The So-Called Mobility Shift [Part 2/2]

Posted on 13 Feb 2013 @ 9:15pm by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius

2,046 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 2, Holodeck 1
Timeline: MD02: 1540 hrs
Tags: personal, holodeck

[ON]

"Did you spend a lot of time in Academy with physics nerds?" Lilou asked with a lifted brow.

"Ha!" he laughed loudly, shaking his head. "No, far from it. I only completed two years of basic Starfleet training in San Francisco before I transferred to the Marine Corps depot in San Diego."

"There you go, then." She sat back in her chair, stretching her legs out and crossing her boots next to his feet. "You needed more nerds and you would have found this place."

"Well...science and engineering weren't especially my strong suits." he answered, then casually opened his menu and began to browse through some of the food items displayed. "So what's good here?" he asked, assuming that she had eaten at the restaurant enough times to know which dishes to avoid.

"Everything," Lilou gushed. then dropped her eyes to her own menu. "Well, I haven't tried everything, but I haven't had anything that wasn't good here." She selected a sesame kale macro bowl with grilled tempeh, steamed kale, sauerkraut, gomasio, ginger, and toasted sesame seeds. "They have meat, on..." She searched the table and found a smaller bright red menu, "here."

Lamar took the small meat menu from Lilou and quickly browsed the six entrees which were listed. "Much better..." he remarked to himself as he read through the dishes. There were many cuts of steak available, and the former Marine quickly settled on the juicy 16oz New York strip steak marinated with jalapeno butter. "What are you going to get?" he asked her, suddenly realizing that he didn't know much about her culinary tastes aside from the occasional meal they shared together in the mess hall.

"The kale macro," Lilou answered. She'd never understood what it was that people found so attractive about meat. Even replicated, all she could think about was the animal it was sourced from, which wasn't remotely appealing to her. The calm was a wash, but she still didn't want to think too long about Marine training anywhere. "What about you?"

"I think I'm going with the New York strip...haven't had one of those in a while." he answered as he placed the small menu back on the table, then looked at her curiously. "Do you eat a lot of meat?" he asked, "I can't remember seeing you ever eat a steak or a burger. Well, a beef burger." he added, remembering that he had seen her eat some sort of veggie burger at the mess hall once.

"None," she murmured with a shrug. "Never did. The idea never appealed." She smiled as a bespectacled waited came to their table and they gave their orders. As he left, she sipped her water. "One of the things about the LCARS: nothing is a mystery for long."

He nodded in agreement and thought back to his academy days. "I remember taking a 21st century Earth history course, and reading about the primitive form of LCARS they used at the time. It had a funny name, I can't remember...Interweb? Something like that... Anyway, their upload and download speeds were so slow that they were limited to a couple megabytes per second. And some places didn't even have access to it at all because of the weird geopolitical nature of the world at the time," he said with a light chuckle of bewilderment.

"I hadn't heard that," Lilou murmured. "Then again..." she bit her lip with a small grin, "I didn't pay much attention to History once I'd gotten into Starfleet Academy. I think - maybe - I got the names of some of the wars, but I was usually just doodling ship schematics on my PADD. I know," she sighed. "It's awful. I was a terrible, terrible student. I did like... what was the name of the course? The History of Innovation. Did you take that one?"

"I took it but dropped it after two weeks," he answered with a smirk. "I thought it was going to be a class about modern innovation, not the entire innovation history of the Human race. I think I started losing interest when we began studying 'telephones'. Talk about boring..."

"But just think about what they were coming from? I mean, even before that, when they went from letters to wired transmissions-" she shook her head at the memory, grinning. "Can you imagine the mind that came up with that? It's incredible."

"Yeah it's incredible, alright." he agreed then took a long swig of ice water. "I think it would have been fun to be alive during a time period like that. Everyone was so primitive...yet resourceful. No starships or starbases yet, just still exploring Earth. The simple life, you know?"

"Hmm," Lilou agreed on a hum. "But then I wouldn't be here," she added with a wry grin.

He smiled and rubbed his foot against the side of her leg beneath the table. "Well then I'm lucky things worked out how they did. Think about it...the two of us, two species from different homeworlds, traveling across space together in a tiny ship..." he said with a smile and bright brown eyes.

"I'm from a research station," she smirked. "But yes. It is pretty incredible, isn't it? We take so much for granted. Just feeling happy. Content. At peace. It's so beautiful." She pressed her lips together and looked away, nudging her foot against his. She couldn't look in his eyes, so happy, and know that in a few hours she might be scared of him again. Senselessly. On impulse. Stupid. Not right now. She forced her gaze back to his, took a deep breath, and smiled on the exhale. "It is," she reiterated. "And you. You are very handsome."

"You're not too bad yourself." he replied with a wink. Even though Lilou was often clad in grease-covered uniforms with a very engineer-like look to her, she cleaned up rather well and the woman who was now sitting in front of him was a huge departure from the typical Lilou.

As their food arrived, Lilou settled in with a smile, spearing the contents of her bowl with a-vengeance. "Where did you go, while you were here?"

Unfolding his napkin and delicately placing it in his lap, Lamar picked up his utensils and cut of healthy chunk out of his steak, chewing and humming in approval of the replicated meal. "What do you mean? Like for fun?" he asked after he swallowed.

"Yeah," Lilou chomped down on kale.

"Well...I didn't go out much, to be honest. Between my Academy studies and the basketball team, I kept myself pretty busy. Maybe once a month we would all go out for some drinks in the city but that's about it..." he answered, then plunged a large forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

"Basketball?" she asked curiously. "I didn't know you played basketball." She paused. "I didn't know you played any sports."

He nodded as he continued to eat. "I started playing basketball and baseball when I was in high school, then played on the men's Academy team for two years. We finished second in the PAC-12 conference my last year before I transferred to the Marine Corps."

There it was again. The fear didn't spring up like it usually did, but the mention still didn't fill her with joy. Onto something else. "And baseball. So many sports with balls on Earth, have you noticed? What is that about? Hitting them. Throwing them through things. All these catapulting orbs."

"Because the best sports are played with balls. Obviously." he quickly answered with a big grin and a shake of his head, as if she somehow should have known the answer before she asked. "Yea sure, you can technically count distance running or piloting to be a sport, but real sports are played with balls. And hands." he explained non-chalantly with a wave of his fork.

"Fencing?" Lilou inquired. "Andorian Javelin? Badminton?"

"Well...fencing is more of a martial arts discipline...like Judo or Muay Thai. Not exactly the same as a sport." he stated, then took another large bite of steak and chewed for several moments. "And javelin? Well, I was never on the track team so I can't say that I've done it, but throwing a spear as far as you can doesn't really count as a sport either." he said with a chuckle. "Oh and badminton uses a shuttlecock...which is close enough to a ball."

"Caber tossing?" Lilou murmured with a devilish twinkle in her eye. "You think throwing a tree shouldn't count as a sport?"

He shook his head and continued to munch on a piece of meat. "Nope...it's an activity, not a sport." he added with an even bigger grin than last time.

"Throwing trees is an activity?" Lilou smirked. "All right. What about... ah! Buzkashi. That's a Terran sport without balls."

"Buzkashi?" he curiously asked with a raised eyebrow, "Strange, I've never heard of it. How do you play?"

"It is a sport where..." she wrinkled her nose, trying to remember the details. "I believe it had something to do with riding on horses and throwing a headless goat."

"Ha!" he blurted out in between chewing another piece of steak and mashed potatoes. "Now that sounds like a sport." he said with a nod of approval. "Sounds a bit primitive and cruel to the goat, but...I like it."

Lilou shook her head with a small eye-roll. "Men."

Lamar flashed her a sideways smirk then continued eating, pausing occasionally to take a drink from his glass of ice water. Buzkashi... he mumbled to himself in his head. He would have to look up the sport the next time he got a couple free hours to himself, and perhaps try a holodeck simulation. Hopefully it was as fun as it sounded.

Lilou watched him fondly. Was that what it was like to be strong? Afraid one minute and fine the next? Not cloaked in that fear and panic always? Did he still think about his dreams? Or was he actually free of them now? "What is Philadelphia like?"

"It's a fun city with a rich history." he replied, "The nightlife is great and there are a lot of arts and entertainment venues around for pretty much every type of music and theater. I think you'd enjoy it."

"Maybe so," Lilou agreed. "I went to school in upstate New York on earth for a while, but we never traveled anywhere really. Weather," she shuddered. "One reason I'm always grateful to be back in space. How people can stand to be at the will of uncontrolled atmospheric elements... I just don't understand."

Lamar nodded in understanding and took another bite of food. "I had a few friends from that area when I was growing up, and I could never understand how they lived in such a cold and snowy area. Myself, I prefer a bit of sun and clear skies."

Lilou shuddered dramatically. "Skies."

"To each their own, I guess." he mumbled when he saw her reaction. Lilou was probably more comfortable in space because she grew up in space, and there was nothing wrong with that. "Maybe one day I'll be able to show you some nice locations on Earth so you can see what you've been missing."

She was pretty sure she'd seen enough of Earth for a lifetime. It wasn't as though she'd only visited. She'd spent years under that changeable blue atmospheric tent. On two coasts of one nation. She didn't doubt there was more to see on Earth's surface, she just wasn't sure she wanted to. Unless it was in a holodeck where she knew the sky wouldn't open up and soak her. At least not without a malfunction or her programming it to do so. "Mm," she murmured with a slight smile and bent back to her task. There was food to finish before their time on the holodeck elapsed and the safe space Liyar had unintentionally created fizzled away.

[OFF]

--

WO Lamar Darius
Support Craft Pilot
USS Galileo
NPC'd by Lirha Saalm

ENS Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

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