Down Time

[The Future Warrior]

For what felt like several minutes (but in reality was scarcely more than ten seconds), she had sat crouched there, peering suspiciously at the stream of water falling from the showerhead, before managing to work up the drive to try messing with it again. And after a few still unpleasant, but nowhere near as shocking or surprising, brushes with icy water, she finally got her mind wrapped around working it. And when she did, the water slowly but surely warmed, first losing the bitter chill (at least, in her mind it was bitingly cold; only things you were supposed to drink were supposed to be that cold!) and took on a coolness that was far from unpleasant. Then slowly it grew warmer still, until finally it started to reach a temperature she would personally judge as 'hot'. That was when she knew she'd finally mastered this whole business, and slowly climbed her way into the shower properly.

Most of the accumulated dust and dirt she'd been intending to wash off had been on her clothes, which had by now been re-absorbed. When they were made up again to be put on, they would be clean as the day she imagined them. Not so for the rest of her, though. Just looking down at herself, her arms especially (and though she couldn't see it, she also could take a pretty good guess her face wasn't in much better shape) were especially coated in grit and the lingering remnants of her trip down to the bottom of Coruscant, and the trudge through the muck and battles down there. In fact, now that she really thought about it...ugh, yes, she could still smell the particular stink of Tier 7 clinging to her, tenaciously. It was faint, and probably easy enough to miss if she wasn't paying attention (and with her wandering focus, that was not an uncommon thing at all), but now that she had taken notice of it, it was persistently hanging around and making itself known, quite aggressively. Times like this she really wished she had a nose to wrinkle in disgust, because that seemed an appropriate reaction to this turn of events.

Hygiene and cleaning had never really been her strong suit. Or...her weak suit, really. Before, back home, she'd always just sorta been able to...magic it all away. All the dirt, grit, dust, grime, and smell of all the trouble she got up to. Just a quick poof into smoke, and when she reformed again, it was gone, good as new, like she'd never been marred or dirtied in the first place. And so, while she had never actually had to go about washing or cleaning herself the conventional way, she had always been pretty clean. She assumed that she'd also always smelled fine, though she was never really into the habit of checking. Pretty easy to stop by a mirror and make sure there were no traces of dirt or something left where you could see, but...kinda harder to get a good smell-check in.

So this was a wholly new experience for her, all things considered. And after her laborious, slow introduction to it, she was finding it to be...not bad at all, really. Probably for the best, given the prospect of being unable to just resort to her old standby of magic'ing away all the accrued unpleasantry associated with constantly rolling around and fighting in massive dust clouds and who knows what kind of sludge and toxic fumes. But as she stood there, quietly pulling her head-tentacles this way and that, carefully scrubbing any trace of stubborn dust and dirt out of them, she came to the conclusion it wouldn't be so bad.