Caf Flask (D1 LM, @ a random city cafe, open)

[Yara Suhr]

The shop is called the Caf Flask, not a particularly creative name. But the quality of the various beverages it sells to those citizens of Noventa City capable of metabolizing caffeine is higher than average for the price, in Yara's opinion. And yes, there is a perfectly functional caf dispenser in the clinic breakroom, but as usual no one can quite remember whose turn it was to clean the filters and the thing only runs on generic pre-ground ingredients and... it's a slow morning, so why not step out between appointments, right?

She leans against a tall cafe table while she waits for the staff to call her finished drink order. The crew here, by and large, seem to spend more time coloring and arranging their fur, hair, or feathers into elaborate subcultural styles or tending their cosmetic piercings and tattoos than on remembering how to pronounce the names of their admittedly varied clientele--she's been Yerra, Tara, and once, for some reason, "Jerrod"--so she has to keep at least half an eye on the counter, but with the rest of her attention she looks over the shop's other patrons. At this hour it's still fairly busy, but not packed.

[Jelna Vawn]

Jelna came into the shop to scout out the local caf shop. Though they had plenty on the ship, she wondered if it would be suitable for a meeting place on the ground.

She took in her surroundings as she always did and eventually honed in on Yara. It came to her as a surprise that a place like this would afford any doctor time to leave the premises. Still, Jelna made the split-second decision to approach her with a friendly wave. "Mornin', ma'am. How you doin' today?"

The blonde turned her attention to the line. "What do you reckon is good here?"

[Yara Suhr]

"Oh." Yara's auburn eyebrows arch upward as she realizes who it is that's just greeted her. "Jelna--Ms. Vawn, fancy meeting you here." Some physicians might find it awkward having a social run-in with someone they'd last seen sitting on an exam table, but Yara's time in the small, tight-knit Alliance military had cured her of that, and life in a small town like Noventa City--well, small by Core or even Mid-Rim standards--hadn't weakened her immunity much.

She looks up at the board and back at her sometime-patient with a friendly-enough smile. "If you have a sweet tooth, the Aldooinian purple latte isn't bad--not quite the way they make it on Coruscant, but the bantha milk is much fresher out here. The Tarine tea is locally grown, and their straight brewed caf is quite good for Noventa."

[Jelna Vawn]

The patient did not make any note of the doctor's current demeanor. She had rarely spoken to doctors back when she was in the ISB beyond business. On this planet, though, she was hoping to find a connection she could trust to keep quiet if needed. "I never was one for that Core worlder stuff," Jelna lied. She nodded along to the rest of the suggestions. "I don't think I get much tea that often and the local stuff is often better."

[CLL-MT9]

The staff had propped the double doors open. The morning sun had warmed the outside air, and the incoming suborbital traffic was scarce and quiet enough to make it seem a pleasant idea. This much eased Clementine's entry, with him only having to compress in one rather than two dimensions. Without advancing further towards the serving-counter, he just pointed his large domed photoreceptor at the sapient at the register until he got a nervous wave. The staff knew that if they waited too long, he'd start to say "EXCUSE ME" a little too loudly, followed by "THE USUAL, PLEASE." Receiving this acknowledgment, he used a lumbering sidestep to place himself next to one of the standing tables near the entrance, relatively out of the way.

His regular status had not come smoothly. The sub- and counter-cultural tendencies of the frontline staff might have been welcoming to the idea of serving a droid (even if their interest in his subversive choice of jewelry and similar taste in body decoration had given way to a realization that loadlifters were just not programmed very cool). The manager, however, had quietly had a panic attack on his first arrival. He had spun rapidly from the assumption that Clementine was a malfunctioning servitor going to upend his shop because he had mistaken it for a cargo bay, to thinking that Clementine was the agent of a Providencetown gangster looking for protection money (half right), to having no idea how a loadlifter took his caf. Clementine, used to forcing his patronage on places that employed bouncers who sometimes actually bounced people off the pavement, just waited him out for a chance to give his order.

It turns out Clementine took it black, and other than needing to have his order taken and brought to him without moving very far from the door, he was a very undemanding customer (and that part was the manager's idea anyway, fearful of his furniture or his customers being trod upon). Like so many sapients in so many caf-joints throughout the history of the galaxy, Clementine bought his caf as a way of renting a table, and then soaking in the ambiance and the company.

Today, as he waited for his caf, he turned his body to take in the room. He pans past the pair of women talking by the counter, but then swivels back and seems to fix on them.

[Yara Suhr]

"A healthier choice than caf full of sugars," Yara says to Jelna with a chuckle, just as one of the staff announces a purple latte for someone named "Terra."

"Ah, that's me." She leans in enough to snag the flimsy insulated container from the counter with one hand. Then she stops with the container halfway to her mouth, a bemused expression spreading across her face as the extremely large customer who definitely has no metabolic use for anything prepared here lumbers in, for all the world like a regular customer. "He... drinks caf?" she murmurs, half to herself, shaking her head slightly. "Will wonders never cease?" Belatedly, she glances over at Jelna, curious how the newcomer will react. One way or another, she's probably about to learn whether Jelna has had any sort of previous run-in with Noventa's most idiosyncratic CLL-M unit.

[Jelna Vawn]

"Hm, I reckon I should trust a doctor's knowledge on that," Jelna said with a big smile. She nodded at the doctor leaving and really had no idea that the name was pronounced incorreclty in any way.

The woman glanced over at the droid and perked a brow. "Now I do declare, that is not somethin' you see everyday."

[Yara Suhr]

"That's... Clem." Yara arches an auburn eyebrow at Jelna, lips quirking. "It so happens we've met. Would you like me to introduce you?"

[CLL-MT9]

If Clementine noticed their attention immediately, it was not obvious. It’s possible he still thought they hadn’t seen him when he waved, a gesture complicated by the care he took to not concuss anyone by making it. He gently rotated his right loading claw 180 degrees, and then deployed his grasper arm from the now-top of it. It extended straight upwards before the opposable claw opened and closed, and then the whole multi-jointed apparatus swung side-to-side in greeting.

[Yara Suhr]

Yara's eyebrows arch upward, but she returns the big lifting unit's... wave? Yep, wave. With a shrug, she takes another sip of her own caf and drifts toward its table, glancing over her shoulder at Jelna with a look that says, This might interest you, who knows?

[Jelna Vawn]

Jelna gave a wave back to the Droid and looked back at the doctor. "Friendly sort, now isn't he?" She blinked and then smiled. "I never got myself a drink myself. I should go do that."

With the past affiliation with Clementine, Jelna wasn't quite sure how she wanted to approach the situation. For now, she bought herself time with excuses.

[Yara Suhr]

"Enjoy," Yara replies to Jelna, lips quirking, then completes the shortish journey to within range of the big droid's table. Because if she actually stood right at the table, the angle at which she would be required to crane her neck to look him in his optical unit wouldn't be particularly comfortable.

"I haven't seen you around Noventa City in a while, CLL-M," she says, brows arching. "I hope that means your organic compatriots are keeping in better repair lately."

[CLL-MT9]

Clementine waited until Yara got to a normal conversational distance before speaking in his above-conversational volume. "Hell-lo Doctor Suhr," he said waiting until he finished the slightly mangled salutation before he retracted his manipulator and rotated his arm back to its normal configuration. "It is good to see you. I am in Noventa City oft-ten. I work at the space port many mornings lifting cargo. But you are right that I have not come to the clinic." He gave an abbreviated version of his usual whole-body nod, wary of knocking over a table (for the second time this week). "I do not know how Bort and the Boys are doing. They might be getting hurt a lot. They were oft-ten getting in deeper than they could handle. But now I work with Master Kaneesa Gee, and he is much smarter."

A server cautiously approached, and Clementine deployed his manipulator again to accept his coffee with a "Thank you very much!" He placed it on the table, but kept his manipulator on it, as if he might at any moment pick it up to drink (somehow). Loud enough to be heard by Jelna at the counter (not intentionally, his usual volume), he continued "And how are you, Doctor Suhr? And who is your friend?"

[Yara Suhr]

A faint Oh, dear, why did I ask sort of look passes across the doctor's face as Clem dismisses his former comrades to their possibly-grim fate. But you can't practice general medicine on Noventa without becoming at least somewhat resigned to the idea that not every being who shows up at your door with a hole through its important bits is going to be sensible enough to avoid repeating the experience.

"Kaneesa Gee... that's the Gungan fellow who runs a tavern in Providencetown, isn't it?" She takes a sip of her coffee and sets it down on the next table nearest Clem's, which is about the safe distance in terms of aural health as well as angle-of-view. "Well, I'm busy enough. That young woman," a glance at Jelna, "is a recent arrival to the planet. We seem to keep running into one another."

[CLL-MT9]

"Oh yes, that is right, Kaneesa Gee runs the Wookiee's Codpiece," agreed Clementine, the name drawing more than a few turned heads.

In a similarly carrying voice, the same audience hears him reply to the remark about keeping running into Jelna with a concerned question: "Why is that? Is she very sick?"

[Yara Suhr]

"Uh, no," Yara says quickly, with an emphatic shake of her head. Previous communications with Clem had been a bit more... practically focused. At the time, it would be fair to say she hadn't really gained a sense of the challenges of discussing abstractions and social niceties with a loadlifter of only slightly above-average intelligence. "Nothing like that. Noventa City is a small town, really. You see the same people over and over."

[CLL-MT9]

"Oh sure. Oh yes. Noventa is ver-rey small. The whooole planet, ver-rey small." He gave an abbreviated (for him) nod. "Even when we could not leave the in-dus-tree-al complex on Coruscant," (he pronounced it cor-US-kent) "it sometimes felt bigger than here." As was often the case, he apparently detected no need to add context for his audience, although whether this was due to a failure of theory of mind or something simpler would require a droid programmer of some skill. "Have you ever been to Coruscant?"

[Yara Suhr]

Yara's eyebrow twitches upward briefly. Not that she's spent an awful lot of time conversing with class-5 droids, but in general they rarely seemed to be especially well-traveled, at least not between memory wipes. "Yes, actually. I spent... several years there, although I've not been back in some time."

Clem not only doesn't need the details, he probably wouldn't make much sense of them in any case, so she doesn't hesitate over mentioning any specifics.