Interlude Nine - The Silly Mechanic

Twenty-Six was as nervous as someone doing their first core coolant decoupling on a live reactor, but she was working hard not to let it show.

It was... actually not too hard to just keep smiling, mostly because despite the fact that she felt like her insides were a turbine filled with loose washers, she was also happy. The smile wasn't forced. If anything, she had to keep a tight leash on that smile because there was a very real possibility that she'd start giggling and that would be mortifying.

Her hand was wrapped around Evelyn's, and she couldn't help but worry that the taller, hotter, cooler woman would notice how badly she was sweating.

"H-have you ever been to an arcade before?" Twenty-Six asked.

"I have not," Evelyn replied. She tilted her head very slightly to one side. "I've heard of them, and of course I've seen a few in shows and movies and they've come up in books before."

"Do you read a lot?" Twenty-Six asked. She wasn't sure if they'd had this exact conversation before or not, but she was grasping at anything she could to make sure that conversation didn't stall out.

That would be the worst, having nothing to say, the air being filled with a long, awkward silence. But no, Evelyn was way too cool for that, and she kept things engaged and would ask Twenty-Six some smart questions every so often. "I've read my fair share. Do you read anything other than technical manuals?"

Erotica. But Twenty-Six would rather stick her head in a turbine than admit that aloud. "N-nope. Just nonfiction and technical stuff for me. I know it's a little boring..."

"Nonsense," Evelyn said. "Don't let anyone tell you that you're not interesting."

"Well, I'm really not," Twenty-Six said.

Evelyn sniffed. "I think you're very interesting, and I'm the objective judge of these sorts of things. If I say so, then it is so."

Twenty-Six laughed. She felt her cheeks reddening a little at the compliment, and it certainly didn't help all of the loose nuts and bolts in her chest from bouncing around, but it had sounded entirely earnest and certain, so much so that she couldn't find it in her to deny it.

"Thanks," she said. "How did you end up so confident anyway?"

Evelyn frowned a little in thought. Twenty-Six wasn't going to tell her, but the taller women's eyebrows were very expressive. They gave away a lot about what she was thinking at any given time. "I'm afraid that I don't have a helpful answer for that one. I've been very confident from a young age, as far back as I can remember. Time and experience turned what was probably unearned confidence into something sharper and harder to bend."

"Huh, I guess. So little Evelyn was a hot head?"

"You could say that," Evelyn said. "I was an orphan, taken in by the army. There were hundreds of us back then."

"Back then?" Twenty-Six asked.

"This would be some time before the second intersystem war," Evelyn said. "There were some pretty high tensions at the time. Lots of growing pains for Mars. Anyway, we were trained from a young age to be the next elite of Mars. I took to it like a fish to water."

"Is that why you're so strong?" Twenty-Six asked.

"I suppose. It was a good start. Eventually the program fell apart, but being wildly overconfident, and feeling betrayed, I decided to take everything I thought was owed to me. I succeeded, somehow. Part luck, part brazen disregard for any issues I might run into, and a large part... my opponents at the time made the conscious decision to underestimate me. It was one of the last times that happened." She looked up and at the ceiling, but Twenty-Six had the impression she was looking back into her own past.

"You're too young to be this nostalgic!" Twenty-Six said as she pulled Evelyn ahead some more. The arcade was just up ahead, and judging by how loud it was, and the number of flashing colours coming from within, it seemed like a good place to allow one's self to be distracted.

She looked back to see Evelyn smiling fondly as she easily kept up with Twenty-Six's tugging. They entered the arcane arcade and were directed to a booth where tickets were being sold. Twenty-Six reached into one of the pockets of her cargo pants, but Evelyn touched her shoulder. "I'll pay," she said.

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"No, you won't," Twenty-Six said. "I'll pay." She smiled at the young guy behind the counter even as she pulled out her wallet.

"Oh, will you now?" Evelyn asked.

"I will. Didn't you just talk big about confidence? Well, I'm confident that I can pay, so I will."

"Having confidence is wonderful. It even looks good on you. But being confident that you can beat me at something? Now that's just presumptuous."

Twenty-Six laughed. "Too late!" she said as she pulled out her card. She glanced at the prices on the wall and made an effort not to wince. She could afford this! She had mostly been keeping her pay to herself, only buying the... occasional tool. Compared to that, a few tokens at the arcade was nothing.

The food was super-overpriced though. That wasn't even her unwillingness to splurge talking, that was just common sense.

"So, what do we start with?" Evelyn asked.

"Uh," Twenty-Six said as she scanned the arcade. It was pretty busy, almost every machine had someone there, but there were a few unoccupied, and there weren't really any real lines behind any of them. "What kind of games are you good at?"

"Hmm, I'd rather think I'll be good at anything requiring good reflexes," Evelyn said. "Ah... are those the prizes?"

Twenty-Six followed the taller woman's gaze to a far wall where toys and plush animals and a few small boxes with electronics sat. "I think so. Oh, should we aim for something to get first? That way we know how many tickets to collect?"

"That seems reasonable," Evelyn said.

They walked over, and Twenty-Six instantly found her attention snapping over to a box in one corner. It had collected a fine sheen of dust over the top edge. No one was trying to get that as a prize. But...

"Something familiar?" Evelyn asked.

"Ah, it's a snap-together kit," Twenty-Six said. She smiled fondly. "They're pretty popular around Saturn." The box had some exaggeratedly action-y art of a space ship on the front, shooting away from a large explosion.

The ship was a Black Mixball 106. A fairly uncommon light freighter from Luna, designed at the tail end of the second intersystem war all the way until relatively recently. They were frequently converted to tackle other tasks and were all over the rings of Saturn.

"My parents used to have a small collection of those. The kits, I mean. We had a small cabinet in our hab. I think we had about seventy of them? My dad used to assemble them, and my mom loved painting them. They used to argue about realism versus making them look good all the time."

"That's cute."

"Nah, it's a common hobby," Twenty-Six dismissed. "I never really kept up with it, but I have fond memories. Ah, what about you, does anything jump out to you?"

Evelyn hummed, then smiled and pointed to a plushie. It was about thirty centimetres tall, of a woman in a dark suit with red eyes and with sharp teeth. The plushie was posed so that the character was munching on a small, soft ship. An Earth Alliance cruiser, if Twenty-Six were to guess, though it was so chibified that really identifying it was impossible.

"Ah, is that the Empress of Mars?" Twenty-Six asked.

"Of course not, see, the tag says 'Queen of Red Planet' on it. And it was made on Earth. It's bootleg."

"Of course," Twenty-Six said. "But everyone knows who it is, no? Aren't you a little insulted?"

"Why would I be?" Evelyn asked.

Twenty-Six froze up for a moment, her heart skipping a beat. "Uh, because... uh, aren't you Martian?"

"I suppose it is a little rude to depict the Martian Empress that way," Evelyn said. She glanced at Twenty-Six, and there was nothing but amusement in her eyes.

She knew. She knew that Twenty-Six knew... probably, and she knew that Twenty-Six knew that she knew. Anymore than that and they'll be twisting themselves up in logical knots, so Twenty-Six didn't push it.

If Evelyn wanted to be Evelyn, then that was okay too. "Look! They have pinball! I bet I can use my core to cheat a little," Twenty-Six said with a grin.

"Oh? That level of mastery already?" Evelyn asked.

"Well, I'm getting there. If not, it'll be good practice, right?"

"Yeah, good practice," Evelyn agreed.

Sometimes she was just a silly mechanic, but that didn't mean she was stupid or unobservant.

***