Carrying your tray, loaded with its meager rations, you stride purposefully down the center of the aisle between the rows of cafeteria tables. You ignore the catcalls and insults flung from the tables to either side - indeed, you accept them as your due. For, if you weren't a highly recognizable and important member of the Vipers, and if the Vipers weren't one of the premier gangs on all of Trips, you wouldn't rate such attention.
Better to be reviled than ignored.
Dodging a particularly insouciant foot, outstretched by one of the young upstarts from a gang you can't even bother to recall - The Corridor Crewe? The Hallway Hooligans? - you find a spot at a table, populated mostly by civvies too old to be wrapped up in the gang style. In your wake, the cafeteria crowd bubbles and stirs. Finally they settle down a little - but not much.
Better eat quick today. Something is going to happen. There's uneasiness in the air.
(on one of the endless rows of cafeteria benches)
The Cafeteria, heart of Mechanosatellite 3! Or perhaps the stomach. Maybe the large intestine. Whatever organ is analogous to hundreds of people sitting at tables that stretch from one end of the room to the other, all talking in a babbling gab that washes over you, the talk broken up by the consumption of dubious foodstuffs, and the eructations of cyanotic gasses that said foodstuffs produce. Wait! The appropriate metaphor is the anus. The Cafeteria, the anus of Mechanosatellite 3!
On the table before you is your cafeteria tray (on which is your daily rations).
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