Cyril slid the slide back onto his .45, drawing it back to be sure that it was true. He dry fired it at a spot of blank wall a few times, making sure that the sear still caught. He had put the .45 together wrong a few times in basic, and was still in the habit of checking to make sure that he didn't do it again.
He set the pistol aside on the cloth as Kaz approached with a question about their more eccentric then usual second in command. At the moment, the blue haired freespacer was pogo sticking through... Cyril let that metaphor trail off before he could become too distracted by the mental image of Dream pogo sticking. Though getting her to try it might be fun. They could make millions selling videos of it to the jarheads.
Anyway, Dream had been swapping rapidly though the emotional spectrum the last little while. Now, there were a million and one things that might cause that, half stemming from the chunk of radioisotope stuck in her chest. But it did remind him strongly of something he had seen a lot of back home.
"Well, I'm no freespacer, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that she has a first class case of spaceritis. Eh, no offense ma'am." He said with a judicious nod to Dream. 'Spaceritis' wasn't what you'd call a proper medical term. There was probably some long, polysyllabic term for it named after one egghead or another, but it was common knowledge to anyone who was part of a primarily space borne, and born, subculture. There were likely a million and one names for it, but it all boiled down to the same thing:
"When you get right down to it, it's fear of going dirtside. See, the difference between a downsider such as your self and a spacer such as me or Dream falls down to basically this: you're used to being in enclosed spaces and being outdoors. We're only used to enclosed spaces. Downsiders can get used to living on a station. It's not that different from being on a planet, just don't get out as much." He kindly didn't mention the fact that most of them tended to go stir-crazy after a while. At least most of them could handle a good few months on a station. Half his living relatives had never made it farther onto Nepleslia then Hampton Down, the surface works of the ship yard. Half of those had never made it farther then the shuttle.
"Let me tell you Kaz, the first time you step off a shuttle and see that great big sky open above you, it is creepy as hell. First time I went down, I was seven. I spent the first two hours clutching to anything anchored into the ground for fear that I'd fall off."
(I got tired of my inability to keep Cyril's accent straight, so I added a link to a sound clip of it to his profile on the Wiki. I'm going to stop trying to transcribe the accent and just stick with his sentence structure.)
He set the pistol aside on the cloth as Kaz approached with a question about their more eccentric then usual second in command. At the moment, the blue haired freespacer was pogo sticking through... Cyril let that metaphor trail off before he could become too distracted by the mental image of Dream pogo sticking. Though getting her to try it might be fun. They could make millions selling videos of it to the jarheads.
Anyway, Dream had been swapping rapidly though the emotional spectrum the last little while. Now, there were a million and one things that might cause that, half stemming from the chunk of radioisotope stuck in her chest. But it did remind him strongly of something he had seen a lot of back home.
"Well, I'm no freespacer, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that she has a first class case of spaceritis. Eh, no offense ma'am." He said with a judicious nod to Dream. 'Spaceritis' wasn't what you'd call a proper medical term. There was probably some long, polysyllabic term for it named after one egghead or another, but it was common knowledge to anyone who was part of a primarily space borne, and born, subculture. There were likely a million and one names for it, but it all boiled down to the same thing:
"When you get right down to it, it's fear of going dirtside. See, the difference between a downsider such as your self and a spacer such as me or Dream falls down to basically this: you're used to being in enclosed spaces and being outdoors. We're only used to enclosed spaces. Downsiders can get used to living on a station. It's not that different from being on a planet, just don't get out as much." He kindly didn't mention the fact that most of them tended to go stir-crazy after a while. At least most of them could handle a good few months on a station. Half his living relatives had never made it farther onto Nepleslia then Hampton Down, the surface works of the ship yard. Half of those had never made it farther then the shuttle.
"Let me tell you Kaz, the first time you step off a shuttle and see that great big sky open above you, it is creepy as hell. First time I went down, I was seven. I spent the first two hours clutching to anything anchored into the ground for fear that I'd fall off."
(I got tired of my inability to keep Cyril's accent straight, so I added a link to a sound clip of it to his profile on the Wiki. I'm going to stop trying to transcribe the accent and just stick with his sentence structure.)
