Mingle - Emergency Potluck

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WELCOME POTLUCK

Greetings, residents! Those more observant sorts among you may have noticed a large influx of very crowded ferries. In order to welcome our new residents en masse, Town Hall is holding a potluck in Town Square. Please bring a dish if you are able and make a new friend!

All of our newest arrivals need only bring themselves. We look forward to welcoming you all into our community, and may your lanterns always be lit.

This event is open to all! In light of our new influx of prospective players following the Great Sail Migration, we've decided to offer a small public event to tide everyone over until the TDM this weekend.

Comments

[astrogator]

'Day labor for now,' she admits. 'I'm helping on a building site for now; much of it isn't any more than fetching and carrying, but they let me start straight away and paid daily, so it'll do until I find something more permanent.'

Tayrey sounds proud of herself for securing work immediately, even though she knows her family back on Cardalek would be horrified by the very thought. It's the sort of work that would make them consider the Tradelines extremely respectable by comparison. Tayrey doesn't care. She has nothing here, profit is profit.

'I'm in talks with a couple of mercenary captains,' she goes on to say. 'Pay's not so bad, you get company housing - I'll be honest, I'll sleep much better somewhere safe.' The Oak and Iron decidedly isn't. Too crowded, too many familiar faces.

[decohere]

Labor not a glamorous source of income, but it is one nonetheless and having that control over her own financial situation seems the important part to the Lieutenant. Even though she respects Tayrey for not viewing herself above such work, she's not surprised it's intended for only a temporary arrangement.

But the mention of becoming a mercenary does make Ava wary. She knows it's a purely profiteering pursuit, getting involved as a soldier in a foreign land. Ava hasn't been here long enough to know the complexities of the political landscape, of the ideologies or history that make up this world... and thus getting involved in it doesn't quite settle right with her. But maybe Tayrey has a better idea, even if talking to the captains probably only provided one side of whatever issue requires enlisting mercenaries in the first place. "Ah," she says neutrally, between bites. "What's that involve?"

[astrogator]

'Depends on the captain,' Tayrey answers with a shrug. 'The ones I'm seriously negotiating with? They mainly go in for border patrols, peacekeeping support for organisations that don't have their own military presence - it pays less than getting involved in other people's factional conflicts, but I've still got to uphold Tradeline code. I'm making that real clear in my negotiations: that they're hiring a Tradeliner, and what that means.'

She won't do anything against her conscience, and anyone who takes issue with that can't be the right employer for her.

'If none of them want me on those terms, guess I'll teach myself bricklaying,' she says with a chuckle.

[decohere]

Depends on the captain almost sounds like a potentially loaded sort of bait, but not one that Ava is willing to latch onto for the sake of her own peacekeeping. Still it's strange to hear the title used with something other than false and disdain from Tayrey. Who clearly feels far more comfortable to be in a position where she is able to negotiate her terms, rather than sent away with childish mockery.

Entirely understandable.

Still, Ava misses the Captain. Worries. It's hard not to, when her memory of everything after the ship's seizure is a fragmented mess that she doesn't even know how to begin piecing back together. Ava lowers her head, quiet, still picking at her food but at least eating.

"What's your code... entail?" Ava asks, curious. She has some insight into Tayrey's boundaries that she won't negotiate upon. In the specific context of the ship. Not wanting to have her emotional trauma used as a power source probably isn't amongst what she'll face here. She knows the Lieutenant puts a lot of weight on upholding contractual agreements, but actually knows little about the sorts of terms she likes to set.

[astrogator]

Tayrey didn't mean anything else by it, because if she refers to her captor at all it's by calling him an evil djinn, or sometimes even that bastard. She'll never again be that excitable young Tradeliner who was overjoyed by any compliment from a captain, but to her, normality is reasserting itself. There are good captains and bad, those she'll work with and those she won't, but they're all leaders, one way or another. They all know how to take responsibility. Their captor did not, and hearing his kidnap victims continue to call him captain disgusted Tayrey. Especially after the Village, when people had latched onto a silly name for Number Two and understood the power in it. She simply doesn't think of him by that title at all.

She's all too eager to explain her Code, though. 'It's to do with our values,' she tells Ava. 'The most fundamental is that we don't initiate aggression. No pre-emptive strikes on people who haven't done anything yet, no cautionary arrests because some planetary council got worried - no aggressive action at all unless harm is done to us, our business, or the people under our protection. We end conflicts, but we don't start them. Then we've got to safeguard life, liberty and property - people's essential freedoms, in other words. So I won't do work that means restricting innocent people or seizing what they own. I will act to protect people from harm, safeguard them and their property and their right to live and do business in peace and freedom.'

Having her trauma used as fuel is a clear violation of her rights, but one not mentioned in the code, because the founders of the Tradelines never imagined that kind of depravity. Kidnap, imprisonment and torture covers the situation comprehensively enough, though.

[decohere]

Oh she thinks Tayrey subconsciously means something by it, by virtue of how unwilling she was to use the title at all. Or more specifically, his name. Given he never received one at birth before he was stolen away. But Ava had been the one to name him, through a dare, and this simply isn't the audience to share that with.

And she isn't going to interrupt Tayrey either, listening carefully as she outlines the values most important to her. They sound reasonable, even as an Earther. But from her own experience she knows it's the type of idealistic thing that leaders would say in front of public audiences and press conferences so everyone could feel good, and not actually support behind closed doors. Because Ava was part of the things that nobody liked to talk about or admit to. It had made Tayrey seem overly naive, at first. To cling to such ideals that were so obviously broken in her own world full of government overreach and a worldwide arms race in the form of transforming people into weapons. Felt like Tayrey just never had to deal with the reality of how things actually worked.

But now she's willing to believe Tayrey just comes from a better society that's actually capable of carrying through. Where things maybe do actually work that way.

Ava laughs, small and sad. "You'd have hated my work." Then a pause. "Were these values you held strongly before, or adopted because you joined the Tradelines?"

[astrogator]

For her part, Tayrey took Ava's cynicism for damage. A spacer sees some of the worst of humanity. Warmongers, thugs, pirates - even ordinary people driven to do terrible things as their colony collapses around them. The difference is that people like Tayrey don't just accept that violence and corruption is inevitable. They stand against it. They demand better, and put their own lives at risk to stand against the evil done by others. They lead by example, living by their own values and expecting the same from those around them.

Tayrey tries, even after all she's been put through, to extend to every stranger the benefit of the doubt. To see the best in them and offer peaceable contract unless she's given a reason not to. That's how you create a better sector, you act as if it's within reach.

'I'd have hated it,' she confirms, 'but that doesn't matter, because you didn't ever have a free choice about it.' Which means Tayrey can't think badly of her for what she did.

What about those old Company values? It's hard to think back to being twelve. It seems unimaginably long ago. 'I adopted Tradeline code when I joined, but a lot of Company values were the same. People made a lot of the differences - ideas of loyalty don't match up, for one, and Tradeliners have a lot more restrictions on our own freedom and some of that grated, but the core values align. My father taught me life-and-liberty-and-property when I was very young. I guess I cared a lot more about voting rights back then, and colonists' Charters. Tradelines aren't democratic.' Tayrey shrugs. 'It seems absurd now that I got asked if a Company girl could ever adapt to the Tradelines. The two are more similar than... well, than anything I've seen from out-of-sector.'

She forgets the points where she'd struggled with adapting, because those difficulties were overcome long ago. She'd wanted to be a Tradeliner badly enough to make it work. Now she looks at Ava, curiously. 'So what would you call your own core values? Not the ones someone else gave you, unless you made a choice to keep them. The ones that matter to you now.'

[decohere]

It absolutely is damage. Damaged trust in systems, in taking promises and contracts at their word when the one thing that her compliance hinged upon turned out to be a lie all along. She wants better, really. But it's something she's learned that she has to earn herself, the hard way.

"I've never had free choice about much," Ava admits softly. "Never voted in anything. SHIELD was hardly democratic either, just operating in the space of a country that claimed to be, that I wasn't even a registered citizen of because they kept my existence so secret. But I've always prioritized my survival. Maybe selfishly. But I had lost anything else I was meant to care about, hard to develop values of my own when all I had was what they told me. Even when I instinctively knew things were wrong. Missions they'd send me on. Pushback and questioning wasn't exactly tolerated, I got labelled as defiant and difficult for things that... now, I realize, were very little. Their psych evals would tell me I was simply paranoid, and that I needed to be more grateful. When I finally escaped, I... tried going against all that. Knew that they had used and betrayed me, so I wasn't going to allow it to happen again," a sad laugh, because she's pretty sure what happened upon the Serena Eterna was her falling right back into the same dynamics.

"So I got mean and prioritized myself first, because I knew nobody else cared about what was happening to me. Instead of asking for help, I tried to take it. Nearly took the life of a woman... I think I told you before. How she showed me mercy and saved me. I wanted that to be my core value. To help others that were hurting, to be understanding of what causes them to do awful things. Instead of outright condemning. And trying to help... eliminate the distress. I really wanted to be as good as Janet." She wipes at her eyes, staring blearily down at her plate.

"But now. I don't know. I thought I was doing the right thing. But I wasn't, was I. So I don't think I have any values left."