Twilight frowned as she thought about it carefully, but her gut instinct said it was the right call to make, and it would give her the upper hoof against her opponent. She took the small polished orb of glass in her magic and tacked it over several darker orbs all the way into its destination.
"Shiny! You're real good at this, Twilight," Kaylee beamed at her, edging forwards in her seat to take her turn. "But I'll show ya I'm real better, missy."
Chinese Chequers was an interesting game, to be sure. It involved a small amount of strategy in the overall plan to have all of one's pieces on the opposite side's starting end of a star-shaped board. So far of her ten pieces she had six on Kaylee's side, while Kaylee only had three on Twilight's. The rest of their pieces were held up in the middle of the board in a no-mares land where they were blocking one another from progressing, and with fewer pieces Twilight was seeing how she could proceed.
Their game was only briefly interrupted as Jayne came storming into the galley past where they were both sat all tucked away in the comfy corner of the room, and hulked over to the cupboards in the kitchenette, yet again on the prowl. Twilight recalled seeing him go after they all split up several hours previously, only coming in a short while ago for a brief moment to avoid her, but now he was back again. He was still drenched in sweat, and still red from what she could guess was great amounts of exercise. River had also come in earlier, having watched their first few games as Twilight learned the basics, though currently she was called away by Simon as she needed to have a check up and take some medication.
"Jayne, it's only a half-hour past lunch," Kaylee admonished him as he raided the stores for something to eat. "Ya already ate, did'n'cha?"
"Not enough." Jayne mumbled, scoring a few nutrient bars and some packs of what Twilight suspected was dried meat, going by the illustrations. He looked up as the intercom sounded and took that as his cue to leave again, but not before giving Twilight a wary scowl.
"Zoë and the Captain are just about back," Wash's voice crackled through the ship-wide intercoms. "They're not in any trouble, so time to load up and get out there, people."
Twilight glanced over as Kaylee beamed in delight. "Oh, Shiny! We've been sittin' on some goods for a while now."
"What's going on?" Twilight enquired, as Kaylee got to her feet.
"Supply run," Kaylee replied with a smile back to the table. "That aint goin' nowhere, Twilight, come on, you can keep an eye on how we do things."
Twilight nodded, moving to her hooves and following Kaylee out of the galley. They went toward the stern of the ship rather than its bow as Kaylee was certainly more accustomed to the route, passing into the aft hall leading to the engine room but taking a left turn into an L-shaped passage leading down. This path led to stairs that came out next to the infirmary, which just off from it were the passenger dorms where Twilight slept, and going opposite the dorms snaking around the lounge that Simon seemed to enjoy resting in and up a short set of stairs was a back entrance to the cargo bay.
The ship's layout was compact and functional the more Twilight got a feel for it, but she could see how it came to be so loved by the crew. There were a number of places where Kaylee had spruced up the decor with little designs or homey touches by adding or painting over something, making even a semi-claustrophobic space seem relaxing. It had been done just about everywhere she could feasibly reach and it was lovely, she adored Serenity just as much as Twilight adored her library.
Entering behind Kaylee into the cargo bay, she got a better feel for Kaylee's excitement; the cargo bay was positively packed with boxes and crates of varying sizes at its sides, a few piles of smaller containers locked down with straps and nets to keep them from jostling around. She had a momentary thought of poking her nose inside them or asking to see their contents, but given the nature of the crew and her discovery of their illicit activities as vagabond bandits she decided that while they certainly weren't transporting anything illegal, at least by technicality, that the less she was involved in such things the better.
Well unless Kaylee just went right ahead and popped open a crate anyway.
"Looksee here, Twilight," Kaylee smiled gently, patting the rim of the crate as Twilight stepped over and let her eyes travel over the contents. "This here's about a double dozen's worth of calorie-dense bars for colder climates. Foodstuffs packed with all sorts'a nutrients and fats from different plants and meats that folks can't generally grow out on the harsher border planets like St. Albans."
"I'm going to hazard a guess that the Alliance doesn't make routine stops there?" Twilight commented rhetorically, already knowing the answer.
"They don't care 'bout the poor folk that don't care for their rule." Kaylee nodded with a sad smile. "St. Albans might not have been officially Independent-aligned, as an example, but a number of folk did join the Browncoats from there, an' as a border world the Alliance don't send much their way anymore to punish 'em for it."
"That's unfair," Twilight frowned. "The war is over."
"Alliance don't want 'em building up though, they're afraid that if enough people out on the rim start doin' too well that they're gonna form into a new uprisin'." Kaylee sighed. "Folk just wanna get on with their lives, not try to restart another war. ...The people with the largest fightin' spirit came from Shadow and that's-"
"A blackrock."
Kaylee turned sharply with a short squeak at the voice, then facing Mal, who quietly observed the exchange with interest. Twilight hadn't noticed his approach. Either he was stealthier than she gave him credit for, or she'd been distracted by Kaylee and the cargo.
"Cap'n! I didn't mean-"
"Ya don't gotta be light footed about Shadow, that's ancient history by this point, xiao mei mei," Mal assured with a shrug. "There aint no reason you shouldn't tell her, I aint the keeper of knowledge."
"I just don't like talkin' 'bout it is all," Kaylee replied. "It aint right what happened."
"No, but then again neither is a lot of what happened in the war." Mal said, his face hard. He lifted the stern expression a moment later and fixed Twilight with a genial smile. "That aside, little pony, I see you're exploring about."
"Kaylee was showing me some of the goods you're going to trade." Twilight nodded.
"Yeeep, we do have a lot of 'em. Ever since we took up the occasional legitimate delivery it happened to turn into a few more here an' there between other less legitimate jobs." Mal explained, looking around at the lack of space to move around. "'Course I never took into consideration that some folk might back out of a deal or that a trade agreement can be rockier than a mountain."
"So now we gotta find buyers for a lot of stuff, or just give it away because its takin' up too much space an' we can't use it ourselves." Kaylee nodded.
Zoë came into view and walked by having heard the conversation, leaning in as she went onward to add, "An' selling things legitimately needs a permit on most planets with feds on 'em."
"That it does," Mal agreed as he waved her on, looking back at the two. "That's a hassle usually, but as luck would have it we do have ourselves a permit for Beaumonde, least for the lower part of town. Less money to be had there, but we can offload some of this gear. Fanty and Mingo directed me to some place that'll take a heap of what we got on the cheap, so at least that's some coin in our pockets. There's also a fellow called Axel that'll take all that packed grain we got off those idiots on Lazarus that dropped out on us, he's got aim to use it all so we can finally be shot of it.
"Axel's also the man to see about a rumour," Mal continued, walking over to a crate and poking his nose in when he lifted the lid. "Huh, forgot we had these... Yeah, rumour," he nodded. "So, it turns out he met with a man that encountered somethin' mighty strange yesterday. The man didn't go into detail, just that his ship had a blackout an' that when it powered back up, he heard a voice talkin' to him before it just up an' disappeared."
Mal settled his eyes on Twilight. "When we took you on yesterday, our ship had a blackout too. Now, ships have blackouts all the time, s'only natural when you run an engine too hot or you pass through a patch of black that doesn't like ya, but the man happened to mention that the voice didn't sound human. He said it sounded alien, not natural."
"I'm afraid I can't help you there," Twilight said, meeting his gaze. "One of the first things I did when I knew it was safe to use magic on your ship was cast a detection spell. Generally range isn't a major factor as all magic is connected through... well, it's like a spider web, really. Every single thread is linked to another, and if you pull on one end the thread at the other end moves too. Magic is all around us even in this universe, it just seems humans can't exactly access it."
"All around us?" Mal echoed.
"Yes. I wish you could feel what I do so you could understand. If I detected anypony using magic I'd feel it immediately, and if anything like my arrival also occurred there would be a notable fluctuation in that web that I could pinpoint. Not down to the exact location, it would be more like the general direction, though I would know it had happened."
"And you didn't feel anything like that?"
"No, Captain. I'm sorry, I'd be thrilled if I did." Twilight shook her head.
Kaylee's vision went between the two of them and she pursed her lips at the odd tension that she felt had just very rapidly built up. She gently laughed it off, kneeling down to put a hand on Twilight's withers as she smiled up at Mal. "Well if Twilight says she aint felt nothin' then I believe her."
Mal nodded after a moment. "Can't say I don't either, she'd be the resident expert on fantastical magics and such else. I was just askin', just in case."
With that he turned away, talking over his shoulder as he moved to the cargo door again.
"You'll have to find somethin' to occupy yourself with though, little pony, 'fraid I'm needin' Kaylee to go an' work her own kind of magic an' get to sellin' what we got," he said as he neared the door control panel. "That also means findin' some new parts for Serenity."
"Oooh, shiny!" Kaylee smiled, hopping up as her worry disappeared. "We've been needin' some new intermitters for the fuel injectors, an some-"
Kaylee was all smiles as she kept listing things that Serenity needed to keep in repair, and as far as Twilight could tell it seemed to be a very long list. The knot of concern that had been building in her stomach unfurled as the Captain focused his attention on Zoë, his first mate coming down from the upper walkways having left the fore deck to most likely join the outing. It seemed that Mal suspected her of hiding information, and if she were in his position then she might feel the same way. Twilight knew that he was rather slow to trust from the information she'd gleaned from him, she just wasn't quite expecting his nonchalant attitude to so heavily be awash with his mistrust. It had bore down on her almost like a tidal wave and taken her by surprise. One moment he'd been genial, and the next an imposing wall had gone up and she'd found herself put up against it.
She felt that at this point if she tried to appear less shifty it would only reinforce his budding belief that she was up to no good. For now she'd have to shut up and behave, not that she wasn't already, but really follow his orders to the letter. There were a few things Twilight had wanted to ask about that might be seen as prying for sensitive information not commonly shared. Kaylee had brought up Shadow, and she knew from his mindscape that Shadow had once been his homeworld. It was now devoid of life, having been reduced to a barren lifeless monument to the cruelty that the Alliance could employ.
It wouldn't do to delve into the Captain's life right now. She wanted to in order to build rapport, but the impression she was getting was that he was a very private man. Twilight supposed his mistrust would also only grow if she were to poke her nose into how the ship worked, at least by herself. Unfortunately that would mean waiting for Kaylee to get back from the trading business she was leaving for. There was also the question hanging in the fore of her mind of what exactly Reavers were, and intuition told her they were likely pirates of some kind, though beyond that she hadn't a clue. Perhaps they were stiff competition when it came to their crew's work of piracy, all she could do was guess until she was told or found out.
As she watched Jayne come down from the upper walkways and join the other three, she then had herself a slight smile, as maybe while they did their errands Simon would be happy to teach her something she'd been wanting to ask about humans. The datapad had a lot of information, but talking and interacting with him had been very enjoyable. Twilight waved a hoof at Kaylee as she left with the others, the cargo bay door closing up noisily until there was a great thoom of metal meeting metal and it shut completely.
Getting to her hooves, she turned around and headed for the infirmary.