Starlance

The Marauders (2018)

Holy shit, coming back after 7 months, that's fucking dedication. Couldn't back out on you in the face of that even if I wanted to.

The Marauders (2018)

Good question.

Innocence Lost - A Science Fantasy RP [v.03]

“Wouldn’t mind sneaking into a base to blow it up now that it’s a base I actually want to blow up.” Avelyn piped up - quietly so bystanders wouldn’t have uncomfortable questions - once she was done with her meal. “Not now though.” Fighting right after lunch wasn’t a good idea. She pulled her legs up on the chair to rest her chin on her knee and hugged her shins, idly observing the surroundings. First with her eyes, than letting the mental barriers down again and checking that nobody gave any thought to Ashton’s antics. Hundred-fucking-million, Jesus Christ! she shook her head, the reality of the situation still sinking in. A foreign voice in her mind started wondering what all those kids were doing there all alone and sleeping piled on top of each other, but a quick angry look over her shoulder was enough to shoo the curious nobody away.

“Anyway, if we get to pick, I’d rather it was something where getting your head taken clean off is low on the list of threats for a change. Places like this can be all sorts of fun.” She shared her view, having had taken a little more shot and shrapnel in the past four years than one should have by their age and missing the days of walking into a department store with nothing but her wit and deft hands and walking out with a few thousand Credits worth of small jewellery. “That is, I’m not saying I enjoy rifling through some poor sod’s memories while his hair is on fire and my thumb is almost pushing the bullet I put in his shoulder out the opposite side, but I could name a couple of bastards that could use such a send off.” she hurried to explain in a hushed voice - accompanied by subconscious hand gestures - when she realized what she said could be interpreted in a drastically different way to what she actually meant. Not that the explanation sounded much better.

As if on cue, the newscast came on, followed by the extremists’ demands. “Bollocks. This guy doesn’t have hair...” She flatly stated the obvious, “I can figure out how many of them there are, their composition, probably even get an idea of how to best go about this, provided I can get close enough. Or better yet inside that thing to be certain. If the hull is thick enough it could interfere with the Mind Bridge.” she suggested recon before striking, having almost four years of experience doing exactly that. “Also, I’ll ask in advance: Are we helping ourselves to some gear while we’re in there or do we behave?”

Innocence Lost - A Science Fantasy RP [v.03]

Avelyn:

Exceptional Streetsmarts: She's not educated, but not stupid either. She can read the street better than many, and her gut is generally right when something feels off about a person, especially when used in tandem with Mind Bridge.

Exceptional Stamina: She doesn't punch the hardest, run the fastest or lifts the most, but she's found out that the people who do those things usually can't keep it up for too long. When she doesn't have the luxury of quickly downing an opponent with magic, she'll resort to tiring them out, biding her time until they make a mistake.

Exceptional Stealth: Thievery laid good foundations for being unseen, upon which she built during the war, often required to go unseen. She also has a habit of keeping to the sides, where there's less foreign thoughs assaulting her mind, so it's easy for people to assume she's gone off to do just that.

Exceptional Agility: Avelyn has a good deal of dexterity from stealing, further helped by her acquired ambidexterity, agility from quickly navigating various environments and, being primarily a close-quarters combatant when magic fails, quick reflexes from fighting.

Innocence Lost - A Science Fantasy RP [v.03]

“She wants two bricks of what now?” Avelyn didn’t recognize the word, but assumed it wasn’t the Rau’ve term for cocaine. “Keep the receipt, demand to be paid back.” Since they were supposed to be her crew, shouldn’t she technically be responsible for keeping them stocked and not the other way around?

“Can always get more money in a place like this.” Avelyn flexed her fingers when the issue was brought up. “And if Finn doesn’t want to…” she didn’t want to say ‘steal’ out in public, “Redistribute... anything himself, another distraction is always welcome.” Before she was taken, stealing was a necessity. And by necessity, she became good at it. Now, she could read minds, make people see things that weren’t there and move things with her mind. Now, it was fun. Perhaps that said something unfavorable about her as a person, and the fact she didn’t quite care probably said even more. But what the Hell, she had to eat and some people had enough to lose a few dozen credits and keep going. Meet four or five of those people and viola, 100 credits to spend on food. Math.

Finbarr’s comment about Iris and diabetes brought a smile to her face. “Aye, diabetes and about 80 extra pounds.” She added her own two cents, “Keep it up and we might have to load you through the cargo ramp when we reach the ship.”

She continued to wolf down the contents of her plate, listening to Ashton’s stock trading shenanigans until he showed them a number that had more digits than an average hand, dropping her fork in astonishment as she tried to figure out how many decades it would take her parents and her average weekly take to make that sort of money. She gave up not even halfway. Was it really that easy?

Innocence Lost - A Science Fantasy RP [v.03]

And so their own quest began. There was a weird bit of irony in them going to do pretty much the same thing they have been doing prior to their capture - the same thing that formed a large part of their shared hatred for the Ascendancy, but this time on their terms, of their own free will and for their motives. First order of business was reaching their cabbie and not making her fall into despair at the sight of the group. If Avelyne didn’t know what she knew, she wouldn’t think much of them either. Then again, if their foes were going to make the same assumption they could use that to their advantage.

“Mate, I promise if you pick a smaller store next time, you’ll have whatever candy they carry you want and you won’t even have to pay for it. We’re likely to be in transit for a while after we meet our contact, which means time to rest, so there’s no harm in walking, it’s good exercise.” she answered Flame’s call for assistance with a few counterpoints, but before the words could even register, there was already nothing that could be done. “Oh for f- Fine. Your way it is.” she sighed in resignation, following along. Approaching the food shuttle, Avelyn let her mental guards down, letting the proverbial lid slip off and the thoughts of others to flood her head, trying her best to ignore the voices in her mind that belonged to the group out of respect for their privacy.

No one else in a 30 foot radius received that honor though, and every voice she didn’t recognize was isolated, judged and categorized. Beggar sitting by the entrance - low risk. She deviated from the group to toss a few credits into the man’s hat sitting on the ground next to him. Their rightful owner was probably halfway across the bazaar now anyway. Rejoining, she continued. Off duty cop. Shit, potential troublemaker. No, scratch that, he had his family with him, highly unlikely he would do something that would endanger them.

With the list of bystanders exhausted, she shooed all the foreign thoughts away, tranquil silence once more filling her mind. Tranquil silence, and the sight of food. “I’ll be over there.” she pointed a finger and proceeded to wreak havoc on the meat section, actually paying for everything since the place had nauseatingly good security measures. She loathed seeing money go away, but the ‘Eat while you can, tomorrow might be hungry.’ mindset was deeply ingrained and hard to overcome. Taking a seat with her compatriots, she once more turned to Flame. “Any response from the cabbie?”

Innocence Lost - A Science Fantasy RP [v.03]

Avelyn Vernal

Avelyn Vernal

Age: 18

Appearance

Voice: Marit Børresen
Height: 176 cm
Weight: 67 kg

Personal belongings

• Omni-tool - A miniature Computer that allows for communication, calculation, data storage and augmented reality navigation.
• Credits - A few thousand digital from the Rau’ve, few hundred in material form. Don’t ask where the latter came from.
• Electronics toolkit - Meant for dismantling and repairing computers. Also works for bypassing locks and simpler alarms on the hardware level.
• Armor – Ballistic vest made to be concealed under clothing, made of overlapping circular tungsten plates sown into the Kevlar fabric. Armor with small metal plates does not degrade as fast with successive hits as large ceramic ones and even should one fail, the surrounding body area is still protected, but comes at the cost of not standing up to dedicated armor penetrating munitions.

Weapons: None.

Spell List

• Illusion (Mind): Avelyn can create an audiovisual illusion perceptible by a single individual. She has to concentrate on keeping the illusion and cannot do anything else that requires her mental faculties (she can create an illusion while performing simple or routine tasks, but not when doing somehting that requires ehr to think too hard about it). The illusion can be virtually anything, but bigger or more detailed things require more focus and take a greater toll on her. Keeping the illusion for more than a few minutes leads to headaches, nausea and general exhaustion. The illusion can only be seen by the affected individual and Avelyn and cannot physically interact with the world.
• Mind Bridge (Mind): By far the most advanced spell available to her, Mind Bridge allows her to passively pick up surface thoughts and strong emotions of people around her. Normally, she can suppress this, but when unable to concentrate, even a small crowd can become a nuisance and a large one an overwhelming distraction.
  
  Its more tasking, active use allows Avelyn to relive the memories of others or share hers with someone else. The process requires physical contact and complete concentration, sending both Avelyn and her victim into a trance-like state. Memory extraction time ranges from milliseconds to a few seconds, depending on the target’s mentality and training to resist such practices, but the more the target fights it, the worse their headache will be when she’s done. She cannot create new memories or change or remove existing ones.
  
  As a side effect of this memory-altering spell, Avelyn’s memory improved. Not to any superhuman level, but her memories, especially the extracted ones, remain vivid and accurate much longer than usual, as Mind Bridge accesses the memories as they are stored in the brain as opposed to as one recalls it. To ‘clean up’ in her brain to avoid information overload, Avelyn’s learned to intentionally forget things and is currently working on extending this ability beyond her own memory.
• Command (Mind): Avelyn can give an order to a single person. To do this, she needs to perform a specific hand gesture and say the order out loud. Her target needs to hear her and understand the language. If the target loses consciousness or experiences intense pain (like gunshot wounds), the spell loses effect. She may also intentionally cancel it.
• Gravity Manipulation (World): Avelyn can manipulate objects at a distance by creating small gravity fields. Applying its effects to herself allows her to jump higher, slow her fall or make small adjustments to her velocity mid-air, but does not allow flight.
  
  Due to its versatility both on and off the battlefield, she devoted a lot of time to practicing control and pushing the boundaries of this spell, giving her very precise control over the size, shape and power of the fields. While she can manipulate gravity through thought alone, specific hand gestures help her focus when she requires precise control.
• Pyrokinesis (World): Allows Avelyn to heat up and cool down materials by increasing or decreasing the kinetic energy of the atoms making them up, to the point of causing the material to ignite. She doesn’t have to see the object, but must know its approximate location.
  
  Much like with Gravity Manipulation, Avelyn gave a lot of time to practice and improvement of this spell due to its on and off the field versatility.
• Deflection (World): Summons a rapidly shifting, head-height gravity field in front of Avelyn to shield her from attacks. Unlike Gravity Manipulation, Avelyn cannot influence the strength, direction, shape or location of the field, but it's strong enough to alter the direction of incoming projectiles. Physical contact with the field is not recommended.

(In)Abilities

Abilities

• Augmented Awareness: During training, Avelyn’s ears have been severely damaged by an explosion. To restore her hearing, she was given cybernetic implants that can pick up and amplify distant or quiet sounds as well as lower the volume of loud sounds to protect what little remains of her biological ears, effectively making them better than before. When paired with an Omni-tool, the right ear implant can play audio files and receive transmissions, allowing incoming voice communication inaudible to others.
  
  Without her implants, Avelyn is for all intents and purposes deaf. Her left ear is severely damaged and her right inner ear has been completely replaced with cybernetics. As a side effect of this, disabling her implants will make keeping balance much more challenging, though not impossible.
  
  Additionally, biotech implants in Avelyn’s eyes mimic the tapeta lucida found in nocturnal animals, granting her better vision in low-light conditions. While in dim light, Avelyn can only discern shades of gray and bright shades of green. The implants react to incoming light intensity and only work under a certain threshold to avoid overbright in daytime. The implants only amplify existing light, therefore she will still be blind in a completely dark environment and they do not protect her eyes from bright lights.
• Deep Reserves: She doesn't punch the hardest, run the fastest or lifts the most, but she's found out that the people who do those things usually can't keep it up for too long. When she doesn't have the luxury of quickly downing an opponent with magic, she'll resort to tiring them out, biding her time until they make a mistake.
• Agile: Avelyn has a good deal of dexterity from stealing, further helped by her acquired ambidexterity, agility from quickly navigating various environments and, being primarily a close-quarters combatant when magic fails, quick reflexes from fighting.
• Polyglot: Due to her many forays into human and alien minds, she has become fluent in both written and spoken form of several languages, though she has an accent in alien tongues. The different accents are caused by the differences between human and alien vocal cords, mouth structure and other body parts invlved.

Inabilities

• Thalassophobia: The combination of being from a world without a hydrosphere and only a rudimentary ability to swim leads to a deply ingrained fear of deep or large bodies of water. Once she can’t see, or at least reach the bottom, she’s not going in unless there is absolutely no other way, and being suddenly immersed in a volume of water larger than a tub will also likely cause no small amount of panic. Symptoms include rapid breathing, elevated heartrate, shortness of breath and inability to focus.
• Eduaction Gaps: Kidnapped at the age of fourteen, Avelyn’s education was mostly put on hold by the whole ‘war and augmentation’ ordeal. While this isn’t much of a problem in combat, lack of common knowledge, down to something as simple as square root, is quite a handicap in daily life. While the Mind Bridge helps to some extent, even basic things like elementary school math can only get you so far without practice

Short Bio: Born and raised in the capital of the Epsilon Theta, Longannet, neither the neighborhood nor her family were particularly well off. And since someone her age couldn’t be employed, Avelyn took to thievery, working her way from food through credits to jewellery. Over the years, she’s become proficient at sleight of hand, blending in with crowds and getting from place to place without being noticed. Well, most of the time. Nothing ever goes completely according to plan, and so she got quite good at getting from place to place without being caught. Until one day she didn‘t. Upon her capture, the authorities took note of her agility and her almsot four-year streak of uninterrupted crime. It wasn’t long until her holding cell was visited by men in military armor instead of policemen - the last time she saw her home.

Avelyn was sent for augmentation, which lead to a fear of needles, and was supposed to be assigned to intelligence. Along with another group of children with similar predispositions, she was trained to enter and exit any compound, negotiate any terrain or obstacle and extract any necessary information from captives. Avelyn was supposed to be a crossbreed of a black-ops operative and a master interrogator. Then the first tests came, and Avelyn’s mind-oriented capabilities were much weaker than expected. But where her mind magic was considered underwhelming, her proficiency in manipulating gravity, be it precise manipulation of small objects or swatting away multiple opponents with a single motion, got her reclassified from intelligence to special tasks. Going behind enemy lines attached to a small team to gather information suddenly turned into going behind enemy lines attached to a small team to wreak havoc. Her outer-colony origins certainly didn’t make her the team’s favorite. Fortunately, there was one other person, a child soldier on tech support duty, in a similar predicament - a Venerian girl named Lucinda Cain. Though Sol-born, she was nonetheless shunned due to her extensive cybernetics that, in combination with mind magic, made her the tech-person counterpart to Avelyn’s ‘people skills‘. The two quickly formed a sister-like bond, keeping each other’s spirits up in face of the hostile core-worlders in addition to the daily grind.

At Proxima, the team was sent to disable a Rau’ve electronic support ship that was feeding additional targeting data to the alien fleet. But before they got even halfway through to their objective, Lucinda tripped a silent alarm she wasn’t familiar with. The team was set upon by much of the ship’s security force and the two child soldiers were abandoned in the confusion. Rather than face the uncertainty of capture, Lucinda spaced herself and Avelyn was captured.

In captivity, the former thief awaited her inevitable execution with bitter resignation. Against all expectations, she and those like her received good treatment, which greatly aided her recovery. However, she couldn’t return to normal life, if the word ‘return’ was even applicable. She didn’t know much besides thievery and war, despite the efforts of some of her alien captors, or rather saviors. All of this pushed reason aside and fanned the flames of vengeance that lay dormant at the back of her mind, and seeing an opportunity for revenge, she took it.

Innocence Lost: A Science Fantasy RP [V.03]

Avelyn Vernal

Avelyn Vernal

Age: 18

Appearance

Voice: Marit Børresen
Height: 176 cm
Weight: 67 kg

Personal belongings

• Omni-tool - A miniature Computer that allows for communication, calculation, data storage and augmented reality navigation.
• Credits - A few thousand digital from the Rau’ve, few hundred in material form. Don’t ask where the latter came from.
• Electronics toolkit - Meant for dismantling and repairing computers. Also works for bypassing locks and simpler alarms on the hardware level.
• Armor – Ballistic vest made to be concealed under clothing, made of overlapping circular tungsten plates sown into the Kevlar fabric. Armor with small metal plates does not degrade as fast with successive hits as large ceramic ones and even should one fail, the surrounding body area is still protected, but comes at the cost of not standing up to dedicated armor penetrating munitions.

Weapons: None.

Spell List

• Illusion (Mind): Avelyn can create an audiovisual illusion perceptible by a single individual. She has to concentrate on keeping the illusion and cannot do anything else that requires her mental faculties (she can create an illusion while performing simple or routine tasks, but not when doing somehting that requires ehr to think too hard about it). The illusion can be virtually anything, but bigger or more detailed things require more focus and take a greater toll on her. Keeping the illusion for more than a few minutes leads to headaches, nausea and general exhaustion. The illusion can only be seen by the affected individual and Avelyn and cannot physically interact with the world.
• Mind Bridge (Mind): By far the most advanced spell available to her, Mind Bridge allows her to passively pick up surface thoughts and strong emotions of people around her. Normally, she can suppress this, but when unable to concentrate, even a small crowd can become a nuisance and a large one an overwhelming distraction.
  
  Its more tasking, active use allows Avelyn to relive the memories of others or share hers with someone else. The process requires physical contact and complete concentration, sending both Avelyn and her victim into a trance-like state. Memory extraction time ranges from milliseconds to a few seconds, depending on the target’s mentality and training to resist such practices, but the more the target fights it, the worse their headache will be when she’s done. She cannot create new memories or change or remove existing ones.
  
  As a side effect of this memory-altering spell, Avelyn’s memory improved. Not to any superhuman level, but her memories, especially the extracted ones, remain vivid and accurate much longer than usual, as Mind Bridge accesses the memories as they are stored in the brain as opposed to as one recalls it. To ‘clean up’ in her brain to avoid information overload, Avelyn’s learned to intentionally forget things and is currently working on extending this ability beyond her own memory.
• Gravity Manipulation (World): Avelyn can manipulate objects at a distance by creating small gravity fields. Applying its effects to herself allows her to jump higher, slow her fall or make small adjustments to her velocity mid-air, but does not allow flight.
  
  Due to its versatility both on and off the battlefield, she devoted a lot of time to practicing control and pushing the boundaries of this spell, giving her very precise control over the size, shape and power of the fields. While she can manipulate gravity through thought alone, specific hand gestures help her focus when she requires precise control.
• Pyrokinesis (World): Allows Avelyn to heat up and cool down materials by increasing or decreasing the kinetic energy of the atoms making them up, to the point of causing the material to ignite. She doesn’t have to see the object, but must know its approximate location.
  
  Much like with Gravity Manipulation, Avelyn gave a lot of time to practice and improvement of this spell due to its on and off the field versatility.
• Deflection (World): Summons a rapidly shifting, head-height gravity field in front of Avelyn to shield her from attacks. Unlike Gravity Manipulation, Avelyn cannot influence the strength, direction, shape or location of the field, but it's strong enough to alter the direction of incoming projectiles. Physical contact with the field is not recommended.

(In)Abilities

Abilities

• Exceptional Awareness: During training, Avelyn’s ears have been severely damaged by an explosion. To restore her hearing, she was given cybernetic implants that can pick up and amplify distant or quiet sounds as well as lower the volume of loud sounds to protect what little remains of her biological ears, effectively making them better than before. When paired with an Omni-tool, the right ear implant can play audio files and receive transmissions, allowing incoming voice communication inaudible to others.
  
  Without her implants, Avelyn is for all intents and purposes deaf. Her left ear is severely damaged and her right inner ear has been completely replaced with cybernetics. As a side effect of this, disabling her implants will make keeping balance much more challenging, though not impossible.
  
  Additionally, biotech implants in Avelyn’s eyes mimic the tapeta lucida found in nocturnal animals, granting her better vision in low-light conditions. While in dim light, Avelyn can only discern shades of gray and bright shades of green. The implants react to incoming light intensity and only work under a certain threshold to avoid overbright in daytime. The implants only amplify existing light, therefore she will still be blind in a completely dark environment and they do not protect her eyes from bright lights.
• Polyglot: Due to her many forays into human and alien minds, she has become fluent in both written and spoken form of several languages, though she has an accent in alien tongues. The different accents are caused by the differences between human and alien vocal cords, mouth structure and other body parts.
• Finesse: Avelyn has a good deal of dexterity from stealing, further helped by her acquired ambidexterity, agility from quickly navigating various environments and, being primarily a close-quarters combatant when magic fails, quick reflexes from fighting. What she lacks in strength, she makes up for in endurance.

Inabilities

• Thalassophobia: The combination of being from a world without a hydrosphere and only a rudimentary ability to swim leads to a deply ingrained fear of deep or large bodies of water. Once she can’t see, or at least reach the bottom, she’s not going in unless there is absolutely no other way, and being suddenly immersed in a volume of water larger than a tub will also likely cause no small amount of panic. Symptoms include rapid breathing, elevated heartrate, shortness of breath and inability to focus.
• Eduaction Gaps: Kidnapped at the age of fourteen, Avelyn’s education was mostly put on hold by the whole ‘war and augmentation’ ordeal. While this isn’t much of a problem in combat, lack of common knowledge, down to something as simple as square root, is quite a handicap in daily life. While the Mind Bridge helps to some extent, even basic things like elementary school math can only get you so far without practice

Short Bio: Born and raised in the capital of the Epsilon Theta, Longannet, neither the neighborhood nor her family were particularly well off. And since someone her age couldn’t be employed, Avelyn took to thievery, working her way from food through credits to jewellery. Over the years, she’s become proficient at sleight of hand, blending in with crowds and getting from place to place without being noticed. Well, most of the time. Nothing ever goes completely according to plan, and so she got quite good at getting from place to place without being caught. Until one day she didn‘t. Upon her capture, the authorities took note of her agility and her almsot four-year streak of uninterrupted crime. It wasn’t long until her holding cell was visited by men in military armor instead of policemen - the last time she saw her home.

Avelyn was sent for augmentation, which lead to a fear of needles, and was supposed to be assigned to intelligence. Along with another group of children with similar predispositions, she was trained to enter and exit any compound, negotiate any terrain or obstacle and extract any necessary information from captives. Avelyn was supposed to be a crossbreed of a black-ops operative and a master interrogator. Then the first tests came, and Avelyn’s mind-oriented capabilities were much weaker than expected. But where her mind magic was considered underwhelming, her proficiency in manipulating gravity, be it precise manipulation of small objects or swatting away multiple opponents with a single motion, got her reclassified from intelligence to special tasks. Going behind enemy lines attached to a small team to gather information suddenly turned into going behind enemy lines attached to a small team to wreak havoc. Her outer-colony origins certainly didn’t make her the team’s favorite. Fortunately, there was one other person, a child soldier on tech support duty, in a similar predicament - a Venerian girl named Lucinda Cain. Though Sol-born, she was nonetheless shunned due to her extensive cybernetics that, in combination with mind magic, made her the tech-person counterpart to Avelyn’s ‘people skills‘. The two quickly formed a sister-like bond, keeping each other’s spirits up in face of the hostile core-worlders in addition to the daily grind.

At Proxima, the team was sent to disable a Rau’ve electronic support ship that was feeding additional targeting data to the alien fleet. But before they got even halfway through to their objective, Lucinda tripped a silent alarm she wasn’t familiar with. The team was set upon by much of the ship’s security force and the two child soldiers were abandoned in the confusion. Rather than face the uncertainty of capture, Lucinda spaced herself and Avelyn was captured.

In captivity, the former thief awaited her inevitable execution with bitter resignation. Against all expectations, she and those like her received good treatment, which greatly aided her recovery. However, she couldn’t return to normal life, if the word ‘return’ was even applicable. She didn’t know much besides thievery and war, despite the efforts of some of her alien captors, or rather saviors. All of this pushed reason aside and fanned the flames of vengeance that lay dormant at the back of her mind, and seeing an opportunity for revenge, she took it.

Aboard the I.S.S. Prize : An Episodic Sci-Fi Adventure

Still here, just assumed everyone was busy with your regular September shenanigans in addition to the second wave of Coronacalypse.

Aboard the I.S.S. Prize : An Episodic Sci-Fi Adventure

As soon as she got the green light, Astrid took to assembling the team needed to snatch the thing. In the time it took to get two pilots and three technicians to the shuttle bay, she’s had time to explain the operation to one of the sensor officers to guide them to wherever the Havi shuttle had scooted off to in the meantime. Teleporting the pilot directly to their medbay had the unfortunate side effect of leaving the Havi shuttle in uncontrolled motion through frictionless space.

Fortunately, the target ship was pointed in the Prize’s general direction, but not right at the Prize, so the shuttle could launch and then wait for the target to approach, match speeds and grab it all in the relative safety of proximity to the Prize.
“So, anyone else not looking forward to explaining this to the locals?”
“Sorry, Your Holiness, our boss is just so curious about your space jalopy.”
“You two want to walk home? Give me shit about it if it fails or after it’s done. Looks like whoever was gunning for this poor bastard is trying to catch the thing too, so let’s hurry. I’d rather not get two and a shootout for the price of one.”

With the wayward transport craft approaching, the shuttle accelerated, matching speeds and using maneuvering thrusters to inch closer, attempting to latch onto it with magnetic landing legs. To everyone’s chagrin, Havi ship hulls were made of a nonmagnetic metal, probably some Aluminium-Magnesium alloy to save weight, judging by the holes in it. That meant they didn’t suit up in vain after all. The engineers floated out the shuttle’s loading bay in pairs, one person of each pair hauling sheets of steel, the other a welder. Before long, the Havi shuttle was covered with said sheets in two places, allowing the magnetic landing legs of the Prize’s shuttle to latch on and carefully tow it back. “What’d I tell you? Let it never be said salvage techs have boring jobs.”

---

She only had enough time to get halfway through disassembling one of the shuttle’s engines - A standard-looking chemical unit using hypergolic propellant - when she was called to the Situation room. That was never a good sign, and this time was no exception. “She said she will consider reopening negotiations. She didn’t promise anything, what’s stopping her from putting the poor sod’s head on a pike and telling us that she considered but we were still free to go screw ourselves? Pardon my french.” Astrid added her two pessimistic cents when asked for more opinions. “Especially since - with your approval, Captain - We just nicked one of their ships. Speaking of, there’s a bunch of weird glowy bits in there I can’t even begin to understand from a glance and I’d like a second opinion before someone grabs a screwdriver and starts poking and hoping.” Astrid added with a glance at Beatrice and Robin.