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The Last Kings of Orion

D= Aaaaand totally forgot to respond to Pauline, Grainy, so sorry! I'll edit
Park's response in first thing after work tomorrow...or later today, as it were.

The Last Kings of Orion

"Four," Park said, with as serious an expression as he could muster, accepting Abby's mustard jar with all manner of pomp and circumstance. He huffed and he puffed and he quietly twisted off the lid, all the time keeping an ear toward the shift talk going on to either side. He'd been assigned his fourth year, one more than his former, he assumed, because of his relative seniority. But now...

He felt his tablet vibrate at his side, and immediately, though with an unhurried care, turned the entirety of his attention toward the incoming message. Suppositions on a dead man were all good and well, given the circumstances. But he had real, almost-clients here and now, and if ever one of them so much as breathed a thought that they might require his aid, he would be there.

As it were, he only smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling in genuine pleasure as he read Pauline Weber's message. He had yet to meet the young woman in question, but even the pixels of her words seem to exude a light and hope most would have guessed impossible. It was...refreshing, to say the very least.

Pushing his glasses to slide a bit down the bridge of his nose, he squinted at his tablet, tilting it to and fro, until at last he was able to type some semblance of a message back -- No pressure to come see me today, Pauline. Just letting you know my door is always open. That said, if you're up for it, I would love a tour of the gardens. I hear you're very familiar! -- before he tucked his tablet away and returned to the conversation at hand.

"I'll take that, if you don't mind," he said, with another smile at Abby, nodding at the veritable tub of pickles behind her, though his tone was a bit more distracted. He had, he thought, a good idea of just precisely where Gavin was going with his otherwise enigmatic question, because he'd been thinking much the same himself.

The details made available to him on the strange and tragic case aboard the mostly-sleeping Copernicus had pertained largely to Sylas Adams's mental state, as well as the states of those impacted by his actions. He'd heard snippets here and there, mostly gossip and whispered judgments, but nothing he took all too much to heart. Even so, spare as the details might be, he could not begin to conceive how so elaborate and odd a plot could be carried out by a single man, in particular one so utterly...normal. For once, it was not the man's state of being that stood out to Park, but the action itself. It was rare -- very rare -- that he reduced people, patients or otherwise, to their (probably criminal) acts. It was, he'd found, the quickest way to alienate and literally dehumanize.

But in Adams's case, he made the necessary exception, and had come to the same conclusion Gavin had by the time the younger doctor swept an inquiring gaze his way. Park looked back sagely enough, his appetite temporarily muted over his open-face not-so-melty tuna melt.

"Pardon me for looking ahead," he interrupted quietly, "but, reading between the lines, Gavin, it seems you have some concerns any...accomplices Adams may have had may still be...around?"

---

Deli started violently when she heard footsteps echo outside her office, and only then knew she wasn't really fooling herself. There was, had been for years, really, a very precise reason she was now crouched on the floor of her office in a nest of old papers, candy bar wrappers, singed wires, and dissipating wisps of smoke. Or perhaps there were several. In any case, the primary one was evasion of thought, and none of what she was doing just now was helping.

"Ay," she muttered to herself as a slow consciousness began to return.

Like any daydreamer worth her salt, Deli could lose herself for hours in whatever project seemed most compelling at the time. Parents, teachers, friends, even Deli herself had been somewhat alarmed by the intense focus that could sweep over a girl who, half the time, forgot to finish sentences. There'd been days when she was younger she wouldn't eat or even use the restroom until her mother physically dragged her, dazed and usually annoyed, to her feet.

She'd been in a similar trance just before her brother had died. She knew, because her father's lawyer had tried to call it something, something it wasn't, a seizure or dream or hypnosis or something. She'd plead guilty after that.

Right now, there was nothing and no one dead around her, just a pile of metal scraps and gears, and half a can of oil she was probably going to get yelled at for later on. She could tell by the faint smell of burned hair, and the blisters forming on the back of her hand that she'd done something wrong (or right?), and had the random thought that she ought to crack a window before Reece or Curmy found her. But then she remembered that might actually, literally kill all of them, and while it made for a genius comic scene in her head, she didn't think Curmy would look all that great, frozen screaming at her for eternity.

Instead, she reached automatically to one side, seized a handful of gummy bears, and absently shoved them into her mouth, humming under her breath as she squinted at the notes she was knelt on top of. Pages on pages of the physical and chemical makeup of the blasting materials (and/or mineable asteroids) she was supposed to be studying. A cursory glance told her she knew most of what she needed to know, or at least the jargon-y bits of it, just from her term serving on the Mountain, though detail recollection had never been her strong suit. She was much better at improvising.

She was sort of curious what she could say to get Reece to trust her out in the dark.

Remembering Reece made her remember that conversation she wasn't looking forward to in the slightest, and then a morbid curiosity pushed her to peek at who it was who'd interrupted Deli Time. She looked out into the hangar (still gnawing on a hunk of solidified gummy gelatin so dense it made her jaw hurt) just in time to see a flash of blue and brightened instantly.

"Hey!" she called, abandoning her work, metal scraps and all, behind the door on which she'd hung a construction paper sign labeled, "DELI'S PLACE!"

"Um...Hey...Blue! Come back, where'd you go? I have gummy bears, you want some?"

The Last Kings of Orion

Just a quick note to say I'll have something up late tonight! For Park and hopefully for Deli, who has been up to...God knows what. >__>

The Last Kings of Orion

I'm also still here and I'll fill out Justric's form first(ish) thing tomorrow! Though for the moment I can fairly safely say Maya is, in essence, an NPC, albeit perhaps with a more detailed background.

Never Lose Your Hat!

For a time, Ivy had been nearly consumed by a sort smug pride -- and then even moreso by a grotesque excitement (the search for a live body could mean many things to a Spark, especially when that Spark was already missing some important limbs herself) -- but all of that, along with the deeper levels of thought, with the mild concern over her livelihood, and her frustrations with how the situation seemed to have progressed beyond 'fun and exciting' and into 'too long and taxing' at the very least; all of it was soon outshone entirely by Ludd's last words.

There was no keeping the shock and confusion from Ivy's face as she fell from the Madness place just as quickly as she'd entered it. Ivy the Spark was gone, replaced by Ivy, the utterly baffled girl.

"Did you say...St. Mayhew?" she repeated dumbly before she could stop herself. "Agnes...?" The given name wasn't familiar, but the surname...the same one emblazoned on a thin silver disk with a strange symbol beneath...the surname she'd been found with when the Bartch's had adopted her, taken her home squalling to wake the dead, covered in a thick layer of inexplicably green mud...the surname she knew. She'd kept it, at Mama Petra's insistence, though she'd not been so keen in her early days. Her name, like her dark hair and gray-green eyes, so different from the blonde-haired, blue-eyed siblings she'd adopted as her own, was one of several things to separate her from her new family, a fact made all the more painful by the fact that she could not remember the one that had abandoned her.

"Uh..." said Ivy, now finally turning to Jötz, her expression somewhere between Did you hear that? and HELP ME!. She was vaguely aware she was losing whatever tenuous hold on the situation she'd managed, but she wasn't quite sure how to stop that. Her mind was still in a whir, only this time, there were no far-fetched solutions, no water-powered light cannons, or steam-driven wolf clanks. There were only questions. Where, when, how, who?

Why?

"Um..." Ivy said again, slowly turning back to Ludd as she struggled to come up with at least a temporary solution. She needed answers from him, yes, but they would amount to nothing without the right questions. And if her name gave her the leverage she thought it might -- and that leverage could prove beyond valuable -- she couldn't afford to show her hand just yet.

But what a hand to hide!

"I...will consult with my body guard," Ivy stammered eventually. "The plan is...agreeable," she added, trying to sound reluctant, and succeeding only in sounding a little congested. "But we...erm...we are going to sort out the...uh...details. Yes. Details. Come, minion!"

The Last Kings of Orion

Park said nothing for a moment, allowing Hob's unfortunate, though perhaps not unwarranted departure to wash over him. It was something he did almost naturally now, his first and and most hard-earned skill, and either the reason or a perhaps an early side effect of his eventual profession. He had been young, very young, just three years old in fact, when he'd learned he was especially sensitive to the emotions of others. His older sister, Sun-Hi, had burned herself serving him his traditional bowl of word or seaweed soup. The burn had not been serious, but their overbearing mother had been concerned, and, within minutes, Park had found himself too distraught to eat. He was not upset, nor angry at the slight disruption in the festivities. It seemed only that he could not bear to step away too long from his sister or mother, had in fact spent most of the day in their arms, just watching, as if waiting for something worse to happen.

As he grew older, he was more able to temper his odd reactions to the more volatile expressions of emotion around him, but it wasn't until he was in his early teens that he learned how to process these feelings, how to quietly recall that was not his anger, not his affection or depression. Slowly, he began to reacclimatize to his friends without being all but forced to take on the timbre of any room he walked into. And once he mastered that, he began to master the art of teaching others the same. He craved it, he realized, and it seem to help as much as it hurt, the wild and boundless diversity of human emotion. And all at once, he could not imagine himself to be without it.

Forty years ago, Hob's disappearance might have left a sour taste in his mouth, but whatever remained in the NI-tech's absence was quickly soothed by the brief but bright moment passing between Abby and Gavin. Park watched, quietly removed, as was his tendency in moments like these, and let himself remember that while his family, his home, his livelihood had been left behind...there was still beauty to be found, often in the shadow of the ugliness before it.

So, there was simply no way to reject Abby's offer, however selfish it might have been to stay. Park chuckled quietly at Gavin's words, then fell instep alongside the doctor and their First Sergeant. And when Gavin asked his question, while Park's smile faded ever so slightly, the quiet agony that would have swept over him in his childhood years seemed content to rumble a low warning at the back of his mind.

"Nothing more than what I'm sure you've already seen," Park answered evenly, with a quick glance at Abby. "Adriana -- Dr. Collini -- left some notes on him, but I don't think I've ever met the man personally." Then he paused, scratched his chin, and reconsidered. "On second thought, I suppose that's not entirely true. I did meet Mr. Adams once, just for a few moments, back in the Mountain." Park cleared his throat as he tried to think whether he should speak more on the topic at all, whether anything could be gained by it or not. The devil was in the details, or so they said. But perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing when one was on the hunt to preempt the devil in the first place.

"I wouldn't have known him if I hadn't seen the photo in Dr. Collini's notes. Everything she'd written -- and granted, there was much at all -- said there was nothing at all out of the ordinary, hardly so much as a scar. No remarkable medical history, mental or otherwise. No psychological red flags, not even a particularly outstanding personality, in fact, she said, quite the opposite." To hear her tell it, Sylas Adams had been the epitome of unassuming in every way. Quiet, perhaps a little withdrawn, but in no way anyone found especially concerning. Or at least not until too late.

"I had an idea to join him for lunch at the cafeteria back in the Mountain," Park mused quietly, his brow furrowed. "It was going on days before launch, and everyone was...well, you know. Somewhere between anxious and reverent. Everything was spoken in whispers, more gestures and touches than actual words. And in all that fatalistic loving, I looked and saw this man sitting against a wall, so close it seemed he'd almost moved his chair back to keep it against something solid. The only thing that seemed strange at the time was that his plate was nearly empty, but he didn't seem to be eating anything. I didn't think much of it, I suppose. There was an empty seat next to him, so I sat down. I hadn't even gotten to really speak to him beyond a, 'Is this seat taken?' before he was leaving again."

Park trailed off for the moment, caught in the memory. Then he shook himself. "Mind you, it probably isn't anything. There was days in the Mountain I'd felt inclined to take meals by myself. But it did seem...odd somehow." Or rather he had. But Park didn't add that part. He was more than used to not being able to explain his hunches, his phantasmic glimpses of intuition, let alone regarding something so ominous.

Still. What might have happened if he had elected to sit beside the new world's first condemned man?

Park shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, once more turning a charming grin to his two companions.

"But that hardly seems the topic to settle an empty stomach, does it. Where do we stand on sandwich fixin's?"

The Last Kings of Orion

Thanks, Grainsy! Both here, and PM-wise. I'm hoping to have something up later this evening. =)

The Last Kings of Orion

*gasp* Ball's in my court! =D

Never Lose Your Hat!

Oh, wow. You...oh, wow. =D *applause*

The Last Kings of Orion

XD S'okay, Grainsy, you are still my first love. After LT. And maybe Heroes. Possibly Derren, but that's almost certainly it for sure I think maybe.

And Kuro, no rush, just a suggestion. =) Deli'll be down in the hangar for a bit either way.

EDIT: Grainles, all your posts make me middle-school-status excited over various romantic relationships possible aboard Copernicus. Most of them are wildly unrealistic, but I am a hopeless romantic and incredibly idealistic. *reenacts opening scene from The Sound of Music*