"Can I tell you a secret?"

My hair obscured parts of my vision as I hung my head down over the side of the bed, looking towards the floor. The top bunk was always mine — Anz had wanted it for all of five seconds until it became a conflict, and then she just backed down. About two meters from the ground, my glasses threatened to slide off, but I replaced them with just a moment to spare. Idly kicking my legs against the mattress behind me, I waited for my sister's face to pop out from the bottom bunk, her longer hair pooling on the carpeted floor, as she looked back up at me with a concerned expression.

"I won't...have to keep it from mother and father again, will I?"

I knew what that face meant. 'Please don't get into any more trouble. Please.' That's how she was — she hated it whenever things got strained or difficult. She wanted everyone to just get along. And she was willing to let anyone and everyone walk over her like a doormat to make it happen.

But that wasn't any way to live. Maybe I was trying to show her that? Trying to inspire her to grow a backbone? Or, maybe, I was just using that as an excuse to indulge in random acts of rebellion. Chaos for it's own sake, but if anyone asked, I'd have a good story, right?

It was a long time ago. We were both small. I feel like I'll never really know what my own motivations were, back then.

"I'm gonna dye my hair."

Her face twisted in agonized concern. She even sat up in her bed, as though trying to get a closer look at me through the rims of her own glasses, much larger than mine, and with innocent-looking, rounded lenses. Just with that statement alone, she was already beating back tears.

"I dunno what color yet, something crazy wild. I'm thinking...pink. Yeah, hot pink! Well, if they don't have that color, maybe like a really bright orange—"

"Anna, you know father won't allow that..."

Her hands placed the book she had been reading aside. I wonder if it was that one she always said was her favorite, about the milkman and his daughters, or something like that. Or maybe that was more than one book?

"You know what he'll do."

"Yeah, I know."

Even as her lips set themselves in a stern expression, her eyes betraying that deep-running concern that always flowed in her, I couldn't help but grin. I was twelve years old, about to commit a crime, and I couldn't be happier.

"Why are you smiling!?" With a frustrated exertion, her fist pounded on the mattress at her side. I rarely saw her angry. Only when I was in trouble, really — or when I was getting myself in trouble. That really set her off, about as much as someone like her could be set off.

"The last time you did something like that, your lip was swollen for a week!! Have you forgotten having to tell your teachers that you 'fell and hit a table'!?" Lost in herself, she shouted so loudly that perhaps our parents had heard. "Why can't you just do as father says!?" Her voice pleaded, as she pushed herself off of the bottom bunk, standing on the floor proper and looking up at me. She wasn't tall enough to make eye contact with me, and her frilly nightgown really sabotaged her attempt to appear bigger than she was, as I continued to look down at her with an unconcerned gaze. "Why do you keep doing things like this? Don't you love our family!?"

"I do. That's why I'm doing it." I was a little confused, honestly. All these years together, and she still hadn't figured it out? What did she see when she looked at us together? "I mean, it's 'cause he cares, you know? I thought you knew that."

Anzhela's comprehension was in utter disarray. She stared at me in complete confusion, almost shaking her head a bit as she turned her head just slightly away, trying to hide her impending tears as she choked up. I didn't blame her. This was a lot more emotion than she was used to showing, even I could tell that much.

"He loves us more than anything. Heck, I figured you would know that better than me, since you're always sucking up to him." I flashed a toothy smile, crooked and yellow from having never brushed them like I should — like dad told me to. "He wouldn't care if some random stranger came up to him and told him they were gonna dye their hair, right? Do you think he's got, like, some kinda hair dye vendetta?"

"N—No, but..." Anz blinked, drawn in closer by something she didn't understand. Strange. She had always been really inquisitive, a fast learner. It was those traits that would get her in so much trouble down the line. She was the type of person who always stayed quiet, but in her mind, she was always questioning things. If only I had been able to give her a voice of her own.

"But when it's me, he reacts. Sure, it's not hugs and kisses. But it's a reaction, and that means he cares." I told her in a simple, factual voice. "It's just that...there are some kinds of love that he can show, and there are other kinds of love that he can't show. He's just giving us the only love he has..."

"...And, of course, it's the same with me. Maybe I'm a broken person, too. Maybe there's something wrong with me. I really don't know. But just like him, there are only certain types of love that I can show." I recounted, my voice growing a bit more somber as the explanation went on. "If it was just some random dude on the train that told me they didn't want me to dye my hair, I wouldn't care...but because it's him, that disapproval just makes me want to do it even more. So that means that I care too, right?"

With a smirk and a sly grin, I leaned in. "So, if he cares about me, and I care about him, why wouldn't it be love?" She seemed to want to reject those words. More than that, she wanted to reject my entire mindset. I was always questioning things, and I was the kind of person who would speak out whenever I could, however I could. She was probably thinking to herself, 'if only I had found a way to temper that voice'.

"I mean, he—"


"Anna, listen to me."

This isn't the color my bedsheets were, back then. The table in the corner is missing.

Where's my laptop? I built it myself. I had to bully Anz out of her allowance to do it, but I made it myself, it's mine, so where is it—

The clock on the wall. It said something around 10:30 before, didn't it? The digital display read out '88:88' in an unnaturally bright display. That didn't even make sense. That's not a real time. That isn't how clocks work.

I turned back to my sister, eyes widened in fear and confusion. Her face was...like stone. Utterly unexpressive. Her arms were limp at her side, and her entire body was as still as a doll's. Only her lips moved. Until they took up the entirety of my vision, they moved when nothing else did, when the entire room was utterly still.

"It is coming after you. The plant with thorns. Please, you mus̘̥͚̤̩̲̻̗̤






A screwdriver clattered to the ground, as the girl jolted awake. She had dozed off, just for a moment. That's how it had been for a while. The dark circles under her eyes, and her drooping and languid face, made it clear just how tired she was. But every time she drifted off, even for a moment, she'd see something in her mind, something horrifying, that would jaunt her back to the world of the conscious after no more than a few minutes.

That's how it had been. She hadn't slept for more than a few minutes at a time — not since Anya had died, right in front of her.

The girl had lost track of time, in her fugue. It could have been a few minutes ago, or it could have been days. She didn't really know. All she knew was that she needed sleep, and she couldn't get it. She didn't want to get it.

She didn't want to have dreams.


Picking the screwdriver up from the ship floor lazily, she tried to turn her attention back to the drone that hound had tore a hole in. She had almost finished inserting the new board. Its weaponry was scattered about around her, leaving gaping holes in the drone's design that made it look half-done. All that was left was to weld the aluminium shell back into place, and they'd have a fully reprogrammed, harmless machine.

That wasn't...the usual dream, though. She couldn't help but think about it. There was still a residual sense of terror, from when she had looked into her sister's eyes and seen something utterly unemotional, like a deactivated robot. Anz was never like that. She cried enough for the both of them. Always empathetic, always tugged around by her heart, in every direction she ever went. Not once had SIGINT ever seen her so...so...numb.

It was just a dream, anyway. It had probably gotten weird towards the end because she was close to waking up. I mean, that warning didn't even make sense. A 'plant with thorns'? Coming after her? Plants don't even move! Except for, like, sunflowers, and venus fly traps, but that was pretty much it, as far as she knew.


"...Now what?" The girl asked, still in her wrecked bodysuit from when they were planetside. She hadn't even changed clothes. "I...forged some certs for the ship that should get us through a nonatmospheric gate check, but...planetary landing approval, I'm not as sure about." SIGINT told the rest of them languidly, not looking up from her work. "I don't think we can land on a core world right now. Going after the coords from Anya's flash drive would just get us shot down by UFP non-atmo, in the worst case."

As much as she wanted to, even she had to admit how bad of an idea it was, right now. They were on-board a ship that had been stolen from smugglers, and crash-landed onto a planet by someone who clearly wanted to abandon it. Throwing away something as expensive as a frigate-class space ship took some extraordinary circumstances. SIGINT didn't know where it had been or what it had been used for, but one thing was for certain. If it was safe to be on it, they wouldn't have gotten it in the first place.

"I've...kinda lived on Frixy my whole life. I've heard of the other two planets, but I don't even...really know what's out there." She should have been excited to be flying. Excited to finally be on-board a spaceship, excited to be so utterly free, for the first time in her life. But the events of the last few whatevers had taken such a toll on her that she could hardly muster anything, except for more work to do. More things to keep her distracted. More questions to ask.

"Where do we go from here?"

@SIGINT@Antarctic Termite @ChickenTeriyaki @LPRKN @Styxx Acheron @JaceBeleren

Even though he was exhausted, Marco couldn't sleep. His nerves were still alight even as he tossed and turned in bed. He'd just thrown away what little he'd had, and he had no idea if this adventure he'd started on would lead him to death or glory.

At some point, he must have drifted off into a fitful sleep, because he woke up who knows how much later. He didn't feel well-rested, but he couldn't get back to sleep. He got up, and it wasn't long before he found the showers. Hot water trickled down his body as he thought over the events of the last day. That had been his first real fight. He'd probably killed several people. And...It had made him feel alive. For the first time since his father had disappeared. He wrapped a towel around his waist, and headed for the workshop. He didn't expect to see the hacker from before there. First he noticed that she was still in the suit, bloodspatters and all. That couldn't be healthy.

"I'm going to get some clothes. Lemme borrow this." He said, picking up a pair of bolt cutters. Then he saw the drone from before. It was completely fixed.

"You work fast, huh?" He said, before disappearing back down the hall. A series of loud *SNAP*s could be heard, and soon, Marco had returned, wearing a pair of jeans and a pendant around himself. He was lounging in the seat across from SIG. If he was going to be forced to live on a freighter, he was going to make himself at home on it.

As she spoke, wordlessly, Marco reached behind his neck, undoing the chain. He took the pendant off, and placed it on the table. It was a tiny black cube, each side only a few centimeters long. Now that he had left Frixion, it was the last memento he had of his dad.

"It sounds like the first order of business is to get out of UFP space, then." Marco said, he tapped the top of the cube with his index finger. The room filled with a blue glow, as the cube projected a holographic image of the known Galaxy. Most of it was written in Galactic Basic. But there were a few annotations in an unfamiliar language. He put his finger to the hologram, where a bright green light blinked.

"This is us. We're here." He slid his finger, and the map followed, until it was in a section labelled The Myrlian Belt. "We should try to get out of UFP space. The question is...Can we get that far? We haven't checked how much food we have. The ship just crashed, too."

"We might be able to make it here." He tapped a blinking orange icon, and it expanded. Half of it was an asteroid. The other half was a sprawling cityscape. "Tortuga. The Pirate's Moon."

"We might be able to find someplace in the middle of nowhere. Maybe some backwater space station where they won't check too hard. Sell whatever cargo we've got, maybe find a new ship." He looked at SIG with his icy blue eyes. He couldn't help but feel responsible for her predicament. "Do you want to go back?" He asked her. It was a question he didn't dare ask himself.

"And...Did you get shot? Have you checked for fractures?" He asked her. The bullet hole in her clothes had been bugging him for a while.

Giggles slept like a well-concussed log.

---

CargoLift VRT-2 #1493850 had always done its absolute best in life, as was the honour of every robot in its line of work. It took pride in its strength, its patience, even, to some extent, in its stupidity. Its duties were simple, and so was its intent to carry them out.

The crate made its usual sound of ever-so-slightly jostling contraband as CargoLift slotted its arms into its hollows. There were other sounds, too, very unusual sounds, but it paid these no heed. A robot like itself was never distracted.

Though the reinforced box was heavier than it was accustomed to, CargoLift made no complaint. It took the crate down the cargo ramp, smoothly avoiding the team of professionals that calmly murdered any SWAT personnel that still showed face, and gently set it down on a hoverplate.

Great! Time for the next box.

There was another person in the hold this time. CargoLift paid him no heed. He wasn't in the way. He was just reading the tags on the side of the box. What a wholesome fellow. CargoLift gripped its box and felt a moment of meditative harmony, that special kind of satisfaction when two persons can work side by side without needing to exchange a single word.

CargoLift picked up its box. Giggles whipped out his machete.

Ah yes, thought CargoLift. Harmony.

---

"Mghghghgrgrnnnnn," said Giggles, trying to stretch sinews that were somehow even more fucked up than they'd been the previous afternoon when he'd fought a three-tonne robot over a hold full of party favours and novelty-use-only.

Part of the reason for this was because he'd slept on a bunk meant for hardened criminal veterans. Though Giggles easily fit the bill, the type of people who made things for threaded gangsters somehow kept making the mistake of thinking they slept rough by choice, and not because nobody ever gives them a reasonable fucking bed.

"Hgrhrhr," Giggles continued. He checked his phone. No signal. Damn it. That meant no spicy memes to wake up to.

Time to figure out the ship's wifi password.

In boxers and a sweaty vest, Giggles checked his kit, and when he was sure it was still where he left it and intact, stumbled off into the corridor.

"We're not going back, we have nothing worth selling, and if we don't do groceries in the next twenty hours I have dibs on the escape pod," rasped Giggles, wishing for various things. A chair. A cigarette. A full-body massage from a Vasishkan supermodel. In the nude. With oil.

"But by all means keep planning. I'm just here to scab the wifi." He jabbed the phone in SIGINT's general direction. "Have you done any maintenance at all? On yourself, not that toy. If you die of infection I swear I'm gonna push your body out the airlock with a pole... Skinny nerd."

"Does everyone here just walk around in their fucking underwear?" SIGINT adjusted her glasses with a raised eyebrow. "...Well, hey, I won't complain..."

The girl leaned back, placing both hands on the floor behind her as she looked over to the map with a sigh, wiping a sweaty bang away from her eye. The drone was pretty much done as far as electronics were concerned. It was really just the chassis at this point, and SIGINT just didn't fucking care enough to do that part right now.

"I'm...kinda surprised you guys are worried about me." Compared to the smug, uncompromising bitch that they had met on the surface, the tired face she showed them now was much more reserved. "I guess I should apologize for fucking with your oculars down there...rebreathing junkie." It had her cracking a smile at least, which was a stark improvement from basically everything since they had left.

She stood up unsteadily, a dizzy spell taking over simply from the amount of time she had spent on the floor. "I'm...pretty sure I'm fine. Just a little sore. Cracked rib, at the worst." SIGINT responded to the both of them, leaning casually on the back of a chair as she inspected the holographic map.

"The rear wing of the ship is busted from the crash, earlier. Wherever we decide to land, we may not be able to get back in the sky again." SIGINT pointed out, "It won't affect us in space, just if we decide to make a pit stop anywhere with gravity...wherever we land this thing, I think we should be planning on pawning it off as scrap the moment it hits the ground, along with anything inside it. It's gonna be like a dude with crutches jumping off a cliff."

She stared at the map for a long time, with bespectacled eyes. She wasn't an experienced space-traveler — she had no way of judging at a glance how long or how difficult a trip would be. But she knew a best shot when she saw one, and if there wasn't a better way, then none of that really mattered, did it?

"I'm all for Tortuga. There's a lot of shit that could go wrong, but that's just kind of our life right now." A UFC border checkpoint. Getting waylaid by Belt pirates. Who knows what else. And that was assuming there was food and fuel for the trip in the first place. They were making a break for it, for sure, but that was all they could do.

Marco's blue eyes met SIGINT's exhausted brown ones, her glasses doing little to mask her true face. The smug smirk, the folded arms, the toothy smile with shiny braces...all of that was gone at this point, replaced with a reluctant need for some real sleep, some real food, and an agonizing sense of loss that had reopened an old wound.

"...Go back, huh...?" The girl turned her head up to the ceiling, shifting her shoulders in thought. "...Running around like that is what I'm more familiar with, I guess. It'd be easier, in a way. I'd probably die, well, I'd definitely die, but, you know, comfort zone and all." She frowned, her head drooping down at the floor. "But...I dunno. I've always kinda wanted to fly, you know? Just...didn't think it'd happen this way." She admitted, "And...after someone died to get me off the ground...no way in hell I'd go back there. Not a chance. Even if I'm just picking between being stardust or fertilizer, I'd rather be stardust."

A heavy smile returned to her face, her eyes softening just a bit. "So, consider me a member of the crew, if you feel like it. I'd like to think I'm useful to have around." Her gilded teeth pressed together as she smirked, more like she had before. "That whole snafu on the surface was kinda like a job interview, eh? A lot more fun than reading over open source contribs and pull requests."

"Stardust is space fertiliser," amended Giggles, ever cautious of romanticising the inevitable end of an adventurer. "Trust me, the longer you spend in space the more feeling the moisture on your tongue boil off as you suffocate loses its appeal. You do you, though. I just don't have room in my fridge for another body." He picked a small screw off the workbench and threw it at her. "And hey, fuck you, did you think we'd let you freeload? All hands on deck so start scrubbing, powdermonkey. I'll find you a sponge." He wheezed a little laughter, rubbing his eyes.

"Tortuga's on my way. It's full of mercs and other scum, though. Militia types, slavers. The Myrlian's crawling with them." Work to be done. "I don't have any contacts there, but it's the kind of place where you don't have to feel bad about shanking someone for their ride."

"Heh! If you push my corpse out the airlock, my ghost will haunt you for the rest of your life, ya fuckin' prick!" She caught the screw and flung it back — the projectile sailing wide by a huge margin — before she returned Giggles' sentiments with a heartfelt middle finger and a wide smile.

"What'd you find in the hold, anyway? I haven't been down there, but I'm assuming there's no food." She blinked away a wave of fatigue, holding her neck as she worked the strained joint a bit. "Wretched hive of scum and villany's fine and all, but like blondie said, we gotta make it there to start with."

"You haven't either. You should let me check for a concussion." Marco said as Giggles walked in. He'd been the one that had gotten Giggles all banged up. On the other hand, Giggles seemed pretty good at banging himself up as it was.

"That trick with the drones was pretty impressive." Marco said to her. "I mean...I can't just let someone die if they saved me like that." He said quietly, before pulling himself out of the chair.

"I'm gonna see if I can find breakfast. There was a dog around her, wasn't there?" Marco asked, heading into the ship's mess hall. Soon, the sound of cooking could be heard. Marco hadn't even batted an eyelash at Anya's corpse as he got some eggs, though he did think maybe they should find a better place for her.

"I know how to conduct a battle check, thanks," said Giggles. "I'm fine. You handle the wheel like an nihilistic monkey on amphetamines, though. There's a sack of rice under the counter."

He sighed, cracking all of his knuckles. "By the time I got to the hold half of the goods were already gone. I think it was AI-related hardware, real hard de-encryption gear. I got the freight bot to shove it out the back as we left. Kept the ramp down long enough for the rest to fall out." Shrug. "The organic fab unit is working, though, so we can cut slices out of the wall and run 'em through it if we have to. It's not like this ship is good for much anyway, so we may as well eat it."

"The drone thing wasn't that impressive." SIGINT rolled her eyes, shifting her weight as she crossed her arms. "All I did was lift the encryption key, frame header, and procedure list from the one we nabbed, and send out a shutdown signal to the rest. Hell, they'll be able to reactivate more than half of them. It just won't be our problem." She kicked Melvin around a bit on the floor, watching him roll helplessly. "And I was saving my own bacon too, you know. All those guys were after me to begin with. If you guys hadn't showed up..."

She wasn't sure whether to say "You wouldn't have been involved", or "I would have died". Both were valid follow-ups, but it was a matter of perspective more than anything else. She had the option of quietly dying alone, but the girl had refused to go out that way. Instead, she had sought to raise as much havoc for her would-be killers as she could, even if it didn't change the inevitable outcome.

It was only fate or chance, whichever one chose to believe in, that her last laugh ended up saving her life in the end — at the cost of involving a number of people who could have otherwise continued their own business at leisure.

"...How much you wanna bet those eggs are fresh?" SIGINT mentioned to Giggles, listening idly to the sizzling from around the corner. "Well, still better than eating the walls..."

Giggles rolled his eyes at the ideas of modesty, duty and fate. "Yah yah, massive clusterfuck and now we're here. Don't we all like keeping our bacon intact?" He stretched his arms high above his head as he spoke, still trying to regain full consciousness. "The eggs are definitely fresh, by the way. I just don't know what they come from. Some kind of reptile maybe. The label's in Cyrawaloc. Have fun."

Kicking himself off the wall, Giggles disappeared into the hall for a moment before leaning back in. "Hey, wanna help me loot the rest of the rooms? Someone's bound to have stashed some ciggies around here somewhere." The uncombed head vanished and reappeared again. "Oh, and- Tell me about 'those guys' while you're at it. Would be nice to know what bounty you might be carrying. Y'know. Out of curiousity."

"Looting shit sounds on-point." SIGINT agreed, fighting the cloying exhaustion that tugged at her limbs as she rose to follow the...man(?). "I should probably check on my bounty, too, now that you mention it. See if it's changed. Kinda fun to find out how high it can go, eh?"

In her sleep-deprived state, she was close to seeing short dreams when she closed her eyes. Always the same scene. Underground, dark. Bullets flying, and...

"It's a privately-owned company called NeoCortex. They have majority share of two publicly traded companies, Hyder Pharmaceuticals and the Esmail Media Conglomerate." She rattled off the information as though she were reading it from somewhere — which she was. Through her eyes, there was a small window overlayed in her vision, with text scrolling along. Data fetched from the neural implant and output directly to her visual cortex. "As far as the public knows, NC is a provider for medical solutions to neurological damage in humans. Nerve-bridging, neuromuscular-correctives, things like that."

The window disappeared. It wasn't useful anymore. The rest of what she knew was known by only her.

"Secretly, they're doing some shady research on the human brain, developing a device that can interface with the entire thing...maybe even take control of it. I couldn't even tell you what they're planning to use it for." The young woman's face slowly drifted into a scowl as she recounted what she'd found, on a day long ago. "But I know that they're using test subjects. And I know that...one of them is...my sister."

She'd never told anyone before. Up until now, she'd always worked alone, ran alone, did everything by herself. But her life was in the hands of these people, and theirs in hers. The time for secrets was over.

"I was able to get into their system, once. I had to be physically inside their headquarters, so it was too dangerous to do any extended digging. But...while I was there...I found something. A series of files, a few hundred long. All timestamped." SIGINT bit her lip, remembering the sheer horror she'd felt when she had first opened them. "They were videos — videos of dreams. Dreams about things that...only me and my sister would know. Things from our childhood. And...dreams of...the last time we ever saw each other." It was hard for her to swallow. But she couldn't stop now. After watching another person die in front of her, she had to ask herself how long she would let it all continue for. "A team just like the one down there...shot her in the back, right in front of me, and dragged her body away while I ran."

"I thought she was dead. But they must have kept her alive, somehow. They're...getting data from her. Monitoring her brain. I don't even...know what they've done with her. What they're doing to her." SIGINT rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. "And I don't know what's up with it, but...well, you can believe it or not, but...her and I, we're always dreaming the same dream. I matched up the timestamps with what I remembered about my own dreams...they've always been really vivid ever since I saw her get shot...and, it's like...whatever she's dreaming about, I end up dreaming about it, too. Or maybe it's the other way around, I don't know. It's just that they always, always matched up that way. Too many times to be a coincidence."

"Maybe they're after me because I have one of their experimental devices in my head. That's what I always assumed. Or maybe they're after me because of the creepy dream thing? I honestly couldn't fucking tell you. They know more than I do, at this point." Adjusting her glasses after displacing them, her vision remained fogged, not from the lenses, but from the mind. "All I know is that...they have my sister. And I don't know where, or how, or why. But I want her back."

She'd never opened up to someone like that before. She assumed that Marco could hear it too, from the other room. Both of them, really — for people she'd just met, she was telling them more than she'd ever told anyone about who she was and what she was doing. But considering the circumstances in which they'd met, was it so unusual? They hadn't exactly run into each other at a park, after all. They were the ones who had made it through the flames, together.

And with any luck, when the fire returned, they'd make it through again and again. If she'd found people that she could accomplish that, with, at the end of her own rope...then, she was going all-in.


Trusting people is...a lot harder than they make it sound.

But, somehow, I managed it in the end, like I always do.

I guess I can do this after all, huh?


...Yeah. You did great, Anna.

The cargo hold was whirring with the sound of engines. Crates are stacked atop one another, as is appropriate. One tumbled and fell, spilling open as it hit the ground with a dense thud. A person flops out, rolling a little, like a corpse might.

The person is male, and frighteningly lanky. He wears worn but old boots, baggy and coarsely woven pants, and something which at one point may have been called a vest. His face is the most interesting, though. On it he wears a helmet of sorts. It resembles a head, split with a smile; only it's the type of smile you might expect a bag of worms and rotten meat to wear. The eyes are comparable to empty patches of space, and the hair pools on the floor in ragged clumps.

He gingerly brings himself to his feet. He casts a despairing gaze across the room. Other than boxes, there was a few doorways, some cameras, an airlocked cargo ramp, and an office space. He walks over to the office space, passing by the ramp as he does so.

"Yeah. Someday, not today. Sorry." His raspy voice filled the cargo hold, though he was only talking to the ramp controls.

The office space was about as exciting as you can expect it to be: Plenty of details concerning the intricacies of cargo delivery, orders placed by far-off companies, quantities of stock on board, and a monitor displaying the current value of various minerals. But it was in the corner by the door where he found exactly what he was looking for. He switched the small device on, and began searching through the crates.

After long enough he had found the crate he stowed his gear in. Through the wonders of technology the crate was delivered through a section of wall that slid aside. At the press of a button the crate popped open, and emitted a vague hissing sound. Inside were his trade tools. A bag containing several ship overdrive modules, some personal modules, and food and drink; A large utilitarian custom rifle; A comm unit; and a small metal cylinder. He plugged a few personal modules in, slipped his arms in the bag straps, and slung his rifle.

"Well, I guess it's time I thanked whatever helped this ship to fly.", and with that he set off to try find some life aboard. That or a ship to get out of here.

After finishing breakfast, Marco had gotten dressed. As usual, he wore his jacket over a t-shirt and jeans, and of course he had his gauntlets on. He never took the damn things off. Now that he was up, he decided to take a stock of the cargo hold. Just outside of the door, he heard a voice.

"Well, I guess it's time I thanked whatever helped this ship to fly.", and with that he set off to try find some life aboard. That or a ship to get out of here.

Marco took cover. There was someone else on board. They sounded friendly, but then, for all he knew they wanted to thank him with a bullet to the brain.

"Hold it." Marco said, rounding the corner in front of his guest. He was wearing a pair of olive-green gauntlets, and the one he was holding out at this emaciated weirdo had what appeared to be the barrel of some sort of gun protruding from the bottom. "Who are you, and what are you doing on this ship?" Marco's voice was calm and measured. He didn't seem particularly keen on killing this man. Instead, he just wanted to make sure they weren't a threat.

@HeroicSociopath

He jumped at the sudden emergence of another person, quite possibly threatening him. Maybe he should have considered that these people may be adverse to someone stowing away on their ship. He held up his hands, not about to refuse any requests, and spoke,

"My name is Pate. I stowed away. I suppose you're one of the people who got this ship spacebound?". He figured his fear wouldn't show through the vicious smile and many voice filters on his mask. By the time his voice rang out it'd sound like a dying man's last breath.

"So how did you do it?"