#and thank you floofylion for answering all those space grindr questions months ago

[notasouleater]

Baby N-8's Grindr Adventures

In which things happen. I don't know why my friends that actually know star wars still talk to me with this nonsense tbh. Thanks as always to @justheretolurk24 for being an excellent editor.

N-8 was getting a bit bored. He’d been planet hopping for a bit, and was finding that it was often a bit difficult to get settled in new planets. Heck, even in just new cities when he needed to leave quickly but didn’t have the money to completely bail ship. It was hard to find a place to stay without knowing anyone that knew the area, especially on his budget. Sure he was pretty well-built to be outside, but he found that unideal. Especially as it gave him very little to do for leisure. Again, bored.

He was snooping around the holonet on his ipad when he found something that looked promising. It was an app- advertised as being Galaxy’s-Reach-Inclusive (excellent, it would still be useful on other planets) for all Networking/Dating/Relationship needs. Worst case scenario it would be a good distraction.

The thing asked for his name and gender. Haha! He had both of those. It also asked for his age, which was of course-

Well-

How old was he?

Chronologically, strictly speaking, he was about 3 or 4 standard years old. Now, there was a wide variance among sapient creatures in rates of maturation and lifespan, but he was still fairly certain that for about every sapient organic out there 3-4 years would be a baby child. He may be fairly new to existing, and especially new to existing with free-will, but he wasn’t a kid.

He finally settled on just putting [category]- [young adult]. He was an adult. He was young. It worked.

Account made, he settled back to wait for it to connect him to someone nearby, hopefully someone with a television. He couldn’t keep relying on sports bars. They wanted you to buy things. And only played sports.

It wasn’t long before he got a notification. He pulled open his messages.

Oh, hmm, that was a way to start a conversation with a stranger.

He blocked them and closed the app immediately.

The next couple interactions went much better, but he was getting the vibe that in practice this app was not, despite advertisements, actually used for all Networking/Dating/Relationship needs. Tough, because he was going to do it anyway. He should probably make some adjustments to his profile to clarify some things for potential matches. Such as the fact he was, under no circumstances, removing any layers. He didn’t even have a mouth for void’s sake. (Not that he was telling anyone that)

Soon, through his impeccable taste and a lot of swiping, he found something that looked promising. A beautiful man (just because he wasn’t going anywhere serious with this didn’t mean he didn’t have standards), looking for a casual platonic one night stand, and was mainly interested in watching movies. N-8 was going to a movie night and hopefully getting an introduction to the city for free. G-R-I.N/D/R was great actually.

Besides having to excuse himself by pretending he ‘ate before he got there’, the venture went pretty well, actually. He got to watch movies, and was pointed towards several dirt cheap places to rent, if you didn’t need things like water which he didn’t. Also, to his delight, the guy let him crash for the night.

Initially N-8 spent a while after that, in the short times between living places, doing what many might describe as a particularly fascinating variety of couch surfing. But pretty soon he was settling faster in new places and was, if anything, using this tactic more often while he had a place of his own. Televisions were expensive and hard to lug between planets, after all. At some point in the future he would decide he was far enough out into the rim and start to settle. He would stay in place long enough to form work relationships with strange people in tall buildings and neighborly relationships with little old ladies. For the time being he was getting really into a lot of shows which was a problem when you were usually only able to watch the same thing for like a week max. 

Did he once have a month-long Something with someone formed in good part on the basis of wanting to finish a really long show? Possibly.

You found weird trends in shows going through them like this. Most material out there you could only actually find on the one planet it was made on, or even state, not to mention what the imperial censorship on the holonet was like. During some more underground connections he found that there was a selection of rare shows a bit fixated on clones. Imperial media liked to use them a lot as little propaganda symbols (no wonder, they attracted people that missed the republic and certainly had the looks for television), but anti-imperial media, when it included them, made a point of dealing with the Empire’s cannon fodder as actual individuals. As something beyond soldiers that might not even stay there.

He tended to gravitate towards these shows. His series had a lot in common with them, he thought, more than most would care to think about. Two sides of the same credit maybe. He’s pretty sure most would probably deck him for saying something like that. There was an event though, that their plot lines tended to come back to. 

He usually stopped watching, after that. No point in retreading the same story.

It was also interesting the different places you could end up like this. Sometimes you found yourself in a nice apartment owned by some asshole you were definitely going to steal from, and sometimes you found yourself in a basement owned by anarchist punks that probably shouldn’t be so laissez-faire about exposing their home and anti-imperial activities to randos they found on G-R-I.N/D/R.

There were weird trends in the people you met too. A lot of the people straight-up trying to find people to watch soaps with were romantics. He got teased his fair share for rooting for the so-called “bad-boys” in shows rather than the “nice guys”. But the shows always made it too intense. The “nice” choice was just too nice. No one would actually treat you like that, it was suspicious, really. Besides, how can you snark with someone like that?