"Hey, are ya coming?" Landsat-9 called out for me on the opposite end of the hallway. I jerked back by a few millimeters, "Oh, yeah, can I just look outside?" I asked, pointing my thumb back towards the windows and to the hills beyond.

"Oh, sure, sure! I'll wait for you over at the cafeteria, it's at the end of this hall, don't worry!" He said, waving his hand once before walking down. We were both going to go at the cafeteria. Landsat-9 said something about seeing what they had to offer and hoping the cafeteria here still had his favorite snack. I wasn't quite listening because I had my eyes zoomed right into the images of the book he showed me.

I stepped up to the windows in equally paced and timed intervals, slowly turning my spacecraft body up to watch the sky. The view was crowded, but still marvelous. It was a lot more hilly, and plenty of architecture and buildings, and you can evidently tell that this was indeed a human-colonized California. I saw some buildings to my left, but most of the view was nice, empty grass.

I was stuck in a sort of pleasurable trance for a good solid half-minute, until I heard footsteps. But it wasn't Landsat-9's; they were coming from a different direction that I doubt Landsat-9 even took to get to the cafeteria, let alone come back from it to call me over. It crept and it echoed closer to my direction, and at this point I had to turn around and look. I turned right, then paused, and then turned more to the right. I did this twice, carefully looking and trying to get whatever the noise was coming from into the corner of my vision and then center it right in the eyepiece.

It was a smaller spacecraft that didn't look like any communication satellite I've seen. Her bus was an absorbing dark grey, and she had this very vivid pattern on her boots that overlayed sunset gradient stripes onto black. Her eyes were wide open, staring at me intently, and she was holding a...rubber chicken in her hands? She pointed the chicken at me, glanced at it twice, and threw it back. And unfortunately for her, the trajectory flew the chicken right into a passing satellite's face, thunking onto their face before the chicken fell onto the floor. The satellite gave her simply angry confusion and walked away. I guess it was unfortunate, just not for her.

The spacecraft in front of me walked closer to me as if she was a technician inspecting me, "So...I heard you're the newbie here." she said, and she sounded similar to the voice I heard earlier talking about xenon something.

"Uh, uhmm..." Why was she inspecting me like this? She was looking all over my hardware like she was orbiting me.

"JPL's newest spacecraft, hah, I can see you're gonna have a blast here." She smirked at me.

"Er-yes..?"

"Europa, Europa Clipper...Clippah....Cleeeeppaaaah..." Why was she saying my name over and over like that?

"I'm sorry, uhm, who are you?"

"Name's Psyche. NASA's 14th Discovery Program mission. Big time guitar shredder." She had an elbow on me, "Don't usually get to talk to a lot of interplanetary spacecraft, especially orbiters."

"So, uhm, where are you, uhm, heading?"

"Psyche."

"What?"

"16-Psyche. It's a giant metallic lumpy blob thing rock in the Asteroid Belt. So, that makes me your soon-to-be neighboorrrrrr!" She pointed her fingers at me, "Well soon-to-be as in like...a decade, who knows?"

Oh stars.

"Okay...Well, erm, I have to...I have to go to the cafeteria." I slowly backed away from her.

"I'll see you later, Cleeeppaaaah!" She had her hands on the sides of her cubic body. I shrugged and looked directly at opposition from her and continued my way. Who introduces themselves like that?

I make it to the cafeteria, and just what I needed, a room filled with spacecraft. And by that I mean I absolutely did not need that. It was this random satellite here, and multiple groups of satellites there! Here and there and there and here! Where in Orion's belt were you, Landsat-9?

I stepped in essentially in the blind, trying to navigate through this sea of spacecraft, or was it like a ball pit of spacecraft? A flock of spacecraft? Now what am I even thinking about?

"Clipper!" I heard him call out to me from the right of my view. Thank stars! He was waving his left hand up as he was holding a red tray.

I ran up to him, "Hey, Landsat-9!" I waved back.

"Just call me Nine. Until you meet another spacecraft with the number nine in the name, heh, now that gets confusing." He lowered the tray an inch and extended it towards me, "Anyways, I got some canisters of hydrazine for us!"

"Oh, uh, I'm actually bipropellant. I don't do hydrazine."

"Oh, okay, uh, what about some chips?"

"We can eat regular human food?"

"Apparently. No side effects at all, either. You just eat it."

We sat near a red, circular table at the corner of the cafeteria. He was right in front of me while the open window to the right of me gave me the view of the outside world. I had someone to sit with out of all of the strange, loud spacecraft in this place. I was feeling a lot more energized in that moment.