SPACE STATIONS > The Cancer

Recycling Fixes Everything [Open]

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Zero Undead:
The garage bay was saturated in a tangled chorus of odors: grease, oil, chemicals, fuel, metal, and rich tobacco. A thin haze of smoke probably should have been alarming when encountered inside a building housing so many flammable materials. Good thing the business was located on The Cancer and regulations were pretty lax. Most of the mechanics would have probably walked out if they couldn’t smoke while working.

Zed's Body and Engine Shop

The place was run, up front, as a legitimate shop. The fact that most of the parts that passed through were not registered on any list, because they were stolen from stripped ships, was only known to people that were in that very business. Things were kept discreet, and nobody questioned where the used parts came from. Zed was in the business of don't ask and don't tell.

Of course, according to Zed, the man in charge, their garage could fix anything you brought to them – guaranteed.

Wolf had landed a job there at first because Zed had pitied him. Just another wayward kid, orphaned by war, and lost in the universe with nowhere to turn. By the end of the first day, Zed had reformed his opinion of the quiet, scrawny young man. Fairly puny-looking, yes, but the kid knew his shit, and he worked without bitching and without questioning. Zed could appreciate those qualities.

After a month, Wolf was still hanging around, not even an official, on the books, employee, but he was semi-content with their arrangement. The shop was noisy that day. There were saws and drills running. Zed's three mechanics were dismantling a small courier vessel, and he was helping. Right now he had on a thick jumpsuit, welder's gloves, and a mask as he cut through a stubborn piece of piping that was in his way to some valuable parts.

Cheesigator:
Yeah, but could that garage fix people, though?


Kirkley let out a rather loud yawn, stretching his arms over his head before dropping one hand back to rest at his hip and the other to scratch at the back of his neck.

He usually never spent too long on the Cancer, because his luck only ran so far before some jackass inevitably pickpocketed him, which was a real pain in the ass; buuut he'd run into an rather haphazard asteroid field when he'd been running some cargo for some customers, and while he made the delivery just fine, his ship? Not so much. So it was with no excess amounts of joy that he took the poor thing in to his friends at Galley La, handing Reva the keys with a pout on his face while Belliel patted his shoulder and told him it'd be a week, mostly to get all those dents out.

Man. This sucked.

The faint scent of cigarette smoke wafted through the air, picked up by his delicate nose, and he sneezed. Coincidentally, he did so right as the sound of hoverbike engines revving echoed through the ramshackle streets, and a group of rowdy young adults wrapped up in the wrong crowd burst around a corner, gunshots echoing as they panged off of the siding on the buildings.

Kirkley started a little, as did many of the other innocent bystanders on the street, who screamed and ran for cover while the gang members shot at each other, having some kind of terf war or something. He'd been about to duck into a bar himself when he happened to notice an open garage door, and the bikers were speeding right up to it, guns drawn at each other. If they missed, the bullets might go inside, where he saw one mechanic with a mask on in the middle of cutting through some thickass pipe, he probably couldn't even hear what was going on!

"LOOK OUT!"

Without a second thought he just moved, jumping in front of the garage door and the mechanic right as the shots were fired. One bullet bounced off of a piece of scrap metal inside before embedding itself in the wall; two others hit Kirkley in the shoulder and lower back.

He grit his teeth at the sharp pain and the familiarity of the metal piercing his skin, and he turned to watch as the kids went roaring around another corner and were gone in the blink of an eye. Jeese, little shitheads, they could've killed someone, if they hadn't already.

He looked back at the mechanic he'd shielded, who he noticed now was kind of on the scrawny side.

"Hey, you alright?"

Zero Undead:
Crime was always a problem in the seedy parts of The Cancer; even their garage ran on a lot of illegal business. Catching snippets of gang violence was nothing new to the workers at Zed’s place, but usually the bullets stayed outside the garage where they belonged.

When it was outside the building, Wolf and his AI didn’t care. He could hear the commotion but it had nothing to do with his work, so he didn’t so much as raise his head at the distant buzzing of hover bike engines, or the whoops and hollers of the young people riding them, even the sounds of gunfire didn’t really make him flinch. Although he couldn’t help but notice the other guys had scrambled for cover, but he was still cutting away without a care in the world. It didn’t matter to him if bullets were flying outside – they weren’t a danger to him currently, so the AI remained idle.

It wasn’t until someone yelled to watch out that his head finally snapped up, just in time for a bullet to ricochet into a wall. Wolf would have been up in an instant normally, but a wall of what appeared to be muscle had jumped in front of the bay door, shielding him from two more errant shots.

The AI could process information very quickly, but his biological brain was much slower and prone to being shocked. Fortunately the danger was already past and the AI did nothing at all. Wolf simply froze there, staring at the man that had taken two bullets for him in a sort of stunned silence through his wielding mask. It was a puzzle that the man was still standing, and seemed relatively un-phased by the fact that he’d just been shot.

Twice.

Really, social convention suggested he should be the one asking this strange man was alright. Wolf killed his torch and easily slipped his hands out of the big leather gloves that had been protecting his delicate hands from the heat and sparks, then pulled off the heavy mask and dropped it on the floor. Without the AI directing him he felt more than a little lost, but with no danger the AI simply no longer cared.

“Yes. Are you?” He stood slowly and took a step towards Kirkley before stopping with a very confused look on his face, but it was replaced with a fare blanker expression a moment later. “Do you need me to call the emergency line?”

Cheesigator:
A few moments passed between him and this mechanic, as the little guy (presumably) just stared up at him without responding to his question. He waited patiently, figuring hey, kid was probably shocked, he would've been too if he'd been in his shoes.

Finally, the mechanic seemed to snap out of it and took off the gloves; Kirkley blinked, watching him closely as he noticed how unscathed and dainty the hands were underneath. Unsurprisingly, they matched this kid's face quite well when the mask came off. He could have been anywhere between the ages of 15 and 23 and Kirkley would have believed it.

He was eerily pretty, he'd definitely give the kid that.

He said that he was alright, and Kirkley visibly relaxed a little, smiling down at him with relief clear on his face.

"That's good, for a moment there I was worried I'd been too late!"

For a moment the kid tried to step towards him, and he saw a bit of confusion before it was replaced by a blank stare. Huh, this one was definitely a strange one, but so was Kirkley so he wasn't gonna say anything about it--that'd be rude.

"Oh, me? No, no need for that. This kinda happens all the time, I'll heal within 24 hours. Besides, hospitals are too much trouble when the legal records don't match up." He moved to try and touch the gunshot in his back, using the arm with the shot shoulder and winced; that had definitely been stupid. "Although, would it be too much trouble if I asked you to help get the bullets out? I hate healing with those in, they're an even worse nightmare to dig out later."

He said it with a kind of embarrassed chuckle; if it had been on his frontside he probably could have dug them out himself, but like an idiot he'd shielded the kid with his back and now he was kind of up shit creek without a paddle. Well, Reva could probably help him get them out but he wouldn't look forward to the walk all the way from here to Galley La while getting suspicious looks for having obvious bloodstains on his clothing. That wouldn't really be much fun at all.

Zero Undead:
The longer he was removed from the fleeting danger in time, the harder it was for Wolf to focus on the very tall, broad man in front of him. With the threat gone the AI simply wished to resume its designated task of breaking down the ship he had previously been working on. The computer didn’t care about complex human emotions or interactions. All it cared about was fulfilling its purpose; if you could even call it caring.

Human Wolf was concerned with why this stranger had jumped in front of him. People didn’t do things like that in his experience. Also, a person that shrugged off two bullets like nothing was alarming. The fact that he would have done the same only made it that much more alarming to him. What was this guy?

“I was never in danger.” Well, not of any serious bodily harm. If he couldn’t dodge the bullets his body would have repaired the damage. It seemed that this man’s body would do the same. Wolf’s inflection fell pretty flat, his voice didn’t hint at the fact that not moments before he’d had bullets fly towards him or that he’d just seen someone shot. It creeped people out, how lifeless his voice sounded with the emotion drained from him.

His teal eyes moved over the man, watching his movements, but lacking the expression of interest or curiosity. He was simply observing.

“Yes, I can do that, but I need tweezers and a sanitizing agent.” The AI had switched gears, there was a function to be performed and bullet wound care information was already being downloaded. Wolf gestured slightly for him to follow and began heading for the back. All the grease and chemicals in the garage wouldn’t be good for any kind of wound care, and he needed to get the tweezers from the bathroom. He pointed to a cot tucked inside what looked like an unused office space. “You can sit here. I don’t think I can reach properly with you standing up.”

The man was very, very tall.

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