"It looks like pineapple."
"Ro...."
"No, really. What's the harm in pineapple?"
Laura sighed. "You ate fish, you got high. Do not eat the pineapple."
"But everything else they gave us was perfectly fine!" Ro insisted. She winced at the loudness of her voice. "My head still hurts."
Laura felt her forehead, even though she wasn't expecting a fever.
"Hon, remember when you used to be all logical and thought out?" Laura asked.
"Yeah. It must be this place. I feel so agitated and useless. No dancing, no outside.... The only thing I've been doing is watching television and eating."
Laura knew that that was not the only reason, but she let it slide. Ro reached for the pineapple.
"Roseanne," Laura warned.
"It's just — alien — pineapple." She plopped one into her mouth and chewed it. "Mmm! Nice and juicy!"
Laura waited tensely, feeling that at any moment Ro would collapse and die.
The other girl began to gag. Her eyes bulged and her cheeks lost their color.
"Ro! Oh my god, someone help! Ro!"
Ro pounded her chest and cleared her throat, coughed. "I'm alright! The bite just got stuck."
Laura scooted to the edge of her chair, reached across her belly, and slapped Ro mercilessly on the arm.
"Ouch. What was that for?" Ro dumped more alien pineapple into her mouth.
"Scaring me!" Laura shouted, which was a bad idea because she accidentally leaned a bit on her belly and felt a little kick. A warning kick, she called it, because Michael/Sonya always did such when her stomach got knocked.
Ro put a piece of the fruit on a fork and waved it in front of her face. "C'mon. It's really good. Very tart, but good. So long as you don't have any sores in your mouth."
"How long did it take the fish to start working?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Ten...ish minutes."
"It's been two minutes."
"Logic-Ro says that whatever was in the fish will not necessarily follow the same pattern as what is in the pineapple. Also, the fish gave me a funny feeling in my stomach. This doesn't."
"Logic-Laura says that she's going to not eat pineapple because she wants to be alive when she gives birth."
Ro sighed. "That's...probably smart. You know, considering that this is the first fruit we've been given in the whole duration of our stay."
Laura paused. "Oh my gosh, you're right!" Going slowly mad, but still right.
"Too bad Losker is giving up on us. He hardly visits."
"Last time he visited, we watched some horrible videos and you two got into a yelling war."
Clearly, that was not the right thing to say. Ro leaned back in her chair and laid her fork on the table. She looked off to an obscure part of the room for a moment, then got up and turned on the television. Tapping buttons on the remote, she turned on the children's channel that she used to learn Scrixs.
Laura sighed and dipped her finger into the juice pooling on the plate. She groaned lovingly at the tart taste. Maybe a tiny bite would be okay....
No.
She took a small piece and chewed it. Never before did she realize how much she missed fruit. She gulped down her share and left the rest for Ro. After sitting for a few moments, she hoisted herself up and waddled to the door.
She knocked lightly, and a guard opened it.
"Neuwe, ulol," she said. Bathroom, please. It was the only phrase Losker taught them that the guards would respond to (well, that and "oh my god Ro and I are dying please help").
Since the secure room was for short-term stays, there was no toilet, and Laura had to be escorted to a windowless bathroom down the hall, where she always got funny and fearful looks from the Lii women.
When Laura first arrived at the facility that (as far as she could tell) was some sort of high-security government building, she was expecting white walls and cold, textured floors. Instead, it's walls was lined with strong, colorful, alien-y plastics. There were orb-like lights planted into the ceiling, and the floor was covered in heated rugs, to keep the floor dry as Galida swam in from the outside lake.
She hobbled slowly to the bathroom, the guard loping behind her. By this time, he knew not to try and make her move faster, because she couldn't.
Laura turned the doorknob and shuffled into the bathroom. All conversations stopped, and the Galida women watched her make her way to an open stall. She locked the door and seated herself on the jelly toilet seat. At first, she found the fact that the toilet absorbed all germs and bodily extracts straight down through it and into the pipes below to be weird and uncomfortable, but now she quite enjoyed the simplicity of doing her business and leaving.
She stood, pulled up her specially-made human sweatpants (courtesy of the Lii) and exited the stall. She placed her hands into the blue goop that served as a sink, and all of a sudden heard snickering behind her.
Laura turned around. "What?" she asked, feeling a bit annoyed.
One of the women gestured to in between Laura's legs. Laura looked down but couldn't see over her stomach. She felt the area.
"Oh my god," she whispered. She glanced at the women and said as if they could understand her: "My water just broke."
