jeriendhal | FIc: Altered Trajectory (cont) (Reply)

“Please hand me that towel, Hazel,” Rufus said calmly, as he hung upside down in the chair’s straps, the smell of vomit deep in his nostrils again..

“Let me flip you up… Wait, no I guess you’d better wipe yourself off first.”

“Quite right.” He took the wet towel from her hand and wiped the sick off his face, before hitting the zero button on the chair’s control panel and returning to an upright and at rest position.

“Ru, are you ready to take a break yet?” Hazel almost begged. “You’ve done six runs in that thing and puked each time. I don’t where it’s all coming from now.”

“It’s mostly stomach acid at this point,” he admitted, unstrapping himself and stepping down carefully to avoid the space sickness bags scattered across the deck. Somewhere on the Falcon Claw a maintenance tech was going to be cursing his existence shortly. “I thought I was doing better. I went almost two full minutes that last run before I lost it.”

“It’s hard to puke up anything else when your stomach is already empty.”

He started stripping off the disposable paper coverall he’d been wearing over his clothes, in anticipation of the likely outcome of this first test of his chair. “I want to talk to the ship’s medic again. Humans have certain medications designed to suppress SAS. Surely there must be something similar that a vulpine could handle.”

Hazel was looking disturbed. “You really want to start popping pills on an experimental basis for this?”

That stopped Rufus short, halfway through wadding up the coverall. “Ah, no. Maybe not.” He threw the coverall down to the floor. “Cold and Dark!”

“Ru, you’re going to get through this, but it isn’t going to happen right away. You and I both know that’s not how it works.”

“Yes but… it’d be nice if it did, wouldn’t it?” he muttered. The enunciator panel set in the cargo bay’s wall bleeped briefly, and he slapped the receive button, “Brushtail here.”

Captain’s compliments, milord, and she’d like you to report to the bridge for deceleration, the first officer’s voice stated.

“We’re on our way up,” Rufus told him and clicked off the enunciator to turn back towards Hazel. “Next stop, Bolt Hole. Home of more anti-social types than I care to count, and the best place to start looking for rumors of oddly configured starships in the vicinity.”

“Sounds like a fun place,” Hazel said.

“Depends on how you define fun,” he noted grimly.

TBC