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“This is so—” Sidonia rubbed her hands over her face, then thrust her fingers into her hair to tug fistfuls by the root, having long given up on maintaining the usual slicked back tidiness of her curls. “This is so throne-damn boring!”  Whatever cursed sorcery caused time to distort during warp jumps was also clearly at work in the waiting hall of the Palace of the Adeptus Administratum.  Here the distortion seemed to only go one way, though—Sidonia had come out of plenty of warp jumps that seemed to be over in the blink of an eye only to find days had passed in realspace. But all the Adminstratum had to offer was unreasonably long stretches of time that somehow felt even longer, the better part of a Terran day she’d spent there dragging out to seem more like a week. A very slow week that was more like a month. The kind of month that took years, in one of those years that seemed to never end. She was beginning to think she’d been born waiting in this queue and she would die waiting in this queue, and the fading memories of there ever being anything else were just stories she’d made up to entertain herself. The queue was her future. The queue was her past. There was nothing beyond the queue. The queue lays waste to all.  Sidonia shook off the thought and instead wondered for the Emperor-knows-how-many-eth time how long it had been since she’d last complained about being bored, searching the glassy-eyed stares of her companions for any reaction.  “I said I’m bored!” Despite her (likely hallucinated) pre-queue lower-middle hive at best origins, Sidonia found herself slipping quite naturally into the persona of a demanding child raised all her life to expect the privileges granted by a Warrant of Trade, constant entertainment among them. Such was the transformative power of the queue.  “The pain to my ears hearing of this misfortune cannot rival the deep ache in my wounded heart knowing I have brought you to such a fate, shereen,” Jae drawled with a very uncharacteristic lack of expressiveness. She barely even bothered with the effort of casting a sympathetic look in Sidonia’s direction before turning to the side to surreptitiously take a swig from her flask. “I can only offer you my hope that the riches my status as an official trade representative will surely bring us will be consolation for your suffering.”  Normally, Jae would also offer her a drink from the flask, but Sidonia supposed she couldn’t blame her. It’s every woman for herself in the queue. And unlike the queue, the contents of Jae’s flask are not infinite.