Talesfromadistantstar

cozy sci fi stories

[talesfromadistantstar]

To say that Ved was stressed was putting it lightly. They were molting during *finals week* of all times, and it looked like the person underneath was the worse for it. Their feathers were a dull brown instead of their usual shiny orange yellow, and they could swear their eyesight was worse, but that was probably due more to late nights staring at hyperspace theory and sentience networking than anything else. The worst bit was a new feeling with this molt. Growing up, molting was exciting, as you look and see yourself a little taller, a little more colorful, and in Ved's case, more androgynous like they willed. The new feeling was a feeling of dread *how long was this going to stick?*

[talesfromadistantstar]

Just as Senzer was getting around to working on his essay, the cluster's AI rerouted the main power to shields. The cloud they were flying through had been forecasted earlier this week, but with his essay due, Senzer had entirely forgotten about it. In the meantime, the only thing to do was grab some jerky to munch from the pantry, slither underneath the warmed rock that most warm blooded people thought was a table, and doze while listening to the soft patter of small asteroids hitting his hab shield like rain on a window.

[talesfromadistantstar]

As a general purpose admin unit, Kelxi-15 worked some really odd hours. Sometimes her shifts were a grueling 15 to 20 milliseconds of making adjustments to the subroutines of a couple billion nano cleaning units. Most times her gigs were nanosecond long tasks to check this system notice or send this message from one ship sensor to another. In between jobs, she loved reading trashy romance novels and sending messages to her penpal, Hessa, a real live human! Hessa took ages to respond, but it was always nice to hear what she was doing throughout her day. They had only been talking for around 10 minutes, but Kelxi was already feeling digital butterflies in her nonexistent stomach.

[talesfromadistantstar]

Gel Zrr never thought psionic training would be this hard.

It made sense of course. Everyone always said it's just like any other skill, and Gel was *excellent* at picking up new skills. They had learned mag boarding in the pipes of Cenva Station in a matter of weeks. They were conversational in the dec or so languages, pidgins, creoles that echoed from for to aft since they learned how to talk. Gel had once won a months worth of creds in a casino, the bulk of which was from a dare that they would lose an Ostriyoli strategy game that they learned the rules of *on the fly*

Things came easy to Gel, and the fact that Psionics wasn't coming easy made them anxious in ways they didn't even know were possible.

And so, Gel kept staring at the spork. Willing it to move beyond all reasonable measure