Luck of the Stars [Part 4]
Aug. 16th, 2020 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
esp_dragonv2Fandom: Noblesse
Summary: It started with Frankenstein chasing up the engineering officer, Muzaka Starr, for a late checkup. But there's something about the man that interests Frankenstein the more he interacts with him.
Notes: Space AU square for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
trope_bingo. :D
Rating: G
Genre: General
Word count: 2,160
Total word count: 8,467
Status: Work in progress
Frankenstein looked around the hangar bay, seeing the usual maintenance workers on the smaller transport ships. He smiled seeing the familiar head of silver hair he was seeking out.
"And you said I worked too much," he said as a greeting once he was within earshot.
Muzaka looked up from the hoverbike he was working on with a grin. He was in civilian clothes, an oil stain on his cheek where he'd rubbed at it. "Hey, at least I get outta the engine room for my hobby. What's up?"
"I wanted to see how you were doing, if you'd recovered yet."
Muzaka shook his head, still grinning. "See? Still workin'."
"And is it wrong to worry over people?"
"Naw," Muzaka said, starting to work on the hoverbike again.
"Is this the one you mentioned before?" Frankenstein asked, watching him work.
"Yeah! Wanna see how she runs once I'm done?"
Frankenstein blinked, and then looked around at the hangar. While spacious enough to give a good runway, with the sheer amount of people crossing the way, they would risk hitting someone every second.
"During the next shore leave, heh," Muzaka said, reaching for the spanner to his right. It was just out of reach and Frankenstein picked it up, handing it to him. Their fingers brushed against each other and while Muzaka paused, he didn't instantly jerk away.
Muzaka weighed the spanner in his hand for a second, just studying Frankenstein, before nodding to himself and starting to work again. "So are you in?"
"Is this a ploy to get me to stop working?" Frankenstein said, amused.
Muzaka grinned at him. "Only if you want to."
If he wanted to, huh? "Then I may take you up on your offer." It had been a while since Frankenstein had ridden a hoverbike.
Muzaka's grin widened. "It's a date!"
* * *
Frankenstein watched the stars by his office window slow, feeling the thrum of the engine in the walls. His office was in the wrong side of the ship to see what the new planet looked like but - he looked up at his office door hissing open.
Muzaka walked in, a black helmet held in one hand, a second tucked under his arm.
Ah, of course.
Muzaka lifted a brow at him. "Did ya forget?" he asked, holding out one of the helmets.
"Only momentarily," Frankenstein said, collecting a helmet from him. "We're going somewhere more urban, I hope?" While hoverbikes didn't have wheels, they still hovered about the ground at a set distance so were more suited to flat ground, and it would be far easier if they wouldn't need to dodge around trees or other foliage.
"Of course!"
Collecting the bike didn't take long and soon enough, they were planetside, people bustling around them. The city they were in was far more suited for a hoverbike, with brightly lit buildings stretching out as far as the eye could see, as well as clusters of skyscrapers and floating islands in the air.
They'd touched down as dawn happened and Frankenstein watched the sun climb the sky, turning everything a hue of oranges and pinks, as Muzaka did his final checks.
"She's ready," Muzaka said from his seat, the bike already in the air as he slipped his helmet on. "You?"
"Yes," Frankenstein said, doing the same. He climbed on, wrapping his hands around Muzaka's waist. "Is this all right?"
Muzaka didn't say anything for a few seconds, and then nodded. "Yeah."
Muzaka kicked off, the bike humming to life. After twisting around some vehicles and winding through busy streets for a while, they found themselves on open roads, the city at their back.
Frankenstein watched the sun rise higher above the horizon, only hearing the thrum of the bike's engine. "She seems to be running smoothly," he said.
"Yep," Muzaka said, their helmets' communications connected with each other. "Wanna see what she can do?"
Frankenstein looked at Muzaka, even though the other man couldn't see him. "So long as you're not breaking any laws."
"The bike's standard issue and I'll keep below the speeding limit." He could hear Muzaka's grin.
Frankenstein smiled, holding onto Muzaka tighter. "Good." He braced himself when the bike sped up, but otherwise, the ride still felt the same.
The area closest to the road blurred but the horizon stayed the same, the sky settling into a light blue.
They continued riding, though Frankenstein paid attention when Muzaka looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see him through the visor, but knew Muzaka was looking at him.
"You all right? You've been pretty quiet."
Frankenstein smiled. "I'm just enjoying the view. I don't tend to spend a lot of time just taking it in."
"Heh." Muzaka started watching the road again. "See? You needed an actual break, not a working holiday."
Yes, it did seem like that.
* * *
They found themselves in a quiet town a while later and they stopped at a cafe whose outside area overlooked the snow capped mountains in the distance.
They didn't need Muzaka's language skills here, though Muzaka had still taken charge of ordering breakfast. There were a few other patrons at the other tables, catching up on the news in the holoscreens by their tables.
"Here," Muzaka said, setting a plate in front of Frankenstein. He recognised fried eggs and sausages, but there was one side Frankenstein hadn't seen before - it was a circle of dull red, some kind of salad mix pressed around for a second outside circle. "I think you'll like it."
"Just how far travelled are you?" Frankenstein asked, cutting into the new food. Muzaka seemed to know a bit about everything, no matter where what planet they arrived at.
The meat had more pepper-like spice than he'd expected, but it was offset by the cool salad. It wasn't a texture he'd had before, crumbling in his mouth than needing to be chewed. He hummed in appreciation, trying more.
"Heh, just been around a lot," Muzaka said, digging into his own meal.
"Always as an engineer?" Frankenstein asked.
"Nah." Muzaka shrugged. "Just went with whoever would take me. I learned what I could and moved on from there." He paused to eat a bit of bread. "But I think I've settled on engines for now." He smiled at Frankenstein. "Every ship needs one."
"As well as linguists," Frankenstein said, teasing. His smile grew at Muzaka's grimace. But that had answered his question about Muzaka's scars.
"And you? You always been a doctor?"
Frankenstein nodded. "I've been on a few ships, always travelling further from Earth. I've wanted to go into the uncharted areas of space since I was a boy." He may have missed the initial exploration expeditions, but with each passing year, Alaunus was getting closer and closer to areas that had yet to be seen before.
"What would you do if you ever met a race that had been undiscovered before?" Muzaka asked, hands around his cup of what looked like tea.
"You mean there's one you haven't encountered yet?" Frankenstein asked wryly.
Muzaka laughed, his tea threatening to spill out of his cup. "Yeah, I left you just the one to discover yerself," he said, grinning.
"Thank you for your kind generosity," Frankenstein said, smiling. He thought it over as he ate more of breakfast. "It would depend on the circumstances, I suppose. but I would want to learn more about them, of course." It was why he had studied so hard to get onto a space ship in the first place, after all.
Muzaka smiled, sipping his tea as their conversation turned to other things.
* * *
Frankenstein frowned at the results displayed on his screen. That wasn't... He pulled up the results of the other plant he'd allowed to die, to see how they broke down. It would be good to know if he could feed the plants to the garden or the farm, or if their nutrients would be incompatible but...
While Muzaka's sample group only had an accelerated growth rate for a while, and they kept a higher charge in comparison to his sample group, when they broke down, there were also elevated levels of hydrogen and helium? His own sample group didn't break down the same and Frankenstein continued studying the results.
He knew what they were telling him, but it didn't make sense. Why were the base elements of stars elevated in the plants that Muzaka had touched?
The radiation theory still held water, but engine radiation didn't act like that, no matter how old or badly shielded the engine had been.
Frankenstein pursed his lips. There was a puzzle in front of him, and he wanted to figure out the answer.
No. He had to.
* * *
Finding traces of hydrogen and helium on a planet wasn't strange. For carbon based lifeforms, hydrogen was essential to live.
It was the transfer of them that was the issue.
It wasn't the first time someone with that effect had been found. Of course not. With the number of individuals in the known universe, with how many worlds had been connected through space travel, it was impossible to be alone, no matter how much it sometimes felt like it.
Frankenstein skimmed the report he'd found. It was a couple centuries old, long before the current digitisation of information, so some of the details were corrupted, unreadable. But it recounted an encounter with a humanoid being whose touch enhanced plant growth, leaving traces of hydrogen and helium in her wake.
A different report, a century later, meeting two humanoid beings whose silver hair shimmered like stars, who elevated hydrogen and helium levels around them.
It was hard to sift through all the other reports that talked about stars and yet, Frankenstein continued returning back to that thought. It was important, the fact they imparted what stars were made of.
Frankenstein stared at his screen. They transferred the base elements of stars. Because that was what they were made of?
No. Muzaka wasn't comprised of just hydrogen and helium. That would have shown up on the scans.
That...always seemed to twitch whenever he used them on Muzaka. Frankenstein had assumed the machinery was getting old, but they hadn't done it again with anyone else, aside from that one blip.
A third report, of a humanoid who wasn't injured even after being blasted by a phaser point blank to the chest. The phaser blast had just shot through them, leaving them in tact, as if they were a hologram. And yet they could still touch the world around them.
Frankenstein wasn't even sure how he'd stumbled across the third report. He'd gone down a wormhole of searching for almost cryptids. Brief meetings of aliens who had never stuck around for long. Unexplained happenings.
Anything that reminded him of Muzaka.
Muzaka had a physical body. He knew that. The engineering staff knew that. It would take less than a week to discover if a hologram was trying to pretend to be someone of flesh and blood.
Stars were made of gas, something not solid.
It couldn't be a star condensing themselves into a body - the sheer amount of pressure needed to make something that huge into human-sized and solid, and they would freeze everything they touched, not make them grow.
Not to mention, stars weren't sentient. ...Were they? Humans and the aliens they came in contact with could only communicate in a way that could they could understand. Using vocal chords, body language and mind to mind connections.
Had they missed a way for stars to communicate, their scans on the wrong wave length or frequency to pick anything up?
Communication, like how Muzaka had communicated with the hurroffs. Frankenstein checked through the records - no humans had ever been in contact with them before. Hurroffs had been mentioned by other races before, but not often.
Just like the star people.
They had hardly ever encountered humans and didn't stick around to exchange more information between them. They didn't want to be found...? Kept themselves hidden?
Frankenstein stumbled, bracing his hand on the edge of the table as Alaunus rocked for a second. The lights flickered and then stabilised but Frankenstein was already leaving his office, listening for announcements or comms. He could feel Alaunus slowing down and that was one of two things, if not both: they were being attacked, or something big had happened with the engine.
Summary: It started with Frankenstein chasing up the engineering officer, Muzaka Starr, for a late checkup. But there's something about the man that interests Frankenstein the more he interacts with him.
Notes: Space AU square for
trope_bingo. :D Rating: G
Genre: General
Word count: 2,160
Total word count: 8,467
Status: Work in progress
Frankenstein looked around the hangar bay, seeing the usual maintenance workers on the smaller transport ships. He smiled seeing the familiar head of silver hair he was seeking out.
"And you said I worked too much," he said as a greeting once he was within earshot.
Muzaka looked up from the hoverbike he was working on with a grin. He was in civilian clothes, an oil stain on his cheek where he'd rubbed at it. "Hey, at least I get outta the engine room for my hobby. What's up?"
"I wanted to see how you were doing, if you'd recovered yet."
Muzaka shook his head, still grinning. "See? Still workin'."
"And is it wrong to worry over people?"
"Naw," Muzaka said, starting to work on the hoverbike again.
"Is this the one you mentioned before?" Frankenstein asked, watching him work.
"Yeah! Wanna see how she runs once I'm done?"
Frankenstein blinked, and then looked around at the hangar. While spacious enough to give a good runway, with the sheer amount of people crossing the way, they would risk hitting someone every second.
"During the next shore leave, heh," Muzaka said, reaching for the spanner to his right. It was just out of reach and Frankenstein picked it up, handing it to him. Their fingers brushed against each other and while Muzaka paused, he didn't instantly jerk away.
Muzaka weighed the spanner in his hand for a second, just studying Frankenstein, before nodding to himself and starting to work again. "So are you in?"
"Is this a ploy to get me to stop working?" Frankenstein said, amused.
Muzaka grinned at him. "Only if you want to."
If he wanted to, huh? "Then I may take you up on your offer." It had been a while since Frankenstein had ridden a hoverbike.
Muzaka's grin widened. "It's a date!"
Frankenstein watched the stars by his office window slow, feeling the thrum of the engine in the walls. His office was in the wrong side of the ship to see what the new planet looked like but - he looked up at his office door hissing open.
Muzaka walked in, a black helmet held in one hand, a second tucked under his arm.
Ah, of course.
Muzaka lifted a brow at him. "Did ya forget?" he asked, holding out one of the helmets.
"Only momentarily," Frankenstein said, collecting a helmet from him. "We're going somewhere more urban, I hope?" While hoverbikes didn't have wheels, they still hovered about the ground at a set distance so were more suited to flat ground, and it would be far easier if they wouldn't need to dodge around trees or other foliage.
"Of course!"
Collecting the bike didn't take long and soon enough, they were planetside, people bustling around them. The city they were in was far more suited for a hoverbike, with brightly lit buildings stretching out as far as the eye could see, as well as clusters of skyscrapers and floating islands in the air.
They'd touched down as dawn happened and Frankenstein watched the sun climb the sky, turning everything a hue of oranges and pinks, as Muzaka did his final checks.
"She's ready," Muzaka said from his seat, the bike already in the air as he slipped his helmet on. "You?"
"Yes," Frankenstein said, doing the same. He climbed on, wrapping his hands around Muzaka's waist. "Is this all right?"
Muzaka didn't say anything for a few seconds, and then nodded. "Yeah."
Muzaka kicked off, the bike humming to life. After twisting around some vehicles and winding through busy streets for a while, they found themselves on open roads, the city at their back.
Frankenstein watched the sun rise higher above the horizon, only hearing the thrum of the bike's engine. "She seems to be running smoothly," he said.
"Yep," Muzaka said, their helmets' communications connected with each other. "Wanna see what she can do?"
Frankenstein looked at Muzaka, even though the other man couldn't see him. "So long as you're not breaking any laws."
"The bike's standard issue and I'll keep below the speeding limit." He could hear Muzaka's grin.
Frankenstein smiled, holding onto Muzaka tighter. "Good." He braced himself when the bike sped up, but otherwise, the ride still felt the same.
The area closest to the road blurred but the horizon stayed the same, the sky settling into a light blue.
They continued riding, though Frankenstein paid attention when Muzaka looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see him through the visor, but knew Muzaka was looking at him.
"You all right? You've been pretty quiet."
Frankenstein smiled. "I'm just enjoying the view. I don't tend to spend a lot of time just taking it in."
"Heh." Muzaka started watching the road again. "See? You needed an actual break, not a working holiday."
Yes, it did seem like that.
They found themselves in a quiet town a while later and they stopped at a cafe whose outside area overlooked the snow capped mountains in the distance.
They didn't need Muzaka's language skills here, though Muzaka had still taken charge of ordering breakfast. There were a few other patrons at the other tables, catching up on the news in the holoscreens by their tables.
"Here," Muzaka said, setting a plate in front of Frankenstein. He recognised fried eggs and sausages, but there was one side Frankenstein hadn't seen before - it was a circle of dull red, some kind of salad mix pressed around for a second outside circle. "I think you'll like it."
"Just how far travelled are you?" Frankenstein asked, cutting into the new food. Muzaka seemed to know a bit about everything, no matter where what planet they arrived at.
The meat had more pepper-like spice than he'd expected, but it was offset by the cool salad. It wasn't a texture he'd had before, crumbling in his mouth than needing to be chewed. He hummed in appreciation, trying more.
"Heh, just been around a lot," Muzaka said, digging into his own meal.
"Always as an engineer?" Frankenstein asked.
"Nah." Muzaka shrugged. "Just went with whoever would take me. I learned what I could and moved on from there." He paused to eat a bit of bread. "But I think I've settled on engines for now." He smiled at Frankenstein. "Every ship needs one."
"As well as linguists," Frankenstein said, teasing. His smile grew at Muzaka's grimace. But that had answered his question about Muzaka's scars.
"And you? You always been a doctor?"
Frankenstein nodded. "I've been on a few ships, always travelling further from Earth. I've wanted to go into the uncharted areas of space since I was a boy." He may have missed the initial exploration expeditions, but with each passing year, Alaunus was getting closer and closer to areas that had yet to be seen before.
"What would you do if you ever met a race that had been undiscovered before?" Muzaka asked, hands around his cup of what looked like tea.
"You mean there's one you haven't encountered yet?" Frankenstein asked wryly.
Muzaka laughed, his tea threatening to spill out of his cup. "Yeah, I left you just the one to discover yerself," he said, grinning.
"Thank you for your kind generosity," Frankenstein said, smiling. He thought it over as he ate more of breakfast. "It would depend on the circumstances, I suppose. but I would want to learn more about them, of course." It was why he had studied so hard to get onto a space ship in the first place, after all.
Muzaka smiled, sipping his tea as their conversation turned to other things.
Frankenstein frowned at the results displayed on his screen. That wasn't... He pulled up the results of the other plant he'd allowed to die, to see how they broke down. It would be good to know if he could feed the plants to the garden or the farm, or if their nutrients would be incompatible but...
While Muzaka's sample group only had an accelerated growth rate for a while, and they kept a higher charge in comparison to his sample group, when they broke down, there were also elevated levels of hydrogen and helium? His own sample group didn't break down the same and Frankenstein continued studying the results.
He knew what they were telling him, but it didn't make sense. Why were the base elements of stars elevated in the plants that Muzaka had touched?
The radiation theory still held water, but engine radiation didn't act like that, no matter how old or badly shielded the engine had been.
Frankenstein pursed his lips. There was a puzzle in front of him, and he wanted to figure out the answer.
No. He had to.
Finding traces of hydrogen and helium on a planet wasn't strange. For carbon based lifeforms, hydrogen was essential to live.
It was the transfer of them that was the issue.
It wasn't the first time someone with that effect had been found. Of course not. With the number of individuals in the known universe, with how many worlds had been connected through space travel, it was impossible to be alone, no matter how much it sometimes felt like it.
Frankenstein skimmed the report he'd found. It was a couple centuries old, long before the current digitisation of information, so some of the details were corrupted, unreadable. But it recounted an encounter with a humanoid being whose touch enhanced plant growth, leaving traces of hydrogen and helium in her wake.
A different report, a century later, meeting two humanoid beings whose silver hair shimmered like stars, who elevated hydrogen and helium levels around them.
It was hard to sift through all the other reports that talked about stars and yet, Frankenstein continued returning back to that thought. It was important, the fact they imparted what stars were made of.
Frankenstein stared at his screen. They transferred the base elements of stars. Because that was what they were made of?
No. Muzaka wasn't comprised of just hydrogen and helium. That would have shown up on the scans.
That...always seemed to twitch whenever he used them on Muzaka. Frankenstein had assumed the machinery was getting old, but they hadn't done it again with anyone else, aside from that one blip.
A third report, of a humanoid who wasn't injured even after being blasted by a phaser point blank to the chest. The phaser blast had just shot through them, leaving them in tact, as if they were a hologram. And yet they could still touch the world around them.
Frankenstein wasn't even sure how he'd stumbled across the third report. He'd gone down a wormhole of searching for almost cryptids. Brief meetings of aliens who had never stuck around for long. Unexplained happenings.
Anything that reminded him of Muzaka.
Muzaka had a physical body. He knew that. The engineering staff knew that. It would take less than a week to discover if a hologram was trying to pretend to be someone of flesh and blood.
Stars were made of gas, something not solid.
It couldn't be a star condensing themselves into a body - the sheer amount of pressure needed to make something that huge into human-sized and solid, and they would freeze everything they touched, not make them grow.
Not to mention, stars weren't sentient. ...Were they? Humans and the aliens they came in contact with could only communicate in a way that could they could understand. Using vocal chords, body language and mind to mind connections.
Had they missed a way for stars to communicate, their scans on the wrong wave length or frequency to pick anything up?
Communication, like how Muzaka had communicated with the hurroffs. Frankenstein checked through the records - no humans had ever been in contact with them before. Hurroffs had been mentioned by other races before, but not often.
Just like the star people.
They had hardly ever encountered humans and didn't stick around to exchange more information between them. They didn't want to be found...? Kept themselves hidden?
Frankenstein stumbled, bracing his hand on the edge of the table as Alaunus rocked for a second. The lights flickered and then stabilised but Frankenstein was already leaving his office, listening for announcements or comms. He could feel Alaunus slowing down and that was one of two things, if not both: they were being attacked, or something big had happened with the engine.