Every apartment looks the same on the inside, according to Amon, but the standard is nice: bare walls and floors made of warm brown wood, a twin bed built into the wall with storage drawers underneath, and a tall cabinet with mirrors built into the doors. A private toilet and shower are connected in a small room, which I find interesting.
Spaceships aren’t a special interest of mine, but they’re so prevalent you can’t help picking up information. The tactical crafts that actually shoot people down don’t come with luxuries like these. Even if they manage to have personal toilets for the general crew, the showers are always communal. Most of us stand there in towels with the other naked people waiting for a free shower, but it does make for interesting small talk.
These rooms came with the ship, like the ornamental ones that host royalty and war commanders through the stars and can’t be bothered with being inconvenienced with their business, so much so the residential cabins are shoved under the ship like a sore thumb in case they’re attacked and the unnecessary cargo will hopefully be targeted first.
Amon stays with me on the way to the briefing, like I may wander off again. He answers the random questions I have but never goes into too much detail. He herds me into the lift and we’re going up, floors whizzing by through the transparent doors. The lift slows to a stop and I see the familiar faces of my crewmates in a large room, spacious and littered with bits of tech that make it look like it is still being converted from some sort of ballroom. The walls have a hasty paint job thrown on, large windows now barricaded with heavy sheets of metal. The one thing they seem to have kept is the bar.
Nothing about this puts me at ease. The Nova was an official Plutonian craft, the captain personally recognized by the family in charge of keeping the Kuiper Belt afloat, and they destroyed it. Didn’t even seem in a rush about it, nor did they painstakingly comb through it for every scrap of sellable shit unless they work at speeds I can’t fathom. The Nymph Flux, the name whispered just enough to catch my ears, seemed to be their only concern, along with increasing numbers, but for what? I saw plenty of numbers without the inclusion of us, just the few dozen humans on the Nova.
Flux isn’t here now, but neither is Captain Lister. Instead, the Nymph that let us loose stands before us. She’s as tall and ethereal as the others, long red hair tied in braids that run down her shoulders. Her eyes burn a bright purple as she stares at us, the four orbs set into skin that the ship’s lights play with, striking the dull gray flesh with a blinding shimmery white.
“Greenhorns,” she bellows at us after referring to herself only as Dione, “you’ve been fortunate enough to be allowed a spot in our little family. Usually we just play catch with you guys until you all drift off into space, but he was feeling generous. As long as you do what we say, we may even come to like ya.
“We play to skills around here, so you’re going to do whatever you’re good at. You–” she points to me, “what do you do?”
“IT stuff. I’m also a mechanic.” I reply.
“Are you good at it?”
“They tell me I am.”
“Then you’re sorted. What about the rest of you?” Dione tells everyone what they’ll do but none of it is particularly thrilling. I take interest when they mention dinner later on but we’re ushered off as quickly as it’s brought up. We’re separated before we get to the lifts, myself included. A peculiar person approaches us, half of them being made up of metal and the other half wood. They have two eyes that look real enough, narrow and dark brown. The wooden parts of them are a sandy brown color while the metal is bronze, a material once plentiful on Earth, seen mostly through their exposed hands and face, the latter being primarily wood, and the upper left corner of their face being bronze. They’re also incredibly short, couldn’t be more than five feet tall, and a small frame to match. Being some sort of robot, she’s completely hairless.
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“You all can call me Alex. I serve as the ship’s computer and am in charge of all of its maintenance, which would also mean you guys,” she says. The wooden parts of her face work around her speech as if it’s just regular flesh while the metal remains expressionless. “We’re gonna have a rad time, don’t you worry.”
Rad? I can only assume it means something good, but when I glance at the others they only look as confused as I feel. They’re also looking at me like they expect me to raise my hand and ask dumb questions again. I did this to myself. Still, I refrain from raising my hand.
I definitely don’t excel here; I managed well enough on the Nova but I was familiar with Plutonian crafts. I’ve only admired Nymphian ships at a distance so far, the giant crafts boldly warping into systems with the confidence that they own the seas of the Milky Way, and their record banks back them up. You’d have to be insane to host an attack on one of them unless you got one of your own. Humans don’t freely get access to them either, apparent by our collective struggle that Alex makes an effort to not tire of.
“We haven’t had a moment to even breathe–how are we supposed to get it right the first time?” Someone, thankfully not me, demands.
“There was plenty of time inbetween the Nova and Siren,” she says with a smirk, referring to us being tossed, “you should have taken advantage of that.” I can’t help but crack a smile at the joke and she looks at me. “Don’t know why you’re laughing when you’re probably doing worse than any of them.” That wipes the smile clean.
We’re released after I nearly blow a supporting reactor, the smaller systems that run diagnostics on the reactor, and passed back off to Dione who already seems aware of our experiences.
“Soldiers aren’t brought up in a day,” she tells us as she leads us back to the lifts, only going down to the first of the residential compartments built underneath the ship, “but most of you aren’t gonna have it easy it seems. You definitely put the green in Greenhorn.”
We’re led into a large mess hall, dark wooden tables bolted into the floor with benches. The ceiling hangs high above with small clouds of dust lingering with the gravity is weaker. People filter in, most already seated, grabbing at various foods presented. Strange individuals rush up and down the aisles and I know I’ve never seen them before. They look a lot like humans– two eyes and arms, a little bit taller than us– but the resemblance ends there. Everyone I get a good look at has no nose and their eyes are big and completely black. Their skin comes in a crazy amount of colors and shades of colors. I watch one whisk by with a platter of mugs with glowing green skin. Another is a beautiful pastel blue, snatching empty plates with four fingers and a thumb. Their hair hangs in their face, thick and shaggy and definitely not made of the same material the Nymphs and I share.
I sit down and one of them immediately hovers over with sustenance. The smell that hits me reminds me of Pluto: earthy, rich, a quite nostalgic scent that takes me back to our bittersweet underground dwellings, before the parents got rich and moved us to the surface. I look up at them into their iris-less eyes. They smile down at me, the shaggy hair hanging over the shoulder with a fuzzy looking quality. It looks velvety to the touch but they’re gone before I can further think about it and I’m staring at a filled goblet and a plate of Lash thrown together with some hearty human vegetables like radishes and onions. A large chunk of Plutonian bread is on the plate, the least surprising part since Nymphs also seem to love carbs. The Lash is another staple. You won’t see a spacefarer this side of the Local Group without the avian meat, found in abundance on Nymphian planets and dried for long transport. It’s no Ambertos but it’s far from bad.
The drink excites me more when I take a swig and feel the burn numb my tongue and snake its way down my throat, setting my stomach ablaze. It’d been a while since I had food I liked, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a drink. I can’t help but down the spiced liquid in two draws and immediately look around for more.
“Easy on it. It’s made for creatures with higher tolerances,” one of the strange servers tells me as he pours another for me. He glows like a golden mineral deposit.
“I know Nymphian ale when I see it, I know what I’m doing,” I say and hiccup, “but you may be onto something.”
“Just eat first,” he coos before disappearing into the aisles, but when I look between the food and the ale, the alcohol basically begs me to attend to it first.