Pash Cracken (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crackentwist) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-01-12 12:22 am
crackentwist) wrote in legionworld2016-01-12 12:22 am
Entry tags:
and the stars look very different today
Who| Pash and whoever wanders through.
What| What's the first thing a pilot does in a brand new galaxy? Ogle the brand new ships, obviously.
Where| The hangar.
When| Same day he gets out of medical.
Warnings/Notes| Nah.
There were a lot of places he could've gone first, and most of them were more reasonable choices (and he knew it), but Pash Cracken was a pilot at heart. So the full tour and everything that came with it was temporarily deferred, as he made his way to the place that was guaranteed to be first on any pilot's mind when they found themselves with a new (temporary) home: the hangar.
It didn't actually seem like much, in contrast to the rest of the ship; Legion World might be far larger than any capital ship he'd ever served on in his own dimension, but there wasn't much variety in the ships it carried. Unfamiliar designs, naturally, but as he paced around the smallest, the size and structure were clues enough. Shuttles or transports, meant for moving a group - but nothing of a smaller class.
"Well, it's no A-wing," he mused, stopping around the back and leaning in to take a look at the exhaust ports.
(Which, of course, reminded him of the early days of the A-wing, before they'd gone into mass production after Endor. Back when his flight group was issued some of the first ones out of the workshop, still being individually made with whatever parts were available and no standardized quality control -)
"Thank the Force for that."
What| What's the first thing a pilot does in a brand new galaxy? Ogle the brand new ships, obviously.
Where| The hangar.
When| Same day he gets out of medical.
Warnings/Notes| Nah.
There were a lot of places he could've gone first, and most of them were more reasonable choices (and he knew it), but Pash Cracken was a pilot at heart. So the full tour and everything that came with it was temporarily deferred, as he made his way to the place that was guaranteed to be first on any pilot's mind when they found themselves with a new (temporary) home: the hangar.
It didn't actually seem like much, in contrast to the rest of the ship; Legion World might be far larger than any capital ship he'd ever served on in his own dimension, but there wasn't much variety in the ships it carried. Unfamiliar designs, naturally, but as he paced around the smallest, the size and structure were clues enough. Shuttles or transports, meant for moving a group - but nothing of a smaller class.
"Well, it's no A-wing," he mused, stopping around the back and leaning in to take a look at the exhaust ports.
(Which, of course, reminded him of the early days of the A-wing, before they'd gone into mass production after Endor. Back when his flight group was issued some of the first ones out of the workshop, still being individually made with whatever parts were available and no standardized quality control -)
"Thank the Force for that."
no subject
Rich had already checked out the labs to see what tech was on hand and the hangar was the next part of his little tour.
He'd seen the guy on the network or else he might've thought he was a crew chief. Hell, maybe he was one back home -- but chances were he was a pilot if he was thanking any higher powers that the ship wasn't some kind of model or another from his world.
"They don't exactly look zippy but they seem serviceable," he said of the ships when he saw the man checking them. "I got a glimpse of the specs in the Labs."
He wasn't exactly an engineer but he'd learned enough about technology to have a good idea of what he was looking at when it was dumped in front of him. You had to when you were figuring out what weapons and ships to throw where in a battlefield.
He flew up in the air -- man, these flight rings were handy since his flight was gone -- and nosed in near the thrusters. The way he flew made it clear he was used to doing it, that for him it was something as fluid and natural as walking, but that was what happened when you'd had flight for most of your life since you were seventeen-years-old.
"Better than some of the birds we had during the war back home, at any rate. We were running so low on ships that we were jury-rigging short-pulse engines to freighters at one point and crossing our fingers that they even had the structural integrity for it. I'll tell you what, freighter captains are the craziest people I've ever seen. Although the craziest man I ever met was a space trucker."
A pause.
"And I mean he was a trucker. He flew a truck. In space."
Rich's universe was pretty nuts sometimes and he was the first to admit it.
no subject
He sounded more appreciative than anything, though. Pash's time flying with Rogue Squadron had been a relatively short patch of his career, but it was easily one of the most valuable experiences he'd had in ten years as a Rebel and more like twenty piloting altogether.
(And hey, as long as Rogue Squadron was still on active duty, nobody could say that the A-wing pilots were the only crazy-stupid people in Starfighter Command.)
no subject
His expression was thoughtful, but still directed at the ship he was inspecting.
"There's a lot you can talk people into if you can give them a sense of control over the inevitable." A pause. "And a lot of people will risk it all if they really feel they're fighting for something worthwhile."
That was what they sold to everyone that signed up to the United Front. A chance to make a difference and not die miserably, backed into a corner.
no subject
Let's just not talk about the Vong."Alliance recruitment shot through the roof after Alderaan was destroyed. The Empire may have been trying to scare people into submission, but in a way, they were just doing some of our own work for us...albeit not at a cost that was worth it to anyone."
There was no way the Empire would've gone so far as to destroy every planet in the galaxy, of course, but one was still one too many. It wasn't at all hard to wrap his mind around what Rich was saying, even if the stakes hadn't reached the same levels at home.
no subject
It'd taken his brain a second to catch up because it'd been literal decades since he'd been a teenager obsessed with sci fi, hanging out alone in his room, and blocking out the rest of the world.
But it all finally clicked. A-Wings. Wedge. The Empire. The Alliance. Alderaan being destroyed.
Don't scream. Also don't hum the theme don't hum the theme God what is wrong with you stop stop stop stop. He's talking about a dead planet, come on, man.
Fortunately, despite his brain freaking out like that, he managed to play it cool. After all, this wasn't exactly a light conversational subject they were talking about, and the melancholy drew him back down to Earth.
Alderaan was a real world. Alderaan was a real world that died -- with millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror and then being suddenly silenced. Rich thought back to when he'd gone home for the first time after it all, ripping all the sci fi posters off the walls of his room, telling Worldmind 'Everything changed while I was far, far away.' He'd been angry because the reality hadn't matched the fantasy but now that he thought about it, the fantasy hadn't been all that bright either, had it?
God, had he ever really been that naive? Even the things he'd idolized in his youth were real out there, and that meant they weren't all about adventure and fun. That meant the suffering and war in and death in them was real, too.
"It worked for us. Nothing quite brings species together better than vengeance when it's righteous -- and fear it'll happen to their people, too."
He flew down to the other man and held out his hand, hoping an introduction might nudge the subject to something lighter.
"Rich Rider. I also go by Nova. Former General of the United Front."
no subject
Sometimes, he wondered if some of them would've stayed behind when he left, if Alderaan hadn't forced them all to open their eyes to just how bad things had gotten.
(Maybe some of them would be alive now? Or maybe he'd have been forced to shoot some of them down instead of leading them into it.)
A change of subject was starting to sound like a pretty good idea.
He met the handshake with a solid grip of his own. "Captain Pash Cracken, New Republic Starfighter Command."
no subject
And he liked that. He liked superheroing when it was just superheroing.
"I've done a bit of both. Actual war and superheroing like this. They're two very different things and there's something a little more...pure, I guess, with the superheroing. You still always have some hard choices to make but a lot less guilt and self-recrimination in the long run."
He grinned.
"There ain't no feeling in the world like being able to look at the people you saved when you get them out of whatever it is and they're finally in the clear."
no subject
It was new even just as an idea, mostly. Comparable to the Jedi, maybe, if he looked at it the right way - but even then, while some kids in his galaxy had grown up dreaming of the possibilities of picking up a lightsaber and doing their part for peace and justice that way, Pash's head had always been in the stars. He'd always known he wanted to be a pilot.
And to that end, there was one part of this deal that sounded especially good to him.
"But they had me at 'flight rings.' Being a force for all that's righteous is just icing on the cake."
no subject
That was what happened when aliens just randomly zapped you and gave you powers. It had literally been a bolt out of the blue.
"I don't know that many that grew up wanting it." Maybe Thrash but he'd been more about finding who killed his parents and vigilantism instead of actual superheroing. It'd taken being part of the team for him to relax out of that more violent mindset and into more genuine superheroics. "Most people I know just fell into it."
A pause.
"Sometimes literally. I bet there's at least one person back home that got dunked in radioactive waste or something and got powers from it."
Generally, there were a lot of people that had been doused with dangerous substances and got powers, that much Rich knew.
no subject
The usual Jedi robes weren't exactly an impressive fashion statement, but they were at least a little more muted and tasteful than brightly colored spandex. (And while neither of them were particularly flattering to the average figure, at least the Jedi had the right idea on showing too little rather than too much.)
"Do people really get it from radioactive waste where you come from?"
As opposed to getting, like, degenerative diseases?
no subject
"Don't even start on the costumes."
Were there places where people didn't get powers from nuclear waste?
"And yeah, people get powers from nuclear waste all the time. Or chemical waste. Or science experiments gone wrong. Or magical stuff. I mean, some people just die or mutate horribly, but a lot of people get powers from that kinda stuff. I think it's probably something to do with human DNA, though. Like, there's a lot of predisposition to superpowers in humans on my world. Doesn't take much to unlock it. Most people are capable of being turned into metas."
He shrugged.
"Maybe it's not the same in other worlds but in ours, anything potentially mutagenic can unlock it -- and some people are even born with powers. A natural quirk of their DNA. A bunch of my best friends are mutants. They just were born with it and their powers kicked in around puberty."
He frowned.
"They get treated different, though. Natural mutants. For really stupid reasons."
no subject
It was the stupidest reason he could think of, anyway.
And the most frustratingly prevalent - superpowers might not really be a thing in his own galaxy, but non-humans got enough abuse in some circles for the crime of simply not being human. Mostly Imperial circles, but he'd known people who were staunchly anti-Imp and still fell prey to that particular blind spot; usually they weren't so virulent about it, but it happened.
Humans who were different on a genetic level...it wasn't hard to imagine them subject to the same.