"Why knives?" Ripley asks, genuinely curious. She isn't anything close to a weapons connoisseur herself— in fact, she knows very little about wielding them. Can generally hold a gun and point it, but whether she'll strike anything is an entirely different question... Hauling oil doesn't require the sort of thing, nor is it her first instinct. Brute strength rarely gets anyone anywhere, especially when it's reckless. Her ill-fated crew is an excellent example of that.

"Which, of course, means horrifically uncomfortable? Whoever designs those sort of things deserves a special spot in Hell."

Ripley weaves herself and her companion around a cluster of guests like steering a spacecraft. She's pleased too, in a subconscious sort of way, that CT's able to keep pace. (There's a short joke in there somewhere; she doesn't make it).

The almost-complete lack of physical contact is shared between spacefarers. Freighter hauling is a systematically lonely occupation, where one functions for a very short amount of time before going back under. Locked away in their separate compartments to dream.

The touch is nice. Intrinsically needed but ignored for so long, a product of capitalistic depersonalization and her own... she doesn't quite know what to call it.

Occasionally she'll squeeze her arm without meaning to, busy dodging guests on their way to the sweets table.

"Mm, you're lucky. We'd eat twice on any given flight; before we went down to sleep, and after we'd woken up to land. The first meal had certain properties to prep us for the going under- I guess you could call it a salad, if you squinted enough. The drink was like tomato juice. Most of it was bland slop. But that was specific to flying. Once you landed or made it to a station, you could find anything."

Ripley spears a strawberry and plunges it under the fountain.