x102: Cowboy in a Plain Brown Wrapper

The Rec Room

Dr. Macay sat in one of the lounge chairs, smoking casually and looking quite pleased to be doing nothing. He looked over at his companion, a ridiculously lanky human named Jack.

”Have you seen the cargo ships they use there? They’re amazing bits of bad engineering. They’ve taken the cockpit of a Y-Wing and cut it off right there. Then they stick a cargo container between, welding the rear section and the engines onto the back of the container, and the cockpit to the front of the container. A conduit with control wiring runs along the top, and the container has some landing skids on the bottom. They’re a wreck waiting to happen.”

Dr. Macay nodded absent-mindedly. He rather liked the new guy, but he just didn’t care about starships. In fact, he’d lost his ship in a gambling match with Jack about 15 minutes after he’d come aboard. He wasn’t sure why Jack had come aboard, but damn Macay had been happy to lose that ship. It gave him an excuse to do nothing, and that pleased him to no end.

”These Y-Cargos are used to make interplanetary runs in one of the nearby systems. They’re not much more useful than that, though, as they don’t have hyperdrives. But sometimes, sometimes, things that are far too valuable are carried on them.”

Dr. Macay’s eyebrow rose up ever so slightly, and he paid a bit more attention. “What do you mean? Credits or weapons or something?”

”Oh, no, nothing like that. Things like that are carried on real transports. No, sometimes the thing of value is in the cockpit. Have you ever heard of Vid Scizs?”

”No.”

The new man, Jack, smiles. ”Vid and I met in a bar one time. What can I say, he’s a charismatic fellow. Anyway, turns out old Vid has quite the bounty on him and is worth 20,000 credits to the government, and probably more someone else. That’s probably a far more valuable cargo than the crap in his container.”

”Why are you telling me this?”

Leaning back, with a winning smile, Jack replies, ”Well, I just won your ship on the flip of a coin. Figure I could at least give you a chance to get some money to buy a new one.”

”No thanks, I’m retired from flying.”

Jack shrugged and made a hand gesture saying, “Your call.” A voice from the doorway caught them both unawares, though.

Captain Delerno replied coldly, ”Where is the system, and what does his ship look like?”

Jack looked at Dr. Macay and smiled.

A brief moment for “what you’re doing now” posts.

"No. No. Absolutely not." Ralat shakes his head. "That's final."

"But Ralat, if you're flying the ship, you can't fly your fighter at the same time." D-PFA's vocabulator rendered her tone as patient; it's hard to out-patient a machine. "It will therefore go unused."

"So what? No one else flies the Longscout. No one."

"So you intend for it to be entirely disused?"

"If I ain't flying it."

"But you acknowledge that it needs regular flights in order to remain in working condition."

"Of course."

"You are aware that the subspace actuators will deteriorate, then?"

Ralat growls. "Yes."

"And that the ion engines will fall into poor calibration?"

"Yes."

"And that the tibanna injectors will eventually need to be replaced entirely?"

"Yes."

"And that-"

"All right! All right." Ralat throws his hands up in the air. "You can fly it. But only you, understand? And if you get it so much as nicked, I am going to take it out of your golden hide! Understand?"

"Perfectly, Ralat! Thank you so much!" D-PFA runs off, joy in her robot voice. If she had been organic, she might have hugged him.

Carandil was playing solitaire in the lounge and looking very bored.

In one of the crew quarters, Sil Vasten was settled half-naked on his bunk. The halo-lamp nearby cast tall shadows on the walls as the Devaronian vehemently focused on the task at hand. He rubbed furiously at the large, arm-long, black, bulge anchored tightly between his legs. The metallic room door groaned, and the startled Devaronian's head shot around, baring sharpened teeth and setting tired eyes on the door. There was no-one there, just the ship settling.

He turned back to the dark deed. The gun's barrel had never looked so clean, yet Vasten continued to polish furiously, until his reflection appeared on the black metal. Finally satisfied, he loosed a long sigh of relief, and carefully settled the weapon on the rack hidden behind a flabby curtain near his bunk. He stared at it's majesty for a moment, before closing in and laying a small, soft, kiss on the weapon. Beads of sweat rolling down his forehead, Sil lay back in the bed, one leg atop the other. He'd have killed for a smoke just then.

OOC: Charsheet is still not finished. I'll make sure it is before rolling/doing anything important.

Zelina, in human form, reclines in a chair in the rec room, reading something intently on a datapad. "Hmm," she mutters quietly to herself, "the liquor to juice ratio in a sonic screwdriver is a lot higher than I expected." She then looks up and stares off into space, as if pondering something.

After some time, she finds herself simply looking around the rec room, when she sees their golden protocol droid and quartermaster, D-PFA, approach Ralat, the old veteran. She watches as the droid extracts permission from the man to fly his starfighter, and begins to smile. That droid sure is one persuasive mechanical, she thinks to herself, I had better be careful that she doesn't get me to agree to something I don't want to do!

As the two separate, Zelina can't help but comment out loud, "Fei, you really want do fly, don't you?"

Fei turns to Zelina and cocks her head, 3PO-style. "Oh, yes, Zelina. I have always wanted to fly. In fact, as a general personal assistant, it is one of my secondary functions. Though of course my primary programming is for protocol, not for combat." Fei sounds oddly worried about the combat aspect.

As was often the case, Lupus was spending his evening in the cargo hold kneeling amidst the remnants and debris of a rather dramatically disassembled speeder bike. The tangle of parts and wiring hadn't flown under its own power in quite some time and it was hard to tell if Lupus' work took it closer or farther away from ever seeing flight again, but the work calmed his mind and passed the time.

The Briefing

Captain Delerno looked at the datapad of information Jack had provided. He checked off a couple of things. Where Jack or Dr. Macay were hiding, no one was sure. The ship Jack had won from Macay was missing also. Apparently, Captain Delerno had sent them off on an errand of some sort.

Captain Delerno glanced up at the assembled band of misfits, and looked displeased in general. He was probably ready to snap at the first thing he could. He began the, briefing wasn’t the right word, and orders were military, but the end result was somewhere between the two.

”We’re in the Fyrth system. There are three small, rocky, habitable planets here. Cleverly they’re named Fyrth II, Fyrth III, and Fyrth V. Fyrth IV, or what would have been, is a large asteroid belt between III and V. Two and III have small colony mines on them. Five is the main planet in the system, with a population of around one million. The other two just have mining crews and nut-job prospectors, apparently. And apparently there are a bunch of micro-mines on the larger asteroids of what was once Fyrth IV.”

“Jack says that Vid Scizs is wanted on his home world. I don’t normally care for bounty work, but we need food and fuel, and the pay is good. If we don’t get income soon, you all will be eating crackers.” The implication, of course, that Captain Delerno would be taking the last of the good food.

”Pan-toh-rahn,” Delerno phonetically says through the species, obviously never having heard of one before, ”from Pantora. Whatever. They have blue skin and are human-like. Vid Scizs is hiding out in the Fyrth system, running cargo between the Fyrth IV asteroids and Fyrth V.”

“Jack says these miners and the ones living on Fyrth V probably are not going to be receptive to us. I don’t care. We’re here. We need to find this jerk and drag his twenty-thousand credit ALIVE butt back to Panderea. Go find him.”

Captain Delerno waves his hand dismissively, indicating that as far as he was concerned, the lot of you had more than enough info to do what he just told you to do. Delerno sat down at the table and went back to fiddling with the datapad, which beeped back at him ominously. Even the datapad didn’t like him.

The ship is floating around one of the outer gas giants, Fyrth VII.

"Ccccc-rackers!" repeats the Devaronian eerily, following up with a sheepish grin and a chuckle. Vasten didn't seem to be all there, probably flying high on spice. He raises his hand up to ask a question, but seems to have some trouble keeping it steady.

"Just a quick one, Captain," he begins, scratching his bald scalp with the large nail at the end of his pinky. "What are these dollar things? Worth any credits?"

Money Honey?

With a perfectly straight face, Captain Delerno says, "I said credits. Stop doing spice when I'm talking."