Barkeep
Scintilla Space Construct
The Unknown Regions
The Unknown Regions
When Salem Norongachi had first set foot on Eve, the capital city of Agents of Chaos, his first thought had been that ‘construct’ didn’t quite do the engineering feat justice. Not quite a planet, not quite a station. Its artificial skies too close, yet so high the mind boggled. Whatever the opposite of vertigo was the lizard part of his brain that recalled the safety of an earthen tunnel somewhere in Humanity's distant ancestry, experienced it and recoiled in acute discombobulation for several seconds.
That had been nearly eight months prior and many more immigrants like himself driven by the promise of a better life, idle curiosity or because they had no where else to go flooded into the city proper and the interconnecting hub of spheres. He’d watched entire areas of the city, preconstructed and waiting for inhabitants, flourish and swell as the administration built to meet and then exceed demand. Sentients found their niche in this strange new not-world and life, as they say, just got on with it.
But for every success story there are a dozen where lady luck grimaced. No matter what planet, species, society or governmental system there would always be the haves and have nots. People who underestimated the material wealth needed to start again or overestimated their own personal worth to the overall job market available (There's a call for jugglers and mimes, but it's usually in the low double digits and after awhile the novelty tends to wear off) and those people became the outliers. They moved to the ragged edges of society and made the best of what they had while trying to make the best (Usually with a polite poke of something sharp) of what everyone else had. Thus the slums, like slums the galaxy over, had come into existence.
If it wasn’t nailed, riveted, welded and under heavy guard, the people of the slums used it for construction. The buildings were a slapdash mishmash of metal sheets, synthetic plastics, and patchwork tents. Somewhere, in some other part of the city, a worksite foreman was having to explain why a full pallet of twenty feet wall panels had mysteriously vanished into the night and if the same foreman had taken a wander through -for lack of a better word- the main promenade of the slums he’d have seen suspiciously familiar walls, roofs, signs and tables made from shiny and, coincidentally, similar material that had cost him a weeks pay and his balls being raked over the metaphorical (Although it was a close thing at points) coals.
Norongachi liked the place, there was something refreshing about knowing that everyone around you would stab you in the back for the shoes off your feet, it certainly saved on the worry. He’d found himself a squat building in those early days and while the occupants were reluctant at first they changed their tune when he deposited enough credits to catapult them to the upper echelons of slum society (Which put them below janitorial droids but much higher than jugglers and mimes). It became the Kark Off. It wasn’t his first choice, but after a fashion the name stuck. Not that he’d bothered with a sign to advertise the name. Those that knew the Kark, knew the Kark and he’d been here for his entire duration on Scintilla, plying the grubby and honestly violent residents of the bulkhead side of the Slums with booze of varying purity and questionable ingredients.
The interior wasn’t spacious, scattered with battered tables that might once have spent life as a park bench, and a small bar at the back. There weren’t any shelves behind it glittering with bottles of rainbow coloured liquids just waiting for a bar fight to kick off and a chair to kill his profit margin. Anything that could be smashed by accident or design was secured under the bartop. It was a lesson learned.
Still, despite the possibility of grievous bodily harm being only a look, sneeze or a misplaced word away, he did a steady trade. If anyone needed to drown reality like a bag of mynocks, it was the residents of the Slums.
Sal opened his eyes on a familiar ceiling, ‘Best Speeders In-’ it proclaimed although he never had found out where. From it hung a bare bulb, unlit, and beneath that was a rug on a floor of mismatched wood and plastic. His bed sat atop it, and as he moved to sit up the entire room creaked ominously, like at any moment it would fling itself apart. A window lay just above and to the right of the head of the bed, weak artificial light streamed through its glass, illuminating dust motes that moved lazily as if they had everything figured out.
He stood, stretched and winced as the base of his spine sent an age warning to his brain. His clothes lay draped over the back of an old wooden chair (A real started out life with aspiration of being a chair, chair) and he picked them up, walked to what passed as a ‘fresher and returned several minutes later clothed. It wasn’t his usual attire, because the attire of several life times ago was either an expensive suit or an equally expensive set of head to toe combat armour, both of which would have bought the slums twice over. Besides, clothes make the man, or so he’d heard, and he had no intention of bleeding on the front lines or risking a corporate board meeting (Both sets of attire were interchangeable for this purpose, he had always felt.) any time soon. So he wore a simple shirt, sandy brown in colour, and equally non-descript trousers. There wasn’t much call for anything else as a barman, especially in a crap-hole like the Kark.
The door to his private room was solid, a heavy bolt and key number, probably lifted from some detention center somewhere, and he pulled it aside. The room itself was adjoined to the back of the main building, opening up on the left hand side of the bar after a short hallway. There were another two rooms off to the right but there wasn’t much call for lodgings in the Slums,(It wasn’t the type of place you vacationed for one, and if you had any family there they weren’t the sort you’d ever want to visit on public holidays) so they were used mostly for storage; replacement tables, empty kegs, that sort of thing.
His hand found the light switch and the empty bar and bare tables were illuminated by a dull artificial glow. It was the type of light that cast deep shadows in all the right corners where a privacy conscious patron might want to have a quiet chat with other equally private sentients about totally legitimate business opportunities. It took a few minutes of drumming a tuneless rhythm onto the bartop before he felt ready to face the day, and then flung open the doors to the street. He got behind the bar and like any self respecting barkeep surreptitiously set about cleaning a glass with a not-so-clean rag.
“Another day in paradise.” he spoke quietly.
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