driftfleet | Gumball Wishes and Taxicab Dreams

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Gumball Wishes and Taxicab Dreams

[On today's episode of the Drift Fleet:

The cargo holds are full of mysterious crates! The crews are filling beyond capacity with new faces! Official alerts are informing the passengers that they are signed to contracts that they've never agreed to! They are docking at the dazzling FS Starlight, but are flat broke!

What are they going to do!? Stay tuned to find out!

...Meaning, this is a kickoff mingle for you all to enjoy the beginning of the latest plot setting. This is a convenient place to start threads relating to the first week of the event-- meeting new crewmembers, reacting to the mysterious cargo, arriving on the station and discovering that you're all broke, etc.

Tag around, start whatever you'd like, have fun. And, as always, feel free to make your own posts and mingles from here on in, as this will be the only mod-posted one for this event!]

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She stared at him as though he was (mayhaps) a little slow-witted. Sansa slowly set aside her needlework and twisted on her makeshift seat so she could better look at Greed. Her hands folded sweetly in her lap, and she did her level best to hide how desperately she wanted to flee.

"But we have met, Captain." She frowned. "We were shipmates, once."

He really should expect this by now, but Ling accepted every incident of confusion with a fresh expression of dismay. In truth, he didn't much like the fact that people couldn't really tell the difference between himself and Greed. Sometimes he wondered if they were really so alike that the difference was negligible. Other times he just enjoyed seeing people's expressions trying to work out just what he was going on about. This time was a bit of both.

"You have me mistaken for Greed." He sighed dramatically. "You might have noticed I sound entirely different."

"You look exactly the same."

She might have apologized. Indeed, she likely should have done so. But the Blue Fish was right there behind her, and this time Greed didn't seem quite so...terrifyingly smug. It unsettled her expectations of the conversation.

"Well it is the same body," he explained as though that were an absolutely ordinary thing. It wasn't. "So I would expect some resemblance."

Yet his posture was less rigid than Greed's and he didn't stand up as tall. Greed made this body into all hard edges, but Ling had a way of appearing softer and harmless. If there was a difference, it was only because Ling knew how to act whereas his counterpart knew only blunt excess.

Sansa's flummoxed response hid handily beneath her stoic expression. It wasn't a calm expression -- but one pulled taut and strained by discomfort. Even so, it showed only the barest edge of her honest dissatisfaction with Ling's suggestion.

Instead, she was forced to try and contextualize the explanation for herself: "Are you brothers? Twins?"

"No, nothing so troublesome as that." If they were brothers, they'd have killed one another by now. Politics. "It's all a little complicated, but we share this body. His old one was destroyed some time ago."

Although his smile faded to something a bit more thoughtful, he betrayed no signs of distress about the situation. He had accepted this and so it was pointless to become upset over it. Quite unlike Sansa, who he could see was uneasy around him.

He lies.

It was all she could hear: rebounding in her head, and filling her ears. A low and constant hiss of doubt, suggesting to her that this was merely the next step to Greed's game. To provoke and unsettle her -- to drive comfort from her life by sending strangers her way. She thought the worst of him because it was easier to proceed with an assumption of disappointment.

But (for now) she put on a careful front. "How curious. And how tragic for him," she answered. Voice low, and heartfelt. "You're awfully charitable to give him a place to stay in the meantime."

Whatever in Seven Hells that meant.

"I wouldn't call it charity." No, Greed was a means to an end. But where Greed had taken an interest in Sansa for the purpose of antagonizing that stranger who'd butted in on a communication, Ling really had no vested interest in her. Although she was certainly pretty.

"But I spend too much time talking about him anyway. You're a noble in your country, aren't you?"

Sansa grew as cagey as she could be with the information that was already freely available to most fleetmates who'd held more than one conversation with her. "The Starks belong to one of the old Great Houses of Westeros," she confirmed. What she did not add, however, was that it was a house in ruin. Stricken from royal record, so to speak.

It was not the same as in Xing, but he was well studied in the histories of other countries to figure out the context here. A Great House would not be so different then some of the larger clans in his own country. It was a feudal system, though he could hardly call the sorry state of his own empire as being much better than that. What was distinct was a lack of a certain haughtiness that came with nobility. If Ling himself lacked it, then it was only because he knew how insignificant his own clan was.

"I see. So that must make you quite the important person back there. I do believe my lady is the appropriate term here, right?"

"It is, yes."

No one had asked before. Not really. A few had sensed her discomfort with other terms and had reluctantly conformed to how she spoke. Others came from kingdoms like hers, and so they started out speaking politely. But here was the first person who'd asked.

Mayhaps he was another man. Or else he'd hit his head.

"But whatever importance I had -- it disappeared the moment I arrived here. I assure you."

And this was almost a comfort. Being Ned Stark's daughter or Robb Stark's sister had only made her a prize to be won, kept, and misused. Importance wasn't always a comfortable thing to possess.

"That may be true." If it was true, then it brought into question his own importance. But Ling was not so concerned with matters of pride more than he was with ambition and want. "But distance does not unmake your obligations to your people. So you may be unimportant to these people here, but there are a great many more to whom you matter a great deal. Is that not right?"

Sansa shook her head.

"I am the first daughter in a House with three full-blooded sons. Distance may not diminish my obligations, but succession does." And she did not lie, although up until recently she did believe herself the sole surviving heir with brothers dead and sister as-good-as. Let him believe her callous for denying any love for her people; she did not care, and did not need to defend her pride to him. Her love for the North was a sore subject, and she was still learning how to express it.

Stark, he remembered. It occurred to him that one of these full-blooded sons had an encounter with Greed already. Robb Stark was not so distant in age to Ling Yao, though they certainly had their differences. Greed had given the Stark lord a difficult time at it.

"Succession is such a troublesome thing," he replied with an exaggerated sigh. "If the empire followed traditional primogeniture succession, I'd only be twelfth in line. That's certainly a lot of heartbeats between me and the throne, isn't it?"

She didn't like the sound of his ambition. It settled roughly on her ears. Why should he talk about his kin like that -- because wasn't it kin who stood in line for a throne? Sansa almost shook her head, but she didn't immediately protest.

Instead: "Do you have twelve brothers?"

"I have twenty-three brothers, as well as nineteen sisters. You'll understand if I don't name them all."

He knew them all by name and sight, as a necessary precaution. But he didn't much care for the idea of boring her with something so tedious as that.

Too many. The shock of it showed (briefly) in her eyes. An unguarded moment, prompted by the surreal nature of his words. What was more unbelievable? That he should be two people in one body, or that one family should have so many children? She bit her lip. Perhaps they are some of them of natural birth. It was said the old king had many bastards...

"Your feasting hall must get quite loud," she commented. Lamely, really, because she wasn't certain how else to tackle such a bizarre fact.

He chuckled lightly. "I suppose it would be, if we ever feasted together. Honestly I rarely ever see any of them."

But here he was, talking all about himself. Ling never felt any particular desire to go hording certain secrets - sometimes he enjoyed the look of confusion that he gave others when he explained his unusual circumstances. But the politics of Xing was a complciated affair. "I've seen one of your brothers. Do you have sisters as well?"

A family that did not feast together? Strange and stranger still. She appeared prepared to query that claim when he smoothly nudged the conversation back into her hands. Her nose crinkled -- as with disgust, or perhaps distaste. Not for the subject matter (for she missed Arya all the more) but because she hadn't been expecting it. Captain Greed had seemed far more capable of nattering on about himself and caring little for the gentler details of Sansa's life. That he should ask now --

Either he was a different person, or merely quite good at the game.

"One. She isn't here."

He nodded understanding. "Well, that is a shame. I might not be close with my own siblings, but I know it can be difficult to be separated from those you care about."

His grandfather, his clan, his bodyguards... those were the family that mattered most to him. To be without them was to be nothing at all. He had been with Greed and with this fleet too long.

"Have you been apart long?"

Why did he want to know? Was he compiling some sort of intelligence upon her? Or merely being polite. Sansa couldn't be certain, and so she maintained her customary silence as the question settled in her mind.

"Long enough," she began vaguely. "It's been some time. She's foolish -- a-and stupid. She ran away..."

And that was (mayhaps) the first clever thing Arya had ever done. Sansa hoped it gave her a better fortune than her own, but she thought along the same lines as Robb: Arya can't have survived whatever happened to her.

"I am sorry for that." There was no smiles that came with that apology. "What was it that caused her to run away?"

In his own head, he pictured it as some childhood dispute. Perhaps she ran off to join the circus. He knew that was often a thing among Amestrians.

What did cause Arya to run? Sansa cannot be certain. Sometimes, she doubted Arya ever ran -- perhaps the Kingsguard had caught her and killed her as they did the rest. But she can only imagine that had Joffrey signed her sister's death warrant, he would have lorded that over her as well. No, missing Arya had been a pain for the crown. A loss.

"Our lord father's guard had been slaughtered. Our attendants killed. She -- probably got scared and ran away, like a baby."

Sansa lied as smooth as silk. Arya was a lot of things, but she wasn't craven. And wasn't a baby. But she'd sooner die than give Greed some honest telling of her sister.

He had no reason to doubt her words, but the notion of calling a fled sister a baby seemed a touch extreme. His head tilted in thoughtful expression. "I wouldn't call that being like a baby. If she had the opportunity to escape, it's well that she took it."

"Is it?" Well. "They could kill her when they find her, you know."

She was suddenly sandpaper. Granite.

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