien machines. Just some friendly neighborhood droids from some company or another. No reason to be antsy, after all.