Trish had been inside a handful of Affini habs in her life, mostly as a consequence of her prior entanglements with the Bureau of Xenosophont Wellness and Care, and Scoparia's was simir enough to the others that Trish was beginning to be able to imagine the section in some Affini-nguage textbook for youngblooms and affini new to humans about how to design a hab that would feel simultaneously familiar and dominating.
The average Terran habitat consists of the following: an entryway, a sitting room (used for leisure and conversation), a kitchen (used for preparing meals, sometimes with an attached dining nook with a table and chairs for consuming said meals), a bathroom (including a toilet; see Fig. 6-A for detail), and a bedroom (used for regur sleep cycles not to exceed eight hours as well as for sexual interaction; however, it should be noted that this tter use is not exclusive to the bedroom). Additional room subtypes can be found in Appendix E1. Current recommendations are to maintain a size ratio between 2:1 and 3:1; however, for specialized needs, this can be adjusted, as any sufficiently upscaled furniture will evoke a predictable dependence response (Anthamanta, Psychological Responses in Terran Neurotypes).
To her credit, Scoparia wasn't trying to hand-feed Trish — that, blessedly, had only happened once, in her second wardship, and the less said about that one the better — but she was nevertheless poking her antennae into every single decision Trish made. "Are you certain that's what you want to wear?" She made no attempt to disguise the disappointed subharmonics in her voice.
"What, is denim feralist now?" Trish replied as she shrugged the vest onto her shoulders. "Not everything needs to be flower-print. Otherwise you'd get sick of it."
"I am starting to see why my instructors warned me about the Terran obsession with drabness." Scoparia sighed and shook her head. "I suppose it's an inevitable consequence of such a narrow visual spectrum."
"I like my narrow visual spectrum just fine, thanks." With the aid of a shoehorn, Trish slipped her shoes on, then stood up. "Ta-dah," she said, spreading her arms in a gesture of mock revetion, "like many adults, I am perfectly capable of dressing myself."
"That much was scarcely in question," Scoparia said, dutifully taking notes on her tablet. "I'm much more interested in your behavior, and to test that we require a stimulus."
"Hence the 'pydate.'" Trish rolled her eyes. "If you want to invite someone over, can you at least not call it that?"
"What else would I call it?" Scoparia said, arching an eyebrow of feathery moss.
"Well, for one thing, it's a bit juvenile a term to use for someone you're evaluating for an elder care wardship."
"... I fail to see the issue," Scoparia said after a moment's thought. "But I will do some research on it, ter. It's possible there's some subtlety I'm missing, I suppose."
"You suppose."
"If your tone gets any drier, I'm going to be concerned you're not hydrating well enough," Scoparia said without looking up from her tablet.
Trish huffed, and couldn't help but smile a little. "Those wordpy textbooks are definitely improving if someone as new as you to humans could pull that one off."
"Please, Trish," Scoparia said, her face totally expressionless, "Terran wordpy, especially in English, is not complicated enough to require an entire textbook."
"Oh?" In response, Scoparia let out a series of odd, slightly dissonant musical noises. "...what the hell was that?"
"A pun in Maelodian-dialect Affini," she replied. "It would take me about fifteen minutes to expin to you, and that's without expining the way that Maelodian polyharmonic voices influence the tonality of their nguages, or-"
Trish was saved from the infodump by the Hab: "Hate to interrupt, but you've got a visitor~"
"-ah. Well, that'll have to wait, I suppose." Scoparia slid her tablet into her chest through an opening that persisted only just long enough to allow it, then crossed to the entryway. The door slid open at her approach. "Ah, hello there, little ones. Thank you for coming."
"Thank you for the invitation, Miss Scoparia," Cass said, smiling up at the affini. She wore a long, flowing dress in a deep green, cinched in at the waist with a braided belt of golden cord. Standing next to her was another woman, this one younger and a head shorter at least, maybe in her 40s, with strawberry-blonde hair tied back in a ponytail so loose it was a wonder it held together at all. She was in an airy red sundress that showed off her legs, and she carried a small tray covered in foil in her hands. She was famir, but Trish couldn't quite pce her until- "I brought Leah with me — I hope that's okay."
"Of course it is. And may I say, it's lovely to meet you both. Come in, please, and let me take that, flower," Scoparia added, a handful of vines reaching down to lift the tray effortlessly from Leah's hands.
"Thank you, Miss Scoparia! It's some cookies I made for you as a get-well present," Leah stage-whispered to Trish. "Some orange cardamom chocote chip, some madelines, and of course a couple snickerdoodles because who doesn't love a snickerdoodle? Also hi!" The pretense of stage-whispering abandoned, the diminutive woman glommed onto Trish without the slightest warning and gave her a big hug. "It is so nice to finally meet you!"
"Y-yeah, likewise," Trish said, arms pinned to her sides and unable to do much except wait for the surprisingly strong woman to let go of her. "Wait...you can't seriously be-"
"And you thought I looked good for my age," Cass said, smiling and stepping in to join the hug. Once again, her pupils were thoroughly dited — she was definitely high again. "My lovely young wife~"
"I'm gonna hit a hundred any day now and you're still gonna keep calling me that, aren't you?" Sandwiched between Trish and Cass, her voice, and the ugh that followed, were slightly muffled.
"You think I'm not going to brag about having the loveliest floret on the station for a pinnate?"
"And so smooth! Only here a week or so and you're already saying 'station' instead of 'ship!'" She wormed her way out of the hug, pausing for a moment with her hand on Trish's vest. "Oh, and I love this. Denim is neat, and it looks great on you!"
"Uh...thanks?" She was energetic, to be sure, but if anything she seemed more sober and present than Cass did.
"Why don't we all sit down?" Scoparia said, setting the cookies down on the much-too-rge table in the sitting room and gesturing to the much-too-rge couch. "We don't all have the benefit of a haustoric impnt to regute and repair our joints."
"Oooh, yeah, let's sit," Leah said. "Especially after you went through a whole health thing."
"I'm fine," Trish said, rolling her eyes. "I could probably even climb up on that monster of a couch unassisted, but something tells me I'd get dinged independence points for not letting Scoparia pick me up."
"It's important to know that you understand you can ask for help when needed," Scoparia replied as she hefted a giggling Leah into the air and deposited her on the couch.
"When needed, or when under duress to do so?" Nevertheless, she held up a hand and sighed, waiting for the inevitable — and, indeed, Scoparia took the invitation without hesitation, lifting her up and settling her in on the couch next to Leah. Cass soon followed, leaving Trish surrounded by florets.
"Now, you three be good. I'm going to get Trish the gss of water she clearly needs."
"Ha ha," Trish said to Scoparia's back as she walked away. "I'll give her this, she commits to a bit."
"What bit are we talking about?" Cass said, blinking in confusion.
"Never mind," Trish said. "Just a dumb joke." She looked straight ahead across the room at nothing in particur; with Cass and Leah on either side of her, there really wasn't anywhere else that was safe.
"Welllll," Leah said, leaning across Trish and poking Cass gently, "Lay has something she wants to say. Isn't that right?"
"Mmm." Cass took in a deep breath, and held it for a short moment. "I'm sorry about getting so angry, down on the surface. I feel responsible for what happened, and I never wanted to hurt you."
"You're fine," Trish said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "It's just tachycardia. I'm 94, it happens."
"Yes, but when it comes out of nowhere the minute an old friend shows up and starts yelling about the book she wrote that you're leaving a key piece out of— okay, I clearly needed more xenodrugs for this." She sighed and leaned back into the couch. "I also feel responsible for just...everything." She gestured vaguely at the air. "You and your mobile hab and always being on the move and printing more and more copies of Freedom's Ember. I just wanted you to make sure it got out there, I didn't expect you to commit your entire life to that."
"You're Cass fucking Hope," Trish said, leaning forward and pulling her knees up to rest her head against them. "What the hell did you think I was going to do?"
"Hopefully, take the third book to heart and live a happy, comfortable life," Cass said. Trish could see in the corner of her eye that Cass was looking at her, but she didn't return the gnce. Probably just as well, given how much she knew Cass loathed eye contact. "But I knew that hadn't happened, or at least, not in the first few years."
"Yeah, how come you never came by?" Leah leaned into Trish, soft and warm and smelling of the baked goods she'd brought with her. "I would have really liked to meet you."
"Would you even have remembered if I had?" Trish growled.
"Hey," Cass said, the upset just barely breaking through the haze of drugs, but Leah spoke first.
"I mean, at the time, maybe not, but Mistress fixed my memory a long time ago," she said. "Spending decades with her was more than enough to give me a stable emotional base to process all the things that happened to me when I was younger — and all the things I did because of it." She let out a soft ugh, and added, "If what Lay's told me about how you and Nikoi got along is true, you would really have hated me if you met me pre-domestication."
"I'm sure there's worse people in the gaxy than Nikoi," Trish said, "but that's a pretty high bar to clear."
"I used to be a Stelr Marine." That got Trish's attention, and before she knew what she was doing, she'd turned to stare at tiny woman seated next to her. "Actually, I'm probably one of the more dangerous humans on the station, at least in terms of hand to hand combat. I remember all of Basic, all the courses in micrograv combatives, the works. I was really, really into personal violence. I might have lost half a foot of height and about twenty kilos of muscle since then, but the old reflexes are still there." She took a deep breath, and let out a sigh, smiling. "But none of that really matters, you know? My past is my past, but it doesn't control my present, and it certainly doesn't control my future."
"That's what Miss Phyl is for," Cass said, the grin obvious in her voice even if Trish couldn't see it.
Leah giggled. "Yeah. Dirt, I love her so much."
Sixty years of the Affini, and Trish still wasn't used to how completely people broke for them. She had no yardstick to measure Leah against but her own words, but from a Stelr Marine to this? There couldn't have been anything left of the original person, horrible though they might have been. "Yeah, well, good for you. I'm still living in the real world."
"Mmm, I might be a little buzzed, but I'm pretty sure this is reality," Leah said, shrugging.
"She'd know," Cass added, "she's been way higher than me. Even if I'm the one begging Mistress for css-E now." She abruptly shifted, leaning against Trish; she held in the urge to push Cass away. "That's not a dig against you, I don't bme you for any of this. I just wanted to finally be friends."
"What did you think we were before?" Cass had always been a little weird, sure, but then she was keeping an entire revolution's worth of logistics in her head, along with stars only knew what else. The woman was a walking library on top of being charismatic as hell despite herself. "Were we not friends?"
"Maybe. But I had to be Cass Hope. That made it different. At least, it did for me." She let out a sigh. "I just wanted to be Lay and still be friends. And I blew that the first time I tried, somehow, and I spent a long, long time thinking about it, and writing to you hoping that it would undo some of the damage I'd done. And then, of course, the minute I get a chance to see you again, I basically gave you a heart attack."
"It wasn't anything that anyone would cssify as a heart attack," Trish grumbled. "I may not be a wise, all-knowing veterinarian, but I did graduate medical school, you know."
"Well, still. Not my finest work."
"You're fine, sweetie," Leah said, leaning into Trish from the other side and reaching across her to take Cass's hand. "Trish, you're not mad at her over it, are you?"
Trish's internal clenching redoubled. "I'm not mad, I just- I shouldn't be here. I should be down on the surface, where I belong. Stars only know what the hell Piper's doing on her own down there, I can only hope she had the presence of mind to drive the mobile hab back to Beacon. But no, because I had a little tachycardia, I'm having to do the whole wardship song and dance for the fourth time."
"Well, there's a saying about that, isn't there?" Scoparia was standing in the entryway, a gss of water looking absurdly tiny in her oversized hands. "Fourth time's the charm?"
"It's third, not fourth," Trish said. "That my water or yours?"
"Oh, it's yours. You clearly need it." She stepped forward, and held the gss out across the table to her between her two thumbs.
"Thanks," Trish said, leaning forward to take it, grateful if nothing else for the excuse to get out from between the two florets. She held the cool, heavy gss in her hand for a second, looking it over, then gnced back at Scoparia. "Did you drug it?"
"Does it matter? You're going to drink it either way." Her otherwise carefully controlled face gave way to the slightest of smug smiles.
"Of that, I have no doubt, but I like to know what I'm getting into."
"Then no. Pure water, appropriately infused with the correct level of minerals for terran consumption and enjoyment, and served at optimal temperature for quick hydration." The smile stayed right where it was. "Drink up."
Trish shrugged and tipped the gss back. As far as she could tell, it was indeed nothing but a gss of chilled water. She downed half the gss before pausing to breathe. "Thanks," she said, raising the gss in a mock toast.
"My pleasure, little wildflower," Scoparia said, settling down onto the floor, now more or less level with the humans on the couch. "Now then, by all means, please continue."
"I'm still not sure about this."
It wasn't what Haven saw when she looked in the mirror that gave her pause. The outfit Tara had shown up with, fresh from the same tailor who did her suit, was a cssy bzer over a body-hugging dress that just barely kissed her knees, professional grey and a deep navy respectively. Bck pumps and a glittery charm bracelet accented the look. None of that bothered her; the sarcotesta made it look like she was looking at a mannequin in the mirror, albeit one that moved. Better a mannequin than me.
No, it wasn't the outfit. She loved the outfit. It was the kind of thing that Tara would have worn, back when she worked for Haven. Back when Haven was incredibly jealous of her. Back when Haven wished she could be Tara instead of herself.
My wishes aren't supposed to come true. I don't deserve it.
"What's not to be sure about?" Tara, in very casual shorts and a tank top, leaned over Haven and hugged her around the middle from behind. "You look great."
"M-more about the game, really," she mumbled. "I've never done anything like this."
"It's super easy. You just show up and be you, and do your job. And I got you a super super easy one that'll keep us together, so you'll always have me right there in case you get stressed out and need to break character, okay?"
"I guess." Haven gnced at the orientation packet on the desk, helpfully marked with her name and her role, beneath it, in big bold capital letters: SECRETARY. "Are you sure it's not supposed to be 'Executive Assistant?' I mean, as far as I can tell, I'm just doing what you used to do for me, just in an office environment."
"I mean, yeah, but 'Secretary' has vibes. It's a game, remember, it's not supposed to be 100% accurate. Stuff gets changed to make it more fun. Like how there's a code you can punch in on the vending machines to make it not take your bills if you want to py out a scene of trying to make it work. And you know how do to all the stuff I did because you saw me do it! Easy-peasy, right?"
"And no one's going to think I look weird because I'm in... this?"
"Haven." Tara looked right at her in the mirror, clearly trying to make eye contact even if Haven didn't have any visible eyes. "Our HR Director literally has horns."
Haven was silent for a moment. "Wait, what?"
"Yeah, she had them put in just for the character. Some people like to go a little over-the-top instead of just being themselves. She's like, Evil HR Director From Hell, or something, I don't know her whole backstory yet, but she's really nice out of character. She's great, you'll love her. Point is, yeah, no one will care. Body mods are super common. I mean, they might assume you've got a thing for it, or they might think you're going for some kind of doll-come-to-life character? But they'll py off of whatever you give them. The whole office is super chill. We're all just there to have fun and hang out and stir up a little drama and maybe do a little a competitive math on the side."
"Okay." They're all going to hate me. I should just accept that now. "Can I admit.... it's also a little weird, you being the one in charge and me being the secretary?"
"I think it's fun, personally," Tara said, grinning. "A little role reversal for added spice."
Haven couldn't help but ugh a little, even if she felt her hypothetical guts churning at the mounting worry that she was going to fuck up her one and only friendship in the whole world. "I'll have to get used to calling you Ms. Dvoretskaya, huh?"
"Damn right you will," Tara said, drawing themself up to their full height and assuming an air of absolute confidence. It fit them so well. Everything about the leadership role they were in fit them so much better than it had ever fit Haven. They should have been the one who got everything handed to them on a silver ptter. They deserved it. And I deserved to be vented out an airlock at birth.
She crammed those feelings deep inside. Experience had long since taught her that no one wanted to hear her useless whining. "Yes, ma'am."
"Hmmm." Tara pursed their lips. "Okay, do that again, but call me 'sir' instead?"
"Uhh... y-yes, sir?"
Tara sucked in a quick breath. "Mmm. Yeah. Better. Go with 'sir.'"
"But still Ms. Dvoretskaya?"
"Oh yeah, definitely," they said, nodding. "Mr. doesn't do anything for me, but Ms.? That's got don't-fuck-with-me energy. And I think I really like the genderfuck-iness of combining Ms. and Sir." They patted Haven on the shoulder. "Got that?"
"Yes sir, Ms. Dvoretskaya." It did feel nice to say, though Haven wasn't entirely sure why — maybe it was because Tara had just told her that she liked to hear it, so she could probably count on knowing she was doing the right thing.
Or Tara still secretly hated her and was lying through her teeth, that was also an option. But the way that she was grinning, the way her hands were gently squeezing against Haven's shoulders, made her think that maybe, just maybe, she'd done something right for once.