trans_9 | mr. blue sky please tell us why

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mr. blue sky please tell us why

Red was not sure which was distracting him more...The fact that this city seemed to remind him of everywhere and nowhere at once, or the fact that he was now wearing a skin-tight suit that seemed to pulsate with living veins but smelled of plants.

After the strange creature following him in the Pod Caverns had disappeared, he hadn't seen another living being. Well, unless you counted this entire city. He was certain now that it was a city. Once he emerged onto the surface, he could see the sky and this planet's star...but that still didn't answer the question of where he was. Whatever Stacy was, her exceptionally literal interpretation of questions meant that Red wasn't getting the answers he was looking for.

Hopefully when he found another being, they'd be slightly more helpful. He needed more information on this place if he was ever going to find out what being "chosen" meant, or if he was needed back at the Rebel base. He would have to be careful with any other sentients he came across, just in case they were allied with the Imperials...

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"No, I'm new here, too. I just came out of suspended animation in the pods a little while ago. You probably did, too, right?" Lacaille peered closely at him; it made sense that other 'alien' species would be brought here, if they were going to the trouble of pulling people from other universes, but this was the first time she'd seen anything sentient that wasn't human. He definitely looked reptilian, almost raptor-like--an alternate evolutionary path, maybe? Floros would probably have a better idea, but since she wasn't here...

"What are you?" She didn't sound awed, or fearful, or anything of the sort--simply curious.

Red blinked at that. Surely, everyone would know a Tiss'shar when they saw it...Or at least confuse him with a similar reptilian species. He was used to correcting people, but not to explaining outright.

"I'm a Tiss'shar. My name is Aish-Kar-Yan," he explained evenly. Wait, what had she said? "Excuse me, I don't mean to pry, but suspended animation? Isn't that a bit...obsolete?"

Being contained in a pod he could understand, being birthed out by some plant-mucus creature seemed not to phase him, but the idea of suspended animation being standardized technology made him mince from foot to foot anxiously.

He was certainly very well-spoken for a raptor, Lacaille mused.

"Not here, I don't think. I mean, where I'm from, it's not used very much, but we also use cryopreservation instead of the organic technology they have here. I don't know what mechanism they use, but I'm sure they must have some texts on it somewhere... What did they replace it with in your world? And what can you tell me about the Tiss'shar? I haven't heard of them, but we haven't figured out interstellar travel yet, so we may just not have contacted them--um, you yet." As usual, when faced with the unknown, Lacaille's first instinct was to ask it questions.

This was getting a bit convoluted. The Human knew about suspended animation and understood it wasn't a typical technology, but then she said her race hadn't figured out space travel. Yet almost every Human Universe came from a planet with ships. Red flickered his tongue out and gave his muzzle a lick as he took careful note of this.

"Ah, the Tiss'shar are much like you Humans. Though I suppose one could say we have a better business sense," He decided to leave out the bit about their natural affinity towards being assassins. If she really was ignorant of his species, that might not help his position. "But please don't confuse us with the Ssi-Ruuk. We don't have any problems with those of other species."

"And you?" Red tried to walk about Lacaille discreetly as he spoke, checking. Perhaps she was not Human, after all. "Is your planet a colony on the Outer Rim? I thought even the most remote colonies had intersteller travel, at the least."

Unless they were under some kind of Imperial garission, he thought to himself.

"Well, we're on the outer edge of the Sol system, but it's not really a planet so much as a ship, and I don't think that's what you mean anyhow..." Lacaille tried to stay facing him as he moved around her, in order to keep eye contact. "No one else in the system has done it, either, and that's all of humanity--as far as we know, anyway," she added quickly.

At that point, it clicked that he might be trying to examine her as she had him, and she stood still for a bit to let him. "Our only FTL method is impractical for long distances, since you have to get there the long way first to set up one end of the slipspace tunnel... What do you use?" she inquired eagerly, hoping that perhaps she might find some kind of hint she could bring back home with her. "And what do you mean by the Outer Rim? The galactic rim?" It was a long shot, but if they had practical interstellar travel, it might be a possibility--and remarkable if true.

He continued his circle around her...nothing unusual, aside from what she was saying. This was odd. And the Sol system? He'd never heard of that. There were only two possibilities that he could see. Either she was insane, or she was telling the truth.

And she seemed awfully coherant for a loony.

"Yes, well, the Outer Rim territories is very near the border to wild space. In theory it's the galactic rim, although not all worlds are exactly on the Rim itself. You live on a world-ship then?" He hoped not. That would cement the alliances of her people, wherever they originated from. "Our ships use hyperspace. Are you saying you travel everywhere at sublight speed? That...that would take centuries."

So they really were capable of interstellar travel at that range. She knew the term "hyperspace"--it used to be a general word for the then-theoretical construct that was now termed "slipspace"--but for all she knew, it could be something entirely different than what she was familiar with. If she could just get a bit more information...

"Not a world-ship, just a regular ship. Well, three, technically... But we're a separate settlement. Everyone else lives on pre-existing astronomical objects. Planets, mostly," she added for clarification. "We don't go everywhere at sublight, we just use it for short-range travel. We use slipspace to travel at superluminal speeds, but we can only traverse it through tunnels with a Gate at either end, and since we can't reach any significant fraction of c with normal methods of propulsion, we can't reach anywhere outside the system to build one. Not without a generation ship and a few centuries..."

She seemed lost in thought for a second before shaking it off. "How does your hyperspace work? It sounds like you can enter and exit it at will. And what kind of propulsion do you use in normal space?"

Red paused, now in front of her again. He lowered his head and tail, shifting from foot to foot. A gesture of confusion and ambigiousness for Tiss'shar...much less so for other species. It looked like he was doing some sort of odd dance.

"Unfortunately I'm no scientist or engineer myself. Not even a pilot, really. Much like a landspeeder, I don't ask how it works, I simply use it." He blinked a nictating eyelid and turned his head sideways to gaze at her. He got the feeling she WAS the type who asked how it worked.

"I do know this much... Most ships use an ion drive to travel outside of hyperspace. I imagine perhaps ions are split in order to get a ship up to speed, but, again-" That odd alien form of a shrug repeated itself. "I am hardly knowledgable in that area. I do know that one cannot simply strap a hyperdrive to another ship and expect less than messy results. If it were matters of security tech, perhaps I could help you. But I believe you may have a better understanding of that subject matter than I."

Red resumed his normal posture, clicking his jaw curiously. "A small section of Humans who have yet perfected a long-distance interstellar travel...That may explain why you haven't reached other species yet. So," He gazed up at the sky above. Still daylight. "Is this world near yours, then?"

Ion drives? Practical for interplanetary travel, Lacaille recalled, but they'd fallen out of use once slipspace had been discovered and all they needed normal propulsion for was relatively short jaunts. Certainly made sense, though. Shame she couldn't get more information about these hyperspace drives, but not everyone was a scientist, after all.

"I don't know yet--there was a flash, and I woke up here." She paused, musing on a possibility that had struck her. "The intelligence from the pod caverns mentioned an observation deck... If there's stellar observation equipment up there, and if we're in the Milky Way Galaxy, I may be able to triangulate our position from the stars visible from there. The calculations would take some time... and it would only work if we have a relatively stable point of reference..."

Red swung his tail and thought this over. He was lucky to have fallen in with a Human who knew her way around interstellar sciences, he realized. But he still didn't know her alliances...He would have to find a way to discreetly weedle that information out of her later.

"A flash. Hmm. That's similar to what I remember." The nictating lid slid over his eyes again, slower this time. He was thinking. "I'm beginning to believe we may have been kidnapped. Have you, tsss, 'met' Stacy?"

He pointed his snout over her shoulder, sniffing at the air. A lack of any wind made it hard to detect any scents, though. "We may need her help if we want to find this Observation deck. But you have a sound plan. Perhaps we will be lucky, and our location relevent to the Core worlds will even be recorded and noted."

"Oh, was that its name?" Terrible memory for these things aside, Lacaille had had other things on her mind at the time, admittedly, though she didn't have that particular excuse for unconsciously shunting it back into her mental recycle bin now.

Oh, well.

"There ought to be some way to contact it here, or at least something else that can help us." She pondered this for a moment. "It has shown some kind of psionic abilities, so it could be observing us now, in which case it would just be a matter of asking..."

Red nodded - a very awkward movement with his head and jaw, it instead looked like he was teetering his muzzle up and down spasticly. But she was a Human, and he would do his best to use their gestures. There were so many little nuances to interspecies communication.

"I believe she may be a telepath, and possibly in a position of power. She previously assured me that no harm would come to-" He paused, about to refer to himself, but then realized Stacy might not have made the same promise to her. "...us. That implies she has some kind of regular observation of us, and is perhaps in a position of power in this city. But..." He exhaled sharply through his snout, puzzled. "She sounded like a female to me. Did she not sound feminine to you?"

"I didn't want to make assumptions," Lacaille admitted with a hint of sheepishness. "Secondary sexual characteristics might not be the same across all species, right?" She rocked back on her heels a bit, looking up at the sky. "You know, come to think of it, the transport tubes ought to be able to take us to the deck, right?"

A long series of pleased-sounding clicks eminated from Red's throat. Another Tiss'shar would have recognized it as a chuckle. "You're right. But where I come from, a name like 'Stacy' is indicative of a female in most Core Worlds species."

He followed her gaze skyward. Nothing but clouds and that sun... "In theory. If the deck is within city limits, and not mounted inside some sort of ship. But in that case, the transport tubes might at least take us close."

Red liked this Human. She analyzed situations and didn't seem to leap to conclusions. He was lucky to have found her.

"It sounded like it was part of the same facility. Either way, we'll find out in a moment, right?" Lacaille added, cheerful at the prospect of further exploration, and a potential problem to solve while she was at it. "We should try to get-- oh! I almost forgot something."

She half-turned to look over her shoulder and called out, "Haro!" After a brief pause, a small purple ball half-bounced, half-rolled up to her feet from behind a nearby building and seemed to blink up at her, its eye-like lights flickering briefly; she scooped it up with a smile and tucked it under one arm. "Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, we ought to get its attention so we can be sure of where we're going..."

Red drew back a moment as the peculiar ball object bounded/rolled up to Lacaille. He'd never seen this before...It seemed like a companion, but you never could tell. He leaned in close to examine it in her hands, sniffing the air gently. "Your droid?"

Then, bringing himself back to full height, he looked over his shoulders. "Yes...tsss. She did say she would be watching. Maybe if we addressed her, er, directly?" He let out a rasping bark of a cough, trying to clear his throat. "Stacy? Are you there? We would like to go to the Observation Deck."

He looked the same way he felt, addressing the otherwise empty city. Extremely awkward.

||Please return to the Hub.|| Stacy answered. ||You may proceed to the Observation Deck from there.||

A pause.

||Do you require assistance locating the Hub?||

Red clicked his jaws together in satisfaction, doing a slight hop from claw to claw. "At least she is attentive. And helpful, in her own fashion."

He rolled the nictating membrane over his eyes and held it there. At least he felt a LITTLE less foolish when miming some form of communication than in speaking to empty air. "Yes, please, Stacy. I fear we haven't yet got our bearings on this planet."

There were no rows of pustules in the City, so Stacy began by instructing them to turn to Red's left and proceed towards the corner of the building that they were standing beside. This movement was to be followed by a turn to the right, and then they were to proceed thirty-two point seven eight feet before taking another left, and so on, culminating in their arrival at the Hub.

||I will repeat instructions should you become lost.|| she added.

"A 'droid'? It is a robot, but it's not really humanoid enough to call an android..."

Lacaille fell silent for the moment while Red spoke to Stacy, still a little disconcerted by the method of communication it used; it wasn't the fact of its existence that bothered her quite so much as that it still felt strange having thoughts broadcast into her mind.

Only when it had finished giving the directions did she speak up again. "I don't think we will, but thank you." With a quick look over at Red, she started off, setting Haro down so it could bounce-flutter along behind her. She followed the directions quite precisely, even cutting her long stride short a few times to conform strictly to the distances given by Stacy.

"Isn't this place amazing?" she said, smiling broadly as she walked. "I've never even imagined anything like most of this technology--even these clothes are just... leaps and bounds from anything we have, let alone its dimension-crossing capabilities--well, that's just a theory of mine right now," she clarified quickly, "but it's what the evidence so far seems to point to."

The Tiss'shar watched the little droid bounce along behind Lacaille as they walked. He was interested in it more than however amazing the world was. A droid, but not a droid? What was its function? He attempted to hide his distraction and focused on resuming the conversation. He hoped she had not noticed his momentary lapse of attention.

"Dimension crossing capabilities? What leads you to that conclusion? While I agree that the technology here is, tsss, unusual compared to the norm, I can't bring myself to call it amazing." Weird, yes. Interesting, yes. But amazing was the kind of word Red tended to reserve for something that didn't involve gooey foul tasting plants clinging to his scales.

"I met someone else here who claimed to be from Earth--that's our homeworld--well, not mine, but my species's..." Realizing she was starting to ramble, she moved on. "The strange thing about it was that he's apparently from about five hundred years in my past. Almost all of the historical details matched up, but... he and people he knows are able to do things that are..." She stopped just short of saying 'impossible'. "... extremely unlikely in my world. Unassisted flight, time travel--things that break all our known laws of physics."

She grinned, seeming to be thoroughly enjoying the role of exposition-giver. "So, by Occam's Razor and the fact that the many-worlds theories have not been disproven, I think it's safe to assume in the absence of further evidence that we're dealing with multiple realities." Suddenly, she halted almost in mid-step, looking thoughtful. "Do you think it might know?" she mused, nodding upwards in a gesture intended to indicate Stacy.

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mr. blue sky please tell us why

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