Thread: ι`ℓℓ вε yσυя c σ м я α d ε -- ?! [[ missedstations & Cash ]]

One got dumped in a shitty little town by disagreeing too violently with one's captain, mechanic or no. Complaining things didn't get broken often enough... Never made him many friends. Stairs, or Alastair Lynch, had always been a bit of an oddball. Apparently he'd worked on an army ship or two, because there were a few medals at the bottom of his bag. Some for bravery, but everyone knew that in war bravery really meant complete lunacy. There were also the tools he found completely indispensable, and very few clothes. It was never one of Stairs's priorities, being decently dressed. He'd always found that there were more important things than food and clothes. It was, hence, that his clothes tended to be worn and faded some sort of dark grey pants, a shirt which had certainly seen better times, and a coat that was military once but had its insignia ripped off a long time ago. He still used to wear army boots, scratched but still occasionally polished. Maybe once a month. Maybe an exaggeration perhaps once a year. Apparently he'd forgotten that haircuts existed, because his black hair had to be braided to be kept neat. He was some sort of mongrel heritage perhaps some mixture of gypsy and something unidentifiable else. Coppery dark skin and golden-brown eyes, tawny, almost like a hawk's. He was a lean one. No cannibals would want to eat Stairs he looked far too stringy. Solatrir wasn't exactly the place for sparkling social dialogue, but when it came to pretty machines... It was completely lacking. All that stopped in this place were those one or two-man slops, that barely flew above the ground and whose engines were barely more complicated than the wheel. It was no wonder he'd ended up in the pub, mostly drunk and mostly whining at the barman about how a good chassis could make him completely hard and how he missed a beautiful battleship he used to be intimate with... No one was surprised that after a couple of days no one wanted to come anywhere near him. And when the money ran out, he had nothing better to do than to sit there in the pub, because he couldn't afford a room. Keeping the local machinery running kept him from being a complete vagrant, while he waited for fuck knew what. He'd stopped believing in any gods as soon as he worked out what gears did. If God existed, it was a ghost in the machine, an artificial intelligence. That would be quite something to see. It was unfortunate that the barkeep started to refuse to give him any alcoholic drinks, deeming him 'one creepy son of a whore'. So when that monster of a ship landed, that was probably the best event in... months . He watched the landing from the window, studying the holes in the hull, the irregular looking engine emissions and very slowly grinning. That looked like hell of a lot of work. It looked absolutely glorious . He tore the door open in front of Irvine. Hi. I need a job, and you have a ship. We can totally do business. His accent was a mixture of various cities. A mongrel mixture same as his heritage, perhaps. In many places he'd be called a 'cheap gypsy whore', but when people found out what magic he did with bits of metal, they tended to start acting as if he shat gold. Until they found his weirdness intolerable, at what point he was that 'filthy gypsy' again. Stairs never really minded.