Re: second class smoking room
The name means absolutely nothing to Charming. He listens to it as he would anyone else declaring their name, and nods, singly. Hephaestus. It sounds like the sort of name that ought to belong to a king, but he's not sure if the smoking man of rock and molten metal could possibly be king of anything. Stranger things have happened, though. He's seen some of them himself.
Charming thinks himself very ordinary indeed, at least he is now, and he evening the world beyond this ship he would have been baffled and vaguely threatened by the idea of himself as a novelty. Undue attention is generally a negative, to his mind. "Who did I hear? Well, people, I suppose." He shrugs his shoulders. "I used to listen to them talk when they didn't know I was there. People say all sorts of things when they think no one is there to listen, or that they can't be understood." That was how he picked up so much culture, after all. It left him slightly less naive to the ways of the world when he entered it, step by step, after the solitude of winter.
That seems so far away, now, so distant, an alien experience to an alien mindset, and he shakes the thoughts off without a hint of reluctance. "What does a Hephaestus do?" he asks. Charming begins going through the drawers of the smoking room. One, two, three. The third holds a pack of cigarettes, and he tosses it to the smoldering man. "Catch."