In Hyperspace, No One Can Hear You Scream

[Mana Corrick]

The droid emerged to the sound of one voice grumbling and another panicking. Prioritizing the former, BD trotted over to Mana, staring up at her as she read over the system readouts with her inefficient, human eyes. Not that such things were her fault; she couldn't be amazing at EVERYTHING after all. Bumping his head into her leg insistently, the droid emitted a muted facsimile of the klaxon from earlier as his holoprojector flickered to life, throwing up a clean schematic between them. One section pulsed red—tight, specific, not the whole system. Just the fault. He adjusted the display once, highlighting a secondary stress point branching off it.

Then he looked up at her, letting out a brief, pointed chirp and dropping a hydrospanner at her feet.

Mana furrows her eyebrows, looking down at her leg, wondering if a sensor component had shaken itself loose. But its just BD. She sits on her haunches, watching intently as the little droid flashes schematics at her. She clicks her tongue and makes a noise of dismay. She had just fixed that part, too.

Scooping up the hydrospanner, she gives BD-86 a pat on the head assembly before heading for the vents again. Of course, she doesn't bother to tell Sindren what's going on. That'd take too long, and they've all got places to be. Apparently.

But the noises echoing through the ship don't tell of an easy repair. There's banging. Yelling. The SHRIPPING of meshtape echoing through the vents.

Anyone who came across Mana in the tight space would be amazed by her ability to contort herself into tight spaces, as she's on top of the rounded, cylindrical device, holding panels in place with her knees as she jams things back into their proper spot and rips strips of adhesive with her teeth. Its not pretty. But it'll hold.

Just like Mana, in a way.

Before Sindren knows what hit him, the lights in the cockpit flicker back on, and the familiar hum of the sublights rumbles beneath his feet.

[BD-86]

BD watched Mana go, chirping contentedly at having contributed.

"Rancor's tits! What WAS that? Are we going to die? What's wrong with the ship?"

The droid turned toward the panicking woman, plodding awkwardly up to her. Elevated heart rate. Elevated surface temperature. This sort of thing seemed unfortunately common with this particular human while onboard the ship, though it intensified multiple times over in the event of minor disasters such as the one they were dealing with now.

Puzzling over the situation for a moment, BD cycled through his databanks for something that could prove useful in this situation. Something... calming? As he reached the archives of music he'd surreptitiously duplicated from Sindren's personal files, some "classics" showed up. BD's head assembly rotated in place to focus on Tessia again, his manipulator reaching out and softly connecting with her leg. This was what humans did when they were trying to calm each other down, right? Usually the fleshy hand bit was supposed to go on the shoulder coupling, but Bd-86 was only about 45 cm tall, which made this a difficult ask.

His holoprojector kicked to life again, a series of binary blips and beeps sounding out as a message appeared on the wall:

<DEPLOYING SMOOTH JIZZ>

A moment later, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes began to play from the front of the droid. They weren't the MOST popular, but what snippets of discussion BD had picked up in a cursory search across the HoloNet seemed to categorize them as "pleasant", "classic", and "Those bastards killed Evar Orbus, Kark em'".