She said, that I don't look like me no more, no more
June 19th
Lalita + Ezra
PG-13 at least? | Ongoing, closed /At The Last Drop
The Conrad was a good ship. It hauled supplies on a regular run from the Lunar colonies settlements to Earth and back again. Consistency was nice, even if the irony of the assignment didn't escape her. She was a good ship and a good crew, and Lalita had served with them for the better part of a year when she saw the news ticker about the plane going down.
It was. Grating against her senses. Instincts said it wasn't what it seemed, and she was pulling up all the details associated with that ship and it's flight path before she realized what she was doing. There was something strange going on. She didn't like it. Lalita didn't have her ex's skills in information gathering, but she had noticed an influx of those...what were they calling them? Amber Refugees? When she was on solid ground, and even a few that tagged along on the last transport she served on. At the time she had thought it odd, shrugged, and moved on, but now it lit up in her mind with this news.
Folk who lived their lives on ships tended to trust their instincts. Trust their guts. It helped them survive, act quick without sitting around possibly flying out an airlock.
Lifelong habits had her sighing at herself and rubbing at her temples when her fingers brought up the site for The Last Drop for the third time seemingly on their own. Part of her mind had a plan, even if the rest of her didn't like it. But you didn't have to like a job or task to do it well, or to recognize it's importance. Certain things had to be done, and if you were capable of completing a needed task then you did.
You could drag ass. You could complain, and you could be booted off the boat. Or watch it burn. So she made her choice.
Lalita, of course, was a professional. Put her feelers out and got another engineer on the ship almost on her level before she left. A good spacer kept connections when they could, you never know who could offer you a job or pick up your escape pod when you needed them, you know. Even baked a big batch of cinnamon rolls on her way out, brought half of those to the bar. That damned bar that hadn't changd at all.
It was six AM, and there were a few people in the cafe part to get coffee and a breakfast sandwich on their way to work, and a few barflies who probably didn't realize it was daytime now. Technically. Back here... Lalita was somewhere between relaxing and being jumpy. It was an uncomfortable contradiction. When she was tense though, she fixed things. Well. When she was anything she did that. So she hugged the people on staff who she had kept in contact with and hopped over the bar to fix that same camera. Snowy, her and Ezra had called him, because they were creative like that.
Surely he was asleep, or just not on duty, or maybe he moved on. Ha. It made her feel better. To fix something. To be useful. To tinker with that damn camera that had never managed to consistently work because of the schitzy wiring of the building. The cinnamon rolls were left at the bar once she finished so she could wander over to the jukebox and put something a bit faster on before sitting in her old table. It was a bad idea but -- look, this was probably all a bad idea. At least she could feel normal this way. This was her favorite because she could sit sideways with her back to the wall, her bad ear towards the jukebox which was usually just loud enough for her to hear if the place was slow like it was. Out of the way enough that even on busier days she could still hear and have a conversation. Tucked away towards the corner. Whoever she was with sat on the other side towards her good ear where they watched the door and she could yell at anyone at the bar (easier if they knew any SL, but still). It was just, you know, reflex, and she needed to think of a plan okay, and it helped to relax when she was doing that. One boot was already kicked up on one of the unused chairs, bouncing to the beat of the song as she pulled out the phone one of the waitresses had shoved in her hand for her to fix. Because some things never changed, and it would make her feel like she belonged again anyway.