Out of Pod Experience

Hey! That back side looks familiar!

After tinkering for half an hour with the screenshot (which already took a good while to capture), the final shot was:

- clone tool to remove the door button marker
- auto white balance
- minor histogram correction
- "Watercolor" special effect
- Gaussian blur
- 50% size reduction

Living in a perfect world, I would had made Yiole look taller. But with time and skill constraints, the picture sufficed to end the "Yiole meets Random" storyline.

*Yiole Gionglao steps into TGFB, walking fast, her face furrowed. She barely answers to Indah's greeting and hastily drinks from her glass before spitting:

Do you know...? You know who's an ass*ole? Jack C., he's an ass*ole!

*Yiole bows her head and grumpily stares at the glass. Indah sees the thunderclouds gathering on Yiole's forehead and decides to let her blow out steam on her own for a while, before enquiring...*

Huh, where's Ishtanchuk when I need her? I've had the most boring mission in ages, slowly chewing 270,000 ISK cruisers in a Lvl2 fit. I even had to buy a couple of heavy launchers to break their tank.

Indah, sweetheart, when will you decide for a Cane fit of your liking? I am a miner, you should do that mission stuff yourself...

*Indahmawar looks loosely at Yiole, shrugs and then sinks her head back into the Fitting Tool again. Yiole looks over her shoulder and sees a mail open on a secondary screen*

Is that a picture of Ish? But, where in the universe is she...?

*Alice Sit opposite Jill and Stares at her*

*Just Smiles and Says Nothing*

*As Sheimi walks out of the bar deep within her own thoughts, a voice startles her out of her introspection*

"Don't take it personally."

She jumps back for distance and drops into a fighting crouch. A bald man is standing just outside the door. He raises his arms to show he is unarmed. "Easy, easy." he laughs. "Dont take it too personally. Usually the place is much friendlier."

Sheimi starts to speak, a handful of emotions passing across her face.

"Might I recommend the Coffee Whiskey. It's....unusual." the man says with a wink as he turns and strolls away.

Suddenly Jill takes a keen interest in the ceiling of the bar ... all while her throat tightens up, the mouth gets all dry. The skin of her face reaches melting point. The air above her ears must be flickering like the air over fiery hot sand she once witnessed on a Matar planet.

Jill forces herself to look at a different part of the ceiling now. "Let's not look awkward now", she tells herself. "They are probably all looking now. No wonder, I'm flashing like the overheat warning on my high-racks ... why high-racks, why couldn't I think of high-slots." A panicky look into that girls greenish eyes. "Did I just look at her boobs and got caught ?" The temperature shoots up another 100°.

Forcefully Jill moves her sight to seem as if she looked through those deep eyes, now past the bright red hair, far into the distance towards the bar.

"Freckles
- bar, look at the bar.
- white teeth in a black ring of moisty lips
- the bar, concentrate, don't look at her and she will stop looking at you.
- pale soft skin ... so white.
- the bar, there's always some reason to look at the bar.
- green eyes, like precious stones, staring ...
- maybe the roof again ?
- glowing red hair, left and rigth from her face and some streaks falling almost into her eyes.
- floor ? Let's look at the floor. No, the glass, the floor is obvious.
- ... and freckles"

Jill picks up her glass and forces a gulp of water down.

A small giggle drowned in another quick sip of water as Jill tries to prevent her muscles from pulling her mouth into a grinning smile. A very unexpected thought had crossed her mind. She tries to imagine how she must look like from the outside. How she must have gone from blushing to blushing as each ridiculous thought passed through her silly brain. "Like a blinking alarm button, all that's missing is the glaring alarm signal".

Jill, calmed down a bit, tightening her grip on the glass. It feels reassuring ... and ... it's not empty.
"If it was empty, it would look suspicious, wouldn't it, my dear."

Staring at the table Jill pretends to be caught up in some important or at least distracting thoughts. She slowly brings her left hand to her ear. Tugging her hair behind the ear and pulling the earpiece of her music player out of the left ear. She wanted to reassure herself that the bar was still filled with noise.

There might have been a discomforting silence after all. People might have heard all of Jill's thoughts and could have been staring at her for minutes.

But there was only one person staring at Jill all the time. ... and slowly that person didn't really feel like a stranger anymore ... "after all we have just gone through ..."

Jill looks at the girl in front of her. "Hello, I'm Jill. ... Hi, you come here often ? My name's Jill by the way. ... Jill ... and stretching my hand out ... maybe ?"

- Hello.

"Did I just say that loud ? ... Loud enough for her to hear ? Should I repeat it louder ?"

Quick sip from the glass ...

Two very long seconds pass.


Jill turns, eyes first, head follows at a slow and mechanical pace, slowly looking up at Mizhir.

"He-hello. Jill. I'm Jill.", she utters shyly.

Jill is still unsure how her hand managed to get into Mizhir's hand ... or wether it is ok to retract it now. She clenches her glass now with two hands and looks very awkwardly up to Miz.

Despite the background noise in the bar, Jill can hear the servos in Mizhir's monocle zoom in on her.

(continued)

As they suffered the check-in routine at the central precinct, Indah felt very depressed, and she had to resource to all her self control and scrap every shred of higher class dignity to not break down in tears, at least until she met Ish and Yiole at a confinement cell, waiting to meet the judge next morning.

Indah looked for Ish, and when she saw her disheveled hair and clothes, and how she was obviouly stiffing her upper lip, Indah bursted in tears. Ish quickly held her in her arms, kissing her cheeks and started sobbing along, mumbling:

- There, there, it's OK... nothing bad will happen... I assure you...

Yiole was a bit amused but also was sensitive enough to understand that her friends weren't used to such kind of close, personal violence. Albeit Ishtanchuk had disabled one of the gang girls herself, Yiole knew that at a certain point things were looking awry and she considered holding the Fazmarai on her arms and firing the thermal peacemaker. That was the thought that bothered she most as it felt like a personal failure; killing everyone in 20 meters around should not be something you end up doing on a weekend evening. Staying away from the gang girls would had been a wiser move, maybe, or why not just notice they were picking a fight instead of jerking at some tourists.

As the Fazmarais comforted each other, Yiole figured that it all would end well. She had a license for the pistol and escalating the TP issue probably was more than what that baclwater city council would like to do, specially with two Khanid noblewomen mixed in. Yiole convinced the Fazmarais to try to sleep and she laid on a bunk herself. At some point, she noticed Indah's smooth breathing wile Ish embraced her, and then Ish fell asleep too. Yiole barely closed her eyes and her mind wandered about the TP, which she had learned to use TP from one of the craftsmen who manufactured them on demand. Yiole remembered the test firing and the momentary agony when the shield vanished and overheaten air slammed on her. That, and how everything 20 meters around had been incinerated... The device, albeit being the size of a hand grenade, casted a massive thermal shield that engulfed the carrier and a small spherical space around him, and then the tip of the device, which was left outside of the shield, bursted in a matter-antimatter reaction whose gamma radiation slammed on a high density lens that converted it into mostly infrarred... "People looks funny after that. The side hit by the TP is charred to the bones and the opposite side is boiled; they look like poorly made burguers. And the heat wave is enough to burn exposed skin even if the blast has incinerated through the thick of several bodies...". Yes. The craftsman, rumored to be a Serpentis operative, enjoyed his deadly toys. He even joked on how it was a miracle that capsuleers didn't ran around firing those things into random crowds.

Yiole closed her eyes a moment, and suddenly it was morning -she had fell asleep after all. She was right about what would the justice do, and by noon, the main concern of the three girls was their missing breakfast. Indah was childishly happy and grumpy at once over her empty belly and how the whole issue had been "a waste of time". Later, Yiole got a copy of the police records, and a new TP from the same wretched craftsman.

Back to TGFB, Yiole and Indah looked each other. They had been recalling the events and shared a understanding look.

- Huh, was just an anecdote after all. And you were so grumpy about your empty belly... -Yiole laughed.
- Well, I was just trying to leave that awful night behind...
- Was a good time all in all, and we had some fun the next days.
- I can live wihout such good times...

::Khergit looks up from his datapad:: Whoa, check this out! Somehow that tune triggered me to think of Shoshin, a band my friend's husband promotes. So I'm looking for Shoshin's website, but instead end up on a site with an interview with their engineer-producer Joel Hamilton. And it turns out that he was also the engineer-producer for The Black Keys' most recent album. Freaky coincidence connection, eh?

[Not trolling, that's exactly what happened.]