Severus isn't sure yet what he thinks of the food stocked in the kitchens - if he'd bothered to anticipate what he'd find, he might have thought of space-age ration cubes or something along those lines; he's been exposed to more science fiction than hard science, but both have come to him in quite limited amounts, all reading and no doing. Shelves stocked with organized containers of non-perishables and a roulette of 'whatever the hell' crammed into refrigerators is so normal as to be verging on unsettling in contrast of the circumstances. But fussing over a plate in the dead of night (not that he can tell here) is an old habit, one that not even Hogwarts could kill. He leans against a counter waiting for a pot to boil - it never tastes right if he forces it to.

The heat is ridiculous. Severus has never spent any significant time anyplace where summers go warmer than about seventy Fahrenheit even at their peak - and usually only briefly - ninety and a bit of humidity feels like the gates of hell. (Which maybe he deserves, but he's not dead yet.) He takes a look at the levels sectioned off for crop growing but doesn't linger there, assuming evidence of it being well looked-after means the caretakers are unlikely to appreciate someone wandering through aimlessly. Instead he ventures to the free-growing areas, as despite the temperature it feels otherworldly, as if he were walking through somewhere terran-bound and not a deck on a space ship. Still he looks as comfortable as a fish out of water - or a stuffy professor out of the chill of Northern Scotland, anyway.

He's all for progress, but Severus can't help but find this use of 'library' to be mildly insulting. Electronic data, while perfectly economical, feels a little soulless to him. Books can rot and burn to be sure, but if they're tampered with they leave notes in margins, crossed-out lines, torn-out pages; digging through file after file here leaves him with the distinct impression that he's piling up more questions than answers without being able to articulate why. And all he's looking for is Space Tech 101, really. I'm not trying to crack open your artificial head, he thinks irritably at the console he's sitting at. I just don't know how to use half the buttons on this damn floor. He scrolls through some more and it offers up a suggestion for a fun space romcom soundtrack.

Sigh.

Introductory data has been read, warnings have been heeded. Severus has observed conversations on the network about the nature of the ship, and he's dug through a backlog of recorded incidents and arguments and crises. He's never been the sort of person who needs to touch a hot stove to learn why it's best not to do so but the Tranquility isn't a stovetop, and he isn't a child. Sometimes he strays. Dark corridors and empty closets, lifts to far-flung corners, doorways to rooms full of broken science equipment. (It's not magic, it doesn't feel like magic, but it's something - he knows what atoms are, even what quarks are, so it's worth looking into, right?) His internal clock is excellent but sometimes when he's toed the line of 'relatively safe' and 'we advise you to turn back', he feels like he's been sitting and staring for much longer than the timekeeper on his communication device tells him that he has been.