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I'm now staying somewhere else. But if necessary, I can still be reached by the communication system. [If Dylan wants to announce where they're living, he can. But Mr. Paranoid Bastard isn't about to publicly give a location.]

As an aside, does anyone here know how to play chess or any other strategy games that might be available? Are there any musicians from the ship?

[He very desperately needs to learn about the local culture. There must be more than "the Authorities are terrible people and want to render us impotent". Survival situations or not, these people have lived here for a very long time and must have something unique and exclusive to them. They're obviously not barbarians or savages.]

Also, do either of the pilots of the ships that have crashed need assistance?

[Nietzschean style proclamation of friendly interest. He wouldn't offer if he didn't like them.]

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[He does and he doesn't; they appeal to the wilds of him, rather than to human attraction. He starts to set up the array of pieces.]

What's it like? Space. We didn't really have a chance to talk about it, before.

It's what I've known for most of my life. But... on a ship with artificial gravity, it's not that different from being planetside. The air is cleaner. You're more boxed in....

Andromeda, she could have told you. The ship's AI knew as much about what was going on around her as within her.

[He misses Rommie a lot now, frequently. She would have been an excellent rallying cry- a warship, through and through. He can't avoid the fondness as he sets up his pawns.]

[He muses, all subtle, secret self-indulgence and a little wistfulness, wishing his own nature didn't have to be quite so confidential, back on earth.]

Must be nice, being able to talk to your home.

Sometimes. [Sometimes it's embarrassing, knowing she's always watching. Or that she might be aware of what he's planning, so he has to take great pains to keep her from discovering.]

The Andromeda is exceptional. She's a Glorious Heritage Class warship and extremely fond of her crew. [A crew that he knows he deprived her of in Dylan's future. He doesn't want to, not really.]

Every last person she gives home to is special to her. She can love and she can anger. She can feel loyalty, and take exception to command if she finds disagreeable.

[He still remembers how he's supposed to sabotage her. He doesn't know if he can.] Though you must find the idea of a ship with a personality ridiculous.

I don't. Not at all.

[It's starkly plain, utterly sincere. It sounds even more familiar than he expected, though he can't share that. And after himself, he thinks suddenly of his own little sailboat, his scrap of salt and freedom, his Liron.]

Men have been acting as though their ships could love them back since somebody first shoved a hollowed-out log into the sea. It doesn't surprise me that someday it might come true.

I imagine if more individuals had to face their possessions or their homes and know that they would be loved or hated for how they treated them, they wouldn't take them for granted.

[His own version of wistful. He did his best to take good care of that ship and make her ready. His very best. No one in retrospect probably even noticed.

He moves a pawn.] Speaking of which, I would like some sealant for these so they could stand up to the elements, but I've not fount anything in the city useful yet.

Most likely, yes.

[His fingers hover for a moment, then choose a knight. His opening is decisive, aggressive without being radically so.]

Most of the carpentry I've seen here is unfinished. Priorities, I suppose. But you could use drying oils fairly easily, if you found enough of the right plant. Someone's got to have a press they'd rent.

[He's curious about that move, but decides to use this as a game of feeling him out. He'll move another pawn for now.

I could ask Edmund. He seems to know everybody with everything. Though most of my tab is going toward carpentry. [He's trying to make the old house he's in livable.]

It's hard to guess which usable plants are most likely turn up. They're not quite as inexplicably varied as the fauna, but they are enough of them out of place to be perplexing.

I could sketch you a few of the most likely suspects, if you're willing to search through the brush.

[When his pawns are open enough to allow it, he slides a bishop out.]

[He just gets the most amused look at that. He had food waiting on him here, and he's willing to sketch things.] It seems you have no shortage of talents. You must have no shortage of perspective lovers vying for your attention.

[There will never be apologies for Rhade's bluntness, as much as they should be necessary sometimes, and he pushes one of his favored rooks forward.]

Though yes, it would be helpful. I have no problem with braving the wilderness and hopefully this unusual ecosystem has a greater chance of having it than just any random one.

[He breaks out laughing, bright and surprised. He does a king-side castle.]

Not really. I'm just more used to dealing with the challenges of pre-industrial societies than you spaceship types.

[This is both true and a complete lie; you do pick up a lot of skills in four-hundred-odd years of surviving on your own.]

You'll have to beg or bargain for the paper, I imagine, but I'd be happy to do it.

I mean more pertaining to the willingness to assist and be a host or render sketches of particular plants from memory. Though admittedly, even though my people were genetically engineered to be pioneers, I don't know that much about Earth plants.

Much of what's here- it's long gone before my time.

[His eyes flick as he goes over moves in his head, before just tending to his bishop.]

[He picks up his knight again, twirling it lightly between his fingers, pondering - his response, more than the game, despite fixing his stare on the board.]

Where I'm from...I don't. Have a lot of friends, for reasons that are mostly beyond my control. I'm self-sufficient enough here, and. It's nice, to be able to help people. Even when people are suspicious, it's just the situation, it's not me. And I can win people over, all I have to do is earn it.

That chance means a lot to me.

[He sets the knight down, finally, in danger of capture if it weren't guarded by Israel's bishop.]

I'm not accustomed to having a lot of friends outside of distant relations, but that's how my people are.

[He looks at the knight. It would be easy to take, but he has a habit of wanting the pawns to last the longest. To see how many of them he can make survive, while the other pieces take the vanguard. There's something gratifying when he can make a pawn take a king- they're capable of the same moves, it's only been decided one is more valuable than the other by its entourage.]

My captain is my friend.

[He thinks he still is. Despite everything, despite what Rhade was planning, he never stopped being his friend.]

He'd probably appreciate your idealism.

[He laughs lightly.]

I am not an idealist.

What do you consider yourself then? [Curiously.]

I'm someone who's learned the difference between doom and long odds.

Interesting way of phrasing it... and cryptic. [Says the man that's unusually blunt with his thoughts, and wraps the hidden ones so deeply sometimes they're extremely hard to read.

He uses the bishop to fortify his pawns, but also watching closely Daniel's preference as he still plays a game within a game.]

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