Checking It Out (Pregame, Evening)

[CLL-MT9]

"An interesting use of that ship. It doesn't have particularly good combat capabilities itself so it would have to rely on the starfighters in combat and be modified to have heavy defenses. The cost to whoever did so must have been exorbitant," Farkas says, thinking about the prospect of that. "Whoever owned it must have been wealthy and had a particular fondness for the wayfarer to do so since there was never a standard module created for that purpose. That's interesting."

Clementine spent a while trying to frame a reply, his binary vocoder repeatedly emitting a half-beep or seeming to whirr up, only to spool down again, like a person repeatedly opening their mouth and closing it again.

One problem was he didn’t really understand how the ship had been modified, and didn’t have the technical vocabulary in basic or binary to describe it if he did.

Another problem was he was belatedly realizing that the parts he could describe, like “we didn’t have to put in a magcon field because the whole crew was made up of battle droids” and “I guess the ship didn’t need that many defenses because we were mostly performing our piracy against lightly escorted merchant shipping” was not really a topic for a conversation with a stranger he had just met. Even if he did speak binary.

Eventually he emitted two short beeps -- [Affirmative] -- with the follow-up coming with suspiciously uncharacteristic speed: [Query: What is your assignment?] Even for someone as maladroit as Clementine, he understood that so, what do you do? was relatively safe hydration-dispenser talk.

[Cefey Raneth]

Parsing Fey's accent slows Yara's response a little, but not excessively. "General practice provides a remarkable amount of daily variety," she answers with a quiet laugh. "That's one thing I've learned here. It's a much more diverse population than I ever treated before, even as a student. With a range of needs to match." She shakes her head slightly, lifting her glass again. "Providencetown calls are generally not my favorites, though, I'm afraid to say."

"General practice...? Oh, as in docteur! How exciting!" the twi'lek mused. What she had seen of Noventa City and Providencetown, any doctor around these parts was probably in high demand. Taking a sip of the beer, she leaned a little closer as she felt a little more at ease. How strange that there had been that strange buzz in her lekku earlier... it almost made her think of the first time she met Jelna. "Why are they not your favorite, I wonder? Clientele?"

[Yara Suhr]

"Not exactly," Yara says, scooting herself a little more comfortably onto her barstool. "Though you're not far off. I see the most self-inflicted emergencies and ailments out here, on average." Her lips twist for a moment, and then she explains, "The sense of accomplishment from saving someone's life is rather diminished when one knows he's likely to get back on glitterstim as soon as the antagonist wears off, and he's only got three working kidneys left." She shakes her head and takes another sip of her liquor, wrinkling her nose a little. "Well, that's still more than I was born with, I suppose."

[Farkas Lowca]

Farkas recognized the speech pattern, the fact that Clementine wanted to say something but also didn't want to say it. His eventual agreement told him that it was not actually the case but it wasn't something to pursue. And he understood the sentiment of leaving the past in the past.

"As I said earlier, right now I mostly do droid maintenance for the spaceport authorities. But for my crew I do programming, electronic security, and sensor operation."

[Hin'biki]

Hin came back with a tray of empty glasses and a downcast look. In spite of his air of inattentiveness, he still dodged out of the way of patrons, flowing through the crowd with no trouble. He again took the empty glasses, put them in the washer behind the bar, but when he closed the lid, he set down the tray and gave a wince. It was barely noticeable, especially with the reserved nature of the twi'lek. He rubbed his hand over his opposite wrist, which, when pulled away revealed a set of slowly revealing bruises. Another could be seen on his side, with the decided indentation of a central mark with five radiating contusions.

[CLL-MT9]

"As I said earlier, right now I mostly do droid maintenance for the spaceport authorities. But for my crew I do programming, electronic security, and sensor operation."

This rebooted Clementine with enthusiasm, and he let out an unbroken series of loud beeps [Statment: this unit did not understand you did maintenance for the spaceport droids. Query: have you ever serviced...] leading into a very organic-seeming stream of hey-do-you-know questions about acquaintances and coworkers (mostly a large number of very similarly designated commercial loadlifters and labor droids), including a fair amount of opinion and conjecture mixed in (so-and-so's motivator doesn't seem as fast as it used to be; the new EV-II overseer droid seems much, much nicer than the old EV-I, whose crushing, I hear, was no mere spaceport accident, and so on). Class Five droids were a much more gossipy bunch than outsiders might have thought.

[Cefey Raneth]

"Not exactly," Yara says, scooting herself a little more comfortably onto her barstool. "Though you're not far off. I see the most self-inflicted emergencies and ailments out here, on average." Her lips twist for a moment, and then she explains, "The sense of accomplishment from saving someone's life is rather diminished when one knows he's likely to get back on glitterstim as soon as the antagonist wears off, and he's only got three working kidneys left." She shakes her head and takes another sip of her liquor, wrinkling her nose a little. "Well, that's still more than I was born with, I suppose."

The twi'lek took another mouthful of beer as she listened to the doctor. "Tu cannot save people from their own idiocy, I say. Can fix wounds and such, but healing stupid? No such thing," she shook her head with some dismay. Thankfully she didn't have that trouble with the three humans she travelled with, as they tended to be cautious, and none of them used drugs.

[Yara Suhr]

The twi'lek took another mouthful of beer as she listened to the doctor. "Tu cannot save people from their own idiocy, I say. Can fix wounds and such, but healing stupid? No such thing," she shook her head with some dismay. Thankfully she didn't have that trouble with the three humans she travelled with, as they tended to be cautious, and none of them used drugs.

"Hm," Yara snorts faintly. "I wish I could argue with you, but with hardly a decent addiction clinic anywhere in the system..." she shrugs. "It amounts to more or less the same thing, I'm afraid. And I haven't the time or the training to fix that."

Hin came back with a tray of empty glasses and a downcast look. In spite of his air of inattentiveness, he still dodged out of the way of patrons, flowing through the crowd with no trouble. He again took the empty glasses, put them in the washer behind the bar, but when he closed the lid, he set down the tray and gave a wince. It was barely noticeable, especially with the reserved nature of the twi'lek. He rubbed his hand over his opposite wrist, which, when pulled away revealed a set of slowly revealing bruises. Another could be seen on his side, with the decided indentation of a central mark with five radiating contusions.

Yara starts to reach toward a dish of some kind of crunchy-looking snacks set on the bar, then stops mid-gesture when a closer look reveals the texture she's seeing is definitely chitin, not vegetable matter, and also possibly something in there is moving. Might take a pass on that. Her hand settles on the bar top instead, thumb tapping lightly in an irregular rhythm.

However, in looking up from the dish she does catch a glimpse of the Twi'lek barman, and her brows draw together, making faint furrows on her forehead. "That will bruise less if you put a cold compress on it promptly," she says quietly, preparing to be given the usual line about having slipped and fallen on a door panel opener or against a banister. A curious pentadactyl sort of banister... but that, too, was depressingly usual.

[Hin'biki]

Hin'biki was caught, almost frozen at being spoken to. At the good doctor's words he drew his hands away from his wrist to look at the mild injury. A glance to Yara revealed a youthful naivety there and he just nodded without word. He let his hand rest around his wrist again and disappeared into the back, his cheeks blushing an ever so slightly darker shade of azure in embarrassment. When he returned there was a decorative cuff on his wrist and a tenders apron on to cover whatever other blemishes he had.

[Farkas Lowca]

This rebooted Clementine with enthusiasm, and he let out an unbroken series of loud beeps [Statment: this unit did not understand you did maintenance for the spaceport droids. Query: have you ever serviced...] leading into a very organic-seeming stream of hey-do-you-know questions about acquaintances and coworkers (mostly a large number of very similarly designated commercial loadlifters and labor droids), including a fair amount of opinion and conjecture mixed in (so-and-so's motivator doesn't seem as fast as it used to be; the new EV-II overseer droid seems much, much nicer than the old EV-I, whose crushing, I hear, was no mere spaceport accident, and so on). Class Five droids were a much more gossipy bunch than outsiders might have thought.

Farkas was quite familiar with the gossipy nature of the Class Fives, given his experience. It came with the nature of how they were programmed, often with a somewhat friendly competitive streak. Not so much that it interferes with their duties, but designers long ago learned that when labor droids had that in their nature it created a sense of incentive for improving the efficiency of their routines. As a side effect though, they tended to talk to each other about each other in order to gauge their relative standings among similar models. Their primary drive tended to make them feel concern for the others though, because even if they were competing they also knew that keeping things running was a group effort. Intricacies like that, existing as part of their interactions rather than their internal programming, were what made it clear to Farkas droids were not mere tools.

The technician fully participated in the gossip, giving Clementine updates on how his fellows were doing and which ones he had performed maintenance or upgrades on. "But HLM-23 still refuses to change out that servo motor in his right lifter. He says its the last original part he's got and won't give it up, so I just keep fixing it for him."