twelve_not_fourteen | fulfilling a promised lesson on the fine art of blasting things ...

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fulfilling a promised lesson on the fine art of blasting things ...

Walking back to the Millennium Falcon through the Nexus has gotten a little bit easier each time. The first time, it took him more than an hour to get back despite the fact that his ship has always been parked about a thousand yards away from a path that leads to the forum. The shiftable nature of this place makes no walk to and from anywhere as straightforward as it seems, but you can get used to it.

For a while, he cleans up the areas that he thinks both he and Verity are likely to be in for a while - the cockpit and the lounge especially, but also near the entry ramp and the living quarters.

He did promise lessons on how to fly and in due course, he will get her into the sky with him ... but he's still doesn't have a ton of fuel yet and the priority was always teaching her how to use the blasters. So he's pulled four weapons out of the storage lockers, completely disassembled them and cleaned them. He also discharges all, but one, of the plasma magazines.

They get placed them on top of the holochess board, which, sadly, is among one of the biggest flat surfaces available to him on the YT-1300 and then, he takes a shower and slips into a light weight pair of pants. It seems to take a long time for him to drift off in the small bunk that he's claimed for himself. The sound of the winter wind skips across the surface of his ship and makes a low howling sort of sound.

This is one of the reasons it's always preferable to put your ship in a proper hanger, but, when you're Han Solo, you work with what you got. After a few hours he wakes up, not knowing what time it is, until he opens the entry ramp and looks outside.

It seems too early for her to arrive. The sun hasn't even reached the apex of it's path yet, so he decides to lay back down. Leaving the ramp down for her to facilitate her letting herself in.

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A part of him wants to say 'how different can it be?' If so much of what he showed her about his ship seems rooted in certain consistencies that are universal, he can't imagine her worlds 'blasters' being much different than his - though, to a certain degree they are.

Still. It's the nexus and if there's one thing he's noticed, there's a lot of room for the unexpected.

"What makes you say that?" He says, as he shrugs out of his coat and lays it out on a nearby crate.

Ver takes a moment to remove her coat before trying to explain. "The guns I've been training with use small explosions to propel small pieces of metal at the target. No lasers, no light show, but a lot of noise and kick."

It's so disappointingly primitive when she says it out loud like that.

It does sound like her people have hardly evolved from throwing rocks at each other, to be honest. When you say it outloud like that.

"Interesting." He says as he rubs his rough hands together for a little bit of warmth. "I'll be honest that does sound a little backwards."

You know what's funny is that he didn't really plan for much entertaining after the blasting and looking over the ship - though he knows there's still a little bit left to show her. It suddenly dawns on him that his life is kind of empty when you get passed his work. A realization that makes him feel small for a moment, before he literally starts trying to shake it out of his head.

He wouldn't be entirely wrong. But in some ways, he's not so evolved beyond it either; violence is violence is violence.

"Yeah... there were more advanced kinds of weapons, but they weren't available to the general public. Which is probably for the best." There were enough problems with supervillains having horrible things. The banal evil of the careless and stupid was best limited.

She wonders what's wrong. It'd be hard to miss that behavior. Has she overstayed her welcome? Or is he regretting saying that about a dead universe?

"I suppose arming the general populace doesn't seem like such a good idea when people are sometimes born able to shoot lasers out of their eyes and stuff. The anti-mutant rallies would have been a lot more violent."

Oh, certainly the fact that it's her culture and not his culture has a high influence on his opinion of their primitive weapons. (And there are some people where he's from who think blasters are unrefined. They're misinformed, clearly.)

Han's egocentric viewpoint tends to make all the things he knows and is familiar with 'the best' which she has probably noticed by now.

Also, he still thinks her place is weird when she talks about it, he just realizes how much of a jerk he sounds like when he says it outloud.

"Mutants," he begins, drawing back to what she said earlier, "are the people who have powers, right?"

Edited 2016-03-03 18:54 (UTC)

She's noticed a slight tendency toward being self-centered, yes. It's a familiar sort of attitude, one she's always sort of going to miss when it isn't around.

"Right. They're born with a genetic mutation that gives them abilities. Some people decided it was not something their all-powerful god could tolerate, so they would sometimes take matters into their own hands. Yes, I know. They're very confused people."

So, what he gathered there is that some people are born with it and some people are not. (Harrumph) And that the people lacking the power seem to object to them having it. Ver, also, seems to have picked a clear side to favor.

"Do they consider you a mutant where you're from?" He says after quietly pondering for a moment. As he understands it, she wasn't born with the truth thing - it was something of an accident, but she can do magic?

Not being racist is an obvious choice to her. One of the perks of the curse: she's not taken in by rhetoric about superior races or genetic purity.

"No, I don't have that particular gene. I'm just a regular human being with a clumsy father." She gives a little shrug. "The government had a classification system for people with powers, and a training program. I was considered so useless they actually made a new lowest possible score for me."

She's not bitter or anything.

Okay, she's a little bitter. But it's still better to be considered useless than to have Maria Hill's attention.

Han's not the type that would hold anything against people who are born a certain way. They didn't have any more or less control over the circumstances of his birth than he did, but, he can empathize with feeling like you've bombed out in divine favoritism.

Captain Solo is the consummate have not and sometimes it just gets to him. Resolving those issues is something of an ongoing process, but it in some respects drives him to a certain greatness itself.

"They just didn't know what they had." He says with a shrug. Clearly, he thinks they underestimated her. "Lots of people make that mistake."

Edited 2016-03-03 19:57 (UTC)

She's not sure she'd call what she's got 'divine favoritism'. Just plain bad luck.

"They knew exactly what they had. Maybe that was the problem. An organization with that many secrets might not like having a human lie detector around. But I'm probably better off this way, I'd make a terrible hero."

Perspective. The grass always seems greener from the other side, as the old earth saying goes. Though, Han does have the idea that Ver doesn't exactly love her ability to see through people's lies. It at least makes him aware of the notion that having powers isn't inherently a blessing.

Though ...

"Yeah, I can't imagine you in a line of political work." Right or wrong, Han has the idea that lies come more fast and furiously in bureaucracy than they do in his line of work.

"Would you get rid of it if you could? Your power, I mean."

This is true, and she's guilty of her own bouts of baseless envy.

"Politics?" The idea makes her laugh. "No, I wouldn't survive long. I haven't got the knack of telling people what they want to hear or the stomach for knowing I'll never follow through."

It's a question she's heard before, but she's still not quite sure how to answer it. "No. I don't think so. I hate it, but I don't know what I'd do without it. Getting rid of it wouldn't magically give me the life skills I'm missing, so..." There doesn't seem much point.

That's an interesting answer. Not to the politics part; that one he expected, but to the one about her power surpised him. He expected her to just want to be rid of it if she could be, but here she is telling him it wouldn't solve her problems.

"I ... suppose I could understand that." He says after giving the reveal a certain amount of consideration. He doesn't really have many points of comparison, though.

There was a time she absolutely wanted rid of it, no doubts raised and no questions asked. But then people started asking her that question and making her think about it. Funny how that works.

"It's okay if you don't." Yeah, she noticed that wasn't a real definitive answer. "I wouldn't want you to. I mean. I wouldn't want you to know what it's like to deal with this kind of thing, because you don't deserve that."

It not like he isn't trying to see it from her point of view, it's just out of the realm of what he can relate to. He can relate to the idea of not wanting to profoundly change who he is right now.

He supposes if there was any correlation of something about his life that he hates, but probably wouldn't want to be different, it would have been growing up on the Trader's Luck. Sure, that place rotted something fierce, but it made a survivor out of him. That's worth something, he supposes.

"I'm sorry you have to go though this, sweetheart." He says after milling those thoughts around in his head. "I really am."

The effort is kind of him, and it's not that she doesn't want the comfort of being understood. But watching people try to understand and not get there is hard. She'd rather nobody try than see people she likes giving up on her.

"Thank you." She truly appreciates it, and will give him this smile for his troubles. A little kindness and a little sympathy is enough for her.

"Well."

Here there are at the point where she'll realize there's not much to her friend Han once you get passed the guns and the ship. She at least has retangles that will pull up things for them to look at.

"Guess I could show you the engines and the hyperdrive." He says, knowing they didn't get to that part earlier.

There's more to him than the guns and the ship. If he's not ready to show her those parts yet, that's okay. They can take their time.

"Okay. I don't really know anything about engines so please don't be insulted if I look completely confused." Finally, something he can show off and explain to her as much as he wants.

"I think a lot of people are in the same boat that way." He says with a shrug. "Nobody thinks about their engines unless they're not working."

Though, at that point, if they still haven't figured out how they work, you'll be paying a kings ransom in repairs. The cost of towing is deep space alone is usually very high.

"I can keep it brief, if you want."

"I don't own anything with an engine," she points out. She's never even owned a car of her own. City girl. Not her problem if the cab's got issues, she'll just get another.

"Oh, no, I like it when you explain things."

She hasn't ever owned anything with an engine, meanwhile, apart from those first couple years of his life that he can't really remember, they've always been present in his life. In fact, Han's spent a lot more of his time living, even at this age, on ships than he has on terra - though the Luck was more frequently docked than traveling somewhere.

Han decides to leave his coat behind, if they're going out again, might as well leave them by the access hatch. Though, her lesson on how to draw might take place inside the ship, since, the signigificant part of learning to draw isn't in pulling the trigger, it's in taking out the weapon from the holster.

Anyway, he starts walking toward the stern of the ship, expecting her to follow.

Their differences are sometimes extreme, but in the important ways they're starting to understand each other. And differences can be fun. It'll keep the friendship exciting.

Yes, of course, she follows him through the ship, arms folded with one thumb absently rubbing the inside of her elbow. She's not sure what the engines are going to look like, so, safer not to touch anything.

"So what's the difference between the engines and the hyperdrive?"

"The hyperdrive system is more advanced. It's job is to get you into a part of space-time called hyperspace. That's basically faster than light travel where I'm from." He says, struggling to come to terms with how best to explain it.

"Sublight engines are for flying through real space. It's a lot slower, but it's where you'll do most of your take offs, landings and evasive flying."

When they get to the rear of the ship she'll be treated to a view of a lot of equipment literally built into the stern of the ship. All the moving parts, which wouldn't be moving anyway since they're on the ground, are housed in blocky looking structures with removable panels.

There's not all that much to see, but it's one of the areas of more open space on the ship. That will probably be a good thing for her to know for later.

He might be struggling with the wording, but she seems to be understanding. The broad strokes, at least. Maybe he's better at this than he thought?

"So you'd use one or the other, but not both at the same time?" FTL travel has never made a lot of sense to her, but it happens so she tries not to think about all the reasons why it shouldn't work. There is a peace and a sorrow that comes with knowing the limits of your own abilities.

She looks around a bit before adding, "Which one is which?"

"Yes. Sort of." Han nods. "The hyperdrive acts to push you into hyperspace and then you end up drifting through it with your sublight engines."

He's alright at explaining things generally, but apart from blasters, he only feels so qualified to teach. His mind is sort of ... task oriented for lack of a better term. He feels like he can show anyone a series of steps to accomplish something, but bringing it all together is a bit harder for him

Han gestured to the whole wall and all of the machinery attached to it. "This whole segment of the ship is a series of sublight engines."

He walks over to fairly large cylindrical unit set back from the other engines by about five meters. Like the engines themselves, everything is well paneled up and otherwise turned off, so he ends up leaning against it and toeing it with his boot. "This is the hyperdrive."

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