There was only one stray crack on the underside. The rest of the brown skin there was whole and intact. She touched it as he clearly intended to let her do. The skin wasn’t rounded like hers was, nor was it polygonal like he was a video game character from the 90s. But it was somewhere between those points. It wasn’t quite hard like stone, though her eyes were convinced it must be, but it was certainly tougher than her skin, more like thick leather than flesh.
“Very tough,” she agreed, tapping her nail on his skin. It didn’t really give like hers would. She imagined it would be much harder to cut. To injure.
And if that were true, just how hard was he hit to leave so many marks all over his body?
“I’m very resistant to cutting,” he said. “My skin will heal from most cuts just fine. But blunt damage cracks and spreads open. And if the damage is bad enough, it won’t heal together and even when it heals, it leaves the cracks behind.”
“Blunt scars,” she said in wonder. It didn’t just look like broken glass, it acted similar to broken glass. His skin shattered, it didn’t cut.
Fascinating.
And terrible.
“Why?” She asked, raising her eyes up to his. Why had he been injured? Where had all these marks come from? What happened to him?
It was hard to find all the words to form the questions. She wasn’t eloquent enough in Standard to get her point across completely. But he didn’t need her to.
He also didn’t answer. But his jaw tightened. He pulled his arm back, breaking that tenuous connection he had briefly allowed between them.
“You have your secrets, I have mine,” he said. “Didn’t you say you were going to fix my stabilizer? That was the only reason I let you out.”
It was an extremely obvious attempt to change the conversation. But she allowed it to happen, following after him as he led the way back to the workbench.
And for the first time in her life, she was more interested in a person than the broken technology spread before her.
The fix for the stabilizer wasn’t complicated. Not when she was able to just slip her hand in through the bottom and twist her fingers around to reach the part that had come loose and needed tightening. There was no way Vytln’s large hands would be able to do it – or probably most people in the Coalition considering humans were the smallest species within it.
“Not bad,” Vytln said, admiring her work with obvious appreciation when she finished. He held up the part and it no longer made that worrying clicking sound that, while soft, spelled impending doom if it went unaddressed. “You’re good.”
“What about that one?” She asked, pointing to the next project on the bench. One she hadn’t seen him messing with since she had been in here, but one that caught her attention because the various screws and parts and wires were so much smaller than it appeared he’d be able to handle.
Sure enough, she saw his gaze dart from the project, to her hands, to the stabilizer, then back again. He set the stabilizer aside and pulled the unfinished project forward.
Vytln’s voice was rough, deep and hard, like rocks grinding together. But it was somehow pleasant as he explained the broken equipment to her. It was part of their shooting gallery – a virtual gun range they kept in their training room. It had stopped tracking the ‘bullets’ correctly and Vytln had broken down the machine, isolating this particular section as the source of the problem.
But his fingers were too big for the delicate work required to fix it. He’d looked up the repair and found it required a suite of tools he simply didn't possess as well as dexterity he didn't have.
Haven figured then it was okay to show him one of her secrets.
Her old high school letter jacket – fake red leather with a big ‘S’ on the front, her name on the back, and ‘gymnastics’ written on the bottom – served the dual purpose of keeping her warm and helping her conceal her tools.
Haven kept a duffel bag full of clothes and supplies as well, though it was still hidden in her wall space. It had a mixture of a few things from Earth and a few things from space, making up an eclectic wardrobe that came from both.
Her letter jacket, however, she always wore because she was always cold. When she had been captured, she had been wearingit over a simple white shirt made of a super stretchy, almost cotton like material that was resistant to tears and stains that she got from Hir-Fallow. Her jean shorts, in contrast, were scuffed and both stained and faded from their long life helping her fix things both here and on Earth. They’d been pants once, but a couple of large rips crawling around in the space station had corrected that. The loops of those jeans, however, helped hold up a fancy belt she got from Holotulle. She compared it to Batman’s utility belt – a place for her to hide and store all the various tools of the trade she used. And most times, her letter jacket was long and poofy enough to hide it.
As Vytln watched, she pulled her gloves from one pocket. They were fingerless, but there was a strip of lights along the knuckles that would illuminate her work surface surprisingly well without her needing to hold a flashlight or headlamp. With those on, she reached for one of the front pouches. With a touch, the seal deactivated and it unrolled, folding down past her short jeans, revealing all the small tools she’d pulled together and created as she needed. They were much smaller than anything Vytln would be able to use with his big hands, and they’d be much more suited to this delicate work than anything he had in his workroom.
Bending over the project, she felt the familiar thrill of a new challenge as she began poking and looking around. Learning this new machine.
She was surprised when a flash of light appeared out of the corner of her eye. Vytln had activated his combot and brought up 3D schematics for the device he must have already loaded. It could zoom, explode outward to show each individual part, and twist in the air as she needed to see it from every angle. She definitely didn't have that, but she suddenly wanted it.
“Can you take off that panel with those?” Vytln asked, pointing to the device, not the holo model.
She could, and did. Demonstrating the use of her tools, she loosened the panel, letting him remove it, and giving them both a look at the internal workings. It was probably one of the more modern things on the Humility, definitely a splurge purchase. She didn't know who bought it, but it certainly saw a lot of use as most of the guys could shoot, and Garnet practiced on it every few days.
As she and Vytln poked around inside, she began to pick up on how the combot holo display was used. She had a little tablet that she’d rigged together, but she hadn’t been able to get a combot. To make, or even fix, one required specialized equipment she had yet to gain access to and so she hadn’t been able to learn.
It seemed to be fairly intuitive overall though, and as she got used to it, she quickly began manipulating the 3D model herself.
