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Just as the dopamine was wearing off, and the food was beginning to taste like the garbage slop that it was again, lo and behold, there be delivered before her another hungry sap to torture. He approached cautiously, with all the confidence of a lost fawn. His eyes were mile-a-minute between her and everywhere that [i]wasn’t[/i] her, and she craned her head this way and that trying to snatch his gaze up in the brief instants they made eye-contact. 

God, how come nobody’d told her it was her birthday?

There was a touch of command in his voice that the rest of him couldn’t back up, which was surprising coming from a red. As far as she’d seen in the past few weeks, the engineering students tended to keep to themselves, and she’d picked up a sort of toothless hostility from them towards the operators and, especially, the pilot-cadets. Of course, it didn’t help that the pilots played into it. Some of her peers relished in the envy, which seemed like a great way to utterly ruin things for themselves down the line, when their livelihoods would depend on those reds. 

Of course, that didn’t mean Cinny was about to show the guy any mercy. 

Cinny tapped her lips in feigned thought, then snapped her fingers and, at a prompt from her, he held out his hand. She dug into her pockets, miming excitement when she found what she was looking for. With the reverence and sincerity of someone bequeathing a precious family heirloom to a loved one, Cinny took his hand in hers, and gently closed his fingers around the prize that had been hiding amongst the lint in her pocket. When he opened his hand, there it was. 

An empty, crumpled Zhenko wrapper. 

Cinny pretended to be shocked. She quickly snatched the wrapper up, inspected it, sniffed it, pulled it flat and taut. She rolled her eyes and smacked her palm against her head, as if to say, [color=BBF6FF][i]Ah, of course, how silly.[/i][/color] The wrapper was sealed at one end, so Cinny put the other end to her lips and with a quick breath, inflated it. Then she licked her finger, sealed the other end, and playfully bounced the ballooned wrapper between her hands. 

This went on for some moments. Patience was a rope you could measure many times, but cut only once, so before [i]too[/i] much time had been wasted, she signaled again for her victim to hold out his hand. She was surprised when he did, but not very. Taking the featherlight wrapper, she waved it about like a wand and tapped it three arbitrary times against her forehead, before holding it out over the red’s hand. 

Lem would have said: [i]“Now you really, [b]really[/b] have to want it.”[/i] Cinny just waggled her eyebrows. She let go, and the wrapper dropped like a rock into Bel’s open palm, full of Zhenko-goodness. 

Cinny did some mystical jazz-hands, then picked up her fork and let the serotonin persuade her to take a few more bites of slop.  
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