Star Trek: Theurgy

Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

August 11, 2024, 11:22:25 AM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Habitation Hull Common Area | Aft Recreational District | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Trudging off into the unknown? Perish the thought…

Sylvain personally found the concept of the unknown to be somewhat relative. After all, with the technological advancements in Federation navigational capabilities, it was rare that any destination was truly unknown. Between their sensor capabilities, the fleet of probes carried by most vessels, and the volumes of astrometric data held in the Federation database, space itself wasn’t quite the mystery that it would have been back in the day. Although, perhaps that was just his qualification in advanced astral navigation talking… He'd written an entire dissertation back on the topic back at the Academy...

Either way, he supposed that it scarcely mattered to their current circumstances. As they were, it was hardly likely that they’d have the opportunity to conduct any great feats of exploration, beyond perhaps investigating an unfamiliar looking plant that he’d spotted on their earlier walk between the aerodrome and the common area, through an open doorway into what he assumed might have been some sort of lab or hydroponics bay. They probably wouldn’t be allowed inside, but it might still be fun to observe from a distance. It had a shockingly pink hue to its leafage, which might have indicated an absence of chlorophyll. He wasn’t a botanist by any means, but he got starstruck by scientific curiosity as much as the next person.

“Oh, of course…” He pondered aloud to her question as he began to walk alongside the woman, his PADD clacking against the phaser strapped to his hip as he moved, the Ensign once again failing to remember that it was there. “Well, I suppose we’re not strictly on duty, so feel free to call me Sylvain if you’d prefer.” Sylvain had a fairly strict preference to be addressed by his title whilst on duty, as much as a mouthful as it might have been, however, he supposed in the interest of building some of that camaraderie that the Theurgy crew seemed to live by, he could experiment with his first name instead, especially considering their current circumstances. “That’s my first name, by the way, not just something I want you to randomly call me…”

Had he not been walking, he might have kicked himself at the over-explanation of his own name.

“Well, before this I was serving aboard the USS Bowman, it’s a Norway-class ship; they’re the sort of, spade-shaped ships, with the angular nacelle pylons.” He elaborated, providing a somewhat cruise demonstration of the shape of the ship in the air in front of him with his hands as he did so. It didn't exactly have the reputation of a Galaxy-class vessel, so he figured that it couldn’t hurt to describe it in a little more detail; some called it a ‘stumpy’ shape, but he personally thought that its size made it very efficient when it came to evasive patterns Epsilon, Iota and Psi…

“We mostly kept ourselves on the borders of Talarian space, handled raids from some of the separatists who didn’t like the peace treaties, helped the colonies with what they needed, a couple of diplomatic excursions…” The more he spoke, the more Sylvain found himself conscious that, compared to what the crew of the Theurgy had experienced during the past few months, his time aboard the Bowman probably sounded like a holiday. “It might not have been the ‘best adventure’ Starfleet had to offer…” He quickly admitted, using Cora’s own words against himself. “But, we made a big difference to those colonies, saving lives… That's sort of why I wanted to join Starfleet in the first place, to help people.”

Already, even after only a few moments, Sylvain found the combined activity of walking and talking to be doing wonders for his overstimulated mental centers... He wouldn't go as far as to say that he was calm, but he did feel notably less concerned that his nerves were going to force him to jump out of his own skin.

“Anyway, I was offered a spot aboard the Bowman straight out of the Academy, and I got promoted to head of my department within seven months, which, probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d been aboard a Galaxy class, so it’s all swings and roundabouts really.” Secretly, Sylvain was quite proud of how quickly he’d progressed aboard the Bowman, especially considering the dregs his mental state had been in when he’d first arrived aboard… He sincerely hoped that Cora wouldn’t misinterpret his pride as bragging, but he supposed it probably wouldn’t do his reputation any harm to broadcast that he’d been promoted so quickly… Thus far, his list of first impressions aboard the Theurgy, Commander Cross, Chief Lok, Cora, had all been less than stellar, so giving himself a bit of a boost, in a professional capacity at least, might go a little way towards making up for that...

It was just a shame that he'd not yet had the oppertunity to showcase to anyone how good he actually was behind a helm...

“Oh, and we did have a stand-off with a Tholian once!” He added with a rather atypical glimmer of excitement to his tone. Even amongst Starfleet officers, Tholian sightings were extremely rare; it was a pretty big deal all things considered, maybe not as exciting as surviving Borg armadas or fighting Savi warships, but it had to be up there... “It’s not every day that they wander out of their territory, so that was, pretty spooky…” Sylvain decided that it couldn’t hurt to omit the part where the ships had sort of just stared at each other for a few minutes, before the Tholian flew off back towards its own territory... Perhaps that made up for his egregious display of candor earlier?

“And, ah, yeah…” Sylvain felt himself grow a little hot, realising that he’d gotten absorbed into chatting about his time aboard the Bowman and somewhat neglected the crewman’s actual question. “Admiral Anderson contacted me a couple of months ago, he and my mum were pretty good friends back in the day…” He sidestepped back into the realm of how he had come to be aboard the Theurgy, somewhat without issue considering the litany of conversational faux pas he would usually have achieved by now. Maybe he was getting better at this whole conversation thing? Then again, after a mostly-naked Kzinti in a turbolift, a walk-and-talk with a fully uniformed Human was a piece of cake.

“So, yeah, he gave me the details about the… Well, you know…” It still felt weird to talk about the parasites aloud, and truth be told, he was currently of the opinion that forgetting they existed until their conflict with the Savi was over, seemed like a preferable option. “....and told me that there was a risk that they might target me because of my psionic abilities…” He gestured somewhat absentmindedly towards his head, neglecting to add any specifics in the hopes of avoiding any lengthy conversation about his capacity to ‘see the future’. “So, here I am.” He added with a somewhat explosive gesture. “I  arrived aboard the Vask'at earlier today. Honestly I was expecting to get assigned down in some navigation lab or something, but, I guess there was a vacancy, and since I’m qualified, they made me Chief CONN Officer…”

“Quite a jump between patrols on the Talarian border and the most advanced ship in the Federation…” And most wanted ship in the Federation, but he figured that the less that particular fact was brought up, the better, for the sake of his mental health if nothing else. “I’ve got to say, I’m excited to get behind the helm someday, assume that we sur-” He abruptly cut himself off. So much for keeping his mental health in check…

“Anyway, enough about me…” He abruptly changed the subject, tilting his head slightly in her direction as he spoke, trying to offer a somewhat friendly smile in the face of the keenness in her eyes. “What about yourself?” He paused for the briefest moment, his soft British accent hanging in the air as he considered that a self-depreciating joke might help lighten the mood away from his previous acknowledgement of how dangerous their mission might be… Perhaps that was one step backwards from a good conversation, but he figured that one-or-two conversational faux pas were to be expected, given the circumstances and all…

“What sort of adventure landed you on a wayward Savi vessel, en-route to stop a supernova from wiping out half of the Romulan Empire?”

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #1 – August 13, 2024, 02:07:11 AM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Habitation Hull Common Area | Aft Recreational District | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

While her newfound companion talked, Cora divided her attention between actively listening and further observation of their surroundings. Curiously, acoustics were oddly dampened for such a cavernous space – she noted that almost immediately, given the number of individuals present and all the activity going on – but it really became noticeable the further they moved away towards the far end of the bay. Savi architecture in and of itself was quite spartan, yet elegant, in its own way; every surface seemed glossy, immaculately clean – all white and chrome colors, like a decontamination cell. As a race obsessed with the dictates and pursuit of high science, she supposed that made sense, but it didn’t explain the need behind such a vast living area. It certainly wasn’t for themselves, and she didn’t care to speculate or dwell on who – or what – they intended it for at the moment.

Cora had more important efforts to focus on.

The first objective lay some fifty meters or so ahead, which was getting them past a semi-translucent door ‘guarded’ by a lone Savi; a female, by all conventional appearance, that seemed to be preoccupied with a PDA of some sort. Cora’s attention drifted from the tall alien just as it’s large, black eyes eyes glanced up at them, oddly emotive - as if she was irritated at the mere sight of them. The analyst casually turned her head and eyes up to the Ensign at her side with a knowing smile at the offer of using his first name, adding a hint of amusement at the follow up over-explanation; even more so at the minute, unconsciously projected body language immediately after.

Expressive people were always a delight to observe; their bodies told no lies – Mr. Llewellyn-Kth was no exception. The non-com wondered briefly how many more times he’d trip over himself, especially if she pushed just right; but offered no outward reaction while he recovered, appearing obliviously pleased with simply sharing his company.

Once he’d gotten over that bit, Cora nodded encouragingly as he proceeded into what became a pleasantly lengthy monologue; which began with a rather endearing attempt to physically describe a starship with his hands – to which she smiled rather honestly – for it was impossibly cute. He then described his experience on said vessel, with a hint of what the analyst interpreted as a touch of self-depreciation, which piqued her curiosity, but Cora kept that carefully hidden behind another, firmer, nod of agreement. At the end of the day, they all joined to help in one form or another – the only difference was the method and definition of said ‘help’.

A very brief lull provided Cora another glance at the Savi; who had returned her attention to the PDA, held low, and slightly pivoted away from them. Brilliant. When Sylvain continued, Cora noted the subtle pride expressed in the success of his career thus far, along with a first true note of giddiness within his voice at the exploits of the Bowman. All things considered, Cora would’ve preferred the Tholians over their current adversaries, really, but in her mind, the Klingons truly had the way of it; chose your enemies wisely – a proverb that she felt was equally wise and apt. If reduced to a crude metaphor, the Tholians were an enigmatic race of reclusive spiders that seemed, by and large, far more predictable in nature when compared to the illusive threat faced by the Infested; Cora was far from an expert in either case, however – to her knowledge, no one was, so it behooved them all to maintain a healthy modicum of respect for any enemy. But she let that train of thought dissipate as the Ensign finally got about answering her question with a rather enjoyable blush, despite how obviously more relaxed he both sounded and appeared.

Such a curious specimen, she allowed herself with a grin, easing a hand up through her mop of dark tresses to clear her view. While he divulged the why’s and why-fore's that led to his current situational circumstances, Cora – very carefully, and very subtly – deftly rummaged her other hand into the pack on her hip. Midst the various items stored within, her index and ring fingers located and withdrew a pea shaped device; silver in color, its metallic surface dotted with tiny indented holes.

At the mention of Admiral Anderson, and upon reaching the desired distance from the preoccupied Savi, Cora gradually slowed her pace and purposefully appeared to give Slyvain her full attention, as if drawn into his words even more, now that they had finally arrived at the proverbial ‘meat of the matter’: her features drew in – brow creased slightly at the mention of psionics – That could complicate things, she noted, but filed that away for later. Given the fact that he hadn’t sensed her subtle duplicitous intent, nor showed any noticeable reaction to her thoughts, she reckoned he wasn’t the empathic/telepathic sort, but that left a myriad of possibilities; none of which she really had time or energy to dwell on. It took considerable effort on her part to maintain the visual reckoning in her mind with where she needed the pellet to go, all the while staying engaged in the conversation; a casual eye bulge of recognition for his appointment as Chief Conn officer, with a complimentary brow raise – followed by an agreeable nod at his desire to fly, which was only natural, really – then a mix of slight confusion and concern at the abrupt cut-off, with an audible exhalation and corresponding nod of agreeable empathy in conclusion, for the specter of death was always constant, no matter what the situation.

Yet with that subject discarded in favor of a few queries of his own, Cora returned his smile and clasped her hands behind her with a little bounce of her heels – allowing him to see her pleasant reaction at his interest – but also priming the heat-activated skin of the capsule for deployment. “Oh! Is that what this is, then? Is it too late to get off,” she replied with considerable cheek after a brief hesitation to mentally count to three, then flicked the pellet off into the hands of fate behind her; both hands then raked up into her hair in an expression of mild embarrassment to cover the motion. “Sorry, I’m just...feeling a bit out of sorts about all of it. Like its...a bit much,” she confessed, then cleared her throat and waved the comment off.

The pea-sized gas emitter, filled with just enough pressurized hydrogen-sulfide to cause a stink, bounded across the polished off-white floor as she spoke, hit the wall, ricocheted, hit the adjacent wall, then rolled to a stop about an arms length away from the Savi female – to vent its colorless payload, heavy with the stench of rotten eggs.

Cora knew she’d been successful when she heard the Savi gag.

“At any rate, sorry – didn’t mean to dump that on you sir, ah, Sylvain, I mean,” she laughed nervously, then followed up with a bit of her own self-depreciation, to help lube things up. “Ah, brilliant, aren’t I? Yes I am. No I’m not. I, ah,” she paused to clear her throat and settle herself. “Well, a few weeks ago I got pulled in by the Admiral too, actually – seems my aptitude for logistics and programming got noticed, somehow – so I found myself in his confidence about the,” her head bobbed to the side, “you know. Laid it all out, said I was needed, that he’d chosen me out of a long list of candidates. Made me feel like I couldn’t really say no, like...I dunno...like I was important?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Cora watched the Savi leave through an adjacent door, looking quite disgusted. With another few seconds delay, she felt relatively confident the small cloud of stank would dissipate, leaving none the wiser. There’s our cue, she smiled inwardly, then took a step away from Sylvain to lead him towards the now unguarded doors. “So I took the assignment,” Cora shrugged, “and I arrived here just a short bit ago on that very same transport,” she pointed a finger at him for emphasis. “I thought I recognized you,” she turned to walk backwards for effect, hoping to keep his attention fixed on her and not so much on where they were going as the doors opened.

“Difficult to miss the spots, is all,” Cora beamed at him, “is it alright to ask where you’re from? Will you tell me about it?”

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #2 – August 16, 2024, 02:15:02 PM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Habitation Hull Common Area | Aft Recreational District | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Social complexities had always been an area of difficulty for Sylvain, and for whatever rhyme or reason, the delicate art of conversation simply didn’t come naturally for him; ironic, perhaps, for the son of a diplomat… Two diplomats, he supposed. It wasn’t the act of talking or listening that he found difficult; both were essential skills to have as a Starfleet Officer, even moreso since he’d begun serving as part of the Senior Staff, and Sylvain took his responsibilities seriously. He could deliver an overview of an upcoming sector of space as good as the best of them, and he’d sat through enough five hour-long meetings about debris analysis and whatnot, that he’d actually begun to find even the lengthiest of sessions somewhat interesting. Frankly, he had the fundamentals of meeting etiquette down to a tee; he could recognise when to add to a briefing and when to refrain, when he might have a unique point of view and when he was better off remaining silent, when it was his turn to bring a sweet treat to a meeting and when to remind the more scatty members of the team when it was theirs... It was all just part of the job for him.

It was when conversation roamed beyond the subject of the objective, where it strayed away from data and facts, that the Ensign began to find difficulty with it. Once dialogue drifted outside of the realms of professionality, once a meeting became a conversation, once the untold myriad of social complexities came out to play, Sylvain’s grasp of the fundamentals fell short. Starfleet guidance on meeting conduct was extremely clear to him, but he regretted that there hadn't been a more thorough course at the academy, regarding how to conduct oneself outside of duty hours… Truthfully, he couldn’t comprehend how so many people seemed to thrive within the chaotic wasteland that was conversation.

Every species, every individual, seemed to have a different preference for communicating. Unfortunately for himself, even the most grounded introvert could usually at least grasp an understanding of the social cues of their own culture, but he didn’t even have that notch on his belt. He couldn’t begin to fathom how Yattho communicated with each other, and yet Humans on the other hand, were perhaps even more difficult to decipher…

Humans could be argumentative like Tellarites, rude like Zaldan, or gregarious like Denobulans and Bolians. Some appreciated logic and honesty, like Vulcans and Betazoids, or simply radiated the same kindness and generosity as even the best Risan. Yet some were exploitative and conniving, like Ferangi or Orions, secretive as Romulans, aggressive as Klingons… The temperaments of the Human race seemed limitless, and with each new individual arrived a plethora of different quirks and subtexts that could completely steer how any conversation was directed. He’d tried to analyse it in the past, but it just tied Sylvain’s brain into knots. He was usually far happier spending his off-time alone in his quarters or the holodeck anyway; the whole ‘friend’ thing had always seemed like too much trouble.

Still, Cora seemed pleasant enough.

She appeared to be interested in what he had to say at the very least; her reactions were genuine as far as he could tell, the way his words were echoed in her nods and facial movements as they strolled, their path taking them towards the far end of the common area, away from where the bulk of the Starfleet crew had congregated. Without the black and colour of the Starfleet uniforms, their surroundings became all the more clinical, unsettlingly so, white and chrome architecture stretching above their heads in a surprisingly sterile manner, considering that the room was allegedly for recreational purposes…. Then again, he supposed that decor was somewhat relative; compared to an Orion vessel, he expected that even the most exotic ship in Starfleet would probably resemble a morgue…Beauty was in the eye of the beholder as they say; perhaps this was peak Savi aesthetics.

As Cora spoke, responding to his own questioning, Sylvain felt a pang of guilt creep into his gut, noting that she definitely hadn’t failed to notice his faux pas regarding the potential outcome of their mission. She was right, it was a bit much. In a perfect world, Sylvain would have reassured her that Starfleet Academy had prepared him for situations like this, that there was some hidden plan, and that they were going to be absolutely fine come tomorrow… Unfortunately for her, he couldn’t… In the wake of the Dominion war, Starfleet Academy had made a conscious effort to lean its new wave of Ensigns into the realm of hope and exploration, rather than the service and sacrifice approach that the Dominion war had required. This situation was regrettably the latter…

And regarding hidden plans, Sylvain didn’t even know what the objective was, beyond trying to stop a supernova… He had a feeling it would require more than a few phasers at the very least…

A soft gurgling sound caught Sylvain’s attention for a moment, as he was contemplating how alien it was to have a fellow officer, a stranger, address him by his first name, his eyes flicking up to a Savi who was standing stoically beside a door a few metres in front of them. The alien appeared to be experiencing some respiratory discomfort. Conscious not to stare, Sylvain attempted to fix his attention on the floor before him as he listened to Cora continue, disheartened by her self-deprivation. However, no sooner had he turned his attention to the floor, did a rustle of movement bring his head swinging back to the Savi in alarm, almost as though he was expecting the alien to attack them for their proximity… Sylvain really needed to stop thinking about what Commander Cross had told him… Instead of an assault, Sylvain’s tense reaction only earned him a glance from the Savi that he felt somewhat scorned by, before the alien left through the adjacent doorway and disappeared behind the chromatic bulkhead without taking even a single look back at the pair of them.

He breathed out a sigh of relief, before a new feeling of alarm settled into his gut, when he realised that he might have missed something in Cora’s story. She’d been recruited by Admiral Anderson just like himself, but she’d been selected for her competencies in logistics and programming. At least that’s what he thought she had said… It made his brows furrow for a moment as she explained the circumstances around her. He wasn’t exactly familiar with the Theurgy crew manifest, but he was fairly sure that logistics and programming would fall under Ops, which would have put her in a gold uniform… However, she was wearing red. 

Drat. He must’ve misheard her or something…

He considered within what faculties logistics and programming might have fallen under Command division; the CONN department certainly hadn’t done their own programming when he’d been aboard the Bowman, but perhaps she was a Tactical Officer? He supposed on a vessel as big as the Theurgy, it was definitely possible that the Tactical department had their own logistics and programming subsection, probably something to do with torpedoes and phaser banks… He pondered the idea, but felt fairly confident that a role within Tactical was probably more likely than him having misheard her; logistics and processing was quite the mouthful after all. Regardless, if Admiral Anderson had hand picked her to join the Theurgy crew, she was bound to be really good at what she did; he was pretty certain that if it hadn’t been for his psionic abilities, the Admiral would have sought out a much more experienced pilot than himself. It did give him some reassurance however, that she’d also arrived aboard the Vask’at; if they were both so new to the Theurgy, he supposed he probably didn’t have to pretend to be quite so comfortable with their newfound situation. Stopping supernovas and battling alien armadas, it wasn’t exactly his cup of tea…

He wouldn’t have even done something like this in the holodeck.

“My, spots?” Sylvain responded to her questioning, raising his hand tentatively to the side of his head subconsciously tracing the features in question, patches of darker coloured skin that spanned from his brows up into his hairline, and from his neck down to his… Well, she wouldn’t need any details on that part of his anatomy. “Well, it’s not Trill. A lot of people think that I'm a Trill...” He answered with his best attempt at levity, whilst his eyes flicked between Cora and the door that the Savi had just escaped through, somehow concerned that it would return with some sort of genetic resequencer and zap them both, and he very well could end up a Trill. Didn’t much fancy the whole symbiote thing to be honest. .

“I’m actually, well my father, is Yattho. They’re a non-Federation species, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t heard of them…” He’d not really met many people who were aware of his species… Realistically, outside of the psionic abilities, there wasn’t much to know. “They’re somewhere out in the Beta quadrant, totally outside of Federation space; honestly they haven’t made a whole lot of contact with Starfleet.” He began, intending to tiptoe somewhat around the subject of said psionic abilities. If she didn’t ask, he wasn’t planning on leaving himself vulnerable to the litany of questioning that always followed. Vulcans were one thing, what with their ‘curious’ followed by an eyebrow movement, but Sylvain had found that Humans always had the worst reactions to it.

Well, aside from one Ferangi who pestered him for an entire week of shore-leave, something about a lottery and a casino; that had been particularly tedious.

“They’ve not been very responsive to establishing a dialogue with us, other than a couple of diplomatic conferences at Deep Space 16. That’s where I was born.” It didn’t seem necessary to go into the particulars of how his mother had violated about eighty Starfleet protocols by… Well, he was sure that Cora understood how these things happened anyway... “It’s fairly remote, my mum was stationed there to serve as part of the diplomatic delegation, she's a Human by the way; Starfleet wanted some diplomats out there ready for any first contacts and whatnot. The Yattho were probably her biggest case, she always said that my dad was pretty diffic-HURAGH!”

The retch that interrupted Sylvain’s sentence was violent and abrupt, arriving with so little warning that Sylvain hadn’t even had the opportunity to brace himself for it, his body wracking in a spasm of pain as he felt his abdomen contract. It was a smell, a stench so ghastly that it took less than a moment for his nose to tell his stomach that it was time to abandon ship, convulsions hitting him before his brain had even caught-on to what was going on. Rancid was too kind a word to describe the aroma that had engulfed him; something truly hellish. It was some unethical concoction of sulphur and sewage, a blend not dissimilar to the aroma that had permeated the Academy bathrooms following the short-lived Bolian night in the canteen. Yet somehow, this odour was more concentrated, and it had hit him like a bat’leth in the gut.

“I’m sor-HURAGH!” He attempted to apologise, before another retch wracked through his form, causing him to hunch as his abdomen spasmed, desperately willing himself not to vomit. He lurched forwards as the wave took him, stepping a few paces to brace himself against the wall not far from where the Savi had just been standing, the cool metal somewhat soothing against his suddenly inexplicably clammy body. He was thankful that he’d not eaten anything all day, but he’d indulged in a few cups of tea over the course of the afternoon, and the last thing he’d needed was to vomit up some mess of watery-brown sludge onto the Savi’s particularly shiny bulkheads. “I’m oka-HURGH!” Sylvain felt the sudden need to try and reassure Cora that he wasn’t having some sort of medical outburst, given that she didn’t seem to be reacting as strongly to the scent as he himself was. Somehow, she barely seemed to have reacted to it at all…

In fact, she seemed indifferent to it, baffling, considering that for him, it was only growing more severe, his nose physically stinging from the burn. His mind returned to the Savi who had made an expedient exit just a few moments before, only moments before the stench had hit him, and wagered that the alien had perhaps noticed the smell themselves. What else would explain such a rapid exit? Unless… The thought made another stifled gagging sound leak out from his mouth. Fighting Savi warships and attempting to stop a supernova from extinguishing the Romulan Empire was one thing, but inhaling alien flatulence was absolutely crossing a line. For such an advanced species, their diet had to be disastrous, if it had such an abominable affect on their bodies.

How was Cora not keeled over from this? Sylvain’s mind couldn’t comprehend how the woman was still standing; he certainly wouldn’t have been had he not been braced against the wall, dry-heaving as he desperately tried to keep his stomach within him. He knew his Yattho senses were somewhat more acute than Humans, but this was beyond foul… Surely she had to be able to smell it? Perhaps she had a nasal impairment?

And then the next harrowing thought slipped into his head.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that a psionic event had manifested in the form of a phantom aroma, though the last time it had happened, it had been a delightfully coconutty aroma that predated an enchanting encounter with Lieutenant Kandhari’s home-made nariyal laddu. Even as the acrid air burned at his eyes, Sylvain attempted to consider the possibility that this unforgivable fume, was actually some sort of precognitive occurrence… Though of what, he didn’t even wish to hazard a guess… Still Cora’s lack of reaction was proof enough; perhaps the Savi had just been affronted by the presence of ‘lesser’ lifeforms.

If his face could have flushed even redder at the realisation that he’d made such a spectacle of himself over nothing, it would have. Alas, Sylvain attempted to steel himself the best he could, straightening his back and leaving only one hand against the bulkhead for support, using the back of his free hand to wipe his saliva glazed lips. His eyes streamed with tears that tumbled down his cheeks, and his head throbbed with a nauseating dizziness that was lingering in the corners of his mind, but he did his utmost to appear as normal as possible; he would need to apologise profusely to Cora for the state he was making of himself. He breathed out what little air he still had within his lungs, closing his eyes for a second as if to will the premonition away, before he curtly inhaled a sharp new lungful of air.

“QUWARAGH!”

Sylvain promptly doubled over once again, all but throwing his head into the bulkhead in front of him with an uncomfortable thud, his mouth retching out a sound as though he was some sort of waterfowl that had just been penetrated by a Klingon pain stick. The contraction in his abdomen was violent enough that he could taste bile in the back of his throat, and the dizziness in his head now rang with the result of his impact with the wall, a dazzling concoction that echoed through his body as though his entire nervous system had become enveloped in a static fuzz.

As it turns out, the smell was, in fact, not diminished.

If anything, it now hit him even more potently than before, scalding his nostrils and burning his eyes, his face red with strain and wet with tears, saliva dangling from his lips as he used every ounce of his strength to stop himself from hurling up the contents of his stomach. His head rang, his stomach ached from the strain on his muscles, and the room seemed to spin whenever he opened his eyes, whirling into a vortex of white, chrome and the black of his boots, perhaps a touch more black than just his boots… He supposed it was his legs as well, though he didn’t think his legs were quite so all-encompassing…

“HURAGH-I th-RAGH-ink… Urghh…” His words were punctuated by wretches, gags and groans of pain, slurred slightly from both the dizziness in his head and the way that saliva seemed to pour from his mouth like an untended tap. He tried to blink away the darkening spots in his vision, and was vaguely conscious of himself moving, though he couldn’t recognise his own legs in his stupor. “I sh-RAGH-ould g-go to -HURAGH- Sick-RAGH-bay…” He babbled, his hand that was bracing himself against the wall slipping lose as his body seemed to go slack, his mind tumbling into a putrid abyss as his entire body seemed to numb into oblivion.

Sylvain wasn’t one to curse…

But now might have been an appropriate time for it, had he been conscious enough to form words at all...

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #3 – August 23, 2024, 06:42:02 AM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Habitation Hull Common Area | Aft Recreational District | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

Once she’d recovered enough to realize what had happened, Cora had done what she could, given the circumstances. Repeated attempts to help proved futile, and really, even though she blamed herself for missing the fact that Sylvain was, surprise-surprise, not a Trill – that the whole plan had in fact gone tits up, really – there was nothing else for it. Her hands went out as he fell, but she misjudged both the Ensign’s weight and direction, so he ended up on the deck in a heap, sprawled out just a few steps inside the door. The doors, which, funny enough, kept trying to close – but just kept bumping into his body – as she dragged him into the lift.

“Come on,” Cora grunted, huffing hair out of her face. “Was just a little stink, wasn’t even that bad! Oh, bugger it,” she fumed, exasperated, tapping the controls to the lift rapidly so as to avoid being seen.  Once the lift finally closed, she leaned against the cool metallic wall and shook her head, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now…

Maybe 'please help' will work?

[Moments later... | Midaegyn qi Erudite | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck]

“This is quite intolerable,” she fumed, “given the complete lack of proper controls in place, not to mention the absurdity of the...situation; these...primitives – though I use the term lightly, given the fact they are barely above amoebic organisms, evolutionary speaking – given free reign to run amok? Has Barpin lost his mind?” It was all quite unthinkable, and dangerous. Of course, the opinion of a lowly tier three medicae researcher of Midaegyn’s standing counted little in the grand scheme of things. Discord amongst themselves was not to be seen or heard, in any fashion, not that the biological fodder that served as their ‘allies’ could even begin to comprehend what was truly at stake here. "I'll not be silent. This...madness...has gone on far enough! If I'm not careful, I'll end up raving at myself instead of that lunatic, Barpin, and that fool Echtand as well!"

Calm. I must retain my composure, Midaegyn closed her eyes with the last of her research station’s data cache’s cleared and powered down. Soon, this will all be concluded and we shall return to our true purpose, our true destiny. A sudden, inexplicable ruckus of sound breached the infinite silence of her sterile, tranquil realm. The Ante caste researcher spun her domed head, black voids of eyes snapped open with a look of mild shock at what she was witnessing; two of the mindless barbarians, one dragged by the other, had somehow barged into her domain!

“Intolerable,” Midaegyn muttered, watching them approach with clear disdain; which shifted into disgust soon after, once she noticed the trail of acidic bile left in their wake. The entire lab was now contaminated, and if any of her work had been exposed – which of course, it hadn’t, but that was beside the point – there would be no biological scrap left of them to identify. As it was, the researcher felt no need to report the incident just yet, as Barpin had already been bombarded with several such breaches of security already. I will not suffer this intrusion, nor its reflection on countless cycles of my work, Midaegyn vowed to herself, then raised a single palm in warding. “Cease your vocalizations, before you lose consciousness. This area is restricted to your...biology,” she half warned, half explained, and very nearly called them primitives to their ridiculously under-evolved faces. Instead, she turned slightly to input a command into the console at her station to re-activate a molecular forge near one of the panting figures; a female – human, given the obvious biological structures of its form.

Medaegyn sighed audibly as the idiot glanced at the masks she had just ordered, then back at her, then moaned some incoherent prattle of grunts and whines in it’s guttural language. “You are breathing our air, imbecile. It. Is. Toxic,” the Savi researcher explained as slowly and clearly as her patience allowed.

“Please, w-we need...help! Please, help him,” the savage yelped.

Medaegyn realized two very important truths before it was quite too late. One, the primitives were either incapable of following simple instruction or too panicked to realize the hazardous nature of the environmental situation they had quite rudely barged into. Two, they had ignored or not realized that the researcher’s hand signal had meant “stop.”

With what appeared to be the last of her strength, the human shoved her unconscious, fluid leaking charge directly at Medaegyn. For all her intellect, the Savi did not possess the physical attributes necessary to dodge or react in time to avoid the limp figure – nor, quite to her surprise and later disgust – could she stop herself from catching the biological detritus. She did manage to squeal in outrage, however.

Of course, by that time, the human had collapsed into unconsciousness as well.

“Utterly intolerable,” Medaegyn scowled, infuriated, but now bound by duty to both ensure both survived – due to the extremely unorthodox nature of their ‘alliance’ – before they would be promptly escorted back to their pens. With a heavy sigh, she let the male drop to the floor, then dragged him by one limb over to one of the examination tables. Once it was lifted and deposited in place, she repeated the same with the female. A few cycles of repiration purification would bring them around in due course; once they were both intubated with a lubricated bio-feed through the mouth orifice, deep into the trachea – Medaegyn turned her back on them to sterilize herself, first, then the lab. Of course, by the time she realized that in her haste and disgust to rid herself of the interlopers, Medaegyn had failed to ensure both were truly[ unconscious, she was already too preoccupied with scrubbing herself clean to really care.

[PO2 Cora Davison | Stuck in a Savi Lab, with a greasy tube of alien shoved down her throat]

It took everything she had to keep still until the Savi left. Yanking the thing out of her mouth without drawing her attention took even more, but she managed to do it without retching too loudly; all things considered. Whatever the foul thing was coated in must have acted as some kind of numbing lubrication - it tasted like watermelon chewing gum but burned her nostrils like rubbing alcohol. Cora wiped the worst of it from her face, then put the 'mask' on that the Savi had made.

"Fuck sake, hope you're still having a nap," Cora shook her head, feeling truly awful for what she had to do, but they couldn't stay here, and couldn't go back - not until she got what she needed. "Sorry 'bout this, mate."

One hand on his head, the other on the tube, Cora pulled the thing out of Sylvain's throat.

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #4 – August 28, 2024, 01:14:08 AM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Sorry ‘bout this, mate.

Sylvain wasn’t fully conscious. Since he’d made the request to be taken to sickbay, the words leaving his mouth as easily as the heaving wretches that had wracked his body with spasms, he’d been stuck in a limbo between the conscious and the unconscious; not fully aware, but not entirely unaware either. It was a tumultuous place, ringed with enough consciousness to identify the absolute mortification that he felt, at the knowledge that he had wretched and gagged himself stupid in the Common Area, dripping saliva and bile all over the Savi’s floor. Equally, he could still feel the sting of embarrassment that he’d all but knocked himself out on their bulkhead, and the burning humiliation of having to request a visit to sickbay for actions entirely self-inflicted, whilst their ship hurtled towards a battlefield…

Truthfully, his actions hadn't been all that becoming of his rank or position...

But whilst he did retain some recognition of his emotions, the limbo also served to blind the rest of his senses, to keep him numb enough that he remained mostly imperceptive of the events unfolding around them, his mind processing his thoughts whilst his body became a ragdoll, thrown through an ordeal whilst remaining predominantly unaware of the particulars. Mostly and predominantly, being key words in highlighting his ordeal.

Whilst he hadn't been fully aware of what was going on around him, he’d been conscious enough to identify a vague series of events. At least, he thought he had; semi-conscious awareness was right up there with daydreams, on the list of things that were inconceivably confusing to someone with precognitive capabilities... Still, there were a few things that stood out above the haze that sometimes masked a premonition, a few sensations inflicted upon his body, movements that had happened against his will…

He recalled that something had repeatedly thumped into the sides of his chest, thundering into his ribs and then withdrawing, time-and-time again, until another unseen force had pulled him from their clutches. Then, the sensation of being dragged through some indiscernible distance, a motion that had left him perhaps even more nauseous than the scent that had perturbed his nostrils before; being dragged through an unfamiliar alien Starship, whilst the entire universe was spinning like a centrifuge, was disorienting, to say the least. A lurch had sent him hurtling through space-time, after which he’d fallen from orbit onto a hard surface, before he’d been dragged, once again, across miles of cold floor, his body threatening to tear apart at the seams as he was manhandled in every-which direction, hoisted and heaved with no grace or dignity, as one might treat a slab of meat, rather than a…

“HUARGHKRRRRK!”

The noise that fled his throat was unnatural, but warranted, given the circumstances. His consciousness returned somewhat abruptly, igniting his neurons just at the right moment for Sylvain to get to experience, with perfect clarity, as something disgustingly long, thick, and slimy, was abruptly wrenched out from his windpipe. It felt infinite, pulled from his body like an old-time nautical vessel hoisting an anchor from the depths of the sea, sliding across his lips like an abyssal worm emerging from his mouth. It was wet, slippery, foreign. His body was all too happy to assist with the dispelling of the foreign entity by attempting to vomit once again, atrocious gagging sounds squeaking out from around the sides of the tube as it exited his throat.

“HURAGH-ARGH!” The retching that exited his lips as the final inch of the tubing escaped his mouth, was even louder than before, his entire form lurching forward as Sylvain’s body made an abrupt jolt from a lying position, to sitting upright at almost ninety degrees, involuntarily flexing almost every muscle in his torso and delivering him a cacophony of agony in the process. “ARAGH!” The gasp was voluminous as it escaped his throat, his body slumping back down onto the hard surface below him instantly, his abdomen shrieking with a diabolical ache in response to his involuntary contraction of muscles, the impromptu work-out hitting him like a photon-torpedo to the gut.

“Argh…” Everything hurt.

And Sylvain wasn’t a stranger to a bit of physical pain; he’d been on the Parrises squares team at the Academy for crying out loud, he could handle a bit of pain... But this ,was different. It felt like he’d taken a shuttlecraft to the gut, all while someone had jammed Klingon pain-sticks into his ribs, unleashed a plasma torch down his throat, and kicked him in the head a few times for good measure…

Still, he forced himself to endure the pain for a moment as he attempted to gather his bearings, sucking a hiss of air into his battered body, and counterpointing it with a ragged exhale. The Ensign attempted to occupy his mind with the task at hand, trying not to think about the discomfort surrounding his torso as he forced his tear-stained eyes to open. Sylvain had been optimistic, hoping to see some sort of sickbay-adjacent facility, maybe a couple of Starfleet officers in teal undershirts, some sort of confirmation that he was in a location intended for rest and recovery, as opposed to anything more… Well, anything more Savi…

Unfortunately, the room appeared to be the latter.

The room was once again a drab spectacle of white and chrome, a harsh light burning down upon him from the ceiling, illuminating the somewhat alarming lack of variety in the colours of the room; if it hadn’t been for the black, grey and red uniforms of he and Cora, who lingered at the end of his bed, it would have been a wasteland of white-on-chrome carnage. Centred in the room were several examination tables, whilst the space beyond the tables was packed with dozens of consoles, monitors, pieces of equipment, tools, all of which were objects unfamiliar to Sylvain. As his eyes flicked back above him, his hazel irises swallowed by his widening pupils, he stared up into a disturbingly scientific bouquet of lights, sensors, scanners, and an untold amount of technology foreign to his eyes, though he had no doubt that the array was not something he wanted anything to do with.

His eyes returned to Cora, as he began to attempt to slide himself off of the table, manoeuvring himself onto his side, swallowing the pain that rippled through him as he did so. It took him a moment, but Sylvain managed to slip his left leg out from under him and down into open air, booted foot clacking against the floor as his right leg swiftly followed. From there, his torso naturally pursued, hoisting himself onto his feet with a gasp of pain, his body weight braced into his left arm as he managed to set himself into a standing position, the pain forcing a hiss of air from his mouth, like sitting on a very old chair. He was slightly hunched as he glanced at Cora again, forcing a ragged breath into his lungs as he tried to find a way to get his bearings on their situation

“W-whe w-whe aww-aww..?” He began, before he halted his attempts, in realisation that his tongue seemed almost completely unresponsive to his instructions, its numbness becoming even more apparent as he consciously tried to move it within his mouth. “W-whe-ruh, aww-ruh, we…?” He forced, overemphasising his letters as he desperately pushed past the fact that his tongue felt like a foreign visitor in his mouth, and tried not to dwell all too much on the somewhat sweet taste that was lingering around his palette like a ghost... He’d certainly had precognitive tastes before, they were never fun; most of the time he seemed to seemed to change the future by chasing whatever phantom taste had graced his tastebuds in the premonition, leaving him thoroughly unfulfilled… Yes, he'd learned to ignore any precognitive event that manifested itself as taste...

Unless, this wasn’t that?

A whirlwind of alarm overtook him before Cora would have had a chance to speak, immediately glancing down at his hands with abject horror peering through his eyelids as he did so. He stared down at his pale-skinned fingers with such intensity, that he threatened to vaporise the digits, relief bubbling up within his chest as he did so, though nowhere near enough relief to counteract the ascending panic in his soul. He hadn’t changed colour at least, he hadn’t fallen victim to some Savi experiment and turned green; Sylvain knew that he’d make a terrible Orion, all that hedonism would be far too uncomfortable for him…

Still, he couldn’t check his spots without a mirror, of which the room surprisingly had none. Thankfully however, the indecent amount of chrome served that purpose wonderfully, Sylvain taking a ragged pace over to the examination table that Cora had evidently occupied, and almost melting with relief that in place of any unwanted facial ridges or additional orifices, he was greeted by a familiar reflection… Still,  his relief was limited. He was in an unknown medical lab on a Savi ship, he had no idea how Cora and himself had arrived there, and after Commander Cross’ briefing on the Savi's proclivities for genetic resequencing, Sylvain didn’t intend on taking any chances…

Perhaps the gas he had smelt had been some biological weapon, a nerve agent designed to incapacitate Cora and himself in order to extract them from the Theurgy crew’s population as efficiently as possible; perhaps his Yattho biology expediated the process? The Ensign had to credit the Savi for their ruthless ingeniousness; they’d certainly chosen their candidates well. Sylvain hadn’t interacted with any of the Theurgy Crew since coming aboard, and he didn’t imagine that Cora would have had much chance to do so either... Since they were both new to the crew, only having arrived that very afternoon, they no doubt wouldn’t immediately be missed by their colleagues, especially with the imminent battle occupying everyone’s attention… Then, even if they survived the conflict, they could easily be mis-recorded as casualties following the battle, left in the Savi’s clutches as the Starfleet crew departed back to the Theurgy, damning them to lives of torment and modification forever…

Not if he had anything to say about it.

“We fould…” Sylvain began, turning back to Cora whilst trying to appear as authoritative as possible, a difficult task considering the aggressive lisp his numb tongue had gifted him; he was the ranking officer of their pair, and thus it was his duty to get them out of their predicament as soon as he could. What exactly he should do however, eluded him for a moment; Sylvain was hardly someone equipped to deal with a hostage situation… And then a brainwave hit him. He might not equipped to deal with such a situation, but the Theurgy had sent over a whole team of tactical officers to the Erudite for the mission, and Sylvain was sure that at least one of them, would know exactly how to handle something like this; he was pretty sure that he overheard someone mention that they also had a diplomat aboard, in case there was room for negotiations with the Savi.  

Sylvain felt a triumphant smile blossom onto his face; they needed to alert the chain of Command, just like Starfleet taught them to do. Maybe it was too early to give up on such ideals after all.

“We fhould ale-ruh-t Command-eruh Leavitt.” His sloughing speech was all but humiliating, and he wouldn't have been shocked if Cora hadn't had a clue what he was trying to vocalise at all... Instead, purely on instinct, he reached for his combadge, intending to alert someone to he and Cora’s predicament as soon as possible, somewhat ignoring the possibility that whoever he tried to communicate with would also have to contend with his slurred speech, and instead focusing on his goal of escaping their predicament as soon as possible.

Though on account of the fact that his right arm was suddenly screaming with pain, he hadn’t been able to make the manoeuvre from his hand to his combadge, quite as quickly as he would have liked…

 

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #5 – September 02, 2024, 03:30:53 AM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

The Intel analyst busied herself, quite hurriedly, with several tasks while Sylvain recovered; first and foremost, she slapped the air purification device over the bridge of his nose – as soon as she could, anyway – while attempting to keep him calm and quiet. That wasn’t happening, not that she could blame him; knowing they could be revisited at any moment – likely by an unfriendly Savi tech that would also very likely blow any chances she had of completing her mission – the analyst backed away and searched her surroundings frantically. The lab, if it was indeed such, and not a secret house of horrific experiments just waiting for an opportunity to eat them both alive – was littered with tech and devices she had absolutely no idea how to use or identify. Her head snapped over a shoulder while the Ensign continued to make a ruckus, willing the Savi not to hear them.

“I’m so sorry, deep breaths, deep breaths, alright,” Cora tried to sooth him while she worked to dig the tricorder out of her satchel; a useless mantra, but spoken with earnest. It really was unfortunate how things had played out so far – not at all the way the analyst intended – but in her line of work, more often than not, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. That knowledge didn’t stop her from berating herself mentally for getting them into this mess, however, nor did it change the priority of the mission at hand...

Still, Cora was keenly aware of the stinging guilt that grew in her stomach. She knew what she was getting into, and hadn’t planned on keeping Sylvain in the dark – not permanently, anyway – but all that had to be thrown out the window now. So stupid, her dark chocolate eyes narrowed down at the tricorder, attempting to sync into and decrypt the console built into the examination table. Brilliant, Cora, really, she continued, as her fingers deftly keyed in commands, only glancing up periodically to assess the Ensign. “You alright?” she asked, clearly worried, only for him to start babbling incoherently.

“You what,” Cora tilted her head at him, confused. The tricorder bleeped negatively. She couldn’t crack the algorithm without the necessary understanding of Savi syntax – but downloaded the raw data with a mumbled curse anyway – and moved closer to him with a shh gesture. “Not so loud, we – oh,” her head snapped back to where the door the Savi used, and spotted a tablet device that rested on a workstation. “Just a sec,” she turned back to Sylvain, who seemed to be gathering his wits, or trying to, then ran – a tip-toed, awkward shuffle, hands up at her sides like she was trying not to fall on ice – to snatch up  the Savi’s PDA. “Hello lovely,” her tricorder was clamped to the device an instant later, set for full analysis and synchronization. Better work bloody fast, Cora huffed, just as Sylvain found his voice again. She caught the words alert Commander Leavitt, spun around, and repeated the same absurd half/run, half/shuffle back to him, mouthing the word nooo the entire time.

“Are you mad? What’re we to tell him, then? Sorry, we got muddled up in a Savi lab while takin’ a walk? We don’t even know where we are,” she whispered rapidly a few steps from him, but didn’t stop. A hand grabbed him by the arm, the one so close to tapping his combadge, and pulled him along. “Listen I’ll explain everything, but we have to go, quick time, march,” Cora patted her hands for emphasis, and made a bee-line for what looked like a maintenance hatch; a place to lay low while her programs broke into the PDA.

If there was even anything of worth on the bloody thing, Cora frowned.

“Please trust me,” the analyst asked emphatically, waving her hand over the opening mechanism; the waist high chrome portal slid open , revealing a tunnel lit with luminous bundles of what looked like biomechanical wires – their purpose and function unknown. “I’m…I’m with Intelligence,” Cora grimaced comically, as if that would explain everything. “Ugh, that sounds so stupid,” she added in a cynical mumble.

The door on the other end of the lab hissed open, the sound reminiscent of a blade sharpened by a whetstone. Cora breathed out a hissed curse, then grabbed Sylvain by the hand and started stuffing him in the maintenance tube. “Get in, get in, hurry hurry hurry,” the analyst pleaded, even as she squeezed herself in after him. Once the portal sealed, Cora panted and groaned at their new surroundings. She was pinned at an angle on her back, her limbs tangled up with the Ensign, who looked very uncomfortable – wadded up in the tight confines – his back to the ceiling, rear up, aimed at her, while his head dangled nearly between his knees. “Shh, quiet,” she whispered, then held her breath and listened.

Any other time, Cora was quite sure the two of them would look positively hilarious; maybe one day they would share a laugh about it – but she rather doubted it – judging from his expression. The luminous wires built into the tube’s walls pulsed with blue-tinted white, like a eerie heartbeat. A few minutes passed, and nothing else happened. Cora felt her neck cramping up, and tried to straiten herself out, but couldn’t move much without kicking or hitting Sylvain. Donning her best sympathetic but wholly authentic smile, the analyst quietly apologized once again.

“Right. Shall we sort ourselves out then,” Cora croaked ruefully, and managed to lift a finger and point down the tube which led to a larger opening a few meters in. “Perhaps...have a sit in there, before we both cramp up and knock out again? Reckon I owe you a decent explanation, but…it’s rather hard to breathe at the moment.”

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #6 – September 13, 2024, 03:17:11 PM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Sylvain had been in Starfleet long enough to know that there was a tendency amongst non-commissioned officers, to explore the concept of professionality a little looser than Starfleet guidelines intended. His initial months of serving as an Ensign aboard the Bowman, had given him a rude awakening as to how flexibly Regulation 256.15 could be adopted; he’d learned curse words in about twenty-seven different languages in his first week alone. But, as time had passed, and he’d accepted his promotion to department head, he’d learned that sometimes, it was easier to lend a little flexibility when it came to implementing professionality and that confronting some of his colleague’s less-professional behaviours, ultimately, was rarely worth the hassle… After all, as much as some of their rambunctious behaviours bothered him, what were a few lapses in professionalism compared to a happy and efficient staff?

As such, he’d learned to wince and forget when people used inappropriate language around him, he’d developed a tolerance for a certain degree of playful banter during duty shifts, he had taught himself how to politely refute ideas that blatantly ignored protocol, and in this case, he’d established an understanding that stressful situations could lead people to speak without thinking… However, Sylvain’s flexibility when it came to such things did have a limit, and Cora’s abrupt change in demeanour had shot at least two light-years past that particular line in the sand… The swift transition from her previously demure disposition, to this new, far sharper persona, was almost enough to give him whiplash, leaving him stunned enough that he couldn’t find the words to react to her sudden frenzy of hushed whispers, that so vehemently criticised his intention to contact Commander Leavitt, to follow protocol…

Had her only offence been to openly criticise his plan to contact their commanding officer, to follow Starfleet protocol, Sylvain would have forgiven her; it was a high pressure situation, and he was the first person to acknowledge that unfamiliar circumstances could make it easy for people to lose their heads… However, her decision to begin physically manhandling him, had certainly crossed a line; quite frankly, it was borderline insubordination; to physically grab him by the crook of the arm, and to actually drag him across the lab, quickly ignited his typically calm demeanour into something incandescent…

Physically apprehending any colleague, let alone a senior officer, was one thing, an act unacceptable in all but the most dire of circumstances. However, in her decision to physically restrain and drag him, not only did Cora breach Starfleet protocol in a most offensive of ways, she also defiled Sylvain’s own personal boundaries beyond any justifiable reason. For an individual so distinctly adverse to touch as he was, her choosing to put her hand on his arm and drag him, was an action so intensely intimate that the Ensign felt utterly violated by her choice of action; the only other physical contact he’d had in the past month, had been his extremely uncomfortable handshake with Chief Lok in the turbolift, and that had been agonising enough. He was only thankful that her grab had been over his uniform and not on his bare skin…

What right did Cora, no, officer Davidson, have, to manhandle him like they were participants in some sort of debaucherous Orion sex-pit?

He felt violated, so much so that his lips were a hair's-breadth away from delivering a rather fiery admonishment of her conduct, when her tone sharply changed once again, her full lips suddenly alight with promises to explain everything, implorations for him to trust her, all the while manoeuvring about the room with the ferocity of a woman possessed. Sylvain was still half-stunned, unsure of whether to admonish her, or to afford her the tiniest sliver of leniency, when the woman flung open a chrome port from the floor, most likely a maintenance hatch, and then dropped the bombshell that, apparently, she was an intelligence officer.

Then, before he could even begin to process that, several things happened at once.

A soft mechanical hiss echoed from behind him, at the same time that he suddenly felt a clammy grip crush into his fingers, his bare hand seized as he was once again yanked forwards, this time half-dragged and half-pushed into the maintenance tube that his companion had just revealed. The hand against his own was burning hot as much as it was cold as stone, Sylvain’s head spinning as Cora’s voice flung whispered pleas at him, begging him to speed up as his larger body crunched into the maintenance hatch, back practically one with the top of the tunnel, whilst his head was squashed down somewhere between his legs. Before he could even think about what had happened, Cora had shoved herself behind him and the hatch was sealed, her legs tangled within his own as he uncomfortably stared at the floor, his mind such a hellish miasma of emotions that he could barely comprehend what had just occurred.

More emotions rattled through Sylvain’s head than he could easily comprehend, but chief amongst them was the sound of a series of dull footsteps above their heads, a confirmation that whatever had entered the room as Cora had shoved him into the hatch, had noticed that they were gone… He swallowed down a shallow breath of nerves, shuddering at the feeling of ice that had enveloped his entire body, shuddering from this unforeseen chill as the space around them pulsed with a fallow blue glow, bathing the pair of them in a baneful light as they waited with baited breath.

As the footsteps continued, Sylvain felt a cool clarity salve his overheating mind, quashing the abundance of different emotion that was roiling through his head, and aiding his overwhelmedness to shrink in the face of cold logic, his genuine horror fading in the face of the life-or-death scenario that he’d suddenly found himself in; he could threat over the fact that he’d just experienced more physical contact than he had since he’d last hugged his own mother, later… And then, in that moment of clarity, Cora sharply dug her heel into the back of his thigh, and had the audacity to shush him for the inadvertent yelp that fled from his lips… Perhaps if she didn’t want him to make any noise, she shouldn’t kick him? Between the heel in his thigh, the phaser digging into his hip, the chest harness that was caught on his combadge and cutting into his back, the fact that he most decidedly wasn’t supposed to bend in this direction, that his entire body still hurt from the last ordeal that he’d been subject to, and the general mental anguish he was feeling, it was nothing short of a miracle that he wasn’t simply screaming.

Instead of obeying his more primal instincts and kicking Cora back in response, he refocused the stinking miasma of his own head into the space around him, attempting to analyse the tube the best he could, with the limited perspective he had, which wasn’t much considering that his cheek was squashed into the floor and his eyes were observing a glowing conduit… But even from that little information, he could hazard a guess that the space around them didn’t serve the same purpose as a jefferies tube… The Savi he had seen thus far had all been at least a foot taller than him, with vastly longer arms and legs, and the tight space that Cora had just bundled them both into, surely wasn’t designed to accommodate one of the creatures...

He wagered that this might well have been a ventilation duct, or perhaps a maintenance tunnel used only by drones or some such automated repair system… From what he’d read in the information that Commander Cross had provided him, he certainly couldn’t imagine a Savi crawling its way through a tube this small.

As the seconds ticked by with naught but the sound of the ragged breathing of the pair, the urgency that had prompted Cora to shush him faded, and before long, her voice had whispered a-thousand echos into the tube around them once again, instructions and recommendations, as if she wasn’t the one who had caught them in this predicament in the first place. A flush of irritation dawned on Sylvain’s face, recalling that he’d been a millisecond away from alerting Commander Leavitt of their situation, and leaving an avenue of diplomacy to their situation… But alas, Cora’s brilliant thinking had got them stuck in a maintenance tube, with the woman bleating at him to move to a location that he could neither see, nor likely move to, at least not without kicking the woman in the face multiple times.

Not that she wouldn’t entirely deserve it… 

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #7 – September 13, 2024, 03:30:22 PM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

“I don’t know how you expect me to move around when I’m curled up like a prawn with you laying on top of my legs!” Sylvain replied with a sharp hiss, his body trembling from a toxic blend of adrenaline, anxiety, discomfort and only slightly tempered fury. He tried to crane his neck enough to see what was ahead of him, rolling his head at a near-impossible angle before he was able to spot the opening in the tunnel a few metres ahead of them, no-doubt the location that Cora was indicating to. “Argh, hang on.” He huffed, anger dimming in the wake of possibly not having to have Cora’s limbs draped across his legs, and deciding to make an effort to move anyway.

He manoeuvred himself as gently as he could manage, but his attempts to flatten himself down enough to be able to straighten his body, resulted in barraging Cora with a salvo of knees, boots and ankles; not that she wasn’t deserving of the barrage. Eventually however, he managed to get into a position that allowed him to straighten up his neck, crawling his way forwards in the tunnel with as much gusto as he had left in him, and making a beeline towards the upcoming opening.

The larger space wasn’t enormous, but it was roomy enough that he could sit up without having to crane his neck, knees tight to his chest as Cora emerged through the opening behind him, the space ignited with the same ghostly-blue glow as the tunnel had been, but doubled in its intensity on account of the larger concentration of tubes that ran around them. The light danced off of the surface of the chrome sheen of the bulkheads, and lent into an almost psychedelic echo of light that danced across the room. Sylvain waited patiently for Cora to straighten herself up, before he defiantly struck a hand to his combadge, keeping eye-contact with her as he did so. Whatever ‘intelligence’ game that Cora was playing, he was certainly not planning on being a party to it any longer.

“Ensign Llewellyn-Kth to Commander Leavitt.” Sylvain spoke quietly, his brows furrowing into a steely expression that he hoped would express how disappointed he was in Cora’s conduct; this was hardly what he wanted from his first interaction with the Commander. “Ensign Llewellyn-Kth to Commander Leavitt?” He repeated, his first message going unanswered, his voice losing a little of his certainty as he did so. After another moment without recognition from the Commander, Sylvain tapped his fingers to his combadge a third time. “Ensign Llewellyn-Kth to anyone on the Theurgy crew, please respond.” A few more agnoising moments passed them by, before Sylvain simply huffed in indignation as he let his hand withdraw, pushing his head back into the bulkhead behind him, something of a scowl blooming across his face.

“Something must be jamming our communications.” He advised Cora, though he considered that she’d probably be overjoyed at such a prospect, given the lengths she’d taken to prevent him from signalling for assistance earlier. He sighed deeply, and tried to prevent a new deluge of emotions rushing into his head in the face of their newest obstacle, shutting his eyes for a moment to collect himself, before glaring at her with venom in his eyes.

“I think you owe me a lot more than a decent explanation.” Sylvain responded to her earlier statement, trying to remain collected even whilst he trembled from the cocktail of unpleasantness that was coursing through his body. “I just want to make it very clear to you, that being ‘with intelligence’, does not give you carte blanche to circumnavigate the chain of command and…” Mid-sentence, Sylvain noticed the soft glow illuminating Cora’s side, distracting his words away from his tongue as the Ensign realised that, secreted against her person, was a piece of Savi tech that she'd evidently stolen from the lab, some sort of datapad by its appearance, her tricorder clamped tightly against its sleek surface and thrumming away with the telltale blinking lights of a data transfer…

“Are you…? Did you…?” Sylvain was speechless as he focussed in on the device, acknowledging that sheer dumb luck wasn’t enough of an excuse to justify how someone in intelligence had ‘happened’ to stumble into acquiring some sort of Savi research tech and having the safe oppertunity to download its data... As the evening’s events began to unravel and reform within his mind, it began to dawn upon him that when he had blacked-out in the Common Area earlier, Cora had been the only person with him, and yet instead of ending up back with the Starfleet crew that were sitting not fifty feet away, both of them had somehow ended up in Savi research quarters… Had she used him as a distraction to get herself in some Savi lab? Had she been the one to release that poison upon him in the first place? Had she just endangered both of their lives in an attempt to get her hands on some Savi tech and make a good first impression to her superiors? Outrage filled Sylvain’s mind as he considered that, when he’d first met her, his mind had been overwhelmed with anxiety and stress, an intense feeling of unease and danger… Evidently, this woman’s intentions had been clear enough from the start.

“I… I can’t…” He was lost for words, swallowing down the flurry of fear and anger that bubbled up in his throat. “If you think there is any excuse that would justify you putting another officer at risk for personal gain, I would love to hear it.” Sylvain exploded at her, keeping his voice low, but his tone sharp as ice. “Because from where I am standing, it looks as though you took advantage of my friendliness, so that you’d have someone to help you out in case your little ‘heist’ went sideways.” He seethed, gesturing pointedly at the Savi item secreted against her side, before wiping at his face with the back of his hand to dislodge the stray tears of anger that had blossomed upon his eyelids.

“And now…” He gestured around them. “You’ve stolen Savi tech, they know that we’re out of bounds, and nobody from the Starfleet crew has any idea that we’re in danger.” His admonishment continued with a painful tone of betrayal upon his voice. He’d accepted her approach in the interest of possibly having a friend aboard, and she’d been intending to betray him from the start. “So there’s now a high likelihood that we’re going to get caught, probably be killed at best, jeopardise the alliance, and put the entire crew aboard the Erudite at risk.”

He blinked away more tears of anger as he spoke, feelings of betrayal and hatred at his own naivety spilling out; of course she had some sort of motive when she approached him, why would anyone go out of their way to try and befriend some Ensign in over-his-head? Either she thought he looked youthful and naive enough that he’d just go along with her crazy schemes without question, or she saw someone with a few muscles and decided that he could take a Savi in a fight… Sylvain was decidedly in neither of those camps.

“Struth, I’m the Chief CONN officer!” He snapped at her, his volume raising a degree. “Even if we get out of this, by some miracle, do you have any idea what sort of repercussions there might be for potentially jeopardising the alliance?” It took everything for Sylvain not to simply slump himself back against the wall in defeat. He was a pilot; he barely ever even went on away missions, let alone whatever twisted attempt at espionage he was currently a party to... The grim reality was that he didn’t have the skills that he’d need to get out of this situation alone, and he, unlike Cora, was enough of a Starfleet officer that he wasn’t going to get himself out of this situation at her expense…

He’d wait until they were safely back aboard the Theurgy before he sought out some repercussions for her to face…

“Right, so whatever ‘decent explanation’ you have, is going to have to wait, because right now, I need to hear your plan for how exactly we’re going to get out of this, because getting caught is not an option for us, or for the rest of our crew.” Sylvain responded grimly, straightening himself up and attempting to look slightly more severe than his tears made him out to be. “Your conduct thus far has been entirely unbefitting a Starfleet officer, so it’s about time that…” Sylvain coughed loudly, immediately stamping his hands over his mouth as he did so, in a better attempt to stifle the noise that erupted from him.

He’d been speaking with such ferocity that he scarcely realised how stagnant the air felt in the tunnels, how exhausted he felt as he attempted to breathe… When Cora had said that it was hard to breathe, he had been too stressed at their predicament to be able to pay attention, but now, he found his mind slipping back into the information that Commander Cross had given him about the Savi, recalling with a dour expression, that the Savi did not breathe a composition of air that was suitable for most other humanoids…

“I’m guessing that you didn’t put enough thought into this little heist, to bring along anything to help us breathe, did you?”

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #8 – September 24, 2024, 09:44:38 PM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

The ‘light-tube’ pulsed eerily all around her. Cora grunted and contorted her body awkwardly in order to right herself once Sylvain managed to do the same, only narrowly missing a boot to her face. The amusement she felt at the scene quickly died as she huffed and crawled out to join him in what she only guessed was some junction or relay area, connected by various other access tubes on every surface. Her head popped out, then panned around, squinting in the oddly unpleasant light. A queasy feeling permeated in her stomach at the weirdly organic appearance of it all – like they were contaminants crawling around in a giant brain – neuron to neuron.

Right. Keep that nonsense to yourself, the analyst snorted mentally. She met Sylvain’s gaze evenly while she settled herself across from him; it wasn’t hard to pick up the tension the Ensign was giving off. Cora didn’t judge him for it; everyone handled stressful situations differently, each by their own strengths and character. He seemed awfully put-off with her, but Cora guessed he was more scared and angry at the situation. The analyst pulled her knees up to her chest and watched him through the tangles of her hair with occasional glances at her feet. When his hails were met with silence, Cora took a deep breath and waited, lips pulled down in a slight frown of guilt, head tilted fractionally to the side. She watched him close his eyes in what could only have been frustration; when they opened, they were hard, angry, and more than a little disappointed.

Her brows flickered together in confusion at first; Cora had to search her memory for what ‘carte blanche’ meant. Is that French, she wondered, then blinked and refocused. It wouldn’t do to get distracted in the midst of what she assumed was a dressing-down – although he had started off with a rather large assumption. The analyst blinked that away for later, resisting the urge to interrupt. Her eyes followed his briefly to the Savi device at her hip and the tricorder there, quietly beeping; she blinked again at what appeared to be an accusation, but the Ensign quite comically seemed to struggle with his words for a moment.
 
Poor bloke isn’t very good at this, Cora frowned and focused on her shoes, then dismissed the thought as thoroughly unfair. He’s probably never been somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be his whole life. That certainly set them apart; Anderson had made a point of throwing her history right at Cora’s face – the good, the bad, the ugly. It was impressive, really…she had no idea Starfleet kept such an eye on her. Of course, she had no idea Starfleet was riven from within either, until he told her and then sent her on this job. Irony abounds.

When he finally found his words again, Cora flinched at the steel in Sylvain’s tone; her brows rose at his assumption of ‘personal gain’, however – mildly insulted at the implication. Her mouth opened to spit a flippant rebuttal but closed just as quickly as his emotional tirade continued. He wasn’t wrong, per se; yes, she’d borrowed the Savi’s PDA. Yes, she hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about her intentions. Yes, she was well aware of the potential consequences of her actions, as well as what might happen if they got caught, as well as the fact that she was responsible for dragging him – literally – into all of it. All that could happen, but it could also not happen, if they played their cards right; Cora guessed the Ensign wasn’t much of a card player.

Yet the analyst was also very aware of the fact that she was following orders, from an authority far beyond his or anyone else aboard the ship, but for all the good that did. It wasn’t as if she could tell him; Intel played their cards close – that just came with the job.

Cora frowned again at his seething exclamation of his own duties; unsure what bearing that had on the situation at hand. It’s not as if she knew he was the Conn chief, after all – but she chocked it up to more emotional outpouring and let it lie, while he continued laying into her. Her head came up at his desire to know what she planned to do, with another reminder that apprehension would not serve anyone’s interest – yes, quite right – Cora nodded, then her brows rose at his additional reprimand regarding her conduct. Well, he wasn’t wrong there either, and there was a very good reason for that, but of course she couldn’t disclose that either. Still, Cora felt a pulse of pleasant pride, knowing she still had the chops to pull it off.

You’ve no idea, she smiled mentally, but betrayed no physical reaction whatsoever – aside from the carefully maintained appearance of a person caught wrong-handed while attempting to do the right thing, albeit in the wrong way. Even that softened with a tilt of Cora’s head at him, followed by a quick gesture to her face and then his own. “Oh! You need to turn on.” The breathing strips – for lack of a better term – that she’d found back in the lab were secured to each of their noses; in the haste of their exit, followed by Sylvain’s…assessment…of the situation, Cora simply hadn’t had the opportunity to activate his. She corrected that immediately, using her own face as a demonstration. Cora got the distinct impression the Ensign didn’t like to be touched; odd, but understandable, she reckoned.

Once that was taken care of, the analyst paused for a few seconds to let him catch his breath and hopefully gather his wits. Fear was understandable, but if they panicked, it would only make things worse, and told him as much, while still trying to keep her tone calm and friendly. “As far as getting caught, I happen to agree, sir – so let’s not do that, alright,” she nodded, then gestured around at the glowing semi-organic mass of conduits that surrounded them. “These lead somewhere, I wager,” Cora shrugged slightly, none the wiser. Her “plan” had been tossed out the airlock the moment the good Ensign collapsed; it was all improvisation and luck now. “Proximity might be jamming our comms; EM interference or material composition, perhaps. Either way, we shouldn’t linger here too long, and we can’t go back the way we came, so our only logical step is forward, eh?” Cora shrugged again, then pulled out the Savi PDA. The transfer was almost done, but didn’t guarantee anything. Her eyes studied it and the display on her tricorder while she ran a hand through the tangled mess of her hair – thinking.

“We know at least one Savi has seen us, yet heard no alarms and haven’t been pursued, not yet anyway,” Cora mused aloud while her fingers tapped out a series of decryption commands. “The lexicon is incomplete, but maybe I can pull up an internal layout…”

A few seconds later, a series of muffled thumps and shouts reverberated from the access tube that led back to the lab.

Specimen release authorized, blinked across the tricorder display.

Cora’s eyes widened as her brows shot up. “Well that doesn’t sound pleasant, does it.” Her head peeked up over the brim of the tunnel to look.

Against all reason, and against all notion of coincidence, the chromed portal only a few meters away decided to buckle at that exact moment. Cora’s jaw opened in disbelief as a fluffy, white-colored mammal waddled into view and sat just within the pulsing glow of the conduit, no larger than a rabbit. She wanted to reach out and squeeze its plushy, fat little body to death. “Well hello there little one,” she cooed, completely taken by it instantly; it was the cutest thing she’d ever seen. Black eyes, insanely innocent, swiveled towards the sound as it took a waddling step. Only then did Cora see the body on the floor behind the creature, oddly deformed; flattened somehow, as if crushed, but unmistakable: it was the Savi researcher, but how? What had happened? What did she do? Cora blinked in confusion, then alarm after the creature squeaked at her – it was a word – not a sound, but a word.

“Y-you heard that, right,” Cora asked Sylvain, with more than a note of concern coloring her voice.

“Moopsy!” The creature squeaked again, as it started off in a waddle straight at them.

“Right, uh, new plan then,” Cora backed away slowly. “Run.”

OOC - que the chase scene music

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #9 – October 12, 2024, 03:09:09 AM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Sylvain’s fingers were still tentatively inspecting the device that had been fastened to his nose, brow furrowing ever tighter, when Cora’s latest choice of words once-again came close to pushing him over the edge... Whatever absurd sense of respect the woman had for the chain of command, certainly couldn’t justify the decision to address a Senior Officer as ‘little one’. He might be young, and perhaps it was true that he wasn’t six feet tall or anything, but he certainly rejected the term ‘little’... His mouth had been a hair’s breadth away from another firm admonishment of the woman’s conduct, his dexterous fingers finally figuring out how to activate the breathing strip upon his nose, when an unexpected third voice joined them in the echoing confines of the tube that had become their hiding place.

It startled him more than he would have expected, a tell-tale indication that he’d perhaps not been as concentrated on Cora’s words as he’d believed, his head snapping up as though he’d been physically jolted from a stupor, eyes darting every-which-way as his brain attempted to re-familiarise itself with his surroundings. His first point of reference was Cora, whom he noted had started backing up towards the passageway they'd not yet explored, evidently content on proceeding without any sort of plan or procedure in mind… It wasn’t as though he was surprised that she appeared to be more of the gung-ho type, just disappointed that she'd not been so receptive of his request for a plan...

With that note of disapproval in his mind however, Sylvain suddenly felt a slither of ice bite into the top of his spine…

Cora’s voice echoed out throughout the tube, asking with no small amount of concern, if he’d heard ‘that’, and he had indeed... However his reply got lost in his throat somewhere as Sylvain’s entire body shifted backwards, hands clumsily reaching for his phaser, as his mind painted harrowing illusions of what it might look like if a team of Savi security agents descended into the tunnel alongside them… He would try diplomacy, of course, but he had a sinking feeling that Cora would be more of a ‘shoot first’ kind of officer… He figured it was best to be prepared for both eventualities.

Thus, it was much to his surprise, and relief, that upon turning towards the awaiting threat, phaser in his clumsy grip, that Cora’s apparent concern was no Savi security party at all… Instead, what presented itself was a chubby little creature, its fur plush and flawlessly white, its body overwhelmingly round and wobbly, with spherical black eyes and little ears that tufted out from the side of its face. It looked as though someone had somehow combined the features of a pinniped, a panna cotta, and a rabbit, with the intention of making it the most unfathomably adorable thing in the world…

That didn’t seem to align with the Savi’s usual motives, but frankly, Sylvain was too overwhelmed by how cute it was, to have any room to care.

“Moopsy!” The creature in front of them squeaked with an adorable little voice, before it began to haphazardly waddle towards them, its entire body wobbling from side to side as its tiny little feet pattered against the deck plating below. If Sylvain had been a holodeck character, his eyes might have transformed themselves into hearts at the sight of it; it was the most precious little thing that he’d seen in his entire life... It reminded him of the time that he’d visited England during his time at the Academy; he’d gone on a tour to see the seal cubs basking on the beaches of the North Sea, flopping around with no care in the world, just little loafs of fur and blubber that caused him literal pain, on account of the tour’s ‘no touching’ rule.

He had wanted to squeeze each and every one…

“Oh my gosh... It’s so cute…” Sylvain whimpered with awe, at exactly the same time that Cora’s voice returned to his ears with a distinctive hiss in its tone, as the word ‘run’ echoed softly in the space around them. The overlap of words delayed him for a few seconds, his head turning quizzically towards the tunnel behind him, shifting his posture to glance at Cora’s disappearing form, when the angle change suddenly revealed to him a somewhat disturbing sight.  Hanging limply down from the access panel that he and Cora had just descended from, was a rather ragged lump. On first glance he thought it was some sort of bundle of damp cloth, before his eyes adjusted to the dimmer lighting, and he saw that said bundle of material, very clearly had a face.

“Moopsy!” The creature echoed as it tottled forwards towards him, its fleshy body thudding down into the deck plating as rolled itself further along, wiggling its little feet in the air above it. It might have been a cute gesture, had it not been accompanied by the sight of the creature stretching its own jaw wider than its own body ought to have accommodated, grotesquely gaping open to reveal an orchestra of enormous gangs jutting out from its gumline...

That, seemed more aligned with the Savi’s agenda.

It perhaps took a second for all of the information to hit him, but when it had, Sylvain shrieked with an almighty burst of panic. He immediately fell backwards as horror gripped at his lungs, suffocating him as the creature seemed to pounce forwards, his own large frame impeding him as he made the most desperate attempt to scramble after Cora, away from whatever adorable monster had just been unleashed into their hiding spot.

Descending onto his hands and knees, Sylvain took off at a breakneck pace, immediately foiled by the phaser that had remained in his tentative grip, throwing his balance off and sending him lurching forwards into a messy tumble. As he fell, his shoulder caught against a valve that jutted out from the wall of the maintenance passage, the conduit erupting with a shower of sparks that boiled against the skin of his back, as his face clouted into the deck plating with a solid thud, arms buried beneath him and entire body tangled within his own limbs.

It was a desperate manoeuvre, but Sylvain flung himself onto his back, using one hand to drag himself backwards whilst his other desperately attempted to aim his phaser at the creature, his eyes softening against his will as he noticed that it had once again returned to the adorable shape it had been previously, lolloping towards him like a tiny little jelly bean that he just wanted to squeeze forever… It softened him enough that his thumb froze against his phaser, delaying him for the second it took for the creature to roll itself forwards once again, its jaw distenting once more as its white fur was rendered purple in the light of the glowing power conduits that surrounded them.

Power conduits…

A cold realisation flooded through his body as his eyes took in the fallow glow of the junction they’d just taken refuge in, realising that he had no way to know what sort of purpose these conduits served… Perhaps they were some redundant subsystem, that would fizzle out and die if he struck them with his phaser… Or, perhaps, they controlled the power-distribution to the propulsion systems, and shooting them would blow out half of the section and leave the Erudite dead in space, unable to reach their goal, and thus causing the death of billions… The only thing that he did know for sure, is that he was a severely under-practised shot…

The creature flung itself upwards with disturbing power, launching itself at him like a missile as he utilised the only means of defence he had remaining to him, flinging the phaser in his hands at the creature as he shielded his face with his arms and embedded all of his hopes in the idea that somehow, this creature wouldn’t kill him… Perhaps they only hunted Savi? Maybe barring their teeth was some kind of friendship ritual? It was a waning hope as he felt an impact into his thigh, a grip against his clothed skin, his eyes clamped shut in a bulwark against tears, as he awaited whatever was to come…

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #10 – October 12, 2024, 03:09:33 AM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

About ten seconds later, very much alive and well, Sylvain tentatively opened his eyes, sheepishly moving his arms away from where they shielded his face, a waterlogged hazel glance flickering down towards where the creature was clamped above his knee, undulating as if trying to swallow, but evidently not achieving its result. It puzzled him. The creature’s fangs had been several inches long, more than enough that they should have pierced through his thigh muscle and possibly hit his bone, yet he scarcely felt any pain at all… He considered that the creature might have had some sort of analgesic venom, though the theory was swiftly disproven when the creature seemed to slide backwards off of him, flopping onto its back with a rather satisfying ‘plap’ sound, no puncture wounds to be seen.

The Ensign straightened himself further, watching as the creature rolled itself back onto its front, trotting its tiny little feet to face his limb once more, its jaw completely distending as it locked eyes on Sylvain's leg, but now void of fangs of any kind… Brows descending further over his confused expression, his gaze moved past the creature that threw itself at his leg once again, and instead drifted further into the junction, looking for any evidence as to what had happened to the rows of fangs that he’d seen not a moment prior… And he didn’t have to work in intelligence to find them, scattered on the floor not far from where the creature had originally bared them at him, nowhere near where he’d flung his phaser…

“Huh?” He vocalised, propping himself up further as he reached forwards, gently putting his hands around the creature’s plump belly and lifting it off of his thigh with ease, trying desperately hard to ignore how ludicrously squishy it was, and failing monumentally in the task. Even for someone as opposed to touch as Sylvain was, the sensation of pressing his fingers against the soft, plush flesh of the creature, was nothing short of euphoric; it was even better than stroking a cat… Though, it became a little easier to move past his overwhelming yearning for squishing, when the creature’s entire face split apart once more, revealing a yawning wide mouth, unusually yellow tongue, and disturbingly bloody gum line…

“Hey Cora, come and look at this?” He called backwards, completely failing to acknowledge how readily the woman had abandoned him, and instead gripped by a robust sense of scientific curiosity that was usually reserved for stellar phenomena; he was hardly a xenobiologist after all… Though, no matter where his curiosity had emerged from, it departed him as swiftly as it had arrived, his entire face swelling up with the unreasonable desire to burst into tears, as the little creature in his hands closed its mouth once again, its own eyes welling up with a heartbreaking deluge of its own tears…

“Moopsy…”

Sylvain didn’t think he had ever heard a noise so sorrowful in his entire life…

“Oh gosh, it’s okay little guy, it’s okay…” Sylvain immediately cooed, hugging the creature softly against him as his own heart seemed to shatter within his chest, any care that this creature had been trying to kill him not a minute prior, forgotten. “I’ll look after you, you don’t need to be afraid right now, it’s okay, you're safe, don’t worry, it’s okay…” He continued to barrage the creature with words of reassurance, conscious that he ought to get some sort of scan of its anatomy, in order to try and establish how he could actually look after it.

The creature wriggled placidly in his grip, not making any particular effort to escape his hands, whilst Sylvain carefully drew his thumb and forefinger away from holding it, in order to get a grip on the zip that hung softly against the top of his uniform jacket. Slowly, as to not startle the creature he unzipped his jacket a little way, before making a thoroughly ridiculous attempt at manoeuvring the creature so that its chunky body would wedged inside his jacket, whilst trying hard to keep its head away from the material. It took a moment, and it was perhaps the most absurdly stupid thing he had done in his entire life, but he succeeded, consequences be damned…

“There you go, nice and safe…” Sylvain’s cooing words continued, looking down at the creature's little head as it nestled in the V shape of his uniform jacket, its body prevented from slipping lower by the combat harness that rested under his chest. Confident that the creature was relatively secure, the Ensign's now free hands reached for his tricorder, pale fingers spidering across its cold surface so that he could make an effort to scan the creature, mentally trying to reassure himself that he’d probably have had a premonition if the thing was going to kill him; that was usually what happened, at least...

Frankly, he knew it was absurd. He just didn't seem to care...

It might have been the fact that he was still light-headed from the smell that he’d been subject to in the corridor, or perhaps it was the lingering remnants of the fact that he’d crashed his head into a solid metal bulkhead… It could have been the lubricant that the Savi had used to wedge the tube down his throat, perhaps he was allergic to it in some way? Or maybe inhaling the Savi’s atmosphere in such a confined space had addled him. Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that he was assigned to a ship that was on an apparent suicide mission, having had to abandon his entire life at the drop of a hat and travel across half of the quadrant, with no idea what their plan actually was, and was now spending his possible last-day-alive, crawling through tunnels in a restricted area of a ship belonging to an advanced and somewhat hostile alien species, all because the only friend he'd tried to make had immediately lied to him...

Hell, it was probably a combination of all of those things, blended with the unfathomable cuteness of the little creature that was now squashed flush against his chest…

Either way, the Starfleet way was to try and help other beings in distress, and he wasn’t going to let his first ‘mission’ as a member of the Theurgy crew, disregard that ideal… Plus, he was fairly sure that the Prime Directive didn’t apply in circumstances where the being in question was already being held hostage by an alien species with technology far more advanced than the Federation’s, so he was all in the clear in that capacity too…

At least, that was what he told himself as he lifted the tricorder up, and started scanning the mournful little creature that was wobbling against his chest.

“Mooooooopsy… Moooopsyyyyyyyyy….”

If Cora gave him any grief about his desire to help such a poor innocent little creature, she had to be one of the infested... Kidnapping the Chief CONN Officer and taking him into a hostile area was one thing, but not wanting to help the squishy little bundle of heart-melting cuteness pressed against his chest, was nothing short of unforgivable...

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #11 – October 22, 2024, 07:34:39 PM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

Sylvain's shriek of horror prompted Cora's; in that second, all the carefully controlled panic and fear she felt exploded free. She couldn’t take her eyes off the threat of death-by-cuteness as she backed away in a panic until her back slammed into something solid. Her hands felt behind her for a way out, blindly groping until she found something, anything, to get away. No, no no no, nooooo I don’t like it! Noooo I don’t like it!!! That was all Cora could think as she backed away, intent on survival, at the mercy of what her senses told her and what instinct demanded; she watched in horror as the Ensign fell, scrambled, crawled. The creature's stupidly adorable mouth yawned wide, full of impossibly long fangs. In the panicked ruckus, the analyst shouted to Sylvain over his own gasps of fear, telling him the obvious, but utterly unable to anything remotely helpful.

“Get up! Watch out, watch out! Shoot it – shoot it – bloody shoot it!”

Even as the words left her mouth in fear-induced mania, she was trying to pull her rear out of the ridiculously small service duct that her misfiring brain had judged to be a suitable hiding place. Somehow she’d wedged herself in nearly hip deep, leaving her bent over, arms and legs kicking and pinwheeling uselessly with a stream of hissed curses at her predicament. Too little, too late. Cold realization dawned: she was going to die thanks to her fat arse getting stuck in a tube, eaten alive by something that should not exist.

The white ball of fluff launched itself at Sylvain, and her jaw dropped in muted disbelief as he – against all reason – chose to throw a perfectly serviceable weapon at the predatory blur of muderous fuzz, which missed miserably. She’d never seen anything move so fast, certainly nothing built like a damned squishy ball of fur! It latched itself right onto his leg, and Cora covered her face with a scream of despair and terror. It was over, he was dead, and she'd soon be next, without ever taking the time to properly apologize for getting him into all of it.

In the silence that reigned, Cora could hear it; slurping, suckling, feeding.

When Sylvain called out, the analyst screamed again – that same start-stop squeak of alarm, not a shriek like the one he’d vocalized earlier – and promptly uncovered her face. She couldn’t understand how he was alive, nor why he sounded so…confused? Curious? Surely this was the time to get away from the thing, yes?! Cora scrambled to free herself with a series of muttered, incoherent grumbles; fear overridden with renewed hope that they might just live to find a way out of there. After another second or two, the analyst finally managed to free her rear and stumbled to her feet, only to freeze in hesitation, looking like she was caught in the middle of a minefield with no idea which way to go.

She couldn’t fathom why Sylvain wasn’t running and screaming, given the Ensign's jittery and easily spooked reactions thus far (the man practically jumped out of his skin at everything!) For a moment, her mind conjured the possibility that the creature had somehow entranced him or the poor bloke had simply frozen in fear response – but then she watched with even higher alarm as he actually picked the damn thing up!

“Are you mad?!” The intel analyst hissed under her breath. Didn’t he see the thing’s teeth? It called out again in that childish coo, sounding even more cute and loveable than before, even though all sense told her it was just a mechanism to lure its prey in for easy slaughter. Its mouth stretched wide again, and a sound escaped her throat before she could help it, another high pitched squeak of fear and panic, like the beginning of a scream that was abruptly silenced. “It’s gotten in your head! It’s…it’s…,” she rambled off a dozen possible explanations for his behavior, each one growing more absurd than the last, to include bio-formed nanites invading his neurological system, pheromone contagion, or visual hypnotic suggestion.

Then she saw the fangs, scattered on the deck, and fell silent, and realized that Sylvain wasn’t listening to a word she said. He was too enraptured with comforting the creature…the…Moopsy. Cora huffed, took several deep breaths, then gave them as wide a berth as she could to investigate the discarded…teeth. Her eyes stayed locked on the Moopsy as she moved, hands out, ready to bat the thing out of the air if it launched at her or die trying.

"Nice Moopsy...dont eat me...dont eat me..."

Her eyes widened as Sylvain actually stuffed the thing in his jacket, while she picked up one of the fangs. It was…sickly looking, rotten and discolored, coated in a thin film of what could only be saliva, or venom. Her tricorder beeped as she drew it out and scanned it. “Osseous potator, but…the DNA sequences are different. Altered. There’s a degenerative enzyme in here and…oh, no,” Cora cursed, dropped the fang, and fumbled for the Savi PDA. Holding both devices, her thumbs coded in commands rapidly as she stood and paced.“We uh…might have a problem here,” the analyst muttered to herself.

“Experiment 712-Omnicron; biological purgation initiative, designation Code-White, subject vector translation to host bioform highly adaptive,  data indicative to self-replication after consumption of nearly limitless indigenous vertebrate species. Minor gene-conditioning successfully limits consumption parameters to acceptable gestational period to enable controlled population growth while achieving desirable extermination of host bioforms. Successful feeding/growth/breeding cycle experimental data archived. Proceeding to mass-genetic alteration phase,” Cora read. “This…is from his notes. The…Savi, I think,” her head tilted to the lumpy mass of de-boned flesh back down the tube. “Its…it sounds like they’re trying to…weaponize it,” she nodded to the white ball of fluff peaking out of the Ensign’s jacket.

“We…who are these people?! Why would we ever ally ourselves with them? We…we cant just let them do this, can we?” The analyst shook her head at Sylvain, then waved the Savi PDA at him. “This says the gene-therapy center is up one level, holding hundreds of vats – each one could already be active, turning that cute little bone sucker into a biological weapon of mass annihilation.” Cora flapped her arms, incredulously. “Well that’s just rich, isn’t it? The blazes do we do about it?”

Her face shifted to outraged concern into a grimace of worry as she watched the Moopsy snuggle up to Sylvain’s neck and chest, suckling away at the entire side of the Ensign’s neck. It’s drool had already discolored the man’s red undershirt.

“That’s going to leave a lovely hickey if you don’t stop it,” Cora pointed out cheekily.

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #12 – October 22, 2024, 11:06:06 PM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ]

“What’s that about potatoes?” Sylvain asked with a somewhat bewildered expression, his attempts to turn his head to look in Cora’s direction being somewhat impeded by the Moopsy that had suddenly made a rather energised attempt to chow-down upon Sylvain’s neck. That, and the sudden, diabolical, craving that emerged in his gut, a desperate yearning to stretch his own mouth that wide, around a plate of hot fish and chips. “No… No…” He chided the creature, attempting to peel its gummy maw away from the sensitive skin on his neck, growing ever-more conscious that perhaps stuffing the animal into his shirt hadn’t been the most prudent course of action. “I’m not food, please…” His complaints continued, one hand battling with the creature’s attempts to suckle the life out of him, whilst the other continued attempting to scan the Moopsy with his tricorder, all the while trying to pay more attention to Cora’s commentary regarding potatoes…

And mentally, he was very much trying to repress the thought of how much slobber was now soaking into the red material of his undershirt.

Cora’s words didn’t exactly fill the Ensign with any great sense of relief. From what the woman was describing, the data she was reading out from the PDA that she’d pilfered, the Savi appeared to have conducted some sort of extreme genetic engineering on the Moopsy that Sylvain was attempting to peel away from his throat… He managed to steal a glance at Cora’s padd, and the few sentences he managed to get through before the Moopsy had resumed its chomp upon his flesh, hadn’t sounded good… An expedited gestational period? Degenerative dental enzymes? The evidence strongly indicated that the Savi were transforming the poor creatures into a biologically enhanced weapon of mass destruction, one that would leave minimal environmental damage, nor evidence, given their penchant for digesting bone matter, before starving to death after the dental enzyme had gotten to work and caused premature tooth loss…

“That’s barbaric…” The Ensign recoiled as he spoke, an expression of equal parts horror and disgust painted upon his face, his temperament, for perhaps the first time, in full agreement with Cora’s stance. “I know we’re desperate for allies… But this is… It’s just…” He found himself at a loss for words. “What’s to stop them from transporting a thousand of these genetically enhanced creatures onto a Federation space station? Or Earth? Or Vulcan or Betazed?” He thought of his Mother, of Starfleet Academy, of the seals basking upon the beaches of the North Sea… The Parasites might wipe out everything if the crew of the Theurgy failed at their grander mission, but what was to stop the Savi doing the same if he and Cora ignored this very obvious threat... “With the Savi cloaking technology, by the time anyone knew what was happening, it would already be too late to stop it… It would be one thing if the Savi were engineering them to combat Borg or something, but doing it with- no! Stop it!” Sylvain’s sentence became detached as the Moopsy that had, for a moment, placated itself with batting its paw at the collar of Sylvain’s jacket, returned to attempting to feast upon his neck.

Worst of all, Cora seemed to find it amusing.

Sylvain returned his hand to the Moopsy’s diabolically squishy thorax, cradling its underbelly within his palm, before yoinking the creature off from his neck once more, gritting his teeth as he gave its squashy body a firm tug. The pull was enough force to break the suction against his pale skin, which, as Cora had so disturbingly commented, would probably leave a mark, a glorious souvenir of a mission to bring back to the Theurgy. Assuming he survived, of course… The motion did have an unintended side-effect however, which Sylvain only realised as he watched the Moopsy’s entire body flop into an arc that flung ropes of saliva outwards across the maintenance tube, thankfully, in a trajectory that curved away from him…

He was certainthat there was a word for it, when, at the end of the motion, a healthy rope of Moopsy spittle hung precariously from Cora’s chin, a second decorating the side of her clearly painstakingly maintained hair… Sylvain had to bite his lip to stop an uncharacteristic laugh from boiling out of his throat. He believed that Humans tended to call such a series of events, karma.

“I know I just berated you for getting us into this predicament, but... You’re not wrong, wanting to put a stop to this…” Sylvain affirmed Cora’s earlier statement, once he’d gotten control over his amusement wracked body, and the rather feeble remainders of his sanity had returned to the forefront of his mind. “But, even just one level up… That’s a long way…” He thought of how many Savi there would be on a vessel as massive as the Erudite. “And if we get caught, it could jeopardise the alliance even further; they could take retaliation against everyone on the ship…” The risks were astronomical… But that didn’t mean that Sylvain was comfortable not doing anything about the Savi’s genocidal payload.

The Ensign’s brow furrowed in thought as he weighed up he and Cora’s options… On one hand, they could attempt to get back to the rest of their crew, inform Commander Leavitt... That would be the Starfleet approved course of action, but the Ensign couldn't help but doubt if it would accomplish anything; he didn't expect that the Commander had the negotiating power to prevent the Savi from dabbling in genocide… On the other hand, he and Cora could make an attempt to reach the aforementioned gene-therapy centre, but even if they made it there, and that was a big ‘if’, what would it achieve? They didn’t have any gear or equipment on them that would allow them to put a stop to the Savi operations, and even if they did, it would hardly be subtle… The cogs continued to whirr within Sylvain’s mind,  set to the soundtrack of Cora attempting to scrape Moopsy saliva off of her, his neck and right collarbone absolutely sodden with drool, to the point that the Ensign figured that his first port of call ought to be finding an alternative mode of travel for the Moopsy…

He couldn’t save them all, but perhaps he could get this one away from the Savi at least.

“Moopsy…” A forlorn little noise squeeked out of the creature’s mouth as Sylvain pondered such topics.

“Yeah, I know bud…” He empathised with the squishy little creature nestled within his palm, looking down at his body in the hopes of spotting something that might have worked as an effective Moopsy transportation device. The only thing that came to mind was the small side-pouch that was mounted upon the hip of his combat harness, a small velcro bag that contained a couple of emergency tools for use in field operations; some emergency rations, a locator beacon, a wrist mounted illumination device… He wagered that such things would fit in his pockets comfortably enough…

“What do you think it can eat now, given its lack of teeth and such?” Sylvain queried aloud to Cora, changing the subject to better prevent his mind from spiraling into a pit of despair, his free hand removing the contents of the combat pouch rapidly, dumping the items onto the floor of the maintenance hatch when the Moopsy began making an attempt at devouring his wrist. “There you go bud, nice and snug…” The Ensign continued as he manoeuvred the creature into his hip-pouch, strapping the velcro down against its chunky body, confident that it was secure enough, without being too-tight on the gelatinous little blob. “We really should give it a name too, it feel’s rude calling it, ‘it’, all the time…” Sylvain began the arduous task of collecting the items he’d dumped on the floor of the tube, and made a haphazard effort to return them to his pockets.

“Yoghurt? That’s got a high calcium content right? As something it can eat, not a name…” Sylvain’s idle postulation on what to feed a toothless Moopsy, was mostly to keep his mind distracted from the harrowing reality of their predicament… “I know you mentioned potatoes earlier, but I don’t see how that would work…” He glanced down at the squishy white head that had popped out from underneath the velcro flap of the pouch, it’s enormous eyes once again doing things to Sylvain’s heart that caused him both physical, and emotional, pain. “Maybe as a name?” He pondered orally, whilst mentally, his mind fought upon a battleground made up of the insane circumstances that he and Cora had found themselves in.

They were already on a mission that had been described multiple times, as suicide, and yet, every passing hour seemed to add weight to their shoulders. Not only were he and Cora stranded within an unauthorised part of the Erudite, possibly to be blamed for the death of one of their researchers, but now they also had to contend with the knowledge that they’d just uncovered a genetically engineered bioweapon designed to eradicate entire planets, conscious that, in reality, there was little that they could do to stop it.

“Perhaps the replicators can create some sort of bone broth, I’m sure there has to be some sort of bone-based Klingon delicacy in the Federation database, right?” His mind continued to tick as he babbled about yoghurt and potatoes, hands busy with the task of stuffing the former contents of his tactical pouch back into his pockets, trying valiantly to avoid the Moopsy-head that was poking out of said pouch, which was attempting to gum at his limbs as they passed by. His mind was still flickering between his conversation about Moopsy-friendly cuisine, the reality of their circumstances, the fact that Cora had started talking about potatoes, and the Moopsy now clamped to his hip, quite a concoction of subjects, when Sylvain’s fingers brushed against something that made him freeze.

A transport enhancer…

“Hey…” It was as if all the cogs and levers he’d imagined within his mind had suddenly lined up into a symposium of perfect symphony, because, as if by magic, Sylvain had an idea… An absolutely insane, career-ending, likely-suicidal, idea… But an idea nonetheless. He might have gone as far as to label it, a 'Theurgy-level' idea. “...I don’t suppose that Intelligence posting means you’re competent with hacking, does it?” Sylvain turned to the woman, probably sounding like a lunatic after making such an abrupt transmission between bone-based cuisine and electronic espionage, before holding the transport enhancers towards her, a cold sweat prickling on the back of his neck… He realised, in quite a heart-pounding revelation, that he was about to suggest that the pair do the most insane thing he’d ever done in his life. “Because I bet there’s a few Savi on the Hobus Station that would find the Moopsies just as cute as we did…”

“Moopsy!” The little voice yapped up from the pouch upon his side, and though it was impossible, the timing suggested that it was in agreement. With a rather confused expression pulling at his lips, the Yathho hybrid glanced back up towards Cora with a face that was somewhere between vague confidence, and absolute hysteria… He reckoned that the only reason he hadn’t yet had a psionic-induced breakdown, was because his mind was so bloody full of subjects, that his precognitive receptors weren’t able to function; he’d probably have a migraine for a week after this. He couldn't even fathom where such a brazen idea had come from; it certainly wasn't a scheme he'd developed based on data or analysis... It was like it just popped out of thin air and landed on his lap, glowing like a latinum bar. It was mad. It almost certainly violated about eighteen Starfleet codes. Yet, he couldn't get the necessity of such a plan out of his head...

“Well, it looks like Potato agrees… What do you say Petty Officer Davidson? Fancy getting a bioweapon out of the hands of a technologically advanced species with questionable morals?”

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #13 – October 28, 2024, 06:47:46 AM

[PO2 Cora Davison | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite] Attn: @TWilkins

Her head tilted at his first question with absolute confusion. Potatoes? What?  But then it clicked; the scientific names she'd used. Cora's mouth opened to explain and clarify as Sylvain attempted to placate and remove the Moopsy from his neck, only for him to share his thoughts on what they had discovered. The analyst blinked in response, a tad surprised but relieved that he agreed; the added speculation (which she hadn't even considered) only added to her worry, and frankly, her outrage at the entire affair. Granted, they only had the stolen journal of a single Savi researcher, who may or may not have been performing said research alone or under some manner of supervision – but there was more than enough actionable evidence at hand.

Cora stood, frozen with fear at the implications alone – not to mention the moral and ethical wrongness of their so-called ‘allies’. What else are the Savi capable of if they can cross so many lines of morality? Breeding a genetically altered creature into a biological weapon might just be the least of our worries. What if they –

Her thoughts were instantly derailed by something wet and sticky splattering across the entire side of her face. “Ngh,” Cora grunted, one eye closed on instinct as she shook visibly, unsure what to do. "Eeeew," she whined, her hands froze raised up, fingers fanned out. It was dripping off her chin, and cooling quickly, like snot or…The first gag hit her as a silent protestation of her stomach, which really didn’t help her situation at all; Cora’s mouth flooded with acid-laced saliva and opened in a mute heave – the same reflex action she suffered brushing her teeth sometimes when she managed to distract herself and brush too deep. Once the first reflex passed, Cora, without thinking, licked her lips and swallowed.

Oh – no!

She shook herself in panic and started swiping the viscous, green-tinted fluid from her face; determined not to deal with the fact that she’d just ingested saliva from a bone-drinking, genetically modified apex predator that just ate a Savi researcher – then had spent the last several minutes trying to suckle through Sylvain’s skin. Don’t throw up. Don’t do it. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen, IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, Cora repeated to herself as she flung the drool off her hands onto the floor and pulsing conduits. Her jacket was unzipped and pulled up to wipe off more with a grimace, as the Ensign wondered what they might feed the thing that just slimed her.

Cora shot him an incredulous look – Really? – it said, as the man suggested that they should name it, then suggested yogurt as a high calcium substitute for bones. Even without a specific scientific education in that field, Cora doubted it would work – however, Sylvain rendered the notion moot before she could audibly respond.  Again with the potatoes? The analyst rolled her eyes as she attempted to comb the worst of the slime out of her hair with a grimace. She couldn’t get the taste out of her mouth, and the more she tried to pull out of her hair, the more it smeared into her curly locks.

“Uhh, yeah, its common enough, sure," Cora grunted a reply to his query about bone broth, “but...we don’t know enough about it’s digestive system to –“ Sylvain shot up suddenly, faster than she was prepared; the sudden movement caused her to jerk back in response with an alarmed sqeak. “Sorry – sorry,” Cora flinched, shook herself, as he talked. Her nerves were fraying, what with all the…developments, so much so that Cora didn’t fully follow his line of reasoning.

“I’m sorry – hacking? What d’you – oh,” her head tilted at the device, waiting for Sylvain to continue. She frowned at his very odd phrasing, not sure what he was getting on about; from what she understood, Savi had no interest in – ohhhh...

Cora blinked rapidly, processing the possibilities. The analyst cleared her throat quietly with another head tilt at him. “To be clear – and, please stop me if I’m wrong – but…it sounds like you’re suggesting we…use the…,” her hand gestured to the creature – Moopsy – Potatoe – whatever. “Them, on the Savi? And how does that make us any better than them, sir?”

Cora's hands found her hips. Yes, she had done questionable things do get the job done; her moral compass wasn’t always a luxury to have, nor did it always point to true north, but she had her limits. If that was his plan, then she had an obligation to point her objections – which, to be fair – were slim compared to the potential havoc the Savi could cause by unleashing the Potatoes – damn it – the Moopsies – on an entire world or worlds.

She waved his response aside, it was a rhetorical question anyway.

“It doesn’t – but if it keeps these creatures from the exploitation that they have in mind, I can live with that. Actually pulling it off is another matter entirely,” Cora sighed and consulted the PDA again. “We know where the center is. We just need to get there…,” she frowned, concentrating as her fingers tapped rapidly. “This’d be a lot easier with a working terminal,” Cora grumbled to herself, oblivious to the fact that she was pacing away and back to him, past and back again. Each time she passed by, the Moopsy squirmed in the corner of her eye, prompting a deeper frown as she skidding away from it. The enhancer was clamped onto the PDA with a snap, promptly powering up.

“The Savi transporters are crazy advanced. I can’t even begin to understand the physics, but a system is just a system. If I can gain access, even for a single action, I can ride their system using our badges into their buffers,” she murmured aloud, fingers tapping faster and faster as she spoke. “Wait – wait I almost got it….almost…there!”

Cora grabbed Sylvain’s arm just as they both vanished in an instantaneous wink of light…

…And appeared inside a transparent tank of slimy yellow fluid. Cora released a stream of bubbles in a muffled scream of alarm and hit the button again, her free hand clamped tight around Sylvain’s bicep as they vanished again...

…And reappeared, dripping foul liquid, in the middle of some sort of hangar, lined with row upon row of sleek, shiny craft, directly behind a group of four towering Savi. Cora hit the button as they all turned, and the pair disappeared again, leaving only two puddles behind…

…and they appeared again, in a cramped wardrobe of some sort, lined with various outfits and lined with dozens of odd looking devices – almost medicinal looking. Cora frowned and grimaced at what appeared to be restraint harnesses built into the walls. "Ohh, hell no," the analyst hissed as she hit the button yet again…

The pair popped into existence in a vast chamber, clean and whole. Cora blinked and twitched, feeling nauseous at what they’d just seen and suffered through, but otherwise alright, until she realized where they were: Cora and Sylvain, with little drool-slinger on his hip, stood surrounded by dozens, hundreds, of bubbling stasis pods; each one held a cluster of somnolent white balls of fur, each one riddled with tiny silver tubes drilled into their adorable little bodies.

“I think we found the potatoes,” Cora whispered nervously, with a glance at him. "So...right - what now, then," she asked with a shrug.

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #14 – November 17, 2024, 10:05:54 AM

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Maintenance Tube | Biological Laboratory Quintus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion

Cora’s question hit Sylvain like a deluge of cold water, his mouth opening and closing in a somewhat stupefied state, as the woman put her hands on her hips, her objection ringing clear in the cramped space of the access tube. It was true, that his crudely constructed plan hadn’t exactly gone through the rigorous stages of processing that Sylvain’s decisions usually did, something he attributed to the borderline delirium he was experiencing, but still, he found it hard to stomach the words that were coming out of Cora’s mouth… Surely she was being facetious, some clever sarcastic comment that he hadn’t quite grasped? His confusion transitioned into a brittle tension that hung around them, his concern growing under the weight of Cora’s expression, its heft hanging in the air for a few moments, before she turned her attention back to the Savi PDA in her hands, and left the boy to flounder.

Sylvain swallowed around a rather dry inhale, ears ringing with the sound of Cora’s murmuring and the clacking of her fingers tapping against the screen of the stolen PDA… Still, the woman’s words bounded between his ears as Sylvain stood rigidly, his face contorted in rather mortifying patterns of guilt. Perhaps he had been a trifle hasty in voicing such a ludicrous plan, after all, he was well aware of how utterly insane it was… But still, it wasn’t so disturbing as to put him on the same level as the Savi they’d just been so openly criticising… Right?

The Ensign’s idea had been born of two things; a somewhat revenant sense of rage over the discovery of a living bioweapon, and a watery and somewhat deluded attempt to shoehorn his mindset into alignment with the rest of the Theurgy’s crew. Sylvain knew his strengths and weaknesses. He was an Ensign who’d spent his entire career chasing renegades and ghosts at the Talarian border, he knew that he was out of his depth aboard the Theurgy, heading a department aboard a vessel that had survived insurmountable odds more times than Sylvain had been in battle… Admiral Anderson had told him the truth about the Theurgy’s endeavours long before he’d come aboard, the USS Calamity, the Theta Eridani IV incident, Starbase 84, the conflict in the Azure Nebula… He’d have been intimidated to try a holodeck programme with such content, let alone reality…

Yet, he was here now, and he was conscious that there was a certain amount of reallocation he would need to apply to his mindset, in order to fit-in aboard the Theurgy, much less survive. He’d been contemplating as much back in the Common Area, before Cora had roped him into the mess he was now embroiled within… And that reminder that Cora was the source of all of their current problems, helped the Ensign return to a state in where he could think a little more clearly about the connotations of her questioning. How did using the genetically modified Moopsy against the Hobus Station, make them better than the Savi? Cora seemed sure that it didn’t, and that stung coming from the woman who had so easily endangered both of their lives, but Sylvain was certain that it was a sound tactical decision, ethical, even…

He just had to work out how.

And his mind was just beginning to formulate such a conclusion, when a hand crunched his arm with surprising force, and he felt that familiar weightless twist of a transport. Unfortunately for Sylvain, he was part way through exclaiming his displeasure at being manhandled once again, so when the pair of them arrived inside a tank of viscous chartreuse fluid, his mouth became flooded with the most rancid tasting gunk imaginable. He clamped his eyes shut for a moment, blocking away the liquid as it burned against his retina, feeling sensations of warmth and coolness buffet his body in quick succession, lost in a miasma of transport sensations as Cora apparently dumped them on each and every deck of the Erudite...

Still, he kept his eyes clamped tightly shut, conscious that there was slime coating against his eye sockets, and that he was transporting far too rapidly to have a chance to cuff it away with his sleeve… He made a little progress with each jump however, and had managed to swipe the sludgy liquid away from his right eye when he heard Cora’s voice call out in exclamation, his eye opening just in time to see the inside of some sort of Savi wardrobe, shiny and glossy uniforms lined neatly amidst what he assumed to be dressing aids, before his surroundings were gone again. He wondered why Cora was so concerned at the insides of a Savi closet?

It took a moment before his new environment was clear to him, his open eye observing the new space as Sylvain materialised within it, dozens upon dozens of stasis pods, each one containing clusters of little white bodies, flailing around somewhat lackadaisicaly as he and Cora stood in relative shock. She spoke first, Sylvain politely but somewhat jarringly twisting his own bicep out of the grip of Cora's fingers, a lasting impression of heat and discomfort broiling through his arm, his chest, a sharp feeling that made him shiver uncontrollably... Though, that might've been the slime he was coated in. It was almost a welcome distraction however, almost, as it shrunk in comparison to the weight of horror that suddenly descended onto his chest, at the realisation of just how many Moopsy seemed to be occupying the room with them... 

What now indeed.

“There must be hundreds of them in here…” Sylvain breathed somewhat tenuously, between the gagging noises fleeing his lips as he tried to cough the remaining residue from Cora’s transport adventure out of his mouth… He was willing as much saliva as possible to coat the inside of his cheeks as his eyes scanned around their newer space and took it all in, hands producing a crumpled tissue from his pocket as he spat a mouthful of disturbingly yellow phlegm into it; his mouth still tasted foul. However, even the taste could not distract him from the macabre surroundings for long, and the Engisn quickly redoubled his efforts, attempting to search for a solution to their rapidly-expanding problem, and finding nothing; there were certainly more Moopsies than his slapdash plan to beam them onto the Hobus Station could accommodate for…

The Ensign still couldn’t help but turn to Cora for a moment, brow somewhat furrowed in doubt.

“The Savi have to be breeding these Moopsy with the intention of using them... They could wipe out an entire species if they wanted to, they could hit Earth, or Vulcan, or Denobula..." A densly populated planet such as Denobula, wouldn't stand a chance...  He stepped forwards to peer through the row of tanks next to them, heart shrinking in dismay as he saw yet more rows of Moopsy bobbing gently within their tubes, their white bodies contrasting with the metallic pinpricks that ran along their spines. “And the Savi on the Hobus Station are trying to detonate a star; Romulus would be gone within a heartbeat... That’s both sets of Savi with planet-destroying potential at their fingertips…” Sylvain moved slowly as he spoke, his pilot mind trying to calculate an estimate of how many Moopsies might have been in the room with them, quickly establishing that there were probably close to eight-hundred of them… More than his transporter plan would entertain…

“I understand that my suggestion of transporting the Moopsies aboard the Hobus Station was pretty radical… Probably worse-much worse than radical...” He paused his somewhat stammering speech, as the Moopsy floating in the nearest tank seemed to notice him, his lips curling into something sombre as he watched the round little creature start to waddle in his direction, face bearing the same wide-eyed stare that Potato had given him back in the maintenance shaft... “But you can’t say that it’s safe to leave this sort of weapon in the Savi’s hands… And I know beaming them aboard the Hobus Station would be somewhat controversial, but the chaos might buy some time for our boarding teams to do their jobs, keep the Savi distracted and keep our people safe...” He knew that he was clutching at straws to justify what was possibly a pretty heinous plan in reality, he wasn't even sure why he was so set on it to begin with; it was totally out of character for him... But Sylvain knew that he couldn't justify any course of action that led them to do nothing.

He didn't want the victims of the Erudite's next genocide to be on his hands...

“Moopsy…” A little voice echoed somberly down from his side, forcing Sylvain to tear his gaze away from the Moopsy that had locked eyes with him from inside the tank.

“Believe me Cora, I am so out of my depth with this, it’s unimaginable. I wish that we had the luxury of going to Commander Leavitt and letting him make the call over what to do about this, but we just don’t…” Sylvain breathed slowly, as his eyes scanned the room, his head filled with the large-eyed stares of a dozen Moopsy as he did so, prompting him to direct his gaze to the floor. “If we don’t do something now, we probably won’t get another chance to, Commander Leavitt won’t be able to take any action without revealing that we’ve been snooping, and that would jeopardise our alliance, so…” Sylvain began speaking increasingly fast as his thoughts began to overlap within his head. “It means that we're on our own right now, and we've got to make a call...”

The Ensign's thoughts felt numb for a moment, trembling with a distressing cocktail of adrenaline and downright terror running through his veins, as he approached a nearby panel, staring at it somewhat unhelpfully, as if its Savi-specific interface would suddenly conform with the Starfleet standard if he glared at it for long enough. Perhaps they could rig something up through the Savi’s own transporter systems? At the very least they could try and delete the data that the Savi had recorded on their genetic modification process; that would slow them down at least. He glanced mournfully out at the rows of tanks that stretched out before them, considering that the most humane thing to do might be to disable the power, make it look like an accident, to kill all of the Moopsies himself without involving anyone else.

“Moopsy…” The weakening little voice bubbled up from his side, twisting Sylvain’s heart into a knot. He couldn’t do it himself… Even if they were dangerous creatures, genetically modified to be the perfect genocidal tool, he couldn’t bring himself to actively kill them, to pull the proverbial trigger and end the lives of eight-hundred-odd little creatures… He supposed that was hypocritical, considering that his first thought was to beam them aboard the Hobus Station, which would no doubt involve even more deaths. No, it wasn't hypocritical; the Savi aboard the Hobus Station were actively plotting the extermination of entire star-systems, genocide on a planetary scale! The Moopsies hadn't asked to be turned into a weapon, he couldn't just murder them with his own hands...

He just couldn’t do it.

“Cora-a…” He stumbled, steeling himself up, repositioning himself as a figure of authority in their circumstances, rather than a snivelling, indecisive wreck. “Do you think you could hack into the Savi’s systems and at least erase the data concerning the genetic modifications? Perhaps that will set them back…” He turned back to the console before him, considering their options, before he flopped his hands down to his sides with a sigh of defeat.

No.

This couldn’t be about pride, or rank, or authority; it didn’t matter that he had something to prove, something he was afraid of... Realistically, he was a pilot. This was Cora’s expertise, not his. He couldn't do it alone, and more importantly, he shouldn't have to. Cora had gotten them into the situation, and she would have to shoulder the burden of whatever decision was made; he couldn't unanimously decide something for the both of them, not without consulting her expertise on the matter at least. He might have been the senior officer, but he wasn't a tyrant. 

“Look, this is your area of expertise Cora.” He turned back towards her, running a hand up through his hair and grimacing as his fingers peeled thick and sludgy waves through his usually soft fringe. “We need to do something, I know that much. But, I’m a pilot…” Sylvain took a step towards her, flicking his slime-clad hand to the side and splattering gunk onto the floor. “What are our options here, realistically?” He paused once more, straightening up as he looked around at the tanks surrounding them a final time. “What can we do that will stop the Savi using these Moopsy as weapons, without jeprodising our alliance, or impeding our efforts to stop the Hobus Station from eviscerating half the sector?“

Re: Ch 4: S [Day 1 | 1810 hrs] A Friend Indeed...

Reply #15 – July 22, 2025, 11:27:34 PM

[ PO2 Cora Davison | Specemin Storage Bay Catullus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ] @Dumedion @TWilkins

The analyst busied herself with lookout duty while the Ensign wandered, his thoughts spoken aloud over the gentle hum of the breeding tanks. Her eyes and head snapped this way and that, hoping they were alone; so far, that appeared to be the case, but there was no way either of them could know how much longer their luck would hold.

She knew she'd wounded him, but that hadn’t been her intent; Cora justified her guilt with the fact that Sylvain was reevaluating his plan and the potential consequences, as any officer worth his salt would do. She listened, and waited, and watched; as he continued, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride for him. This was indeed, quite the pickle, and even though nothing had worked out the way she had intended, Cora was glad they had made it this far.
 
When asked for options, she moved to stand beside him at the console. The Savi PDA slotted in without a sound as her eyes scanned the holo-projected interface, then flicked down to her PADD and back. When she spoke, it was barely more than a whisper, but held an edge to it that demanded his attention and belied her age and appearance.

“In my experience, doing something is always better than doing nothing. Using these creatures against the Scions may blur the lines of what some would consider morally ethical, but as you say, they plan to destroy a star and murder half of two quadrants. What purpose do ethics serve in defeat? None. A good officer will take what he knows and improvise, adapt, and overcome, by any means necessary to accomplish the mission; a great one will constantly incorporate every scrap of Intel available and reevaluate that plan on the fly – while making it look easy. That, is leadership, Mr. Llewellyn-Kth. It doesn’t matter how many pips are on your collar, or what job you hold; leaders aren’t born or trained – they are molded by both and tempered by experience.”

She talked while she worked, attempting to gain access to the vast database of research and development files collated into the console before them. Beyond  ‘Experiment 712-Omnicron’ – or Code-White – the analyst discovered a multitude of other sketchy-sounding projects existed as each one flashed briefly on the screens. The Savi seemed obsessed with genetic manipulation, management, and augmentation. They also seemed to hold no moral compass in their pursuit of mastery; going so far to collect samples and experiment on hundreds of thousands of species throughout the galaxy. Cora paused to take a breath, to steady herself then  nodded and continued.

“Sometimes there isn’t a clean exit. Sometimes you have to live with the lesser evil, to do the most good. Sometimes, to save the many, you have to kill a piece of yourself,” Cora glanced to meet his eyes, knowing all too well what he struggled with. “I needed you to understand what you’re proposing. I never said I disagreed,” she finished kindly.
 
A brow arched at his expression; he was obviously shocked at her sudden slip in appearance and tone, but the analyst merely shrugged. “I’m not at liberty to explain, Ensign,” Cora smirked playfully. “Just trust me, please.”

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Specemin Storage Bay Catullus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ]

With an involuntary eye twitch, Sylvain tilted his head in Cora’s direction, brows locked into a somewhat heavy furrow, whilst his lips twisted in a rather pained looking grimace. He had to admit, he couldn’t help but feel somewhat baffled by her change in demeanor, perhaps somewhat perturbed as well… It was hardly the time or the place for such antics; hadn’t she already put him through enough? 

First, she, probably rightfully, criticised his absurdly reckless and unethical idea to deploy what was, for all intents and purposes, a bioweapon... Now, she was validating it, and saying she agreed with him all along? Sylvain raised a hand to rub at his temple for a moment, somewhat frazzled by the breadth of the confusion she had just hurtled in his direction; what right did she have to test him?

Then again, considering how he’d taken the events of the past few hours, she might not have been entirely wrong for doing so… He’d been acting like a lunatic since arriving aboard the Theurgy; throwing PADDs at commanding officers, singing lewd songs in the corridors, making a fool out of himself in conversations, getting himself poisoned… Though, he supposed that he couldn’t be blamed for taking the brunt of that last one, that was Cora’s doing; he partially wondered if it had been an accident at all… Perhaps she saw a naive looking Ensign and thought that he’d make a great distraction…

Of all the things his psionic abilities inflicted upon him, he’d have thought that they might’ve had the decency to warn him about being poisoned…

“Commander Cross told me the same thing…” Sylvain admitted with a somewhat fallow tone, turning away from Cora’s position and returning his gaze back to the creatures bobbing in the tank before him, trapped inside a glass cylinder no bigger than a turbolift… It was cruel, to keep them like this… Poor things. “He said that we’d all find our non-negotiables…” He breathed somewhat raggedly as he spoke, his calm words juxtaposed to the anxiety running through his head. As he spoke, his hand reached down into his pocket, where he’d stored the transport enhancer that had prompted his grand idea in the first place; what he was about to do violated even more laws than they’d already broken, and he couldn’t blame Cora for this one… “If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said that doing this was a disgusting misuse of Starfleet resources, a violation of pretty much every code of conduct…”

He paused, seeing his reflection in the dark glass of the tank, as his fingers pressed into the surface of the transport enhancer…

“And I don’t, not, think that now… I just…” He paused, wracking his brain for some words that justified his actions not to Cora, but to himself. “The nature of this mission falls a little outside of Starfleet Standard operating procedures; it's our responsibility to uphold Starfleet Principles, but, I don't see away out of this without doing something that goes against Starfleet conduct...” All the best officers he’d studied at the academy had bent the Prime Directive at one point or another; fewer had deployed bioweapons of course, but the situation before him was a rather sterling example of damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t…

They didn’t have the grounds to negotiate with the Savi on the matter. If he released the Moopsy now, the mission would be put into jeopardy. And if he never released them at all, they would be used as templates to create a bioweapon that could be used to cause mass extinctions across an untold number of inhabited planets… Using them against the Infested solved the latter issue, and at least the Moopsy wouldn’t spend their final days of life stuck inside a cage; they’d go out in something of a blaze of glory, and possibly save the Romulan Empire as they did so…

Veiling the issue in logic, wasn't as comforting as he'd hoped it would be…

The truth was, Sylvain was scared. The Parasites, being hunted by Starfleet, what danger the people he cared about could be in… His mind was plagued with images of horror and calamity, and within his mind's eye, it was impossible to tell if they were simply manifestations of his fears, or they were premonitions of things to come. If there was any chance that they were the latter, he was prepared to do anything he could to make sure that the Theurgy came out on top, even if that meant weaponising creatures against their will… He was never supposed to be in a situation like this, but he made the choice that he believed gave them the best chance of success; that was their goal after all. It was a sick justification, and Sylvain felt that in the twist that knotted through his guts at the thought, but transporting a tank full of Moopsy onto the Hobus Station could very well give them the edge they needed to win in the next fight, and if he was being brutally honest with himself, he knew that they would need every advantage they could muster.

“Besides, if we don’t succeed tomorrow, the Romulans lose their homeworld, and the Parasites get one step closer to destroying life as we know it…” Sylvain paused, crouching down and making his best effort to attempt to busy his mind with the act of attaching the transport enhancer to the base of the tank, to distract his more untoward thoughts, to slow the thrumming of nausea in his gut. “We still need our principles, but I guess everything gets a little greyer when the fate of existence is at stake…” He tried to play it off as a joke, but he wagered that the choke in his voice conveyed his fear far easier than he would have liked. “If we fail, everyone dies, right?”

That last note made his watery attempt at a joke fall even flatter than he would have liked.

“I’m sure there’s some Vulcan philosophy that would be comforting right now, the needs of the many, or something? I’ll be sure to check the cultural database if we survive tomorrow…” Sylvain swallowed around a dry mouth as he spoke, checking that the transport enhancer was secured to the storage tank in the most discreet spot he could manage, activating it with the switch upon its base. He had no doubt that the Savi would find it eventually, but perhaps the Erudite would take enough damage in the battle for it to pass as debris… Standing straight and glancing around the room, Sylvain winced at the thought of how many Moopsy would die if the room got struck by a torpedo...

Maybe using them as weapons was what they would want? He couldn’t pretend to know the mind of a Moopsy, but a chance to save the galaxy seemed like a kinder fate than to get immolated in captivity… Plus, he doubted any of them would turn down a meal, based on his experience with Potato.

He glanced back towards Cora, hesitantly scanning the doors to the room as he did so, an assurance to himself that the pair of them hadn’t been interrupted… She was still busying herself in her PADD as he approached, his bootsteps somewhat squelchy on the floor of the room, on account of the slime that the pair of them had been dripping everywhere; they were lucky that the stuff hadn’t been caustic… Though that luck didn’t prevent him from wishing for a sonic shower…

The boy thought upon Cora’s words as he approached, her coy revelation that she’d been ‘testing’ him, that she wasn’t ‘at liberty’ to explain, that she needed him to trust her… His brows furrowed particularly at that last thought. She’d gotten them into this mess, and whilst she was far better equipped to get them out of it than he himself was, that didn’t mean he trusted her…

“I don’t think I can trust you Cora.” He admitted somewhat honestly, after a silence hung between the pair for a few moments. “I can appreciate that you’re uniquely equipped to get us out of this mess, far more so than I am at least… But I also can’t forget that you roped me into this under false pretenses; I was just being friendly, and because of your actions, my life has been in danger for a significant part of the afternoon… Thanks for that, by the way…” Sarcasm wasn’t usually Sylvain’s chosen flavour, but it slipped out in the heat of the moment. He didn’t especially regret it.

“But, I'm not ignorant enough to ignore the fact that f you hadn’t done what you did, the Savi would have the means of weaponising the Moopsy and we’d have been none the wiser; thanks to you, we might be able to put a stop to it, or at least slow them down in their plans…” He paused, glancing back up towards the tanks that stretched out before them, eyes narrowing on the one that silently hummed with the presence of his transport enhancer. “We’ve also gained a sick, but probably effective asset for the battle to come-” A squeak from his side made him glance down again, a pair of wide black eyes looking up at him from his waist. “...and of course, Potato would have probably starved in those maintenance tubes too; we’ve saved one life at least.”

“Moopsy!”

“So as I say, I’m sorry, but don’t think I can trust you as a person right now…” He paused for a beat, a pang of unease settling in his chest at the revelation; spending two years of his childhood and much of his social development on Betazed, sometimes prompted him to overstate the value of honesty… “However, I do trust your expertise and competence to get us out of this, you’re qualified, and you’ve done an… Good… Job so far.” He glanced back towards her with a somewhat twisted expression, though given the circumstances, considering that he was coated with slime and gravely uncomfortable, it was about as neutral as he could muster. “How’s the Savi system looking anyway? Anything we can do to halt their operation?” He briefly thought back to Commander Cross, before adding… “Anything in there that might be of use to the Theurgy? Say, about the Savi’s genetic modification technology?”

If they had already broken about every rule under the book, they might as well bend a few more in the interest of helping their crew. Right?

[ PO2 Cora Davison | Specemin Storage Bay Catullus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ]

A brow cocked up while she worked, without a glance in his direction. “I've been downloading everything I can this whole time - which is compartmentalized behind several encrypted firewalls I am struggling to penetrate – while systematically attacking their command and control capabilities. While my efforts will undoubtedly draw their attention, I think it will at least slow them down long enough for us to egress back to the Hab decks.” Here Cora paused to lift the opposite shoulder nonchalantly. “Short of cutting the power distribution nodes, which would eliminate the test subjects but certainly reveal our presence, I don't see any alternative from here.”

The analyst tilted her head, eyes narrowed in concentration as her fingers swept over the console. Even with her mind and focus fully engaged, she didn't miss the hurt in his voice or the sarcasm. “Trust? Listen, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't intend for things to turn out the way they did, but, yes, I used you. Yes, it was premeditated - but the mission parameters I was given left me with limited options. I needed to create the situation, and yes, I roped you into it. The only thing I regret about that is the fact that I couldn't be honest with you about it, for reasons already established; primarily, your own inability to adapt to the reality of your situation – and I'm not talking about right now – I'm talking about the Theurgy in general.”

The Savi PDA bleeped in a double chime, indicating its massive database was filled to capacity; Cora sighed and shook her head with a murmured curse, then met Sylvain’s eyes. “I looked at you and I saw a young officer too afraid of his own shadow, but brave enough to stand and set an example. Someone who needed to be broken out of his shell of doubts, pulled out of his head, and given a chance to meet someone utterly opposite of everything he thought Starfleet could be. So, you don't trust me? Fine. I'm not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to trust that I am sorry for what I got you into, and to trust yourself,” she handed him the PDA. “Get this to Leavitt, or better, Cross. Tell them it's what King asked for - well, not all of it, but it's better than what we had before, and the best I can do without blowing us all out of the water.”

Her fingers danced across the console once again, uploading every cyber-weapon at her disposal from the PADD still synced into the Savi network. “I cloned the incubation centers' subroutines into that as well, so we'll know if they activate the birthing chambers. All we need now is a way to transport them, then get the hell out of here.”

The console screen before her glitched with static-filled pixelations, reset, then stuttered back to seemingly functionality. Cora nodded and leaned her head back with a sigh. “It'll be a miracle if any of that holds for more than an hour, “ she muttered, then blew the hair out of her face and faced Sylvain fully. “We should get gone now. Any ideas, or should we continue to work things out between us?”

[ Ensign Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Specemin Storage Bay Catullus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ]

Sylvain accepted the PDA with a somewhat frazzled expression, eyes wide like a rabbit as the cool surface of the device pushed against his chest, almost slipping from his grip for a second as Cora’s hands pulled away from it. He tried to speak, but he found his throat uncomfortably dry, his mouth closing again like a fish out of water as he tried to process what the woman had told him, without allowing himself to dwell too long on any of her assessments. Unfortunately, he probably failed it before she’d even finished speaking; he’d never been great at hiding his facial expressions… Truth be told, he hadn’t often found the need to. It wasn’t his most well practiced skill.

“Okay.” He pivoted the conversation with a nod, a nod that was a little too enthusiastic, making a shallow attempt to bypass the rest of Cora’s words, and instead focus on the mission. “I think keeping our presence minimized in terms of what the Savi notice is the best approach, so…” He glanced back over the bay of storage tanks with a saddened expression. “... I think we’ve done all we can for the Moopsy; hopefully we’ll at least spare any more of them from suffering the same fate…” Not to mention the planets that might have suffered if the Savi continued to engineer their weapon of mass destruction; Cora had actually done a pretty sterling job…

“In regards to the information…” He glanced back down to the PDA in his hands, awkward in his grip as though he were holding an irradiated badger, or something equally unfavourable… He tried to tuck it more casually under his arm, but truth be told, it felt wrong to hold the thing; why had she given it to him anyway? It was her mission, surely it should be her responsibility to deliver it? Realistically, the whole situation was a miasma of conflicting thoughts for Sylvain. On one hand, Cora had gotten him into this mess, roped him into her agenda, tricked him into this game of hers… On the other hand, she seemed to be implying that the whole thing had been for his own good; to help him grow, adapt, conform to how life on the Theurgy might need to be… Neither felt like a good option, from his perspective; why did she feel the need to tutor him as though he was still a Cadet?

Yet still, she did seem at least a little apologetic about it all. Though, that Cora could say that she was sorry for what she had gotten him into, in the same breath as she told him that he looked as though he was afraid of his own shadow, felt a little bit backhanded, if he did say so himself…

“Look, I know that you probably think I’m totally inadequate, completely unsuitable to be in charge of anything on a mission this important, let alone a member of the Senior Staff…” The words flew out of his mouth before he really knew what he was saying, a tone of voice as unsure as it was defiant… He didn’t think that Cora was making any attempt to belittle him, but the stress and unfamiliarity of the situation had forced him into a defensive mindset over the matter; he didn’t want her to consider him as some pet project… And truth be told, a part of what she was saying was hitting closer to his heart than he expected she realised…

He wasn’t afraid of his own shadow; he was afraid that he didn’t deserve his commission…

“But I am good at my job.” He said it for his own benefit, as much as Cora’s… His fear that he’d cheated his way through Starfleet Academy was the reason why he’d rejected far-higher calibre assignments, and opted for a deputy role on the Bowman, not because he couldn’t do his job, but that he didn’t have the confidence in his own abilities… But that had changed now; he hoped. “I had some of the highest scores in my class for astrophysics, astrotheory, subspace geometry, stellar cartography, fractal calculus, I passed all of my flight simulations at the top of my class…” He barely paused for a short sip of air before he continued on his somewhat tirade.

“I am good at my job; I don’t need ‘testing’. Put me behind the helm of a Starship, and you’ll find that I’m a pretty competent pilot, to say the least, not to mention my abilities as a navigator, maybe even an astrophysicist if push comes to shove…” He paused again, his cheeks flushed as he gulped in another breath of air. “What I’m not, is an espionage specialist, so if this ‘King’ individual isn’t satisfied with the information you’ve gotten him, I will be sure to include in my log, all the details on where exactly he can shove it…” He blinked hard all of a sudden, and found a sudden wave of sheepishness come over him… “U-unless this ‘King’ is one of our superior officers of course; that... That wouldn’t be appropriate…”

Sylvain felt himself straighten up on instinct, as if he was preparing for a disciplinary hearing, shoulders back and chin up, tense enough that he wasn’t far off snapping his own tendons. Such an emotional outburst was unprofessional…

“Regardless, back to the matter at hand…” He cleared his throat somewhat gruffly. “If you don’t want to take the information to Commander Cross, I’ll be sure to do it on your behalf. In the meantime…” Sylvain glanced around them once again, the unfamiliar space almost feeling like a second home at this stage; they’d vastly overstayed their welcome. “As I mentioned, my skill set isn’t well grounded in espionage, so unless there are any spatial anomalies to analyse, I’m afraid getting us out of this mess is probably going to have to fall on your shoulders…”

[ PO2 Cora Davison | Specemin Storage Bay Catullus | Aft Tertiary Research Deck | Erudite ]

As the Chief Conn officer spoke, the analyst turned to him with a neutral expression but listened attentively; her face betrayed no outward reaction, yet inwardly, Cora couldn’t help but feel a sense of…something. Pride, perhaps? Encouragement? Maybe a mix of both? Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to curl the corner of her lips and set the faintest of glints to her eyes - even though she was well aware such an emotive response, if recognized, could be misinterpreted - she was, after all, only human. To hear Sylvain speak with such confidence and assurance of his abilities, in defense of everything that had transpired, inspired her. I’d hug you, Cora smiled inwardly at him, but you’d probably only get weirded out by it.

Once he had finished, the analyst nodded as her hands clasped behind her back.

“My wants are irrelevant, Mr. Llewellyn-Kth. My mission parameters state my presence here is a need-to-know basis, and I’ve jeopardized that enough by involving you. Once Commander Cross receives that data and your debrief, I’m reasonably confident he will connect the dots enough to determine for himself who and what I am, as well as who sent me; however, I must leave that deduction up to him.” She offered the slightest of shrugs. “For what it's worth though, I never doubted your capabilities, Ensign; you wouldn’t be here if you weren't the best suited for it.”

That said, Cora returned her attention to their surroundings to sweep the area as she continued. The next bit was, as some would say, the tricky part - if Sylvain took it badly, she wanted to make sure they were still alone. Nothing moved but the twitching balls of fur in their growth tanks.

“As far as getting us out, well,” her eyes returned to him with a guilty smile, “here, catch.” Cora tossed a small, silver and gold device to the Ensign, one he would recognize instantly. She watched him fumble with the combadge, accidently knocking it an impressive distance in his disastrous attempt to catch it. He moved to pick it up from the floor while she explained her plan. “Sleight of hand while you were out of it, I’m afraid. I hope in time you’ll forgive me, but it isn’t necessary; in my line of work, forgiveness is rarer than an apology, after all. What you choose to do is up to you, but I would recommend direct beam-out back to the staging area rather than calling for help. I can make my own way back from here discreetly,” she stated with a nod to the vast viewport against the far end of the hall.

Cora was already backing away when she offered him a warm departing smile.

“I’m glad I got to know you, Mr. Llewellyn-Kth. Perhaps the next time we meet won't involve quite as much theatricality and subterfuge. One can only hope, right?”

- Fin