Dispirited Evening

I closed the comm channel, and a quiet sigh escaped my list. The kind of sigh you make when you know something is really bothering you but you can't quite place your finger on what.

My quarters in 98Q were sparse and felt barely lived in, I had spent most of my time in my pod or in quarters of a ship in my hangar. Somehow I always ended up back in here when I joined holo channels like the summit.

I refilled my glass with more whiskey, the clear bottle, label-less belying it's smugglers nature. Good drink was so hard to find in a 'hostile' station. While I had grown so used to my connections in TXW, the people here had grown used to the demands of IRED. Those things had been, well, disrupted would be one word, hectic another, since 'we' had dropped by.

It surprised me how much was different between my quarters here and the quarters I had in TXW. Here felt like just another berth, but somehow TXW felt like home.... or at least a kind of home. I sipped my whiskey, my free hand pushing my chair away from the small comms console and walking in front of the enormous holoscreen. I turned to face the broadcast, it was some sort of baseliner news, murders, wars, deaths were the headlines, in two words, background noise.

Another Sansha invasion here, another abduction there, various capsuleer wars, the ever simmering Militia wars. Numbers trickled over the screen, overlays on overlays trying to unweave the tapestry of capsuleer relations to the baseliner level. I nearly snorted... reflecting more on 'home.'

Recently TXW had been feeling a lot less like my home. It had started when Usagi took her hound and more importantly, her cute ass off to see 'family' deep in Gurista controlled Venal. Initially we had talked often, but as usual, things slowed down. I hadn't heard from her in months, and then I went looking for trouble.

I found some welcome trouble in the arms of another capsuleer, and that had helped, for a while. Up until she had also disappeared, maybe moved on was a better term... And then I had moved onto real trouble. Finding another link to my past I had through avoided, or at the very least, buried. I frowned, mentally muting the holoscreen.

My eyes refocused, and I found the glass of whiskey waiting at my lips, I took a sip... the alcohol sliding down my throat. At least my body knew what to do. Home is where the drink is. I walked back over to the table, grabbit the still half full bottle of whiskey before moving back towards my hangar.

Mentally I scrolled through my local ship hangar, flipping through their pods and beds, wondering where I would end up tonight.