Nomi and Vic 3

Every morning while in space, Nomi usually does a round of the ship, she checks in with Gigit, walks all the halls, visits the engine room, checks all of the remote monitors, even if they report to the main cockpit and generally looks after the ship. It's something she does as part of her responsibilities as captain, and even if she is only Captain for convenience's sake or because her picture is on the register, she still seems to take it seriously. Nomi often takes Vic with her to have his more experienced mechanic's senses on the rounds with her. It's on this walk the morning after they are fully recovered from any mishaps on Dathomir that Nomi breaks the companionable silence as they inspect the systems. "You know, it is really too bad that I wasn't on Zoph longer. I should have taken the chance to visit the quarters you had set up there. I am sure that you enjoyed having more space to let it all hang out." She smiles at the turn of phrase as she leans down to inspect a panel that appears to have come a bit loose and tightens the bolt with a wrench she has taken to carrying around. She is amused imagining how Vic will translate that particular metaphor.

Vic seems like he enjoys these morning rounds and has taken to playing along by calling Nomi "Captain" while taking the informal role of ship's mechanic. It's always hard to tell exactly to the extent that Vic is teasing due to the translator, but even having a person nominally in charge appears to put him more at ease. It might have something to do with his culture; Skakoans are notoriously hierarchical.

He cocks his head quizzically at the idiom, thinks for a moment, and decides he understands. "Relaxing! 'Let it all hang out?' That's good. On Skako we say...okay here's the test to see what comes out: 'the mess I've made is not sufficiently hidden.'" Vic laughs. "Close enough. Not putting your tools away or failing to clean up a project is much ruder to Skakoans. If you ever see someone else's mess unattended, it's either a sign of disrespect or they are comfortable enough with you that they think you will not take offense. Like a part of your family." After thinking about it, while Vic has a great many possessions that he carries around, you don't think you've seen him leave any of them lying about. Probably the untidiest thing you've ever seen him do is neatly stack the boxes that were in his room outside his door. Even his unfinished work gets put away at the end of a day. "To answer your question, yes, I'll admit that I'm going to miss it. I put great effort into making my space on Zoph a comfortable place to work and live. Although if you had come to visit me in my rooms there, you would not have been allowed to look in the closets, as I'd have had to hide my messes somewhere."

"But if you are interested, my invitation is still good for my cabin. There isn't much to see in there, but it could be an enlightening experience to step into my shoes." Vic holds up a hand, completely misunderstanding this idiom. "Silly translator. I don't have any shoes for you to try on."

Nomi laughs. "It means 'to interpret something from another person's viewpoint' - as though you are them, wearing their own shoes. And I would love to visit you. I have to admit I am curious as to what you actually look like." She pauses a moment. "You use a translator which makes your accent. Is that because your vocal chords do not produce the sounds that are needed to speak Basic?" Nomi continues their usual inspection. It is clear that she intends to complete the rounds, even if they end in a visit to Vic's quarters instead of the common spaces.

"No, I can speak Basic. I've been told it's a little hard to understand though. It isn't a problem with the vocal chords so much as it is an issue with some of the sounds in Basic being difficult to replicate without teeth. Here, I'll show you." Vic turns off the translator and continues speaking. It is a bit difficult to understand, as he appears to have a hard time making certain sounds and only manages them haphazardly. His word choices are a little odd and out of place, which is something that the translator would normally smooth out. Inflection comes through much better. "I forget det you weren dere on Zoph during the difficoudies. I deactifaded my dranslador as a part of de roose to fool the mercenaries. Cannae lie if you cannae be unnersdood, ya? Mosly I use the dranslador for assimilashun purposes. I found I was much more accepded among de crew when I spoke in dere bernacular. Dranslador humor also was a zurprisingly good ice breaker doo." Vic glances over at Nomi in what is probably a sheepish realization that he is describing his first interactions with her too.

"And by da way, I never want to indroduce myself wifoud assisdance. I don't wan do be Fic Dandor." After getting used to his voice for a bit, you're sure he said 'thick dander' before thinking about it.

Nomi looks like she is giving Vic a lot more attention than she was a moment before. Even her Lekku look like they are paying attention or listening to him. "Well, it's not the hardest accent I have ever had to listen to, but you are right, it is much easier to understand your translator. It's nice to hear your actual voice though." Nomi gives Vic a smile and punches the code to lock the screen on the sensor array she had just finished checking. "Everything looks great, just as it did yesterday. Not that I expected anything different, but it's good to make sure." She confirms.

"I'll need an atmosphere and pressure suit to go into your rooms, right? Might as well pick that up while we're here." Nomi crosses to a closet and shuffles through the suits there, finding the one that fits her best - is the least uncomfortable at least. "Lead the way."

Vic pauses outside the internal airlock door. He turns around and double-checks that Nomi's suit is sealed properly. "Id's de habid of my people do check de suid of your neighbor when going indo a dangerous admosphere. Id doesn' come up bery offen in our drabels on Rogue Rondo." Satisfied with Nomi's suit, he says, "Dere is only enough room for one in de lock chamber, so I will go before you. I will cycle de admosphere behind me, so you may proceed when de door opens." He turns back around and goes through the door. You can hear the hissing of atmosphere exchange and a minute or two later the door opens again.

"Thanks," Nomi says. There is a little bit of nervousness in her voice, but she doesn't seem to portray any distrust of Vic. She bounces on her feet as she waits for the airlock to re-set and open up and then steps into the airlock and activates it to take her to the other side. As it pressurizes Nomi grimaces, but the suit does its job and she is not honestly any more uncomfortable than she would be wearing the suit outside of the created pressurized atmosphere. When the door opens on Vic's side Nomi is standing there expectantly, this time, sure the suit is doing its thing, she has an expression of interest and excitement on her face.

Vic has turned the chair that is in front of his little desk built into the wall around and gestures with grand over-exaggeration for Nomi to sit as if he is implying "Voila, look at this majestic throne." On his desk, you notice his terminal is set to cycle through images of what look like Skakoan people doing various things on a strange planet. Interspersed with those, there are images of what you recognize as the mine on Zoph and various humans, Mustafareans, and others posing or showing something to the recording device. You assume that they may be pictures of his family or his friends and coworkers.

The room feels especially small since the pressure chamber takes a part of the space of the cabin. There is a bed that is made (if perhaps hastily) and what appears to be a metal bar that looks recently installed up near the low ceiling. Could Vic be doing pull-ups on it? It looks too high up for that. Nomi does see one thing that looks out of place: there is what appears to be a garment sleeve poking out of a closed hatch on the wall next to the desk. It almost looks comically deliberate as there are very few things in the room to see and it's impossible to imagine that he'd not have noticed it. Thinking back to the conversation about "letting it all hang out" Nomi thinks there's a message to be found there.

Vic waits for a moment so Nomi can take in her surroundings. She notices he is still wearing his suit. Vic says, "I'm very excited that someone actually gets to see my new program in action. It didn't occur to me until I got inside that this would be an opportunity to try it out in front of someone. Although the fact that you've never seen me need to laboriously remove my suit the hard way takes some of the fun out of it." [Vic isn't using his translator, but you've acclimated enough to his speech to understand most of it from context, so I'm going to write normally for him unless something sounds especially odd.] He holds out an arm and says, "please make sure to stand back; I don't have safety collision procedures built into it yet." Vic keys a code into the controls on his suit's arm and the mechanical arms of the suit deploy. Two of the arms reach up to grab hold of the bar near the ceiling and the other two begin to unseal the suit and remove parts of it. Vic has to do a little dance to keep up with what appears to be an auto-removal program he's written. He nearly falls over at the end when the arms grab his last boot and he trips a little when he twists the wrong way. The suit is then pulled up to the bar and settles up above the room hanging from the ceiling. Nomi realizes that she was not sure where he would have put it without this rig, as it is bulky and there isn't any clear place to stash it. Vic looks proud of it and claps his hands together in delight. He then reaches up to wiggle the rig to make sure that the suit is secure and not going to fall atop them both.

He stands before Nomi now without his suit. Like he had intimated, he looks...stringy? A little like a bunch of green beans of different lengths tied together in the middle. His limbs are long and his torso is oddly narrow. The suit's shape is extremely deceptive, as if someone who designed Skakoan suits decided that broad shoulders and a larger middle cut a more imposing figure among other races with a wider shape. So rather than the stocky appearance he has in his suit, he looks almost graceful outside of it. His skin looks not as smooth as a Twi'lek's, but not scaly or slimy, just rough and with a matte quality to it. One cannot escape that he looks quite sinister though, and it's mostly due to the eyes. They are red with no irises and they reflect the dim light, seeming to glow faintly. Vic's skin has a hue that is bluer than the well-known Wat Tambor's (one of the only points of reference that non-Skakoans have); two of the figures in the pictures have skin with a similar color. He's wearing what appears to be some sort of skin-tight clothing with an apparatus that had been connected to the suit until the arms disengaged it as a part of the program. It appears to be similar to a flightsuit or wetsuit and it looks like it is designed for lengthy periods wearing a pressure suit. Vic steps over to the wall with the rogue shirtsleeve, and pulls out a light jacket that he dons, making him look a little more like he's dressed as one would while lounging around on ship. As he sits on the bunk across from Nomi he says almost to himself, "I'm really glad we got a chance to go to Zoph, if only to give me access to my own clothing again. Nothing we found aboard even remotely fits me."

Nomi's eyes are almost comically large behind the screen of her pressure suit as she tries to take in everything that there is to see all at once; she's trying not to miss anything, trying to keep a straight face and not react with any expression that might betray that Vic is just a little scary, until she lets everything normalize for her and can associate all that she is seeing with the Vic that she knows and loves. When he is done with his performance and has shown off his apparatus and suit storage she claps; the claps being muffled by the large, air-filled gloves of her suit.

"Well, I don't know what I had imagined I would find by stepping into your space, but I never imagined anything like the reality that is." She makes a gesture which would otherwise be small, but is amplified by the suit she has on and she is horrified as she almost knocks the terminal on the desk onto the floor. Nomi settles her hands in her lap, holding the fingers of one glove with the other. "I am really impressed. This space is... well, completely apart from the rest of the ship. And I know that's the purpose, but it's really incredible what you have done in here. Also, I don't know how you wear a suit that is so much bigger than yourself without knocking everything over all the time!" she yelps.

"I'm glad we went to Zoph too, and that you are more comfortable. If I could have some of my old clothes it would make me so happy. Or maybe just my favorite head scarf." She chuckles to herself. "If Vesper had any idea what you really look like he would either be really embarrassed or tripping over himself to try and correct the error of the 'tiny man in lace' clothing that he made for you." Nomi's eyes settle for only a moment on Vic as he sits on his bunk, but they slide off toward the terminal on his desk. She is not comfortable looking at his eyes yet. "Tell me about these pictures. Are some of these people your family?" she asks.

"Not knocking things over took a long time for me. Imagine what it was like for a boy of ten and two who is new to his height. If you have any [unintelligible] training, you may try pretending you are doing that." Realizing that the last sentence may not have been comprehensible, he repeats slightly more clearly, "EE-BEE-AY, or exdra-behicular acdividy. Do liddle moobmends and dry doo doo dem slowly. If you need doo reach, move and durn your body " He demonstrates a series of deliberate arm movements and turns with his whole body to do something that you would normally just twist your arm around to do outside of a suit. It looks very odd without the suit on but accounts for the limited mobility. He points out a couple other things to be mindful of when moving and you can tell that these are rote instructions that he has heard or said dozens of times. It's reminiscent of an attendant on a civilian transport warning travelers about what to expect and how to behave during space flight.

Vic strokes his chin and looks perplexed at the 'tiny man in lace' but seems to put everything together after a moment. You've seen him make the same gesture wearing the suit many times, but it makes much more sense to see him do it without it on. "I'd be surprised if he doesn't know what I look like. He can see through my armor, yes? Perhaps he thinks it is too impolite to look!"

Vic allows himself to be diverted to the photographs. He stands up and fiddles with the terminal so that he can manually scroll through them. He flicks past several until he gets to a picture of the two Skakoans with skin of a similar hue. They are in a rather sumptuous living space with the sort of wall art and lighting that you associate with apartments on Coruscant that don't have windows to the outside. "This is my father Lorr and my brother Ori. My father lives on Skako, but Ori is out here somewhere. I worry about both of them a great deal, but I talked with my brother recently and apparently they are both alright for now." When he passes pictures of his father, some of them appear to be at some sort of large factory and Nomi sees some rather familiar-looking ship components. With her mechanical familiarity, she can easily tell that Lorr seems to be manufacturing large-scale electronics used in Seperatist ships, vehicles, and some of the largest combat droids (not regular battle droids, but the vehicle-sized ones that are used mostly for heavy engineering in war zones. She probably would have seen them on Ryloth wherever fortifications or prefabricated buildings would be constructed.

She doesn't see any pictures of Ori at the factory; in fact, in most of the pictures of Vic and Ori, they are suited and clearly not on Skako. Some of the pictures look like tourist photos at cultural attractions. "Ori is really fascinated with other species' cultures. He'd drag me along to all sorts of museums and local..." Vic makes a gesture as if he's looking for the word. "...places of note when we were travelling for business." She sees another picture of what she thinks is Vic in a much smaller pressure suit sitting in a conference room behind Ori who is negotiating with some humans. Vic appears to be taking notes on a datapad. He looks like just a kid.

"Oh! You've got to see this. I just saw this the other day and pulled it off the net in case it was censored. It's by a painter that escaped one of the outlying colonies that was taken by the Empire. Supposedly the artist paid smugglers some exorbitant price to transport her off world after the blockade had already been established and she did it all from memory." Vic brings up the image on his terminal.


 * place holder for image ***

Nomi shakes her head, just a slight movement in the suit. "I've never been outside a ship in space. Or been trained in it." She practices a few of the motions Vic explains. "But I can see how it would be similar. Is your suit heavy?" Nomi looks up toward where the suit in question has been attached to the ceiling, but can't crane her head all the way back due to her own restricted movements.

"I'm glad your family is ok right now. I haven't talked to mine in a long time."

When Vic showed her the painting he had downloaded she leans forward. "What exactly are we looking at?"

"The piece is called 'Bridgeworld Lost' after the colloquial name for the Skakoan colony. They were forced to surrender to the Empire when they were invaded without warning. Supposedly, the scene is that of the Hierarchy there being arrested by Imperial troopers as they tried to escape; the artist claims to have seen it happen herself." Vic switches gears. "Oh, if you mean the structures depicted, they are cities built upside-down underneath the... [long pause] I don't know if there is a word in Basic. Sky-foundations? They are renowned among visitors for being quite beautiful though and attract many artists to take residence there. I've studied a great deal about how they are built... but that is probably less interesting to a non-engineer." Vic is clearly babbling a little and it's pretty clear that something has made him a little nervous, but you don't think it has anything to do with the art or the story about it. He seemed fine before when he was talking about his pictures, but something changed.

"Wait, you've never been on an EVA? Oh, [unintelligible Skakoan], that's probably like heights cubed, isn't it."

Nomi frowns. "I'm not sure if it would be the same. When you're up high on a planet with gravity you can feel the pull towards the ground far below and you know that if you slip, you will fall. In EVA there's no where to fall, no inevitability of a crushing death. It might be different."

"The buildings are quite beautiful. I'm sorry to hear about the invasion of your planet. I know what it feels like when that happens." She very diplomatically didn't mention the Skakoan role in that invasion.

When Vic begins to appear nervous Nomi takes her eyes off of his datapad and looks him square in the face, sinister eyes and all. "What's wrong?"

For a moment, Vic looks pinned by Nomi's gaze, but then he takes a moment to purposely and visibly calm himself. He nods to himself and looks down resignation. "When you mentioned that you had not talked to your family in a long time, it occurred to me that one reason that this is true was due to what my people had done to your world. At that moment, I felt a deep shame more sharply than I ever had before. I'm not sure if it is the shared experience of seeing a world of my people invaded in a similar manner or whether my perspective has changed over the last months." Vic touches the image of his father and brother as the pictures begin to scroll past again. "I think my brother knew how bad it had gotten, which is why he got political. But it was so easy to...forget what was happening elsewhere." He gestures to the marching images of Zoph. "It took a Jedi overturning my life to...do anything."

Vic takes in a long, slow breath, like he's going to yell really loudly or dive underwater, but then nothing happens and he still looks relaxed. It takes you a moment to figure out what it was: Skakoans sigh in reverse. It probably takes more energy to expel the pressurized atmosphere than to take it in.

Nomi tries to pat Vic but it is an awkward gesture in her pressure suit and she ends up nudging him a bit too hard. She cringes. "Oops! I'm sorry. Are you ok? This suit! I swear. If I ever go to Skako I am going to have to take poise lessons in a pressure suit so that I don't make a fool out of myself at every opportunity." Nomi laughs a little, hoping that Vic joins in. "If there is one thing that I have learned from traveling the galaxy, it is that it is very very big and it is easy to miss what is happening in another place, especially if you have your own troubles at home. I have also learned that the big splashy representatives of a place- the Wat Tambors and Emperor Palpatines of this Galaxy- are not representative of the average, hard working, good natured being who you find at home in that place. I don't hold it against you Vic and you shouldn't either. Just, now that you know more, act wider. That's all."

Nomi nods sagely, or attempts to, while again the suit makes her gestures large and comical. She steadies the helmet with one hand and holds very still. "The Jedi are very good at overturning one's life, no? Even our newest Knights in the Galaxy do it."

Vic dodges Nomi's nod/headbutt. "Yes, it is not a joke. They do overturn the lives of those around them." He makes a gesture flipping his hand over. "But as much as the Jedi overturn, this new empire stomps lives out." He makes a stomping gesture with his foot and then puts his hands up and laughs. "Do not try that. You might put a hole in the bulkhead!"

Vic does a twirling motion with his hand and says, "We shall see if we can get you back out through the airlock without anything exciting happening, yes? Remember: slow, deliberate movements. We're going to have to try doing an EVA together at some point if you don't find it to be too much. It's rather fun once you get the hang of it." Vic assists Nomi in moving back toward the door in the cramped quarters, but does not hurry her.

"Thanks, Vic. This was fun. I'll practice before next time so I don't knock things over. And an EVA sounds like it would be interesting too. Surrounded by all those stars, I bet it's beautiful." Nomi waves goodbye as the airlock closes.