Noventa - A Star Wars Story

Clementine, more in the flow of conversation, kept on talking while using both manipulators to apply oil to joints along his loader arms. It's a bit like watching someone go through their skincare routine at the bar -- and all the more incongruous for trying to imagine Clementine's organic equivalent having an elaborate skincare routine.

"I like No-vent-ta City. I like the space-port. I like to watch the ships come and go. They come and go from all sorts of play-sez. They bring cargo. I can get paid to move the cargo when it is too early to be serving drinks at the bar. I like to talk to the other load-lifters. It is nice to talk to droids that are like me. I also like to talk to the droids from the ships, the repair droids and the ast-trow-mechs. It is nice to talk to droids that are different from me. They have good stories.

"Sometimes," he continued, "I can talk to the crews of the ships as well. They are also different from me and have good stories. They do not always want to talk to a droid, though. That is why I also like the bars at the space-port, and in Providencetown. Some of them serve droids, and if I try to go some-where that do not think they do yet they find out that they were wrong and do serve droids. Once I am there I can see the people from the ships and hear their stories." He flexed his loader arms, some powerful servos for gripping, but also an array of smaller moving parts designed to bring magnetic clamps and repulsor-coil arrays into proper alignment with whatever mass he was lifting.

"That is nice," he declared. It was unclear if he meant eavesdropping in spaceport cantinas, the oil, or both.

Cal nodded. "That's good. I didn't figure..." Cal trailed off, his eyes narrowing as he studied the big droid. His instincts told him that Clem was hiding something. He just didn't know what.

Of course, if he did know, he wouldn't believe it.

"Alright, then." Cal nodded. "Well, you're free to spend your time here if you like. Doing whatever it is that you do." He shrugged. "What do you like to do in your off time, anyway?"

That question seemed to throw Clementine a bit. "Oh no, I don't even think he knoo[b]ww[i]zzz-"[/i][/b] his basic slurred and dropped even lower in pitch, like he was powering down, as he nearly said "knows about Demona." Keeping secrets was hard. If only he could remember which part he was supposed to keep secret. He tried to recover. "He is not expecting me back until I bring the lum shipment this after-noon."

Cal watched, mildly amused, as Clementine somewhat awkwardly picked up one of the containers of oil. Dealing with Clem was sorta like dealing with a bantha in a lot of ways. Big, good at lifting, could accidentally squish you. Simple. Clem smelled better, anyway.

"Ah, the Wookiee's Codpiece." Cal's brown eyes lit with enlightenment. "Yeah, I've heard of it. Never actually ventured through its doors myself, though. But the name's reached my ears a couple of times." And it certainly fit what he knew about Clem.

If Clem was having oil, however that worked, would it be polite for Cal to have a drink himself? It was still awfully early. Shrugging, Cal got a glass, splashing a bit of tonic in it. That'd be good enough. He took a small sip, eyes narrowing once more. "And he didn't suggest you come by, did he?" Clem didn't seem like the most convincing liar.

Cal's dryness was mostly lost on Clementine, who in any case was distracted by a question that offered him the comfort of an already public answer. He walked slowly forward to a more conventionally polite conversational distance, although the effect was somewhat spoiled by his lack of volume control.

"Thank you Cal," he said, stopping next to him, facing the bar and the two oil cans. "I ap-pre-she-ate the hos-peh-tal-it-ty." While working with the Gotra, an assassin droid had tried to explain to him that the practice of offering oil to droids was, while better than not serving them at all, itself a hostile act. He had used phrases like "a form of organic chauvinism" and "centering biological frameworks of liquid refreshment." Clementine usually didn't have anywhere he could usefully apply it externally with his limited range of motion (there was a reason that oil baths were immersive), but he appreciated the gesture, and he often thought he felt better afterward.

"I work at an est-tab-lish-ment like this one," he continued, reaching for one of the cans with a manipulator. The bartender had meant well, and one of the two would do, at least for the droid equivalent of touching the glass to your lips. "In Providencetown." He said the name with a slightly uncharacteristic affect, as if maybe he was using a sound clip from somewhere. "Par-haps you have heard of it. The Wookiee's Codpiece, owned by Master Kaneesa Gee." Those two also came out more smoothly than usual, but sounded more like Clementine.

Cal watched and waited as gears spun, almost literally, somewhere inside Clementime. "If you say so." He muttered. Cal and Clem didn't sound that similar to his ear, but he had to grant that maybe a droid built for lifting, even if he'd branched out a bit, might not exactly be a linguistics expert.

Finally getting an answer, Cal's frown deepened. His arms tightened across his chest, just a little. "Is that a fact?" He half-asked, his tone dry. The way he remained still was a bit similar to how Demona did, although coming from an entirely different place; marshal training, instead of... well, in Demona's case, it was pretty unclear.

After a pause, Cal shrugged. "Well, you're welcome to hang around if you like. We don't get many droid here, so the selection's a bit limited. Best to stay out here, too; door's a bit narrow. You probably noticed." The dryness was still in his tone.

He leaned casually against the bar. "Who are you working for these days, anyway?"

Clementine finished the squeezing out process fully before coming up to notice Cal standing there, the bartender already exiting. He froze, although it was unclear from the outside if this was a guilty start or his more usual need to devote all of his processing power to forming an appropriate reply.

“Oh, hello.” He said at last. “You are Cal.” He bobbed in a full-body nod. “I remembered your name because it sounds like my name. Clementine.” Droid models nowadays were far too advanced to use anything as simple and grossly physical as gears in their cogitational computations, but there was definitely something whirring along in a slightly unhealthy sounding way, deep in Clementine’s chassis. It was the loadlifter equivalent of a prolonged, stalling, “uhhhh....”

In the general sense Clementine’s sense of duty was clear. Demona was a friend (maybe a special friend?), a fellow droid (basically?) and she had asked him to keep a secret. Cal seemed all right, but they were not friends. Also, he seemed kind of like a cop. Snitches got scrapped.

As usual, the problem was coming up with a substitute thing to say. Clementine normally relied on durasteel-clad silence, but even he could tell when that would attract more attention. Also, he wanted to be able to come back. Demona had asked him to.

Wait... which part was a secret, again? Was it the whole [i]visit,[/i] the gift, or the hiding place? (Demona didn’t want to keep [i]him[/i] a secret, did she?) Usually he was able to ask his bosses to repeat instructions. Better play it cool, just in case.

The noise wound down, transitioning in to some static from his vocoder resolving in to words. “I was just vis-sit-ing,” he said. “Your ceilings are nice and high.”

The door might be a bit of a challenge, but it just required some careful squeezing to get through. Nothing that would be a problem unless one was being pursued.

"-oh, there he is." The bartender was back, and was joined by another man. Cal Arcton, if Clem remembered him. Cal and the other man turned to face the big robot, Cal's brows drawing down in recognition.

"Oh." Cal said wryly. "So I see. Go ahead, I'll handle it. Oh, leave those here, though." Nodding, the bartender set two oil cans of very different shapes and sizes down on the bar.

"Clem, right?" Cal said, leaning against the bar, his arms crossing. "What brings you by Twelve Parsecs this fine day? Just stopped in to use the restroom?" He glanced meaningfully towards the door Clem just exited.

[quote="Cal Arcton"]There was no sound at all as the box was swallowed up by the inky blackness. There may have been a brief flash of red, but it also could have just been a trick of the light.

"[i]Thank[/i] you." Demona said, her voice sounding unnaturally pleased. "Now, just put it back. This'll be our little secret." [/quote]

As Clementine rose from his crouch, still unperturbed by the atmospherics. "Oh-kay, Demona. I am glad you liked the present." He demonstrated his very specific capacity for gracefulness by turning around in the small storage area to replace the crate neatly over the void. It was not the first time he had been asked to throw something into a hole and never speak of it again, so it all felt pretty natural to him.

[quote] Quirking one translucent hip, she gave him a wink; at least, that was what the flicker over her blank white eye looked like. "Now, I've got to go for a while. But I hope you'll come back to see me again. Maybe someday, you can stay..." The soft laughter echoed again as she vanished.

The lights briefly flickered rapidly, then returned to their normal illumination level.[/quote]

Caught trying to frame a witty, romantic farewell, Clementine didn't speak until she was long gone. "Goodbye, Demona." He paused. That didn't seem quite witty or romantic enough. "It was nice to see you." Another pause while he considered. That seemed pretty good. He turned to squeeze back out the door and up the hallway. "Sweetie," he repeated, (relatively) quietly, to himself. Now he just had to get past the door that swung the wrong way back in to the bar...

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There was no sound at all as the box was swallowed up by the inky blackness. There may have been a brief flash of red, but it also could have just been a trick of the light.

"[i]Thank[/i] you." Demona said, her voice sounding unnaturally pleased. "Now, just put it back. This'll be our little secret."
Quirking one translucent hip, she gave him a wink; at least, that was what the flicker over her blank white eye looked like. "Now, I've got to go for a while. But I hope you'll come back to see me again. Maybe someday, you can stay..." The soft laughter echoed again as she vanished.

The lights briefly flickered rapidly, then returned to their normal illumination level.

There was, unusually, no immediate pause before the response -- “Oh” -- although a long pause followed after, with Clementine standing stock-still. “Oh yes I [i]do[/i] trust you Demona, oh yes I do.” He crouched down low, getting his manipulator arm as close as he could to the opening.

Clementine talking quietly to himself was pitched at probably about a normal human conversational volume, so anyone standing in the room or near the door might have heard him say “‘Sweetie.’ Oh gee. She called me ‘Sweetie.’” Louder, he declared “Here it goes, Demona, I am letting it go now,” and did so, his grasper claw opening and letting the small box tumble in to the void below.

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Soft laughter echoed all around, and the strange white grin appeared on the hologram's features once more. "Oh, sweetie." As usual, lips and words weren't quite in sync. "You couldn't go down there. Not if you ever wanted to leave..." The laughter came again, echoing on and on.

"Go ahead." The figure leaned forward, translucent eyelashes fluttering coquettishly, uncannily. "Don't you [i]trust[/i] me?" She flickered out for a few moments, only to reappear in the exact same spot, motionless.

The revelation that Demona had a secret tunnel to some sort of inky, subterranean void seemed to make little impression on him. Any bizarreness or oddity to it was lost in the background noise of the world, much of which was only vaguely sensical to Clementine. Why were all starships pretty much the same temperature inside, even though they were built on different planets all over the galaxy? Why were credits really worth anything, anyway? How did organics manage to make full-sized versions of themselves, [i]inside[/i] themselves? All equally baffling, and all equally not his department. Some droid, somewhere, was programmed for that, and it was not Clementine, and that was okay.

He shuffled backwards, retrieved the box, and came to the edge of the hole. He stared at the blackness for a solid minute, then at Demona's glowing red form, then back again, having to move his whole upper body to reorient each time. At last he said "I am not sure I will fit down there. Is it soft at the bottom? I would not want to drop it in and have it break."

The crate was against the wall, and extremely heavy, but of course neither of those things were any impediment to a real lifting droid like Clem. As he approached, Demona blinked back out of existence, but the flickering lights gave evidence as to her continued presence, on some level.

Beneath the crate, up against the wall, there was a whole in the ferrocrete floor. It was dark, almost impossibly so; not a mote of light escaped, nor penetrated beyond the first few inches of the edge of it. It was silent. And, most curiously, if Clem's sensors were sensitive enough to detect it, the air seemed just a little chill right around it.

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Behind Clem, Demona flickered back into being. She was silent and expressionless, waiting.

Clementine hunched through the door, looking around with small motions of his body. When Demona reappeared, he homed in on her, and when he figured out what she was asking (which took a minute), he visibly expanded, like a demonstrative bird fluffing his plumage. He let out a trio of low, happy sounding beeps, and turned to delicately place the gift box on another crate. Then, retracting his finer manipulators, he trundled forward towards the glowing holographic figure, ready to show her what he was manufactured out of!

The storeroom was dimly lit at the best of times. Perhaps part of that was because the mechanic who installed Demona had put holoprojectors in here, too, much to Cal's annoyance. With all the lights flickering, it managed the sort of atmosphere normally reserved for horrorvids.

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After a moment, with a sputtering red flicker, Demona appeared, near the back of the room. She was dancing again, that strange arrhythmic sway. This time, though, her arms were both pointed to the side, to a large, dusty, metal crate. "Under here..." The spectral whisper came.

Of course, there was only one way to get under the crate. It would have to be lifted.

Clementine hesitated. Again, in an organic, this might have been to some ancestral hindbrain registering its objections to this course of action. He was just calculating whether he would, in fact, be able to get out -- the sort of task his programming, intended for shifting large objects in crowded spaces, was actually fairly adept at.

Satisfied, he lumbered forward. The flickering lights reflected in the dome of his photoreceptor, and player over his battered frame. His servos whirred, a deep faint hum, with each step, and his foot came to rest with a creaking sound as he crossed along the wooden floor. The only sign of tension was his right manipulator checking that the box was secure and closed in his left. As he approached the door, his right loading arm reached out to ease it open...

This door was, in fact, a push door. Easier for Clem on the way in. But both the direction it opened and the relative narrowness of the frame might lead to problems for him on the way out.

It opened to reveal a dimly-lit hallway. The dimness was no fault of the design, but rather the level of the lights seemed unusually low. A restroom for customers was off to the side.

But perhaps of most note was the swinging at the end of the hall, marked "Storeroom". The lights flickered rhythmically, first the closest, then leading on down the hall to the door. Demona was nowhere to be seen, but her path surely was.

Unlike her previous vanishing act, this one was telegraphed enough to let Clementine follow it. [i]That’s nice. I am glad that she is willing to make things simple for me.[/i] It didn’t occur to him that perhaps there was just some overlap in the cognitive abilities of licentious drunks and loadlifters, and her programming was already aimed at the latter.

Again taking great care, he steadied the box with one manipulator and closed it with the other, the loader arms overshooting the whole operation by about a meter to get them as close as possible. Holding it firmly in his left grasper, he walked slowly and steadily for the door, swinging a wide berth around tables and ducking under the rare hanging light.

He paused at the door. In an organic, this might have been hesitation, a second thought, some voice in the back of their meat-brain screaming [i]No, you fool! Don’t go in there![/i] In Clementine’s case, it was him waiting for her to open the door, and taking a while to realize that that was impossible. He reached forward with the other manipulator, self-consciously remembering other times that he had destructively mistaken whether a particular door was to be “pushed” rather than “pulled.” He much preferred the ones that just [i]swooshed[/i] up in the the ceiling for that reason.

[img]http://i67.tinypic.com/2bru6d.jpg[/img]

Demona's pause, on the other hand, was much longer. She froze, the expression on her face gone completely still as the seconds stretched on. The lights all around began to flicker arrhythmically.

Then she vanished. But the lights continued to flicker.

Once again, she appeared. This time, Demona's ghostly projected form was nowhere near Clem. She was by the door near the back of the bar. Hips swaying, arms outstretched, she beckoned to the droid, her face blank.

She vanished again. The lights in the bar returned to normal, but the light under the door seemed to be pulsing unsteadily.