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Posted on Wed 8th Jul, 2020 @ 6:58am by Yuliette Marayan Dr.

1,118 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Brown Sector: Zodiac

Yuliette managed to scrub the walls all the way to the top with the help of a rusty metal crate she’d procured for a stool. It doubled as the only chair in the place. She hand washed her clothing in the now disinfected bathroom sink. As she meticulously worked her way through the fabric with knuckles worn through from the day’s cleaning, she concluded that the ichor wasn’t going to come out of her remaining favorite outfit.

“Grah! Bo.” And he’d smiled like a school boy the whole time! Probably from the lightheadedness of all that kanar rushing his bloodstream at once. “...Wretched heel,” she muttered. Hopefully the first time she’d met him would be the last.

Leveraging her disgust with Bo, she wrung out the clothes agressively and set them over her balcony rail to dry. How long since she’d worn clean clothes? She’d last washed the blood and guts out of her clothes in the insurgents’ medical tent. She’d had maids or a laundry service most her life, but run a machine a couple times a week in her clinic herself. Handwashing the blood out of her clothes in the camp was fairly demeaning at the time. But it seemed a skill she was still plying to get by, now.

Yuliette got her satchel, counted out her remaining seed money and decided on an amount she’d be willing to spend on clothes. The money was spending fast, even though she was being guarded with it. Mostly it was a matter of buying her food out. She decided it was probably more frugal to get herself a hot plate and a minifridge of some sort to try eating in if she could. Or try eating out on the balcony at least. Although the fan helped, she still hadn’t gotten used to that rotten smell in the apartment. It hadn’t been due to the gunk on the floor. Her next guess was something in the floor drain in the bathroom or in the workings of the toilet. Maybe some lost pet had climbed inside the old mattress and died? She wondered how much it would set her back to get a new mattress.

All this she puzzled as she got ready to go out. Being laundry day, she was in what she’d kept for nightwear in the desert— a tank and shorts. There was no sense trying to cover up with the white shawl. Apart from it being an affront to some part of the culture around here to impersonate a widow or something, the texture of her forearms and shins was going to give her away anyway. She’d just walk towards the Rotunda quickly. There had been a second hand clothes shop she had spotted along the Drift, beneath the apartments between her place and the Rotunda.

She kept her head down the whole way and moved along without looking around like a tourist as she had when she’d arrived.

And frip was she cold.

Mercifully, it was steamy enough in her part of the apartment block, for some reason. Maybe some poor air exchanger in that portion. But humans seemed to be winning the thermostat war in the rest of the Zodiac. Something she was familiar enough with since she’d lived in a lot of Human and Risan company. But she’d been in kind of a rush and hadn’t happened to pack for the climate.

It was no warmer in the little shop when she ducked into it, so she quickly started shuffling through the racks especially looking for things with sleeves. The shopkeeper had put the nicest secondhand things on mannequins and wall displays, and a few of them were the kind of things her friends might have called vintage and shelled out for in the right boutique. She looked at the tag on a fleece lined leather jacket and then blew air out her cheeks. Like so many things now, that amount was beans for old Yuliette but sweetmint for new Yuliette.

“Can I help you?” An Orion woman came around the counter hopefully as she saw a customer browsing her pricier goods. She had been chawing pretty hard on some gum and spit it into a piece of notepaper discretely before grinning brightly. “That’s a great jacket. I just got it in, it’s broken in but still has a lot of mileage. which is just the way to get these. Did you see the lining?”

“The lining is lux.” Yuliette agreed, hugging her shoulders and resisting the urge to rub them for warmth. “Do you accept seed money?”

“There’s a service charge.”

“Of course there is. Do you have anything maybe, a tenth of this price?”

The Orion’s hopeful look morphed into a glare only emphasized by her bold application of catty eyeliner. She popped her gum back into her mouth and resumed masticating. “In the back.” She pointed to a discount rack.

Yulitte shuffled back to it, trying not to project her humiliation. Shopping a discount rack in a secondhand shop. And not just to be ironic with friends. Could she get any lower? At least she wasn’t picking through trash. Yet.

There were only a few things remotely in her size and shape intended for adults. She reached for something bigger, mainly because it had a hood, and setting down her satchel, pulled it on. It was oversized, but cozy. It felt a little like a hug, actually. The cuffs were ratty. She held out the hem so she could see the front of the hoodie. It had something printed on it that she couldn’t read. As near as she could suss out, it was Bajoran glyphs. It was probably an ad for a soft drink or a musical group. She hoped. The real downside was the deep shade of red the whole thing was. Red was only going to make her stand out. But it was warm. And everything on the Drift was colorful and clashing, anyway. Red was more like blending in, she reasoned.

“You gonna pay for that?” the Orion woman asked, eyeing her like a potential shoplifter.

Resuming her satchel, Yuliette moved around to the counter and counted out the seed money and the added fee.

“Do you know if there's somewhere on the Drift I can use a computer terminal?”

The Orion pointed and Yuliette followed her press on nail down the Drift to the Rotunda. “There’s a library on the ground level of the school. They got terminals there.”

Yuliette pulled up her hood and put on her big sunglasses. “Thanks.”

 

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