Chapter Text
If the markets of Illyricum contain the solution to Kraglin’s future functionality as a crewmate, Nebula is perfectly prepared to comb through them until she finds it. At least the surroundings are far more congenial than Contraxia’s general air of alcohol, bodily fluids, and snow of dubious quality and cleanliness.
Illyricum is, as always, a crowded and bustling mass of merchants from every conceivable corner of this galaxy and several inconceivable ones besides. Kraglin seems disinclined to enter any specific segment of the market to search for whatever he wishes to purchase, insisting that “the point is to look, not to just buy what you came for and leave!”
They begin at the section designated for edible products, sniffing through the overwhelming and myriad offerings and tasting the samples proffered by the shouting vendors. With so many sellers hailing from such distant parts, the variety of foods, spices, and intoxicants available is almost bewildering. Nebula wonders why people bother, when nutrient slurry is so much more efficient and can be tailored to the individual and consumed more quickly. Cheaper, too.
Kraglin does not appear to be amused when she expresses this opinion, and starts tentatively but implacably badgering her to try this or that sample at the vendors they pass. She eventually caves and tries a few particularly interesting items—a bitter stimulant drink served in a gourd that she quite approves of; a flat stick of some sort of dried, crunchy leaf matter; a cone of roasted tubers, a papery fruit that cracks open to yield the slimy, strangly delicious crunch of seeds inside. Perhaps the effort people spend on these things is not so strange, after all.
She does, however, refuse the horrifyingly sticky-sweet fried-dessert concoction that Kraglin enthusiastically tries to make her take a bite of. There are standards.
Nebula is confident that nothing found here will poison her, but Kraglin is less lucky—he bites into one deceptively sweet-tasting orange fruit and immediately begins to vomit until he is curled over, retching. Apparently it’s a common intolerance in his species, which no one noted until the vendor realized He doesn’t seem too bothered by the experiment, but they move on to non-consumable goods quickly enough after that.
They give the slavers' market a wide berth.
Nebula thinks she might enjoy the junker and salvager ward the best: she spies a number of excellent potential hardware additions to her personal prosthetic designs and a few promising bits of scrap and junk that might be fashioned into useful weapons with a bit of creativity. Kraglin, for his part, dickers and bargains and haggles until they’ve got spares of every potential part they could possibly use for the M-ship, and a few more cannibalizable spare pieces besides.
It’s a good thing Illyrican markets are designed for the traveling customer so that all they need to do is pay and leave the ships’ address so that their purchases can be delivered the next day. Nebula has met few others who can match her strength, pound for pound, but even she would probably break under the weight of the purchases they make.
Danger arises in the garment district when Kraglin begins to finger a long, flapping rusty-leather coat and look pensively mournful. Distraction appears to be immediately necessary if this venture is to have any chance of success, and Nebula looks wildly about her to find something suitable. Fleetingly, she remembers her first meeting with Kraglin, when he asked if she was going to purchase a hat—and conveniently, there’s a milliner’s stall right across the aisle.
And then she spies it, nestled among more ornate, brightly colored offerings like a sleek racing ship in the middle of a pack of round, lush pleasure cruisers. The hat is all harsh angles and glittering curves, perhaps the most appealing head ornament she has ever seen. It is even a practical charcoal grey pricked with hair-thin, silvery stripes at intervals that might theoretically serve to break up its outline in a dark corridor. Nebula suddenly wants it, like she has wanted nothing else that she has seen today, so—well, why not? She steps quickly across the aisle and perches it atop her head before she can talk herself out of the impulse and clears her throat in order to capture Kraglin’s increasingly fixated attention.
“Well? Does this qualify as a ‘nice’ hat? I have never worn one before; head-coverings without function were… discouraged when I was a child.”
He startles and then turns to look at her, blinking rapidly as he assesses the fashion object. “I… I think that one might be intended for men? It looks nice on you, though.”
Nebula rolls her eyes. “Many things are not intended for my sex or species. If I wear it, it is therefore a hat that is suitable for me. The important thing is to work out whether I should wear it.”
He grins crookedly at her in that sidelong way of his. “Well, you’ll certainly make all the pretty girls go ‘oooo’ with that one.”
Nebula sniffs. The compliment is making her unexpectedly warm, but that doesn’t mean she has fallen so far as let any such sign of weakness show on her face. Nevertheless…
Well. She has the credits to spare. The hat is not particularly expensive. It appears to make her ‘look nice.’ Does it need to have a further function?
It’s frivolous, but she buys the hat anyway, and they walk on through the stalls with it perched proudly atop her head.
They have nearly made it back to the original location of the parked ship, on the edges of the scrapyards and the agricultural sellers, when Kraglin spies another item that makes him go all frozen and misty-eyed: a set of leather harnesses and trappings from a shop that advertises custom work, proudly displaying a dummy mannequin covered in increasingly more elaborate knife and blaster harnesses and holsters. Nebula grits her teeth and looks for another suitable distraction—and then she spots one. There’s a stall with a grizzled older Gneidarian presiding over cages of racing-Orloni advertised as “the fastest in the business,” a wide banner proclaiming the owner’s skill at all manner of pest control (“Orloni, anyorlet, wreka beetles, dropslugs, antechines—you name it, we’ll take care of it! Chemical and biological solutions approved!”), and… the object of Nebula’s sudden interest.
It’s a wide box with low sides, and it is filled with tumbling, wrestling, furry, biting creatures. Their bodies are a uniform dark brown, glistening with healthy sheen like a freshly eviscerated liver, but their heads lighten from neck to nose, ranging from ash grey to almost the same dark brown as their bodies. A much larger version of the creatures, presumably an adult, is tethered right outside the enclosure by a harness wrapped around its long, sinous body. Ignoring its leash, it stretches itself along the floor just outside the box and gnaws on a frozen carcass. There’s a sign saying “TEIRA CUBS: CHAMPION LINES, VERMIN KILLERS, PIT PROSPECTS, PETS AVAILABLE" leaning casually against the enclosure.
Perfect. She had observed Kraglin naming each of the little mites in his melior from the previous week, which suggests—perhaps he is simply lonely, and needs more contact than Nebula is used to providing. She knows from experience that she is not particularly good at providing such company, but perhaps… perhaps something like this will suffice. If not, well, despite her best efforts she has not been able to eradicate the current orloni infestation on board; theoretically, a creature like this might solve the problem. Nebula has very little experience with domestic animals, but she thinks she has seen creatures like this in orloni pits on some of the worlds she has visited. At the time, they had seemed like very efficient predators. She likes that.
She elbows Kraglin. “Kraglin.”
“Hm?” He jerks his head up, pausing his focus on the coat to scan the market quickly. Nebula rolls her eyes, internally: as if she would let a threat sneak up on or follow them. It is not as if she is new to this.
“Those. What are they?”
He jerks to attention, squinting at the box. "Uh, those? Those're teira, like it says."
Nebula stares at him. She can read, thank you very much.
Kraglin suppresses an eye roll and sighs. "They're what you'd call domestic animals? Bright, but not like you or me or anything. People keep ‘em as pets sometimes? Sometimes people run 'em in the orloni races, but they tend to be too good at catchin' em to put much sport in it." He looks pensive and then adds, “Pete had one for a while as a’ kid, used to terrify the cap’n somethin’ fierce when it’d skitter over his feet in the night huntin’ things or leave dead shit in his bed.” He winces, and Nebula inwardly curses and dives for another distraction.
“Why would people keep them as pets? Are they not good at their intended purpose?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, they’re vicious little buggers to vermin, but they’re smart and they like to be warm an’ shit, so they’ll sleep on crew’s feet at night if you let ‘em. Hard to keep out of anywhere you don’t want ‘em to be, so sometimes it’s easier to just give up an’ let them where they want to be if they’re on board.”
Well. This sounds optimal. “Good. They’re soft, right? He can clutch one and sob into its fur, leaving Nebula out of the whole messy business. She nods firmly to herself and strides briskly towards the stallkeeper.
“How much one of for the cubs?”
The man blinks and looks up at her. “Urhhh—ehh—two hundred units, unless you want one of the breeding prospects.”
Nebula has no use for additional small animals. One will be plenty. She eyes the tumbling, gnawing, wrestling cubs and thinks. One, a smallish, dark-headed pup with an enormous white patch on its chest, seems particularly stubborn: it is only half the size of the largest, but it is fast and energetic and frequently reduces the larger pups to yelps as it gnaws their ears and skin with enthusiasm. It is plainer than many of its comrades, whose plush fur glints in the light of the late afternoon, but there’s something about the tenacity of the little furry thing that catches her attention.
She points to it. “That one. How much is that one?” The man eyes her. “Same as the rest, that one. Y’got a cleaning unit for it, or are you going to keep her in a kennel?”
Nebula stares at him. Behind her, Kraglin coughs. “You gotta have the special box for it, or it’ll shit wherever it pleases and no one’ll be happy. You sure you want to put up with somethin’ like that in your space? Animals like that, they’re never quite what you expect—might be easier to go back an’ buy an automated pestkilling system, if the orloni are buggin’ you that much.”
She doesn’t know how to explain that the wilfullness of the little furry creature is part of the appeal, so she doesn’t even try. “This seems more efficient. You’ve cared for one of these creatures before; figure out what to purchase from the man and call it good.” She picks up the odd little thing, inspecting it. It immediately tries to gnaw on her prosthetic hand, creeling in thwarted aggravation when its jaws meet unforgiving metal.
“Fair enough,” Kraglin sighs, but turns to the man and sets up an order for a quickly-figured set of items that, the man assures them, should set them up with everything the little creature will need. The asking price is apparently solid, because he only haggles a little for form’s sake before settling on the cost and turning back to Nebula, who is still inspecting her new purchase. “What are you going to call her?”
“Does it need a name?”
He stares at her. “Yes. Ain’t right to have a living critter without a name, not if it’s going to be a part of your crew like that. And it’s bad luck to take one of them things on board if it’s not gonna be part of the crew, so she needs a name.”
She sniffs. “You name it, then.” She’s acquiring the animal to keep him busy, after all, and she unceremoniously deposits it into his scrambling hands before turning to return to her ship. There’s no reason to regret losing the touch of its soft, furry body or its pointy little claws, but she obscurely misses it as soon as it’s gone.
Kraglin glares at her, but doesn’t argue much. The cub burrows into his jumpsuit, worrying at the leather, but he discourages it easily enough and shifts it in his hands. He carries it all the way back to their M-ship, too, and his attention doesn’t shift once.
Perhaps this, Nebula thinks, will get his mind off of whatever has been distracting him so badly.