Jeryd accepted the menu with bemusement. He brushed his thumb against the smooth plastic and tested its flexibility. Rayner glanced up, so he busied himself with the contents. Half of the words he didn’t understand. Though his classic nerf burger took pride of place in the centre of the menu, it was beset on all sides by unusual foreign dishes. Colourful rows of alien faces sat below each option, demonstrating which species it was suited for, and the pink human was, by far, the most prevalent.

“I’m sticking with the nerf burger. How wrong can they get it? Simple, safe, sterilised with heat,” he said, recalling Rayner’s remark about health inspections. Before returning the menu, he gave the edge of the plastic wallet a sniff, detecting a reassuring note of cheap cleaning agent.

Upon entering the diner, Jeryd thought he had immediately stepped in something unsavoury, but ripped his fancy 5 credit boots from the tiled floor to discover nothing underfoot. It wasn’t until he braved a second step that he realised that festering stickiness was just a quirky feature of the entire floorspace. As he squelched his way to the booth, he waded through a pungent yellow cloud of smoke that billowed from sizzling platters at a table of… the tentacled dome-headed aliens with goofy teeth. Warrens, was it? There was also a solitary Aqualish in blue dungarees, slurping from a large bubbling bowl full of what looked like tadpoles.

The challenge was to spot something out of the ordinary, which, given their surroundings, meant finding something - anything - normal.

Even as he dumped himself into the seat, it gave a shriek of surprise. He hovered, half expecting to find a flattened Ugnaut beneath him. But no, just a strange slippery seat that squeaked and sang like the entire string section of the Imperial Capital Symphonic Orchestra.

Everything was new and unusual, and he fumbled at his surroundings like an infant with one of those cute rotating mobiles full of moons, stars, and TIE fighters. Indeed, no sooner had the menu been discarded than he picked at the frayed edge of the table, uprooting flecks of wood between his fingers.

“So what exactly is a meatloaf?”