Private To Bear The Sins of our Past

[Grigory the Bear]

"сука блять," Grigory swore.

Sparks shot from the console of the airspeeder he was desperately trying to hotwire. The smell of burning fur filled the air, competing with his cursing for the most acrid airborne pollutant in the parking deck.

The speeder was an older model, built for capacity and comfort over speed. It was the capacity that Grigory required. His fat ass wouldn't fit in one of the sports models that littered the deck. The lack of speed might be a problem, but a people carrier was innocuous enough that it shouldn't attract notice. If, that was, he ever managed to get the damn thing started.

It wasn't often that the bear needed to make a quick getaway. Normally, he preferred to operate in the shadows, with the, if not tacit acceptance of authorities, at least their deliberate ignorance. This target, however, had been extremely well connected with the local constabulary. Police chiefs often are. The fact that he had been running drugs on the side, nothing really out of the ordinary. In the relatively lawless Outer Rim, corruption was just a part of the game. What the bear took issue with was the spot of humanoid trafficking that accompanied the drugs. That was a hard no from him, and for his sins, the police chief was about 8 hours away from playing a pivotal role in answering the age old question: do bears really crap in the woods?

 

[Tyria Koth]

"Lousy karkin' heat sinks," Tyria cursed as the temperature in the cabin spiked, causing her pixie cut hair to frizz out at odd angles from the extreme heat and humidity. Rivulets of moisture trickled down the control panels above her as she wrestled with the the Atrax, it's forward view-port a hellscape of flames and fire as the vessel attempted its descent down to the planetoid below.

As if in response to her insults, one of the primary cooling buffers that shared much of the cockpit with her ruptured, filling the cramped space with super-heated gas. Tyria's vacuum suit sensed the danger, as the gas rushed towards her, extending her helmet around her head and face and sealing her in, before the substance could flash-boil her. The suit chimed merrily, informing her that while the inside temperature of the suit was a comfortable 25 degrees Celsius, the outside temperature was nearing fatal levels, with radiation spiking from recent weapons use as well.

It then informed her that as she had not thought to fill up the suits O2 tanks recently, she had a whopping 8 minutes to find a new source of breathable atmosphere or choose between suffocating, or steaming to death. She swore again, peering through the foggy interior of the cabin to the instrument panel in front of her. She pushed on the controls of the Atrax, angling its nose down, increasing its velocity.

According to the charts, the planet below was sparsely populated, hopefully her landing wouldn't cause too much death and destruction. A moment later, the flames cleared and she was greeted with a large expanse of desert, with a small settlement hugging the foothills of a mountain range. Angling the Atrax' short, stubby wing flaps, she guided the ship so that when it crashed...it would at least crash parallel to the mountain range and not on the town.

The ground sped towards her.

---

The impact threw up a plume of dirt into the air which rained down on a nearby furry mammal of some sort who was busy working on a speeder. The Atrax then settled with its nose buried in the ground and smoke pouring out of its spluttering engines, and as the rear boarding ramp descended half way to the ground (before jamming), a gout of steam and radioactive gas mixed with coolant erupted from it.

Tyria, who had had well and truly enough of the inside of the Atrax by this time, threw herself down the ramp and landed on the ground in a disheveled pile, before rolling onto her back and retracting her helmet. She breathed a deep breath of fresh, cool air before chuckling to herself.

"Karkin' heat sinks," she swore again.

 

[Varick Lechner]

If his wolf form could properly arch and eyebrow, he very much would in that moment, surveying the scene presented to him.

On the one hand, there was a massive ursine creature currently cursing a storm in a language he didn't recognize, even as worked rather hurriedly over a speeder. On the second, there was the ship that had narrowly missed crashing into them and spat out a seemingly human woman who was quite literally smoking from its wreckage.

Perched on a nearby pile of crates, his large tawny furred form lounged in a seemingly casual manner, head tilting one way and then the next as he simply observed. This was supposed to have been a quiet trip; a simple get away to a sparsely populated world with a variety of fauna he'd never hunted before. The locals had pointed him up to the mountains, where he'd found the deer-like creatures they considered more nuisance than food source.

They had been remarkably agile and difficult to catch, but entire worth the effort as they were gloriously delicious. He'd sated himself well and had preserved enough to take back with him. But waiting for the scheduled transport was taking longer than expected with delays, but at the very least he had some form of entertain before him now.

Hopping down off of the crate, he shook his frame to settle his fur and padded across the landing pad, sauntering down the ramp past the ursine first. ///Try the blue wire./// he sent mentally, a quiet and unobtrusive thought broadcast at him before the wolf continued down to investigate the crashed craft and still-swearing fallen occupant.

 

[Grigory the Bear]

"Blue wire?"

Stupid colorblind beariness. They were all sort of a fuzzy grey.

"Blue wire, red wire, the hell is this nonsense?"

It took him a moment to realize that the sound hadn't come from his own mind. There was a big furry thing that smelled like dog, but bigger, more feral, and also with a hint of...cologne? Bah. Worry about speeder first, doggo second.

Eventually, the bear located a wire that was darker than the rest and sparked it off the hot wire, and the speeder coughed to life.

"Warning. Warning. Unauthorized access detected. Please insert keycard. Warning. Warning. Unauthorized access det-"

Nearly six inches of razor sharp claw through the dash shut the alarm down. The vehicle sputtered for a moment and threatened to go dark, before Grigory smacked it with a massive paw. Whatever failsafes had been in place were terrified into silence, and the vehicle purred into proper life.

"I do not mean to alarm, but if you want to live, come with me!" he bellowed towards the plus-sized pupper and the smoking human. "Many cops come, much angry. Is my fault, but they may not care. Come, come. Old Grigory will get you safe."

Varick Lechner | Tyria Koth