July 11th

Once, a few years ago, I got so caught up in whatever I was obsessed about at the time that I forgot to eat for almost two days. It didn't bother me all that much, until I decided to drink a soda and discovered that carbonation and stomach acid do not mix. I spent several minutes curled up in pain on my bed, and afterwards decided to avoid a similar situation in the future.

Not eating for five days, I found out, induced a comparable level of pain.

The first day I was here, after being shot at, had been mostly quiet. I explored the surrounding area a bit more and eavesdropped on the locals. I learned that I was in the Gozu District of Omega, a name that unfortunately didn't ring any bells, and it was considered Blue Suns territory. I made several observations, including that apparently there had been a recent influx of humans arriving on Omega from all over Alliance space. The other races of Omega did not take kindly to what some saw as an intrusion on what they viewed as their station.

Eventually, aching and slightly hungry, I had approached a shopkeeper and asked if I could work there in the hopes of getting credits and alleviating those two conditions. The male turian who ran the restaurant had taken one look at me and told me to leave his shop.

After several similar attempts, I learned that he had been rather polite.

A third of the people I approached didn't even let me ask; they just cursed at me and ran me out of their store. The others would skeptically ask if I had any experience in what their store specialized in, and when I said I had none they had told me to leave with varying degrees of rudeness and disgust.

After a few hours of rejection I had given up and went back to the alleys, where I found a small, isolated corner and fell asleep.

Day two went similarly: me, people watching and trying to find a job, and everyone else refusing me, one time physically throwing me out. I was very fortunate to meet an elcor who turned me down when I asked for a job, but took pity on me and gave me a bag of some strange baked goods. They were definitely alien cuisine, but they smelled good. Had I known it was the only food I would get my hands on for a while, I might not have eaten them all so quickly.

The next three days passed with an agonizing slowness. I had been slowly expanding my search for work, but it seemed like news of a strange human asking for a job had been passed around because I was pointed, or forced, out nearly the second I came in every time.

On the sixth day I had noticed something deeply troubling. My shoulder had slowly stopped hurting so much, so I didn't check on it until I started to notice it feeling warm. The wound wasn't healing right, the skin around it was inflamed and the injury itself looked slightly discolored. I had an infection. In retrospect, I should have expected it; I jumped into a garbage bin and had been sleeping in alleyways. I was a little more frantic in my search for work that day, and had also looked for a clinic. I found two in the area, but both demanded payment.

The seventh day I didn't leave the small hiding spot I had been sleeping in. It was just a hole in the wall behind a large storage box, but no one had found me there yet. I'd heard various crimes committed in the area around me, but they always passed me right by. That day I wasn't particularly glad for it, as it meant I was left alone to my increasingly depressed and morbid thoughts.

I was scared. Truly scared. Starvation was one of the worst ways to go from what I had heard, and it would be slow. The infection was also very worrisome, but it had a possibility of not being lethal, my immune system might be able to fight it off. Lack of food was a whole other matter. I supposed I was lucky that it wouldn't be dehydration that killed me; oddly enough the Blue Suns provided a public water source. Dying of dehydration might have been quicker, however.

The eighth day since I woke up here, I swallowed my pride enough to ask for jobs I had refused to consider before: club dancing, 'advertisement', prostitution even. I was rejected for those too. Apparently, injured, scrawny, unwashed human women weren't in much demand when it came to sex work.

Some small part of me was relieved that I hadn't had to go through with it, but there was still the crushing weight of fear and hunger to contend with. I had begin to noticeably lose weight.

The emptiness beyond the railings outside the alley had started to look inviting.

It'd be quick. Maybe even painless. Certainly better than starving to death in a filthy alleyway.

I resisted the thought, as tempting as it was. I wanted to give up so badly, but I didn't. Not out of any actual hope or stubbornness, but sheer inertia. The finality of suicide was too daunting, foreign. Existence, even painful existence, was familiar.

I wasn't sure for how long that familiarity would matter to me. Until then, I sat in my bleak little hole and tried to think about anything else.

A pair of voices drew near me, unaware I could hear them. Latching onto the distraction, I listened.

"-you should have been there, those Eclipse bitches were screaming bloody murder when we blew that place!"

"Yeah, it sounds like I missed out on a lot of fun. How many did you get?"

"Oh, not much… somewhere around six."

"That's not something to scoff at! I usually only kill like two on raids."

I had been listening in on various races' conversations enough to recognize that the two mercs, probably Blue Suns, were batarians. They were walking past me at a leisurely pace.

"Yeah, but I think something happened to my omni-tool in the firefight. I got shot on my wrist. The armor was enough to protect me, but it must have rattled my 'tool or something because now the damn thing keeps turning off at random times."

The other batarian stopped walking near the crate I was behind. I tensed, but his next words gave no indication he had noticed me. "Really? That's some bad luck."

"Seriously, and it glitches and freezes up sometimes too." The speaking batarian stopped as well and sighed, "I'm probably going to have to get the damn thing fixed."

"It can be pretty pricey to repair one of those things. You're probably better off buying a new one."

"Hmm. Yeah, I been thinking about an upgrade…"

The batarian chuckled. "You might even be able to convince Tarak it's a 'business expenditure'."

"Ha, like that uptight asshole would ever pay to replace personal equipment. But, I think I've got enough creds saved up to buy a new 'tool."

There was a short pause. "…what are ya gonna do with that one?"

"Eh, I'll wipe it and toss it." A momentary silence passed, and then I heard the sound of a small object clattering on the ground.

"Anyways, let's go. I can't wait to get some food."

The two Blue Suns chattered some more as they walked out of the alley. After a few moments I crawled out of my hiding spot and looked around on the ground. I felt around blindly for a moment, until I remembered I still had my glasses and put them back on. I quickly noticed a small, disc-shaped device on the ground and grabbed it, retreating back behind the crate.

It was a thin, circular metal object about an inch in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick. One side looked a bit like a camera, a glass plate with a strange reflective component behind it. The other side looked like flat metal, but was oddly clingy, like Velcro. There were a few odd slots on the sides of the disc, and one small button. I pushed it and suddenly the Velcro side got a lot stronger, sticking to my fingers like superglue. A small, orange hologram popped up with text, but I couldn't read it. The text blinked three times and then the hologram disappeared. I pushed the button again and the clingy side let go of my fingers.

I experimentally put the Velcro side of the device against the inside of my wrist and pushed the little button again. The device attached itself to my skin and another hologram popped up. I still couldn't read the text, but this time a quiet voice emanated from the omni-tool.

"Hello, and thank you for purchasing the Elkoss Combine Cipher Tool Mark I. Please speak into the device so your omni-tool can be configured to your language."

Feeling a glimmer of hope for the first time in days, I whispered into back to the device, "Uhh, I speak human. English."

"Language recognized as the human dialect 'English'. Please confirm this by pressing the 'confirm' button within five seconds."

On the hologram the text turned into English, saying exactly what the voice had said. A button with 'confirm' on it popped up. Uncertainly, I attempted to push the button. My finger passed through the hologram and I half-expected it to not register, but the device made a tiny chiming sound. Suddenly the small holographic window disappeared and another hologram, this one encasing my entire forearm and wrapping around my palm, appeared. Many different buttons with a variety of options appeared on a rotating menu hovering over my palm, and in the middle of the ring of buttons were displays for things like the date, time, location and temperature. The arm area had what seemed like a keyboard.

I smiled for the first time in a week. My face was so unused to the expression it almost ached.

Then, suddenly, the holographic display threw up an error message and forced a reboot.

[Edited 2/26/2017]