trans_9 | The King Is Back, Long Live The King

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The King Is Back, Long Live The King

Grif was back, and he was back with a vengeance.

Or at least, he was lounging on the Obs Deck. It was kind of difficult to pick up the vengeance with which he was doing this, but he was almost making a point out of it.

Grif was on a couch, chilling, and any ceiling voices that had a problem with that could go...

go...

go do something that was insulting to ceiling voice computers with psychological problems, anyway.

Congrats, crew, one (or the only) of your (least?) favorite pieces of orange-armored furniture has returned from the test chambers. Rejoice! (Or not.)

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"That seems unwise, to create a machine that can think and act independently." She frowned, glancing at the ceiling automatically. "Stacy as well?"

The look on her face implied something similar, though it was hard to read the expression. "Not quite like that, no. But we...have...or had, something to that effect. I am sorry you were forced to do battle if you did not wish it. What would you have been, if not a solider?"

She had taken to watching the line of his shoulders, judging his reactions based on muscle tension beneath the protection of the suit. He was guarded, and she had to wonder why. "It is a good place. I keep finding myself returning to it, and if there is nothing else to be done, then time enjoyed is not time wasted. My siblings and I are often busy with very meaningless things, but I would not trade them."

"Stacy's not as bad as GLaDOS but like... she's crazy too. Sometimes she's nice but other times she's psycho. GLaDOS is at least psycho all the time so you know what you're dealing with. And for the record, yeah. It's always a bad idea. I've never met one that wasn't at least part crazy." Grif winced inside his helmet at the memory of Omega, the first AI he'd really interacted with. That megalomaniac had pretty much set the tone for all the other intelligent computers he'd encountered.

...Wait. Was a draconian just now telling Grif she was sorry that he was forced to go to war?

Maybe not all of them were crazy or Kang. There was hope for this species yet!

And that was a good question, really. Grif was, in perfect honesty, not entirely sure. "Well," he hesitated, considering. "I'm not sure. I kinda just... wanted to get a job someplace to help support my family and stuff and to help take care of my little sister since Mom ran off." He raised and lowered one shoulder, another motion that looked kind of odd in such a bulky suit.

Nobody had asked him that question in a long time, and if they had he hadn't bothered to try to give a serious answer. But... well, this was a kid. And so far she was a draconian, which was kinda a bad start, but she had been pretty decent so far. You didn't just be an asshole to a decent kid if they didn't do something to you first. He'd lied to the kid with the horns before, but that was different. That had been a joke, a prank like you were supposed to pull on kids. (Right?) This was serious.

Grif relaxed. Whoever this kid was, she was officially alright in his book. Whoever was alright with him hanging out up here and didn't want to fight him over it for being a lazy bum or whatever was cool.

"I mean, I kinda wish I did have something useful to do? But..." another shrug. "I don't know why the ship woke me up. There's lots of people who are better at fighting and stuff than I am. Big whup. Why keep me awake, right?"

"It seems like there is a predisposition for insanity here." She sighed, wishing again for her father. It would certainly make the entire situation make more sense. At the moment she simply felt adrift without a purpose.

"Not everyone is meant for war. I am certian if you are awake, then the ship has another purpose in mind for you. As you said, the healers are very good here, and healers very rarely go to war. There are many tasks to be found on a ship this size, if you have a care to look for them. Every army has need of non-soldiers to do the tasks they have no time to do." She smiled, drifting closer. "The fact that you have training as a solider might even be useful in a different ways, as well."

Loyalty to family she understood, though he would not know that bringing up his sister would further endear him to her. "I have a sister as well, and two brothers. I think they must still be sleeping. My mother as well. Your sister must be as well, even if we cannot fight, we must work to make certian that their rest is not interrupted before they are ready to wake."

Grif nodded. "This whole place is crazy. So are a lot of the people," he agreed. Of course, not that he was implying anything about his own sanity.

"Well," said Grif, backpedaling a little. "I don't know, don't you need to like... be a doctor to do doctor things? You don't want a guy who doesn't know what he's doing putting your liver back together or whatever." He was zeroing in on that perhaps a little too specifically. Grif didn't really have much formal training in anything aside from soldiering, and he'd managed (more by dint of stubbornness and rebellion than anything else) to sleep through half of that.

"I mean, I can shoot and I can drive but there's no way in hell I'm running out in the middle of something to punch aliens in the face."

He was quiet on the subject of his family. Grif didn't like to worry about them too much, his feelings there were a little mixed. He was angry with his mom for running off and joining the circus, angry with his dad for never being there, and angry with his little sister for defying absolutely every attempt he made to actually protect her.

He just hoped they were in those pods, and that none of them planned on showing up on the obs deck at a release any time soon.

"I did not mean that you should become one, just that there are tasks that do not require fighting. Some make nets, others fish." She barely blinked at his flailing, calm and composed and smiling very faintly. "Perhaps you can drive for the medics? I am sure that you will think of something, if you grow tired of idleness. But you have been injured and there seems not great rush to activity on this ship."

Which was strange in its own way, she had been a child of constant activity, in any given day they were still only a handful of hours, and many of those were spent sleeping.

She missed them, they would have made this much more bearable. To know that her father was here was a comfort, but a father who would soon return did not match the comfort of her brothers and sister watching her back as she watched theirs.

He sighed and leaned back into the meat couch again.

"I guess I could do that," he said, thinking aloud. "It's not like we got much use for wheels on the boat but I could. My problem right now is I got people like Kang on my ass trying to make me into a murder machine or something. I mean, not that it would be bad to be able to kill stuff but the whole way that's panning out is just not working for me."

Grif then realized he'd mentioned Kang. He had no idea how this kid would react to that name.
Um. Oops.
Just keep going Grif, be cool.

"Besides. I shoot at things, not hit them with swords. I am just that kind of guy."

So, he knew her father. But not in a positive light, that was...interesting. Her father had been trying to forcefully form him into something more useful, and it appeared that Grif was resistant to that sort of method. Like trying to make Yana or Brevo do anything, either you dug in for the war, or you worked around them and made them belive that they wanted to do as you wanted them to do.

Kali settled on one of the meat couches, wings relaxed to either side of her body, still smiling and watching him curiously. "Not everyone is meant for battle, you obviously have no love of it. But we are on a war ship, everyone should be able to defend themselves, I think. I would rather cause no more weight to the crew than I can help, do you not feel the same? If you do not wish to use a sword, I could show you how to fight with your hands. I am sure that would satisfy the Lord-Governor." She smiled. "But, since I came on the ship, I have heard of some sort of flying ships. Could you learn to drive those? I am sure that most warriors would rather not, but it seems like a good place, and transportation is a very useful thing."

"The thing is? You don't need to fight if nobody gets close to you. That's what the shooting's for," Grif explained. Well, he supposed that was technically fighting, but that was just details. "That's why you never take a knife to a gun fight."

Though really Grif had gotten into an argument about this before and concluded that it was a good idea, because nobody would expect that, you just needed to have a gun too. This was the kind of discussion you ended up having on the roof during guard duty with nothing else to do.

"And there's a difference between ground vehicles and like... ships and stuff. I don't know. I've never done that before," he said, thinking. Really, he wasn't sure about heights. If you gave him a warthog jeep he could make the sucker tapdance, but flying things? That involved like... up and down.

Up and down would be new.

Grif himself was calm by this point, just talking. It was a conversation, not a fight, and it was all good in his book. He was talking to a draconian kid thing, which was weird, but all things considered that wasn't as bad as it could be.

"Of course. But you never leave the knife at home, either. I am an archer. I prefer being far away, watching the backs of those that want to brawl, but that does not mean I cannot fight with a knife or my hands, if it comes to that. It is important to know how, even if you never use it."

She nodded, obviously not entirely understanding. She had only been here a few days, and still some of the concepts caused more confusion than they managed to explain. But she was making a valiant attempt to understand. "I still have not managed to completely grasp the concept of the technology of the ship, it is far different from anything I have encountered before. But I have always wanted to fly. I doubt very much that the ships are made for Draconian hands. It would be exciting, I think. To fly."

Grif was reluctant to admit he was losing ground here, so he opted to slide the topic over off of combat training to flight. He felt better equipped for that discussion, and less like he might be talked into something he'd regret.

"Flying's okay, as long as you don't get airsick." He shrugged. "We're kind of flying right now I think."

"Which you obviously do not, if we are in fact flying right now. It might be fun to learn. Who could scold you for anything if you had your own wings and were capable of flying away?"

She smiled, wishing she could learn as well. But she doubted she could even manage the land transports that Grif was able to operate. Much less something that needed to fly. That was disappointing, she wished so much to fly.

"Well," he said, "anybody who could catch you, for starters. And around here I think that's actually a lot of people, plus the ship. You could get shot at, too. Flying stuff gets shot down all the time. That's kinda the bad part about it."

He shrugged. "Where I'm from, like... we have aircraft and so do the aliens, so it all evens out."

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The King Is Back, Long Live The King

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