a good space boy from a good space family (pethdorn) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2018-06-25 11:04:00 |
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“It’s got a great energy,” Poe said, collecting a series of (thankfully durable) galley implements their newest acquisition had sent bouncing to the deck in a bout of what he was pretty sure was frenetic … joy? “Don’t you think?” Maybe he was just overly excited to be star-side again, gazing out viewports into swaths of stars, unfamiliar though they may have been. Getting his hands on a completely alien set of controls was a rare novelty for him, and while he’d refrained from the urge to really put this ship through its paces, out of consideration for his fellow passengers - the pleasure and exhilaration of moving through vacuum after so long was enough to keep his mood boosted to turbo levels. With Steve, and Finn, and Babs, and now a droid (and one other crew member he preferred to ignore until absolutely necessary), whatever happened, he was prepared to enjoy it. He was, however, moderately concerned that said droid might entirely accidentally rip through some essential equipment. Or - the hull. One of those. He stopped, a pile of stackable plastic plates in his hand, listening: silence. Uh oh. “... Did you see where it went?” Barbara couldn't help but laugh from the moment Poe brought that little robot - droid, she reminded herself, that was what he had called it - aboard. It was so full of energy that she could hardly handle it, and she was used to sporadic bursts of energy herself. "Did you lose it?" she asked Poe, wide-eyed. "How did you lose it? This ship isn't even that big?" Mostly, Barbara was just on sensory-overload by the fact that she was in outer space, and keeping track of that droid wasn't on her radar. She got up from where she was sitting, fiddling with the ship's computer to better understand it, and looked around. "It didn't get out, did it?" “If it got out, you’d know,” Poe said, stuffing the plates back into their stowage. “From the violent decompression. No, it’s - I don’t know. It seems playful, right? Maybe it’s hiding.” And maybe Poe was projecting some of his personal complaints onto this particular situation - every time he had to leave BB-8 behind at the compound to head off on some unannounced adventure, it made him more than a little sad - and maybe he’d brought something aboard that was a little more chaotic than cute, but he refused to consider that eventuality just yet. “You’re right - the ship’s not that big.” And if their new droid was hiding, it wasn’t very dedicated: a tinny, sing-song voice was emanating from somewhere out in the corridor that served as this ship’s spine. He waved her out, stalking toward that sound. “Hey, pal,” he called out, and was answered with some clattering; nothing more. He turned to cast her a glance over his shoulder, his eyebrow raised. “Maybe it likes you better.” "You know, I almost went into the space program back home," she said, moving along with Poe as though this was one big game of hide-and-seek. She supposed all of the robots she knew that could think for themselves were up to nefarious ways, not something as innocent as hide and seek, "but then I got recruited for something else." Barbara trailed off a little and stuck her head around the bulkhead as Poe suggested she give the droid a call. She shrugged. "Ready or not, here we come?" she called out in a cheerful, 'let's play a game' type of voice. She gave Poe another shrug and lowered her voice. "I mean, it might work if it's really playing a game and isn't trying to, you know, kill us or something." “It’s definitely not trying to kill us,” Poe said, peering over a girder - nothing. “Almost definitely.” He was - well, he was mostly sure. He was less sure that Finn would be as mostly sure, and so it occurred to him that they’d better find the little guy and contain him before one of the more suspicious crew members stumbled over him. “Come on, friend,” he called out, sticking his head into the thankfully empty shoproom. “What’s better than space, anyway?” he asked, shutting the hatch on that room, figuring they could just go at this by process of elimination. He gave her a smile, and its bravado was mostly put-on. Mostly. “That doesn’t sound right.” Barbara tried the next room, poking her head in and calling out for the droid, but she didn't receive any kind of response at all. "Almost?" she echoed. "Also, it definitely likes you better. I'm getting nothing but silence." She closed that hatch too and pressed a hand to the bulkhead, thinking. "It's not very big. Maybe it got stuck somewhere." She looked over at Poe. "Oh, our space program is nothing like this. This is all science-fiction and space opera. NASA is lightyears behind all of this." “Well, that’s even more exciting - right? New horizons …” He’d have to admit, though, that flying off into the black would have been rather less appealing to him had it involved the kind of hindrances that must have come with a system of space travel not yet prepared to launch fighters, or even a particularly speedy yacht. The mysteries of the Unknown Regions had never really spoken to him; exploration and innovation had never been his primary concerns. He wanted to get up there, and go, and not worry about how to get home safe. “So - what did you do? Back home?” He had stopped underneath one of the beams running across the corridor; he thought he saw something moving up there in the shadows, but he kept speaking normally, just waving his hand a little at her to signal: got him. “What was more fun than - Nassa?” She slowed so as not to give them away, almost going into stealth mode as she made her way underneath that beam Poe was gesturing too, giving him a slight nod. She smiled. "Oh - I was a librarian," she said casually, "pretty much the same as I'm doing back at the compound, just with an infinitely better book selection." Barbara paused. "Also, I was a vigilante superhero." “Seems like we’ve got a lot of those,” Poe observed, his eyes trained on the now-motionless hunk of metal he was pretty sure was their target. “Around here. Heroes. Not librarians. I get the appeal, I mean - who hasn’t gotten fed up with the bureaucracy, right?” Certainly he’d seen the law fail, and had looked to higher ideals to see him through that lapse - whether the majority of the folks he’d met here who’d taken it on themselves to make the world a better place were really up to the job, he wasn’t quite sure, but. They were here, now, and so he supposed it didn’t matter. He was about to try to leap and grab the beam and swing himself up - he probably could have done it - when he went up on his toes, and pressed his mouth into a line, and - “I think it’s … in sleep mode?” "Well, I'm not superhuman or anything, not like most of the others. Just regular human here." Barbara lifted herself up on her tiptoes in an attempt to see what Poe was seeing, but she simply wasn't tall enough. "But where I'm from, it was something that needed to be done, so I did it." That was how she looked at it, how she had to look at it. "It's sleeping?" she asked, lowering her voice. "Up there? It couldn't have found somewhere more comfortable? What if it falls?" “I don’t know that it’s got much of a handle on comfortable. Or - practical, for that matter." Which raised the question of what, exactly, it was programmed to do, but he’d seen his share of droids who’d gone haywire for one reason or another. Maybe they’d taken in that brand of stray. He had a hard time regretting it, either way. “We can put him somewhere where he won’t fall on someone’s head in the middle of the sleep cycle, anyway.” If he jumped, he might dislodge it unintentionally - or startle it. “Do you want to go grab something to stand on? Or I can give you a boost.” He grinned, and injected a dose of grave solemnity into his voice. “It needs to be done, Barbara.” Did he just make a joke about her height? Seriously? She narrowed her eyes at him for just a moment and then walked over to him. "Fine. But just a boost. I can climb up there just fine as long as I can reach the beam." Barbara moved in front of him. "I'm putting you in charge of the droid, all right? Since you know more about these - droids - than I do." “You got it,” Poe agreed with a grin, dropping to his knee and craning his neck to catch one more glimpse of their dormant target. “I’ll feed him, walk him, keep him in my bunk …” The whole package. This was shaping up to be a pretty decent crew, he thought; better than a few he’d had. And that was something. If the mission was lacking, at least the company wasn’t. |