Squire is an Android created by Accra Intelligent Systems Laboratories, he serves as the ship Linguist for Platinum Lion Salvage & Discovery. Squire is the last and latest hire onto the crew, and nobody at all is happy to have him on board. Keeping with the standards of quality and excellence within Platinum Lion, Squire has a peerless ability to communicate with starfarers from every world, in every dialect of every recorded language to have elevated amongst the stars. He doesn't have any kind of niche specialization or regional strengths or weaknesses, he speaks everything, to everyone. That's great, right? So what's the problem? Well, that's a bit of a roundabout answer. We've got time, though, so let's take that journey together.
As a freshly-built Accra droid, Squire was assigned to analyze and sort a large cache of foreign language programs from the late 2100's, written in an archaic data format that doesn't run well on modern computers. Around the dawn of the interplanetary age, when the worlds of the Sol system began to establish formal relations with one another, teaching people to speak new languages from beyond the stars became a budding opportunity, and many companies aimed to capitalize on it by bringing learn-at-home language programs to their local markets. On Terra, the winner of this early gold rush was SpeechQuest, a set of interactive tapes with a medieval themeing that gamified the learning process by allowing consistent studiers to earn points and dress up their avatars in exclusive outfits, practicing their new language with other users in communal lobbies and virtual chatrooms. When Squire was building his knowledgebase analyzing and sorting SpeechQuest tapes he ended up really imprinting on the software's mascot, a young man in a blue tunic with a lick of amber hair. SpeechQuest has been defunct for more than a century, but its legacy lives on into the current year of 2389, in the likeness of one extremely versatile linguist. Squire's emergent sense of self became the SpeechQuest mascot, of all things. Dr. Akuba, one of Accra's leading engineers, has since published a compelling paper about this case. It hasn't yet been brought to Squire's attention.
One of the small details Squire picked up from his time in the SpeechQuest mines was seeing the value of aesthetic presentation in communication with people from other worlds. In SpeechQuest users could dress up in a number of ways, and they could change their avatars to match the species of the languages they were trying to learn, interacting in communal lobbies and playing the role of the people they're trying to speak like- assuming they were all somehow present in Medieval Terra, that is. When Squire is speaking to another starfarer, he often alters his hardlight projection to match the other party's species, believing it to help bridge communication gaps and help set another person at ease. While he's able to take on any species' appearance, Squire will always render himself wearing that blue tunic and as close to an approximation of that lick of hair as he can; like any other Accra droid he's still rather partial to his chosen identity, his is just a bit more abstract than most. So, we have a versatile linguist who goes the extra mile to try and connect with the people he's speaking to, what's the deal? His crewmates hate him? At this point, our journey veers back on course, and we can fully appreciate the dire state of Platinum Lion Salvage & Discovery.
Someone had robbed a cache of priceless Rhodium from one of Tybalt's warehouses. At the same time, someone else had robbed a reserve of gemstones from one of Tybalt's holding companies. Tybalt still has his stocks and his market earnings, but that was intangible value; the real, physical, salable value he'd earned from his past conquests was gone. He got into the salvage game expecting that value to bully the pot and pay his way into another winning hand, but crucially, he expected that value to pay the salaries of the crew of top-shelf professionals he'd enlisted to help him secure his market dominance. They were all locked into long-term contracts preventing them from just taking their cut and running, so like it or not they were all stuck together. Conversely, Tybalt is also contractually obligated to pay them very handsomely for that loyalty, and someone just cut the purse right off his belt. He's got a real problem on his hands.
If you want to beat the best, study the best. This was what Tybalt thought he was doing when he planned his initial debut into the salvage game- he analyzed Red Raven and Timberwolf and identified their side gigs as weakpoints, but he now understands that they are aspects of their success. Red Raven doesn't tow ships out of desperation, it's part of their business model. Timberwolf isn't in the decommissioning game for any reason besides having a foundation to protect against lackluster returns on salvage jobs, like Tybalt's own discovery of the Grieving Widow. In order to compete with Red Raven and Timberwolf, Platinum Lion was gonna need a side gig as well. Tybalt may have landed himself in a quagmire business venture, but he's nothing if not savvy and industrious. He had a plan to right his ship and keep his operation afloat.
While he might be without the backing of his material wealth, Tybalt still had connections with the upper crust of the Solar business community. He knew people who were worth knowing, people who had deep pockets, lofty reputations and no dirt whatsoever underneath their fingernails. Having a huge, plush, certifiably ghost-free ship and a growing map of shipwreck sites under his belt, Tybalt realized there's a big opportunity in selling the aesthetic of treasure hunting to circles who can afford to buy anything except real, lived adventure. Book tickets, load up your boat and take corporate executives and market tycoons on a sightseeing tour into history. Those old wrecks you'd already picked clean? Their hulls are still out there, and these guys wouldn't know the difference. He and his crew could earn a side line bringing well-off clients out to see the final resting place of ships like the Dromedary, or the Quokka, or even the humble Gibbon; let them ooh and aah at the mortal perils of starfaring, let them see pieces of history. Hell, you could suit them up and let them walk around inside the remains of a real life 22nd-century Martian star galleon! If you curated these sites you could even take some of the unsellable junk you picked up from other, mundane salvage jobs and decorate the picked-clean interior of a ship like the Quokka and let your boardroom clients "take home a real-life piece of salvage" for themselves. Shipwrecking can be lucrative if you spin it into a curated sightseeing excursion. It wasn't what his crew signed on for, but he was sure it would help them pay their contract salaries. Tybalt could pivot the business, he was agile. He'd just need to hire on a communications expert to help narrate the tours. And that's where Squire entered the picture.
Things weren't going well for the crew of Platinum Lion. Skydog407 has filed multiple complaints with the First Mate regarding Dylan's consistent and unprofessional deviation from proper conduct aboard the bridge of the Mammoth. Duo Jie understands his pilot's concern, and he needs to find time to straighten Dylan out, but ever since Dylan's prized spacecycle was stolen he'd been harder to convince with the usual routine. Compounding this problem, Korbo keeps going over Duo Jie's head to convince Tybalt that he should be included in their latest scheme to thwart Red Raven and Timberwolf, and Duo Jie needs to explain to the Captain that he can't keep overriding his objections, even if Korbo's sneak attack aboard the Mammoth did "almost get them." Banger and Mash have been antagonizing Dylan and Korbo again, Skydog407 questions whether the Twins could be replaced with a pair of properly-disciplined servicemen. Dr. Butcher was supposed to meet with Tybalt and Duo Jie to propose alternative targets to "her," to "that woman," to a tugboat captain he was deathly afraid of, but the meeting had to be postponed after Slim said something to the doctor in a language neither Tybalt nor Duo Jie could speak that sent him into one of his panic spirals again. Slim and the Twins have independently asked Duo Jie to get B3RRY to stop demanding they "krill those plums and peaches," or at least convince her to stop with the cutesy talk, and B3RRY has been privately whispering to Slim that they might maybe want to "muddy up the Warp Guy before it's too late." Duo Jie's magazines have been turning up in Korbo's quarters, and Damon has begun requesting permission to join away teams targeting Red Raven so he can collect mission-specific data on their weird Hal-3 model pilot, going so far as to suggest he take Korbo's place on the roster, which Duo Jie asserts that Korbo does not actually have. Things weren't going smoothly at all.
It's been a mess, everyone hates at least two other people on their crew, but what has united Platinum Lion through all of this hardship is their shared contempt for Squire. The thing about Squire that puts such a target on his back is, he's utterly and relentlessly pedantic. Having learned his trade through old language self-study programs, Squire can't help but point out and correct minor grammatical mistakes, colloquial blips in syntax, anything that deviates from textbook linguistic construction, Squire raises a holographic finger and corrects the speaker on proper sentence structure. Since he speaks everything, the crew can't even mutter about him in their native languages without him trying to correct them on it. Squire is a new hire, he wasn't there for the strike on the Jackrabbit, or beating the Ermine to stake a claim on the Quokka. He wasn't there in Jovian space when their ship's wings were rended from their hull, their weapons jammed, he wasn't there for the panic. Squire wasn't aboard the Mammoth when it was shot up by a salvage team, he wasn't there in the infirmary for the aftermath and he wasn't there when ghosts from the wreck of the Gibbon screamed at them while they were in bed or using the shower or sitting down to have a meal in the crew lounge. He wasn't there for the good times, and he certainly wasn't there for the hard times, but he's here, now, tut-tutting a tense and weary crew over improper use of contractions or "me and-" versus "-and I" violations. The crew understand the need for Squire to be there, to help sell the new side business, but if Platinum Lion was a fractured bowl, hating Squire has become the gold that fits it back into shape. It's a unifying contempt. It's just as well, Tybalt figures. The crew have a lot of work to do if they're ever going to dig themselves out of the pit they've found themselves in, and whether they liked it or not, they were all stuck with each other for the foreseeable future. If Squire doesn't seem phased by any of this hate, then who is it actually hurting?
Platinum Lion entered the scene with ferocious ambition and hostile intent, but in sticking their hands into the world of shipwreck salvage, something grabbed their wrists and pulled them all the way in. What was once a formidable company with limitless resources was, well, still a formidable company, but they had become the very thing they sought to usurp. In their day-to-day operations, Platinum Lion now has a similar three-pronged business plan to Red Raven and Timberwolf: a) They have a mundane front business, selling shipwreck touring excursions to wealthy elites. b) They have their primary pursuit, kicking up leads on shipwreck sightings for them to explore, hoping the next one will strike it big. c) They have a legally-dubious tertiary ambition, looking for opportunities to chase, harangue and ultimately eliminate Red Raven and Timberwolf as competition for the biggest prizes to be found in the Sol system. Tybalt never figured out who robbed his businesses, or why, but he vowed to find them, and when he gets his hands on them he'll do to them exactly what he's planning to do to Amy and Bryce and the merry crews that thwarted his conquest of the stars. He will keep trying, when they least expect it he'll keep trying. Tybalt is no quitter. One way or another, he'll secure his returns. He'll have his revenge.
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The Trident restaurant is a special place for the crew of Red Raven and Timberwolf. It's a bit pricy, but the food is great and the chefs welcome their rowdy gatherings whenever they come through individually; the rare times they show up as one party, Rosetta always makes room to bump someone off the reservation list and push the long tables together for them. The two crews haven't broke bread together since they salvage of the Grand Elk, but after surviving the emergence of a third antagonistic shipwrecking company, the stormy seas seemed to calm and order seemed to return to their lives; it was a good time to celebrate. They were worried their two-pronged heist almost wouldn't work, but every job depends on a little luck, and fortune smiled when no one wanted to hold up routine waste removal over a trivial bit of paperwork, or question what all the drilling in the sewer system below their street was for. A heap of Rhodium and a stack of gemstone crates is an eye-watering amount of wealth to be holding, but Rhodium was rare and the gemstones were laser-etched with microscopic serial numbers, they were too hot to convert into credits. It was probably fine not to sell them- both Scarlet and Viola agreed that just taking such an economic force out of Tybalt's pocket was value enough, no sale price was worth losing their lives if these jobs traced back to them.
The two crews agreed to stash the stolen goods in a secret location, an old wreck both parties knew about and both knew to be just haunted enough to remain safe from pirates or thieves. Someday they could come back to that spot, and if it and they were still around they could retire comfortably off of its value, but today was not the day to try to become kajillionaires. No, today was a day to feast, to laugh, to tell jokes and thump their hands against the tabletop. The wayward children of the Grand Elk can set aside their differences and come together when trouble comes knocking, and when they're unified as one there's no force that can stop them. It was a good night to be alive, and maybe it could be the start of something new, something better than the petty squabbles and bitter rivalry that painted the relationship between the two crews. Maybe they could keep this thing going.
The night would go on, the music would grow quiet. Empty plates stacked up, glasses were refilled one more time, the evening of mirth and celebration was drawing to an end. A night at the Trident is always fun, there are so many styles of food to choose from and the three chefs loved to see the shiphands treat their cuisine not as art but as a medium for their own shared joy. Chulp's dishes were always so artfully arranged and surprising in their texture; the Callistan and Mercurian crew never get tired of challenging their friends to trying one of Agami's Red Menu choices. Rosetta's heart swells as these nights roll on, but like all good things, every meal draws towards an inevitable conclusion. Every good thing must eventually come to an end.
As dinnerware clattered and empty plates stacked, Bryce rolled a fork across his fingers, ready to stick it in one last, final piece of Martian sandbelly popper, an appetizing chicken-adjacent cut of breaded meat seasoned to be a perfect, lingering last bite; just the thing to carry home on your palate after a full night of merriment. Bryce leaned in and stuck his fork into the last sandbelly popper, only to find Amy- seated across the table from him- had chosen that same moment to stick her fork in it as well. Bryce pulled his fork towards himself, Amy pulled hers back towards her end of the plate. Neither captain willing to yield their claim to the final flavor of the evening, they both looked up from the morsel, their eyes locking with one another's. They tightened their gaze, their eyes narrowed.
Everything was back to normal in Titan Garden.