The Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
Aly was looking forward to having dinner with Grayson. She had only met him about an hour and a half ago, but she liked him better than any of the snooty Alpha kids. The other Alpha/Beta kids couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with their blasters, but they still waved them around in people’s faces. She was the only one who was actually in shape and any good at shooting (She was good at it, but she never admitted how much time she had spent practicing).
She walked down the hallway towards her dad’s room, pressed her finger into the lock, and walked in.
“Hi dad!” She said as she walked in. Her dad was a tall man. He had whitening blond hair, a clean shaven face, and a calm demeanor. He could stop an argument by walking into the room.
Aly sat down at the table in the middle of the room, and leaned back in her chair, and tilted her chair back on two legs.
Her dad was looking out the window at the construction vehicles working to plug the leak on the ion container. Aly looked down at the patched and aging bottom of the ship. Grayson probably lived somewhere down there, she thought.
I’ll just tell Dad i’m going to eat in my room, Aly thought, that way he doesn’t have to know that I’m going to invite a Sector Delta over. He would completely flip. She watched her Dad walk over in calculated steps, like he had planned out everything he was going to do. He joined her at the table. From tubes inside the cylindrical table, two perfect grilled cheese sandwiches were pushed up to the tabletop, with a glass of water and everything.
Uh Oh, Aly thought, Dad never orders something as simple as a grilled cheese sandwiches unless he wants something from me.
“So Da-” Aly started,
“Listed Al-”
Aly sighed “You first”
“Aly,” said Lead Officer Richard “I’ve decided that you are old enough that you need to know how to work- I mean play with other people your age. So I met with a couple people, and they have kids that would get along wonderfully with you”
Aly rolled her eyes. She and her dad had differing opinions about what“Getting Along” meant.
For Aly it felt more like watching the other kids brag about games they had won and food they had eaten and places they had found.
Aly opened her mouth to speak, but her dad interrupted.
“I know you wouldn’t be excited about this” He said, “so I decided we would go to the Blaster Range after dinner”
Aly wasn’t sure what to do. Should she tell her dad about Grayson? Or maybe just sneak out when the other kid got here? Or maybe she should just cancel.
Aly ate her grilled cheese and hoped that inspiration would strike.
Grayson was debating whether he had time to go to the Trash Vault (As he had decided to call it) Finally, after deciding that he needed a blaster pistol, he headed to the Trash Vault in a rusted HoverT that kept sputtering to a stop before starting again. (The good HoverT’s were reserved for the Alpha and Beta Sectors, only when you did paid service would you get to use the good ones). Grayson was an orphan, so he stopped at Child Health Services for a cardboard tasting grilled cheese.
Grayson’s next stop was at his room for a change of clothes. His door was blue, but the blue had worn off, so it looked more like grey. The fingerprint scanner was worn with use, and you had to press hard to get it to open. His room walls were made out of peeling white wallpaper, much cheaper than the White Plasteel of the Alpha, Beta and Gamma apartments. The floor was made out of smooth(ish) steel squares, and the whole place was cluttered with shelves and materials. He had some heat retaining aluminum sheets thrown about (for his food).
Grayson’s bed was not much more than a cot, with a blue blanket and heated wires inside. There was a couple glow lights hanging from the ceiling of the small square room, so it was light inside. There was a HoloVision 33 on his table. He headed straight for his one shelf with his clothes, courtesy of Child Health Services. He put on his normal clothes and headed out.
At the Trash Vault he rummaged through the piles of unwanted stuff, with the chutes closed to prevent any accidents. He was starting to get a feel for the room. Some chutes dropped engine chassis and broken pipes, others dropped ship parts and damaged HoverT’s (HoverT wrecks were very rare but not unheard of)
And others dropped old and unwanted things, like robots and vehicles that were controlled manually. Lastly, there were chutes that dropped ignored things. He was able to scavenge five different (Still in the box) blaster pistols.
He grabbed the first one he found. If he had read the box, he would have seen that it was Sol-0® DN - 13 Tracking Pistol. It was an average one, but Grayson didn’t care.
Then something caught his eye. It was a Pulse Rifle.
Pulse Rifles where long range high powered Blasters. They were extremely rare, because 1, they were not made anymore, and 2, because they were illegal. You could literally blast a hole in the ship with one of them. He hid it, not before thinking about what other illegal (Not to mention dangerous) things that were hidden beneath the trash. As if in answer to his thoughts, he heard a dull explosion from somewhere far away.
He shivered and rushed out of the room, opening the chutes as he left.
