voidtreckerooc | Test Drive 032

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!tdm

Test Drive 032

Welcome to the Test Drive Meme! Here is the place to see how your character might fit the setting, grab samples and have fun!

1. Post with your character, including their name and series in the subject. We’ve written out some prompts but feel free to make up your own, you have a whole train to play with!

2. Assume they've been around long enough for threads to jump right into the action.

3. Have lots of fun.

Happy testing!

Culinary Containment

Every month, the train's stores are filled with crates of ingredients for use by its passengers. And every month, one ingredient is the focal point of all recipes. Potatoes, cinnamon, seaweed… but as the train pulls away from the station this month, there seems to have been a blip in the system when it comes to deciding on a biologically-appropriate foodstuff.

Spilling out from the storage carriage and into the kitchen are hundreds of live frogs. They're in the sinks, they're in the ovens, they're hopping alarmingly close to the transgates that link the area up to the sleepers...

Vote-Rigging

At the behest of its passengers, the train has instituted a voting system to allow for more carriage options and upgrades. Passengers are able to submit new ideas, or crowdfund those already suggested...

It's the night before platform, and all through the train, no one was stirring... Apart from your group, with your stockpile of a thousand points and the luminous voting panel you're all currently pouring them into. Bouncy castle carriage? Funded! Fishing carriage? Funded! Clocks? Eh... You have the points. Funded!

Then it's simply a matter of waiting for the morning, and seeing the chaos you've caused to the layout of the Voidtrecker Express. What new delights have you discovered?

Repo Train

The Void Ministry have another task for the Express: locating and repossessing the contents of a number of minor storage craft in an old mercantile zone. The coordinates are given, a small fleet of space-worthy craft and sufficient hazmat gear has been deposited at the meeting site for Voidtrecker use.

The main area is cushy enough, a round communal area surrounded by living pods renovated for basic Voidtrecker requirements. The hangar above allows for groups to head to the next assigned storage location, or to return with their piles of lawfully impounded gains.
Team One

High-risk storage locations are this team's priority. Potentially explosive material, artifacts or experiments without the requisite paperwork explaining how or why they were made, sometimes living creatures, the kind that shouldn't have been left in a large metal crate habitat for a decade. Opening these areas is a study in initiative and dealing with unpleasant surprises!

Team Two
This team are the back-up for the first group - once the artifacts, creatures or hazardous material has been made safe and brought back, they have to be recorded. Scanned. Studied, and compared to the extensive lists of potential contraband or lost goods. Sometimes, they're not quite as safe as you'd like.

Team Three
Some locations, rather than being used for the storage for which they were intended, have been repurposed by sapients who have developed within the system since the depot was created. Short, furred people with clever, webbed hands and high voices, they've turned crates and ships into cramped, partially-submerged warrens. This team is cleared to assess the damage done, and, if the current official owners of the stores will agree, process the change in ownership to the Su Samuru. Not all owners are happy with their squatters, however...

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1. Culinary Containment

Mala-Tam beams at the mess. "Klatoonian paddy frogs! I know so many recipes for them!" Of course, she recognizes the situation, so she takes a deep breath, raises her hands and starts making cupping motions with them. Frogs start to move and lift, and make startled croaks.

"Could you," she says in a distracted tone, "get something to hold them in?"

2. Repo Train - Team One

Mala-Tam isn't an experienced spacer, but she's traveled and had the basic emergency training you need when you're working supercargo.

She's also a Sith adept, so weird stuff comes with the training.

As the team approaches a large container, she raises one hand and closes her eyes for a moment. "I don't know precisely what it is, but it's angry, hungry, and large. Be ready." She draws the metal tube from the hook on her belt and presses a stud on it, causing an orange bar of energy to emerge from it for about a meter, then nods to show that she's ready. She tries not to show she's eager for the fight.

(She may not be doing very well on that last part.)

On a scale from normal to why is this happening to me, Aden would say this counted as rather normal if somewhat unexpected. A kitchen full of frogs and powers that he was familiar with but didn't possess himself ranked fairly low on the strangeness scale, really. The train itself was much the same, despite the fact that he resented being on it in the first place.

"Sure," He said, delivering the affirmation in a neutral almost disinterested tone, moving to fetch a large stock pot with a lid. Given that he'd heard that exclamation about knowing so many recipes for the frogs, it seemed the logical choice if the amphibians were going to get cooked anyway.

"You're really going to eat them?"

Aden wouldn't call himself particularly picky when it came to food- if anything, he considered himself the adventurous sort. Frogs though. He couldn't say he was a fan conceptually. Maybe if the choice was between cooking and eating a frog and starvation. But then, he felt much the same about some other dishes popular in the wider galaxy too.

"Is it true that they taste similar to poultry when cooked?"

Mala-Tam hasn't looked at the speaker, instead concentrating on the frogs.

"I don't know what other foodstuffs are here, so we may have to use it as the main protein source until there's another chance to take on supplies. As long as there's decent spices to use to flavor it... well, similar in general, but again, the spicing..." She turns to look at the person talking to her, and then the flow of frogs dips and almost falls before it restores its path.

"....are you Chiss?" Her skin is a little lighter blue, and her eyes don't glow as much, but she's got the dark hair and sharp features of a Chiss.

"Spices do make everything more palatable, that's true. Pretty sure you could make an old boot tasty if you had the right spices."

Despite his casual tone, he meant that as a joke. Honestly he supposed he could only hope that there were spices to use similar to the ones he had access to at home. But then, learning what was familiar and unfamiliar was probably something everyone here had to go through. He supposed he was lucky that he wasn't a species in need of a specialized diet.

"I'm a Pantoran with an eye condition, actually," He answered, with a tilt of his head and a smile as aloof as his tone, holding that expression for a moment before letting out a huff of laughter. Never had anyone actually asked him whether or not he was a Chiss, so he was actually a little amused that someone who looked to be Chiss themself would have to ask, "... I am. You too, right?"

A little different, perhaps, but a member of his species nonetheless.

She's trying not to stare, and her mouth proceeds to outpace her brain as she says, "I'm not sure about mynock, but who'd eat that?"

"Yes," she says. "Not from the Ascendency, from a group of Exiles. I am Malat’amzaar’raat, but I more usually go by Mala-Tam or just Mala."

The line of frogs moves along into the pot, croaking and waving legs lazily, for their part.

"A starving Hutt, maybe? I've seen them eat things that I wouldn't put near my mouth for a million credits."

Aden knew a few Hutts who would resent that statement, but then, those Hutts weren't here right now and couldn't talk his ear off for his insensitivity.

"Pretty sure a Sarlacc wouldn't complain if you shoved one down its throat either."

Not Sarlaccs were capable of complaining in the first place.

"A pleasure to meet you, Mala-Tam. I'm-"

Well, he had a few names, really. Had it not been for that damn roster, he probably would have introduced himself by one of his many aliases, but he didn't really have the luxury of it here. And honestly, given that he was speaking to a fellow Chiss, he was more inclined toward his own brand of friendliness than the usual frigidness.

"Aden Nahain. Just Aden's fine."

It wasn't a proper Chiss name, but he hadn't been a proper Chiss in over a decade, despite his continued loyalty to the Ascendancy.

"Is there something on my face, by the way? I didn't get slimed by a frog without noticing, did I?"

"A pleasure, Aden." People use different names for whatever reason. She thinks of herself as Mala-Tam, after all, and only used the Chiss name because he was Chiss.

"No, no, I'm just surprised. I haven't encountered another Chiss since leaving my home world, and then to find one in this place... but then it seems that this place warps things."

She's not even talking about the Force; she's talking about the general weirdness.

"That's one way of putting it," Aden commented blithely, with a slight roll of the eyes that was directed at the situation itself. Warped really might be the word for it. He was plenty used to weirdness though, he just thought that it would always be some Force related something that would wreck his life and leave him scrambling to pick the pieces back up again.

"Lucky us though, I suppose. We don't have to be alone here."

Plenty of colorful characters aboard the train from what he'd seen so far, so it wasn't like they'd be that unusual regardless, but having another Chiss around still felt comforting to him. There was a time when he had been used to being on his own, but that was long ago now. Recently he'd readjusted to being around others of their kind, and had once more come to see the presence of a blue face and red eyes as a comfort.

"Can I ask, by the way?"

He nodded toward the floating frogs, to indicate his meaning before speaking again, "Sith, Jedi, or something else entirely?"

Curiosity, more than anything else, his tone entirely neutral. He knew better than most that Jedi weren't always saints and Sith weren't always monsters, and that those who were neither were just as varied, the same as literally anyone else in the galaxy.

"I've been wandering for a while. I've met people, but no close friends. I just finished something I was trying to do, and that's been my entire concentration."

She smiles, and for a moment, the frogs do a loop in the air.

"I guess you'd say... Sith-adjacent? My particular order believes that you don't need to use the Dark Side, and that there's ways to use the Dark Side without becoming a cackling lunatic looking for galactic conquest, and for that, they ran away before the more orthodox Sith killed them for being too nice. I don't want domination, I just want to be free to live my life. My direct ancestors could use the Force, and the Ascendency had specific rules about what they could do with their lives, so they ran and found the planet my order was on. And the thing I was looking for, as long as I'm being candid about this, was a crystal so I had a working lightsaber."

It's just remarkably easy to talk to another Chiss, she's finding. She was a bit worried about it, especially being a Force-user, but Aden's dry humor is reassuring.

"How long have you been here, or is this the kind of thing where time gets strange?"

That sounded different to what Aden knew, brow furrowing in thought for a moment, before evening out to the more common neutrality that he preferred to display. He'd known pragmatic Sith in his life, but none that would call their pragmatism enough of a branch off to be called its own order entirely. Of course the universe was endlessly vast, so he supposed it was possible that there was a branch like that broken off from the Empire somewhere, or perhaps the discrepancies were part of this train's warped nature too.

"The Ascendancy does tend to have an entire tree lodged up its rear about the whole Force thing, I find," He commented drily, without so much of a twitch of his expression or raise of his even tone of voice to suggest that it was a joke, following it up in that same timbre with a quick, "They really should see a doctor about that. Can't be healthy."

Not all Chiss thought the same, of course, but the decisions made by their leaders was louder than the voices of more open-minded citizens of the Ascendancy.

"Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me. Right? Seeking freedom seems reasonable to me."

More reasonable- and way easier to navigate- than galactic domination. Less paperwork for him to handle, for one.

"Congratulations on finding a crystal for your lightsaber, by the way. That's a pretty big deal for any Force user, isn't it?"

Seemed like it, at least. As for the question of time, he merely shrugged a shoulder. It wasn't that he was uninterested in the passage of it, so much as it was his circumstances being what they were. He'd been so busy that with the exception of major events, days sort of blurred together. It was the same here.

"Honestly I couldn't tell. Time's been strange for me even before all of this so somewhere along the line I just stopped counting days."

She laughs, and this time the frogs don't even jiggle.

"I've never actually been there, just heard stories from travelers and traders, but that sounds like what I've heard. And yes, that's part of the code. It's just... a lot of the traditional Sith think that any use of the light side is a betrayal of the code. There was, apparently, even a purge by a Sith Lord that caused the founders to run away. And yes, finding the crystal is. I searched for two years. The original major source for them was destroyed a few years before I started my travels, and then I was keeping my head down. I don't really want the attention of the newest Jedi, even with the orthodox Sith supposedly gone."

A nod at his last comment. "Like being on a slow hyperspace trader. Not much to do between planets as long as the ship doesn't have any issues, but then if there is one, you're busier than a Gand low on methane."

Purges sounded familiar enough. The Sith didn't like ordinary men like him poking their nose into their business, but some things bled over. A long time ago a man Aden hated had said that the people who worked for Intelligence were the sanitation workers of the Empire. In his new role, Aden was coming to accept that statement as being very true, given that he was constantly mopping up a mess left behind by someone who had more power in their little finger than he had in his entire body.

The discrepancies, he decided, were an issue for another day. Aden liked keeping his mind busy by fitting puzzle pieces together, but his mind was currently full up on mysterious circumstances and questions in need of answers. And for all his adaptable attitude, he was more inclined to be the secretive sort. That was just life in his line of work.

"Not keen on the endless strings of sanctimony, are we?" He asked, with a twitch of his lip up into something resembling a small smile. He understood why of course, he just couldn't resist poking fun at the Jedi, despite having worked with more than one that he actually could say he even liked.

"Something like that. Could also be the five years I spent in carbonite on some jackass's trophy shelf."

He shifted his grip on the stock pot, so he could free a hand to gently push a frog attempting to escape up the side back down. He had befriended said jackass later on, but that didn't change that his sense of the passage of time had changed somewhat in the aftermath, "Once you lose that amount of time, you're just never quite the same again."

"Who really does like sanctimony when you're on the outside of it?"

More frogs float.

"I've heard of that. That sounds like a terrible thing to happen. I hope the side effects didn't last too long."

To explain the whole thing would require a lot more time and digressions that right now either has the time or interest in, but maybe they'll get to it later.

"You've got a point there."

Who indeed. Certainly not him.

"I can't say I enjoyed it. Luckily I've got good friends who wouldn't let me stay a Chiss-cicle forever."

Just the five years had been plenty bad. Especially since his mind hadn't been entirely his own at the time. That was a long and complicated story though, bordering on unbelievable. One he wasn't inclined to tell, either. He himself was an entire hive of lies and secrets, after all, as any Intelligence operative should be. That didn't change just because the current circumstances were a bit unusual.

Whether or not it had been a terrible thing, though. Well. He was fine now, so he couldn't really complain.

"So these recipes... Are they a secret or can I pester you to share them with me?"

“I don’t see why I can’t share them. My master said that being a teacher of the Force didn’t pay bills, so he was a chef, and made me learn it too. He also said it taught one focus, judgement, and timing. It all made sense when we started lessons on alchemy, but they’re not some kind of recipe you’d find in a holocron.”

The line of frogs ends.

“Now I find myself wondering about ancient Sith recipes for food, but I also wonder how many of them are just for poisoning enemies and living through it yourself. Galactic conquest sounds exhausting.”

"How pragmatic."

It made sense. While plenty of Sith went on to find riches in their careers, it wasn't true for all of them. For those not traditionally aligned it would be even more complicated, he imagined. And with the inconsistencies between what he knew and what she seemed familiar with, well. He could imagine that the Force itself didn't pay the bills. Or even being Sith in and of itself, apparently.

His head tilted slightly to the side as he pondered Sith food and poisonings, and galactic conquest too, "I wouldn't be surprised. So far as conquest though, it makes sense. If you read peace is a lie literally, then trampling on the lives of others is a convenient way to ensure that there's always going to be strife, since living sentients aren't naturally inclined to politely bite the curb so some Sith with an ego the size of Coruscant can stomp them."

He gave a slight shrug of his shoulders, "Poison an enemy with your cooking, and that enemy's buddies will come running to get revenge for what they've lost. Same thing, really, if you look to strife in particular to be what brings strength, power, victory."

Aden was an outsider, of course. He only knew what he'd seen.

"I do find it ironic that some Sith seem so chained to the literal interpretation of a code that is supposed to free them, though. If I couldn't enjoy a simple meal without worrying about being poisoned, I don't think I'd ever consider myself free."

Edited (supposedly supposed to indeed. removal of a redundant word.) 2022-01-24 06:52 (UTC)

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Test Drive 032

Culinary Containment

Vote-Rigging

Repo Train

Team One

Team Two

Team Three

Mala-Tam Zaaraatt | Star Wars (post-ROS) OC

Culinary Containment

Re: Culinary Containment

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