Asrai

Hey guys, long story short, I'm leaving the site for personal reasons. Really sorry to let you down, and thanks for getting involved. It's got me writing again, if nothing else! Look out for the novel, someday. :) Sorry, again! Asrai x

OOC: I'm going to indelicately time skip a tad, because as much as the expositional character setting stuff is useful, we need to get along with the action. She we're going to skip to landing in Japan. Awesome. Morph woke up with a start as their clunker of a ship nudged into the dock and bumped into the mooring bay. "Novocaine!" she growled into the intercom at her nightstand, "I am going to kick you in the ******* face." "Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I've been flying all night, it's 4am, cut me some slack." Morph shook her head. She was too tired to be amused that Nova's accent was stronger when she was tired. "Well you can stay here and get some beauty sleep. The rest of us don't have time." Morph stretched herself out and gave herself the luxury of one last yawn before slamming her hand down on the alarm that would sound throughout her ship, waking the whole crew. "Wakey wakey. If I'm up the rest of you will be." She just rolled onto the floor and wriggled into her clothes - a pair of shredded and oil-stained jeans, a tshirt with several holes in and her battered to hell boots. Standing, he regarded herself in the mirror and snorted. "Mama needs new clothes." she told herself, realising how much of a ragamuffin she looked. She tied her dreads back off her face with a band and walked down the corridor, knocking on every door on her way. "Up, up, up." Nova walked past her, eyes dark and smelling like she'd been using a giant ashtray as a bath. "Except you, you're off duty for the day. You deserve... aside from the bumpy landing." Nova just proffered a choice finger before going into her room and slamming the door. Morph stood in the galley as her tired and tetchy crew filtered in. "Yeah, I know, it's early. Deal with it." she said severely. "Now, our gameplan while we're here is to get our hands on T-17 and botox. Both are in very high demand right now, and it's cheap here, so we'll make a fortune selling it on. I have two contacts here, Mayuko Takanawa and Sakura Otomo. The issue is, these women are serious rivals. If one knows we've spoken to the other they will refuse to supply us, but they don't necessairly have any stock. I am going to have to split us up. Thally and Val, I want you in underground Tokyo. You'll have to play it by ear and feel out where Takanawa is. If anyone asks, you're from a ship called the Califa and Val, have fun playing Captain. Nick and myself will find Sakura Otomo. If you can get anything else, that's fine, but concentrate on the T-17 and botox. Any questions?"

Ha! No, it's all good, add away, it makes me happy! xxx

Having walked all through the guts of her ship, Morph felt around for the flap in the ceiling the would open into her own bedroom and slammed it open, pulling herself through, and popping out beside her bed. She sat on the floor, feet dangling through the hole, for a little while. She wasn't all too sure what she planned to do with herself. Her brain was buzzing full of work stuff, but this was one of those days when she really didn't want to deal with the practical aspects of her life. Sometimes it was just better to ignore it and sleep. Being a pirate always seemed like it should be glamorous and exciting, but in reality it was just hard, and required a lot of planning. And it wasn't just work that messed with her head. She just didn't have time to think about anything else. She picked herself up off the floor and sat at her computer. The screen was fuzzy and green for a second before flickering to life. She typed "Blue Cabral" into a search engine and scrolled through the different articles, seeing if there was anything new or interesting online about the Prime Minister. Nothing caught her eye, so she closed that window and searched instead for Marie Cameron. A few pictures of a little girl with freckles and frizzy mouse-brown hair popped up, but nothing exciting. She scrolled through articles she's read a hundred times, headlined with words like, "missing" and "the search continues". Clearly it didn't - the last article was from a year and a half ago, and it included a digital image of what Marie Cameron would look like now. Morph snorted. The "photograph" showed a still-frizzy but no longer freckled mess with too-high cheekbones and thin lips. "Blindingly inaccurate," she muttered to herself. She turned the computer off and flopped on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Everything was fine. Everything in the world.

I've started my transformation into a superhero. It is ridiculously exciting.

Morph forced a smile that looked more like a grimace. "Right... I'll be off, then." Her fatalistic side said to herself that this was clearly a sign that they were treading dangerous ground, and she was inclined to agree with it. "I'll be in the Underbelly." She got up and walked out of the room past Val, without looking either of them in the eye. She pulled up a hatch in the floor and dropped down inside it, landing like a cat 9 feet down. She looked around the cavern full of pipes and wires and let out a strangely relieved sigh. Down here always felt a little more like home than anywhere else in the ship. She never wanted to be a Captain. She didn't like being in charge, she didn't like having to coordinate everything and everyone. It wasn't as if she had great people skills. It stressed her out. This was what she loved. Mechanics. Electronics. She liked knowing that she could take this whole ship apart piece by tiny piece and put it back together again, exactly as it was before. She walked through the twists and turns of the Underbelly, reconnecting random wires as she went. It was a good place to get other thoughts out of her mind. Unwelcome thoughts. Thoughts about Arsenic, about moles, about anonymous tip offs. She needed to be here from time to time, to let her mind wander. It was like meditation for the mechanically minded.

Morph snorted. "Did I mention that I'm covered in engine gunk? If that works for you in any way you are a creep." she indicated her ruined t-shirt. "Also, I'm exhausted, man. It's been tough. Today was a really hard day." she cracked the bones in her neck. [i]Yes,[/i]the quiet voice in her head that knew better than to speak too often said [i]It's been a VERY hard day. You deserve a little slip. Consider it a work out.[/i] "Do you ever think about the fact that when we first met, you were just nineteen?" Arsenic asked, with an odd quality to his voice which Morph took an instant disliking to. "No, I don't." Morph said, slightly more angrily than she either intended or expected. She wasn't hugely happy about any referral to her age. It always felt to her like condescension. He looked at her as she just glared at the ceiling. "You know I don't mean anything by it, don't get touchy." Morph almost laughed. "Have you met me, Arsenic? I was born touchy, and I will die shouting at people to do their jobs or face the toecap of my boot. In fact it might be the shouting that finishes me off. I'll be ninety nine and give myself a peptic ulcer or something." She looked at him, and felt the tiniest hint of a shudder through her body, one that was far from unpleasant. He saw the look on her face and downed the rest of his drink, walking over to his bed that she had so ungraciously hijacked. He sat at the edge of it as he thought that it would smell of engine oil and rust for ages. And the lotus oil she used in the tips of her hair. And the weird pineapple smell that always seemed to follow her, for reasons that nobody knew. She wasn't a scented bodywash kind of woman. Girl, really. She looked at him and sat up straight. She smiled, ever so slightly awkwardly. "We're a pair of silly people." she muttered, not sure whether she was talking to him or reminding herself.

Morph eyed up the remaining crew in the galley and shook her head. "You know what your jobs are, get on with them. We need to get moving sooner rather than later." She stood up and walked out of the galley. Instead of going straight to her own quarters she passed Nova in the corridor before muttering the override password and entering Arsenic's room, closing the door behind her. She watched him work, the music blaring too loud for him to have heard her come in uninvited. "Still listening to this crap?" she yelled over the loud, loud music, a rare smile on her face. He turned around, knife in hand. "You know better than to sneak up on a man with a weapon in his hand." he said, raising a brow at her. She chuckled. "Dirty." Arsenic gave her a look but he smirked a little. "How's my sauer looking? The trigger has been seizing lately, and that's never a good sign." Arsenic threw her Sig Sauer over to her and she caught it deftly. She checked it over, took the mag out and tested the trigger. It slid smooth as a hot knife through butter. "You legend." she said appreciatively. "I just cleaned it, Morph. If you use a gun like that on the beach you can't expect it to work properly. But thanks." "I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to my gun." Morph joked. She didn't joke often, but this was the one room where she felt she didn't have to be quite as acerbic as she was with anyone else. She flopped back on Arsenic's bed, and rested her eyes for a moment. "You know those days when you just want to kick people?" "You mean every day?" "Yep. That day." she said, sounding exhausted. "Sometimes I think of giving up. Selling the stock, the ship, the weaponry. Retiring." "No, you don't." he said, bluntly, "You'd get bored in five minutes and develop casual middle-class kleptomania." Morph stared at the ceiling. He was right, of course.

Morph eyed up her crew, jaw clenched. "As I was saying... that was close. Too bloody close." she placed her booted feet back on the floor. "Cyan, I need to know who tipped them off. It could have been random, but you all know me well enough to know that I don't really believe in coincidences. Whoever it was, they need a warning." She looked at Arsenic. "You'd be able to sort that out for me, wouldn't you." It wasn't a question so much as an order. "Nova, you need to take better care of this junk heap. It's saved our arses pretty consistently, but it won't keep doing that if the engine falls out. If the motor splutters, tell me. If the steering jams, don't just hope that sort of problem goes away. Log it. I need to know about every dodgy gear change and every rocky landing. Every issue is like an injury. Usually a metaphorical band-aid will do the job, but if I don't catch problems early they only get worse, and you know that." She turned to Thally, "I get that violence is kind of your schtick, I get that, I do, but tone it down a little, yeah? You know that, tempting though it may be, we can't kill HOPE officers. Even though they're scum of the Earth. No offence, Cy. Now, I need you to chart us a course to Japan. I want something quick that won't absolutely murder this glued together bit of rubble we call a ship."

RIGHT! The RP thread is up, now that we have a full cast! Yay! This thread will remain open for questions and ideas, and I'm going to quickly put up a glossary of random terms and words. Sleb - Derogatory term e.g. Son of a Sleb. Stems from the word "Celebrity", following the law against fame in the 2500s. Monodio extractors - These filter air for buildings and craft in the daytime. Personal respirators should be used if going outside in the daytime, but they're expensive and hard to get hold of. HOPE Officers - different to the police in that they work for a specific division of government, and have more power. They can search people, homes and ships without warrants and can basically do whatever they want. I'm sure more will crop up because I've had a mind blank. x