Climbing Mount Fuji (Kaili Talith)

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Kaili Talith"]

"That's totally you hissing. The impact has punctured your lungs and wow that got morbid fast." Mara unlatched the straps and staggered upright, leaning against the console. "Looks like a comet, a big one, breaking up on its way insystem. We caught the edge of its mass shadow, one in a trillion chance, and the instant we reverted we ran into a chunk of it. That's the guess, anyway, based on the freaking snow on the windshield." She retched but held it down. "Internals are reading a drop in air pressure. We've gotta find that leak. May all the gods of freighter maintenance forgive me, but it's time for a D'Lessio Bubbly. Uh...hope you can swim."

She was referring, obliquely, to the state of zero gravity that ensued as she disabled the artigrav. A pained but expert kick launched her back out of the cockpit and into the guts of the ship. She cracked her mini-fridge in passing and snagged a can of DragonsFlame, then shook it viciously. Entering the hold, she popped the tab. Spheroids of fizzy drink carbonated their way through the air and were drawn toward a specific point, a microbreach. Outside, it snowed blonde.

 

[Kaili Talith]

Doe eyed staring intensified. Kaili was hearing things, punctured lung and... Oh, a joke. Kaili glared at her friend for a second before wiping the stupid face. The ship had been hit, apparently. It just went to figure that the second a Talith got close to the controls there would be an increased risk with doing even the simplest of things aboard a ship. One-in-a-trillion became one-in-three-hundred. One-in-a-million became one-out-of-five. The girl was cursed but there was no point in dwelling on it.

A brow perked up about swim lessons. Sure, Kaili knew how to swim. What was the poi-

“Woah.” Kaili chipped up as her body began floating within the confines of the cockpit. Slowly but steadily she felt the rush of blood as it coursed to her head. She turned red, her arms began flailing uncontrollably as the girl approached the ceiling.

“I’m good. All good.” She assured Mara, though mostly herself, as she clinged onto the ceiling. “Mara?”

Kaili spun around to look for her friend. She wasn’t there. A puzzled look set upon her as she kicked herself towards the floor again. “Mara? Where did you go?” No answer. The warden-in-training took the short tour of the ship in an effort to find her lost friend again. The closer to the hold she got, the lower the temperature seemed to sink.

And there she was. Eyeing the wall and what Kaili could only assume to be the area of impact.

“There you are.” Kaili announced her presence before she too looked at the breach. “What exactly do we do? Superglue it? Stick a plug in there and hope for the best, or?”

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Kaili Talith"]

"If I had nothing else, I'd use my butt. Old spacer decompression trick. But fortunately, we have all kinds of butt substitutes." Mara ripped a velcroed cushion off the ratty lounger and pressed it against the hole. "That'll do for the moment. There's a patch kit over there, under that hatch. Grab it, use it if you know how. If you don't, just wait. I'm going to go turn the gravity back on and see how our reserve atmo is doing."

She indicated the little hatch that said 'Patch Kit' in Rodian, Huttese, Rammocate and Sy Bisti -- every trade language in the 'verse except Basic -- then kicked away. She cleared the hold against the subtle, cold tug of air, grabbed a bulkhead edge at the door, and pulled herself through. A twisty little maneuver got her back to her seat, feet more or less against the ground. "Turning on the grav in five seconds!" she called back. On the five-count, weight returned and she settled back to the deck. "Looks like reserve atmosphere is below thirty percent already. Tanks might have taken a secondary hit. Air pressure's still at eighty percent, though." She settled into her chair, yelling back over her shoulder. "How's that patch coming?"

 

[Kaili Talith]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

Kaili snickered as she pondered the imagery of Mara sticking her butt against the leak in order to decompress the ship. Mildly disappointed they had to fix it with a couch cushion Kaili drifted on over to hold it into place as Mara went to do something else, Kaili wasn’t paying attention. The image of butts were far too amusing to not think on. Her eyes set on the patch kit and with a gentle pull along the ground (or quite possibly the ceiling) she got herself over to the patch kit.

She looked at the package and then at the hole. Mara called something from the cockpit but Kaili didn’t really hear it. She was far too into her thoughts on the very basics of breach patching. Actually, it was more likely that the thoughts within young Kaili’s mind wasn’t as much about doing it as much as actually knowing how to do it.

For a few moments she blinked. Until the gravity came back on and she plummeted to the ground. The kid caught herself with her arms covering her face as the patch slipped from her hands.

How was that patch coming?

“Not at all!” Kaili coughed back. “Mister Teacherman at the Academy hasn’t gotten to this part yet!”

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Kaili Talith"]

"Grrrahhhhhh."

It was a Wookiee expression of frustration that she'd picked up from Beyyr as a kid. She took in another glance at the Thing Outside and got out of the chair as quickly as she'd gotten into it. "Air is life," she said as she scrambled back into the hold. She took up the patch kit and pulled out a glue gun, with flexible plasteel discs of various sizes. "We lose enough of it, you'd have to shoot me or choke to death. What kind of gorram academical fethwit didn't teach -- look, here." She shoved a disc into Kaili's hands, then gestured with the glue gun. "I'll pull the cushion away. You put the disc in place. I glue it down around the edges."

WIth her free hand, she grabbed that cushion and pulled it free. It was like pulling metal off a powerful magnet. The air went from a hiss to a rush.

"Now now now now-"

 

[Kaili Talith]

Panic. Frustrated Mara wasn’t the Mara that Kaili was used to. Though to say that the panic was solely because of her friend’s reaction would ultimately be a lie. The overwhelming sense of helplessness and inadequacy would most likely play a very big part of it as well. A disc was shoved into the girl’s hands. Now wasn’t the time to mope or panic, now was time for action and Kaili knew damn better than to truly let her friend down.

“Got it.” She nodded in affirmation to her order.

The cushion was removed and with as much care, and speed, as Kaili could muster she reached out to firmly lodge the disc in place.

“Done!” It was an involuntary shout. “Go!”

The disc shook and shivered ever so slightly undearneath the fingertips of the young Talith.

“Well, you see, the teacher guy had a kid and-” The plate nearly slipped but Kaili kept it in place. “And the substitute teacher wasn’t even half as good as he was.”

“He’s back now though! It’s great, but his kid is still keeping him all busy-like.”

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Kaili Talith"]

Mara almost responded, but the first time she'd been there for a ship breach, her dad's 'less talk, more glue' mantra had gotten drilled into her. Her first circle was ragged, panicked; she went around again, forcing herself to take her time as Kaili's rambling washed over her. She switched hands to adjust glue-gun angles around Kaili's arms.

Her butt hit the deck. "Now just hold it like that," she said, reaching for the can of soda. She covered the aperture and shook it up again, then poured it over the edges of the plate. Nothing schlurped. Safety.

"Guuuuh." Another Wookiee expression. "Sorry to flip out on ya there. Breaching's no joke. You did good." Mara pulled herself upright by a cargo strap. "There's, uh, something out front you should see."

Snow on the windshield, and a huge comet breaking up on its way insystem. And a few little lights, blinking on the side of that comet.

 

[Kaili Talith]

“Not that I don’t understand a kid keeps him busy, but I figure if he is supposed to truly be back then why don’t he-” Kaili ranted on before being interrupted by Mara. “Okay.”

The can was cracked open and the liquid trickled ever so slightly along the surface of the plate. The carbonic acids irritated her fingertips merely half as much as the fact that the stickiness of the sugar slowly began to coat her hands with great discomfort. Inconvenience at best, of course, considering the circumstances. Kaili would most certainly take sticky fingers over a slow suffocating death any day of the week. Even on Centaxday.

The plate remained in place and so did Kaili’s hand. She had no idea if it was safe to let go yet, was the glue all good? Mara gave Kaili her praise and even then her hands remained in place.

“Nah, it’s good. I mean, yeah, we’re not dead.” Kaili grinned before Mara cut her off again. “Can I let g- Oh, really? What?”

Mara set off for the cockpit and for the first time since the breach, Kaili let go of the plate. Hands and fingers extended in front of her she held her breath for a moment fully expecting the plate to fall down and break apart.

It didn’t happen.

“And they say the force is what holds the galaxy together.” The young Talith sighed of relief and set out in a slow stroll through the ship to find Mara. Her fingers about as sticky as was to be expected Kaili kept her focus on her hands, opening and closing them as if mimicking a hungry, hungry monster. She was obviously coming to terms with her now-sticky fingers.

Not that that lasted very long either.

Her eyes rose from the annoyance and set on the snowy windshield. A jaw certainly dropped, eyes certainly opened wide.

“What the fffff-” Panic! Mother told her not to use that word! “-fffffphrik is that?”

“It looks like a... Comet, but what is that thing?”

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Kaili Talith"]

"Something we're supposed to find, maybe. Even my dad doesn't know what instinctive astrogation has to do with the will of the Force. He's always taken the Daragon Trail as a pretty firm counterpoint."

She eased power to the thrusters and matched speeds with the comet, then increased a little to skid alongside and matched speeds again. She turned the Corridor Sweeper on its roll axis so that they could look up at the comet through the snowy viewport.

"Doesn't look like a mining base. No cargo ports of any serious size, no drills, no vehicle bays. Self-contained. That's an airlock right there. Scanning for lifesigns...it's diffuse, but it's there. Weird signature. Stasis maybe." She pointed at the facility. "See how particulates fall at about a two- or three-metre threshold? Even if nobody's home, we dock and we'll be inside the artificial gravity field. That'll make a onceover and repairs a lot easier to get started. So. Do we hail them first, or not?"