<div align="center"><strong>-=the stowaway – blissfully asleep – the Gamble’s engine room=-</strong></div><br/>The sleeping girl didn’t move when the announcement was made about leaving the planet behind. In fact, she fell more deeply into sleep as the engines came to life, the thrumming and hissing of the machinery putting her to ease. She’d spent most of her time surrounded by noisy machinery, her body attuned to the regularity of pneumatics, electrical discharge fields and the understated use of filter capacitors. Releasing her stress and fear, she slept heavily, free of images and headaches for a time.<br/><br/>As the ship shuddered and leveled, she drew the blanket up over her head, blocking the ambient light from her closed eyes. The hum of the power core’s initiation for space drive only made her relax more, her mind and body at ease for the first time that she could recall… if she were remembering anything at all. Finally resting, she allowed her subconscious to take over, leading her into dreaming gently, as one might lead a skittish pony across new territory.<br/><br/>She didn’t often dream, but then she didn’t have to, so much of her subconscious mind concentrated on the images that flashed through her head while awake. Too much to understand without connection to her waking life, they caused the headaches, her synapses firing wildly out of control as her brain fought to place into her memory bank where those images should have been housed but didn’t actually belong. She could not describe what she saw, actually… so many things out of time or place and unfamiliar to her.<br/><br/>This time it was a happy dream, pleasant and warm, freeing. She dreamed of ailerons, clouds, and banking across a white-blue sky, a delightful mechanical scream emanating from somewhere around or underneath her. Added to that noise was her laughter, the thrill of flying in an open cockpit released musically from her cherry red lips, a scarf holding her hair down. For the moment she was no longer hunted, racing through the empty air with her heart singing and her pulse pounding, adrenaline used in a joyous celebration of life.<br/>