Milk Run: Sing-a-long
Posted on 29 Jan 2022 @ 3:40pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Commander Bruce Kensforth
Edited on on 29 Jan 2022 @ 3:42pm
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Kalara City, north quarter, cantina
Timeline: MD11 1220HRS
1141 words - 2.3 OF Standard Post Measure
“Look,” Calliope said some time later, remarking with some attempted gravity to cut through the lightheadedness brought on by a number of shots to which she’d lost count of. She leaned over the sandstone slab of bar and put a finger down as if she were trying to pin something there. She hiccuped and then giggled, “There’s somebody I was gonna ask after.” Biting her lip, she squinted one eye but the effort in her face did her no good— the name was elusive in her memory. Glossy eyed, she looked at Bruce as if he would remember. “Who was he?”
“Someone with a cure for the hangover you’re going to have tomorrow?” Bruce chuckled, doubting she really processed that statement at all.
“Elder… Elden, Elbro….” She tried, biting her thumb. “Shit. Oh wait!” She shouted suddenly.
“You alright?” Bruce replied, looking concerned.
“I wrote it down! It’s in one of these damn… pockets.” She started unburdening all of her pockets on the counter. A dozen compact tools and little tubes of sunscreen, a hypo, and other bric-a-brac piled up before she came to a scrappy note she’d taken. “See, I wrote it down!” She said triumphantly while looking at it upside down. Triumph quickly shifted to puzzlement. “Not sure those are letters.”
“You know it's a good thing we live on data PaDD’s and computer screens… because if that's your handwriting…” Bruce answered, turning his head slightly to try and read what she’d written.
“I’ll have you know I took a calligraphy class. My handwriting is gorgeous. It was a bum pen.”
He had to twist the paper halfway to the left to get it right. “El.. Eldnoth?” he recited.
“That’s him! That’s the guy I’m looking for!” Calliope declared spritely as if it were all coming together. “He’s a trail guide.”
A Kalaran at the other end of the bar scratched his chin whiskers and smiled in spite of himself. It was nice to have some life around midday, and he’d missed women coming around. “Eldnoth hasn’t been here in a couple odd years.”
“Oh.” Calliope looked crestfallen. “I really needed to connect with him.”
“He’s a Turani.” The whiskered patron said, as if that explained everything. He seemed a little reflective, the hard judgemental lines of his furrowed brow eased with memories of another time, not even that long ago. He looked towards the door as if he were expecting someone was going to catch him talking to a foreign woman. “Turani don’t come through here anymore.”
“Maybe they would if you had some tunes!” Calliope stood and ambled in a wide, unsteady curve toward the forlorn piano.
She swiped the dust off the key cover in one long, satisfying stroke and it landed on the floor like a piece of felt. The keys underneath were well protected and the label was actually an old earther make. “These things last forever.” She declared confidently out of her complete lack of real knowledge on the matter of piano manufacture or durability. Setting her glass on the top, she started on a ragtime she’d used to annoy her mother with by over playing. It was more muscle memory than anything else. The piano had most of the strings and the hammers got right to responding, each beat of the song unsettling dust from the top of the instrument. It sounded close enough to being in tune to Calliope. There was no piano bench so she just stood over the keys, swaying for balance as she rounded off the warm up tune with some playful scales, skipping around the keys for a spell. Then dragged her fingers over them in a falling punctuation of noise. Thoughtfully, she took her kerchief off her head to finish dusting the piano.
"A’ight, no, just… you know what?” She put her hands on her hips and looked over the sad lot of patrons scattered around. She felt sorry for their dreary situation. They needed some pep. Something simple they could call and respond to. “What you guys need here… is sea shanties. And I’m gonna teach you. Because you’ve never seen the sea, so how’d you know any shanties? So I’m gonna sing the first lines, and you lot do the refrains. It’s very simple.”
She noodled around to find a comfortable key.
“I’ll sing you a song of the fish in the sea—” Her voice held up nicely and even melodically as she loosened up. She pointed around the room “And the next part is you guys, You all do the —Way-hey Blow the man down!— Back to me again, I trust that you’ll join in the chorus with me— you again!—”
She waited for a painful pause, all on her own, until Bruce’s voice broke the silence.
“Way! Hey! Blow the man down!” he bellowed.
Calliope perked up as Bruce joined and someone else moved a stool in closer, the heel of the Kalaran’s foot reflexively tapping out a beat. Some of the men who had been casting lots outside came to the door to see what the strange noise was.
Calliope continued with added verve. “There was an old Skipper, I don’t know his name—”
She got back a response from a few of the patrons, some near and some from across the tavern. The reply was a little muddled by drink and translation but on the mark in spirit.
“Waaay tooo blow this man down!”
“But I know he played him a very smart game—”
“Waaay toooo blow this man down!” Even the stoic barkeep was swaying in the lilt.
“Oh give me some time to blow the man down!”
Someone surprised her by joining in with a deep pitched bone flute. “Waaay toooo blow this man down!”
“When he was becalmed in the Tropical seas—”
The call and refrain continued, with Calliope getting more playful and her active audience growing. The foot stamping mounted. Calliope was pleased at the chorus of men’s voices. Kalarans had a wide range of basses and baritones and tenors similar to humans.
Grinning, she wrinkled her nose at the flutist who had joined her as she leaned into the keys. “He whistled all day but it stirred up no breeze—”
“Way to blow this man down!”
She sang of various sea creatures they’d never heard of, seals and herrings and whales and the like. The reference to the poop seemed to create a juvenile wave of laughter, seeing as they’d never heard of a poop deck. Calliope laughed as she struggled through the following lines.
“If you’ll be the Captain then I’ll be the Mate!”
“Waaay toooo blow this man down!”