(( Okay, first character profile, search for my first corp, time to complete the trifecta with my first character story. It's not my best work, and its only the first part I've written - more to come later - but I wanted to flesh out my lil Caldari and give him some personality. Harsh criticism is accepted. <3))
Hungry Dog: Part I
The salvage dealer, a short and portly Civire, scratched his chin with the edge of his fingers, working his pudgy jaw from side to side. He narrowed one eye, then the other, tilting his head like a toy dipping bird, and letting out a gruff, meaningless noise every so often.
“Four mil for the bundle,” he grumbled.
Senn gave the clerk a squint, looking down at the assortment of components he was offering and taking a long drag on the thin Minmatar cigarette dangling from his lips. The young man seemed acutely out of place in the dingy backwater station; he was meticulously maintained, with nearly-black hair polished and pulled back, flush with the skull. Tight, uniform clothes, olive green in color, clung to his athletic frame, covered by an ivory floor-length, skinny trench coat with a high Nehru collar.
“Six point five,” he replied curtly.
“Four point five, final offer,” the clerk retorted in a tone that suggested he had no patience for haggling.
“The manual disk is worth two mil on its own, the micro circuits are two thousand apiece on the open market,” Senn answered, trying for the third time to explain his pricing in a deep, smokey voice. The slaver hound at his side – spindly even for its breed - panted softly in the poorly ventilated station, baring its fierce fangs.
“Salvaging parts off Guristas minnows and hacking orphan satellites? Yer lucky I’m paying you at all,” the clerk defended, throwing one hand up halfheartedly. “CONCORD keeps a close eye on manuals these days, plenty of stolen technology floating around…”
“Do you want these parts or not?” Generosity had run its course. Now frustration was setting it. Senn had been praised for having icy nerves in the past, but even he had his limits. “There are people willing to pay ten mil for all this. If you buy them, I get to eat, I get to skip a nine jump trip, and you can make a four mil profit. But I’m equally willing to ruin your day and take my business elsewhere. I wonder how the station manager will feel when you can’t make your rent this month-“
“Alright!” the clerk said, holding up both hands in surrender. “Fine, six point five for the whole bundle. Now get out of here, yer causing a scene.”
He begrudgingly made a few keystrokes on a data tablet in his hands, and Senn nodded when the transaction popped up on his personal tablet as well.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said, words laced with a hint of sarcasm. He whistled for his hound, who followed after him to the sound of study boots against synthetic tiles. Senn took a deep breath and exhaled a stream of smoke that loosely circled his head, breaking apart as he picked up his pace.
***
It was impossible to judge how heavy water truly was, until you’d felt it for yourself.
Senn pinned his eyes to the wall in front of him. He told his body to go stiff. He tried to listen to the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead - anything to take his mind off of his arms. The bucket in his hands, filled roughly halfway with water, was getting heavier by the second. And if he dropped it, the pain would be even worse.
“What class of damage is dealt by a standard Sabretooth light missile?”
The instructor’s voice fell on one’s ears like the crack of a whip. These officers were selected specifically for their ability to break the mind of a recruit.
“Electromagnetic!” answered the trembling boy in front of him. His shaved head beaded with sweat, and the bucket bounced in his hands dangerously.
“What is the maximum flight time and velocity of that missile?” the instructor followed up.
“F-five seconds, three-seven-five-oh meters per second!”
“What is the explosion velocity?”
“One-“
The boy went silent. His jaw hung open, working from side to side desperately as he scrambled to recall the last two numbers. He was doomed, and every one of the twenty recruits knew it. “One-hundred seventy,” Senn answered in his mind.
“Dead,” the instructor snarled. He hefted the large plastic drum of water in his arms, pouring its contents into the recruit’s bucket, until it nearly overflowed. The boy gritted his teeth, the muscles in his neck tightening to suppress a scream as his sore arms were tortured further. And then, in a moment of unspoken horror among the others, he finally submitted.
The clank of metal striking the floor was deafening. The boy looked down at the mess of spilled water pooling around his feet, like he was staring at his own grave. The hallway was silent for an agonizing moment.
The instructor narrowed his eyes, and the recruit’s widened as he struggled to brace himself. A second later, the instructor had delivered a crushing kick to the boy’s stomach, sending him crumpling against the wall behind him,
He moved to Senn like a predator stalking its next prey, and when he reached him, stared into his eyes challengingly. Senn could see ruthlessness in those eyes without peer.
***
When it came to station habitat rooms, you got what you paid for. And Senn couldn’t pay for very much. The one commodity more valuable and rarer than any mineral mined in the heart of a wormhole, was work. He hadn’t seen a single piece in a week.
His room in the station was, it went without saying, minimalistic. The two and a half by three meter box had space enough for a single-person bed on one side, a desk on the short wall, a counter with the most basic comforts for patrons of the station, and a thirty-eight centimeter television screen anchored into the wall above it.
It, like the rest of the station, was better lit than it was air conditioned. The only option Senn had to combat the stuffy, dry heat was to leave his overcoat and shirt hanging on the door, leaving just his undershirt, and even that did little for him.
Some of what he’d earned selling to the salvage dealer, he allotted to room service. He wasn’t entirely certain what was sitting on the stainless steel tray in front of him – small, spherical, crunchy foodstuffs deep fried in the typical Caldari style atop a shallow bed of rice – but they were satisfying enough. One bowl he held as he ate, watching an intergalactic news broadcast. The second bowl he’d set in front of Voodoo, which the hound nipped at ravenously.
“We need to find a job, boy,” Senn murmured through a mouthful of food. The hound picked up its head and wilted an ear, growling in its throat.
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Topic: Hungry Dog (Read 1438 times)