“I’m about as strong as I am tough. I’m not...entirely unfamiliar with ship maintenance, even if I’m used to more recent models. I can shoot a gun, about as well as any other cannon fodder.” Honey shrugs.

Kit grins. "You'll fit right in. I'm sure we can find something for you to do."

And now they're at the library door, where he retrieves two different pistols from the GUNS box. Both are of unfamiliar makes and look heavily modified. 

"Any last questions for now?" 

“No, I think I’m set for now. Thank you for the information, sir.”

"Excellent. Well, see you around, kid. Oh—and watch out for the octokittens," he adds cheerily. "They bite." 

With that, he walks away, whistling. 

Having successfully negotiated a place on this odd crew, and having secured a bit of food and hydration, the exhaustion of a long day (or, days, technically) begins to wash over Honey. He begins his search for a sufficiently out of the way corner, before eventually curling up in an overhead nook that has a good amount of airflow.

He is undisturbed for the next few hours. 

Having recovered about as much as he needed to, Honey extracts himself the nook, and begins wandering the halls of the vessel, meandering more than heading somewhere, but still trending towards whatever seems most like an engineering deck, in the hopes of finding work to do.

—and something small and dark, about the size of a smallish dog but with a lot of legs, skitters across the hallway in front of him. It disappears back into the shadows before he can get a good look at it. 

Honey freezes, briefly, before recalling the first mate’s warning regarding...octokittens? Curious, he carefully approaches the shadows he saw the shape dash to and gropes around for the creature.

The shadow hisses and bites his hand, drawing blood and nearly taking off a finger. 

Honey lifts his hand up, creature presumably still attached. “You’ve got some real teeth on you, don’t you?” He says, more to himself than anyone else.

In the light, the thing turns out to be a ball of far too many writhing limbs attached to a head and torso that resemble a stray cat. It hisses again, lets go of Honey's finger, and drops to the ground, skittering away again on its multitude of legs. 

“Huh.” Honey stands back up and continues his wandering. “Octokittens.” He nods.

There seem to be a lot more of the octokittens down on the engineering levels.

He spots an orangeish one curled up in a tangle of limbs on top of a humming machine, probably attracted to the warmth. Others in various colours and patterns are play-fighting in the dust of an abandoned room as he walks past its open door. They squeak at headache-inducing pitches and make rusty-engine-like growling noises at each other. 

They don’t honestly seem too different from other cats Honey has encountered, even if he can’t say that’s all that many. Now that he knows what broadly to expect, he doesn’t pay them much mind.

As he descends deeper into the heart of the Aurora, the air around him begins to grow warm, and the thrum of the engines gets louder. 

Faint sounds of clanging metal can be heard from somewhere up ahead. 

Clanging metal sounds like something to Honey. Whether it’s something broken, or something someone is working on, or something else, he’s interested. He does his best to head straight towards the clangs.

This part of the ship is fairly maze-like, the chambers and corridors—now more akin to tunnels—seeming to follow no logical pattern he can discern. More than once, he hits a dead-end or finds himself heading away from the source of the noise instead of towards it. 

Eventually, the sound of metal on metal grows louder, the engines thrumming in counterpoint. 

Turning a corner, Honey comes upon a pale-skinned man fixing a broken section of pipes. His clothes are stained with engine grease, and at some point, he has stripped down to his shirt; a long navy coat is hung carefully over a chair out of the way. Twin ports on the inside of each wrist, laid bare by his rolled-up sleeves, look like they might be data sockets. 

Absorbed in his task, the man doesn't immediately notice Honey. 

Honey approaches the man and his work, trying to get a better look at the broken section of piping. “Anything I can do to help?” He asks.

He drops his wrench with a clang, one hand going to the gun at his waist. 

"What—oh, you're the stray Martin picked up." As he speaks, he relaxes again, although his hand stays near his weapon. "How long have you been standing there?" 

Honey reaches down, grabs the wrench, and hands it back to the presumed engineer. “Just a few seconds. Just looking for something to do.”

The engineer looks at him assessingly.

"Alright then." He raps a pipe with his knuckles. "Ever worked on something like this before?" 

The specific design is as alien as everything else on this ship, but pipes are pipes. It's not hard to tell what needs fixing. 

Honey nods, and moves forwards under the assumption of the plumbing being...more or less ordinary.

"Straight to business, huh? I like it." The pipes behave like ordinary pipes, at least so far as he can tell. 

"Name's Kolya, by the way," the engineer says as he gets to work on a different section. "Nice to meet you."