Session 141 - The First And Final Starfall Pub Crawl

Previously, Across the Horizon...
The return to Thalatte is bittersweet for Celeste Meracydia, but the meeting with her sponsor at the Nanab Foundation has soured her further.
The gift of Alba & Ater to the Foundation will not come without conditions, and one of those conditions -- where it came from -- has proved to be a hill too high for the captain of the Starfall to climb.
Surely a donation of such value will grease the wheels to allow Celeste into the Foundation as a full member, a goal she's held longer than any other in her wide-ranging life. Without that, though, the likelihood of her gaining admission is dangerously low, with the Board's complaints about the dangers she brought on them casting a harsh light on her future as an explorer.
We join our brave adventurers as they help Celeste determine what to do next...
**
"So yeah, in four days, it all goes to shit." Celeste takes a long swig of a lime green beverage that contains absolutely no limes and absolutely much alcohol. "Officially speaking."
"This is why I left academia," says Yves, like someone who definitely was not asked to leave college before degree completion. "All the rules and limits and that sort of nonsense. Are we sure we can't just give them that stack of pulp novels from, mm, you know, where we found them that one time, and let the literary people get excited about that? Excited enough to not ask awkward questions? It's not as if anyone was using those when I took them."
"Really, I don't see what's wrong with plan 'screw these assholes and find another university,' anyway," mutters Linnet into a glass of something brown and probably toxic. "And honestly, Yves, you're welcome to do what you like with the books. If they'll help, use whatever resources we can dig up." For a return to almost her native environment, Linnet is looking anything but academically curious and cheerful. There may have been some muttering re: icicles up various orifices.
"It's only going to help if they're willing to accept 'acquired them from a private collector who won't tell us where he got them' as provenance for those when they won't for other things," Yves says. "...wait, did we try that yet?"
Luca is inhaling something vaporous from a long glass tube, on Yves's advice. "So, what's the balance between building you up and tearing this other whatshername down?"
"I think we did and it got us shown the door." Linnet is watching Luca out of the corner of one eye, because "on Yves' advice" frequently ends poorly.
"It's not just a university, Linnet." Celeste sloshes a bit of her drink onto the table as part of slamming the glass down. "It's my future. It's my dream. The Nanab Foundation isn't just a place you can get a paper on a wall for the rest of your life. It's an entire world that I want to be in and access to so many things that I don't have now and I had it for a little bit but not really all of it but now I'm not going to have any of it and it's not--I'm babbling." She stares at her drink, for its opinion.
"Oh, Celeste, I understand, and I'm not trying to dismiss your ambition. I'm trying to think of more accepting places that would value your talents instead of constantly belittling them for stupid office politics reasons. ...I guess you could always go to Saine, but you like money and sane social systems."
Bast, after several minutes of listening without a drink to his name, finally speaks up. "So there's probably something I'm not getting here. Not a scholar and all. But - what is it that you want from them? And don't already have?"
"We could ask someone on the Seventh Dawn where they got it." Orrey offers. "But that might not end well."
Yves offers a different glass tube to Celeste, after a quick check of the label to make sure it's not harmful to her species. Or not inappropriately harmful, anyway. "Could we just, like, fake provenance? With this many actors and people lurking in the vents on one ship, I'm sure we could whip up some pretty convincing forgery about the origins of something or other that they want. Do they want paperwork? Is provenance paperwork a thing? I'm not sure how this works, it's not something we covered in that one history class I took for the gen ed credits."
"...given that we stole it from them in the first place, sweetheart, let's not," Linnet says.
To Luca, Celeste can only shrug. "I dunno. With how they think I've done, her performance would have to go worse than mine. Just completely shit the bed."
"Oh, well, if THAT's all you need..." Linnet doesn't finish the sentence, but drinks deeply.
Celeste looks at Bast for a long, wobbly moment. "Permission to speak freely?" she finally hiccups.
Luca blows a smoke ring. "Completely, huh?"
"Are we contemplating kidnapping her so she can't present?" Orrey asks, adding to the list of bad ideas he's got at his disposal.
"Is it ethical to sabotage someone else's presentation?" Yves is drinking a perfectly normal beer, himself. Completely normal. No additives. "...I'm asking that honestly, I don't know if that's standard in this style of academia or not, and I know better than to trust my own instincts on the ethics of this kind of thing."
Bast nods to Celeste. "Don't particularly need to ask. Go ahead."
"Stability. Professionals. People who do what they say they're gonna do and don't decide to help themselves to an entire vault's worth of artifacts. People who don't break artifacts or tip ancient architecture into the ocean. People who know what they're doing. Right now the only person on the ship who knows what she's doing around that stuff is me, and I'm a terrible teacher. I want to be able to chase my dream with people I know I can trust around my dream, not just people who I can trust not to get us all killed." Celeste slams back the rest of her drink and settles into a nice long pout.
Orrey looks chagrinned at the mention of architectural ocean dropping.
"Isa'd know what to do," Celeste mumbles to herself as she really wraps herself up in the blanket of pout.
"Is... is that a no to the forgery idea?" Yves asks tentatively.
Bast nods again. "Fair. Not like any of us studied for this, we're figuring half of this out as we go. But you didn't say what it is you're chasing, there. Knowledge? Fame? The Forgotten in particular, or just all the history there is to know?"
Celeste stares deeper and deeper into the top of her glass as she listens to Bast's questions. "I need some air," she says suddenly. Her chair tips into Luca's as she hurries out of the bar.
Luca catches the chair out of reflex, and looks around at the others. "She's, uh, taking the Cardians ditching kind of hard, isn't she."
Yves reclaims the ignored vial he offered her, and says woefully, "Okay, I shouldn't have suggested forgery, right? It's the academia thing. Bad idea. I shouldn't have said that. Probably unethical to fill her rival's presentation with hecklers and/or scorpions, too. I actually don't know how academia works, I was in the industry side of things, we mostly went to conferences for the open bar after the panels!"
"Celeste being attacked during her presentation was also not fair." Orrey points out. "Do you think someone put those folk up to it? How would they even know what she was presenting beforehand?"
Yves covers a page of the notebook where he's been doodling a scorpion-launching system with a lectern target. "They seemed pretty sincere at the time."
"Seemed more like a fanatic with a couple of helpers, from what I recall. Not usually the type you get for hire. Someone tipping him off, I could maybe see, but that someone would have to be excessively well-informed." Bast stares at the grain of the wood for a space, then looks up again. "So. That sound like our navigator wants out to anyone else here?"
"Like someone high up in the Nanab Foundation who wants their candidate to succeed over Celeste?" Orrey continues to stir the conspiracy theory pot.
"Like, off the crew?" Yves stares into his beer, then at his scorpion-launching plans, then finally back at Bast. "Maybe? Or more like... if she had to choose between us and them, she'd go for one. Which is fair, I guess, because they did come first, and now Isa's gone too, and... okay, so, hear me out, what if we forge something for where that game came from, and just don't tell Celeste that's what we did? Think that'd work?"
"I mean, if that's what she wants, we should get her a tenured position in Saine and drop her off for good." Linnet stares dolefully into a refill.
Luca gives Bast an apologetic look. "She did kind of have an opinion about the way the whole 'explore the fallen empire' process has been going."
"Most of that wasn't our fault," Orrey says.
"And you know what, if she's willing to get almost killed in a dramatic variety of ways, she is welcome to run the expedition the way she sees fit. In the meantime, we're the schlubs on the front line of the actual work, so I apologize if we have been less than rigorous. ...I can't tell right now whether I'm angrier for her or at her. I think it'll simmer down to "for" in a couple of minutes."
"It's hard to not get the thing you thought you were pointing at all along. Especially if you're not entirely sure if the problem is everyone else, or you." Yves is back to staring at his beer.
"Are we going to help her get into the Foundation, somehow?" Orrey asks.
Luca exhales a thoughtful plume. "Well, she's not out yet, right? Still crew?"
"One of us, yes."
Luca nods. "Well there you go."
"Right," Yves says. "And it's not like we can get Isa back and plan-making or title-deploying or whatever it is that she would supposedly do to fix things in the time we have left before that other presentation, so--it's really up to us to fix this. Or something."
"Trick is," Luca muses, "we have to fix it in a way she'll be happy with. So probably not so much with the sabotage or forgery. Although I liked the idea."
Yves adds, in an off-hand way, "You can still see colors, right?" That question's for Luca. "Just, like, let me know if that changes. Quickly. That is, let me know quickly if that changes, even if the actual change happens slowly. Probably won't happen! Nothing to worry about! Right, let's figure out ethical Celeste superiority convincing plans that will work on a bunch of risk-averse academics. Definitely that's what we should focus on right now."
"We could debunk the research of the presenter. That seems academically appropriate. Do we have any way to determine what she's presenting about?" Orrey asks.
"Fliers on a bulletin board would probably be traditional," Yves says uncertainly, "unless there's a newsletter instead."
Luca thinks. "Does she have an advisor, or a mentor, or whatever they call it, who we could lean on a little?"
"Didn't Celeste's mentor give us a name?" Orrey asks.
Yves flips back through his notebook to where he was, apparently, taking notes on that meeting. "...yes, but I didn't write it down. Celeste would know, though. Everyone needs a mentor, sponsor, advisor, whatever they call it in this institution, for getting in."
"Great! So if we can't or shouldn't get at whatshername directly, we can come in from above."
"Osvald Temenos," Orrey says.
Celeste walks back through the door and makes her way back to her seat. She looks more like herself. "Sorry about that," she says.
"What would make the most sense," says Yves, arbiter of things being sensible, "is them letting more than one person in at a time. Celeste and this rival could both get in, and everyone could be fine! But that would probably require changing bylaws or something, and at that point it's probably easier to fix things with musical theater. Oh, hey, Celeste. Want another drink?" "I should switch to water now," Celeste says.
"Celeste, you're a member of our crew, and one of the ones we like the most, so we'll support you in whatever you want to do going forward. How can we help?" Orrey asks.
Celeste rests her chin on her hands and thinks. "I've wanted to be part of the Nanab Foundation since I was a little girl. I think I have the start of the something no one else has, the Forgotten City. There's some truth in what that memo about me said -- I did cause a lot of damage at the Foundation. But I made that map myself, I figured out the path myself, and I'm not at fault for zealots showing up to try to kill me without even talking to me first. They tried to shoot me in my office! How is that my fault?!" She takes a breath to calm herself down. "I'd be dead if you all hadn't been there. If you can help, I accept."
(Linnet has pulled out paper and is drafting a letter to her mother.)
"Is your rival's presentation better than yours?" Orrey asks rhetorically.
Celeste snorts.
"Then you deserve this spot."
"Yeah, that's the part that makes me wonder if getting in with them will get you what you want. They already have it out for you for getting almost assassinated under their roof. Twice. Which, by the way, says a lot of things about ther protection. So - say you get in, does the Board still get a say in whether it's you or Anders McChocobutt that gets funding for an expedition?" This gives Celeste pause. "I don't know how the funding is distributed," she says. "I've heard it's determined by your peers, not the Board, but I don't know that for certain. They haven't covered the economics of it."
Bast pauses to consider that, then continues almost gently: "...and how'd your presentation go over with them?"
"It's painfully clear that your presentation won't be enough. They're sabotaging you, Celeste, and some of it is with good reason, because you fucked up. I know what that feels like; I got kicked out of the only place I thought I knew when I fucked up, too." Linnet's not looking at Celeste for this speech. "So why in the hell are you still pandering to them? Leave. Broaden your horizons. See the world. Hell, jump ship if you want to; the Seventh Dawn doesn't seem like our crew of bumbling idiots. But don't just sit there whining about how you're not getting your dream job because we're fucking up your expedition. Either stoop to their level and play dirty, rise above their level and find somewhere else, or blow the whole place to kingdom come. But if the deck is rigged that badly, you rig it back or you don't play." Linnet slams her empty glass on the bar - not hard enough to actually do anything, she still has noodles for arms - and slides off her barstool. "I will issue a proper apology for that statement when I have finished panicking over having said that out loud." She exits in a hurry.
"Oh festering mildew," Yves mutters, and leaves the last third of his beer behind to follow the sylph out. "Linnet, wait, it's fine, do you want a calming vial? I have calming vials, they're sort of too strong but that just means they're really soothing..."
(Linnet is busy hyperventilating into face-covering hands and does not appear to hear Yves.)
Luca takes a minute for some reflective vaping, and finally says "it was a pretty good summary of your options, though."
(Yves ends up patting Linnet on the shoulder awkwardly and offering her a cinnamon roll from his bag. It's two days old and one she made, but it probably doesn't contain any experimental drugs!)
(In between weeping, Linnet waves off the cinnamon roll but manages to tell Yves, "I'm sorry we're not an entire crew of Isa's, dammit, I'm sorry none of us are Isa, and I'm sorry I don't see a way to get her back. If I knew, I'd go after that ice queen in a heartbeat. But I don't, and we're much the poorer for her loss and stuck bumbling through, and I know it's not enough and I'm sorry it's not enough and winds damn it I am making a mess." She fumbles in her sleeves for a couple of handkerchiefs.)
Bast looks after them, then back to Celeste. "Well. I don't think you fucked up, if that matters. But she's not wrong on the whole. If the heads of the Foundation are that far up its ass, you'll have the wind in your face the whole way even if we somehow contrive to get you in. Me, I'd say fuck 'em, go discover the city you've mapped a route to with us and without them, let them read about it in the papers like everyone else. But you're not me, and you don't like the way I work. So what do you want?"
("Well, you've never offered anyone the remains of their dead relative while standing awkwardly in their hallway and had to sneak back in later in disguise, and no one is currently sitting on a throne made of corpses around here telling us horrible facts about the gods, so, you know, it's probably all going to be okay, compared to some of the possibilities out there," Yves tells Linnet in his best approximation of a comforting voice.)
Celeste has been sitting very still in her seat since Linnet started her speech. When she speaks, it is with the cool precision of someone who has taken two courses on public speaking, even if her words are stumbling together around the trickier consonants. "I want to go back to the ship, and that is what I am going to do," she says. "I signed on with your ship, Captain, because I trusted Isa when Isa said I could trust you, and I don't regret that decision. Isa asked me to leave with her and I said no. I want to join the Foundation because it is the best place in Ducorde to explore and puts me in contact with the best archeologists in the world. I want to navigate on the Starfall because it's the ship where my friends live and I'm happy being there."
Linnet re-enters the room red-eyed but composed, takes a deep breath, and stands before Celeste. "Ms. Meracydia, I am a mouthy idiot and let my judgment slip. I apologize for every part of my ill-informed rambling speech except for the conclusion. I really do think you're too good for the Foundation, but if that is your dream, I will support you as best I know how. We may need to play academic politics, but I will aid to the best of my ability and shut up when off point."
"And I'm still ready to launch scorpions at the next presentation if that would help," says Yves, who has followed Linnet back in. "I think we had decided against the scorpions, though? But, uh, just, if you decide it's the right approach, I have a preliminary design for the launcher put together, and could probably get the parts easily, prototype it before morning, that sort of thing. Not real sure where to source the scorpions, though. Uh. I'm going to stop talking now."
"That said, with your permission, I would still like to ask for a recommendation to the archaeological society in Saine on your behalf. Not as a primary concern, as a back-pocket offer." Linnet bows with pressed hands, hops up onto her stool, scrubs her eyes one more time, and resumes writing her letter.
Celeste looks at Linnet. "I don't want your apology."
With that, she leaves.
"Completely fair. Lin, you're an ass." She continues writing. To the office of Dr. Merula Leveche, Chair of Indefinite and Indefinable Studies (hi Mom!)...
Luca watches her go, trying to figure out if this is one of those "back in a few minutes when I've calmed down" departures, or the other kind.
Orrey sighs and takes a long pull off of the beer he's been nursing.
"Well, I buggered that up royally. Someone else who's a little less angry is invited to make a plan, because right now I'm inclined to agree with Yves re: scorpions. Though I don't have a source for them. Yet."
"If we can't get scorpions, we have a source for bats."
"...still don't get why she can't just write a letter to the damned archaeologists she wants to talk to..." Bast mutters, then turns to Linnet. "So. Do you have some idea of how this works? She doesn't just get the spot if what's-her-name doesn't show up to present, right?"
"She needs a very different environment and a very different crew." Linnet refocuses and turns to Bast. "I haven't a fucking clue, so I say let's give it a try. Every time I think I have academia figured out, someone else comes up with some new insane rule or byzantine process or head-bangingly stupid justification and I'm back where I started. In the stacks with no reading list."
"And people still think it's worth it?" Luca seems honestly curious about this point.
"And they never appreciate out-of-the-box thinking," says Yves. "...I mean, they do have all the best journals, and if you don't want to have to justify your research with how it'll make money for someone, it's pretty much the only place. Unless you've already got your own money and can be a Gentleman Scholar, but you kinda gotta be born into a gig like that."
"The little time I spent learning was fun, but nothing like being on the Starfall. Experience beats out research."
Bast favors Linnet with a very dry look. "We have what, four days to figure this out? I think we can do better than 'no clue, might as well'."
"Luca, honestly, it's the only place where some sheltered brains can survive. But I grew up there and I can't see the appeal compared to the real world." She glares at Bast, eyes still red. "Look, I didn't say I can't get a clue, but if you want "how does this institution work from an insider's perspective" right now, I'm not your gal. Your gal just stormed out in a huff after being called on her inaction. Rightly so." "I think we should scout out the competition." Orrey says. "And investigate to see if someone is actively working against Celeste."
"Anyone up to checking if there's anything in their rules we can use here?"
"Orrey, I think you should befriend them. You have an excellent guileless charm about you. Yves, I think you should see what secretive underground circles you can move in with the right chemistry background. And I'll look into the rules. Bast, you...uh...stand there and look official. I don't know. Break into a vault or something? Take Luca with you so you have an extra pair of hands."
"I wasn't here when you all got into a fight in the lecture hall...I can sidle up to Temenos, maybe?" Luca gets a bit of a mischievous grin. "I am...an unknown quantity."
"Leave the blade, then, or at least conceal it a bit better, but that's a good start."
Bast grins. "Full of interest in whatever that presenation is going to be on? Yeah, that might work."
Luca points at Bast. "Wide-eyed and eager to learn!"
"I'll, um. Pose as a local researching on behalf of a relative, or something like that. Breeze blows, I shouldn't be anywhere in extended contact with people for a bit." Linnet's letter hasn't gotten much past the "hi, Mom" bit. She glares at it and stuffs it into her bag.
Bast pushes away from the bar with a creaky sigh. "And I'll go talk to some pipes."
Yves looks thoughtful. "Oh yeah I can probably find a lot of grad students who need help de-stressing because it's not like they're going to get a chance in their day jobs, or their night jobs that they took to help pay for their day jobs. I'll see what I can find out."
"I could check to see if there's connections between Nanab and local shrines."
"Are we sure we don't know where to get any scorpions? Is there a pet store nearby or something?" Linnet raises an eyebrow at Bast's glare. "What? Yves has had some good plans! I'm just being supportive!"
"I feel supported," Yves says earnestly.
"Wait. Pipes? Are we putting stuff in the pipes, or...oh. Right. Carry on. Bring some sandwiches."