Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who is Chunk Hugefist, Biff Hardface, and/or Dirk Fridgemeat
"Excuse me," says the port official, blinking at the sleep-tousled teenaged girl revealed by the opening airlock hatch. Eyeshadow the colour of charcoal is smeared across the side of her face. "I am looking for Shine Five Axial?"
"Well, keep looking," the girl says, folding her arms and puffing herself up. "I won this ship in a back-alley game of Six-Card Foolkiller on an orbital six systems back."
"Ah," the official says dubiously. "And you are—?"
"...Dirk Fridgemeat," the girl says, with the impenetrable hauteur that the high Apparat instill in even their infants.
"That doesn't sound quite like a real name," he says, and she widens her eyes as if shocked and offended.
"Racist," she says. "It's from the Buffer Worlds, you wouldn't know it. Good day to you."
He looks at the closed hatch. "Excuse me," he says tentatively. "Mechself indwelt-cargo lifter? Is that young woman really Dirk Fridgemeat?"
No, the mechself says, liberally mojigramming deep weariness in the subline before popping ironic quotation marks there, too: Dirk Fridgemeat is an alias used by Sleve McDichael to avoid his creditors.
"Ah," the official says. "Well. There are some messages at the port office for Shine Five Axial, you see."
Thank you, the mechself says.
As the official toils away again across the dusty landing field, the hatch pops open again for the girl to yell at his receding back: "The only thing we know about any Shine Five Axial is that she loses at cards!"
(He politely arranges to be taking tea, away from the front desk, when she comes to collect her mail.)