lukeoutbelow | (no subject)

Sungrass's sails bell and her standards flap in the stellar winds. Tailrings flit and circle, perching sometimes on the masts or the railing or favored shoulders, snatching smaller creatures to clutch in their little hands and devour.

It would be the very picture of a fine space voyage if not for the patched and tattered sails, the repair crew prying boards from the aftercastle and taking them to the outer hull, and the ever-present sound of hammering. An experienced starfarer would know, too, that this many tailrings couldn't be supported so far from a port on plankton and random small fry alone; they would either need to be fed regularly, or devouring an infestation. The smell of mynocks and space barnacles being cooked up in the galley just confirms it. Sungrass, like most ships in the Rebel Alliance, is old and scarred and long overdue for a refitting, but she can still fly. The funds, when they're around, always end up going to something else.

Plourr Ilo is here. She isn't as big as the grim-looking Tunroth Xarcce, but she has a presence that makes her huge to the mind's eye. People look to her when the two or three ranking people on this ship aren't present.

She is dipping in and out of the aether prying up and hammering down boards damaged by mynocks and other parasites, secured with a rope harness whose other end is tied to a piece of rail that was more singed in battle than she realized. Or she's in the crow's nest with a telescope, scanning the cloudy nebulae and any nearby ships and wildlife. Or she and Xarcce have been sparring and both women then decided to lie down, and she's stirring. Plenty of things could be happening.

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Duncan was new here. Both on the ship specifically, and to interstellar space travel. He'd been off-world a few times, sure, but visiting your moon is very different from leaving your solar system entirely. But he had a goal, and it involved a lot of interstellar travelling, and throwing in with the rebels had seemed like the best way to get it underway on the cheap.

Too cheap. He'd joined the crew at their last port of call, and he was starting to regret it. He stood in front of the forecastle, near the door leading belowdecks, his shoulders against the bulkhead and his arms folded across his chest as he looked out on the ragged, patchwork rigging that the crew was in process of piecing back together. He watched dubiously as Plourr flitted around on her tether, his brain already spinning him a dozen scenarios in which her work could go horribly awry. Thanks, brain. Much appreciated.

Duncan was the new ship's doctor, and aside from that, he hadn't left much of an impression yet. He didn't look like anything special, 5'8" and built like a weed, dark hair with bright blue eyes, and the youthful face of someone in his early twenties, even though he was almost thirty. For now, he made sure to wear his lab coat wherever he went, until the crew started recognizing him as the new doctor by his face instead of his clothes. If the ship held itself together long enough for that to happen, anyway.

Few beings could breathe aether, but a strong person could put on a pair of goggles and a mask to cover her nose and mouth and clamber down through it. Thicker and more elastic than water, it tried to cling as she hauled herself out and free, leaving a residue on her clothes and skin.

"Hey, new kid!" She pulled her mask off and stood wide-legged, unconscious of the rocking of the deck. "Gotten aether-baptised yet?"

"I didn't spend eight years in med school to be called 'kid'," he called back, very deliberately not moving from his spot. "And you probably shouldn't be trying to kill your new doctor the first week he's on the crew."

Yeah, sure, you could survive in aether with the right gear. But if any little thing goes wrong and you wind up drifting in the vacuum of space instead, forget it. Even his god-heart wouldn't save him there.

"You sure didn't join the Rogues to be called 'doctor', kid! No one here is respectable, save maybe the captain. When he has to be." Captain Antilles is a small, slight man who looks like nothing special away from the battlefield.

"Out here when shit comes down you survive by relying on your crew. We're all good as dead without each other. Isolate yourself away from all of them. See how long before you show up in that hall of heroes."

"I didn't join to get lectured, either."

Her warning of ending up among the dead fell flat for him. It wasn't that Duncan didn't fear death - in fact, knowing what came after gave him a stronger fear of it than most people. It was that his concept of things which could be considered deadly had been completely recalibrated. Anything that didn't kill him instantly and left him conscious was survivable, except maybe asphyxiation (thank you vacuum of space).

So he pretty much gave her a complete non-reaction, which could easily be interpreted as not taking her warning seriously. In reality, he just felt like she didn't have the right context to be giving him such a warning.

"Anyway," he added, dropping his hands into the pockets of his lab coat, "if I were trying to isolate myself I wouldn't be out here in the first place. I just don't think it's a great idea for me to go gallivanting off into the aether when I don't even have my space legs yet."

Two steps forwards. Even though she wasn't significantly taller than he was, she managed to look down quite a ways.

"All right. You're here with your shiny new license. You've also taken the oath, so you should have a rudimentary concept of duty. If not that, maybe you're aware of self-preservation. Ever been on a ship with a hull breach?"

The truth is, no matter how cool and disaffected he might seem in the moment, Duncan is actually a huge bundle of nerves who crumples under the slightest pressure. Plourr might not be significantly taller than him, but she was a lot thicker and had tons more presence than this skinny backwoods doctor who looked too young for his degree.

She took two steps forward and he instinctively matched with two steps back--except his back was already up against a wall and he had nowhere to back up to. "Uhhh," he stalled, his eyes darting past her, scanning the deck for potential witnesses. Nobody close enough to rely on. That made him nervous, and when he was nervous he had a tendency to ramble. "Nnn...o? Actually I can count the number of times I've been on any starships at all on one hand, so, uh..."

Edited (icon) 2015-08-11 00:11 (UTC)

She wanted, she very dearly wanted, to go further. Plourr is intimidating and knows it, loves it. It takes a lot to make her powerless anymore.

But there was no one on deck who'd stop her, and she was a bully only to a point.

"It goes like this," she said, cutting him off. "First, there's just a little leakage. There's this whole long period where you can still seal it off, but more and more is just bulging through. Reach a certain point, and the pressure's enough that between what's in and what's out, the hull starts to crack like a wafer. Makes the most incredible sound."

She didn't need to advance any further, really. Duncan was already tense and alert, staring at her like a cornered rat, or maybe more like an anxious chihuahua. Either way, she had him sufficiently on-edge for her words to make the impact she wanted.

What she was telling him was not enough, in itself, to garner this sort of reaction. It was the delivery more so than the content. Plourr was scary. She was physically intimidating, and she carried herself like someone who didn't need to prove anything because everyone already knew it. Her looks, her demeanour, and her tone all came together to multiply the effect of her words. The description alone would've been sobering, but with Plourr's delivery it was downright chilling.

"Um," he responded uncertainly, his voice tight, already starting to pitch up slightly. When he was really freaked out, Duncan could gain an entire octave. "I'm not sure where, exactly, we're going with this?"