[centre][h2]Sumiye King – Acting Chief Engineer[/h2][/centre]

There wasn’t much reason for Sumiye to be here, truth be told; setting up a tent like this didn’t need the Chief Engineer to oversee it, acting or otherwise, or even a regular engineer. That was why she’d passed the request along to the EVA teams, yet she’d ended up coming along anyway. Her presence hadn’t been explicitly requested by the captain either, since diplomacy wasn’t exactly her forte. But since the captain was the one who dragged her out here, she wasn’t [i]not[/i] requested to be here either.

As acting-Chief she probably should have been back at the ship monitoring and organising repairs, but there wasn’t much reason for her to be there either; her unexpected promotion meant she was spending more of her time rounding people up and reading reports than getting her hands dirty now. Farris had taken over her duties in the engine section and was doing a good job of it so far, the rest of the teams knew what they were doing without her looking over their shoulders, so unless she wanted to grab and wrench and chip in she had little to do right now.

Little to do but watch the captain and the botanist nervously converse with a creature that casually broke the laws of physics and offhandedly confessed to knowing that people meat tasted like. Sumiye should probably be a little flustered by those things as well, but this was still feeling a little too surreal right nor for the panic to have really set in yet. She just stood by, watching as Zoe fielded questions with the giant lizard in human form.

Then it was her turn and the dragon turned to face her. Sumiye stuffed her hands into her pockets at the mentioned of the discolouration on her fingertips; oil and grease tended to linger no matter what kind of soap she used and getting the stains out of her plastic hand was probably impossible. She long gotten past the point of being self-conscious of it, but having it so bluntly pointed out still felt a little uncomfortable. [color=fff200]“I’m an engineer. That means I try and keep all these fancy things from breaking and fix them when that’s not possible.”[/color]

Now that Galmira had addressed her directly, Sumiye felt it was safe to ask a few questions of her own. She wanted to ask about the kind of technologies this world had to offer; not just out of curiosity of course, her main priority was getting the Thucydides working again and knowing what resources were available would help with that. Even if take-off was impossible, radioing for help wasn’t. It was probably too much to ask that they would know how to fix an FTL drive or have a means of long-range communication they could borrow, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t help in other ways.

Galmira had mentioned horse-drawn carts however, so she wasn’t getting her hopes up.

[color=fff200]“The rover is powered by electricity. We use a chemical reaction to produce energy, then use that energy to drive mechanisms that make the wheels turn. That’s the simple answer at least; I could go into a lot more detail, but that’s the basic principle. As for that thing…”[/color] Removing her prosthetic hand from her pocket Sumiye indicated the heater in the corner of the tent. [color=fff200]“Also electricity, except we’re converting that electricity into heat energy. Most devices produce heat as a waste product anyway, so it’s not that hard to make heat the main purpose.”[/color]

Was that answer enough? It felt a little basic, but given the dragons apparent lack of knowledge of these things basic was probably better than nothing. [color=fff200]“I take it you don’t have anything like this on your world?”[/color]

[@Kumbaris]