Jim looked unamused at Slick as he finished laughing at his own (stupid) joke. “It isn’t funny. I shower.” Slick cackled yet again. “No, she isn’t worth it. She thinks she’s out of your league because she has a job she has to report to the taxman. You’re a freelance scrap miner, you may as well be a Junker, the fringe sometimes piratical scrapper kind, to her. Oh, and they’re on your ass for smuggling already.”
“He just had to announce it where she could hear it, didn’t he.” “If he did it just to cockblock you, I wouldn’t be surprised. Then again, considering where you work, and what you do, it would be more surprising for you to be clean.”

“Look, Slick, tell me straight. How the hell is a pirate like you so well-spoken, but then we have people with a decade of education and training talking like they’re Houston street gang kids?” “Oh, right.”

Slick then adopted the most shockingly adolescent mindset one might expect from an adrenaline junkie pirate and got ready to spend the rest of the night making jokes at the expense of Jim’s love life, with increasingly lewd and crude hand gestures to describe what Jim was most assuredly not getting, to the amusement of the other patrons of the local spekeze. Jim’s regret at having asked that question was as sharp as it was immediate. And then