[Kaydel]
It was Kaydel who took the plunge on introductions. "Well. My name is Kaydel Ko Connix. This is Finn. That's Rey. This is Chewbacca, C'ai Threnalli, and Rose Tico. What should we call you?" She looked directly at the trooper in charge, because she knew enough of First Order ranks to recognize who that was. The black shoulder pauldron gave it away, but she wasn't sure what the orange barring around the edge meant. "Captain?" she hazarded when no answer seemed forthcoming.
"No," Finn said. "First sergeant." He made a show of rolling his shoulders. Keeping his hands firmly tucked at his sides, he walked right up to the soldier in question. It got him a blaster leveled at his gut that gave Kaydel a spike of fear, but no trigger was pulled and Finn didn't waver.
He leaned forward slightly, looking at something on the upper left of the armored breastplate. "CL-0745." He glanced over his shoulder to the Resistance members to add, "First sergeant, in command of this squad." He turned back. "Is it a squad or section?" She didn't answer, so he moved on to the next, side-stepping the blaster, which went back in the holster with no further objection.
He read off all eleven remaining designations and ranks. She could understand where he was getting the ranks – the pauldrons (black with white barring for a staff sergeant, white with black barring for a squad leader sergeant, plain white for a squad leader corporal – at which point Finn said, "It's a section, which means two squads," and went on). But she couldn't tell how he was reading the designations. She assumed it had something to do with him stepping right up to them, right into their personal space. He then looked at their upper chest, although from her angle she saw nothing there.
After one of the designations no different from the others, 'H' something, Finn paused to say, "Respect," with a small nod the trooper did not return. Then Finn went on to the next one. It was nothing but an alphabet soup of numbers and letters to Kaydel. Even more confusingly, about half of them started with 'FN-90'.
"I'm not going to remember those," Kaydel admitted. "How does anyone remember those?"
The first sergeant said mockingly, "K-nel Coconazz? How does anyone remember that? Our designations mean something. What does yours mean? You didn't earn it."
She was so startled by the question she didn't answer. Finn, to her surprise, chuckled in sympathy with the stormtrooper and said, "It means she has parents." Several of the other troopers rocked in place silently. Their shoulders moved. A couple of them bumped into one another. Kaydel suspected they were laughing, but not the way humans normally laughed. They were humans, right? They could be anything under those helmets, though she'd always heard the First Order were bigoted xenophobes.
Finn walked over next to Rose, leaving Kaydel to fend for herself in the face of their ridicule. "Yes," she snapped. "It means I had parents! Unlike the First Order, we don't take children from their families!"
"No," CL-0745 growled, "you just leave them to die."
"What?" she said in outrage, taking an angry step forward.
Kylo came up the ramp with long strides, stopping abruptly at the top. It put him directly between the two groups – stormtroopers on one side, Resistance on the other. He looked back and forth between the two, head cocked.