Female Inflation

Fleur hugged her knees, eyes languishing on the various needles and gauges set in the gray metal walls, and gave another long, heartfelt sigh. Fully twelve atmospheres remaining, by what she could tell. Or, by a more relevant metric, a half-dozen more hours steeping in ennui inside the tiny decompression chamber. She should be grateful, she knew. Relish a bit of boredom after the mishap earlier that day, from which only quick reactions and some impressive new technology had saved her. But that was the sort of thing that happened five hundred feet beneath the surface.