Hard Luck Hermit

While the ship was in transit to their next job, Corey used most of his spare time perusing the internet for more information. He wanted to stop asking stupid questions eventually, and while alien websites were a bit hard to navigate at first, he got the hang of it eventually, and then started spending some time on Space Wikipedia. One of the first things he did was try to look up more about Tooley and Doprel’s species, which turned out to be surprisingly hard. Searching “alien race blue skin” turned up several hundred species, and trying to search for “alien bug gorilla fish thing” brought up nothing useful at all.

Corey put a bit more effort into searching Tooley’s species. He needed to know if they had some kind of cultural thing about sharing cleansers. In spite of his attempts to shake up his cleaning schedule, Tooley kept stepping in to shower with him. He could only imagine she was doing it on purpose. Probably just to mess with him, but he wanted to know if there might be some other cultural reason before he said something potentially offensive. The whole point of using Space Google was to try and avoid stupid questions.

But even when Corey was trying to avoid stupid questions, stupid questions came to him.

“Hey, Corvash,” Tooley said. She slumped into a seat across the common room, next to Farsus. “You going to be able to keep your beast caged when we’re on site?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, the planet we are going to is apparently very religious.”

“Yes, and?”

“And the last time we met a bunch of overtly religious people you shot them to death.”

“I did not.”

“You very much did.”

“The only people I’ve killed were murderous cannibalistic cultists,” Corey said. “They weren’t religious, they were psychopaths with uniforms.”

“The distinction between religion and cult is often a matter of good publicity,” Farsus added.

“I tend to agree, but I’ll be fine. Those cannibal bastards on the station were especially bad. As long as these guys aren’t hurting anybody, it’ll be fine.”

“And what if they are hurting someone?” Tooley asked. “Are your feelings more important than our job?”

“Hey, Tooley, you fucking reprobate,” Kamak snapped. “I know the professor’s all locked up in his room right now, but maybe don’t go casting doubt on the character of the guy I just vouched for.”

The good doctor had spent exactly fifteen minutes trying to socialize with the crew and then quietly retreated to his room for reasons unknown but easy to guess. Kamak blamed Tooley, Tooley blamed Kamak, Corey blamed both of them, and Farsus and Doprel stayed on the sidelines, guiltless and entirely amused by the blame game.

“Oh, I’m not casting any doubt, if Corey wants to murder people as a coping mechanism for past issues, that’s his deal,” Tooley said. “I’m not going to try and talk him out of it, I just want to know what’s going on.”

“What are you even-”

“Don’t bother looking for logic, Corey, you won’t find any,” Kamak said. “She should know better. You haven’t shot Farsus yet, and he’s the most religious guy we know.”

“I thought you had more of a philosophy thing going on,” Corey said. A very weird philosophy, but philosophy all the same. As far as Corey could tell, Farsus’ belief system revolved around destruction, death and the inevitability of entropy. That kind of logic didn’t confuse Corey, but the fact that he was so darn chipper about it did. Farsus debated the inherently meaningless nature of existence the way most people discussed a sunny day.

“There is much debate on where chaos scholars fall on the scale between religion and philosophy,” Farsus said. “We have little organizational structure and acknowledge no higher entity other than the cold, uncaring forces of random chance and entropic decay that govern our universe, so most call us philosophers. The official policy, however, is that words are meaningless attempts to cage concepts greater than we can ever understand, so people can call us whatever they want.”

Farsus stopped and took a sip of his drink.

“Though I would apparently hesitate to call us a cult, given your feelings on them.”

Just because Farsus studied death and destruction didn’t mean he wanted to invite it upon himself. He was very excited to die someday, as the experience would be quiet illuminating, but it would be the last educational experience he ever had, and he still had a lot of things he wanted to learn before it happened.

“Sounds fine to me,” Corey said. “No power structure makes it hard to abuse power. That’s my real issue. Power and control. And the ways it can be abused.”

“If you hate shitty controllers, feel free to shoot Kamak any time,” Tooley said.

Corey shook his head, but Kamak didn’t even blink at the threat.

“You wouldn’t get anything out of it,” Kamak said. “Ship’s DNA coded, and it goes to Doprel if I die. Even you would never kill Doprel.”

“It’s true, I could never hurt that beautiful blue giant,” Tooley said. She shouted across the ship to the kitchen area, where the man(?) himself was preparing a meal. “I love you Doprel!”

“Then please stop talking about murdering Kamak!”

“I don’t love you that much, Doprel,” Tooley said. She then stood, clapped her hands on her thighs, and stretched out. “Alright, we got an FTL lane switch coming up, I better go make sure we don’t cross a star’s gravitational influence and get turned into atomic paste.”

“That’s what I pay you for,” Kamak said. “Quit hassling the new guy and do your job.”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

While she was going, Corey started searching. Now he had to look up what an FTL lane switch was, a brand new stupid question for him to try and cut off at the pass. Corey began to have a sinking feeling the stupid questions would never stop.