“Onion flower! My favorite! How did you know?” Anny cheered as Adrien plunked down the plate in front of her.
He winked, running a hand through his messy pink hair.
“Guess I’m just psychic, dude!”
Anny tried not to notice that when he stretched like that, it showed off the muscles beneath his tight-fitted t-shirt nicely.
WISR broke her out of her reverie, “You also order it every time.”
She tore off a petal and stuck it in her mouth.
“That’s nawt troo, lass week I gotta… No wait, mebbe… before that?”
Adrien’s twin sister Rosie laughed, “Face it, honey. You’ve got a usual.”
“Guess so!”
Tearing off another piece, Anny tossed it up high and it flipped in the air once, twice, and then landed with a sauce-dripping splat inches from her mouth.
Her watch communicator chimed as she chewed the offending morsel.
“Ugh, another job?” she groaned, “Can’t we take a break?”
“Not if you want to continue to pay rent and have food to eat,” WISR reminded her.
“Can we pretend to not be home?”
“Mandatory on-call hours.”
Anny sighed and tapped at the tiny screen.
The hologram that leapt up from the screen showed a cobbled-together hunk of metal, a series of haphazard engines stuck to one side.
“That’s one of the Spark Dynamics space stations, isn’t it?” WISR asked.
Anny nodded grimly, “Space Station 8, the Constellar.”
“Their station controller AI causing trouble?”
“I don’t know,” she slammed her palm over the screen, shutting off the image, “And I don’t care. We’re not going.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Those places are- are death traps!” she explained as she shoved onion petals in her mouth by the fistfull, “We’re not going to any SD space station, especially not that one!”
WISR tilted his head, a comma and apostrophe appearing over his ‘eyes’ like a quirked eyebrow.
“What are you avoiding, Anny?” There’s something there you’re afraid of, isn’t there?”
She froze, stiffening.
“N-No way! It doesn’t matter anyway, we’re refusing that job!”
His monitor flickered to the jagged-line ‘thinking’ display before flashing back to its parenthetical grin.
“You were requested personally by name. Refusing could cost your job.”
“There is no way I’m going to that station!”