Jamee's frankly very surprised that they didn't add a description of Bonehead, at the very least. He...stands out in a crowd, as it were. Still, be thankful for small favors, he thought to himself as he swiveled in his leather computer chair. Once Bonehead had inhaled a sufficient amount of pizza to not protest leaving, he stands his RAB up, having safely compartmentalized the pizza he would be bringing home to...himself.
"We should be off immediately. They haven't got any strong leads on us yet, but in a city with as many eyes as this, we're bound to be noticed sooner or later by someone else who wants us dead." his voice is wry.
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As soon as the news castor mentions Delshick, Sona begins recording and editing audio.
The audio clip is composed mostly of Delshick's voice with pieces of ambient parlor chatter used to fill any grammatical holes. "This is- a group of Cinnar terorists; seven good officers- We attempted to bring them in; -suspicious- Law enforcement officials- opened fire without warning. We- -separatists- -will not negotiate with terrorists! If- The Kvothan Protectorate- -doesn't- -open- polic-y to -local- families; Your pizza is next, and it's the bomb."
Sona moves in to adjust the sound on the TV, and Miss Muffet climbs up to the ports in the back. The technician connects to the Pizzeria's broadband and asks the switchbox to deliver the sound byte to the news station that just made its report. She tells it there is no problem if the broadcast station's switch doesn't want to air it immediately, just as long as they get it to one of the reporters anonymously.
"We're leaving, right? We should leave."
Blast-O-Tron stands from his table and makes to leave by the main entrance of the pizzeria. Meanwhile, Jamee back at the ship itself turns on the internal comms and radios the captain, telling him, "We got a gig! We're shipping out!"
With that, confident that things were going well, he accesses his music library and "Awesome Mix vol. 1" begins transmitting through the RAB's speakers and Jamee's headset.
I'll do both for us, because I'm a ranger.
While numerous passersby stop and gawk at the sight of the group passing through the streets of Shan City, no one moves to stop you.
The scene of you walking through the street wipes to a close up of the underside of the Lucky Sixes. A small goblin moves unnoticed through the shadow cast by the ship, and carefully installs a small metal box between an exhaust port and the armor plating. The box is effectively invisible to the naked eye. The goblin slinks away, with none the wiser.
You arrive at the ship to find that the Cap'n has already prepped her for launch. T.E.R.R.A. has already removed the cargo.
What stations do you each man in the ship?
I think it would make sense for Jamee to emerge from his hidey-hole in his room to join the Captain on the Bridge. Probably at the Sensor station due to his high awareness, with a willingness to run over to the Point Defense station during Red Alert scenarios.
The Kvothan forces do not bother you as the Lucky Sixes climbs towards the stars. Soon the ship is in hyperspace. The time passes slowly, but finally alarm klaxons begin sounding your imminent return to realspace.
How do you approach the system? Exit lightspeed at a large distance from Kanata Prime? Exit lightspeed within Kanata Prime's atmosphere only narrowly avoiding a cliff face? Something in between?
2BR clumps into whichever room Sona is at the time.
> Sona, request. Installation of retrothrusters for in-flight maneuvers. Query cost, resources, time?
Sona spends the majority of the two days in the Generator room monitoring the automated systems, ready to turn any catastrophe into a small disaster. She has carried a pallet of Lodestar Equipment into the lower deck staging area, and when BunkR BusteR finds her she has her chestplate open, reassembling the advanced features of her Forge Core.
> return [personal energy, raw material of equivalent mass and complexity, negligible/minutes]
> This one is equipped with a limited number of operation modules, but in the safety of the ship, three can be devoted to upgrading my forge core.
> Current production queue includes personal weaponry.
> This one cannot afford to remain defenseless on our next mission.
> retrothrusters can be added to the front of the queue.
We should exit lightspeed within the system, when the planet and its surrounding space is within scanner distance.
Sona feeds a few sidearms and bits of ballistics armor into the Forge Core and quickly assembles the retrothrusters, which she snaps into some of 2BR's modification hardpoints. She also produces an anti-armor poignard, the first and simplest of her compact weapon designs, and a collapsible spear.
The modules begin to accumulate processor conflicts and waste static as she continues to build through the afternoon. She modifies an existing stun baton to fit her growing arsenal, as well as a simple plasma pistol and one of the beam sabers. In this case, most of her work goes into making the parts lighter and compact or retractable.
As the hour grows late, Sona gets into the more complex builds. Sparks fly as she builds pair of wicked beam katar, blades focused to a hair's breath; a boom baton, using electromagnets to deliver a burst of crushing force on impact; and in case she needs to hand over a weapon to someone quick on their feet: a nanofiber ribbon blade. Exhausted and jittering with rampant energy, Sona turns in for the first night.
On the following morning, no one can find Sona. She spends the entire day working on three masterwork weapons.
She arrives at her station in the generator room in time for arrival with her modules reconfigured for an away mission.
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-Sona
Under Jamee's steady hand the Lucky Sixes reverts to realspace on the edge of the Kanata system. Passive sensors are not picking up any communication signals, and the Sixes is not confronted by any sort of welcoming party. The system itself has a total of three planets: two gas giants and a Super-Earth that your map labels as Kanata Prime. There are two unusually dense asteroid belts. Horvus' data indicates that that T.E.R.R.A. has numerous autonomous mining stations littered throughout these two belts. There does not appear to be any active traffic in the system.
What do you do?
Jamee sets the scanner array into active ping mode and turns his attention to the visual range viewscreen. Gesturing at the screen in a specific way lights up the nearest autonomous mining station, and Jamee queries the scanners to determine if movement continues on for T.E.R.R.A.'s mining projects. He doesn't intend to immediately act on the information, so he doesn't share his intentions out loud; he's merely acting on curiosity regarding how robust these autonomous miners truly were.
Once that's done, he turns to the Captain. "Shall we bring her in to Kenata Prime, sir? Looks like whomever last controlled this area of space left the door wide open for anyone to wander in."
Accessing the unmanned sensors through the Generator, Sona thumbs the comms to the bridge. "Petit-Fils, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately..."
Jamee, the nearest autonomous mining station shows signs of orbital bombardment, and there are numerous burned out husks of autonomous mining ships nearby. Your scanners indicate no activity within the asteroid belt, autonomous or otherwise. In fact, you don't pick up any active ships anywhere in the system. For all intents and purposes, this appears to be a dead system.
Sona, you know that the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field without highly specialized navigation software is approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one. You relay this information to Cap'n Bucanero.
Never tell me t' odds! Jamee, me matey, brin' her in close t' t' planet!
Jamee, there is an unusually high amount of space debris in this system. Traveling to different locations within system will require defy danger rolls.
What do you do?
2BR will set himself up on the cannons and open fire on incoming foreign objects. Should help with whatever you have in mind. Feel free to roll my Aid roll if/when you need it.
Sona walks to the Shields console and begins the protocol for altering their patterns from hyperspace tachyon storm shielding to point-impact kinetic shielding. She also removes any algorithms intended to mask their heat signature. The command console on the bridge gets a progress bar for these tasks.
Not for the first time, Organic Robot Series 5d-1337, Batch 5694, Unit 42 cursed the engineer of the ship in at least five different tongues and in fifteen different traditions, nineteen if you separated out the branches of the ancient Unite States Military. The tradition of the USMC was a particular favorite, although some of her handlers had argued the USMC was a myth started to fake the Apollo landings. At least they did back when she had handlers.
Reminiscing wasn't going to solve her predicament. Nor was her esoteric knowledge of the Second Lost Age of Terra, unless you asked the yahoos who claimed the First Lost Age of Terra had never been lost, but again, that was a topic for when her stomach wasn't trying to commit a mutiny against her brain because it had tasted nothing but e-rats for the past two months. She'd had a close call then, barely managing to escape her former captors' trap and getting off Kelshi IX with her life and freedom intact. That had left her too scared to go out and actually eat something worth eating, but she was on a ship, and the crawlspaces were big enough that she could carry her railgun and pack with no issues.
The only downside was the condition of the catwalks that ran above the maze of cables, wires, plumbing, and other vital connections that kept everything working and the crew alive. To be frank, she was amazed that the rusty deathtraps hadn't given way yet. That might be because she weighed less than a space marine's full combat kit, even with her own kit.
She breathed a sigh of relief at that thought. If it hadn't given out by now, it would probably hold her to the galley, where she could fix something that actually tasted good.
That was when she heard the tinking of rusty bolts on the catwalk. The very same rusty bolts that happened to be holding that section of catwalk, and the genetically altered halfling on it, up.
A Very polite chime and the accompanying alert makes its presence known to the person at the console. The alert is a simple thing, just a routine check that is letting the engineer know that the aft third of the rust bucket known as the Lucky Sixes no longer existed and appropriate actions should be taken.
Which was odd considering that the readouts for the engines were still working and everything but the head was reporting when pinged. Logically, that meant something had broken the connection, and someone would have to go find what it was.
The cause of the break is readily obvious. A small female humanoid had managed to get tangled in the mess of cables and wires that ran in the ceiling. She is hanging upside down, but she'll likely slide out of the boots and cargo pants she's wearing in a few minutes given the slow millimetric movement provided by gravity. Her body from the waistband of her pants to the bottom hem of her bra is exposed, and blindingly white. Gathered at her armpits the t-shirt and hoodie she was wearing. Her arms, unfortunately for any hope of modesty she may have had, are pinned above, or rather, below her head by the straps of the backpack and the strange rifle she carried.
"Uh, a little help, please," comes a pleasant, if highly embarrassed, voice from where her head is, muffled by the folds of fabric that covered her face.
Schedule one night of personal leave, and the ship literally splits in half. The technician is alerted directly on her HUD as soon as the ship loses its aft feedback sensors. Grumbling in audible grawlix, Sona walks to the Generator, Reactor, and Life Support consoles and checks their diagnostics.
>Be advised, suspicious readouts indicate interior breach in corridor C. Organic crew, please refrain from crossing sealed thresholds, as life support may be inconsistent.
Sona draws her stun baton from a compartment in her left elbow, and extends it out to its full length. To engage the stability locks that keep the weapon sturdy, she activates the stun feature with a crack. Satisfied, she saunters out of Engineering toward corridor C.
The progress bars on shields have stopped.
There's the sound of a gulp as the sound of a stun baton registers
Man, this is gonna suck!
"I-I know it looks like I'm a pirate, or a saboteur, but what kind of a pirate gets caught in this kind of a predicament? Can you please get me down? All the blood rushing to my head is starting to hurt," she asks, a note of desperation in her voice. Whether that's from the blood rushing to her head, the sound of the stun baton wielded by the person who discovered her, or the barest hint of the waistband of her underwear starting to show as she's pulled down by gravity isn't really clear.
When she spots the speaking halfling suspended by the cables and wires of her ship, the technician levels her weapon. Leaning in, she tries to figure out what she's looking at.
“You… are beautiful.” A caliper ejects from Sona’s wrist and clatters to the floor. “Your facial structure- limb proportions- symmetrical iris patterning- the density of the melanin in your skin has uniform distribution!” Sona gasps and her hand clamps over her mouth. “Are you… Who are you? Why have you disrupted this ship's aft diagnostic sensors? This is a violation… of some sort. I’m sure of it.” The technician gestured at the woman with her stun lance before spotting the thing, as if she didn’t realize she was still holding it. She pulled the end up and set the butt against the floor.
Sona could not think of what kind of violation it might be, but it was one, and this… breathtaking cherub-like paragon would have to be sent to the brig.
“Destruction of private property!” she blurted.
Taking a deep breath to re-calibrate her voice emulator, Sona continues: "This one will have to extricate you from the duct-work and take you to the brig... Do you comply?"
The Cap'n's voice booms over the internal intercom system, a hint of panic underlying his normal abrasiveness.
Interior breach, ye say! Sona, what in t' seven hells be goin' on down thar?
You hear a sharp intake of breath, then a curse best left unrepeated. The ship shakes gently.
Damn ye Jamee! Mind t' paint, sonny, it be brand new!
>Ah, cancel that, Captain Bucanero. It appears we have another stow-away. This one has damaged the ship. She will be transported to the brig where she can be, uh, observed.
"Organ-- I mean, the name's Nedora. I was on my way to the galley when the catwalk gave way," she says, hoping to avoid the brig if at all possible. She'd been caught before, it was bound to happen over the course of ten years, but she'd been lucky enough to exchange work for passage, often as the cook.
The veracity of Nedora's story is easy enough to confirm. A section of catwalk hangs from only one side, the other having fallen to deposit the halfling, the rather tall and lanky halfling at that, into her current situation.
"Um, if you don't mind, could you hurry? I'd rather not have my head explode or fall out of my pants. I promise not to give you any trouble. I can cook and do basic repair work if that will keep me out of the brig," she says, trying to get a better look at the person she's talking to with her gray eyes.
Then, as if her mind is about fifteen seconds behind, she reacts to Sona's statment to the captain.
"Wait! Whaddya mean 'observed?'"
this.parent.Manifest["crew"].apend("Nedora", ENSIGN, DEPARTMENTS.ENGINEERING, "Cook", "Mechanic");
Sona has the ship's manifest altered as soon as the woman says 'repair'. Setting the lance against a bulkhead, the technician lifts Nedora in one hand and begins untangling her from the cables with the other. This Theta model 3 has a small chassis, comperable to a small child or large hobbit, but your weight is not an issue to her. The height of the cables does giver her some trouble. Of the five known models of Theta, threes fall securely within the uncanny valley of soft-textured plasteel panels and glowing seams. "If you could reach for that red- Careful! Try not to disconnect any more wires. This brand new ship is held together by hairpins and toothpaste as it is."
"All crew are maintained entirely on the basis of my desire to observe them. As crew technician I have root permissions on all the ship systems. I've changed my mind. You will be running engineering with me. Do you know how to program shield algorithms? Our system is meant to be operated manually by six crewmen, but it runs in Ubuntu, so a batch file can take care of it if you can load and unload them fast enough." Sona continues to babble about the systems in Engineering as she releases Nedora from the wiring.
When she eases the halfling to the floor, she pauses for a moment and glances at the stun lance which is out of her reach. Instead, she lets her gaze fall and picks the caliper up from the floor, tucking it back into her wrist compartment.
"Batch file? Don't you mean a shell script," Nedora asks as she's slowly extricated from the cables, "I could set up a script to take care of the loading and unloading, but I don't know how things are set up."
Finally free of the tangle of cables and wiring, and upright again, she fixes her shirt and hoodie, and pulls her pants up. She's the kind of pale you get when you live indoors all of your life, her hair is black, and her eyes gray. She stands about 145 cm (a little above 4'8") and her lanky limbs make her look more like a young human teenager before her final growth spurt than a halfling.
"So," she says looking up at the mess she'd made, not that the tangle was worse, but now it was in the corridor, "how close is this observation supposed to be, and is there anything vital here that I shouldn't touch," she asks, pointing to the maze of wires and cables.
"The parameters of your query are so vague as to make an answer difficult... If I require a microscope, I will request a sample and observe at a distance. As your direct supervisor, and so long as you are on probation for crew policy violation, your actions will be surveilled throughout the day, either in person as they are now, or from a console. So long as you are a productive member of the crew, you'll likely be removed from probation in six weeks."
The damages are not so critical as to require drastic means, Sona reattaches a few key conduits and leaves the hanging mess of cables where it is. "You'll fix all that when we get back. At the moment, we are closing in for an away mission. I hope that you are also experienced with weaponry. The organics found it in their eternal wisdom to establish a mining station in a hostile system. It happens quite frequently in my experience. The lengths organisms go to test their mortality are amusing."
"Another stowaway? Captain, this is what happens when you scrimp on the ship's antipersonnel defense mechanisms in port! We wind up leaving every planet with more people aboard than we landed with!" the ship rocks slightly to the left as the elf's sudden sharp intake of breath can be heard over the comms. "We're fine, we're fine, I dodged it...we're okay...." he mutters afterward, when the ship has somewhat stabilized. The ship continues to meander through the asteroid field on its way to the planet, the elf's distracted tone showing the split concentration this conversation required.
"This looks like a dead system at first scan, so there's nowhere we can drop her off...uh, wait, did Sona say it's a her? Wonderful..." in Jamee's (adolescent) experience, girls could usually cause 10 times the trouble boys could.
Nedora seems to be conflicted for a moment.
On the one hand, joining with the crew would help her avoid the perils of stowing away in the cargo holds of ships. On the other hand, she might be recognized, and they might be wanted for other reasons, and the ship itself wasn't the most inconspicuous vessel. Despite the coat of paint, it was still easy to see the damage from battles and boardings.
Still, it was an opportunity to have people who could watch her back, and that by itself was enough to convince the halfling that joining was better than not.
"Those aren't for show," she says with a smirk, nodding to the pair of strange guns leaning against the wall next to her pack. One seemed to be an amalgamation of a pump-action shotgun and a small caliber rifle, the barrel of the rifle sitting above the barrel of the shotgun. The rifle's magazine was in the buttstock of the gun, giving the weapon a longer barrel than it's rather short length would imply. The barrel of the shotgun was about half the length of the rifle, and the magazine it had only held four to six rounds based on the size of the shells.
The other weapon was truly strange. It seemed to have three magazines, no barrel, a scope, and some big block that was where a barrel should be. It was also remarkably heavy considering it was the same size as the other gun, though it appeared that the stock on this one could fold out.
Sona lets out an impressed whistle, she was not as familiar with ballistic weaponry. The combustion that occurs in the chamber falls in the broad category of carbon-based reactions she's long decided are not worth her time. Petroleum fuels, digestion, all of it represented a cycle of chemical cannibalization that the gynoid found... distasteful. Machines were much more concrete, deliberate, orderly creatures. This Nedora stood at the precipice of that divide: a designed organism, uniform in its chaos.
Delighted, Sona looked down on her new little sister as she gathered her lance.
> Crisis averted, captain. We've got a new conscript.
> Ensign Nedora is reporting to Engineering to run our shields.
"Let's get going, there's no telling how much longer Petit-Fils can dodge rocks, and we both know this ship doesn't need any more hull damage."
We be pickin' up crew faster den a docked ship picks up bilge rats!
As the ship nears the planet:
Jamee, be thar signs o' t' station?
Jamee, you scanners show that Tau-SH3 station has been turned to rubble. The perimeter shields are down, and there is no sign of humanoid life.
What do you do?
"So, what kind of hardware are we running," Nedora asks as she scoops up her pack and weapons, "I've operated GC-308 shield generators before, and I heard those became kinda the de facto standard for usability from the guy supervising me at the time."
Though, we weren't trying to plow through a pinball machine at the time, she added silently.
Then she had a thought.
"You said that the shields needed six people to operate, right? What if I could get some more help?"
Without waiting for an answer, Nedora takes a few steps back and holds out her hand. A chant comes from her lips in a strange language, fluid and harsh, lilting and flat.
"⠠⠊ ⠉⠁⠇⠇ ⠥⠏⠕⠝ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠃⠑⠊⠝⠛⠎ ⠕⠋ ⠇⠊⠛⠓⠞⠝⠊⠝⠛⠂ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠠⠑⠇⠑⠉⠞⠗⠕⠝⠊⠉ ⠠⠉⠓⠕⠗⠥⠎⠂ ⠁⠝⠙ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠠⠇⠕⠗⠙⠎ ⠕⠋ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠠⠑⠧⠑⠗⠎⠞⠕⠗⠍⠲ ⠠⠏⠇⠑⠁⠎⠑ ⠇⠑⠝⠙ ⠍⠑ ⠽⠕⠥⠗ ⠁⠊⠙⠲ ⠠⠎⠑⠝⠙ ⠍⠑⠂ ⠠⠝⠑⠙⠕⠗⠁ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠓⠥⠍⠃⠇⠑⠂ ⠽⠕⠥⠗ ⠍⠕⠎⠞ ⠞⠗⠥⠎⠞⠑⠙ ⠁⠝⠙ ⠧⠁⠇⠊⠁⠝⠞ ⠅⠝⠊⠛⠓⠞⠲"
A ball of crackling energy forms above Nedora's hand, an orb of blue-white lightning that grows until it's about 40 cm (A foot and a few inches) across. Plates of some dark, mysterious metal form around it, looking like wings and armor. After a moment, the crackling fades into a pleasant hum. A white-blue sphere floats above the deck at about chest-height with dark metal plates, all subtle curves and sharp angles, float about it.
"⠠⠝⠑⠙⠕⠗⠁⠖ ⠠⠇⠕⠝⠛ ⠞⠊⠍⠑⠂ ⠝⠕ ⠎⠑⠑⠖ ⠠⠺⠓⠁⠠⠦⠉⠓⠁ ⠥⠏ ⠞⠕⠦" it says in a humming voice that, for some reason, brings to mind a hyperactive teenaged girl.
"Nothing much, Sparx, nothing much," Nedora answers as she sticks her hands in the pocket of her hoodie, "I guess I joined a merchant's crew and they sounded like they needed an extra hand."
"⠠⠁⠓⠲ ⠠⠊ ⠛⠑⠞ ⠊⠞⠲ ⠠⠎⠕ ⠙⠕⠑⠎ ⠞⠓⠑ ⠍⠑⠞⠁⠇⠇⠊⠉ ⠕⠝⠑ ⠥⠝⠙⠑⠗⠎⠞⠁⠝⠙ ⠍⠑⠦" the voice hums again.
"Uh, I don't think so. I guess that means I'll handle the introductions." Nedora turns to Sona, gesturing to the strange being now floating in the ship. "Uh... I don't think I've caught your name, but this is Sparx. Sparx, this is..." the halfling stands there, gesturing to Sona and waiting for the gynoid to give her name.
Sona watches the procedure intently, wishing she had a more robust sensory array. She couldn't decide if she was watching an ultimately precise fission reaction, or an assimilation of local substrates by controlled bozon and tachyon manipulation. Because the data was so sparse, she finds herself thinking more about the potential schematics of a multispectrometer module.
When the thing begins to issue it's harsh, tactile speech, the technician snaps back to attention. "This One is Commander Sona, Generation Thirteen, Model Three Theta unit and First Engineering Officer of the Lucky Sixes. Though my sister model fours would boast a wide array of organic languages, ⠠⠠⠊ ⠁⠍ ⠋⠇⠥⠑⠝⠞ ⠊⠝ ⠕⠧⠑⠗ ⠎⠊⠭ ⠍⠊⠇⠇⠊⠕⠝ ⠋⠕⠗⠍⠎ ⠕⠋ ⠙⠊⠛⠊⠞⠁⠇ ⠏⠗⠕⠞⠕⠉⠕⠇⠲" Sona gives a brief bow. Even in high-ranking positions, Theta models show deferential respect to just about everything. The knowledge that Sona is ranked just under the captain by her own design in a computer system largely curated and adhered to by her does put the deference in a peculiar light.
They reach Engineering and approach the shields console. "It's a GC-212 patched with TI-199 parts. The two interfaces are routed through the shell, and a custom UI is displayed here." Sona gestures to the screen. An observer with experience on Mil-Spec consoles would recognize the manual controls for both models in a small window in the corner of the screen, and notably out of the way of an open display screen. "See, among other differences that are difficult to describe without slipping into binary, the GC models run a logarithmic frequency scale, and TI runs an exponential scale. Manual controls have to be adjusted in unison and in matching scale to prevent overloading the system with radicals. Instead, I have these composite controls here, and more complex adjustments, like heat signature masks that are run by BASH scripts. This One is not optimized for reaction speed, so statistical models are used to predict impacts." The shield readout is certifiably insane. Where most ships would have a single layer of passive kinetic static and a concentration of shields that shifts from arc to arc, the depiction of the ships shows a constantly shifting cloud of frequencies that thin and concentrate seemingly at random until a ping shows that a particle has hit the shield at a point that appears to have been well-protected. Surely there's no way this shield is keeping the atmosphere in. The hull sure as hell isn't. No heuristic being would feel safe in open space with shields running like this, but the ship has been safely traveling for two days.
"Oh, uh, nevermind then," Nedora says sheepishly after being corrected about Sona's understanding of the language of the elements, "pleased to meet you, Commander Sona."
===
When shown and told about the setup, Nedora, somehow, goes even paler.
Sparx, though clearly not humanoid in anyway, somehow manages to convey an air of astonishment and terror, but mainly terror.
"⠠⠝⠑⠙⠕⠗⠁⠂ ⠺⠓⠁⠞ ⠓⠁⠧⠑ ⠽⠕⠥ ⠛⠕⠞⠞⠑⠝ ⠥⠎ ⠊⠝⠞⠕⠦" The golem hums worriedly.
"I dunno, Sparx. I really don't know," Nedora answers with a confused, terrified note in her voice.
2BR crunches down the corridor towards the collapsed catwalk. With a projectile cannon, flamethrower, armor shredding claws, stun wave pulse and retrothrusters all grafted on, the older model bot is mess of patches and repatches in between the heavy artillery. In addition, the oversized chainsword strapped to its back looks like it last cleaned back in... never.
A small speaker grill opens, and a poorly synthesised voice issues forth, sounding like blending rocks.
> Greetings Ensign
> Attempt with all due alacrity to avoid termination
> Requesting access to your weaponry if you...
> [Colloquialism module loading... loading... searching... search complete]
> If you snuff it.
On the Bridge, Cap'n Bucanero glances at his simplified shield display, which show fore and aft shields in a reassuring shade of green.
Arrr, be some fine work Sona.
He turns to Jamee. Brin' us in close, if ye dinna mind.
"Uh, I guess, since I'll be dead," Nedora manages to get out while looking at 2BR in amazement, amazement that he hasn't fallen apart into a pile of scraps yet.
"⠠⠺⠑⠠⠦⠗⠑ ⠝⠕⠞ ⠊⠝⠉⠇⠥⠙⠑⠙ ⠊⠝ ⠞⠓⠁⠞⠂ ⠠⠏⠕⠏⠎⠲" Sparx tells 2BR in its humming voice.
2BR looks between Sona, the new Ensign and the ball-golem.
> Translation?
Sona mirrors the blank look and responds privately.
> The satellite device claims autonomy and self-ownership.
> They're new here, they'll learn how this world works with time.
> What are the means of our delivery and extraction?
> Is there somewhere to put down?
"Sparx said that she and the others weren't included in the deal. The other golems I mean," Nedora explains.
Sparx, meanwhile seems to glare at 2BR for a moment before turning to Sona.
"⠠⠎⠕⠂ ⠺⠓⠕⠠⠦⠎ ⠞⠓⠊⠎⠦ ⠠⠓⠑ ⠎⠑⠑⠍⠎ ⠞⠕ ⠓⠁⠧⠑ ⠇⠕⠎⠞ ⠁ ⠋⠊⠛⠓⠞ ⠺⠊⠞⠓ ⠁ ⠚⠥⠝⠅⠏⠊⠇⠑⠲ ⠠⠊ ⠺⠕⠥--" Sparx stops mid sentence when she spies the projectile cannon that 2BR carries. The golem floats over to the Theta 2 and begins darting around while speaking in rapidfire, "⠠⠕⠍⠊⠛⠕⠎⠓⠖⠠⠕⠍⠊⠛⠕⠎⠓⠖ ⠠⠕⠍⠊⠛⠕⠎⠓⠖ ⠠⠊⠎ ⠞⠓⠁⠞ ⠁ ⠠⠧⠠⠗⠠⠍⠠⠙⠠⠎⠤⠼⠊⠼⠚⠦ ⠠⠺⠊⠞⠓ ⠠⠎⠞⠗⠕⠓⠇ ⠠⠍⠥⠝⠊⠞⠊⠕⠝⠎ ⠉⠥⠎⠞⠕⠍ ⠍⠥⠵⠵⠇⠑⠃⠗⠁⠅⠑⠎⠦⠖ ⠠⠕⠓⠖ ⠠⠕⠓⠖ ⠠⠕⠓⠖ ⠠⠞⠓⠁⠞⠠⠦⠎ ⠁ ⠠⠎⠊⠛⠗⠥⠝ ⠠⠺⠑⠁⠏⠕⠝⠎ ⠠⠉⠠⠃⠠⠭⠤⠼⠉⠼⠙⠖ ⠠⠞⠓⠑⠽ ⠕⠝⠇⠽ ⠍⠁⠙⠑ ⠇⠊⠅⠑ ⠋⠊⠧⠑⠤⠓⠥⠝⠙⠗⠑⠙ ⠕⠋ ⠞⠓⠕⠎⠑⠖ ⠠⠺⠓⠑⠗⠑ ⠙⠊⠙ ⠽⠕⠥ ⠋⠊⠝⠙ ⠊⠞⠦ ⠠⠞⠑⠇⠇ ⠍⠑⠖ ⠠⠏⠇⠑⠁⠎⠑⠦⠖"
"Oh, yeah, I forgot Sparx is a gun nut and on a constant caffeine high," Nedora explains sheepishly as Sparx zips around 2BR asking questions far too quickly to keep up with, even for a robot.
"BunkR BusteR is an older generation model 2, though with heavy refurbishment. He is as much the automaton that left the factory floor as Kray is the man his mother delivered." Her inflection doesn't seem to indicate if she means they are or are not.
2BR opens the projectile cannon load socket and dials up a mild negative pressure. An invitation, if you like, to the professed gun nut.