“You know, they did not include training for a situation like this.” Alex ached pretty much everywhere, muscles weak from the exertion of taking the massive waverider engine apart while Carbon did the easy parts - albeit ones that required a functional knowledge of the engine, which Alex did not have. He’d let that slide for now. “Are you sure the dust is safe?”
“There is no evidence linking it to diseases that would not occur from any other sort of dust.” She was shoulder deep in the good engine as he rested on top of the ruined one they were scavenging. “One must simply not make a habit of inhaling any sort of dust.”
“Oh well, that’s easy enough.”
“I have found it so.” She ducked her head into the frame and grunted as she closed up whatever bit she’d been working on with a sharp metallic clack. “I feel this is a good amount of work for the day. Unless you would like to continue?”
“No.” He said it a little harder than he’d have liked, but he really did not want to exert his recently repaired body to the point of failure. One trip to the mediboard was more than enough.
“Very well. Your assistance has made this progress much faster, although I believe I am starting to understand where one of the stereotypes of Humans has come from.” She sounded rather amused by that as she picked her array of tools out of the air where she’d left them, gliding over to the toolbox that she had welded to the wall and storing them properly.
“Don’t leave me hanging, which one?” This should be good.
“I am unsure how delicate I should be when I say this.”
“A little bit would be nice, but we’re talking stereotypes so I’m preparing myself for the worst.”
She turned and set an arm on the toolbox, lips pursed as she sussed out her words. “It is a common statement that humans... do not have a good smell. I have not had that experience so far. You - humanity, not you specifically - do not produce an unusual amount of scent, nor a particularly offensive one. Or you have been exceptionally fastidious to the last.”
It was strange to be talking about the whole of humanity. At least it was trending good. “There’s a ‘but’ here, right?”
Carbon nodded. Of course there was. “During prolonged physical exertion, it is much more significant.”
“Well yeah. That’s pretty normal, sweating will do that.” He shrugged and stretched, pulling himself down off the top of the engine, “honestly not that much of a stereotype. Some of us do smell bad. Hopefully I’m not getting too offensive here?”
“No, it is not. I have worked with a few Tsla’o who produce worse. It is just significant and quite foreign.” She pushed off the wall towards the airlock back to the rest of the ship, gliding slowly past him.
“All right, well, guess I’ll be stopping at the head before dinner.” Alex followed her with more space than usual, letting her load into the airlock first. He felt filthy anyway, no sense in trying to enjoy a meal while caked in dried sweat and engine grime if he wasn’t going to be going right back to work afterwards.
The Engineer’s quarters were just beyond the rear airlock, close to the engine room, and he caught Carbon disappearing into them as he cycled through. Alex propelled himself down the hall to his own quarters and ducked into his still dark room, rifling through his drawers for clean clothes in the light coming from the hallway.
He found himself back in the head with a fresh jumpsuit tucked under one arm, staring at the water tank readout. The fresh and gray water tanks were both half full, the filtration systems intended to circulate enough for two showers per day. He decided he’d probably want to use it more in the morning than he did right now, opting for an anti-bacterial body wipe instead. It wasn’t perfect, but it was refreshing in a shockingly cold sort of way.
He shoved himself across the passageway and back into the mess. Carbon had been so kind as to prepare dinner, two trays stuck to the table already as she waited for something at her dispenser. She looked at him sideways with a wave, a little disappointment in her eyes. Alex waved back, slipped onto the bench and clipped himself in.
“Hey, pizza. It’s been a long time since I had pizza.” He had been ignoring his hunger, but the prospect of eating changed things significantly. He had just about managed to get the round, cheesy disk into his mouth when he could tell that it smelled wrong. A little too sharp and tart, but he was committed to taking a bite, teeth already sinking into the not-pizza.
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Carbon’s head perked up, clearly confused. “Pizza?”
“Oh, that is not pizza at all.” Alex spoke around the mouthful of hot... not-pizza.
“Certainly not.” She tossed him a beverage tube and sat down across from him.
“That’s... Not bad. Tangy.” The crust was springy and moist, what he thought was cheese was some sort of spicy, creamy sauce that had been browned.
“Good.” She nibbled away at her disk of food, “What is pizza?”
“It’s like this...” He set it down and gestured at it. “But different. There’s cheese, tomato sauce and toppings on bread. Well, it’s almost nothing like this. But it is round. Usually.”
“I do not know these, what cheese and tomato sauce are.” She spoke the unfamiliar words carefully, imitating his pronunciation as she turned the words over in her mouth. "They are specific to Humans, or is there a more generic term I may have heard before?"
“Specific to Humans, I guess. Tomato is a proper name, and cheese is...” What the hell was cheese? “It’s a solid dairy... product. Made from milk.”
Her eyes narrowed in thought before she sat up straight. “Oh! I have heard of the cheese. The milk proteins are clotted and then processed into solids.”
“It- It tastes better than that description makes it sound.” If someone had described cheese to him like that before he’d eaten it, he wouldn’t have. “Admittedly a bit of an odd thing. But, when you don’t have refrigeration or stasis fields, you do what you have to to make fresh foods last.”
Carbon chewed on a bite of the not-pizza, thinking over what he’d said. “It is understandable. The Tsla’o have practiced fermentation of foods for millenia now, and it has been some time since it was required to survive a winter.”
“If you like fermented food, I can think of a couple of things you might want to try.”
“Humans ferment food, not just alcohol?” She asked, an eyebrow arched in surprise, the antenna on the same side rising as well.
“Yeah, of course. Again, preservation. Just adds something to the taste, too.” Despite no one else in his family enjoying it, Alex always had a soft spot for sauerkraut.
“I did not know that.”
His face scrunched in a little, eyebrows and voice pitching up in disbelief. “Really?
“Yes, really. I would not lie about such things.” Carbon was a little perturbed by that, her tone sharpening for a moment.
He continued to work his way through dinner as he spoke, a little confused. “I’m sorry, I just got used to you knowing a lot, kind of having a knowledge disparity with you.”
“I have become very familiar with the technology used in the ship and a few of your customs, but that is almost the full extent of my knowledge. The original manuals were in English and they were very technical.”
“They didn’t translate them?”
“The translations into written Tsla were... bad. The technical aspects in particular had issues with measurements either being extremely precise or rounded so far as to make them wrong. ” She paused to take a pull off her beverage. “I already knew a small amount of English, learning more of it proved to be only somewhat difficult.”
Alex nodded at that, it made sense. Despite the plethora of other languages still in use, English was still what pilots and traffic controllers spoke to avoid running everything through translators, and that made its usage very common among engineers as well. “It has come in quite handy.”
She smiled, “yes, it has.”
“So you haven’t experienced any of our culture? Movies, books, theater?”
“I have screened two human movies that were in illicit data stores that were confiscated on the Khav, but that was just to determine if there was anything of concern in them like viri or seditious materials.” Presumably the ship she worked on before the Kshlav’o.
“Oh, what were they?” Alex was legitimately curious about this. What had managed to cross the rather significant divide between the two, both in cultural differences and the more logistical issue of simply not having a lot of points of contact between their respective stellar communications networks.
She hesitated, suddenly straightening up and looking rather uncomfortable. “They... were not complete, just a few scenes. I do not think I can identify them with my current knowledge of Human media.”
“Huh.” Alex deftly steered the conversation away from whatever was going on there. “We should watch a movie or something. They packed a few terabytes of entertainment into the store, lots of classics.”
“You would like to watch something with me?” She contained her excitement poorly, leaning forward with a wide grin. All those pointy little teeth on display for the first time.
“Sure.” He finished off his not-pizza, “they have the series that really got me into wanting to work out here. In space, I mean. The circumstances are way different, but it still set me down this path.”
She leaned back, appraising him. “I am very interested in seeing what helped turn you into what you have become, Alex.”