See the first chapter for the disclaimer.

A/N: Thank you Sunrise over the Tango factory, cazflibs, Quentin Massadacious and Eternally Optimistic for your kind reviews! I started typing up individual responses but my comp crashed so I lost what I'd written...sorry about that :( This computer is useless! So I thought I had better send this before it crashes on me again. I decided to leave this one fairly open-ended, so the reader can decide what happened next! This chapter deals with Rimmer's revision, and Lister's reaction to it.I really hope you enjoy - all comments are appreciated!

Conversations from the Dwarf

--On Revision, and ways to Get Out Of It--

One more day; that's all he had left. That was plenty of time, he thought. Twenty-four hours should do it. Twenty-four golden hours to revise like he'd never done before. Rimmer sat hunched over his military grey writing desk, chewing the end of his ship-issue pencil with all the ferocity of a hamster gnawing the bars of its cage. On the desk lay two objects; an Astronavigation textbook, open at a section entitled "Quasar Theory", and a sheet of yellow card, covered in rainbow-coloured labels in increasingly vivid shades.

Rimmer put down his pencil and reached for his sheet of stickers.

He knew he shouldn't be doing this. The sensible part of his brain was telling him that he needed to revise, that he needed to pick up the frighteningly thick book and start to get some of it into his head. But at the same time, another part of his psyche pulled at him, one that told him in a much kinder voice that a few more stickers couldn't do any harm. Rimmer, being much more inclined to listen to this sort of voice, pressed the new one into place and admired the neatness of it.

Rimmer's timetables were, in a word, pristine. Each sticker and shaded square was perfect. If a sticker overlapped a line, or if the shading of a coloured pencil crossed into Saturday's 2pm-3pm box, it was not good enough. First, Rimmer would try and remove the offending label, carefully picking at its corners with the tips of his fingernails, which would usually result in a gooey, sticky mess. So he'd throw it away and start again. When he worked on his timetable, he got the satisfying sensation that he was doing something to better himself...though this was far from the case.

His textbooks sat for months on the shelf, gathering dust. But they did look pretty there, those volumes lined up in red, green and blue.

And so it came to the final night of revision; the day that would decide, in Rimmer's mind, whether or not he obtained that elusive title of Officer. He switched off his study lamp, and switched it on again, trying to bask his work in the optimum level of light for studying. He chewed on his pencil. He held a ruler so tightly in his hand that the sides of it left indents in his fingers.

"Yo, Rimmer!"

Relief; but he mustn't show it. Rimmer sat unmoving as his bunkmate entered the room. He turned a page in his textbook and looked absently at the words on the page until they lost all meaning, blurring into a congealed mass of letters and numbers that made even less sense than before. He flipped over a page in his reporter's notebook, wrote the title "QUASARS", underlined it twice, and sat poised, pencil to paper, for what seemed like hours. It was, in fact, five seconds before Lister spoke.

"How's the revision going, then?" Lister catapulted himself onto his bunk, using the fixed metal couch as a springboard.

"Fine, thank you very much," replied Rimmer, without taking his eyes from the page.

"No problems then?"

"Let's just say," said Rimmer, "that come tomorrow, I won't have to be seeing the likes of you anymore." He winced at the desperately false words. Lister grinned. He knew his bunkmate too well to know when he was lying. And Rimmer lied a lot.

"Well in that case," he said, "how about you take a break from it for a while? Me and Petersen are going down the disco later – want to come?" Rimmer turned around to face him, and Lister could already hear the answer.

"Lister," he sneered, "I have more important things to be doing then getting tanked up on lager and ending up, through a combination of obscure vision and disco lighting, chatting up women who turn out in fact to be men."

"Hey, that only happened once," Lister said in his defence.

Rimmer turned back to his books. "The answer is no," he said. "I have an exam tomorrow, Lister. Now if you don't mind, I'd like some time to think." Lister sighed and rolled onto his back. His plan had nosedived. He wouldn't have admitted it out loud, but he'd actually been feeling sorry for Rimmer. Then again, that was just the sort of person Lister was. Sure, his bunkmate could be a smeghead a lot of the time, but the month upon month of constant worry that he went through every time the Astronavigation exam loomed did evoke some sort of sympathy. Surely he could relieve some of that.

It was time to switch tactics. He waited a few minutes before speaking again.

"Rimmer?"

The answer came quick and sharp, "What?"

"What do you want to do?"

Rimmer turned around again, his brow furrowed in irritation. "What are you drivelling about, Lister?"

"Well you said you didn't want to go down the disco," Lister shrugged. "So let's do something you want." Rimmer was unimpressed.

"Don't waste my time on this," he said, his voice laced with acid. "Go on. Petersen's probably on his third pint by now." He turned another page without facing his work. "You can't let him get ahead of you." He swivelled his seat and again feigned studying the book.

"I'm serious, man!" Lister said, making it perfectly clear that he was. "Pick something, and we'll do it." Rimmer eyed his bunkmate for a moment. Was he really serious? He couldn't imagine Lister sitting through a five-hour game of Risk, or listening to three minutes of his Reggie Wilson tapes without making a remark about a thousand cats being stretched across a rack. Still, he was prepared to entertain his statement. Besides, it was a perfectly plausible excuse to get out of revision.

A/N: Thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought of it!