Reverse Engineering
nolan
cylinder station 12
nolan
cylinder station 12
Nolan Seward was considerably smarter than most people gave him credit for. People made a lot of assumptions about a big purple guy with tusks and a station scum dialect. Particularly after he'd dropped out of high school.
(In fairness, he had an equivalent degree through testing. But people tended to forget that part.)
Nolan’s hobbies included modding antique vehicles to move faster than they had any right to, and pyrotechnics. Which sounded a lot less impressive than the equally accurate ‘rocket scientist’, but so it went.
He didn't mind. Low expectations were easy to exceed. And he could be pretty dumb sometimes, when he put his mind to it. Most of the time his best friend was involved.
Kreska Ido was a lot like a bomb: difficult to disassemble without the whole thing blowing up in your face.
Kreska blew up a lot more than his bombs did. Mostly hurt herself doing it. Still never learned her lesson. Not learning lessons was like a hobby of hers. That, and climbing all over him like a goddamn lemur.
You could learn a lot about where a person came from based on how they acted when they felt like they were home. Nolan didn't do a whole lot of engineering outside of his garage. Around Kreska he growled more, because he knew it wouldn’t mean to her what it meant to other people.
Jobari culture was a big old question mark in an otherwise thorough net database. Might be easy to assume they acted on Kotii the way they did on Allied ships, around Allied citizens. Cold and hard and safe distances, clipped tones with hard edges, head-to-toe immaculate white. Nolan didn’t think so, though.
Kreska wasn’t Jobari. Wasn’t human, either. Wasn’t just an in-between like most halvsies, was instead aggressively and pointedly neither. Trying to figure out Jobari from looking at Kreska was like trying to figure out a car based on treadmarks in the road.
Not impossible. Nolan was willing to make some educated guesses, and he was pretty confident in himself.
First: Jobari did not have a concept of personal space. As evidenced by the constant jumping on his back, on his shoulders, grabbing him and prodding at him and generally having no goddamn respect. Like a cat, was Kreska, the kind that’d bite him for petting it but climb into his lap when he wasn’t paying attention.
He wondered sometimes if she’d been more touchy-feely when she was new to the station. He wasn’t gonna ask when she’d learned better of it. Kreska had feelings like pipe bombs had ball bearings.
Second: Jobari didn’t wear clothes. Or at least, not the way they did when they were off-planet, all covered-up and chaste-looking. Made sense that they wouldn’t, when sunlight was so important.
Kreska had an issue with clothes. This had taken him a while to figure out, since she was so opposed to dudes seeing her naked, and all. But eventually she forgot that he was a dude, or else just stopped caring, or else forgot she was supposed to care.
If she happened to get a particularly impressive bruise somewhere, she would not hesitate to take her shirt off to show him. When it was hot out she sometimes did not bother with pants. Sometimes she seemed to just forget why clothes are worn and when. She had no respect for his clothes, either, and it did not seem to occur to her that maybe she shouldn’t go pulling on his shirts just because she’d decided it was her job to take care of his road rash.
Totally unnecessary. He took care of himself just fine. Didn’t need to let her go stripping him and playing doctor. She’d just as likely kill him.
Third: Jobari sang. They sang like hell. Never off-planet, clearly, but they had to. Captain Robinson’s voice did not explain Kreska’s even by half. Perfect pitch, her range was goddamn absurd, and she picked up accents as quick as he’d ever heard. Instruments, besides. It made him wonder what exactly it was they did on Kotii, that made a girl who could sing like that.
Fucking unfair, was what it was.
Fourth: Kotii was designed like a set of monkey bars gone feral. It was the only possible explanation for Kreska’s refusal to stay on the damn ground. Or use stairs. Or, generally, her tendency to climb all over every damn thing so long as she thought she could get away with it. Even sometimes when she didn’t.
If it wasn’t, they would have broken her of the habit before she left. He felt pretty sure of that.
It was all conjecture, anyway. Wasn’t like there was any proof. Wasn’t like there was anything he could do with this information. It just existed, nebulous facts that brought him no closer to understanding the person he considered his best friend.
There was understanding, and then there was understanding.
Then again, Nolan’s idea of understanding necessitated that he be able to take something apart and put it back together again. So maybe it made a certain amount of sense that his closest friend would be someone too fragile to try it with.
Didn’t seem to work out so well with everybody else.
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