Inquire Within

Overview

Inquire Within is an unofficial job-posting board and informal dispatcher’s node located on Nowhere Station. It occupies a stretch of corridor at the junction where the Gravitas Drift’s old starboard cargo access meets the Smokestack vertical shaft, mounted to the exterior wall of Bay 4-C. The board serves as the public face of the small emergency-response business operating out of that bay — a family-run operation that has handled improbable breakdowns, cosmic roadside assistance, and unclassifiable crises across several generations.

Though it appears on no station schematic and holds no commercial permit, Inquire Within is one of the station’s most enduring institutions. For residents, transient freighter crews, and entities of ambiguous legal standing alike, it represents the most direct path between a problem that needs fixing and someone desperate or competent enough to fix it.

Description

The board itself is a salvaged slab of bulkhead plate, 1.2 metres wide and 0.9 metres tall, bolted to the corridor wall with a mismatched collection of hex-head bolts and repurposed furniture fasteners. It tilts 3.2 degrees to port — a lean that has survived every attempt at correction for over forty years. The posting surface is cross-hatched with worn grooves once meant for magnetic clamps; now it holds jobs via rusting bulldog clips, adhesive patches, a single orange magnetic hex-clamp, and at least one lump of ancient chewing gum.

Above the board hangs a hand-painted wooden sign, roughly 40 by 15 centimetres, suspended on a stretched braided cable. Its lettering — INQUIRE WITHIN — is rendered in a sloping, unhurried serif script, repainted in at least five distinct shades of off-white over the decades. A later addition in smaller, hastier script reads: (if door locked, knock twice, wait, then kick it — the latch sticks). The wood itself is dark-grained, faintly aromatic, and belongs to a species absent from any ISA botanical database.

The corridor is permanently dim, a pocket of shadow cast by the Smokestack junction. Ceilings are low, the walls peeling in mustard-green curls of old hull paint, and the deck plates directly before the board have been polished smooth by decades of restless waiting. The wooden sign swings gently even in still air, a side effect of the station’s intermittent grav-plate pulses. The board’s surface is a palimpsest of paper — fresh printouts flutter alongside notes so aged they have annealed to the metal, and the names of countless solved (or catastrophically unsolved) emergencies fade into ghost-adhesive residue.

Society

Inquire Within operates on a set of unwritten rules so thoroughly entrenched that no living resident remembers any other way. Anyone may post a job; no credential or solvency is checked. Anyone may take a job; there is no bidding, no seniority — the first to remove a posting and present themselves at Bay 4-C’s door wins the contract. The board is never cleaned on a fixed schedule. Postings vanish when fulfilled, when withdrawn in person, or when they crumble past legibility. On average they last fourteen standard days, though some have persisted for decades as unanswered questions inked on thermal blanket scraps and playing cards.

A loose community orbits the board. Independent contractors, station regulars with niche skills, and ship engineers on enforced downtime treat it as a primary source of income. They rarely collaborate openly, yet maintain an informal awareness of who is available and who has vanished. Clients range from legitimate freighter captains to grey-market merchants seeking quiet, off-the-books solutions. The board undercuts the official Station Council job registry and the Smokestack’s commissioned barkers simply by being closer to the ships, taking no finder’s fee, and requiring only initiative rather than paperwork.

Legally, the corridor wall segment is leased to the proprietor of Bay 4-C — currently Danny Huang — under a perpetual agreement that no one on the Station Council wishes to renegotiate. Functionally, however, the board is controlled by no one. It is a node of pure, laissez-faire exchange, curated only by entropy and the occasional hand that clears away the oldest detritus. Danny has repeatedly declined to digitise or organise the board, recognizing that its inefficiency is what filters for the exact blend of desperation and improvisational competence that his business requires.

Notable Features

• The Wooden Sign: Carved from a timber of unknown, warm-fragrant origin (possibly salvaged from a missing generation ship), the sign is subtly warm to the touch and swings almost imperceptibly forward, as if leaning in to overhear. Station folklore claims touching it brings luck in finding work.
• The Sacred Clip: The leftmost bulldog clip — a heavy-duty jaw with a broken spring — has occupied the same spot for so long that its outline is etched into the metal beneath. No current regular posts anything there, and the last job it held (a reactor bleed-off request from 2841) passed into legend as the one nobody was ever qualified to take.
• The Perpetually Sticky Latch: The door to Bay 4-C has a latch that sticks no matter how many times it is repaired. The secondary instruction on the sign — knock, wait, kick — is accepted as an intentional chaos-preservation mechanism, ensuring that every client arrives at the office already slightly frustrated and thus prepared for the nature of the work.
• Postings of Note: The board’s collection includes a grease-pencil plea on a Queen of Hearts card, a child’s drawing of a malfunctioning engine (payment: a tour of the response ship Adequate Response), and a message in an untranslatable language that has hung for six years, its resolution status unknown. The oldest continuous posting, a request for gamma-spike containment advice from 2889, remains legible and unanswered, a paper monument to persistent uncertainty.