“As to the former, that is acceptable.”

He made a gesture and the contract updated with the agreed upon wording. After that, he pursed his lips and almost seemed to shrug in resignation as he felt that there wasn’t no longer a meaningful path forward with respect to what it seemed they actually wanted in regard to the latter—which was, in his estimation, the sharing of intelligence and top-secret technologies. To the UFP, as far as the public record was concerned, to which his security clearance was limited, the Ragnarov Fleet were an unknown quantity.

After a moment he spread his hands and said, “As I stated earlier with respect to the sharing of scientific information, these are things that can be negotiated at our leisure on a case-by-case basis. Much of the items you delineated are accessible via our extranets.”
He glanced around the room and took in their expressions. Obviously, this was a moment of impasse, but hopefully they were satisfied that it wasn’t closed permanently. With that settled, he asked, “Are there any other matters you wish to raise or shall perform the signing of contract ceremony?”

---

Mentions: @Hekazu @JBRam2002 @Zverda

Vropda should be on her way. Do not do anything stupid. By stupid, I mean anything I would call stupid, since your own sense of judgement is not to be trusted.

Nick couldn't help but grin from ear to ear. That was the precise response he'd been looking for. The shapeshifter had taken and analyzed the message, devouring it like a pot roast to a starving man for all the little nuggets of information that the text provided. Such was in his nature, psychologically geared to pull every little detail from his environment for knowledge of value. Should be on her way. That denoted uncertainty. Not is on her way, not will be arriving shortly, SHOULD BE on her way. What that meant to Nick's storied experience in espionage was that they had no idea when she would arrive and possibly not even where she was at or what she was doing, which gave him roughly 20 minutes to an hour of alone time to do as he pleased. Very fortunate considering he only needed three. In a perfect world Nick would have been the last to board where he could be supervised and controlled, where the Fleet Council members could leave without incident. In this gritty reality they happened to be in the most destructive and unpredictable member of the crew was left to his own devices with the only control mechanisms being a stern warning and two pitiful guardsman that had already fucked up bigger than they knew.

They had left Nick by himself.

It was just as he intended for them to do as soon as he met them, putting on a pathetic facade where he let them manhandle them and spoke nicely and joked around, giving off the impression that he wasn't the most vicious murderer they'd ever heard of let alone had the incredible luck to shake hands with. He'd gotten there first, where they had to watch for the reception of their beloved General and Council. He'd let them think they had control of the situation. No one had control of the situation anymore, not even Nick. His entire plan was to hover his finger over the proverbial nuclear football and dare anyone to spook him. Nick paced about the dock as he put everything together, prowling like a caged tiger as his primal mind let itself spin into a chaotic frenzy as his plan went into motion.

The receiving hold was mostly empty. It was a small ship, a jumper, its only purpose to make landfall and shuttle people to their destination before taking off back to the ship. Among that, a utility hold, and the pilot's cabin, there wasn't much to look at. But that was fine. No one wanted Nick in the pilot's cabin. The shapeshifter waltzed up to the titanium airlock doors holding the ships most vital systems, chewing his tongue as he looked the thing up and down. Breaking though it would be stupid and impossible, faking past the lock would be incredibly difficult and require a lot of luck, soooo...

Nick began to play with his hair pins, winding them around each other and bending the tips until he made approximately what he wanted with them. An allen wrench. The miscreant began to remove the screws on the plate, slowly and surely taking the entire metal casing off. Carefully, soundlessly, using his jacket on the ground to mask the noise, Nick placed the plate in a specific point on the ground before beginning to play with the wires inside. He didn't know what he was doing and he didn't need to, stabbing each wire with the pointed end of a screw until he felt a vicious burning current... and hooking it up to the plate. Proud of his work, straightening his posture with a bit of accomplishment, the deviant chucked his glass bottle on the ground with a loud smash.
"I DIDN'T DO IIIIIIT!" he called out in a childish tone.



The first thing the lone guard sent to investigate laid eyes on was a hunched form with its grimy little hands wedged inside the access panel for the pilot's cabin. Shouldering his ice cannon, the grunt issued a commanding "Halt! Hands out! Now!" to an apparently startled Nick. The shapechanging menace scrambled to his feet with his arms up and a sheepish smile on his face like he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
"Whaaaat? This? It's nothin', just be cool for once," he dismissed jokingly, fully aware of what was about to happen. Unknown to the guardsman, the usual thing that happened i.e. Nick getting beaten and shocked was not about to happen this time. When the mook attempted to maneuver around the mess of whatever gunk the shapeshifter had smeared on the floor his foot caught the shoelaces tied between the seats, as he'd been looking at the man fiddling with the ship's security boxes and not his footing. As he stumbled Nick swept in with surprising speed, guiding a powerful palm to help the unlucky security guard to his face... and right into the plate he'd set. Smeared with mustard, a surprisingly good conductor, the lights on the ship dimmed a tad as the man screamed bloody murder and convulsed, his trigger finger tensing and spraying vicious ice shards to smash across the receiving bay.

As the other member of the detail guarding the ship entered, spurred by the commotion, he was greeted by his partner on watch. Slumped over, in the arms of a maniac with his weapon in the killer's hand. Without hesitation the grunt hefted his chain gun and began to bark his warning order.
"FREEZE! HANDS WH-"
"Oh give it a damn rest already!" Nick moaned, training the dead man's Get Down on the new intruder to his fucked-up little domain.
"You already lost! Tell me, who do you think's got the better odds of surviving a gun fight right now?" The soldier visibly paused, the barrel of his weapon lowering just ever-so-slightly. A twisted smile crossed Nick's lips. It was everything he could've asked for and so much better than waiting around and getting told what to do. But the shapeshifter could sense the tenseness in the security troop's body, and interrupted before he could do anything monumentally stupid.




Nick bared his teeth in an incredibly hostile smile toward the grunt as the his weapon lowered from Nick's head area down to the floor.
"Greeeeeeat, that's just swell. Now I know by now we've established that everyone local from the Fleet from the highest echelon to the lowliest security guard such as yourself with their infinite wisdom and superior technology is absolutely incapable of stopping me. You're keeping me here with your presence! ...but not because you're a threat. Y'see, the only reason for me to stay in this hanger right now isn't the threat of death or injury or whatever the hell because I know you can't kill me and so do your superiors, just ask! Nooooooo no no no the reason I'm still here is because of you. Because you're today's entertainment."

The sinister smirk began to extend past Nick's lips, eyes bulging as he stifled a chuckle from the events that were unfolding before him.
"The only thing preventing me from leaving this receiving bay for something a little more engaging is we're going to play a little game. It's called Simon Says. If you do exactly as I tell you, you'll probably get to live! Well, at least I can guarantee that I won't kill you. But if you refuse to play people are gonna start to get suspicious from the gunfire coming from the empty ship and two corpses aboard, understood?" The mook didn't move nor did he make a sound, but Nick could feel the resignation in the tenseness of his posture.
"...good. Now, Simon says throw me your weapons." The guardsman hesitated toward his holster, pausing for a moment as he was thinking it over. Too bad Simon didn't say [i]contemplate the consequences of Simon's commands[i].
"I said fuckin' drop'em!" barked Nick, the playful pretenses absent from his voice. With a movement from the shapeshifter's shoulders as if charging his weapon the man threw his own to clatter against the deck. Nick grinned once more as if he had never been angry.
"You're pretty good at this! Alright, now turn around."

Doing as he was told, the security detail turned around. Nick lowered the body to the ground slowly, noiselessly as he approached in light footsteps.
"Awesome! But just in case you forgot..." He swept over low, like a predator to pop back to whisper in his ear.
"...I didn't say Simon says." The guard attempted to swing his arm back to disable the threat, which might have worked in ordinary circumstances that weren't Nick who had been prepared for it. He grasped his helmet with a clenched hand, blocking the elbow with an arm and swept his legs out from under him, cracking the faceplate of the helm on the metal ground before following his head with a swift boot to the neck.



Chayylial/Drekavac's commlink would buzz with an alert just as soon as the deal was agreed upon, being the Fleet Head of Security and everything. A very familiar alert considering it happened about two to three times a week. It was a distress signal, a generalized panic alert that a ship security could activate in times of distress wordlessly and without motion. First applied to personnel as a means of responding quickly to perceived threats were action was paramount but a full report couldn't be given, these soon gave rise to a secondary situational use: they triggered whenever Nick was left unsupervised around the men, typically followed by casualties.

@Zverda

The General simply nodded along as the other two spoke, showing his non-verbal approval at what they spoke of, the final and slightly deeper nod at their approval of the use of a more secretly constructed constructor ship marking the end of this chain. It was a shame the UFP did not want to join in on their endeavours in technology, but case-by-case basis could actually work for the Fleet's benefit if they played their cards right. Nonetheless, he joined in on echoing the opinions of the other two: "Regrettable, yet reasonable", he commented.

Now with most of the formalities out of the way, the Federation person asked whether there was anything more to be discussed before some 'signing ceremony'. "No, I do believe we are quite ready. We will have to decline participating in any lengthy ceremonies however... we are already behind on our schedule." The General was quickly corrected to know that the 'ceremony' was pretty much simply signing the contract with nothing added on top of it. Odd to call it a ceremony in that case then, but he had his exoframe shrug it's shoulders and took a look to his sides: "Anyone against this may speak now." Nobody spoke up.

"Good, we can get this over and done with", he rejoiced and extended his right hand to sign what there was to be signed. Of course, the other two would also be needed, but he could well start. Once they were all done, Creft brought up one more thing: "And then, as an act of good will between our people, Duke Rexes Virne of the council would like to invite the most capable of UFP's surface racers to join the biannual Fleet races. He has won them for a decade in a row and desperately needs worthy challengers."

@Circ@JBRam2002@Zverda

This distress signal compounded by the live feeds now streaming in had incriminated the sadistic Zelthis, with little sway for his innocence. However, Vropda noted that the shapeshifter’s phrasing was peculiar. Decreeing viciously and intermittently with a foreward of Simon says and later punishing the sentry grunts if they followed any direction without such a preamble, Nick had reached a level of maniacal sophistication which had not seen for some time. The Council deemed that he could be regulated; she always had her doubts. ACASIAS had fortunately captured and deciphered the audio; it was a reference to an elementary game played by school children on Earth, a primitive planet, several hundred light years away.

Fascinating.

He was out of control; the engineer now knew what must be done.

With the gravitation manipulator in hoe, the captain hastily communicated by root via command prompt glove as her ship prepared for launch.

> CONTAIN
> VACCUM
> EXTRICATE

The location of the trickster turned traitor was ascertained. The fungal machination worked imperceptibly and automatically, with the chamber already quarantined and reinforced. The two security guards would have to be sacrificed, but this, in the mind of Creft’s sister, would be a mercy in lieu of the promise of future torture.

However, the biological computer stalled on the second order with an unexpected hesitation.

> ARE YOU SURE It questioned.

This was ACASIAS’ reminder to Vropda that the death would be quick but extremely painful. She knew that he could be salvaged; his harvested cells withstood almost everything science could inflict upon them.

The rapid decompression would suddenly instigate a severe form of ebullism, gas within blood, lymph, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid would literally be bubbling due to the quickly reduced ambient pressure, while slowly icing his bodily liquids due to the glacially low temperature. The water vapor within his respiratory tract would quickly cool forming icicle roots branching and filling every alveoli of his pulmonary system, inducing a thoracic-wide frigid atelectasis. Then, the rapid hypoxia would induce flaccid paralysis if his corpus was not yet frozen, while the severe hypocapnia would force the pH within each cell to become acidic, due to the inability to evacuate carbon dioxide, the body’s way of removing volatile protons and atomic waste from the Krebs' cycle. Without this, the internal milieu would begin to burn with the build-up of undesired potassium, phosphorus and calcium, inducing seizures and instant rigor mortis, in a person whose consciousness was possibly still trapped in such a rigid in situ.

This could all occur in one to six hundred seconds, not necessarily in that order, all the while his corpus would shrivel and expand due to all the pathologic processes occurring almost simultaneously.

> ARE YOU SURE It asked again.
> YES Was the response.

A few moments later, her cephalic monitors provided the necessary imagery and confirmation of three floating carcasses in the confined area, grated and equalized to deep space. The slits then closed and oxygen was suddenly restored in the room. The process, in total, took no more than 1-2 minutes.

Nick would have to hover, in the meantime, until reinforcements would be able extricate his body from the lack of gravity.

Vropda messaged all within the Council.

> THREAT PURGED

@Hekazu @JBRam2002 @Zverda@Corporal Lance

The General and the rest of the people were already on their way back to the transportation vessel when ACASIAS delivered worrying news from his sister. The message was simple, two words in all. "THREAT PURGED", she affirmed. If his exoframe would not automatically root out behaviour that could harm the delicate parts of the faux face it carried, Creft would have called for it to bite its lip. What does she mean, 'purged'? It didn't take him long to add one and one together though: Nick had gone against his direct order of explicitly not doing anything stupid, hadn't he? Dammit.

He responded to the information post-haste: "This is about Zelthis is it not? Virne is going to rip us apart." The latter statement carried the same matter of factly tone which the General was known to use when issuing orders that could well lead to the death of the unit. He knew that they would not get any too serious reprimands, but deaths of crew on peaceful missions like these always warranted an investigation. And the Duke was known to be a thorough and dutiful man under their joking and approachable exterior.

Eventually they arrived at the ship and it would be the time to extract their unruly, even rebellious lunatic from the space they had been confined into. To make sure any further stunts of foolishness would not be taking place, Creft donned the set of twin plasma repeaters on his shoulders, the familiar targeting reticules appearing in his field of vision. He would personally be looking after this fellow for the rest of the trip, if the guards were too incompetent to be trusted with said job. As soon as they'd have recovered Zelthis and ran a successful and fault free diagnostics test, they would be heading back to Fleet space. It had been far too long since he had last walked in the familiar hallways of the Universal Nova.

@JBRam2002@Zverda@Corporal Lance@Gordian Nought

"What do you mean, you can't get me a job? You're hiring."

The man placed his palms together against his forehead and prayed for rain. He tried to be a good person. God knew he tried.

But this woman was testing him.

"What I said was," he explained, "that I don't have a job to give you. We are hiring security professionals, mademoiselle. I do not deny your talent, of which I'm sure there's plenty, nor your willingness to work, which is... obvious." Maybe if he put the words in the exact right order, like ratchets in a key, her brain would finally click. His sleek navy coattails swished in a lost breeze.

"You are a combat gynoid, mademoiselle. I see that. But you are an unemployed combat gynoid, with no work experience, no references, no official documentation, no ID, no clothes, no address, no idea where you are, no concept of timeliness, and only the most rudimentary knowledge of your own specifications. And, most of all, no clue what you're applying for. We are hiring bouncers, mademoiselle. Doormen. For our annual office party. We do not need anyone with a gun. Nor a..." He raised a notepad he had been filling in earlier. "'Dakimakura'."

"She could keep company on night patrols!" said Taidana the robot.

"Mademoiselle, bouncers don't do night patrols."

Taidana stared at him. For the first time in the last half hour, she realised she wasn't going to get her way.

"Fuck you," she said.

"Please leave, mademoiselle."

Taidana's gazed flicked from his one eye to his other, a trembling waver growing in her face, and she stomped out the way she came. When she was gone, he curled up on the spot and wilted to the floor, massaging his temples with his fingers.



Taidana sat down on the grassy slope outside the grand entrance. She sat beside her bag, which was exactly where she'd left it, and had all her things. A faint pitter of rain was starting to tap at her, soaking her synthetic hair and cooling her joints.

She'd hopped planet for this. Somehow, using more effort than she'd ever put into anything in her life, she'd seen that one line at the top of a distant corner of the grand internet, and, in a spin of chaos, she actually got here. She remembered buying eight tickets before finding the right one. She remembered talking to spaceport staff without number. She remembered asking a million passerbys for directions, and winced.

She'd learned so much. She'd tried so hard.

Taidana opened up her favourite altchan and made a thread about it.

When that didn't help her, she cried.