"And then they made me their chief," Jocasta continued, her voice somewhat muffled from within the confines of the refresher unit. She had to admit it was a nice one, probably the nicest thing in Neil's apartment. It was almost two square meters enclosed in transparent plex with four water jets, three of which were actually functional and spraying in water hot enough to steam in the conditioned air. Jocasta was naked in the shower, back arched as she scrubbed the roots of her hair with her fingers.

"Seriously?" Neil asked from the stool he was sitting on across the apartment, it was a single room, but the shower was steamy enough that he could only see Jocasta as a somewhat fuzzy silhouette except for when she accidentally brushed the plex as she scrubbed herself, revealing a momentary flash of skin. Two of her drones were hefting a long handed scrubbing brush which they inefficiently tried to apply to her back, their wings beating lazy eddies in the steam. A third drone perched on the edge of the refresher, doing a fairly decent impression of its mistress' bathing habit.

"Yes well, shortly after that the aliens decided they didn't want us to leave and we had to flee with nothing but the shirts on our backs," Jocasta continued.

"Not even your trousers?" Neil asked.

"Esspecially not our trousers," Jocasta confirmed, "We managed to get out of the system but not before they shot us through with more holes than Regulan cheese. We managed to make it here and ran straight into the Terran blockade." Jocasta made an irritated hurumphing sound at the indignity of that.

"We would have turned and left if we could, but the ship was basically a flying scrap yard at this point, and enough of the crew were wanted by the Terran's that we had to abandon ship. It took some pretty fancy flying to avoid being intercepted but we got down in the desert. We made it to the city by the skin of our sunburned backsides," Jocasta concluded, her left buttock brushing the plex as she bent down to scrub her toes. The crew had elected to go their separate ways at that point, the run of bad luck convincing them that they were better off on their own, an opinion with which Jocasta had to reluctantly agree. After all in a month they had been together they had seen two mutineys, a sentient black hole, been made royalty by an alien race, contracted Iotian hiccups, been driven out by those same aliens, crashed into a small asteroid, and been marooned on a blockaded desert planet. I mean... come on.

The refresher nozzles coughed and died and the drones lowered a towel down to their mistress who wrapped it around her body just ahead of the dissipating steam. The third drone produced a second towel which she wrapped around her vibrant green hair. The drones zipped away, freed from tasks for a moment and using the time to explore the nooks and crannies of the apartment.

"So now you have my story," she said, as though the random collection of improbable luck, mixed fortunes and chaotic disasters were a simple chronicle.