Chapter Four: A Piercing Gaze

                                    

                                          
Terrine is lost in the haze between sleep and reality. She hears the irritatingly recognizable sound of her alarm wailing somewhere in the void. Her inner ear is going crazy. Is it somehow possible for the whole station to do a barrel-roll? What little of her mind that is operational is begging desperately to go back to sleep. In this preconscious-haze, the only constant is that everything hurts and that she is approximately thirty seconds away from emptying the few remaining contents of her stomach across... wherever the hell she is right now. The irritating alarm continues to beckon her. Her mind grabs the sliver of consciousness available to it by the reins and pulls herself out of her sleep.
                Terrine is floating in a room that looks a lot like her apartment. As she pushes off the roof to right herself, she has a massive breakthrough: She is, in fact, in her apartment. As she turns around to go to her bedroom, she gets smacked in the face by a blob of vomit floating through the air, which in turn inspires Terrine's gut to produce a fresh one to add to the set floating around her apartment. She feels like a corpse, an entity with muscle and bone that can barely think and barely move but with no semblance of life anywhere to be found. She floats over to her closet and pulls out the hose for the integrated vacuum system. She connects it to the wall port in her living room and turns it on, letting it float as the air current it creates slowly pulls the floating bulbs of bile towards it. She taps the console on the wall between her living room and bedroom, which in turn closes the blinds. Then she strips and pulls herself into the shower.
                A long hot shower cannot fix many things in this life, but this morning there is one thing it can. While her head and gut are still in some disarray, the shower significantly brightens her mood. She ties her brown, curly hair back and gets dressed. It is thoroughly surprising what designers were able to accomplish given the limits of clothing in zero-gravity. Even though everything she is wearing, from her shoulders to her ankles, is one interconnected piece, it does not feel like a jumpsuit, nor is it any less clean or professional-looking than clothing worn by executive businesspeople on Rakian or even Earth. She grabs her bag, which she almost entirely repacks when she gets home from work each day, in case of situations like this where she needs to leave on the fly and head out.
                She checks her watch that actively tracks the transit car schedule and realizes that she has time to get proper food. She uses her forearm thrusters to float over to Gavar and Mashir's restaurant. They greet her as she enters.
                "Hey! How's our favourite software engineer this lovely morning?" Says Mash.
                "Fine, just show me where the volume knob is before my head explodes," Terrine responds.
                "That kinda night, eh? I know just what you need. Gav! Whip up one 'Hangover Special.'"
                "Oh, Mash, don't make a fuss. It's fine. I'll get my usual." 
                "Relax, Terrine. It's on me. Take your time. The IMH (Inter-Module Hyperloop) is slow today."
                "You should listen to him, Terrine. This sandwich saves lives," Gav adds.
                "Fine. I can never turn down free food from trustworthy individuals."
"That's the spirit," Gav says as he starts preparing the meal.
"Here, Terrine, take a seat at the counter." Mash says as he hops over the counter. He slides a lock-in bench out from under the counter along its magnetic rails. 
"You're too good to me, guys," Terrine says as she clips her shoes into the base of the stool and her bag onto the back of the bench. "So, what is the hangover special anyway?"