1 Spanners: Okay, I found us a new cargo. Some guy needs a pet shipped to Bune.
2 Paris: A pet? That won't fill the cargo hold or pay the bills! What is it? A dog? A cat?
3 Spanners: An Allosaurus.
4 Serron: Cooool!
4 Iki Piki: Well, this has "eventless trip" and "happy ending" written all over it.

Actually it's supposed to be Serron's job to find cargos and do all the merchanty stuff related to the shipping business. But Spanners probably figured that Serron might find some sort of dangerous cargo or something.

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2015-09-14 Rerun commentary: The characters actually do all have defined job roles on the ship. Paris is the pilot, and Spanners the engineer, which are the two most obvious jobs. Serron is the merchant, who is supposed to make all of the trading deals when they seek and sell cargoes. Iki Piki is probably the least obvious of the roles - he is trained in science and interpersonal relationships. So theoretically he is the person to go to when trying to be diplomatic or to talk their way out of trouble.

These roles were inherited from the real life roleplaying game I ran in which these characters were created. Iki Piki also has a few other occasionally useful skills, such as familiarity with explosives. That particular skill is actually alluded to in a future strip, but not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the comic, that I can recall.