Quinn always liked the chocolate shakes more. They were the least bad.

The vanilla ones tasted like chalk and sadness and she honestly didn't know why Dahlia liked them the most. Or...disliked them the least. And the strawberry ones were...well...there was something about them. Quinn didn't know exactly what it was; maybe it was the way it was flavored, or some other ingredient that was absent or covered up in the others. But the first time she drank it--soon after she became a pilot and only a few days on the Aerie--she'd thrown the bottle across the room and stumbled backwards into a corner away from it, face white as a sheet. She hadn't had one since.

So yeah. When she retrieved [i]her[/i] shake from the fridge, it was chocolate.

The TV was on now, and she felt a guilty sense of relief that it wasn't about her for once. It was something in Casoban, some smallish singularity. But that sense of relief was ruined in short order, as she gazed at the two saviors over a small town filled with people. Her heart squeezed painfully, and she turned quickly away from it and down to her pancakes.

The first meal that Quinn had ever had on the Aerie had been Besca's pancakes, so they were always a treat. She'd missed them so much in the past few weeks, and tucked into them eagerly, pointedly ignoring what she'd just seen.

"[color=gray]How ‘bout you?[/color]"

She jerked in her seat, looking back up at Besca, eye wide. While she was still more cheerful than she'd been in the past few days, [i]absolutely,[/i] she was still bouncing her knee, a habit she'd picked up as she'd grown increasingly twitchy. Her stomach was tied up in knots as a matter of course now, and it was just as knotted as she stared up. But after a moment, she grew relaxed, or at least more so. Besca's smile always had that effect on her. She finished chewing her bite of pancakes and made a face as she downed another gulp of her chocolate-adjacent vitamins.

"[color=ffe63d]I slept okay, I guess.[/color]" She gave a little smile as a fuzzy memory of last night bubbled to the surface of her thoughts. "[color=ffe63d]I had a dream about--[/color]" She interrupted herself with a brief head shake, still uncomfortable talking about the lake. A beat of silence passed.

"[color=ffe63d]Well, it was a good dream![/color]"