Girl was dropped into a dumpster on Philadelphia Station a few days after birth, because her mother found that taking care of a child was too much work. Girl would surely have perished if a careless Cryer Pharmaceuticals employee hadn’t disposed of experimental growth hormones together with a cage full of super-intelligent lab rats in the same dumpster. For the first month of her life the rats fed Girl from half-empty synthpaste tubes and kept her warm in a shredded spongebob squarepants pillow which they also used as a nest. The garbage container in which they resided was then acquired, together with all its content, by Fat Tony McKensy the Second, a relatively wealthy Junker who used a refurbished old Pilgrim liner to haul trash across Sirius. When he found Girl, who had already grown to be a toddler thanks to the growth hormones, he decided to sell her or her organs on the Buffalo black market on his next stop.
But Queenie, the largest and most intelligent rat of the bunch, had already made other plans for the ship. She killed Fat Tony and his entire crew by mixing the rat poison they had laid out into the casserole one night. The sole survivor was the ship’s progeria-afflicted repairman, Gizmo Hoi-Tec, who Fat Tony kept as a slave and who he forced to eat a container of bretonian jellied eels which he couldn’t get rid of. Hoi-Tec agreed to work for Queenie as chief engineer and took care of Girl’s education by making her watch “American Gangsta” seasons 1 through 47. Girl quickly learned to talk and grew up to be the ship’s communications officer. Under Queenie’s command, the crew of rats and humans navigated The Nook (as they called the ship) through Sirius in a never ending quest for useful stuff.
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