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21
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 03 [ 1330hrs ] Back Channel Operations
Last post by Hans Applegate -
[PO2 Knox | Docking Ring 2 - Halkor Anchorage]
Atten: Pertinent Writers @Ellen Fitz @Nesota Kynnovan @Eirual @Krajin

Everyone seemed to be going to Docking Ring 3. Knox realized that he had not been told where to go. He was neither science, medical, or engineering. Knox was intelligence, so he decided that Cross wanted him to use his own intelligence and choose where to go. So, Knox had chosen to go to docking ring 2. It was in the middle and he could quickly get to 1 or 3 with equal speed if the need arose. But he could get to a problem on ring 2 the quickest…since that is where he would already be. Also, if he ran into trouble, he would not have to wait on people to come all the way across the station to render aid should he need help carrying something large if he made a big purchase. Yep, it all made sense to him. Knox was intelligent because he was intelligent! With this happy realization, Knox looked at the shopping list on his PADD. Then he realized he had no idea what half the stuff listed even was. But, it would be a wasted shopping trip if he didn't buy something! Putting the PADD away, Knox smiled absently as he walked among the solids pretending to be one of them enjoying his leisure day out. The air was stale, the gravity slightly off, and there was so much to see.

Soon Knox found what he was looking for. Armor. It looked a little worn. But it was still functional. It didn’t look like the exosuits on the Theurgy, but it was nifty none the less. Thick heavy protection across the chest and back. Large joints at the shoulders. Thick upper arms. But it was missing parts covering the forearms and one leg was missing as well.

“How much for the suit?” Knox asked the Tellarite female at the booth as he gestured toward the object of his affection.

“1,000 credits. Firm.” She said gruffly.

“Minus the missing arms and leg of course. I’ll buy it for 500. Along with the user’s manual too.” Knox fired back.

“You must be the most ignorant son of an Orian dancer! This thing is old and has no user manual and it is 1,000 because it is missing the arms and leg!” Now visibly hostile Tellarite woman stood up from her chair behind the table full of her wares for sale. Her round belly now showing she was very pregnant.

Knox then remembered that Tellarites loved to insult each other. With negotiations now in full swing he decided to attempt a few insults to see if his briefing was correct. The worst that could happen was that he simply have to leave without the armor. “If you didn’t eat so much and get so fat you wouldn’t need 1,000 credits to feed yourself each day!” 

“You horrible and hideous human! If you had half a brain you would know that 1,000 credits is a steep discount for a Gorn Mark VIII combat exosuit.” The woman crossed her arms.

Knox bent down and picked up a loose piece of deck plating. “I’ll give you an incomplete anchorage for 1,000 credits. It is missing a few pieces though.”

“That is a piece of scrap.” She yelled, drawing the attention of two more Tellarites, that approached the heavy negotiations Knox had started.

“You are a piece of scrap! I guess you are what you eat. Your teeth aren't even filed into points and your shirt doesn't fully cover your belly fat. You have holes in your trousers. Not to mention, most of the stuff you are selling is scratched up. Looks like you have been so hungry you have been gnawing on your own merchandise. Please uncross your eyes when you are looking at me you wrinkle faced waste of recycled air. And just know that I am not trying to look at your tits, it is just hard to maintain eye contact with someone that has that unsightly of a unibrow. Now I say we swap my piece of an anchorage for your piece of an exosuit, or you take the 500 credits I offered.” Knox finished, wondering what was going to happen next.
22
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0800 hrs ] Maybe By Next Tuesday
Last post by joshs1000 -
CWO2 Brask | Main Engineering | Vector 3 | Deck 25 | USS Theurgy]
Attn. @RyeTanker @rae @Ellen Fitz @Brutus

Brask whistled as stood, hands on his hips, in the middle of the cavernous engineering space, looking up at the warp core.

“That’s a big sucker,” he murmured to himself.

Theurgy had one of the most powerful matter-antimatter reactors in the fleet, tricyclic injection, which she really didn’t even need, producing a massive output that allowed for an extremely stable warp field and the ability to power just about anything the ship needed. Brask, who had been following the ship’s history to some extent since launch, had always found it curious that such a vessel seemed to be designed for war and not exploration. Her platform was perfect for it, similar to the old Galaxy Class, but the minds at Starfleet Command seemed to think better, though if the crew of this ship was to be believed some, most, or even all the brass was being controlled by some evil parasite. Brask honestly had no real thoughts on the matter, while he was doubtful of their story, it was quite apparent that the few crewmembers he had met since the ship docked at the Starbase were not like the bloodthirsty pirates that FNN made them seem like. Probably just a way to get people to watch the news, he never particularly liked FNN much, too human.

He glanced around the room to see if there were any senior engineers about, per Vance’s orders he needed to speak with them first before removing anything, but first he wanted to get his own look at some of this new tech himself before somebody started running interference.

“Let’s get started I guess.”

Out came the tricorder and within minutes Brask was scanning the equipment around the core, definitely not Starfleet issue even at a glance. While he had been assigned several other things by Vance to look over, he was most curious about the quantum slipstream drive. The only information Brask could get his hands on was the reports from Voyager’s brief use of one and Starfleet’s experiments based on the Voyager reports, but a real working drive was another matter entirely. The actual “drive” was located elsewhere, a surprisingly decentralized system considering its complexity, but the meat of what made it work came from the warp core.

What was attached to the core was familiar, but far more complex than what Voyager had built, a series of systems that looked like they were either bolted directly to the core or amalgamated into the system itself. The Tellarite was particularly interested in the benamite crystals being used, they were difficult to synthesize, at least in Starfleet, but he guessed the aliens, called the Savians or something like that, must have found a way to produce it quickly or had more stable crystals that lasted far longer. It was this area that Starfleet ran into the most trouble during its own QSD tests.


Standard high energy plasma would pass through the crystals changing the energy frequency into the lower Q-band, also called the “quantum range”, to then be directed at a specific modulation out of the main deflector, adjusted to focus on a quantum field, thus allowing the ship to penetrate the quantum barrier utilizing its warp engines. What was produced was great speed far in excess of anything a warp engine could produce but at the same, or even less, power consumption as a standard warp engine required. The issue that Voyager and Starfleet faced however, due in no small part to the benamite crystals, was a dangerous phase variance or wandering variance caused by the decay of the crystals that physically altered their crystalline structure on the atomic level and thus their energy frequency would shift or “wander” across the Q-band in unpredictable ways. Thus far, Starfleet’s attempts to solve the problem that do not rely on constant monitoring and manual adjustment, have failed. Initial attempts were to design a phase compensator but any design capable of counteracting the phase variance degraded the power output by such a degree that a quantum barrier could not be penetrated, however there is still promise in this area. Another avenue involved extensive programming of the navigational computer, but the time it took to scan, analyze, calculate, and adjust by the computer were too slow to properly keep up with the variance on top of compounding errors that would grow exponentially worse over time. What remained was the benamite itself with huge efforts being put forward to find better and more refined synthesizing techniques, but even with the level of research going into the process, as with most crystallography, results were unpredictable. The expectation was at least a century before a real breakthrough occurred.

And thus as Brask waved his tricorder over the benamite containment unit, attached to the plasma output conduits, did the Tellarite feel some pressure to get results as the future of Starfleet, wounded in no small part by this very ship, may lay in the alien device before him. Just how to get inside? The thing was locked up tight and it was unlikely he would get help from the Theurgy engineers. Just as the Starbase personnel were treating them with suspicion, they were in turn not acting much better.

Brask ran his stubby fingers through his beard as he pondered how to get inside, at least just to open the casing to get a scan of the crystals and their energy couplings. He turned on his heel back to his tools resting on the floor behind him as he continued to think.
23
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Hirek tr'Aimne | Surface, then Below | Barrier Reef, Uuluma Chain | Romulus ] Attn: @Dumedion

The buoy ran nose-down and every third swell put him under, and each time he came up he found the blue smear again — thirty meters ahead, riding high on the inflatables, lighting the water around her for twenty meters in every direction like an offering laid out on a table. Four strikes of a wrench and a lost thumbnail to kill her beacon, and the suit had simply taken over the job.

The skiff came out of the rain low enough that he heard it before he saw it, the engine note wrong for the weather, a man flying past the edge of what the airframe would tolerate because he had been given a reason to. The floods swept the surf and found her. The disruptors came green and twinned, and the sea between them went to steam and closed, and then again, both of them put where she was and nowhere at all near him.

The cold came up through his chest ahead of anything he could have called a thought. The pilot had two returns in the water and had taken the one that could not shoot back — the lit one, spinning on a strap, soft — while Hirek rode thirty meters off in the dark with nothing on him that glowed, and the man had not troubled to sweep the beam across him even once.

The flare pistol was in the buoy's chest pocket. The buoy had exactly one ambition and that ambition was forward. He got the seal open with the heel of his right hand, and the swell took him as the flap came free and the pistol came out with it, turning, already going — and he caught it by the barrel with two fingers, underwater, with the strap hauling him bodily away from his own grip. He brought it in against his sternum and held it there while the sea went over him and let go, trusting the strap of the buoy to keep him tethered while he was dragged behind, clear to shoot.

He came up into a trough with the skiff swinging back across the wave-tops, and he pointed the muzzle where the sound was and fired. The first cartridge went up orange and kept going, and the wind took it sideways, and the whole face of the sea lit copper for a second and a half before the rain swallowed it. The second he sent flat into the underside of the hull and watched it skitter off the plating and drop burning into the water, and the skiff hauled its nose up and away with the floods sweeping wide.

Here. Look here, you gutless little clerk. There are two of us.

He twisted on the strap with the pistol still in his fist to see whether she was clear of the vector.

The blue was gone. She had gone under eleven times already and come back eleven times, and he held through a full swell waiting on the twelfth, and the piece of ocean where she had been stayed as black as every other piece of it. He put the pistol down the front of his tunic, dumped the air out of his chest in one long controlled push, and hauled himself hand over hand up the buoy's body to the drag release.

Green light. Silt and storm-churn and the strobe of her suit somewhere below him, going down, at a rate no failure of equipment produced. He saw the arm before he saw the rest. It came out of the dark beneath her in a slow unhurried coil, thick as his thigh at the root and tapering to thin around her ankle, and above it the mantle spread and settled and spread again, three meters of it, the skin running through the colors it keeps for the dark.

Hru'savrei. The big ones came up off the outer wall when a storm turned the reef over and made the hunting easy, and they took whatever the water handed them, and a woman on a strap being dragged across the labyrinth with her lights on was the most interesting thing that had happened on this reef in four hundred years.

He went down the last four meters with the drag full open and the knife already out. The first cut he put into the arm holding her ankle, above the suckers, and it was like sawing a hawser. The savrei kept its grip and turned, bringing the whole of itself around onto the thing that had cut it, and the second arm came across his back and found his shoulder and set — and every sucker on it had a rim, and every rim had spines, and they went in through the tunic in a row like stitching.

They went over together. Her, him, the creature, all of it rolling down the face of the reef with the two buoys pulling in different directions and the weed coming off the rock in sheets and winding into everything that passed. He got his knees into the mantle and his left hand into the skin above the eye — huge, horizontal, watching him without alarm — and worked the blade in and pulled it toward himself with both hands.

The arm on her ankle whipped. She went into the reef floor shoulder-first with her arm above her head, and he felt the crack of it come through the water into his teeth, and there was nothing to be done about it then. The savrei let her go and put everything it had into him. He was dragged eleven meters, twelve, the spines opening a second row down his forearm and a third across the outside of his thigh, and he kept hold of the knife. He found the mantle wall by feel and went through it. Something gave, and a great deal of cold black ink came with it, and the world ended entirely — and in that blindness the arms came off him one at a time, and the pressure went, and a wall of displaced water shoved him backward into a coral head and left him there.

He hung in it with his chest locked down and his ears screaming and no notion at all of which way the surface lay. His own blood was in the water, and hers was too, and the weed, and enough of the savrei's to bring every other thing on this reef to the table inside the minute.

Hirek's body jerked as the buoy found the surface and sped towards it, dragging Hirek behind it. Without him controlling it, the buoy beached itself with a finesse of speeding violence and the beach put Hirek down on his face, and the backwash tried for him again, but he got a forearm under himself and let it go past.

South. He knew it before he lifted his head, off the run of the swell against his ribs and the way the sand shelved under his palm — this stretch shoaled shallow and long, and the water came in fat and tired, which made it the southern hook, and everything they had been carried toward lay north of him. Somewhere.

He took the spines out of his forearm with his teeth, because his right hand had stopped closing properly and the left was slower than he had instructed it to be, and he made a note of the slowness. The treeline stood forty meters up a slope of wet black sand. He hugged it and went north at what he was calling a run, though it was anything but that.

He had covered perhaps three hundred meters when the skiff came back over the water and opened up on the jungle: a long chewing sweep of green fire walked back and forth across the canopy over the stretch where a wounded woman told to go twenty meters in and stop would be lying, and the trees came apart, and the rain came down through the new holes in white columns.

He dropped the buoy in the sand, and the pistol came out of his tunic with a hand that had to be told twice. He walked out into the open, into the wash of the floods, and put the third cartridge up in a flat orange arc across the skiff's bow, and had the fourth away before the first had finished burning.

The guns stopped, and the skiff came around off the treeline and dropped its nose toward the beach, and Hirek stood in the rain with his arms going heavy from the shoulders down and understood, with considerable professional interest, that he was about to keel over. His knees went first. The sand came up warm against his cheek, and the last thing that obeyed him was his eyes, and he put them north up the beach and kept them there, seeing without the ability to blink.

[ …Meanwhile, Agent Raja | Skid-flyer, inbound | Southern Beach ]

The wind nearly killed him on the way down. He came in crabbed forty degrees into it with the port thruster cycling in and out of authority, and the skiff hit the wet sand hard enough to bury the starboard skid to the strut and slew him around, and he sat with his hands shaking on the yoke until they stopped.

Two flares. The man had walked into the open and thrown fire at an armed aircraft to pull the guns off the treeline, and had gone down in the doing of it, and Raja had been in this work long enough to understand what that said about whatever was still up there in the trees. Still, his target was the Romulan and out in the open, his sensors let him know that was precisely who now lay on the beach before him.

He took the disruptor rifle off the bulkhead rack and checked the charge twice, put the sidearm on his hip, and clipped the restraint cuffs where he could reach them one-handed. The instruction was neutralize and deliver. A note about Meira and the boys had been appended, with an image attached in case he proved slow.

He popped the hatch and the storm came in and took the breath out of his mouth. The body lay eighty meters up the sand, face-down, one arm out ahead of it, not moving. Raja brought the rifle up and started walking.
24
Parallel Universes - "What if?" / Re: [2376] Entanglement of Chaos
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[Ens. Enyd Isolde Madsen | Casino | Cardassia Prime] ATTN: @RyeTanker

Zark's voice came up through the bone behind Enyd's ear while both her arms were still over her head.

Ten seconds of it, compressed and unpunctuated, arriving at the exact moment her spine finished its arch. Green woman. Two men. A drink somewhere quieter. An arrangement Zark had already built and was now confessing at speed, the way you confess a thing you'd do again. Enyd smirked. They weren't so different. Opportunity required offerings.

Four dead on a colony near Trill. Ryzit had said it at the bar, and Enyd had filed every word of it while pretending to admire the ceiling. A bad security recording, ten minutes out from the scene. A face on it. And the face wanted to buy her a drink.

Enyd's hips did not stop moving. She noted, from the part of her mind that the Metternich School had trained to keep running under conditions of any description, that her pulse had gone up and that the humidity in this building would account for some of it. The air came through the vents warm and slightly sweet, the way air does when someone has spent money to hide what the ducts smell like.

Understood, she sent back, and nothing else, because there was nothing sayable in four seconds.

From up here the floor was a map. Terraces going down and out like water finding its level, gold light off the dabo wheels, the shadow along the walls where the carpet ran out and the architecture stopped pretending. Cardassia Prime lay outside these walls in rubble that still hadn't been sorted, and in here men were losing the price of a water reclamation plant on a single throw and laughing about it.

She found the Cardassian in twelve seconds.

Same place he'd been standing for forty minutes, at the outer curve of the walkway, one shoulder to a column. The glass of kanar in his hand was still at the level it had been when she climbed up, and the condensation had made a ring on his cuff that he hadn't noticed. Two servers had passed him without turning their trays. His collar was a season out of fashion and pressed hard enough to have been pressed by hand, and he had looked at the main doors twice while she watched, not the way a man looks for someone he's meeting, but the way a man checks that a door is still where he left it.

Nobody in this building had spoken to him. but somebody in this building had told him to be here.

Enyd brought her arms down, laughing, breathless, and leaned toward the keyboardist with her hand cupped beside her mouth as though she were sharing a secret with four hundred witnesses.

"Play something everyone knows. I'm about to be terribly popular."

She sat on the lip of the riser and dropped the half meter to the marble in a rush of floral silk, and she was talking before her heels landed.

"Drinks!" One hand up, voice over the music. "Drinks for this entire end of the room, on me, because I have had the most marvelous evening and I refuse to be the only person enjoying myself."

The floor turned toward her the way a floor turns when someone opens a purse in public. The Bolian whooped. Somebody behind him took up the noise, and then the noise had its own weight and didn't need her.

Her grandmother had put a pot of coffee in front of every man who ever came up the drive at Yew Valley, including the two she meant to run off the property before sundown, and Enyd had understood the arithmetic of that gesture years before she had a word for it. You give people something first, and then you find out what they walked in for, and the beauty of it is that both halves are sincere.

She threaded through the gathering crush toward her abandoned table, swept her chips up with both hands and no attention whatsoever, and collected the clutch from where it had sat unwatched on the rail for six minutes. Careless. She hated when she was careless like that.
The compact mirror opened under her thumb.

It could cut pure duranium, Korex had said, given time and a steady hand. At present it showed a human woman with her hair coming down at the left temple and her color high from dancing, and Enyd fixed the first with two pins and declined to do anything about the second. The lipstick came out of the case. She uncapped it below the level of the table and put it on the way she had put it on in worse mirrors in worse buildings, unhurried, following the line of her own mouth, pressing once to set it.

Thirty seconds, Korex had said. One kiss.

She capped it, put everything back, and turned around with her chin already lifted.

The Orion was crossing to meet her.

She moved the way water moves downhill, weight forward over the balls of her feet, glass held low and out from the body, right hand free and empty and relaxed. Not a threat posture. The two men came behind her at four paces, and neither of them looked at Enyd at all, which told her more about what they had been told than anything the woman was about to say. Enyd went to meet her, so they arrived nowhere, which meant they stopped in the open with the whole floor around them and drinks going out in every direction at Enyd's expense.

The pheromones came in ahead of the conversation.

She felt them land on the room before she felt them anywhere in herself. The Bolian's face changed. A Nausicaan at the rail forgot what his hands were doing. Warmth came up through Enyd's throat and behind her sternum, sweet and slow and entirely borrowed, and stopped there, held at the door like a caller she had not decided about, and did not get in. She stood in it, and cataloged it, and looked pleasantly interested, and thought about the recycled air.

"You're the one buying," the Orion said. Low voice. Cardassian accent laid over Standard, learned here, learned well.

"I'm the one celebrating." Enyd put out her hand.

The woman looked at it, amused by the gesture the way you'd be amused by a child's card trick, and took it. Dry palm. Cool. She held on half a second past the point of usefulness, and her thumb moved once across Enyd's knuckles, and there was nothing accidental anywhere in it.

"My protector tells me you wanted a word somewhere quiet," Enyd said. "I'm afraid I've just committed several hundred people to a party, so I've ruined quiet for both of us. You should stay anyway. Everyone interesting in this building has come over, and I've decided that includes you."

"She was very accommodating, your protector."

"She's been strict with me all evening. I've stopped arguing. It's terribly restful, having someone tell you where you may and may not stand."

The Orion's mouth curved, and she drank, and over the rim of the glass her eyes caressed Enyd's shape.

"Eleven hands," she said. "You lost the first two, and you did not lose another until you stood up."

Enyd's smile did not move. In the space behind it she took the sentence apart, the way she took apart every sentence that had ever been aimed at her, and found the shape of it: not a question, not an accusation, and not spoken quietly enough to be either. Somebody had counted. Somebody in this room had been given the job of counting, and had reported, and the reporting had reached this woman fast enough for her to cross a floor with it.

"Beginner's luck," Enyd said, "is the only kind I've ever had the patience for."

"I don't think so."

"No," Enyd agreed cheerfully, "you don't." She turned before the woman could put anything in the gap, pitched her voice up and out across the circle, and aimed it at the column. "You. With the kanar. You have been nursing that for half an hour and I have bought you three."

Every head between them came around. The Cardassian went entirely still, like a man who has spent a career being professionally invisible and has just been seen at volume.

Enyd crossed to him before he could recover, took his free elbow, and steered him back into the circle with the confidence of a woman who has never once been refused. Under her fingers, his arm was locked to the bone. He came anyway.

"You are the only person in this room not pretending to enjoy himself," she said, delighted, "which makes you the only person in this room I believe. What is it you do?"

He looked at the Orion. He looked at the two men. Then, because Enyd had asked and nobody else had, he looked at Enyd, and something in his jaw dropped about a millimeter.

"Agriculture," he said.

"You are not." Enyd laid a hand flat on her sternum. "Agriculture. On this planet. Do you know how many men have told me tonight that they are in shipping? I came here to put money into something, and every one of them wants to sell me a percentage of a freighter I am certain does not exist." She rolled her eyes for the benefit of the circle and let the register drop, just slightly, just enough that a careful listener would hear the costume slip and not be able to prove it. "But somebody is rebuilding this world. Somebody signs for the seed, and the water, and the soil reclamation, and nobody at this end of the room can tell me who. I find that remarkable. Don't you find that remarkable?"

The Cardassian said nothing. He also did not leave, and his weight came off the one foot and settled onto both. Enyd turned the whole of the performance back onto the Orion, eyebrows up.

"You play. You have the face for it." She lifted the chips and let them clatter, and held the woman's eyes. "A table. The three of us. I'll stake him, since he clearly won't stake himself, and if I lose every credit I have, I have the consolation of having lost it to the two most interesting people in the building instead of to a machine."

"And the stake?"

"Oh, I'm bored of money." Enyd tilted her head. "I'd like to know what each of you would want if you won. Not what you'd take. What you'd want. I'll go first, if that's the trouble."

The music changed behind her. Along the rail, one of the two men stepped out of his four paces and began to move around the outside of the circle, and Enyd watched him come in the polished curve of the nearest dabo wheel without turning her head.

The cold under her ribs turned over once, the thing she had spent four years attributing to skipped meals and long transports, and she kept her hands loose on the clutch and her chin up.
25
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0700 hrs] The Salvage Job
Last post by Krajin -
[ Lt.JG Dominic 'Atlas' Winters | Wolf-10 | Near last known coordinates of Cayuga] Attn: @Brutus @Ellen Fitz @Dumedion @Nesota Kynnovan @Stegro88 @Eirual @rae & Everyone else

"Accuracy over speed I think. Least some pirates come out to play privateer on a bunch of Starfleet Shuttles. There'd be some out here; I'd bet there are other sorts too. A Federation starship adrift and abandoned is a goldmine of materials and information. Good idea to hunt what hunted her! Let's go with that!"

Atlas took up one position and kept pace with Shadow as they arranged the sensor sweeps. The flight was short, at least until the others chimed in, including Arnold from the Maslow. His armoured tail twitched as he shifted course to follow out that way Arnold had directed them.

"Let's see where the rabbit hole goes." Then came the debris field ahead of the two fighters and their probes. "There she is; anything can be hiding out here amidst the debris. Undetonated munitions, enemy surprises, bodies, capacitors, and other hazards. Let's go slower and get a scan of the area, get a predictive drift chart going for pathing in and out just in case we need to bug out." His tone drifted to a more sombre one as he throttled the speed down as the debris field began to thicken. The field reminded him of flying through the old battlefields of the Dominion War, ship wreckages of every side all mixed together. Silent monuments to the fallen.

Atlas took his time flying through the debris field and twitched an ear as the hull of the Cayuga came into visual range. Atlas checked his sensors and watched as something pinged on the outer edges of their range. "Got a lurker at the outer edge. Running quiet, it seems; they forget their fat ass creates gravitational distortions. I'd bet a salvager of some sort. Let's not run a full scan, let them think we don't know they are here." He closes into the ruined Cayuga, shifting this way and that to get closer. Avoiding the bodies of its crew left adrift in space.
26
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 1 | 2100 hrs | The Charred Archive
Last post by Nesota Kynnovan -
[Lieutenant Dr. Nathan Frost, Ph.D. | Library and Research Room | Deck 15 | Vector 01 | USS Theurgy]]
Attn: @Dumedion

Frost could heard a voice over the music, which was the first sign that he indeed wasn’t alone inside the Library and Research Room, and the music abruptly paused a moment later. The Canadian Immunologist didn’t really mind; while the music had a certain rhythm to it, he personally preferred jazz. To Frost, jazz and some of the Trill equivalents was much more soothing and that particular kind of music allowed his mind to wander while drinking. 

Just as the Acting Chief Science Officer began to rise back to his feet with his arms full of books, something suddenly scampered from around the corner. It startled Frost and he took a step back, still not fully risen, and felt how his heart rate instantly fastened and adrenaline began pumping through his veins; sending a cold shiver down his back in the moments before he identified that whoever -or whatever- had just charged at him as a woman wearing a Starfleet uniform. He saw how the black-haired Romulan began to pick up books as well while presenting him with a friendly smile, and as Frost fully rose to his feet he noticed the two pips on the blue collar of the woman’s uniform. He guessed that this was Lieutenant Vanya and, a brief moment later, he was proven right as the woman spoke up.

”Ah, miss Vanya.” As he spoke up, Frost’s Canadian-accented voice was uneasy and only further accentuated the uncomfortable smile on his face. Of all the possible ways this first meeting with the previous Chief Science Officer could have gone, he certainly hadn’t expected to be addressed as ‘cutie’ and ‘darling’ and it was rather obvious that it caught him completely off-guard. ”I’m Frost.” With his hands full of replicated books there was little he could do, let alone wave, so the Canadian Immunologist walked over towards the nearest research station and placed the books on top of the desk before turning around. ”Doctor Nathan Frost.” His hands now free, Frost raised his right hand in a somewhat uneasy wave.

While his intention had been to sternly talk to Vanya about the lack of supervision in the Science Department, it was much more difficult to remain stern while the woman was standing right in front of him. Especially if she smiled at him in such a friendly and disarming manner. Still uncomfortable and now not knowing what to do with his hands, Frost put them in the pockets of his black uniform trousers while he looked at the black-haired Romulan and thought of something to say. The brief silence that followed was equally uncomfortable, but how was he supposed to tell her that he’d come to replace her?

After several uncomfortable seconds, Frost cleared his throat and spoke up, deciding to just say it the way it was. ”I’m the… well, I’m the Acting Chief Science Officer.” A smile appeared on Frost’s face once more in an attempt to be friendly and disarming, but it only made him feel more awkward in the process. Regardless, the Canadian bravely battled on. ”I heard you’d been revived from stasis and I wanted to check up on you, see if you have everything you need.”

…that, and he came to check if he could unpack his boxes or if Vanya would take over from him again now that she was awake, but that was something he couldn’t really start with.
27
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 02 [0030 hrs] The Ready Room Catch up
Last post by Dumedion -
[LT Vanya | Ready Room | Deck 01 | Vector 01 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @Brutus

By the time Natalie reached her, Vanya had already moved forward a step, just past the threshold. That brief moment of time offered a plethora of informational observations: the stacks of PaDDs were noted, unsurprisingly — Nat had always pushed the limitations of what was considered by many to be a healthy and manageable workload. However, the shroud of exhaustion carried on Nat's features elicited a blink of surprise mixed with concern, as well as the obvious weight loss; Vanya estimated the former First Officer, now Acting Captain, had shed fifteen to twenty kilos since their last physical encounter.

Vanya kept these observations to herself, but let her smile fade just enough to convey concern as her arms closed around the shorter brunette in a long overdue embrace — one arm low, to support Nat’s weight, one arm high about the shoulders, fingers spread up into the hair at the base of the skull.

There they met, and there they remained; no words offered, only a hum of contentment and relief as the seconds turned into minutes. Vanya had no desire to relinquish contact — her nose was buried in Natalie’s semi-undone, tangled mess of hair — the entirety of her neck included in the embrace.

It felt wonderful.

Peaceful.

It felt like home — without ever knowing what that truly meant.

And yet, she could not ignore the rapid breaths, nor the desperately controlled tremors that coursed through the body in her arms...

Vanya let her nails tease the base of Nat’s scalp, then down the entirety of the humans neck; a soothing motion, intimate without sensuality, while she offered the faintest of whispers above a warm ear:

“I’m here, I have you. My sweet Nat, I missed you dearly. I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner.” She could practically hear Natalie’s mind racing — which prompted a firm kiss to the temple. “I will explain everything, darling. But first,” Vanya pulled back, just enough to run her hand over a wonderfully flushed cheek, then continued under Nat’s delightfully cute chin, and lifted just enough for their eyes to meet. “An intervention is required.” She spoke gently, through a loving smile. A wink followed immediately.

The look on Natalie’s face was absolutely adorable.

“Oh yes. An intervention my dear. You see, by my reckoning, you,” Vanya booped Natalie’s nose, “are supposed to be several hours off-duty by this hour. Imagine my surprise to find you here, working instead. Oh nu,” she pouted. “That simply wont do at all,” another smile, impish and mischievous.

“So, first things first,” her free hand snaked up Natalie’s back and deftly untied the already loose scrunchie holding the tangled mop of hair up, which promptly fell about the shorter woman’s shoulders. Once that was accomplished, both hands rested on Nat’s shoulders, then circled across her collarbone as Vanya moved to stand behind her.

“It is perfectly acceptable to dress down while off-duty, Natalie, even for you, — especially when I'm around,” the synthetic whispered into an ear with a grin, as her hands unzipped Nat’s duty jacket, then gently pulled it back and away from her body with a hum of approval. With a toss, the garment was discarded to land atop the piles of PaDDs adorning the CO’s desk.

Vanya nodded her approval, then repeated the process upon herself, removing both lab coat and duty jacket in one action; she tossed these upon one of the twin chairs before the desk without concern.

“There, that's a little better,” she stated, hands on her hips, smile bright. “Now, you sit and relax. I will make you something to eat.”

She didn’t give Nat a chance to argue, nor would it have done any good if the woman tried; Vanya was there to take care of her — there was nothing to dispute about that fact —  and all this was communicated unashamedly in the light-hearted but serious look she gave the Acting Captain.

Then she smiled warmly once again.

“BLT, toasted, mayo on one side only? Steamed broccoli smothered in cheese, and apple slices, peanut butter on the side, — with chilled cucumber water,” Vanya offered from memory over her shoulder as she glided to the replicator, hips swaying.

Then she stopped without turning to see what Nat was doing.

“If you touch another PaDD, there will be consequences, miss,” the synthetic warned playfully, then typed out the order into the replicator with an amused smirk.
28
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 02 [0030 hrs] The Ready Room Catch up
Last post by Brutus -
[ Acting Captain Natalie Stark | Captain's Ready Room | V. 1 D. 1 | USS Theurgy ] ATTN: @Dumedion
[Show/Hide]


To say that things had been stressful would be an understatement. Leaning over the desk in the Captain's Ready room (she refused to think of it as her ready room, Natalie Stark Fingered the fourth pip that rested on her collar, placed there on the recommendation of the President of the Federation herself. Yes, Natalie understood it was a temporary commission. There was no way she should be the one to hold this rank long term. But she had it now. And it had been suggested, heavily, that she wear it for the duration. Hard to say no to the President of the Federation. Harder still when it was the same woman that had stood in this office and given her a hug.


So here she sat, in the Ready room, when she should be in her quarters, asleep. But there were still too many reports to go through, and she didn't want to bring the stack of PADD's back to her room. Not when she had this office to use. And the stack was getting smaller, slowly. Still too many reports to go through. They were piled atop each other, next to a mug of coffee (decaf, at this point in the night - no, morning) that had long gone cold. She frowned as she read an update on, of all things, a vole hunt, and shook her head. Compared to everything this crew had been forced to deal with over the months since Jupiter Station, Natalie supposed that seeing a report on something so minor was something of a blessing.


It was certainly more lighthearted and welcome than the responses she was getting from the starbase command, or Starfleet in general. All those carefully worded replies, the apologies for unforeseeable delays, unavoidable complications. Things she had been prepared for. No outright hostility yet. Just...passive aggressive complications coated in a layer of polite behavior above outright reproach. And even that was preferable to medical updates, which she'd not yet been able to bring herself to check, out of fear of what would, or more likely, would not be there. Of the presumed lack of status change in one particular officer.


Something she could not allow herself to dwell on, or she'd break down. Again.


Instead she reached for a report on the Qo'noS mission. The need to send officers back, knowing that everyone from the team sent would be under polite (intense) scrutiny from fellow officers dispatched from elsewhere within the Federation. And there was less goodwill from the High Command to go around at the moment, though Natalie favored herself in thinking that despite it all, Chancellor Martok still favored the Theurgy more than he did the rest of the Federation at this point. Even with everything related to the Romulans at The Triangle, and after.


There was that report to look at too, more missions into Romulan space, and a general political update to review. She set the PADD back down and reached for the coffee, only to spit it back out into the cup as a wave of disgust flashed over her tired face. "Damn. It's gone cold. Again," she lamented, holding the cold mug in her hands, and pushing her chair back from the desk. With a sigh, Natalie closed her eyes for a moment and took a long breath to settle herself.


Which was, of course, when the door-chime went off. For a moment Natalie wanted to pretend that she was not there. That she had not heard the chime. But that was a level of irresponsible she would not allow of herself any more. When she had been merely Lt. Stark, Assistant Chief of Operations, she might have succumbed to the urge. Then again, when she had been Lt. Stark, the odds of something like this happening at this late an hour would be slim to none. But she was not Lt. Stark. And she was not an Assistant department Chief. She was, for the time being, Acting Captain Stark. And Captains (even acting ones) did not get to ignore a door chime. Despite all the authority that they possessed.


"Enter," Natalie called out, hoping she kept any irritation or fatigue from her voice. She opened her eyes in time to look up to the parting doors, and stare, dumbfounded at the site. For one short instant, she wondered if she had gone off her rocker. And then the apparitions spoke, and Natalie dropped the mug she had been holding onto the floor with a loud clatter, splashing the cold coffee over the carpet beneath the desk.


"Shit!" the escaped her mouth, and then her brain caught up with it all and the spilt coffee was forgotten. Decorum, was forgotten. Rank, right out the airlock. She nearly smashed her thigh into the corner of the desk as she scrambled around it, hopping to one side at the last moment. In a feat of improbable human athletics, Nat crossed the room, reaching over the threshold and grabbing Vanya's tunic with both hands. Of course, if the Android did not want to allow Natalie to move her, there would be no moving Vanya. But that didn't stop Natalie from trying to drag her across the threshold and into her arms all the same.
29
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 | 2200 hrs | The hunt is on
Last post by Nesota Kynnovan -
[Ensign Jaya Thorne | Forward Landing Strut Bay | Deck 30 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy]
Attn: @Eirual @Pierce @Dumedion

The catwalk was bent and twisted, making the crossing not only much more scary but also quite dangerous. Ensign Jaya Thorne had just made it to the other end, albeit with somewhat wobbly knees, when a voice suddenly called out. While Jaya didn’t recognise the voice, which was feminine and actually quite pleasant to listen to, the person apologized for her tardiness and proposed a new strategy. As the Assistant Chief CONN Officer listened to the idea, she looked down at the state of her uniform; the damaged catwalk had torn several gashes into the black fabric of her uniform pants and, through the gashes, the smooth skin of her bare legs could be seen. That alone was enough to convince Jaya to place her trust in the unknown woman, as the proposed strategy seemed a lot better than what they had going on at the moment.

One downside of that strategy, which Jaya bitterly realized as she turned around and was faced with the daunting task of crossing the catwalk one more, was that she’d crossed the catwalk for nothing. If the woman had spoken up a couple of minutes earlier, the Assistant Chief CONN Officer wouldn’t have crossed it in the first place. A deep sigh, full of annoyance and frustration, escaped Jaya’s lips as she slowly began to cross the catwalk with wobbly knees once more. ”This is just great…”

By the time Jaya made it back to where she started, she’d snagged her pants on the catwalk once more and further soured her already dour mood. It was there, at the top of the Jefferies Tube, where the Denevan Ensign finally met up with her team members and was immediately treated to the sight of an equally dour blonde-haired Scientist who had snagged her own uniform in various different places. In response to the woman, Jaya just shrugged and spoke up on a tone that only accentuated her smirk while gesturing at her own uniform. ”Tearing uniforms is what I do best.”

With those words, the three Starfleet Officers began to make their way to the turbolift. It occurred to Jaya once more that this entire expedition to the lower decks had been a complete waste of time; if she’d waited for Lieutenant Junior Grade Ashley Kerina in the Upper Gymnasium, she could have taken a nap and relaxed instead. Thus, when the blonde-haired woman spoke up once more, Jaya nodded in agreement. ”I don’t know who contacted us, but her idea definitely beats what we’ve been doing thus far.”

[Physics Lab | Deck 17 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy]

Several minutes later, Jaya walked through the doors leading to the Physics Lab; followed closely by Mia and Ashley. The Denevan’s mood had improved a little since then, as she’d been introduced to the two Scientists and they had a pretty good, albeit sarcastic, laugh regarding what they’d been through thus far. Between the three of them, Mia’s uniform had definitely been through the worst; compared to the blonde-haired woman, Jaya’s black uniform trousers only had several gashes, the red-coloured undershirt had a gash in the side of the right sleeve and she was missing her uniform coat, which she’d forgotten somewhere in the Jefferies Tube.

As the three Starfleet Officers walked into the Physics Lab, Jaya spoke up on a friendly tone of voice that only accentuated the signature smirk on her face. ”Hello, housekeeping!”
30
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 03 [ 1330hrs ] Back Channel Operations
Last post by Nesota Kynnovan -
[Ensign Jaya Thorne | Docking Ring Two, Halkar Anchorage]
Attn: @Ellen Fitz, @Krajin, @Hans Applegate, @Eirual & pertinent writers

Jaya realized that her mood improved considerably after she disembarked from the Merchant’s Folly. As she stood there, tasting the familiar stale air and listening to the muttered curses of the gantry crew somewhere below them, the Halkar Anchorage felt not only like a trip down memory lane, but also strangely… familiar. While several years had passed since the Denevan had last visited anchorages like these, both as a smuggler, a freighter pilot and a little bit of both during the rowdy years of the Dominion War, Halkar Anchorage made Jaya feel like she’d never truly left that part of her life behind.

As Lieutenant Commander Cross briefed them on what was expected of them and the dangers of their mission, Jaya focused on the Chief Tactical Officer. While she listened to the Vulcan, the Denevan heard how a member of the gantry crew below them dropped a can of penetrating oil used for maintenance work. She could hear a metallic clang as the canister fell onto the metallic surface of the deck, followed by a loud curse as the canister apparently broke on impact and spilled its contents. Just a fraction of a second later, Jaya could hear a softer thud followed by loud laughter, prompting the Assistant Chief CONN Officer to believe that someone had slipped in the puddle of penetrating oil; much to the amusement of the gantry crew. It was such a common occurrence that Jaya could clearly visualize it and, as the gantry crew laughed, she couldn’t help but grin as well.

When the meeting ended and the various members of their little team began to disperse, Jaya couldn’t help but look around. While the Lieutenant Commander had told them about the subdermal implant and the civilian-grade weapons he’d passed around, which she’d checked properly before concealing it within one of the pockets of her dark brown cargo pants, her limited attention span had led to Jaya missing the part where Cross explained where she was supposed to go. With people heading off in various different directions however, Jaya shrugged and decided to follow the one person she recognized; Ensign Mia Dunne. She’d met the blonde-haired Scientist during the vole hunt two days earlier and, given how shared adversity breeds instant chemistry, Jaya had taken a liking to the woman.

Thus, she now followed Mia from a distance as the woman began to walk away with a Bajoran.

[Docking Ring Three, Halkor Anchorage]

As they made their way across the bulkhead of a corridor, with the floor to their left-hand side and the ceiling to their right-hand side, Jaya couldn’t help but chuckle as she watched Mia and the Bajoran woman. While the Assistant Chief CONN Officer didn’t knew the Bajoran, it was fairly obvious to Jaya’s more experienced eye that the two women who were walking in front of her weren’t part of the crowd usually found aboard these kinds of Space Stations.

When they finally came to a stop in front of the first stop, Jaya decided to walk up on them with her usual signature grin on her face. ”Want to bet that they’ll try to sell us a vole?” As she spoke, Jaya placed her left hand on Mia’s right shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. ”I think I’ll stick with you two boffins if you don’t mind.”
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