Case File P-06
Velveteen
CHARGE: GRAND LARCENY (PROTOTYPE TECH) — STATUS: UNBOTHERED
Didn't want to calculate gravitational waves. Wanted to feel them.
// Latest — Session 2
The crystal was purple and he had never tasted purple, so really that answered itself. It sits in him now, turning slowly, and it tastes like morning dew off an elderberry under a red sun, which he accepts is not an answer anyone was hoping for.
He caught 
Kael Vass by the scruff over the fire and told him not to dare. He shouted blink dog at eleven separate people and it worked on precisely none of them. He watched a man he had called a friend through the bars beat 
Oot to death on a loading floor, and he has not yet worked out where to put that. And then the universe gave him back a bathrobe.
// Standing Case File
Velveteen is. He just... is. He's smart, but mellow, and vibes with the gravitational waves all around us, always.
When another inmate is spun up about something — a fight, a lockdown, a guard who didn't rotate out — Velveteen has one piece of advice, delivered the same unbothered way every time:
"You need to center your gravity, dude."He left the family business, working the Maw Stations, a family of scientists who maintained the warp engines. Velveteen just wanted to get away. Sure, he could do all that work, but he didn't want to calculate gravitational waves. He wanted to feel them.
That's what got him here. At a transit hub between systems, a corporate envoy came through under heavy escort, guarding a sealed cylinder of something blue and swirling. Velveteen had never tasted blue before. So he drifted closer, the way he does, until his own gravity well, the one he can't help carrying with him, tugged just hard enough to pop the seal.
The liquid came loose and started to rise. He didn't hesitate. A pseudopod unspooled, wrapped around the whole shimmering mass, and pulled it in.
"It tingled."Turns out that "blue" was a prototype gravity well core worth more than the envoy's entire career. The corporation was not amused. Velveteen is, as far as he can tell, the only prisoner on The Rock who got sent to a black site for feeling something too intensely.
There is also the matter of the refugee ship he tuned to his own taste before it vanished into the dark. He is confident they're fine. He asks about it more often than a confident person would.
The crystal was purple and he had never tasted purple, so really that answered itself. It sits in him now, turning slowly, and it tastes like morning dew off an elderberry under a red sun, which he accepts is not an answer anyone was hoping for.
He caught
Kael Vass by the scruff over the fire and told him not to dare. He shouted blink dog at eleven separate people and it worked on precisely none of them. He watched a man he had called a friend through the bars beat Oot to death on a loading floor, and he has not yet worked out where to put that. And then the universe gave him back a bathrobe.He wakes first, because he was the least braced against any of it. He lifts the slab off
Oot without much fuss and asks if the tortle is okay before he asks anything else. At the crossroads he puts his cheek to the floor and lets the station tell him which way — west — and he's right. He holds the hands of two dying men and tells them, meaning it, that the universe has them now. He keeps asking people to be his friend: the bird, the pirate, the tortle. When the day gets loud he has exactly one thing to offer. You need to center your gravity, dude.
// Connection Map
Dug him out from under the slab, then offered to roll him through the prison like a wheelbarrow.
Propped the dying guard up, called him a good guy, and got the shape of the whole crisis out of him. Then blessed his journey and walked off — fuck him, I am done. The one person Velveteen has ever given up on.
- Ezra ColePersonnel
Did the same for the second dying man in an hour, and meant it just as much.
Called him an old friend from the yard all the way up the wing, and then watched him beat
Oot to death on a loading floor. He has stopped saying it.- The ArchivesLocation
Velveteen was pulled here by the fates, or by gravity, or by the universe.…
This is where Project Lethe was being erased, and where Velveteen found and swallowed a purple crystal with an inscription too small to read.
// Also mentioned in
Velveteen held his hands and told him the universe would take him somewhere good.…
Velveteen was pulled here by the fates, or by gravity, or by the universe.…
This is where Project Lethe was being erased, and where Velveteen found and swallowed a purple crystal with an inscription too small to read.