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Hydroponics was Volanz's new favorite place, but it didn't really have a lot of competition for that title. The whole ship was disturbing and weird and unpleasant. Hydroponics, though, had fake sunlight and plants and animals running all over the place. It was still very, very strange and wrong, but it was just a little bit like home. That little bit meant a great deal to him.

It had taken him a while to finally get around to the disused laboratory near the entrance to the area. He didn't know what he'd find inside, and nothing the crew had recorded gave him much information about the place. So it was that Volanz stalked into the abandoned area as if he were walking into a known trap, shield arm ready to pummel anything that might've jumped out at him.

It was dead quiet and after a few minutes of suspicious prowling around and squinting at corners yielded nothing to hit, Volanz relaxed. He clambered onto a chair that had plainly been built for someone a good deal larger and frowned at the bank of buttons and switches and sliding things in front of him. Nothing was labeled in a way that made sense. Lots of abbreviations, if there were labels at all, and he couldn't quite pick out the meanings. What were they for?

He shrugged to himself, tapped out a quick omnicomm post, and tried to decide which he was going to poke first.

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There was the sound of wings fluttering through the air, and then a brightly-feathered, medium sized parrot was sitting on top of Volanz's console, using his feet to turn a switch on and off.

"I'm the greatest wunderkind!" he said.

Volanz jumped. He jumped very very hard, and as a result he fell sideways out of the chair and crashed to the floor with an inarticulate "Aaagh!"

He scrambled upright again and stared at the bird over the rim of the small shield. Your move, scary alien.

Alan stared back at him with his beady little bird eyes. Finally, he spoke.

"Do you like space?"

"What?" Volanz stared for a second before his brain figured out that yeah that was a question. "Uh. I guess? Space is okay."

He lowered the shield. Slightly.

A moment later and Zouichi had appeared in the entrance to the room. "Alan! What are you doing?"

The parrot took off from his perch on the console, landing neatly on Zouichi's shoulder. And proceeded to stare at Volanz again.

For his part, Zouichi waved a little at Volanz in greeting. "Hi. Sorry about that; he's very curious."

The switch that Alan had been messing with made a few uncomfortable fizzing noises, but Volanz was distracted.

"Oh! So it's your featherbeast?" He stared back at the parrot. "He was actually just talking to me. Is that normal?"

"Is that what you call a bird?" Zouichi ruffled the feathers behind Alan's head affectionately. "Oh, it's normal. he's a pretty big talker nowadays. I think he likes the attention he gets from it."

He motioned to the controls. "Figured out how that thing works?"

Volanz nodded at the bird question. Huh, what a weird term. It wasn't quite descriptive enough, he felt.

He looked at the controls. "Well, not exactly," he replied. "I was only about to get started when the bird showed up." He was careful to use the humanrobot word.

Alan chewed thoughtfully on a strand of Zouichi's hair.

"Ah. Well, don't let me stop you." In fact, Zouichi was a little curious about what the controls did. Although normally, he wouldn't satisfy them by pressing all of them at once.

Unless, you know, it was an emergency. "You know, I've been in Hydroponics quite a few times, but I never found this place. I guess it makes sense with the size and all."

"I like it in here. It's..."

Volanz hesitated, and was ultimately unable to come up with an explanation on the spot. He frowned down at the buttons and switches some more and hurried onto the next statement to try to disguise the pause.

"I'm not really sure where to start with this? I suppose I could go from one side across. I don't know if it actually would make much difference."

He glanced up along the right shoulder of the bank. It seemed slightly less dead than the left.

Oh, come on. A comm post like that? If he didn't show up, then everything he stood for would be dashes. Getting to watch some other idiot pressing buttons in experimentation was like, what he existed to laugh at! It helped that he could just speed run his way over, so it wasn't long before he found the location.

He had managed to slink in quietly enough, peering around corners as if expecting this were some really clever trap on Ankh's part, before spotting the troll in the chair. But, it didn't...look familiar.

"Oh~ You're another one of those gray things!~" ...ignoring the casual racism in that statement, Cazali leaned over the top of the kid's chair, reaching out to gee-ee-eently poke the tip of one of his horns. It seemed he didn't have any damn personal space when it came to trolls.

"Troll," Volanz corrected automatically, then he felt something poke one of his horns.

Volanz's horns were connected to his head, and his head was where a variety of important things were. He ducked instinctively, giving his head a little shake.

"Don't touch!"

Shortly after his omnicom post there's a sudden unexpected breeze, and someone lands next to Volanz.

"You might not want to do that!"

What does this button do?

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