Best Way To Start A Hike Is The First Step
12 Jun 2021User319792
Me, Coral, and the man in the black suit didn't do much but sit around for a day, following the Imperial diplomat excusing us from the need to pursue the findings with any support from the Imperial family or the Empire. Every so often the man in the black suit or Coral would look at me and start laughing, which would elicit either some form of violence I'd attempt to act upon them or my leaving their presence entirely. I'd catch both, or either, of them sharing looks of disappointment with each other or myself now and again knowing that, even if we did continue to look through the connections, there'd be more than likely a closed door at the end of the trail. Before the man in the black suit disembarked Ovid he looked me over and said to stay sharp and that he'd be rethinking his approach and discussing the matter further with his superiors in the organization.As me and Coral walked across the quarterdeck and back into the cockpit, Coral caught sight of a poster I'd put up after my first trip to Jameson Memorial. It was a crudely drawn impression of the symbol that's being bandied about amongst pilots that's supposed to be the only symbolic representation of Raxxla in existence, superimposed over a picture of some weird square face that's supposed to be on Mars. It was given to me by CMDR Filthymick420 and I put it just outside the cockpit for a guffaw whenever I got set to launch. Not that it wasn't a cool idea, as much as the Raxxla symbol just looked like one of those googly eyes that we used to throw at each other as kids to see who would be willing to walk around with one stuck to their clothes while serving the woman and her guests. She pointed at it,
"What and who is that?" I looked at her, slightly confused.
"CMDR Filthymick420?" She looked back at me, scrunching her eyebrows together and pursing her lips.
"No, idiot. The Raxxla thing. Who's the guy?" I looked back at the poster and tried to remember what he'd told me.
"I think its some statue or something on Sol that he thought might be connected to Raxxla. He can explain it better. I'm not sure. I haven't put too much thought into it. I'm not into that whole 'archeology' thing." Coral crinkled her nose as I spoke.
"Yeah you are, you liar." My head instinctively rocked back on my neck. My lips curled into a sneer and I stared hard at her, demanding an explanation. "You're the one reading all those books about that Rome place."
"It's ironic," I yelled back. "I'm only reading those things because the folks that owned me and my dad used to read them, thinking it made them better than us." She looked back at me with a tight smile and her eyes were bright. She shook her head slowly.
"That is just sad, Cadence." I started walking toward the cockpit, rolling my eyes, and before the hatch open Coral mentioned that she'd been nurturing her own theories and wanted to check them out before Keystone's internals began frying themselves. I looked back at her and she turned her head so I could only see one of her eyes and gave me a comedically exaggerated, open-jawed smile. I stared for a few seconds before finally rolling my eyes and saying,
"Fine. Pull up your notes." We took off in Galileo straight from Mackenzie relay toward Ptolemy, near the Barnard Loop Nebula, before going over to Galileo, which was one jump over. She was sitting there in her flight suit taking weird notes about surface deposits in asteroid belts, out-of-the-ordinary "align with escape vector" commands from my ship computer during FSD boots, eta times during supercruise- which we did a lot of, after Coral remembered something about Hutton Orbital being a billion light seconds or something from its system star, on our way from Ptolemy to Galileo. End of the day, it was just a bunch of pretty pictures in the making, so I took a bunch of pretty pictures. The rest of the trip was about the same as we made our way over to Ronemar in the Witchhead Nebula, which turned out to be an Alliance outpost with tons of Thargoid activity, before I finally dropped her off at Cubeo and headed back to Meech to figure out what to do with my time.
I suppose I could run those Imperial missions the man in the black suit and Coral seem to think is funny. I could just as easily go back over to Nanomam or Alioth, too, though. Apparently, that Hesperus ship is making bleep blop noises again, but I've never really believed it was in my interest to go chasing after someone else's mysteries. We'll see.
