Entrance Post
Kaylee was in a good mood as she ambled back to ship humming an old folk tune from her home planet under her breath as she carried the box of parts she had gone into town for in the first place. She had been complaining to the captain about all the repairs she needed to make to keep her girl flying for weeks and since the job had gone well on Three Hills, she had finally gotten the go ahead to get some of them. What he really wanted was to get some new entry couplings for the primary buffer panel, but she told the Cap’n that they would hold another couple weeks, so he told her to keep to the regulator for the port cooling vent and they would worry about the rest later. Knowing Mal the way she did, she figured that she wouldn’t be getting new couplings until the buffer panel flew clean off.
“No one likes to remember what happened when I didn’t get the compression coil I needed,” she grumbled to herself even as she already happily planning a long afternoon elbow deep in engine grease. So wrapped up in her thoughts of her repairs and the rewiring she wanted to get done this week, she didn’t give much notice to when the landscape opened up and what should have been chaparral slowly became desert.
“Well, tee wuh duh pee-goo,” she muttered under her breath when she finally looked around and instead of finding Serenity where she left her, she found a behemoth of an old derelict building. “Cap’t? Zoë? Wash?…. Simon?” she called out, an optimistic smile on her face.
She was sure this was the way back to the ship, would’ve sworn to it on a whole stack of the Shepherd’s bibles. Now, looking around, she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten so turned around. And on top of that, it was starting to get late and she really didn’t want to get stuck by herself at night, especially not this far out on the Rim. Not knowing what else to do, she warily approached the old building, hoping to find someone who could point her in the right direction. Pushing open the one of the large front double doors, she stopped halfway thorough and looked back outside, making sure it was the same run down building she had first approached.
“Huh….” The outside looked like it was right where it belonged here on The Rim, but the inside seemed like she had been transported right to one of The Core planets. It was opulence the likes of which she had never seen. “Well that don’t make no lick of sense,” she murmured to herself as she ventured inside.
“Hello?” she called cautiously. “Wei?” she tried again in Chinese when she didn’t get a response the first time. Putting the box of parts that was starting to get heavy down by the ficus next to the door, she nearly fell over and let out a small shriek when a voice sounded from behind her.
“We’ve been expecting you.”
Spinning around to face the voice she was surprised to see a tall man behind the desk that had been empty a moment before. “Shuh muh?” she asked confused as she crossed over to the desk. “No, you must be thinkin’ of someone else, I just got turned around, could you maybe possibly point me back in the direction of town?” she asked with hopeful smile.
“There has been no mistake Miss Frye,” the man said, flipping through the pages of the leather bound ledger in front of him. “See, here you are,” he continued pointing to the last name on the page, “Miss Kaywinnit Lee Frye.”
“Ho- how do you know my name?” Kaylee asked tentatively, taking a few slow steps backwards as she tried to think of possible reasons. She didn’t usually take part of the crew’s more colorful missions, and while she knew that the Alliance knew she was associated with Serenity, she didn’t think there was an alert on the cortex for her that people could possibly recognize her. Besides, they hadn’t done anything extra illegal in weeks now, possibly months. She gasped when a thought came to her, what if the Alliance had found out that River and Simon were on Serenity and put alerts out on the whole crew?
“We’ve been expecting you,” he simply repeated in answer, jolting her out of her thoughts. “Welcome to the Hotel California.”
“Wait…hotel? I ain’t in need of no hotel,” she babbled growing more and more concerned, especially when she looked back down at the ledger and noticed her name was signed in her own handwriting. “I just need to get back to my ship as soon as possible, see the cap’n is expectin’ me and he gets an awful sort of grumpy when we’re late,” she tried to explain with a nervous giggle. “So really if you could just point me on my way that would be shiny.”
“No need for that, we have you down for an extended stay,” he contradicted agreeably, the affable smile never leaving his face. “Here is your room key Miss Frye, please enjoy your stay.”
Kaylee looked down at the key the man placed between them on the counter and when she looked up he was gone. “Wuh de ma!” she exclaimed looking around frantically. “Where did he go?”