[D1 MM] Pay Me My Money Down (open)

[CLL-MT9]

While a speck on the map compared to a never-sleeping coreworld ecumenopolis, lot of work got done at the spaceport before Noventa's long dawn. Ships arrived and landed with little direction from ground control and even less reference to the local time that governed work shifts. Worn-down infrastructure forced incoming traffic into a smaller number of convenient or viable landing spots. Attempts to re-establish the port’s former glory focused on security before efficiency -- your ship probably wouldn’t be robbed while it waited to be unloaded, but it would have to wait. All told, there was normally a backlog of cargo going to or from a dozen or more vessels by the time the earliest shift of stevedores showed up.

Larger and more established shipping outfits who made regular runs might have a corresponding crew of port-rats they worked with. Everyone else, ship-masters and workers alike, showed up every morning to the same dingy hall, once belonging to a Trade Federation-affiliated workers’ Local. It was marked by decades of both neglect and graffiti, some advertorial, some political, and some merely idle, and was lacking appointments save a few benches and spots for enterprising vendors to wheel in caf-stands and peddle breakfast to hungry or hungover working-beings. There people who needed cargo moved on or off ships haggled pell-mell with people who would move it, with the definition of “people” being wide enough to include a few droids, both freelance and being offered for hire by their owners.

Clementine caught a few jobs in a row, mostly from captains who frequented Noventa often enough not to be off-put by him, and the streets were fully light by the time he decided to give his servos a break and maybe try to find a public charging port (even machines tended to break down when worked without rest or care, much to the annoyance of some organics). While plodding down the streets between warehouses and landing pads and fields, Clementine looked around him, seeing if anything has changed -- a distinctive ship, a newly condemned or renovated building, an alien strain of music coming from a cantina.

[Soren Lom]

Outside of a shop that appeared to be selling restored droid parts there was a young humanoid woman with pink eyes tinkering on a small repair droid. She had grease and grime on her hands as she worked patiently at shaving off a layer of rust and scoring on the battered old droid.

[CLL-MT9]

Clementine knew the shop, as many droids did, for reasons that offered no direct parallel to the organic experience. Depending on the part, it was somewhere between a secondhand clothing store, a pharmacy, an organ transplant clinic, and a funeral home given to hosting a public, open casket viewings -- but all of the above less fraught than their not-droid equivalent.

In a demonstration of this principle, Clementine seemed curious rather than put off at the sight of the woman scraping away at the rusted chassis. He angled his long strides, whirr clank, whirr clank, to bring him in front of the shop, casting his long morning shadow over her work when he came to a stop.

"That's a very old droid, a ver-rey old droid," he said, his voice a little too loud and a little too slow, as usual. "What kind of droid is that?"

[Soren Lom]

"This?" She said to the droid as it approached her. "This is a prototype DUM-ie."

She turned it over in her hands to show it more clearly, "It's of the DUM series of pit droids, but before they condensed them down into a more compact size. Storekeeper lets me work on old and outdated stuff to hone my skills."

[CLL-MT9]

“Oh, a dummy droid. I know those.” Clementine does a whole-body nod, bending at the knees and tilting down at the waist. “I am a more compact size,” he adds, in the face of the immediately available evidence.

[Soren Lom]

She chuckled, "That you are. But that makes me like a miniaturized size."

[CLL-MT9]

This stumped Clementine for a minute. “You look reg-you-lore-sized for a human,” he said, his vocoder slowing down even more than usual.

[Soren Lom]

She smiled softly and nodded, "Quite right. Super normal typical human."

She chuckled once through her nostrils and then asked, "What are you called my new friend?"

[CLL-MT9]

"I am called Clementine," he said, missing any subtext in her agreement. "I am a load-lifter. Who are you?"

[Soren Lom]

"I'm Aily. I'm kind of... a lot of things. Moved here recently... do lots of odd jobs to make end's meet." She said with a smile.

[CLL-MT9]

"Aily." Clementine said it like he was trying out the feel of it on his speaker. "Eye... ell... ee." Or maybe trying to reverse engineer the alphanumeric designation that had given rise to it. "I came here about one year ah-go. Noventa is nice. I have been other places that are not as nice."