Gleep's Softening Grin

Gleep’s grumbles were as constant as the hum of his welding torch. Astra, perched precariously on a stack of spare asteroid ore, tried her best to ignore them. “Just a little further, Gleep! I can almost taste the starlight!” she chirped, her voice echoing in the cavernous bay of the rickety spaceship, the *Cosmic Clunker*.

Gleep, who was wrestling with a particularly stubborn plasma conduit, let out a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a strangled badger. “Taste the starlight? You’ll taste disappointment and possibly a black hole if you don’t stop bouncing like an over-caffeinated nebula slug.” He jabbed a wrench at her. “And stop calling it the *Cosmic Clunker*. It’s a perfectly respectable, if slightly… seasoned, vessel.”

Astra giggled. “Seasoned like your stew, maybe. Which, by the way, smelled suspiciously like burnt engine grease yesterday.”