Meanwhile, back at the frat pad

Captain Adventure is roommates with Engineer Lovesalot, a Navy lieutenant whose geographic separation from the female species appears to be causing him physical pain. They're both fully grown men, but they carry themselves like frat boys and have an ongoing war of attrition based on causing the other just enough pain to be annoying. It's awesome to watch.

(Before I went on leave, I'd asked Lovesalot if he needed anything from Europe. He looked off into the distance, sniffed the air as if searching for a memory, and mournfully whispered -- "girls?")

The two of them have taken to carrying around cans of compressed air -- the sort you'd use to clean the dust out of a keyboard -- because if you spray it upside down on exposed skin, the propellant comes out in a streaming jet that's cold enough to sting.

"So we were in our room last night," Lovesalot said (Boston accent: flat vowels, final r's dropped), "and that bastard tried to get in me in the back of my arm, right here, back of the arm, but I ducked and he got me RIGHT HERE" (open mouth, index finger aimed at the tongue, talking as if though at the dentist and fully numbed) "right here on my TONGUE -- it tasted like I'd chewed up an aspirin or something, on my TONGUE -- and I was like, you got that in my fucking MOUTH," (mouth still open, still pointing indignantly at his tongue).

"So I told him, you gotta sit there and let me do that back to you, and he was like, twitching and trying to like, get away from it" (and here he imitated Adventure, tongue extended and eyes closed, head down and to the side, twitching in anticipation of the hit on his tongue), "but he took it, I mean he HAD to after that. Seriously, it was like aspirin."

I'm not sure I have done this story justice; living in the grown-up equivalent of a college dorm does sometimes have its upsides, though.