“Replacing the armor is outside of our current budget…the best we can probably manage is replacing the ruined section near the elevator,” Aoibhe said, eyes focused on the grimoire in her hand. Both she and Miliam were staring down the price breakdown they were sent by the mechanic they’d spoken to as they tried to decide which repairs to prioritize. It had been a couple of days since they’d spoken to Abigail and they had put it off about as long as they could, since they’d be making the official sale soon.
“The quote is for mithril and adamantite composites, though, right? What if we just…got some kind of non-magical alloy?” Miliam asked, thinking it might be something of a cultural blind spot. In Earth’s early space age, materials like aluminum and various composites had been used for the outer shells of shuttles, and although they hadn’t always worked perfectly, they might be an acceptable short-term alternative.
“That…might be doable, actually,” Aoibhe agreed, looking something up on her grimoire in response. “Aye…as long as we get the barriers fixed it should be safe enough. Won’t be stopping any railguns or lances, but it should hold up against space debris.”
“I think if we’re needing to survive those in a ship this small we’ve probably fucked up somewhere along the line anyway…”
“Aye, we can probably leave the point defenses alone in favor of upgrading some of the secondary systems, too, for that matter. What are the odds of me running into pirates a fourth time, right?” Aoibhe asked, oblivious to the look of exasperation she was getting from Miliam’s side of the table. Miliam sighed heavily before replying.
“Now that you’ve said that, 100%. We are without a doubt seeing pirates the first time we go anywhere. Nope, I’m invoking captain’s privilege on this one, point defenses are now priority one,” she declared, wondering how anyone could be so lacking in genre savviness even hundreds of years in the future. Then again, she still wasn’t quite sure what genre she was in, so maybe that was fair.
“What in the galaxy are you on about? Nothing I say can affect probability,” Aoibhe retorted sourly, popping a pretzel into her mouth halfway through. Miliam didn’t comment on her talking with her mouthful but she definitely had some thoughts.
“Too late, decision’s made. Uh, what’s next, life support? Pretty sure he said that was dying.”
“Aye, assumed that one was a given. And we’ll need to have new orichalcum conduits run for both the barriers and point defenses if you’re so set on it.”
“Oof, that’s pricey. I don’t think we have much of a choice there though…what about the lance and the missile launcher?” Miliam asked, glancing up to see Aoibhe’s response. This time Aoibhe waited until she finished chewing, which made Miliam wonder if she was a mind reader.
“Too expensive. The launcher doesn’t look like it costs us much, but we have to figure in ammunition, and you don’t skimp on counter missiles. And one lance won’t help us much anyway; smarter to run rely on point defenses and the barriers.” Aoibhe punctuated the explanation by leaning her chair back and propping her feet on the table as she scrolled down the list. Miliam couldn’t help but notice how weird it looked given the tall woman’s distance from the table.
“I’m assuming you definitely want the controls reverted to human standards?” Miliam hadn’t been on the bridge much, but she remembered the switches being an absolute forest to search through.
“Aye, and it’s one of the cheaper things on the list, anyway. Thrusters are…optional, but recommend we upgrade them. The newer ones will be more fuel efficient, so we’ll save in the long term.”
“Sounds good.” Miliam tallied up the numbers in her head roughly and searched for anything else they could afford. “I think that rules out the sensors, comms, mana furnace, and reactor upgrades…but isn’t that last one kind of important?”
“Nay, we can get by with a tune-up for that. If we find a good enough engineer we might not even need to pay the mechanic. Might be a bit of a longshot, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Anyone that wants to work on this thing is unhireable anywhere else like me,” Aoibhe explained succinctly, and Miliam couldn’t blame anyone for staying away, considering the shape the vessel was in.
“Right…well, that leaves water reclamation, wards, whatever those are, the elevator, fail-safes, and miscellaneous repairs. Fail-safes sound important,” Miliam said, eager to move on from the previous topic.
“Aye, and I think that’s the last thing we can afford. We should keep a bit set aside for resupplying plus sign-on bonuses and wages.”
“Oh, I didn’t think about that. Good idea. Okay, so that means the list of repairs is going to be…plating, point defenses, barriers, life support, controls, thrusters, and the fail-safes. Did I miss anything?” Aoibhe took a moment to strike through the repairs they would be getting now and looked over the remainder.
“Just the reactor tune-up, but we can decide on that after we interview crew candidates. It won’t require being in dry-dock anyway,” Aoibhe said as she returned her chair to normal and stood. She made a few motions on her grimoire as she switched gears. “Alright, I’ll take that list to the mechanics once we have the money. We should get ready for the interviews now. I tried to weed out the worst ones but…well, just brace yourself.”
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Miliam and Aoibhe sat around a low and broad crate substituting for a table in the cargo bay. Miliam had an actual chair, but Aoibhe had just sat herself down on a particularly tall crate. The table was mostly for the aesthetic, as they didn’t actually have anything to put on it. A final crate sat on the opposite side for their interview candidates to use.
They had opted to use the cargo bay because the ship lacked a real meeting room and the galley shared a floor with all the sensitive sections of the ship. There wasn’t much damage anyone could do right now, with the ship in its current state, but given the quality of recruit they were faced with, it seemed a prudent precaution.
“Our first guy is…Seshay Sushin. Sahagin. Engineer,” Aoibhe read out as she sent the man a message indicating he could enter. The only door on this deck that wasn’t sealed and locked was the cargo bay, so it wasn’t long before he came in. The sahagin was obscured by a bulky, featureless pressure suit, favored by sahagin that weren’t willing to go through the extensive conditioning needed to live in surface pressures. Miliam had looked up what their appearance under the suits and, well, all she had to say on the matter was that anglerfish could have done without the competition.
The sea-dweller looked around awkwardly before timidly taking a seat on the crate they had offered. Miliam had thought it was quite sturdy, but its top bent inwards a bit under the man’s weight.
“So…Seshay. My first question would be, why would you even want to serve on this ship instead of a sahagin vessel?” Aoibhe asked, cutting directly to the heart of the matter. Sahagin ships were both flooded and pressurized; working on a ship like this would mean living inside his suit.
“I am…scared of deep water,” the fish-man admitted, earning him a look of disbelief from Miliam.
“…isn’t that like being afraid of air?” she whispered to Aoibhe, confused.
“Closer to agoraphobia, I think, but sahagin ships do usually have a few multi-deck rooms that could trip him up,” Aoibhe explained before turning back to him. “You’re aware we don’t have accommodations for sahagin, right? You would be confined to the suit while onboard.”
The long pause that followed told both women he had not, in fact, considered this.
“I am…skilled engineer,” he said, pretending the question hadn’t been asked.
“With the suit on?” Miliam asked, observing the mitten-like gloves he wore due to his webbed fingers.
“I am very dexterous,” he answered, again dodging a question.
“With the suit on, right?”
When he didn’t answer, Aoibhe asked him to tell the next candidate to show themselves in.
Unfortunately, there were many candidates like Seshay on offer today. Examples included an arrogant harpy that pretended to be a sensor tech only to ask for Aoibhe’s job, a drunken centaur, a gnome that insisted he was in fact a leprechaun (which Aoibhe confirmed do not exist), and even a human that Aoibhe eventually realized was making things up to pretend he was a qualified comms officer.
By those standards, their next candidate wasn’t actually better, but he was more memorable if nothing else. In walked the first carillion Miliam had seen in the flesh, finally answering a question she hadn’t actually cared enough about to look up: what their mystery appendage was that necessitated the extra cavity in their space suits.
His eyes were wideset and huge compared to his head, reminding Miliam of a featherless ostrich with a flattened face like a primate. The carillion’s skin was clammy and tinged green, and he had an impossible thin waist with a normal sized chest, almost as if an anime girl had come to life. Miliam didn’t need to be told to understand the extra body part contained the organs that didn’t fit inside his torso; it was similar to a wasp’s abdomen in that it connected by a thin petiole, although it was shelled in a manner closer to a snail’s shell.
When he sat down, the shell folded up between his legs; the seats on the bridge must have been built to accommodate this, as he was forced to sit a bit forward on the crate.
“So, Mr…Ute? You’d like to work as our weapons officer?” Aoibhe asked when he was seated.
“Yes. I hit things,” he said simply, confusing both women.
“We don’t…need you to hit things, we need you to operate the weapons,” Miliam said, wondering if he thought he was supposed to be some form of security.
“I…throw things?” he asked, looking at each woman at once by moving his eyes separately. Miliam shivered at the image.
“We’re not hiring bouncers,” Aoibhe said with a sigh, realizing quickly that the man didn’t even understand the job title. She went ahead and dismissed him at that point, groaning loudly after he left. “I knew they’d be bad, but that was on another level.”
“Was that normal? For a carillion?”
“Nay, but that man is not fit to serve on a starship. Moving on…looks like we have a bit of time before the next applicants get here, so I guess we can take a bit of a break.”
“How many are left?”
“I think we’re about halfway. Hopefully we get at least someone competent. Not holding out much hope, but next is a pair of twins, so maybe we’ll at least get some fresh weirdness.
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Codex Entry: Carillions:
Carillions are a species best know for their worst trait: xenophobia. A prey species, carillions developed a stronger tribal mentality than many other sapients, which, once they developed tools, led to a history bathed in strife. Uniquely, from the time they first developed city-states to the time they left their homeworld, there was not a single year in which they were not at war.
Unification was achieved only through the complete annihilation of every other cultural group on the planet. Today carillions are know to almost always possess the same black and white whorl pattern on their shells, but other patterns are attested to in historical records. None survive today. This was not a simple matter of ethnic purging or genocide like most species have unfortunately attempted in their histories; these other carillion groups hated the surviving group, and each other, so much that they fought to the last rather than ever entertaining the idea of peace, determined to be the only form of carillion allowed to exist.
Within their in-groups, however, carillions are extremely communal. They are known to trend psychologically towards equity, strong social networks, and support for the weak and infirm- but only for those they consider like them, although this definition seems to be somewhat static, as no new 'out groups' have been designated since their final war. This allowed the carillions, once they had finished fighting each other, to rapidly advance technologically in non-military fields, culminating in an unprecedentedly fast leap from their nuclear age to their interstellar age.
As a people, carillions do for the most part retain this xenophobia in the modern day, but space travel has allowed for the creation of a significant expat community that, technically speaking, suffer from a mental illness that reduces their natural xenophobia. This trait is genetic, and since only those that possess it are inclined to leave carillion space, it is ironically the case that most people will only ever meet carillions that are not xenophobic. Most information on the state of the carillion interstellar nation comes from fresh expats, as baseline carillions refuse all diplomatic contact and trade.