Perail Staite
Ingénue Initiate
Hyperspace near the Cularin System, Thaere Sector
From her early childhood in which she went to the freight spaceport to watch the arriving and departing starships while waiting for her father to come off his shift, Perail had dreamt of taking to the stars. That desire could well be credited for the course her life had taken. After failing the aptitude tests to be accepted to pilot training programs at multiple freight carriers, she had taken the easy way out: she had fallen in with a group of smugglers who had, of course, not allowed her to actually fly a ship, but at least she had got to peek into the cockpit. Until, that was, they abandoned her on Son-Tuul...
Her teacher
Asara Ta'kona
was an enthusiastic pilot herself and had decided that Perail's lack of ability in that department was an issue urgently to be remedied. Therefore, she had somehow contrived to arrange lessons with, she had assured Perail, a pilot of some repute - a true professional, in a word. It was really a rather improbable sequence of events, but Perail was excited to go along with it, and eager to please both of her teachers. Alas, there was a reason for why the career of a professional pilot had been denied to her. Truth be told, she simply wasn't the most talented of students in this domain.
It was, oddly enough, not her motor skills and reflexes, as one might have expected, that limited her. Perail had done surprisingly well in manual landing training. But under normal circumstances, you didn't manually land a space-ship. Safe flying was all about planning, knowing how to program your flight computer and when to engage it. And then you had to keep track of all the communications and their frequencies. When it came to inter-system travel, things became even trickier because you had to plot a hyperspace jump. Sure, the computer did the actual calculations, but the computer didn't read your mind - you still had to read and input a lot of data, and if you made too many typos, it was potentially lethal.
They had spent the last few days traversing a number of systems along the Corellian run in a twin-seater starfighter, travelling coreward from Ryloth, to practice, sleeping at various space stations and safe houses that Trenton mysteriously had contacts at. It was, truth be told, rather incomprehensible to Perail how it all worked, but she accepted it as a fact about the world. Naturally - naturally? -, she was anxious to make a good impression on her teacher, but that hadn't prevented her from landing them in the middle of nowhere once, right in the empty space far between systems, from which it had been difficult to extract themselves due to lack of any navigational aids. She uncharacteristically worried that he might grow rather exasperated with her.
They were now en route to the Cularin system. Trenton had plotted the course himself this time - it was important to exit hyperspace at a safe distance to the core of the system to avoid smashing into the Comet Cloud. Some daring pilots would endeavour to jump past it, as the asteroids and comets did not possess a sufficient mass shadow to pull ships out of hyperspace, but that was a fraught manoeuvre that carried a high risk of crashing into something, somewhere, within the crowded core of the solar system. The asteroid belt was not excessively difficult to navigate as those things went, it was not dense and the beacons of the Comet Broom Service broadcasted current information and computed safe routes to those who arrived in the system. Thus is would provide a suitable practice terrain for realspace piloting skills.
It figured that Trenton was, as she had learnt, from Corellia - Perail recognised his accent as similar to her erstwhile employer's. "You know", she said a propos of nothing, to make some conversation while in hyperspace transit, "I used to work in a Corellian bar. On Son-Tuul. Your people really get around! I know how to make ryshcate."
From her early childhood in which she went to the freight spaceport to watch the arriving and departing starships while waiting for her father to come off his shift, Perail had dreamt of taking to the stars. That desire could well be credited for the course her life had taken. After failing the aptitude tests to be accepted to pilot training programs at multiple freight carriers, she had taken the easy way out: she had fallen in with a group of smugglers who had, of course, not allowed her to actually fly a ship, but at least she had got to peek into the cockpit. Until, that was, they abandoned her on Son-Tuul...
Her teacher
Asara Ta'kona
was an enthusiastic pilot herself and had decided that Perail's lack of ability in that department was an issue urgently to be remedied. Therefore, she had somehow contrived to arrange lessons with, she had assured Perail, a pilot of some repute - a true professional, in a word. It was really a rather improbable sequence of events, but Perail was excited to go along with it, and eager to please both of her teachers. Alas, there was a reason for why the career of a professional pilot had been denied to her. Truth be told, she simply wasn't the most talented of students in this domain.It was, oddly enough, not her motor skills and reflexes, as one might have expected, that limited her. Perail had done surprisingly well in manual landing training. But under normal circumstances, you didn't manually land a space-ship. Safe flying was all about planning, knowing how to program your flight computer and when to engage it. And then you had to keep track of all the communications and their frequencies. When it came to inter-system travel, things became even trickier because you had to plot a hyperspace jump. Sure, the computer did the actual calculations, but the computer didn't read your mind - you still had to read and input a lot of data, and if you made too many typos, it was potentially lethal.
They had spent the last few days traversing a number of systems along the Corellian run in a twin-seater starfighter, travelling coreward from Ryloth, to practice, sleeping at various space stations and safe houses that Trenton mysteriously had contacts at. It was, truth be told, rather incomprehensible to Perail how it all worked, but she accepted it as a fact about the world. Naturally - naturally? -, she was anxious to make a good impression on her teacher, but that hadn't prevented her from landing them in the middle of nowhere once, right in the empty space far between systems, from which it had been difficult to extract themselves due to lack of any navigational aids. She uncharacteristically worried that he might grow rather exasperated with her.
They were now en route to the Cularin system. Trenton had plotted the course himself this time - it was important to exit hyperspace at a safe distance to the core of the system to avoid smashing into the Comet Cloud. Some daring pilots would endeavour to jump past it, as the asteroids and comets did not possess a sufficient mass shadow to pull ships out of hyperspace, but that was a fraught manoeuvre that carried a high risk of crashing into something, somewhere, within the crowded core of the solar system. The asteroid belt was not excessively difficult to navigate as those things went, it was not dense and the beacons of the Comet Broom Service broadcasted current information and computed safe routes to those who arrived in the system. Thus is would provide a suitable practice terrain for realspace piloting skills.
It figured that Trenton was, as she had learnt, from Corellia - Perail recognised his accent as similar to her erstwhile employer's. "You know", she said a propos of nothing, to make some conversation while in hyperspace transit, "I used to work in a Corellian bar. On Son-Tuul. Your people really get around! I know how to make ryshcate."
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