Bashful in Binary [Pregame Morning]

[CLL-MT9]

There was, unusually, no immediate pause before the response -- “Oh” -- although a long pause followed after, with Clementine standing stock-still. “Oh yes I do 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.

[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.

"Thank 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.

[CLL-MT9]

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

[Cal Arcton]

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.

[CLL-MT9]

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 visit, the gift, or the hiding place? (Demona didn’t want to keep him 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.”

[Cal Arcton]

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?"

[CLL-MT9]

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 Arcton]

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.

[CLL-MT9]

That question seemed to throw Clementine a bit. "Oh no, I don't even think he knoowwzzz-" 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 Arcton]

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?"

[CLL-MT9]

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.