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Post by The Tired God on Jan 12, 2015 13:20:59 GMT -5
They were a few hours out from their destination, and over a day late according to the schedule. As skilled of a pilot as Cate was, she couldn't break the laws of physics, nor could she help a faulty rust bucket of a droid breaking on them. They had stopped by a space station for repairs after their engines started having trouble, and the engineering droid that had been given to them died. Shit happens when your wires get crossed and you think it's a good idea to stick your head in the moving turbines.
Their little pit-stop and pick-up cost them a days worth of travel, but ever since Charlie started fine-tuning their devices, the ship never felt better. Maybe the bot was defective from the get go? Or maybe he had protocols against overclocking and diverting power from non-essential systems. Either way, his opinion didn't matter anymore. They had a new engineer! A much better, much more lively engineer. Sure she was missing parts, but that didn't seem to hinder her skills as a grease monkey one bit.
Charlie had been aboard the Paragon for four days, riding along to assist in whatever sort of mission Silas and Cate had in store for her. Anything was better than being stuck on that mining colony for even a minute longer. You can only get so much entertainment and wonder out of mining asteroids before it really starts to get boring.
As far as the crew had informed her, they were investigating a tripped beacon in a far away system. As far as what they hadn't informed her, Soline stressed the importance of this job, but didn't explain why it was important other than the simple fact that it was. That's really all it took from her to establish the importance of things, however. She was a serious woman, and as such there was an intense gravity in everything she dealt with.
T-minus two hours and thirty eight minutes before they were in range of the station. It was located in an uncharted system, orbiting above a gas giant known as YTT-006 II. Two hours and fifteen minutes from now, they would be in range for their sensors to start picking up scans. Until they hit the two hour mark, the seriousness of the situation probably wouldn't make itself known, allowing the crew some time to banter before it was time for the mission.
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Post by Cate Baxter on Jan 12, 2015 16:08:00 GMT -5
Cate was where she always was, settled into her pilot chair, a blanket on her lap and her eyes watching a half dozen view screens and readouts to make sure a pebble didn't split a hole through the engine at the speed of light. Faster if you wanted to be picky about it. Outside of trips to the restroom or the rare meal that wasn't taken in the cockpit Charlie likely hadn't seen Cate anywhere but that chair, even during repairs the girl had stayed steadfast in her safe zone than stretch her legs aboard the station.
Music was a single distraction that Cate allowed herself during FTL travel, calculating movement as far ahead and as precisely as was required without a computer took more attention than most pilots ever had. Cate wasn't most pilots though, a fact she made sure everyone aboard her ship knew. Oh sure she wasn't technically the owner of the ship, or even the captain, but no one had ever successfully argued how she handled the Paragon.
It was that skill that kept her just indispensable enough to get away with the crap that clogged the cockpit under her tenure. While the rest of the Paragon was sleek, clean and a testament to modern spacecraft the cockpit more resembled the dorm room of a particularly lax college student. A bin of laundry sat in the corner of her room, a mini-fridge by her seat, a mess of blankets and a rather obscene collection of stuffed animals were the basics of what littered her space. Should anyone aboard ever somehow forget the pep that Cate exuded at nearly all times, the last thing they would see upon leaving the cockpit was a classical 'Hang in there' cat poster taped against the door.
"I bet they ran outta coffee. I mean really, stranded out passed any civil space with nothin' but a big ball o' gas around. I bet they don't get the best supply runs. Or maybe it was a big accident. Someone hit the red button by mistake an' they don't have any way to proper say 'we fucked up' so they just wait for us poor souls to come out here. Ooh, maybe they just want to have some company with how lonely it is out here. That's probably why they have me totin' Silas out here."
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Post by Charlie Willow on Jan 12, 2015 17:05:20 GMT -5
Charlie pulled her noggin out of a wall panel, shuffling backward on her knees. It was becoming increasingly common for her to have her freckled nose somewhere inside the walls of the ship’s deck. These first four days aboard the Paragon were an absolute dream for the eager little spanner-jockey, with her skittering this way and that across the deck--and primarily through the ducts! Her own estimates said that after just a month more, her lovely new home would be actually up to galactic standards and codes, if you happened to be on good terms with the technician operating the scanner. Not like it really mattered for an independent vessel.
It just so happened that she found herself in the wall panel beside Cate’s door, in the cockpit. Totally random happenstance, not at all influenced by the music playing in the room, which was totally not making Charlie bounce slightly as she worked. If anyone asked, she would say she had to seal some micro-cracks around the processor for the door’s opening mechanism, to account for the extra weight of the poster on it. Totally.
“Well, even if they are out of coffee, don’t give them any.” She tapped lightning fast on a little display just inside the panel, a micro plasma-laser attached to her right stump for the micro-cracks. “I need it. All of it.” She spoke about as swiftly as she was typing. “I bet they’ll trip the beacon again when we leave ‘cause they miss Silas so much. It’s a shame we can’t leave her, my FTL core console wouldn’t ever look so ugly again.” She grinned cheekily before popping herself right back into that wall panel and adding the sound of her little laser whirring to the music. She even did it in time.
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Post by Silas Sedgewick on Jan 13, 2015 0:21:23 GMT -5
Just because Silas wasn't in the cockpit didn't mean she couldn't hear the two suggesting that they should leave her on the station. Her sneeze told her someone was talking about her, as the superstition went, and she stepped out of a steamy "captain's" cabin with a towel wrapped around her body, shielding the poor childlike eyes of the crew from her squeaky clean nudity.
She had been MIA for the past three hours, the door to her room closed and locked. To Cate that meant sleep, but to Charlie... she hadn't seen the woman take a break, let alone sleep, from the endless list of things to do around the Paragon. If Cate was busy watching the feed and keeping them from exploding, and Charlie was getting the ship in proper shape, Silas was doing everything else. Anything to keep busy.
"Talking about me?" she asked, running a hand through her wet hair to slick it back. With her other hand she was flossing, using a flossing stick and licking it clean between each tooth. On a ship between women, certain feminine standards went out the airlock. Not that Silas claimed to be feminine in any sense of the word.
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Post by Cate Baxter on Jan 13, 2015 19:00:53 GMT -5
Cate barked out a laugh, learning forward for a mug that sat on the dashboard. "Charlie y'don't even get all o' our coffee. I don't think you'd be gettin' all their's neither." She paused to take a sip of the liquid in question. "Besides, you need coffee like I need a jog."
The sound of the cockpit's door opening announced Silas' presence even before the woman's voice, an upbeat greeting of "Oh hey Si!" was accompanied by a hand popping over the chair. "Jus' talkin' about why we're headin' out to the middle o' nowhere space. Figured it must be a lonely place an' hey, you're from the edge o' nowhere right?"
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Post by Charlie Willow on Jan 13, 2015 20:28:53 GMT -5
“Cate, coffee already has a whole chapter in my hypothetical memoirs.” Charlie sat back again, closing and sealing the panel so the only evidence it was opened was the phrase ‘C-Will wuz here' near-microscopically laser-etched into the corner. “That’s even more than the Paragon itself--though, it’s not even been a week yet.”
As she tugged off her arm-laser, she leaned to peek her head out the door. “Oh, hey, Si.” Still smiling fairly cheekily. “Edge of nowhere, huh?” Her left brow arched especially high. “And what qualifies as ‘nowhere’?” Charlie tilted her head, glancing back toward Cate. “And not-nowhere?”
Her erratic eyes shifted back to her tools, carefully stowing her arm attachment on her belt, then wiped a sheen of sweat off her brow with the bare stump.
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Post by Silas Sedgewick on Jan 13, 2015 23:12:52 GMT -5
"I wouldn't call it the edge of nowhere," she replied with a shrug. "I mean there wasn't any thing to do but fuck lizards and do hard drugs, but that's hardly nowhere. Any small world is like that." Silas leaned against the wall and waited for a long moment, watching Charlie's expression most of all. "But no, Tartarus isn't nowhere. We're on the edge of civilized space. That counts for something, right?" She wasn't terribly sure herself, given the shrug that followed.
Still wearing nothing but a towel, Silas hardly seemed disturbed or worried by the fact. What was Cate going to do? Complain? She's heard it all before. Charlie? That was to be seen, or so the gunslinger mused. "An old friend of mine once told me you're only as alone as you want to be. I'm sure these folks can lean on each other, or call up their friends on some long-range channels. Unless it's super top secret. In which case yeah, pretty lonely."
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Post by Cate Baxter on Jan 14, 2015 0:06:10 GMT -5
"Right. Edge o' space. Edge o' nowhere. Same thing really ain't it?" Cate still hadn't looked back at Silas, or even really Charlie for that matter. It wasn't being rude, she simply had her focus on keeping the ship on track. All she had to do was flip a switch and a computer could run the simulations to get them pretty much there, but Cate never did that and so she was stuck keeping an eye on a half dozen scanners, formulas, and timers to make sure that the FTL travel went smooth.
That all said, this was also the most important part to pay attention to. A ship doesn't go from FTL to normal space at the drop of a pin and Cate was already prepping the Paragon for when it would begin to slow down over the next few minutes.
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Post by Charlie Willow on Jan 14, 2015 0:16:38 GMT -5
Charlie rolled back on her heels, then hopped to her feet. Her left hand shot down immediately, patting down the many pouches on her tool belt until it withdrew a little bag of pretzels. “Edge of… spacesh?” Charlie cocked her head once more, taking a few steps out the door toward Silas, tone full of curiosity. She didn’t bother to close the door, and she was already talking with a mouthful of crunchy carbs. Clearly she’d fit right in.
“Isn’t there any shpace past it? Like,” She swallowed, “...is it all just black nothingness on the other side of your home?” Her dark brown eyes widened just a tad at the idea.
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Post by Silas Sedgewick on Jan 14, 2015 0:26:14 GMT -5
"Edge of civilized space. As far as what we've charted and settled, the Tandava system is the last of it. Tartarus VII is where I born and raised. It's a, uh . . . it's not the furthest in the system? But it's close. Eighth in the ring," she explained, pushing off her wall with a slight grunt to pad into her quarters, speaking up over the sound of music so she could still be heard as she got dressed. She left her door open, clearly not worried about being noticed naked.
"Aren't you from a farming community yourself, Cate? We're pretty similar there, aren't we? Same with Charlie!" She was at least dressed in proper underwear now. "I raised giant lizards, Cate grew crops, and Charlie harvested rocks! We're all working class."
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Post by Cate Baxter on Jan 14, 2015 8:09:41 GMT -5
"There's space after it. I mean, that's where we're goin' right? YTT-006 II, space beyond names an' people. Where all that's left is pretty lights in the skies, some letters, and numbers." Cate settled back into her seat, eyes on the timer.
"Yea, I was sure." She responded to Silas, "Ain't anymore though, an' that's the same with you Si. Now my home's the Paragon an' it's a better home than Sito were. I'd rather be out here any day than go back there."
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Post by Charlie Willow on Jan 14, 2015 12:51:23 GMT -5
“Oh! Oh, yeah, I get it, sure.” Charlie’s expression quickly turned to an awkward half-smile, her cheeks getting just a tinge of pink as she looked off to the side. “Must be weird to look up at night and see lit-up numbers and letters in the sky…” She mumbled, pulling another handful of pretzels from the bag and stuffing them into her cheeks.
While she chewed, she ran through a checklist in her head. Her eyes just so happened to linger on Silas while she did, not even realizing she was staring. “Did you both not like living on a big ol’ planet? I’d imagine it gets pretty terrifying, with all that open space. I like a ship. This ship. It’s cozy. Smaller than a station.” She nodded, finally averting her eyes quickly. “Do you get to use plasma cutters to farm lizards and crops? Shiny metal farming has tons of them.”
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Post by Silas Sedgewick on Jan 14, 2015 13:13:42 GMT -5
Silas put her pants on like anyone else, one leg at a time, pulling the brown slacks up and struggling with the rear. Either she needed new pants, or she needed to get off her lazy butt and shed a few pounds. The look on her face as she turned around and noticed Charlie showed she probably intended the latter. "You and me both, Cate. Planet-life isn't so bad if you're used to it, but there's something nice about . . . being able to sleep where you fly," she shrugged. Not that she really ever slept.
She stood in the doorway, leaning up against the side and with arms crossed over her chest, still shirtless and simply grinning at the new addition to the crew. If her being mostly naked drew stares, she certainly would never complain about it. "No plasma cutters. That would spoil the meat. Good old fashion butchering is what I grew up with. 'Course, my job wasn't to make meat. It was to raise the riding Monitors. We had a few dozen for slaughter, but most of our crops came from riding lizards."
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Post by Cate Baxter on Jan 14, 2015 19:29:26 GMT -5
Cate laughed at Charlie's musing. "I mean it ain't no different than any other constellation right? 'Cept brighter. Buncha big numbers an' letters spellin' out all sorta things. Maybe when we slow down we'll be greeted by a big space sign that reads 'Welcome Charlie 3452'." That was pretty much her way of handling conversations that touched around Sito. Laugh at the light things she could and just skim right by the rest.
"Speakin' of slowin' down..." The young pilot muttered to herself, a small light blinking for a moment before she slid her hand across one of the screens. It was a credit to both the ship and pilot that the hitch was barely notable as the ship began to finally slow. There'd be another when they officially dropped out of FTL travel.
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Post by Charlie Willow on Jan 14, 2015 20:03:07 GMT -5
After a moment of quiet, thinking and looking back toward Silas, she seemed to be struggling on what to make her facial expression. She settled on a very perplexed eyebrow raise. “Wait-- Riding lizards? You… mentioned fuc--fricking them before. I didn’t think you were ser--...” A well-timed little sneeze interrupted that thought. She managed to catch it on the inside of her left elbow.
Charlie let out a giddy little chuckle, “Nevermind, Si.” Then focused her eyes back on the cockpit. “Let me know if they do, Cate? I’ve always dreamed about the day that the stars actually, literally welcome me.” She rubbed her nose on her palm, then that palm on her pants, trying and failing to understand what was happening on any of Cate’s many screens from afar.
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