Hygienics

"Okay", Cha mumbled, "let's consider all possibilities".

One: she could maybe ignore it was all there. Just go on gathering dust, cans, unspeakable biomass and icky tricky selfgrowing goo from the kind that doesn't belong in pods and ships. She
could just leave her crap on the floor so she couldn't see the dirt. It would pile up of course. It would get a bit akward moving around the ship. But at least the docking crews would start looking elsewhere than through her interface suit. If there was no afterlife, then maybe this was her only opportunity for leaving some legacy. She would get some type of immortality, albeit not of the heroic type. Hmm.

Two: she could just dump it all in space. And then she could insist the piles of garbage everywhere around her of course did not belong to her. And then they would of course not believe her. They would start threatening with fines, and she would ignore them, getting more and more infuriated about how injust it all was. They would start threatening with detention, and she would be taken out of her ship by force, kicking and screaming about how injust it all was. The injustice would raise massive protest from Arnola to Jolia, featured on every news channel, but there would then arise a slight miscommunication between the activists on who would be the real spokesman for the Save Chacacha Committee, and then they would start quarreling about what exactly would be the best way to protest, and then they would forget what exactly the subject of the protest was. And then they would discover how injust the scorpions on Hirtamon were treated by their own offspring. And there she would be, in the middle of her cell, surrounded by suddenly superfluous merchandise. Which probably would start gathering dust too.

Three: she could break all these non-consumable possessions down into the necessary and the unnecessary. She pondered a while about this exercise. Apart from the inescapable fatigue that would come with it, she doubted there would be much of what she would deem to be necessities. Like this - she slipped her hand into a silvermetallic loop kinda thing that probably should have been on the drone. That could be useful. Her thoughts jumped, her face flushed red, and she corrected herself hastily: "Well, no, just bracelets." Other than that, she would still be stuck with a whole lot of unnecessary dust, cans, unspeakable biomass and icky tricky selfgrowing goo from the kind that doesn't belong in pods and ships anyway, which would bring her back to square One. Or Two. Or -

Four! Aha - she might get to be famous without being dead first. She looked around. Lots of opportunities for unbridled creativity! She could start practising for the interviews already. "I select familiar stylistic imagery, icons and spacemarks that transcend traditional cultural boundaries and promote a superficial notion of interspace, the image being a fantasy realm obtainable through commodities void of a contextual study allowing the illustrated lifestyle to be readily adopted, leaving the seeming banality and regularity of these objects, through various media, only addressed when positioned by it's subjective components."
She'd be rich in no time. She'd be the greatest thing since Fedo sushi. If it wasn't for the champaign on all the gallery openings. Champaign did something to her. Wine took two glasses to get her giggling, and three to start doing things she shouldn't. Champaign did the same in sips. Tricky territory. She shook her head. Art is dangerous.

She shuddered at option number five, loaded with peril.
Alas. It seemed there was no other way.

Option number five sat right there, on the floor next to the control panel, inside a cardboard box. With compliments of mrs Nakatre Read, delivered right on her doorstep. And since mrs Nakatre Read was her boss, it would have been slightly deficient to refuse, careerwise.
She should have known that there would be consequences when she had started accepting help "to enhance the smooth integration of your unique professional abilities within the corporation's future plans" - Cha wasn't entirely sure mrs Read had only meant her fighter pilot skills, the way she had looked her up and down with that slow appreciative smile of her, wasn't she married or something? Anyway, she could live with the help when it took the form of skillbooks and autocannons and ammo. Even both those shiny new ruptures in her hangar right now, although her stomach had been upset for two days from that. But this - possibly this truely was the worst fate that ever could have befallen her. Horror in her own ship.
Too late now.

Reluctantly she pushed the box over with the tip of her foot.

A pilot can establish, with a fedo, a kind of relationship, if not friendly then logical at least: the pilot produces the garbage, the fedo decomposes it. Not so Cha. To her there was nothing logical about having a giant smelly detritivore wander her ship, no matter how much detritivoring it obviously needed. She simply knew that it would breed exponentially, carpet the floor and burst underfoot when she'd try to get somewhere. Or that they might get in the habit of hurling themselves from the ceiling onto the human face.
Eurgh.

She stood with folded arms, silent, observing her first subordinate. The spongebug remained equally silent.
"Maybe this is a formal manifestation of respect," Cha thought, realizing she knew nothing about fedo culture. "soon it will throw itself on my garbage."

Time passed. Nothing happened. It didn't look dead though.

She didn't feel any urge to connect on a deeper level, but maybe the fedo did. Maybe it needed a personal relationship to function properly. Cha supressed the upcoming panick. Maybe a name would do.
She had no idea whether it was male or female, and she didn't feel the urge to look for the determining sting either. But it was reddish. It felt female. She shuddered at the thought that she actually had something in common with a fedo.
She took a decision. "...Sue," she said hesitantly, and then more firm: "Sue, nice to meet you, would you now please go to work?".
Sue remained snug and irresponsive.

Maybe Sue needed more explaining. Cha picked up something undefinable slimy something, and, remaining at a safe distance, dropped it near the fedo. Sue firmly refused to ingest, let alone she warped into raiding her fresh territory. Who knows what's on the mind of fedo's anyway? For all Cha knew fedos maybe exacerbated a thorough hatred toward all humanity. She was probably giving off hostile vibes that Cha just couldn't pick up for some reason.

Cha started loosing her patience. Maybe Sue needed more convincing. Cha gave her a stern look. "Now, listen up Sue," she straightened herself, "i dont want to be a nuisance and crash your party here, but this is about the jolliest place for fedos i know of. I know we aren't extravagantly fond of each other, but i suggest we try concealing our mutual enmity and get to work."
Sue didn't conceal anything. She just didn't move.

Cha dwelt more than just a short moment on the possibility of some fatal accident putting an end to Sue's existence, and then afterwards just turning the lightning low. Very low. That would not only be romantic, but it would hide a multitude of dirt.
She suppressed her homicidal urges. She had faced more than just an unwilling fedo here and there! It was clear that it would take authoritarian rule, the fear of the sole human in the room holding a strap, or a laser, or maybe a railgun, to convince some unruly fedo to actually abide by her rules. She emitted what she hoped would be the brave and optimistic image of a seasoned fighting pilot in a battle, grabbed a piece of scrap metal and held it up in what she hoped a fedo would understand to be a life threatening pose.
The fedo observed her rancorously, suspiciously, reprovingly. That is, it would have, if fedos would have had eyes to observe with. But Cha could feel its contempt anyway.
"Raaaargh!" she screamed, "you, you, you roly-poly tiggychuggypigglydoodlepillpotatobughog!"

Disheartened she sank on her knees next to the recalcitrant critter. Were fedos possibly self-destructive? She had no clue.
She got the feeling it was a bit upset though.
"Not exactly of a passionate nature, aren't we?" Cha whispered to Sue.
To her astonishment, Sue stirred a multitude of little tentacles.
Duh! She had as much social intuition as a fedo. She walked over to the desk, checked the market and gave the order. She wasn't exactly excited by the prospect, but if it had to be done, it had to be done.

"I'll call him Adam," Cha said, "do you like that?"

Sue moved. She put her tiny fiddles forward, wheezed a trifle acid, and started to work.



* expression first coined by CCP executive producer Nathan Richardsson

Mutinies

Cha initiated the drone exit sequence. The hobgoblin hummed into action, and made it's smooth entry into infinite space. "Hmm," mumbled Cha "- let's not make that too infinite in this case."
Shiny perfect, sunlight glinting off it's alloy hood, the drone looked exactly the way it was supposed to look. Surprisingly. Apart from the waving little strand of ductape then, but what would perfection mean without a little flaw here and there? "No roses without thorns", she thought, "and no him without -"... well, sometimes the image of the ultimate perfection only holds up if you don't look too close. The drone blinked, as if he acknowledged such wisdom.
"Let's see if the merry midget can find an asteroid", Cha said to noone especially, but the ship's comp picked it up anyway, and nudged the drone into electronic compliance. Cha held her breath, but the drone whirred and buzzed as expected, and floated swiftly towards the rock. "I'm an engineering wizard", Cha told the ship, and the ship agreed in silence.
"Target and hold". The drone seemed to hesitate a moment, then slowly turned around. It hicupped.
"Being targeted." Poss dryly said in her unconcerned Aurora voice. "Wut? wwWHAAT?". Cha sped to the scanner but there were no ships nearby. Something cloaked?
The bwip-bwip-bwip from the targeting scanner brittled on. Cha's eyes opened wide when truth sank in. Rrraaargh! The drooone! Did it just go rogue!?
She dived to the drone data readings, just in time to see its weapon sequence start up. Cha screamed furiously. "Put it offline! Put it offline!" The motion array wooshed to zero, but not so the targeting system. "Target locked", the ship continued, oblivious of the pending disaster. "Weapons offline!" she yelled.
Alas, the drone chose to disobey, cycling his servo loop and aiming straight for the stabber, scrutinizing its target. It blinked slowly. As if it took time for a smoke before the kill.
Sheer torment. "Of course, why not. Of course this has to happen to me. Of course, from aaaaaall people this has to happen to me. Floored in an own-goal." She already saw Mrs Read, lifting one eyebrow but otherwise staying totally unemotional, asking the giggling receptionist: "Chacacha did what?".
"Think, Cha, think! Put both your braincells in sync!" No way she'd shoot her own first drone. Although - having her first drone shoot her wasn't exactly the next best option either.
The solution jumped to her, or at least a possible solution. Hopefully a solution. The asteroid. "Fast jump 2 o'clock then fall sideways 127° SSE." The ship flapjacked up, then spun around, leaving the asteroid between itself and the drone. "Harrrrr. Eat that, you dirty midget!"
The drone blinked again, shocked, as it had lost its target, unable to follow. The targeting signal stopped abruptly. Cha almost felt sorry for the little bum. "Okay," she told it, and commanded the scoop. "You are forgiven. Let's try establish a friendly relationship. Come back to mommy." The hobgoblin seemed to chew on that for a while, processing its options. It emitted a series of clicks, then finally started behaving logically. Data carefully started to flow in, as if they knew some apologies were appropriate.
The hobgoblin moved. It rounded the corner, and then there was a hope-dashing crash.
"All drone systems down", the ship comp said, and Cha was convinced it could barely hold its laughter. "Try again", she hissed. "Environmental interference. Data corrupted. Elements static. Processing complete. All drone systems down.", it repeated.
"My salary is ludicrously too low for this", Cha sighed. She stared at the asteroid, where she barely could make out the little shred of duct tape, still waving enthusiastically at her. The drone seemed to be stuck between two rocks, sunken halfway in what looked like a small rift. No way the basic ship's crane could get the damn thing out of that hole on his own.
She parked the ship as close as she safely could, aimed the crane, and recalculated. She sighed even deeper. There was no other way.

Nausea struck her as soon as she stepped, eyes closed, into nothingness. She swallowed. "Go to your happy place, Cha," she self-instructed. She thought of - nope, she would not think of that. Not now.
Reluctantly she opened one eye. She caught a glimpse of herself mirrored in the metal of the energy shields, sprawled against the side of the ship. "A truely ass-kicking pose", she thought, and then remembered how she had proved him a billion times again she wasn't a starfish, unlike his previous girlfriend. Not there, then not here either! All she had to do was simply throw herself forward with all her weight (although that wasn't much to start with already), not minding that it was going to hurt.
"Come on, Cha, you cant fall in space." She swallowed again. "Just orbit perpetually." She giggled. Another floating female frozen corpse for a disturbed collector. Nevaaaah! She pushed off, soaring high. Beware, evil forces of space, for the ever so deadly, legendary, amazing and sexy Chacacha is prowling the planets and the stars!

She maneuvred herself towards the drone, crawling, floating, drifting, tumbling. Disorientation galore. Nearing the surface of the asteroid, she had no idea anymore of what was up or down. But she landed reasonably elegant, even if she had to say it herself. Only slightly fluky.
She bobbed towards the waiting crane gripper, and then pulled it along, bobbing back towards the hobgoblin.
It looked a lot larger and heavier than she remembered. And frayed and eew - greasy. And horrifiying distant still - she couldnt get the grip arm close enough. She leaned over as far as she could, but she still lacked length. She tried from her knees. Damn. She got on her belly, praying her space suit would hold without chafing or tearing, and writhed herself closer, dragging the gripper behind her. One of her dreadlocks chose this moment to spring loose, getting in her eyes without any chance to put it back behind her ears. And then another one. She sighed. The joys of tribe symbolics in a space career. Blowing them out of her face again and again, she thanked the powers that noone else was nearby to witness the entire self chastizing endeavor. Especially men. They wouldn't understand anyway. She managed to crawl close enough, and with a superhuman effort hooked the grip to the drone, the tip of her tongue between her teeth.

She watched with surreal anticipation how the drone jerked its way out of the caving, pulled back by the retracting crane arm, tottering with electronic glee towards the rocky edges and then lamely bouncing off towards the waiting ship. Yeaaaaaaaa! She had done it! "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's suuuuper Cha!" She jumped carefully, then tried a few triumphant swoops.
The duct tape joyfully winked at her before disappearing in the stabber's belly.

She knew the worst part still had to come. Even drowning slaver puppies would be more fun than writing a cold objective corp report on this day's happenings. After which it undoubtedly would seep in chuckles and chortles into the Waterdrop Bar.
She could swear the ship comp replied to her warp command with a barely hidden robotic relish.

Efficiencies

Everyone has a little bit of deviance somewhere, even if they hide it well. Cha found herself quite normal, apart from this thing with him. That, and how she was determined to build her own first combat drone. Come to think of it, both had to do with exhilaration, technophilia, and a knack to prove the impossible.
When she was small she had learned everything her grandma had found useful. How to start a fire. How to carve a carrot doll. How to extract ink out of squids. How to read drone assembly manuals. How to find the right man. O wait - no, not that. Why is it so hard for women to find men that are sensitive, caring, and good-looking? Because those men already have boyfriends. She giggled at her own cheesy humor and then frowned at the screen.
Download these instructions for assembling T1 Hobgoblin I. First click. Need It, then click on the link to download. Okay, she Needed It. Click. The graphic jumped to 'Got It'. "Got it where", she mumbled. She queried her local system. Nothing. 'Got it' means you've already downloaded it, right? Hmmm. Apparently she also just had lost it. No worries - download it again. Click.
Got it. Or not.
The neocom tab blinked. Mail! Mail? Do drone assembly manuals come by mail?
"Do you want to go for a ride?" She looked at his picture, the cruelest, meanest, vilest person she had ever known. "I always wanted to go for rides, but now i'd just scream at you!", she hammered the keyboard. She closed neocom, and returned to finding the damned manual. She had demons to exorcise and hobgoblins to build. Need It. Click. Got It. She counted. 23 manuals. Somewhere.

Would she let a small setback like this get under her skin? No sir! How tough could it be anyway, a toy drone like that!?
Merrily she turned to the crate and started unpacking. She remembered the assembly courses, and was determined to not make any of the mistakes anyone could make. No sir! She reconsidered. Duct tape! Duct tape duct tape duct tape. Grandma solved everything with duct tape, including keeping small loose parts in one spot. "Poss", she asked the comp, "do we have duct tape?". The comp hesitated, clearly not used to its new name yet. Or maybe it couldn't find the duct tape. "46° NNW 45'' from local position." Cha stretched her arm sideways and found the drawer, and consequently the duct tape. She brought her hands together, crossed her fingers and stretched. Now she was ready to become an example for mankind when it came to assembling T1 Hobgoblin I drones.

The amount of screws, struts and otherwise undefinable parts that kept coming out of the crate was simply amazing. She saw things she had never seen before, and she had seen many, including all parts of a certain tall, dark, intelligent, distrustful and having-blurry-feelings man. Small, but not quite that small. Small but interesting. Not small at all, actually. On the contrary, even.
She only got small here.
The crate packager deserved the Elite Drone Trade & Manufacturing Prize for Efficient Space Utilization.
"Inhale!", she reminded herself and started to be efficient. All small stuff she found she carefull pasted on the sticky-side up duct tape. There were some parts she recognized. Vaguely, but still. They seemed to be combinable with the cabinet. Hmm. Odd how 1/2" sides fitted into slots in the 3/4" fronts and backs. It even left a nice little cavity for the 1/8" ply to sit. It did make sense. A hinge with gas filled struts. She raised it all the way up and the ratcheting supports released. "Kewl", she cheered for herself, "now i can put the whole thing back down". It even started to look like the label on the crate. A whole bunch of screws actually fitted in the remaining holes, keeping it all together.
It was real good duct tape. Some screws got a bit sticky and moderately fussy, because they preferred to stay on her fingers rather than on the metal. She was having most difficulty getting the rail and stile overlaps to match cleanly. Now her fingers where sticky too, and one very important looking screw didn't want to come off her left hand, and then when she tried to get it off with her right, it cosily nested itself on there. She waved her hand rapidly, counting on centrifugal force, and boy did centrifugal force do what it was supposed to do. The screw sailed through the air and rolled comfortably invisibly away under the baseboard. For a moment she was thrown off, but then she gathered herself. Not that she would let one cocky screw tamper with her efficiency. After all, she had duct tape!
The last piece was the metabox with the datacore inside, now with taped flat metal sides and half the runner molded in at the top. She mounted it on the other half of the runner on the cabinet, and tadaaaa!
Love of her own excellence filled her.

Behind her, neocom made a sound. "Only during." was his reply. She melted. Damn him for knowing how to push her buttons. Life was great, and so was her shiny T1 Hobgoblin I, waiting for his first space adventure.

First encounters of the third kind

It was one of those unexpected things that happen in life, and it happened with great thoroughness. Little did Cha know of what fate beheld for her that day. And it all just started because she was thirsty. Or, let's admit, not entirely just thirsty. She felt like a good glass of wine to celebrate her newly acquired first rifter. Well, newly - it had been labeled as second-hand, but it wouldn't have surprised her when it would have been third- or even fourth-hand really. She desperately needed a job.

And so she walked into a bar with a simple plan for a good glass of wine and the appropriate amount of ISK.
Unfortunately the Gyng Pilkington Inn was packed with Amarr recruits on leave, swarming all over the station to find plenty of distraction, games and other less public means of whiling away the time.
Not that she had noticed at first. Cha usually went her ways in a blissful bubble of non-communication, except for the people she learned to like, and even that took time. Of course, once she found people likeable enough to talk to, she wouldn't stop talking either.

She never made it to the counter, let alone to a good glass of wine.
"Who are you people?" she said, "Stop looking at me like that."
"I didn't know they had miniature versions of Brutors," badgered a tall blonde guy, and a broadshouldered redhaired fellow added something about hypnotic curves of glorious small female tribal Brutor bodies, to which a brutal roar of laughter filled the inn.
"How inconsiderate", she thought. It was not as if she didn't know she was smaller than most Brutor. In fact, it had always bothered her more than she ever would concede.
And she couldn't see the counter anymore - too many Amarr uniforms in her line of sight. And oh my, the uniforms seemed to push closer by.
Cha got a little annoyed now. The thought of a more violent method to get closer to the wine crossed her mind, but after all she was a peaceful soul, albeit with little patience dealing with people who clearly lacked a good upbringing, even when they showed aesthetic sensitivity.

Until she felt a hand on her butt.
Enough to make anyone, but small female tribal Brutors in particular, lose their nerve.

She always, instantly, felt the need to inflict bloody, messy carnage on anybody laying hands on her butt. Especially when the hands were from Amarr with their cruel god of wrath and slavery.
As a proof of good faith in her own Minmatar gods, Cha levelled a fist in a generally horizontal direction and, to her own surprise, floored the tall blonde guy. "Oh no," she panicked consequently when she saw the blood run out of his nose, "he'll make a fine mess over the poor carpet." She looked around if she could see the patron, ready to apologize and negociate her way out of the ISK the carpet drycleansing surely would cost her.

The other Amarr now behaved extremely bothersome though: they became grabby. “Hey!”, she uttered, “leave that!”, but to no avail. She jumped around trying to evade them, flitting hands and feet about. Granted not in the most elegant way, but she didn't know what to do otherwise anyway. She got a tad angry now. She just wanted to plant another fist right smack in the middle of the face of the next Amarr, but they didnt seem to want to cooperate. Every time before she knew where they were, they were somewhere else. One time her foot hit someone before her fist could, next her elbow planted itself in an other face, right when she wanted to hit it. She got a bit upset by the continual necessity for paying attention to where her targets went - why couldn't they just stand still so she could properly hit them?
Cha made what she deemed to be awkward vertical leaps as she sometimes passed a surprised Amarr overhead, sometimes, indeed, succeeding in striking him feebly, but more frequently overthrown by her own eagerness, describing a parabolic curve and descending upon her next victim at just the exact angle of incidence to take him out.

Suddenly, there was a profound silence.
Before her stood a man with a gloomy, unsociable attitude and a lasergun.
He didn't look happy.
"Oh," Cha panted, "i think i am to be prohibited to come to the conclusion of this work."
The man didn't answer, just looked very glum. Surely some deep disappointment in early life had soured his disposition.
"No wine today huh," Cha assumed.
He compressed his lips angrily. The gun flashed out with a loud report, truely a compelling motive for Cha's sudden deviation. She sprang to one side, lapsed and rolled over, stumbled back on her feet, tripped over a chair, bellyflopped sideways and, to her no small astonishment, tumbled backwards over a balustrade that she could have sworn wasn't there a second before, all in a crossfire of lasered lines.
"This is unreal," Cha thought woozy while she plummeted through the glass panels under her.

She landed unharmed on her back, amongst an exquisite display of fresh vegetables, crackers and sliced baguette, sweet and sour sauce and grilled chicken, and a lot of glass.
The two people at the table leaned back in their chair, but didn't even wink.
"If that isn't an omen then what is," said the silverhaired Caldari woman at her left, her calm features unmoved apart from one raised eyebrow. "Fascinating indeed", replied the giant Brutor at her right with a vague underlying sense of amusement.
"O yea!" Cha threw out angrily – "Personally i think it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating!"
"Well", the woman replied with a slow smile, “I think we can arrange for that.”

And that is how Cha met the ceo's of the Stillwater Corporation.

Improbabilities

Cha squinted when she tried to open her eyes. The blinding white light of the nearby sun jumped without remorse right off the cockpit dashboard into her face. She grunted and smashed the sunshield button. Her head. She should stop drinking so much. It didn't help to forget anyway.
Slowly her pupils remembered how to dilate. Self pity. What a talent she had for it.

The ship shuddered when something scraped its shields. Cha just barely could stay seated, clinging to the seat arms. For a moment she thought she had imagined it, this stagger in the flood of radiantly happy memories playing leap-over with the excruciatingly painful ones. All 3 velocity alarms fluttered on, hesitated, then restored to normal. She tried to focus back to what was happening in the giant hole called space, but the only thing that kept her attention was the slow motion of the now empty wine bottle, falling over and rolling down over the edge of the sidetable as the stabber started to lean sideways. The bottle jumped a little dance on the floor, then decided to squash to pieces against the paneling.

They had broken up a million times and still she couldn't let go. Nor did he. But she could admit it, and he, for reasons he didn't know himself or didn't want to tell her, could not.
And so, every time they decided to step out of something that started to look like a relationship, the air cleared, they would enjoy again being around each other, laughing about the silliest stuff, discussing politics or song lyrics or ship fittings, and in between he would lift her up against the wall and send her into a series of breathtaking orgasms while a couple of hours later she would return the favor in the lavatory of the local Quafe bar. Or any variation of that. And then, invariably, she'd make some mistake, the fights would start and there they were again, back on track to the next breakup from something that supposedly wasn't even a relationship.

The ship stayed slanted, but none of the indicators announced a system failure. Silence. Cha waited for the squeaking sound of metal tearing. Nothing happened.
Nothing ever happened. Flimsy reasons.
She screamed at the ship in anger. Of course the damn ship would abandon her, right at the moment when she needed to find peace the most.
If the ship couldn't hold its balance with all its supercallifragilisticexpiallegoric nanotech wiring and components, then how could she?

Expecting too much when he didn't want to give back. So then to protect herself from a next round of pain she would decide to not give anything back either, which would sent him into a panic frenzy in return. Balance? What a joke.

The shipcomp suddenly remembered it had a voice. "Activating stabilizing compensation routines" it hicupped, and the stabber came back to horizontal.

He didn't want her, but he didn't want her to have anyone else either, and to be honest, she didn't want anyone else either. Not that she didn't try. Nor him, for that matter.

"Take me out of here", she rasped. The computer screen happily showed off its next series of improbability calculations, a heist of fresh stochastic data.
The ship hissed.
Cha's stomach jumped up in her body when it accelerated into warp, pressing her into the seat's back. She reached out and slammed the beverages automat button.

The kafak tasted terrible. In a sudden rage she threw the mug against the wall. “Hereby I baptize thee Possibly Maybe”, she screamed, and then bursted in laughter.

“Inhale”, she reminded herself.