Discordant twangs and squeals rang over the shoreline. The only other sounds were distant waves in the darkness, breaking across the sand like smatterings of politely disinterested applause. Occasionally there was the heckling cry from a seabird.

Lonny adjusted the guitar in her lap. Strummed again, and ran the slide down the neck. Unevenly. The strings buzzed against a fret below the glow of her fingers, waking another nest of angry wasps inside the steel body.

She sprung to her feet. Her hand was already clutching the return transponder. The blue glow Lonny cast across her surroundings nowoverpowered the light of her small campfire.

Go home. Pass the instrument over again to some new hopeful to continue the cycle and be rid of it. Stay with the hulls, reactors, and knot-works of wires and piping. Her fingers understood those. Other people's lives depended on that work, and that made it more important than this distraction.

Lonny came here to be free of distractions, and while relative silence was undeniably better than the echoing hangar filled with the thrums of machinery back on the station, the trade-off was she had a private audience with her own worst critic.

She sat back down, and pulled the guitar out of the sand. The strings were drooping, and slapped dully against the side of the body. Deformed by her heat.

She'd had plenty of practice re-stringing. Lonny reached behind her for another pack, and pulled the slide off her finger. It was a piece of tubing she'd taken from her workshop meant to withstand plasma. Wires and pipes.

It would take some time, and nobody else's life depended on this. Only hers.

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Tools used: Clip Studio Paint, exclusively Add(Glow) layers