RP: The Wayward Old Wounds (Pre-episode 4)

[Syaoran]

Once Janelle was inside, the man gestured for her to close the door, and once it was, the car began to move.

"I know you're hesitant to trust, and I would be too, but your trust will not be misused." He reached into his brief case and pulled out a thin folder of papers to hand to Janelle. "We want you to assist in a civilian-based operation. Because there is a high possibility of first contact, we do not want our military presence to be the first thing they see. You'll be joining a crew of contractors run by a former member of the Weltraumflotte. She has agreed to operate with our authority, which was fortunate for us."

The man sat back now and relaxed his posture, to let everything sink in a bit. "The question of the matter becomes what would you like as compensation for all this? Money, or perhaps something else?"

 

[Floodwaters]

As the car started to move, Janelle's entire body tensed and her knuckles tightened on the edge of her seat until they were taut and white. Her eyes kept jumping from looking out the window of the now-moving car, the driver, the door locks, and the man sitting next to her. Her neck was turning her face this way and that fast enough for one to make the near-comedic comparison to that of an agitated bird.

Her heightened sense of near-panicked suspicion eased somewhat as the man laid out the details of his offer, and her attention began to slowly center on him. By the time he had, to her astonishment, actually asked her what she preferred as her method of payment, her gaze was solidly locked on the Abwehran.

She didn't reply immediately, only watching him blankly, as if she either didn't understand what he had just said to her, or was having some serious difficulty in believing that she had understood correctly. After several seconds of silence, an odd grin started to sprout on her bemused expression. "So wait a second," she replied, a touch of sardonic humor in her mezzo-soprano voice. "Let me make sure I'm getting all this right. Just yesterday y'all were suggesting I was a pirate or a thief, but now not only do you want me to work for you, but you're actually telling me I get to name my price?" She narrowed one eye at him once more, again giving him that same sideways look she'd given before she'd stepped into the car. "Why?" she continued, folding her arms and rotating slightly in her seat, folding one of her legs up beneath the other one. "Why me?"

 

[Syaoran]

"The less affiliation you have with us the better." The man spoke plainly as he looked at her with a flat expression. "We do not know what is on the other side, if you mess things up, we can easily distance ourselves from you." He was rather direct, but it was not as if he was saying anything too strange. "Of course also you must realize if you ask for too much we'll refuse the offer. But judging by your ship, you're not in much of a position to risk losing a job over pricing disputes are you?"

 

[Floodwaters]

Janelle's lips pursed tightly as she gave the Abwehran officer a slight scowl, remaining with her back to her corner of the car, but it only lasted a few seconds before it began to evaporate. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as she looked down at her lap. "So you just need a disposable lackey," she muttered, and not as a question, and then breathed a long, resigned sigh. "Y'all sure don't sugarcoat things, at least."

She turned her face away from the four-armed man, retreating into her thoughts. For several long minutes she simply stared out of the car's window, watching the city roll by and its people go about their day to day lives as they drove past, lost in contemplation.

Of course her brief suspicion that she might have the upper hand had been foolish. What in all the universe did she have to offer that the Schirmherrschaft would want badly enough to give her bargaining power? And furthermore, what other options did she have, anyway? She may not have outright lied about how she had gotten here, but as far as she could tell, it hadn't been the whole truth, either. Telling the officer that she actually didn't own the ship she'd flown in on, that she had been mistaken for a woman she didn't know under extremely confusing circumstances, a woman she was now pursuing for answers she wasn't even certain she wanted wouldn't earn her any help from them, judging by her limited experience thus far. And if she were to walk away right now, then what? Her ship was useless now, and without the funds to get it spaceworthy again she'd be at another dead end in a strange place with no connections, no resources, and no answers.

However, her dishearteningly short list of options didn't make this offered mission sound any more appealing to her. She had no idea what he had meant by "the other side," and she couldn't think of any interpretation of the phrase that she liked. For all she knew this was little more than a suicide mission, and using a no-name off-worlder with no ties to the local community would give the Abwehrans total deniability. They'd get whatever it was that they were after with minimal risk of getting their own hands dirty.

But in all honesty, did she really have that much to lose to begin with?

Finally, with a cynical scoff, she looked back at the security officer, her expression flat and blank. "If I do this," she said, "I want enough to fix my ship's hyperdrive, plus a week's worth of living expenses. In cash, one lump sum. And - don't take this the wrong way - to never hear from any of y'all ever again."

 

[Syaoran]

The man smiled and let out a hearty laugh in response to Janelle's request. "I do believe you have the wrong impression." He waved a hand in a gesture of brushing aside her words. "You see this will be an extended situation, but the captain of the ship will be paying you regardless. You will have much more than a week's worth of living expenses. As for your ship, we can indeed fix it. It should be no real problem. But is that all that you want?" He pulled out a datapad and typed on it, making arrangements of some kind no doubt.

 

[Floodwaters]

Janelle bristled slightly at the response, her mild embarrassment very obviously overshadowed by annoyance. "Well, you ain't giving me much in the way of clues about what's on the table, exactly," she retorted, doing little to hide the irritation in her tone, and shifted slightly in her seat to more fully face the officer. She gathered her long hair in her hands and pulled it into one bunch over the front of her right shoulder before folding her arms tightly across her chest again. "If I had a clearer idea just what the frak I'm getting into, or if you'd be so kind as to throw me a bone about what exactly it is you're offering in return..." She paused, her green eyes boring into the Abwehran's forehead as he typed away on his datapad, and she bared her gritted, frustrated teeth at him silently. "All right, look. You don't wanna tell me exactly what it is these 'contractors' of yours are expecting to find," she continued with a resigned sigh, "or hell, maybe you don't even know. And whatever your reasons for doing it, I don't much care. That's all fine by me. But we both know y'all have me by the short hairs here, so can you at least give me some kind of hint as to what it is you're offering? I can lay out my wish list for you all day, honey, and I'm pretty sure there ain't a sizable portion of it you'd be willing or even able to pay out."

 

[Syaoran]

The man let out a heavy sigh seeing Janelle's response, but he did not seem irritated. "I apologize I thought you'd be the type to simply take advantage of the situation, but I see you're more cautious than that." He put down his datapad and looked her in the eyes. "I guess I'll explain it to you." He leaned forward partially to get closer. "I take it you do not know much of this star system...but ASE-006, is missing all of its planetary bodies with the exception of the star. We believe we found what is the cause of that, a spacial anomaly similar to a wormhole. We've stabilized it, but now we need to investigate it. That is what the Anbruch is doing, they have gone in to see what is on the other side, you will be joining them at the first opportunity should you accept. So frankly, we have no idea what it is you will be dealing with."

 

[Floodwaters]

As the agent spoke, Janelle listened intently, her eyes never leaving his, but her muscles increasingly slackened as he neared what was clearly the end of his explanation. They really didn't know any specifics, which was almost certainly why they didn't want to risk any of their own resources. As she'd suspected, as well as the officer had basically come straight out and said in so many words, she was just another expendable asset, a pebble to be tossed into a black chasm to gauge its dangers without putting the handler in jeopardy. That didn't matter to her, though. This was the only opportunity at her feet, and she saw no benefit to ignoring it aside from potentially prolonging her meaningless, miserable existence for another few weeks.

The car made a turn as the officer wrapped up his summary, and Janelle held onto the handhold above the door on her side to keep herself from sliding into him. For a few seconds she let her gaze wander out through the window, watching a street performer juggle no fewer than sixteen rubber balls between his four arms as they passed him. After a long pause, she sighed again and looked back at the officer.

"You repair my ship and return it to me," she said flatly, hardly even blinking as she said it. "You clear my name from any watch lists or 'suspicious persons' dossiers y'all have. Your contract crew pays me a fair wage, your outfit pays me one lump sum, four figures, once we get whatever you need." Before the officer could chime in, she held up a finger to indicate she wasn't done. "You give me every shred of information you can dig up on one Sienna Shelton. Where she lives, who she dealt with, any contacts she might have. Everything." She leaned in closer. "And no questions asked."

 

[Syaoran]

"Sienna Shelton...if they are not Abwehran it will take some time to collect information but we can still get it. As for the rest, it can all be properly arranged and organized." The man set back and folded his arms. "I don't think this needs to be said, but the things that you see on the other side, we want you to keep that information from spreading, in fact, we want to keep the anomaly as a whole secret. We'll have the paperwork for an NDA by the time you're ready to join the crew, but I think it'll save us both hassle if you just stick to it and don't try to spread things around."

As the man spoke these words the car came to a stopped outside of a small hotel that was running on the station. The man then pulled out a key and handed it to her. "I assume you don't have a room to stay in, so we arranged one for you, just stay there."

 

[Floodwaters]

Janelle watched out through the window of the car as they approached the hotel, taking in the look of the building. It was a squat, blocky structure, mostly, save for the small porte cochere that jutted out over the single glass door facing the short, semicircular pass-through from the street. She leaned into the window, casting her eyes up beneath the roof of the car to afford herself as much of a view as she could from within. She wasn't entirely sure what she expected to see; perhaps given the spectacles they'd whizzed past on their way here, she thought that perhaps there was more to the building that met the eye at street level, and the unadorned, uninteresting gray-and-white facade drew the eye away from a darkened spire that pierced the darkness above their heads. But she saw nothing, just the looming blackness of the station's artificial night, bejeweled by the lights of the other buildings encircling the empty space above the little hotel.

No matter, however. She didn't need luxury, and she silently counted herself lucky that the Abwehrans were putting her up in lodgings at all. Turning back to face the officer, she slid her jaw sideways and gave him a curt, perfunctory nod as she nabbed the offered key between two knuckles. "All right, I'm in," she said, and yanked on her door handle to open it. She had one foot out onto the curb when she glanced back over her shoulder once more at the Abwehran. "Anything else?"

 

[Syaoran]

"Don't look so disappointed, it's honest work and an honest pay. We just don't want everyone to know about it." He chuckled and then pulled out one more thing, a from his suit. This time it was a small rectangular electronic device. "That is a communicator, it can handle files as well as transfer, but it's meant to be discreet and hard to track its signal. We'll leave messages for you on that, and we want you to contact us as well about any suspicious behavior. You'll get a bonus if you do." He Then relaxed and smirked, "Aside from that, I suggest getting familiar with a gun, the last report said there was a bit of shooting."

 

[Floodwaters]

Janelle held out her palm for the agent to drop the device into. She looked at it intently while he described it, and couldn't help a little smirk of her own. They want me to spy on their spies, she thought, amused. She turned the device over in her fingers as she held it up to her eyes, then dumped it into her right hand with the hotel key and slipped them both into her pocket while she shifted more of her weight to the foot that was already out of the car.

She paused at the mention of guns, however, and her eyes came back to the officer's. Her lips parted as she began to speak, but oddly, the words eluded her entirely. She wanted to protest, to say that she had never used a firearm before in her life, but she had the strangest feeling that it wasn't true. She couldn't remember ever having fired a gun, and yet the mere mention of one called up memories of the weight, feel, even the recoil of a very specific ten-millimeter pistol in her hand. It felt as from an exceptionally vivid dream, in that ephemeral state between sleep and wakefulness, where no matter how much one's conscious mind knew that its details made no semblance of sense, its lingering memories insisted that they had actually happened.

Just a second too late she realized that she had frozen, and the color in her face had likely wavered before she managed a tight-lipped smile back at the agent. "I can handle myself," she assured him, rolling down her window as she stepped out of the car, slamming the door behind her. She turned, leaning in and resting her elbows on the open window's edge, wrists crossed over one another as she eyed him again. "So I'll just stay here until y'all call me." The tense smile softened into a wry grin. "Mind if I call up some room service too? Least you could do to make up for that little scare in the hospital is let me have a hot meal that don't taste like watery rubber."

 

[Syaoran]

The man doesn't say anything to her sudden freezing up, but it's obvious that he noticed it. Once she stepped out though no one stopped her and the man smiled. "You can get what you want from room service, but do try to restrain yourself some. The hospital food is not great, but hotel food is not worth its price, you're better off at a diner. It might not look like much on the outside, but the inside of this place is very sophisticated, just it's not about the glamour."

True enough, through the glass door Janelle could see inside the establishment, and the first thing she would notice is a lot of wood furniture. It'd be hard to tell without touching, but it might actually be real. Along with such furniture were other adornments to the hall that looked like they were also made out of natural materials. The quality of the interior really was nothing like the exterior, and if the menu was similar, it might be quite the pricey stay.