“Remember: do not call them ‘Korean goblins.’ It’s a slur and it will get you punched,” Aoibhe said as she sent the twins a message inviting them inside. Miliam just gave her an odd look.
“Why on Earth would I even do that?”
“It’s a mythology thing, don’t worry about it,” Aoibhe said, brushing the matter aside. They didn’t really have time for a full explanation anyway, as moments later a pair of women walked through the door, looking around nervously.
They were short and vaguely Korean-looking, but that was where the similarities to humans ended. The twins were taller than Abigail only by virtue of the black horns emerging from their temples, curving outward slightly before turning straight up. Their skin had a slight blue-green tinge to it, and their ears were small but dagger-shaped. Miliam wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart were it not for their coats, which were purple and green respectively.
“Go ahead and take a seat,” Aoibhe instructed them, and they sat hesitantly at nearly the same moment. “I have your names, but I don’t know who is who, so could you introduce yourselves?”
“I’m Eun-Ji,” said the woman in purple.
“I’m Min-Ji,” said the woman in green.
“Thanks. So, you two are wanting to apply for the sensor and comm officer positions, right?”
“”Yes!”” they confirmed at the same time, glancing at each other in embarrassment a moment later. It clearly hadn’t been on purpose, and Miliam thought the resulting bashfulness was kind of adorable.
“Who’s applying for which job?” Miliam asked, mostly just to be included in the conversation.
“Well…” Eun-Ji began, “technically I’m qualified on sensors and my sister is qualified on comms.”
“What does that mean?” Aoibhe asked, brow furrowed. Miliam could tell she was already about ready to check out of this interview after their string of bad applicants.
“Our parents made us take different courses, but we didn’t want to. So we swapped places every day and studied together to keep up with both courses,” Min-Ji clarified, with Eun-Ji nodding in agreement. If that were true, it meant they had effectively double-majored whatever courses qualified them for those positions- Miliam had no idea if that was a college degree, a technical program, or officer training, but it would probably be impressive regardless.
“Huh,” Aoibhe grunted, not having expected that answer. “That would make you both wildly overqualified for this dinky little ship. Why in the galaxy would you want to work on a bucket like this and not for a major company?”
“Well, ah, you see, our parents are now pushing us to get married…which would mean being separated,” Min-Ji explained, though even Miliam could see it wasn’t a complete explanation.
“That doesn’t actually answer my question,” Aoibhe pointed out, frowning slightly and shifting in her seat to cross her arms.
“Our family has a lot of connections. They own one of the major shipbuilders. Anyone that wants access to their yards would fire us on the spot, even if we were hired.”
So, they were heiresses, then. Except their parents wanted to marry them off. So, either they wanted to bring someone else in to manage the company, or they wanted to forge some kind of corporate alliance. Was that old fashioned, now, or still in-vogue as always?
“Wait, if we hire them, would we be in trouble?” Miliam asked Aoibhe, shifting her gaze away from the twins. Aoibhe thought for a moment before giving an answer.
“Nay, I don’t think so. Even if they wanted to put some kind of bounty on us, or them, there’s no way they could spread the news throughout the GC without getting the wrong kind of attention. They would either need to risk federal attention or keep it so low key it would be almost impossible to track us.”
“Could they stop us from getting work?”
“Only if they knew what ship their daughters were on,” Aoibhe answered, glancing back at the twins, who were watching the discussion nervously. “Even then we’re probably changing the name while it’s in dry dock, and the hull is getting a work over, so it’s not going to look the same either.”
“We’re pretty sure we lost our guards all the way back in Sol,” Eun-Ji was quick to assure her.
“We changed ships in every system and were hiding our faces until we boarded this ship,” added Min-Ji.
“Aye, and how did you handle payment? That’s all pointless if you used accounts linked to them,” Aoibhe asked, leaning forward. The twins leaned away in reply; even Miliam could find her intimidating at times, so she could only imagine what the tiny girls across the table were feeling.
“”Prepaid cards!”” they answered in unison to Aoibhe’s satisfaction. After a moment of silent conversation between the two, Min-Ji continued. “We bought them in Sol, right before we boarded a ship that was just about to leave.”
“It’s still risky-” Aoibhe began to tell Miliam, only to stop and sigh. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration. “Fine, fine, you can put away the puppy-dog eyes. I’ll give them a test and if they can do the job I won’t argue if you want to hire them,” she said while looking away. Miliam learned two things right then: Aoibhe was weak to puppy-dog eyes, and she could do them in the first place.
It hadn’t been on purpose but she was going to take the win.
“”Really!? Thank you!”” the twins yelled in celebration, syncing up once again before flushing with embarrassment. Silently, Miliam prayed that wasn’t something they only did when they were stressed, because it was kind of delightful to watch.
“Don’t thank me yet, I’m going to have to run through a few things on the bridge first.” Aoibhe slapped her knees with her hands as she stood, beckoning for the two young women to follow her. Before she left, though, she reached behind her crate and retrieved some kind of component. “Miliam, think you can handle one by yourself? The next one should be our last engineer candidate. Just tell them to fix and reinstall this thing. I was going to use it as a test but the other guys were too full of shit to bother.”
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“Uh…what even is it?” Miliam asked as she took the part. It was…metal and a bit greebly. That was literally all she could figure out by looking at it.
“Don’t worry about it. If you don’t even know it’ll be a better test,” Aoibhe told her with a smirk before taking the twins for their test. Miliam sat there for a few moments before realizing she needed to call the next person in herself since Aoibhe wasn’t there, but since she forgot to actually ask how the fay woman was doing it, she’d have to go to the airlock and invite them in herself.
Miliam hopped up and jogged over to the airlock, punching the button she’d seen Aoibhe use to cycle it several times already. The door behind her slid shut and the outer door opened a moment later to reveal a diminutive reptilian waiting silently. This was the smallest person she’d met so far at less than four feet tall from head to toe, although they had a large pair of tattered wings folded up behind them adding to their size. The being’s scales had a teal base with darker blue spotting and a bit of a gradient from light to dark going from head to tail tip.
“Are you the engineer applicant?” Miliam asked after a moment. The winged lizard blinked at her slowly.
“I am. Engineer.” That was all they said for confirmation, but figuring that was as much as she was going to get, she invited them inside. When they were both seated in the cargo hold, Miliam thought about what to ask next.
“So…first, can I get your name?” she asked, before hurriedly adding “And pronouns?” after realizing she couldn’t tell and the name was unlikely to tell her a whole lot.
“Engineer. Am. Engineer,” they answered haltingly. Miliam wondered if their translation charm was malfunctioning or if they lacked one and were merely answering with what little English they knew.
“No name? You just want to be called Engineer?” A nod. “That might get a bit confusing. Would you also accept they/them?” Another nod. “Uh, cool. So.” Miliam stopped and tried to figure out if she had any other professional sounding questions but quickly gave up and just grabbed the part. “Can you fix this?”
“Mm,” Engineer grunted, taking the component. “Capacitor failsafe.” They began to open the part up with practiced motions, using a claw in place of a screwdriver with precision. In moments the outer casing was on the table, and Engineer was shifting the innards in its hand in search of the issue.
After a careful examination, they reached into their lizard-shaped jumpsuit and pulled out a strangely shaped tool with a magnifying glass on the hand. Engineer peered through the glass at something before nodding and Miliam realized the tool was a grimoire shaped for their clawed fingers when they began to several spells upon the part in succession, then reassembled the part.
“Is done,” they said simply, offering the part. Not knowing anything about the component, Miliam moved onto the next thing Aoibhe had mentioned instead.
“Do you know how to install that?” A nod. “Uh, right. I’ll show you to the engineering room and we’ll see if you can reinstall it, if that’s okay?”
Miliam took Engineer to the middle deck in an awkward silence, glancing briefly towards the bridge where Aoibhe was giving instructions to the twins still. Engineer spotted the engineering room quickly and tottered off ahead of Miliam in their inhuman gait, tail swaying as a counterbalance as they walked.
Engineer didn’t even need to ask where the component they held went, which was good, because Miliam hadn’t the faintest idea. They simply ran their eyes over the room until they spotted the compartment Aoibhe had taken the part from, which had been left open, and it was in place before she could even catch up.
“Huh. That was…fast,” she said lamely, wondering what Aoibhe would have wanted her to do next. While she was technically the captain, a few days of reading elementary level textbooks and looking things up on the intranet had not been enough for Miliam to really find her feet here. Luckily for her, she only had to stand there awkwardly for a measly four minutes before Aoibhe showed up.
“Already done? The twins checked out, so I told them we’d give them a call when the ship is out of dry dock,” Aoibhe told Miliam, walking over to check Engineer’s work. After running some diagnostics she smiled. “Looks like it’s working good as new. A lot better than I was expecting, even.”
“Am good. Engineer,” the reptilian said proudly.
“Did you have anything to ask? I didn’t really know what to ask them,” Miliam admitted.
“Nay, this practical test tells me that they have a grasp of repair spells, which was the most important thing. We don’t have time for anything more time consuming, since we still have a few interviews before the handover with Abigail and taking the ship to dry dock.” Aoibhe went over a few details about compensation and when Engineer could board the ship, then saw them off while Miliam returned to the cargo bay.
“Didn’t want to say anything in front of them, but we should probably keep taking applicants until the last second,” Aoibhe said as she joined Miliam, sitting down with a sigh.
“What? Why? I thought you said Engineer did well?”
“Aye, but didn’t you wonder why they wouldn’t give you a name? That dragonewt is an exile,” the fay explained seriously, saying it as though the meaning should be obvious.
“And that means…?”
“Doesn’t happen a whole lot these days, but traditionally dragonewt clans will exile their worst criminals and strip them of their name and wings.”
“But Engineer had wings,” Miliam argued, remembering them clearly. They were kind of big and obvious.
“They don’t amputate the whole wing, just the membranes. Dragonewts tattoo their wing membranes with clan markings when they come of age, so mutilating their membranes tells other dragonewts they’re clanless at a glance. Healing magic can repair their wings, so if they didn’t go to a healer…” She shrugged, letting Miliam fill in the rest herself.
“If it’s so easy to heal what’s stopping exiles from just doing that?”
“That’s part of the reason it’s fallen out of favor. The only reason I’m giving Engineer a chance is that they didn’t make me find out through a background check.” For a moment there was silence between them as Miliam wondered what the hell Engineer could’ve done to earn such a punishment.
“…is that also why they didn’t have a translation charm?” she asked after a moment, thinking back to their odd manner of speech.
“Nay, they had a charm. They just like to talk like that.”
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Codex Entry: Dragonewts
Dragonewts are a rarity in the galaxy: they are one of the few sapient species capable of full flight. This comes at the cost of size, however. Male dragonewts are only three feet tall on average. Female dragonewts are as much as a full foot taller, and this increased height is accompanied by a significant advantage in overall mass. All dragonewts have hollow bones and relatively weak limbs, however. They boast a twelve foot wingspan in exchange, which allows them to fly as well as any bird. These wings resemble those of bats in structure rather than birds or flying reptiles. Healthy wings are of particular importance in dragonewt culture.
Dragonewts come in many colors, but the pattern and coloration applied to their wing membranes is what identifies a dragonewt's clan group, rather than the color of their skin, which is varied among all groups. This has lead to a mostly-dead custom in which exiles were stripped of their wing membranes or even their entire wings to show they were no longer welcome in any society.
Dragonewt society is matriarchal. This has many historical reasons, but the primary one is that female dragonewts have a significant size advantage over males and do not carry their young- instead, eggs are deposited one at a time into a brood pouch on a male's underbelly. There is no difference in birth rate between the dragonewt sexes.
A fractious people, dragonewt society is highly divided, with no polities governing more than one clan ever surviving long. Clans gradually grew in scope and size instead, each maintaining their unique cultural identity with little multiculturalism. Only once the largest clans had grown equivalent to entire nations did their technological level begin to advance, so their society spent a particularly long time in their equivalent to the medieval period before eventually industrializing.
Today, the dragonewt clans have dispersed so that each may have a world to themselves, which has greatly reduced infighting. They are one of the three founding species of the Draconine Freeholds, a loose confederation primarily united in mutual defense and nothing more.