Everfree Tales

Iris yanked her hand away "They didn't until you touched me. The way things stand now I'm either with you our your hostage."

"Yeah, if anyone was still paying attention to us!" Rui cried, throwing his hands in the air. "Every head turned towards that gorram fight, I doubt anyone's still looking at us! In either case, we all gotta get outta here now!" Rui raised his voice to be heard above the commotion in the casino, trusting that nobody would pay attention to him but his crew. "ELI, LEON, SCRUFFY, BAIL OUT!" He cried. HE turned his attention back to Iris and motioned towards the door. "I'm waitin' on Tai and Chass, get back tot he ship before the Fed's get here!"

"But-"

Chass was cut off by Tai's grab, her expression almost mournful as she threw one last look at the vault. "I was on the last spin..."

"Fine. I'll have John be at the ready...like he wouldn't already be." Iris said, rolling her eyes at the one person on the ship she could tell she wouldn't be fast friends with after ten minutes."

She turned to leave. "If you're not back in ten minutes, I will be back, and I won't care about my 'reputation' then. If you're captured my 'reputation' means nothing."

Iris turned and left the casino.

"I can walk under my own power, Tai," Chass snapped, yanking her arm out of his grip and easily moving to keep pace. "I made a mistake; that doesn't mean I'm incapable of functioning."

"Not what I meant, and not funny." Miss Munroe made a waving motion, as if to ward off whatever Tai planned to snark back. "Let's just get to the ship."

Rui grabbed the rest of his crew from around the casino which was devolving into chaos. He got them out of the casino just before the feds arrived to stop the fight, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Soon enough, everyone was back on the ship, and Rui had ordered John to get them offworld. He then collapsed into the second navigator's chair, sighing at everything that'd gone wrong. Chass had seemed very angry with Tai on the way back, he'd have to deal with that at some point... "John, as soon as we break atmo go take a break or something. I'll take over piloting back to Persephone."

((Just to recap, everyone got back on the ship. I apologize to those I had to bunny, but we needed to get out of there.))

Eli

Entering onto the ship, Eli's personality immediately grew dark as he turned to the captain. "Well that certainly could've gone a lot better than expected, and why pull us out Rui? Things were just about to get fun!"

"Alrighty then, Captain. Try not to get us all killed by impact with a random celestial body... Or another ship... Or get us caught, Or-" It was probably a good thing that Eli had cut him off, or else John would have gone on for quite a few more minutes. As it were, he decided to go and get himself a sandwich from the Tianlong's kitchen. All the while, he was formulating more emergency plans in his head. He still wasn't quite sure as to how anyone else would react to certain stimuli, such as Reavers armed with chainsaws cutting down doors, but he might get to know them that well soon. Which reminded him, he might as well see Chass about how much stress the ship could take. He knew the basic figures for the Dragonfly class, but ships could vary.

He prepared a second sandwich for Chass, a bit heavier on meat than vegetables, and brought it to where she was working. Along with some milk. He'd have gotten her ale if she wasn't off-duty, but he'd have rather not risked a mechanical failure. Those tended to get messy in space.

"Hungry?", he asked as he held out the sandwich platter.

Chastity glanced up from her work at John. Her lingering frown softened a fraction, if only because it was a different face from the one currently annoying her. "I could eat a horse." She peeled off her gloves, slipping out from under the pipes and grabbing the sandwich. "Thanks."

With sandwich in hand, she sat down and took a large bite. "What c'n I do yu f'r?" she asked, still chewing.

"Oh, just some data for crunching would be appreciated... I mean, I know the figures that a normal Dragonfly can take, but I would like to know if any changes that you've made to this one would alter those. If I'm going to be piloting the ship, I'd like to know if a maneuver of mine is going to, say, cause this ship to rip itself apart, y'know?" With that, John pulled out a notepad, and a pen, "So, what would I be looking at? In metrics, please."

Rui sighed and turned to Eli, who was standing in the doorway to the the cockpit. "Eli, this wasn't about fun! It was about getting a job done, and the feds were about to descend on that place like Reavers on a a border planet! There was no way we were gettin' outta there with the coin, we had to bail." He then glared at Tai for a minute, shaking his head. "I piloted this ship before we hired Eric, and after the accident I piloted her again till John showed up. And not once did we die, might I add. That's about the only thing that ever goes right for us..."

After entering the ship Iris had gone to the job of striping her makeup and changed into a more practical, yet still loose and flowing, set of clothing. After she heard the sounds of the rest of the crew entering the ship and going their ways she made her way to the bridge and caught the tail end of what Rui was saying.

"Because tonight sure didn't go right. What were the feds doing there? And why was it worth panicking over? We could have at the least melted into the crowd instead of running out like that."

Rui groaned and turned his chair around, facing Iris. "Maybe you don't know how the Alliance works out here. Bar fight involves the Feds, the Feds are gonna round everyone in the building up for questioning. And not all of us have a squeaky clean record, or have payed for our 'crimes against the peace'. 'Specially not those of us who helped out in the war, even though we were never officially involved with the Independents. Evidence holds no place out here, if the caught a couple of us in that casino, they'd have hauled us off if they even suspected we supported the Browncoats. We had'ta get out."

"We've got a bit of variation to it," Chass replied, a thoughtful expression on her face. "Pretty typical Dragonfly-class specs, although it's a solar-powered model, with panels in the wings that can retract in a pinch. They're fragile, so it's not much of a pinch."

The mechanic took another big bite of sandwich. "I've messed with some of this baby's stuff, though. We get more mileage out of our engine than most solar models. Call it, oh, twenty percent increase? Speed can go about ten percent higher, too, and if we get cash soon I might get that higher. We also have a scrambler activated from the cockpit- basically makes our position way harder to pinpoint on scanners. And then there are the Crybaby decoy satellites, which are always good for an escape option."

Another bite. "I tried to get Rui to okay a big ol' laser cannon I had schematics for, but he thought it'd be too much of a drain on the ship's energy. And our funds. Also, the mini-Tianlong I used for a scale-model demonstration kinda blew up when it misfired."

John dutifully took notes on the specs that Chastity gave to him. The information was somewhat helpful, and it was nice to know that he didn't have to alter his equations too much. Along with this, she'd told him some important things regarding the power generation and the speed. However, he wasn't too sure of the amount of risk she might put on the ship after hearing the laser cannon idea... He found himself agreeing with Rui on that one.

"...Well this has certainly been illuminating. Let me know if you need anything." He began to turn back towards the door out, planning to head back to his bunk.

"It's still just a bar fight" Iris said, coming in and leaning against the wall. "You could have gotten out of there before any serious feds showed up. Those just looked like small time cops to me, nothing like high level alliance soldiers. And I do know a thing or two about those, and yes, I understand not wanting to be tangled up with them. But I'm new so what you feel safe with is what we do, it's a good thing I didn't have any clients lined up for tomorrow. Where are we headed for next and why?"