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"Mmn...Dancers. Knew a dancer once..." Toni commented with a rogue-ish grin and a distant look in her eye until Torin reached over and slugged her in the arm. "What? I know, wrong kind of dancer, but still...She was trained as a ballerina 'fore we met 'er."

Torin rolled her eyes at her twin before turning back to Ceci. "I did. I apologize, I've forgotten we met. Productions are...hectic."

Clearing her throat, Toni tapped her cheek just under the scar. "Toni's tha scarred twin. Torin's tha quiet 'un. Or. I'm tha red one an' Torin's the blue if'n yeh prefer t'think a' us that way. We're thinkin' we'll dye tomorrow t'help th'new folks out." There was a brief pause as she turned her attention back to Lisa. "Yeh doin' intermediate 'r advanced? I'm fer intermediate righ' now, but I'm thinkin' I migh' jes switch. I gotta full room installation in mind an' those're easier t'get away with in advanced."

Lisa, upon deciding the two weren't going to accept the invite to sit on her mattress with her, got more comfortable as the two spoke. Her attention was drawn back to the two girls in the doorway when she was addressed once more, grinning at them once more. "Right now I'm in intermediate. Hopefully I'll pass and get into advanced next semester." She nodded at the girl's plan, sitting up in interest. "A whole room? That sounds super cool, actually. I have a few ideas, but they're mostly small scale things. You can do a whole lot more in sculpture than what you can get away with in Jewelry."

As she glanced Cecilia's way and found her doing the same, she smiled warmly. "Hey, at least now I have a good reason to go to the dance concerts." The soft grin was replaced with a tense frown as her phone started going off, causing her to sit up and sigh irritably. "I'll be right back." She stood and glided out the doorway, answering the call once she was a few feet down the hall. It was more so she didn't interrupt their conversation than for privacy, she honestly didn't expect anyone to listen.

"Kay, what's up? I just meet my roommate and suitemates, I think you'd like them. My roommate's a dancer, and the other two seem to just be good at all of the making of things." The constant chatter was only going to delay the inevitable, but for some reason she felt very strongly about holding on.

Her girlfriend, however, was having none of it. "Lisa. I don't care. Look, I am so proud of you for getting to go to this art school, and I'm super happy that you're really great off and out living your dreams, but I'm still stuck in Austin. Without you. I really miss you, you know?"

"Awe, love. I know you do, and I miss you too...but I don't know how to make that better."

"That's the problem. I guess I've just been...resenting you for being so happy without me and off having fun while I'm stuck. And you telling me about it all the time only makes me even more upset."

"So...I can't be excited and tell my girlfriend about the things I'm doing out of fear that she'll resent me for being happy." Her fist clenched around the phone and she sighed. "I'm sorry, I'm just a little upset about this."

"What the hell are you saying, Lisa? You can't be mad at me for feeling the way I do!" Kay was sounding shrill over the phone, though Lisa managed to keep her voice down.

"Well I'm sorry I'm not taking the news that my super awesome and supportive girlfriend secretly resents me for trying to be happy very well. You were so cool with this when it was just a pipe dream, but ever since I actually came here you've been super...god, I don't even know. Standoffish and clingy and accusatory and just...way to goddamn complicated. Maybe I'm just...I'm tired of putting up with your insecurities about me." Surprisingly, Lisa heard the relationship-ending words from herself, and not from the other woman on the line. "I think we should take a break, or just break up. Yeah, we should just stop dating altogether." Her eyes welled over as she spoke in a halting voice. "Goodbye, Kaylee." She shut her phone and she sighed, leaning against the wall and putting her face in her hands.

"Thank you. But I did not forget your face and name because of the stars. I don't know theirs either. I do remember your measurements though." Torin said with a faint smile at Ceci's complement. The smile quickly turned to a wry quirk of her lips. "We understand. They're very similar."

As Torin spoke, Toni was quite obviously not listening to them. She had partially turned to watch Lisa leave the room. A few moments later, she reached out and lightly touched the back of Torin's hand before jerking her head in the direction of the hall. Toni made a slight gesture, to which Torin gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"Get'cher stuff, Cecilia. We're goin' out fer ice cream an' drinkin'. Firs' round's on us." Toni rasped as she stepped out into the hall toward Lisa. Moving as gracefully and lightly on her feet as a dancer, the scarred woman strode the few steps and reached out to grab Lisa's elbow. "Yeh too, Lisa. C'mmon. We're gunna go get'cha smashed an' inner-duce yeh t' a frien' a' our'n."

Sighing, Torin stepped out into the hall and touched the terminal that Sona had used earlier. "Andara? Please let Jane Davidson that the twins are on their way over to take her and their new neighbors out drinking. Thank you."

Without warning. Andara simply came to existence in Jane's room. Most students she would announce herself before arriving but Jane had already told her to stop it. Several times. Sometime in the previous year the AI had started to comply.

"Jane, you are being whisked away by the Kerr twins to go drinking with your new neighbors."


Cecilia watched Lisa leave the room, unknowing of the contents of her phone call or the ramifications of it. When Toni announced the drinking, she raised her eyebrows just slightly.

"Oh ok." She slid her sweater off and left it on her bed, finding a purse from the depths of her closet. She paused by the mirror and whipped some of her hair back. Finally she slid a pair of flats onto her feet, and was ready to go. Actually when not huddled on her bed, Cecilia wasn't bad looking, and smiled naturally as she fell into step alongside Torin.

"Are you okay, Lisa?" There was something in her expression that made Cecilia hesitate when her roommate came back out of the room.

Sona did not have much to unpack, or put away. In fact, the entire contents of her duffel bag were a several sets of underwear, ten shipsuits, five lab coats and three datapads. After hanging up the shipsuits and labcoats in the closet, stowing the underwear in the drawer and arranging two of the datapads on the desk and the other on her bed, she found herself standing in the middle of the room alone with nothing to do.

She sighed heavily and laid back on the bed with the datapad on her chest. On the one hand, she was quite used to solitude and boredom. She had never quite fit in on Triton with the more earthy pioneer-spirited miner population. Then she spent thousands of hours on cramped mining vessels and ore freighters in the Kuiper belt and around Neptune and Uranus, usually alone in a secluded corner – or her private quarters if she was fortunate enough to have one – avoiding the much older and rougher starfarer types while she indulged in readings about physics. When she finally got to Earth, the plan had been to finally break out of her shell and become more outgoing and adventurous, exploring the mother planet. But that plan never really took off, because the Strang Institute discouraged their prize properties from wandering about, or even socializing too much; with the amount they were paying for them, Strang preferred their assets to be head down busy working most hours of the day. The Strang Institute campus where Sona lived was so nice that she felt little inclination to explore beyond it.

But this was supposed to be different. Sona could have had the Strang Institute hire tutors to get her her undergraduate – and later graduate – degrees, rather than going out of her way to attend a star-borne school. But more than anything else, Sona wanted to escape the Strang Institute and everything else in her life – to escape her whole life really – and start fresh again, to experience life from perspectives she had never had, but sorely envied.

That’s why she was here, on Astrum Andara, and, oh, look, here she was again, fallen back into the same old pattern. Sona sighed heavily again and let the datapad fall on her chest. Maybe she was like one of the particles she modelled: doomed to live only according to the specific laws of nature assigned to her. Maybe she was just a slave to some equation she had yet to figure out, and the solution to the equation was perpetual solitude. Idly she started to muse about what that equation might be....

She was surprised by the knock on her door. Surely it wouldn’t be the welcome waggon; they had already greeted her in the hallway, after all. Then again, it hadn’t exactly been a proper greeting, and for all they knew her roommate was in here with her, ungreeted.

Sona sat up and crossed her legs, holding the datapad in her lap to make it look like she had been involved in doing something, rather than just laying alone morosely in her room. “Door open,” she said, simply without even bothering to ask who was knocking, or even giving a warning response to the visitor that the door was about to open right before them.

“Hello,” she said, when she saw that it was Torin, “Is it my turn for the welcome ambush?”

Lisa had a girlfriend? Or rather, had formerly had a girlfriend? The idea was both concerning and pleasant at the same time to Cecilia. She knew perfectly well that she was attracted to girls, but it wasn't something she had really acted on. There was always something in the way (usually involving ballet or her mother).

Ceci was next to Torin when Sona's door opened, and laughed lightly as she asked about being ambushed. As she didn't look alarmed it may or may not have been easy to tell it was the same girl that had peered out of the room across the hall several minutes before.

"No, no ambush. Torin and Toni have elected that we ought to go out. So it's more invitation than ambush. Would you like to join us?" Cecilia smiled, bright eyes looking hopeful. "I'm Cecilia, by the way. I don't think we've met yet."

As soon as the word ‘out’ cleared Cecilia’s lips, Sona started sitting up cross-legged on the bed, clearly interested. Unfortunately, not for the reasons Cecilia or Torin might have imagined.

Sona had grown up in a fairly spartan outpost on Triton, where there was actually less to do in the whole colony than there was on even an average cruise vessel. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that Sona whisked through school so quickly she never had much of a social circle, then almost immediately blasted off into space on cramped asteroid mining vessels. Even after arriving on Earth, she had few friends among her much older peers at Strang, and even less inclination to go out alone into the massive throbbing chaos of the mother world.

So ‘going out’ was a somewhat foreign concept to Sona’s mind – although she had certainly heard about it and even done it on occasion – but there was another, confounding problem.

Having lived almost exclusively on non-terraformed colonies and small starships, when one talked of ‘going out’, one usually meant... out. Outside of the controlled atmosphere of the colony into the wild wastes of Triton, or outside of the starship on an extra-vehicular excursion. In Sona’s mind Astrum Andara was a starship. Although she was intellectually aware of the fact, it hadn’t yet sunk in that she was also a cruise ship, with full entertainment facilities on board. In Sona’s mind Astrum Andara was a starship – just like any of the dozens and dozens she’d been on – which were all mostly small transports, mining ships or ore freighters.

So, naturally, when Cecilia said they were ‘going out’... Sona assumed she meant it literally. They were going EVA. They were going on a space walk. Immediately Sona perked up, interested.

“Out?” she said, eyes shining, “I looooooove going out. I don’t think anyone else loves going out as much as me! I didn’t think we were going to be allowed to go out! They actually let us do it? I’m going to go out every day!”

Sona, of course, was blissfully unaware that she was making herself sound like an insatiable party maniac. And, in her ignorance, she kept digging.

She hopped off the bed immediately; since she was already in her shipsuit she was essentially always ready to get up and go (which, really, is the point of a shipsuit – she could technically walk right out the airlock as is and the emergency helmet and gloves would deploy, but that would be silly because she would only have a few minutes of air). “I always used to have a hard time finding people that wanted to go out with me! I mean, I prefer going out with lots of people at one time – as many as I can safely handle – but usually it’s so hard to find people that want to go out that I end up only going out with one or two people at a time. Which is nice, but so boring! It’s much better to have a lot of people to go out with at once. I’m so glad you guys want to go out! But just so you know, if any of you ever wants to go out and can’t find anyone, I’m always available.”

Sona was so excited about going EVA that she had no idea that she was sounding like an incurable flirt and player who liked to juggle multiple relationships and would date just about anyone who asked, but she also missed the key hint in Toni’s comment about drinking because she was so focused on an EVA. In fact, her only comment on seeing Toni carrying Jane on her shoulder – which only served to make things worse – was: “Hm, that’s actually quite an effective way to get someone to go out with you. I should try that method.”

“But I’ll save that for when I’m craving a partner and can’t find anyone who wants to go out,” she continued, lacing one arm through Cecilia’s and the other through Torin’s, and dragging them both along with her, not even remembering to properly introduce herself to Cecilia before doing so, “For now, let’s go!”