Collins Does Solo RPG 'The Wretched'

Day 13, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Another day another broken system… the water recycler has started acting up. My morning cup of tea had a strange aroma to it. I’m sure if I had time and a committee of marketers or publicists I would be able to package it in a mildly fancy box, create a 6 second advert and then sell it to daft rich people as an exotic, super deluxe, top banana, ammonia smelling cup of tea rather than the reality of tea made with piss… I spent breakfast hoping that it was something as simple as the filters that needed changing. I know they don’t last forever and the system we have here is old tech. A better system is either evapsep or fresep but both of those take a lot of energy to run. The old school filters do the thing with the fraction of the power draw but the deterioration of the filters as the pours in the membrane fill up the overall effectiveness continually reduces. I had to go digging through Powell’s manuals to figure out where to swap the filters over. That bit only took 4 hours. Finding the damn filters took so much longer as I didn’t know where they were. Then installing it took all of 5 minutes. 4 clips, a gate, 2 clamps and that’s it. I did forget to shut off the running water just before the filters so I did get a bit wet doing it which was frustrating but not the end of the world.

As a side note, I’ve noticed that I’m cursing a lot more now. I have become more irritable at the incredibly minor things. Miss my mouth with food/drink, FFS. Drop a tool when working, FFS. Stub my toe or bang my head, FFS! It is probably the strain of the situation I find myself in now that is getting to me. I definitely could do with a break. 13 days living in a death trap with circling sharks is really tough. A nice get away somewhere warm with some cool, citrus, mint and sugar spirit concoctions. Oh, and only humans allowed… no creepy creatures… they can all fuck off.