Not much later, Hoshi awoke. Oh. She was still in her clothes. She'd been having the weirdest dream that she'd forgotten to do her Spanish project, and it had been terrible. Wait a second. Spanish. Tomorrow was what day again? Friday, March 8.. oh lord, she had forgotten!
Hoshi groaned as she dragged herself from her bed, eyeing the clock hopefully. Well, it was still 11:30, so maybe this wasn't such a tragedy. She sat down in front of her computer, pulling up the project requirements on her data PADD. Well, you could do a travel report for any country colonized by the Spaniards between 1650 and 1900, and that didn't sound so bad. She picked the former Equatorial Guinea, knowing most of her classmates would choose countries from the Americas. Hoshi raised her eyebrows and sighed as she dove in, sifting through page after page of the world information database.
*
Hoshi glared viciously at her computer screen. The stupid thing just had to tell her the name of one stupid hotel in Malabo, and then she could be done with her Spanish culture project and go to bed happy. But no, it had to go and crash, the database mysteriously shutting itself down for 'unforeseen maintenance'. Hoshi stared into her now-empty coffee cup, waiting irately for the database to reload. She wondered if she could read the name of a hotel in Malabo from the coffee grinds, like those people who could read your fortune out of tea leaves. Maybe if she squinted hard enough....
Hoshi jumped as her mom's cuckoo clock suddenly cuckooed that it was two. My god, two in the morning already... Hoshi quickly subtracted from 7 to find that she could still manage to scrape out five hours of sleep if she finished everything right this very second. If the stupid database would just reload, she could be done right this very second. She grumbled, searching for a word to vent her frustrations. She smiled wryly as she found it: the Vulcan sbah sulak. She didn't even really know what it meant, but she liked the sound of it.
Her Vulcan instructor thought it was appropriate to teach his students vulgar Vulcan words so they could avoid accidental use, but not the actual meanings that made the words so offensive. Hoshi rolled her eyes. It frustrated her to no end. She was halfway convinced that he didn't know the meanings himself. Vulcans weren't exactly the types to jump at the chance to share their culture, especially a part of their culture that was so tied to emotions... and loss of control. Oh well. Swearing wasn't a precise art, and as long as she had a general arsenal to fall back on, she was happy.
A little 'ding' rang from the monitor next to her. Hoshi glanced over, nearly drowning in relief as the database reappeared on the screen. Thank the stars! She found the hotel in a matter of minutes, appending it to her report and traipsing sleepily back to bed.