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Everywhere around him were strange and often wondrous sensations to pick up. Blinking lights in patterns, gleaming instruments perfectly sterilised, floors polished to a shine. A hint of pines brought in through the ventilation shafts, rythmic sounds as of music and the crackling of electric charge in the air.
But when you're caught in the middle of the worst hangover you can imagine and there's no toilet around for miles, sensations are the last things you need.
It wasn't just the lack of a toilet bowl. It was the complete and utter lack of lampposts, churches, alleys, truck wheels or even those dark corners which would greet you with those pleasantly familliar sour smells and sticky floors. If he ever found out what lousy architect had failed even to include just one of the above, Timorris Rubio de la Veine would be forced to get nasty.
Although it was really his environment that got nasty. If you had been cursed with the kind of luck that made you trip over a crate of rockets you miraculously failed to see before, just when you'd run out; if your type of fortune involved others tripping over crates they miraculously failed to see before just as they were speeding towards you with murder in mind, if your guardian angel rescheduled every bar's happy hour to Right When You Walk In or you're unhappy enough to roll a twelve every time unless you shouldn't, you weren't ever really nasty yourself.
You'd blunder into anything, but that was a trait of the unfortuitous as well. The difference was, you'd live to blunder out as well.
Still, it seemed his guardian angel had failed to arrange sanitary facilities. She was a busy person though so he gladly forgave her.
Forgiveness does nothing for the bladder.
Looking around he saw warning lights blinking, surgeons' tools beginning to rust and mirroring floors covered in a layer of dust an inch and a half thick in places. There was alarming noise around him, a man letting out a scream and it felt like lightning poised to strike. In places sparks flew through the room. The only good things were a woman's voice and the faint smell of pines. Of course, the reason it was faint came from the steam spurting out of broken pipelines. Foul chemicals massing in force were more than a match for two-dimensional trees growing no taller than a key-chain troughout their lives dangling behind windshields.
His thoughts turned back to wheels and sweet release.
At least there was one thing that could be said for the human body. No matter the state it was in, it never failed to send the brain nagging whenever there was danger. Almost instinctively he worked out the place was going to blow, a bang to match most every explosion he had endured every time he turned his head. The voice sounding the two-minute warning helped too.
Out of solidarity, he picked up his bunk mate and exited the room through a door set towards the rear.
Bunk mates were important. People didn't realise how much effort it took to decorate a bachelor pad by yourself. Those things never happen overnight.
That is to say, not without a bloody good party, enough booze to flood the grand canyon and even more pizza than you had uninvited sleepovers.
People always seemed to know when thir messmaking skills were required. You picked that up at an early age trashing a friend's house while his parents were gone. You picked up vanishing into thin air when they returned early as well. It was exaclty this kind of helpfulness and generosity people ought repay.
From the looks of the place, it had been one wild party indeed.
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