Firefly: Black Cat Blues - 5.09 Don't Taze Me, Bot
Previous episode here.
Osiris and Siqin can only stare in horror as two killer robots stare them down. Osiris quickly draws his gun and fires at both robots, hoping to disable them before they can hurt either crew member, but the robots' metal plating proves too resistant. One robot fires on Osiris with its tazer arm, causing serious electrical burns, while the other grabs Siqin and begins to carry her away (though it seems much more careful not to hurt her). Setting aside all concern for his own life, Osiris focuses his attention on the robot grabbing Siqin and disables it with a few well-aimed shots, permitting her to run away. He needs to shoot at the robot attacking him several times (and manages to jam one of his guns in the process) before he drops it as well, but he eventually does it. Burned and battered, Osiris and Siqin hurry back to the hotel to tell the others of their experience, avoiding many other robots on their way out of Julio's Salvage Yard.
Osiris and Siqin beat the rest of the crew back to the hotel, where only Luke is waiting. They fill him in on everything that happened at Black Cat, including Osiris's scientific discoveries and the robot attack (which, they soon learn via communicator, is very much like what just happened to the rest of the crew while on their job). Luke is particularly intrigued to see Siqin's shaved head and learn about the possible memory modification that may have been perpetuated upon the crew. He and Osiris decide to shave each other's heads for a closer look (since Siqin keeps quiet about the fact that the scars can be felt without doing so, perhaps resenting the loss of her own hair). Soon both are bald and able to clearly see scars identical to Siqin's, though everyone is still uncertain as to their origin.
Soon, the rest of the crew (including an extremely sick Nicolas who appears to have contracted the flu somehow) arrives at the hotel. Osiris becomes extremely upset upon learning that the robots are replicating themselves and goes into one of his bouts of fatalism as the rest of the crew tries to figure out where these robots came from and why they're after Siqin. Right away the crew makes the connection to the previous kidnapping attempt and how the perpetrators mentioned Nagashima. Luke recalls that Brendan Fair, of the ship Sword of Jade, had a robotic crew and was presumably quite talented in constructing them. He also came into conflict with the crew when he broke the rules of Nagashima's game, but otherwise did not do anything to anger Nagashima and seemed like the sort of person whose morals would be more than flexible enough to work for that organization. Everybody concludes that Brendan must be working for Nagashima and sending the self-replicating robots, though they still don't entirely know why Siqin might be so important to him.
The conversation then turns to how to stop the robots. Archer points out that on a scrap planet like Beylix, the robots will just keep replicating nonstop and overwhelming the entire world unless a way is found to shut down whatever central control is coordinating their movements. Birgitta remembers that the android that came in the last group of Siqin's attackers (which the crew is also assuming was Brendan's construction) had a long-range transmitter built into its head, and wonders whether using Siqin's technical skills to backtrack the source might help pinpoint Brendan's location. The only trouble with this plan is that the crew lacks an actual transmitter with which to prove any of this.[1] So they decide to venture back to Julio's scrapyard and try to find either one of the robots disabled by Osiris or an active robot that they can overcome and reclaim to test their theory.
In spite of Birgitta's stated desire to sneak in and do the mission on her own, the crew insists on going as a group. After persuading Julio's employees to let them in, the crew quickly encounters two robots and eventually overcomes them with a combination of cunning, mechanical engineering knowledge, and gunfire. However, the robots are quick enough to cause some serious hurt to Osiris, who is shocked once again, badly enough to stop his heart and require a first aid intervention from Archer. When the robots have been felled, Siqin removes a transmitter from one of them and Birgitta removes its arms, for purposes of a potential future plan being dreamed up by Luke; the other one is too destroyed to salvage anything from it, thanks to a blast from Luke's super-expensive gun which literally blew it in half. The crew then returns to the hotel to investigate. By combining forces, Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin soon figure out that signal is not coming from anywhere on Beylix, which makes their job much more difficult as it means that Brendan was smart enough to keep Sword of Jade in orbit. So now, their new task is to figure out a way to entice him to land.
After taking a night to sleep off their wounds, the crew gets up the following morning and begins to carry out their daring plan. Because Quinn is fully engaged in taking care of the sick Nicolas and the wounded Osiris with Archer's help, it falls to Luke to lead Birgitta and Siqin in traveling around Beylix to gather up everything they will need. In brief, their plan involves tricking Brendan into landing Sword of Jade by faking a transmission from a robot that will make Brendan think that Siqin has been captured. When Sword of Jade lands, it will do so on a camouflaged magnetic landlock device to be purchased and installed by the crew in an isolated location. Once the ship is trapped on the planet, the crew will be able to deal with Brendan on their terms, rather than needing to fight entirely on his turf by chasing after him in space.
The biggest problem with this plan is getting all of the necessary components, and although it takes the crew most of the day to complete that task, Luke's nearly limitless pocketbooks make it easy to pay for everything. Less easy to deal with is the fact that the robot infestation is clearly worsening, and Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin spend most of the afternoon dodging killer robots as they move from junkyard to junkyard in search of what they need. In one instance, they also end up fighting toe-to-toe against another robotic duo, and take a bit of a beating before they disable both. Although no one is badly hurt in this fight, they can see that the robots are beginning to pose a great problem for anyone on Beylix who is less well equipped to take care of himself, which imbues their actions with a greater urgency as they return to the hotel to continue bringing their plan together.
In mid-afternoon, Osiris has mostly recovered from his electrocution and wants to go out and be helpful, so he and Quinn leave Archer to care for Nicolas and, at Luke's suggestion, scope out the planet for a good place to put the landlock. They eventually find a sort of "garbage mesa" that will provide both an open space and a lot of camouflage, and they wait there to oversee the machinery being delivered. They, too, end up encountering a number of robots that would love to shoot them once again, but by now Quinn has had enough of beating on machines for no good reason, and instead of fighting she quickly turns tail and runs away with Osiris in tow. While they wait for the landlock to be installed, Osiris and Quinn continue with the lengthy conversations they've been having lately about life, the universe, and everything; it's clear that the bond between them is stronger than ever before.[2]
Back at the hotel, Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin assemble a rig consisting of the salvaged robot arms and transmitter and a camera purchased from the scrapyard, which they run through Siqin's Cortex terminal in order to reproduce a robotic signal and send it to Sword of Jade. By this time, the sun has set and the crew is considering putting off the final stages in this plan for another day...until they notice that the robot population on Beylix has expanded so much that killer robots are now openly roaming the streets in packs and attacking anyone they see. This is enough for the crew to accept that their plan can't wait, so they assemble at the location of the landlock to bring an end to the robots' dominance once and for all.
At the landlock, they stage a transmission that makes it look as though a robot has captured Siqin (which they accomplish by putting her in front of the camera and telling her to look scared while they menace her with the robot arms) and that the robot itself is badly damaged and unable to move from its current location on the landlock. They know their ruse has been successful when they receive a response stating that a pick-up is imminent. Very pleased with themselves, the crew finds a hiding place within a pile of scrap from which they can watch the landing zone while avoiding any robot attacks. But their plan hits a major snag when they see what actually lands on the landlock and gets magnetically stuck there by Luke. It's not Sword of Jade like they were hoping, but rather a small green escape pod that only has the ability to home back to the main ship and is only big enough to fit two people. Brendan is much smarter than the crew thought.
After the crew gets past their initial frustration at this problem, they realize that they still have the means to stop Brendan's plan...it's just going to be a lot more destructive now. They realize that Birgitta's engineering and sabotage skills are more than sufficient to cross-wire the pod's fusion engines so that when it docks with Sword of Jade, it will explode and either destroy or cause massive damage to the ship. Birgitta (who is, as always, thrilled at the chance to cause an explosion) gets to work right away while the remainder of the crew sets up a perimeter to keep marauding robots away.
Because the sabotage process is rather time-consuming, the crew soon begins to talk, and conversation topics quickly turn to Siqin and why robots and bounty hunters all across the 'Verse seem to want to capture her lately. Luke idly wonders whether she has a bounty on her head, and Siqin grabs her terminal to look it up. She is shocked to learn that while normal law enforcement authorities don't want her, there are a huge amount of bounties out for her from all of the Syndicate families...and every one of them says that she is wanted alive. Siqin's shocked reaction is impossible to hide from the others, and they sternly tell her that the time has come to reveal the secret she's been keeping from them for so long. Finally, Siqin realizes that she can't continue to lie to the people who are risking their lives to protect her, and begins to explain.
Siqin explains about the bounties and then gets to the meat of why the Syndicate families want her.[3] She explains that she is the heir to a Syndicate family, the Mu family - or rather, she was when the Mu family still existed. An ancestor of the Mus was one of the original inventors and programmers of the Cortex, and when she wrote the code that underlies the Cortex she included a back door that is accessible only by members of the Mu family. Of course, this back door was meant to be used for crime. For generations, the Mu family served as a neutral balance among the other twelve Syndicate families; apart from providing an anonymous virtual meeting space in which the Syndicate heads could conduct business, the Mu access system contained an enormous amount of information and secrets about all the other families. This was what kept the peace among the families and allowed them to work together to carve up various parts of the crime sector; nobody dared to step out of line and grab for more than their share when they knew the Mu family had enough information on them to destroy them if need be. Siqin was trained by her mother, the most recent head of the Mu family, to take over as head of the family when the time came.
All of this changed when one Syndicate family head, a man named Shyam Nagendra, decided he was tired of the status quo. He assassinated Siqin's parents and the rest of the Mu family; Siqin herself only survived because her mother's dying actions were to transfer the database power to Siqin and provide her with a hiding place. But when Siqin became older and learned the truth about what had happened, she got angry and decided to get revenge on the Syndicate families who had stood by and allowed the Mu family to be destroyed by using the Cortex back door access to hack the other families' systems and essentially eliminate huge swaths of their fortunes. But this backfired on Siqin when she discovered that the other families were able to trace her location when she accessed the secret database This led to something very bad happening (Siqin is vague on exactly what that was) and Siqin ending up on the run again. She eventually teamed up with Jaya for mutual protection, and later encountered the crew. This is why so many Syndicate members are tracking Siqin; Nagendra is forcing her to access the database to get information on his rivals, which in turn gives her location away to those same rivals, all of whom also want to use her power for their own ends.
The crew is quite shocked to learn of Siqin's past in the Syndicate, though it certainly makes recent events make more sense. Archer, in particular, seems overwhelmed and tells Siqin that as long as Nagendra can keep blackmailing the crew and forcing Siqin to access the database just to keep them alive, the Syndicate operatives will keep coming and causing huge problems for Black Cat. The only solution is to cure the crew's disease as soon as possible so that Siqin can resume hiding and the crew can buy time to figure out how to defeat Nagendra. Toward that end, the crew decides that their next stop will be Paquin to continue following up on the mystery of what happened to Dustin, and following that they will go to the Core so that Osiris can try to gain access to a lab with sufficient supplies to start creating a cure.
Of course, before this can happen, Brendan must be dealt with. Birgitta finishes sabotaging the pod and tells it to launch, which it does with a bone-shaking roar that attracts a bunch of robots to the crew's location. The crew is surrounded and way outmatched...until, quite suddenly, all of the robots slump and fall over, no longer functional. It seems as though the pod-bomb has succeeded in its mission and the robot invasion has been halted. Triumphant, the crew returns to their hotel to sleep the sleep of the just.
The next day is very normal with no robot attacks to stir things up. Most of the crew returns to the site of their original job to get in one more day of work, and succeeds in making a decent amount of money to continue replenishing the ship's coffers. Birgitta, Luke, and Quinn also ask around for jobs and manage to contract with a company selling refurbished mules that needs a crew to deliver shipments of vehicles to Paquin and Bernadette. Although neither of them is very enthusiastic about the prospect of taking on any passengers right now, since they're concerned about picking up Syndicate operatives by mistake, they end up changing their minds when they are approached by Mr. Anand Kumar, a traveling salesman of cleaning chemicals for the Chang-Singh Chemical Distributors. He is looking for a new ship willing to take him on as a long-term passenger, since his last such arrangement didn't work out very well due to personality clashes. Although Birgitta, Luke, and Quinn are initially quite skeptical of Anand, all of his documents appear to be legal and the Cortex shows no criminal record, and the crew could definitely use the additional source of income that a long-term passenger would provide now that Daisy is no longer providing them with 400 credits a month. They agree to take Anand at least as far as Paquin, and see how things work out afterwards. Anand is very grateful that the crew is giving him a chance and promises not to cause them any trouble. With passengers and cargo loaded about the newly upgraded ship, Black Cat takes off, heading for Paquin and (they hope) some answers that will lead them to a cure for what ails them. If nothing else, Beylix now seems safer, with the only thing left of Brendan being a few chunks of green hull plating that drift in front of the ship as it leaves the planet behind.
1 - Luke: The last time we got a robot, didn't you...
dayzdark, OOC: Squirrel it away in your room really fast to do who knows what with it?
2 - If you're not doing so already, you can read some of these conversations at the blackcat_crew community.
3 - Siqin: All 12 Syndicate families are offering a bounty for me.
Archer: How much?
Siqin: A lot.
Osiris: So, like tens of thousands of credits?
Siqin: Yes.
Birgitta, proudly: So not as much as the Cat.
Siqin: Well, actually...
Osiris and Siqin can only stare in horror as two killer robots stare them down. Osiris quickly draws his gun and fires at both robots, hoping to disable them before they can hurt either crew member, but the robots' metal plating proves too resistant. One robot fires on Osiris with its tazer arm, causing serious electrical burns, while the other grabs Siqin and begins to carry her away (though it seems much more careful not to hurt her). Setting aside all concern for his own life, Osiris focuses his attention on the robot grabbing Siqin and disables it with a few well-aimed shots, permitting her to run away. He needs to shoot at the robot attacking him several times (and manages to jam one of his guns in the process) before he drops it as well, but he eventually does it. Burned and battered, Osiris and Siqin hurry back to the hotel to tell the others of their experience, avoiding many other robots on their way out of Julio's Salvage Yard.
Osiris and Siqin beat the rest of the crew back to the hotel, where only Luke is waiting. They fill him in on everything that happened at Black Cat, including Osiris's scientific discoveries and the robot attack (which, they soon learn via communicator, is very much like what just happened to the rest of the crew while on their job). Luke is particularly intrigued to see Siqin's shaved head and learn about the possible memory modification that may have been perpetuated upon the crew. He and Osiris decide to shave each other's heads for a closer look (since Siqin keeps quiet about the fact that the scars can be felt without doing so, perhaps resenting the loss of her own hair). Soon both are bald and able to clearly see scars identical to Siqin's, though everyone is still uncertain as to their origin.
Soon, the rest of the crew (including an extremely sick Nicolas who appears to have contracted the flu somehow) arrives at the hotel. Osiris becomes extremely upset upon learning that the robots are replicating themselves and goes into one of his bouts of fatalism as the rest of the crew tries to figure out where these robots came from and why they're after Siqin. Right away the crew makes the connection to the previous kidnapping attempt and how the perpetrators mentioned Nagashima. Luke recalls that Brendan Fair, of the ship Sword of Jade, had a robotic crew and was presumably quite talented in constructing them. He also came into conflict with the crew when he broke the rules of Nagashima's game, but otherwise did not do anything to anger Nagashima and seemed like the sort of person whose morals would be more than flexible enough to work for that organization. Everybody concludes that Brendan must be working for Nagashima and sending the self-replicating robots, though they still don't entirely know why Siqin might be so important to him.
The conversation then turns to how to stop the robots. Archer points out that on a scrap planet like Beylix, the robots will just keep replicating nonstop and overwhelming the entire world unless a way is found to shut down whatever central control is coordinating their movements. Birgitta remembers that the android that came in the last group of Siqin's attackers (which the crew is also assuming was Brendan's construction) had a long-range transmitter built into its head, and wonders whether using Siqin's technical skills to backtrack the source might help pinpoint Brendan's location. The only trouble with this plan is that the crew lacks an actual transmitter with which to prove any of this.[1] So they decide to venture back to Julio's scrapyard and try to find either one of the robots disabled by Osiris or an active robot that they can overcome and reclaim to test their theory.
In spite of Birgitta's stated desire to sneak in and do the mission on her own, the crew insists on going as a group. After persuading Julio's employees to let them in, the crew quickly encounters two robots and eventually overcomes them with a combination of cunning, mechanical engineering knowledge, and gunfire. However, the robots are quick enough to cause some serious hurt to Osiris, who is shocked once again, badly enough to stop his heart and require a first aid intervention from Archer. When the robots have been felled, Siqin removes a transmitter from one of them and Birgitta removes its arms, for purposes of a potential future plan being dreamed up by Luke; the other one is too destroyed to salvage anything from it, thanks to a blast from Luke's super-expensive gun which literally blew it in half. The crew then returns to the hotel to investigate. By combining forces, Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin soon figure out that signal is not coming from anywhere on Beylix, which makes their job much more difficult as it means that Brendan was smart enough to keep Sword of Jade in orbit. So now, their new task is to figure out a way to entice him to land.
After taking a night to sleep off their wounds, the crew gets up the following morning and begins to carry out their daring plan. Because Quinn is fully engaged in taking care of the sick Nicolas and the wounded Osiris with Archer's help, it falls to Luke to lead Birgitta and Siqin in traveling around Beylix to gather up everything they will need. In brief, their plan involves tricking Brendan into landing Sword of Jade by faking a transmission from a robot that will make Brendan think that Siqin has been captured. When Sword of Jade lands, it will do so on a camouflaged magnetic landlock device to be purchased and installed by the crew in an isolated location. Once the ship is trapped on the planet, the crew will be able to deal with Brendan on their terms, rather than needing to fight entirely on his turf by chasing after him in space.
The biggest problem with this plan is getting all of the necessary components, and although it takes the crew most of the day to complete that task, Luke's nearly limitless pocketbooks make it easy to pay for everything. Less easy to deal with is the fact that the robot infestation is clearly worsening, and Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin spend most of the afternoon dodging killer robots as they move from junkyard to junkyard in search of what they need. In one instance, they also end up fighting toe-to-toe against another robotic duo, and take a bit of a beating before they disable both. Although no one is badly hurt in this fight, they can see that the robots are beginning to pose a great problem for anyone on Beylix who is less well equipped to take care of himself, which imbues their actions with a greater urgency as they return to the hotel to continue bringing their plan together.
In mid-afternoon, Osiris has mostly recovered from his electrocution and wants to go out and be helpful, so he and Quinn leave Archer to care for Nicolas and, at Luke's suggestion, scope out the planet for a good place to put the landlock. They eventually find a sort of "garbage mesa" that will provide both an open space and a lot of camouflage, and they wait there to oversee the machinery being delivered. They, too, end up encountering a number of robots that would love to shoot them once again, but by now Quinn has had enough of beating on machines for no good reason, and instead of fighting she quickly turns tail and runs away with Osiris in tow. While they wait for the landlock to be installed, Osiris and Quinn continue with the lengthy conversations they've been having lately about life, the universe, and everything; it's clear that the bond between them is stronger than ever before.[2]
Back at the hotel, Birgitta, Luke, and Siqin assemble a rig consisting of the salvaged robot arms and transmitter and a camera purchased from the scrapyard, which they run through Siqin's Cortex terminal in order to reproduce a robotic signal and send it to Sword of Jade. By this time, the sun has set and the crew is considering putting off the final stages in this plan for another day...until they notice that the robot population on Beylix has expanded so much that killer robots are now openly roaming the streets in packs and attacking anyone they see. This is enough for the crew to accept that their plan can't wait, so they assemble at the location of the landlock to bring an end to the robots' dominance once and for all.
At the landlock, they stage a transmission that makes it look as though a robot has captured Siqin (which they accomplish by putting her in front of the camera and telling her to look scared while they menace her with the robot arms) and that the robot itself is badly damaged and unable to move from its current location on the landlock. They know their ruse has been successful when they receive a response stating that a pick-up is imminent. Very pleased with themselves, the crew finds a hiding place within a pile of scrap from which they can watch the landing zone while avoiding any robot attacks. But their plan hits a major snag when they see what actually lands on the landlock and gets magnetically stuck there by Luke. It's not Sword of Jade like they were hoping, but rather a small green escape pod that only has the ability to home back to the main ship and is only big enough to fit two people. Brendan is much smarter than the crew thought.
After the crew gets past their initial frustration at this problem, they realize that they still have the means to stop Brendan's plan...it's just going to be a lot more destructive now. They realize that Birgitta's engineering and sabotage skills are more than sufficient to cross-wire the pod's fusion engines so that when it docks with Sword of Jade, it will explode and either destroy or cause massive damage to the ship. Birgitta (who is, as always, thrilled at the chance to cause an explosion) gets to work right away while the remainder of the crew sets up a perimeter to keep marauding robots away.
Because the sabotage process is rather time-consuming, the crew soon begins to talk, and conversation topics quickly turn to Siqin and why robots and bounty hunters all across the 'Verse seem to want to capture her lately. Luke idly wonders whether she has a bounty on her head, and Siqin grabs her terminal to look it up. She is shocked to learn that while normal law enforcement authorities don't want her, there are a huge amount of bounties out for her from all of the Syndicate families...and every one of them says that she is wanted alive. Siqin's shocked reaction is impossible to hide from the others, and they sternly tell her that the time has come to reveal the secret she's been keeping from them for so long. Finally, Siqin realizes that she can't continue to lie to the people who are risking their lives to protect her, and begins to explain.
Siqin explains about the bounties and then gets to the meat of why the Syndicate families want her.[3] She explains that she is the heir to a Syndicate family, the Mu family - or rather, she was when the Mu family still existed. An ancestor of the Mus was one of the original inventors and programmers of the Cortex, and when she wrote the code that underlies the Cortex she included a back door that is accessible only by members of the Mu family. Of course, this back door was meant to be used for crime. For generations, the Mu family served as a neutral balance among the other twelve Syndicate families; apart from providing an anonymous virtual meeting space in which the Syndicate heads could conduct business, the Mu access system contained an enormous amount of information and secrets about all the other families. This was what kept the peace among the families and allowed them to work together to carve up various parts of the crime sector; nobody dared to step out of line and grab for more than their share when they knew the Mu family had enough information on them to destroy them if need be. Siqin was trained by her mother, the most recent head of the Mu family, to take over as head of the family when the time came.
All of this changed when one Syndicate family head, a man named Shyam Nagendra, decided he was tired of the status quo. He assassinated Siqin's parents and the rest of the Mu family; Siqin herself only survived because her mother's dying actions were to transfer the database power to Siqin and provide her with a hiding place. But when Siqin became older and learned the truth about what had happened, she got angry and decided to get revenge on the Syndicate families who had stood by and allowed the Mu family to be destroyed by using the Cortex back door access to hack the other families' systems and essentially eliminate huge swaths of their fortunes. But this backfired on Siqin when she discovered that the other families were able to trace her location when she accessed the secret database This led to something very bad happening (Siqin is vague on exactly what that was) and Siqin ending up on the run again. She eventually teamed up with Jaya for mutual protection, and later encountered the crew. This is why so many Syndicate members are tracking Siqin; Nagendra is forcing her to access the database to get information on his rivals, which in turn gives her location away to those same rivals, all of whom also want to use her power for their own ends.
The crew is quite shocked to learn of Siqin's past in the Syndicate, though it certainly makes recent events make more sense. Archer, in particular, seems overwhelmed and tells Siqin that as long as Nagendra can keep blackmailing the crew and forcing Siqin to access the database just to keep them alive, the Syndicate operatives will keep coming and causing huge problems for Black Cat. The only solution is to cure the crew's disease as soon as possible so that Siqin can resume hiding and the crew can buy time to figure out how to defeat Nagendra. Toward that end, the crew decides that their next stop will be Paquin to continue following up on the mystery of what happened to Dustin, and following that they will go to the Core so that Osiris can try to gain access to a lab with sufficient supplies to start creating a cure.
Of course, before this can happen, Brendan must be dealt with. Birgitta finishes sabotaging the pod and tells it to launch, which it does with a bone-shaking roar that attracts a bunch of robots to the crew's location. The crew is surrounded and way outmatched...until, quite suddenly, all of the robots slump and fall over, no longer functional. It seems as though the pod-bomb has succeeded in its mission and the robot invasion has been halted. Triumphant, the crew returns to their hotel to sleep the sleep of the just.
The next day is very normal with no robot attacks to stir things up. Most of the crew returns to the site of their original job to get in one more day of work, and succeeds in making a decent amount of money to continue replenishing the ship's coffers. Birgitta, Luke, and Quinn also ask around for jobs and manage to contract with a company selling refurbished mules that needs a crew to deliver shipments of vehicles to Paquin and Bernadette. Although neither of them is very enthusiastic about the prospect of taking on any passengers right now, since they're concerned about picking up Syndicate operatives by mistake, they end up changing their minds when they are approached by Mr. Anand Kumar, a traveling salesman of cleaning chemicals for the Chang-Singh Chemical Distributors. He is looking for a new ship willing to take him on as a long-term passenger, since his last such arrangement didn't work out very well due to personality clashes. Although Birgitta, Luke, and Quinn are initially quite skeptical of Anand, all of his documents appear to be legal and the Cortex shows no criminal record, and the crew could definitely use the additional source of income that a long-term passenger would provide now that Daisy is no longer providing them with 400 credits a month. They agree to take Anand at least as far as Paquin, and see how things work out afterwards. Anand is very grateful that the crew is giving him a chance and promises not to cause them any trouble. With passengers and cargo loaded about the newly upgraded ship, Black Cat takes off, heading for Paquin and (they hope) some answers that will lead them to a cure for what ails them. If nothing else, Beylix now seems safer, with the only thing left of Brendan being a few chunks of green hull plating that drift in front of the ship as it leaves the planet behind.
1 - Luke: The last time we got a robot, didn't you...
dayzdark, OOC: Squirrel it away in your room really fast to do who knows what with it?
2 - If you're not doing so already, you can read some of these conversations at the blackcat_crew community.
3 - Siqin: All 12 Syndicate families are offering a bounty for me.
Archer: How much?
Siqin: A lot.
Osiris: So, like tens of thousands of credits?
Siqin: Yes.
Birgitta, proudly: So not as much as the Cat.
Siqin: Well, actually...