[Lieutenant Lily Speidel]

Five A.M, Friday Morning; Thursday night far from sleep.

Lily lay on her bed, her gun laying on her nightstand, her feet in the air, swinging back and forth with the timing of the clock hanging from her wall. Her grey eyes glazed over from the ultimate lack of sleep and the intoxicating alchohol flowing through her veins. She balanced her glass on her chest while she stared at her ceiling, some of the scotch tipping over onto her pink pajama top.

Lieutenant Speidel couldn't care less if she were drench in scotch; to her nothing was really worth getting worked up over anymore. Nothing was worth worrying about, life was just a float along a river, there was no controlling it.

There was no controlling of the haunting dreams, the returning, repetative dreams of that endless rage, that horrible sensation of having no control over her trigger finger. The vision of the buckets of blood on the soft white matress, the way his head lulled to one side when she stepped towards him. The scent of the feces that flooded his pants, the way his shredded tongue fell out of his mouth, the way his teeth fell out of his gums, the way his eyes looked right through her.

The imagery was too much in the first half hour of sleep that Thursday night. She had bolted awake and rushed to the toilet where she had vomited her meal from that evening. She knew she couldn't, wouldn't, sleep that night.

''Dammit, Lily, we really need to talk to someone!'' She shouted at herself aloud and threw her glass against the wall, shattering it and the glass framed picture it collided with.

''Fucking fat cow!'' She turned on her stomach and kicked the pillows and the lamp on the nightstand. Six am now, people would definately hear her, but she didn't care. She was just so incredibly angry at herself, at her Cheif from the Revolution party, at the judge that put her in the military....

[Major Richard Quinn]

Finding ways to pass the time was fast becoming the number one hobby amongst the Eidolon's permanent crew. Spending over a year on the ship with nothing to break the monotony but the occasional reversion into real space. The Alliance had done what they could to keep crew morale high. I.C.E. was loaded with virtually every movie that had ever been converted to a digital format, including the more recent 'Immersion' films that allowed the viewer to choose their own viewpoint. There were numerous games, simulations, even library access to ensure the mental health of any crew would not atrophy.

But one could only watch so many films before they got bored. And one could only play so many games before they all seemed like variations on a single theme. Everyone had their ways of countering the boredom. Some took to bed together. Some took up new hobbies, or trained endlessly to hone what skills they already had. For Quinn, he set himself a rigid discipline of training for two hours after he woke, and spent the rest of his awake-time either running simulations or tending to his meager duties. At this point, the ship was at a quiet point, with all of the colony sections locked down, their occupants blissfully unaware of their status. So for the time being, Quinn had very little to do.

He sat in his chair at the security station on the bridge, hands behind his head, feet resting up on the console. One side of his brain was going through a careful integrity check of all security systems, making sure there weren't any breaches, while the other side was running an Immersion program. Quinn was right there, centre-front, at the last Rolling Stones concert, even though he still hadn't been born when the last of the Rolling Stones had died. Modern technology was a wonderful thing.

As he belted out the lyrics to 'Street Fighting Man' with the rest of the concert goers, the integrity check flashed a minor alert into his mind. Sighing inwardly, he paused Mick Jagger in mid scream and focused his attention on the problem. "What seems to be the problem, I.C.E.?"

There was a short pause as Crystal flashed the image up in his mind. He recognized Lieutenant Spiedel lying on her bed in her quarters, which didn't faze him. If she'd been in a state of undress, I.C.E. would have simply told him the problem rather than give him a direct visual feed. As it was, he could clearly see the firearm on the nightstand beside her. He wondered how she had managed to get it out of the armory without him knowing. Of course, there was no way she could fire it, all weapons aboard the Eidolon were code-locked by I.C.E. unless a suitable state of emergency was declared.

She was obviously inebriated....but she was also apparently upset about something. Without thinking, his translator brought up her bio in the background of his thoughts, and he perused it rapidly before dismissing it. Rather than bring Tolbert in on this, he figured what she needed was someone to talk to. So he cancelled the Immersion program altogether and got off his chair. A few minutes later, he arrived in the crew living quarters, and stopped in front of Lieutenant Spiedel's door. Gathering his thoughts, he linked the doorbell function and waited to see if there'd be a response.