The lobby is empty when she returns so she taps the bell loudly and in annoyance until someone comes to book her a room. Myrha knew her pride would sting when Bartin enters, looking horribly smug.

“You’ve decided to join us?” he asks.

“For one night, until the shuttle leaves.”

His smugness instantly disappears.

She points to her prize package on her utiphone, “Now give me the best room you’ve got.”

The ‘best room’ happens to be a small nook on the second floor with a rotting balcony overlooking the ocean. Like the lobby, the wood in the room gives off a noxious odor…something like stale sweat. Gross.

Also, she’s missing a bed.

Myrha puts her hands on her hips and blows hot air past her lips. She’s pretty damn sure she’s supposed to have a bed. Stomping around the room she examines the nightstand and dresser, the only pieces of furniture in the room. Even when she looks under them, she cannot find their pods. They’re like relics of a past era, found in some grandmother’s attic. Or maybe they were rescued from a dump. She honestly can’t tell.

She’s also missing a lamp. And most importantly, a bathroom.

This must be a joke. Some form of cosmic joke. She slams a fist in the wall, because if she doesn’t punch the wall she’ll probably find Bartin and slug his ugly face and it’s relatively impolite to maim your host (not to mention the last time she did something like that she spent a long, uncomfortable night in a holding cell while Officers laughed at her idiocy). She feels slightly better after taking her aggression out on the wall, but then the wall does something strange: it squeaks.

Backing up quickly she surveys the wall with a critical eye. On Earth, she spends a lot of her time hanging out in bars and cheap hotels (which, of course, are still classier than this hovel), and she’s encountered more than a few sneaky aliens hiding out where they shouldn’t be. Sometimes, they’re criminals on the run; other times, they just want to watch tourists get naked.

She taps the wall again. It squeaks. But it sounds more like a rust-squeak than hiding-alien squeak. A strap sticking out of the wall catches her eye. Standing on tiptoe, she yanks on the strap and yelps as something falls on her. She darts out of the way and with a rusty clanging noise, the bed is revealed.

She gapes at it. She has never seen a bed come out of a wall before. Usually the furniture is already laid out, and if a guest wants to change the placement, all they have to do is pick up its pod.

Phenomenally glad she already released her anger on the squeaky wall, she marches down to the lobby and slams her hands on the counter. Bartin, doodling on an artist pad on his utiphone, jumps.

“Bathrooms,” she demands with false sweetness.

“Communal facilities on the first floor,” he answers with the same sugary tone.

“Luggage?”

“In the corner.”

She swiftly turns away and goes to the grey luggage machine. A fine layer of dust covers its surface, and rust dots its corners. Myrha slides her luggage plate into the slot, the machine makes a rather worrying rattling noise, but then her luggage appears on the metal weighing slab safe and sound. The luggage plate, now blank of data, shoots into the recycle bin, where the other passengers’ plates rest.

She heaves her suitcase off the machine and drags it up the stairs. She has some serious decorating to do.

When she pops open her luggage, everything is thankfully intact and packed how she left it. Grumbling, she takes her travel kit out of her suitcase. It was something her mother, upon hearing about her trip, had thought she would need. Myrha had endured endless gossiping and shopping sessions to find the best one.

She carefully takes a tiny pod out of the kit. She places it in the corner, presses the expand button, and tada! Instant standing lamp. She enables the anchoring feature and the lamp transforms from a projection to solid lamp of awesomeness. Soon she has several lamps, a mirror and a clock. Unfortunately, the ceiling and walls don’t seem to have hooks for pods, so the pods stay on the floor which means she’ll probably trip over one of them and smash in her face (something that had been a design flaw of the pods in the first place).

She is not in the mood to get food from the hotel, so she makes the bed instead. She peels off the bed’s comforter, which is flowery in design. It has sensors that replicate the smell of the flowers, but since the flowers aren’t Earthen in origin, they’re not really a comfort to her. She kicks it aside and takes her own sheets out of the travel kit. Nasty bed bugs, especially the extraterrestrial ones, are things she unfortunately has experience with. She did not need her mother to tell her that clean sheets are a vital part of a travel kit.

Finally, when her bed is made, and the lights are extinguished and the sun has set, she peeks out her window and the enormity of what she has done just sort of smacks her. She’s on an alien planet.

The world is entirely dark except for the light of several far away moons. They’re not as close and luminous as Earth’s solitary companion, but she can still see them as small orbs, three in total. They cast minimal light only, and everything is very…quiet. The Universe is asleep here is a line from a Dellylee poem. She still doesn’t much care for her poetry, but perhaps she knew what she was on about after all.

Earth is loud. Loud and bright throughout the day and night. Even the moon, which is the astronomical equivalent of Antarctica, is still dotted with research facilities and clusters of lights that can be seen when the moon is new. Here, she is one of nineteen people (plus an android) on a foreign planet. She chokes a little on the reality of such isolation, and there’s an itch, a need, to get back to Earth as soon as possible.

Instead she goes back to her bed, curls up in the warmth of her terrene sheets, and pretends she’s not light-years away from home. In the darkness, she can almost believe it.