His eyes opened, interrupting his snoring with a start. Listlessly his eyes blearily blinked into focus, the full pain of a hangover hitting his temples like a bullet shot between them. He painfully, slowly rose to a seated position on his stool, blinking at a document of some kind.
“Probably only vaguely important”.
He shuffled the mess of papers about his desk, through set-aside plans, poems, love letters…
His blood ran cold. The Ceremony. He had but an hour to take the stage.
The man leapt to his feet, scattering several packs of MRE’s from a shelf built into the asteroid’s bare rock itself and grabbed what would hopefully be the right pharmaceuticals to power through. Too hungover to view the label, the dosage… The man had already swallowed them with one last sip of his alcoholic company.
His typical worn coat that doubled as something of a comforting safety blanket about his shoulders, the man walked hurriedly through the part-rock, part manmade-steel hallways of the station. Wearing the politician’s standard fare for much of “modern”, even to pre-Sirius history, was not required amongst the Bundschuh; the more points that could be won through appealing to the underclasses the better.
Something felt wrong. Perhaps it was his regular habit of “borrowing tomorrow’s happiness” through copious amounts of alcohol; perhaps it was the increasingly fruitless attempts to power through signing the Metropolis’ obituary notices without losing composure.
His mind flickered to how, despite the eminent and undying hatred of the Kanzler - Not even merely him, but the entire office… He looked up to it for inspiration in a way.
“Stop it.” he mentally chided himself. There was nothing to be learned from the station. Nothing save… Maybe the discipline of the powers that were. They never seemed to give any actual inclination of remorse. The language of their unjust laws and proclamations was utterly intolerable, and in his eyes, should have been cause enough to demand change.
But they never batted an eye, never seemed apprehensive. Maybe they truly believed in their convictions. They had the law on their side in any regard.
A somewhat queasy feeling surfaced in the pit of his stomach, shortly before an older tone called “Mister Klugmann.”
