Calibrations and Revelations

Posted on 10 Oct 2023 @ 7:02am by Lieutenant JG Montgomery Vala & Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor
Edited on on 10 Oct 2023 @ 4:55pm

2,499 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 18 - Cold Station 31
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 3, Multi-Purpose Laboratories
Timeline: MD 19, 1100hrs

ON

It had been an incredibly intense couple of days so far. Compared the often listless six month journey to this part of space, the onboarding procedure of the USS Galileo had been a sprint to meet everyone in time for the systems test and departure on a new mission.

Vala had spent much of the morning so far setting up his lab station to his satisfaction. He had transferred his personal files, both digital and physical, to a pleasant corner of the Multi-Purpose Laboratory. His handwritten notes were clasped in binders and crammed into storage units below the benches, fresh paper was piled haphazardly next to a spread of writing implements. He'd already scrawled several to-do lists intended for spare moments over the coming few days.

His final task, for now, was to calibrate his profile on some of the equipment he would most likely be using frequently. He had a particular way he liked these devices to work. First the Quantum Resonance Spectrometer, second the Tachyon Decay Chronometer, so far so good, but when he got to the Chrono-synaptic Analyzer he found it utterly rejected his parameters. He repeated his input several times, and eventually got the machine to run a test cycle. It lit up, made a terrible crunching sound, flickered then died.

Vala sighed. "Lieutenant Vala to Engineering, could you spare someone to assist with a repair in Multi-Purpose Lab A."

--

Sera was finishing up her first shift when the request came in. Instead of farming it out, Sera took the assignment; considering that it was in the same direction as her quarters…relatively speaking. She picked up a utility satchel that held numerous tools—along with her highly modified tricorder—and headed off to figure out just what had gone wrong in the lab.

It didn’t take very long to find multi-purpose Lab A. It also helped the Sera had memorized the deck layout on the long journey out here.

The door hissed open, and Sera stepped through, crinkling her nose in distaste. Something had definitely burnt up. She looked about for the responsible party.

“Hello?”

Vala pulled his head out of a storage unit where he'd been organising his binders and stood up at the sound of the voice. Turning around he saw the Vulcan he had met the previous evening at the banquet. "Oh! Hello Sera." He side-eyed the broken Chrono-synaptic Analyzer. "Our first 'professional' encounter." He gave a slightly awkward look. "The Chrono-synaptic Analyzer has encountered some kind of... difficulty." He gestured towards the lightly smoking device.

Sera responded in kind. "Greetings...Montgomery." She would use people's requested names--within reason--but that didn't mean she was comfortable doing it. She had been raised to use people's titles or positions to address others. To use personal names was...demonstrating a familiarity of sorts that felt...perilous.

She walked over to the device that was the source of the acrid smell and began visually inspecting it. "Can you tell me what occurred?"

Straightening himself up properly and walking over to the device, Vala tried to maintain some composure. "Well these things are never configured correctly you see." He grabbed a binder from the console nearby and quickly rifled through it, pulling out a page covered in spiderlike scribbles. "I had one configured just as I liked it at Daystrom, and I noted down the exact calibrations here." He waved the paper. "But I can only assume this one is faulty." He gave it an angry look as it continued to puff a steady stream of smoke. "Perhaps you can help. You can take a look at my notes here if you like but they are mostly in Rihannsu I'm afraid. There's a bit of Federation Standard mixed in which you might be able to make sense of." He proffered the sheet.

"Sera looked at the filled binder which--if the pages visible were an accurate representation of the other sheets within--was filled with meticulous hand written lines of Rhiannsu which was liberally interspersed with Standard.

She looked at the meticulously written notes and raised a brow. "Fascinating." Her eyes began to skim over the blocky letters arranged on a line between intermittent groupings of Federation Standard.

"Comprehension of your notes will not be an issue, Lieutenant Vala." Sera added in a slightly distracted manner.

"Oh!" Vala scrutinised her. Was she... reading? Surely the script of their distant, emotional kin was some kind of profanity to a Vulcan. Interesting... "You are... familiar with Rihanssu?" He asked curiously.

"Yes. I am...familiar with it." She replied in accented Rihannsu as she finished the line and looked back over to Montgomery. "If this page is an indication of the totality of your work here, you keep meticulous notes."

They would prove useful to her when she got to the stage of reprogramming the device. If the smell was to be believed, the power source had overheated and...melted. It would, most likely, require a complete refit. Already Sera was silently making a list of replacement parts that would need to be replicated, and she had not even seen inside the analyzer.

Machines were simple really. There were only so many ways it could break.

"Mandaaranh." Vala said softly, cocking his head a little while looking at the Vulcan. "You speak it and read it?" He was taken a back, momentarily speechless. "I... haven't met anyone in the Federation who has..." He shook his head a little. "It has been a long time since I have heard my native tongue." He gave her a small smile. "I do not wish to hinder your efforts to help me with this device but... where did you learn Rihanssu?"

Sera began pulling off the face plate the device off in an attempt to buy time to consider his request for personal information.

"Verbal discourse will not hinder my efficiency." Sera replied, peering into the casing that was encrusted with carbon scoring. Undesirable. She reached down into the satchel pulled out a cutter beam, setting the beam to wide/dispersed and began using the tool as a sort of carbon scraper.

"My foremother taught me Rihannsu and showed me the letters in the sand..." Sera replied in serviceable Rihannsu as she began removing the scoring. It was a tedious task.

Vala watched her begin to work. He felt like uncanny valley had emerged around him and he was at risk of being swallowed. "She must have been a wise individual. I imagine it is rare thing to have an understanding of our words and letters amongst your people. Particularly those two generations removed." His 'old' accent felt foreign in his mouth. If Sera were intimately familiar with his people she would recognise it as a nnui rehvie accent - from the worlds on the edges of the Star Empire. "Do you know where your foremother learned it?"

Sera raised a brow in a manner that denoted amusement. However, thus far, no one other than other Vulcans figured out the meaning behind that particular micro-expression. "She is still wise, Montgomery. However, you are correct. Rihannsu is not commonly taught, at least to the best of my understanding." His accenting on certain words were quite distinctive - different than how she had been instructed. Was her inflection inaccurate or was this an expected variance within the language?

She pulled out another tool, a duotronic signal tester and began isolating defective circuitry...there were a lot of them. Fvadt. This may require an entire overhaul.

"And to answer your question...I do not know where she learned it - her proficiency in the language was quite comprehensive, however." Sera thought back to the hours of instruction in her ko'mekh-il's private quarters within the fortress. The small courtyard which held a small spring-fed water feature was a favored spot for Sera's language lessons. Well out of the way of prying eyes and ears.

She shook her head slightly, to banish the recollection - to continue would distract her from the number of tasks she was actively engaging in.

"Your accenting of words is...different. Is this a regional variation or have I been mispronouncing the words? It is not my intent to speak Rihannsu with inaccuracy."

Vala remembered why he often found Vulcans frustrating. He could not imagine learning a taboo language, surely covertly, for what must have been years only to never inquire as to how the teacher came to know this extremely profane and forbidden tongue. He shook his head momentarily as he considered this thought.

It was tremendously strange - Vulcans knowing Rihannsu. Vulcans teaching Vulcans Rihannsu. Vulcans teaching Vulcans Rihannsu sufficiently well that their accent is flawless. Vulcans teaching Vulcans Rihannsu sufficiently well that they can pick up on a regional Rihannsu accent!

One thing was certain - no Vulcan he had ever met up to now would have considered this appropriate behaviour. Vala's instinctual sense for suspicious behaviour was flaring up. He was glad Sera was focusing on the machine so he could regain composure, shift his eyebrow back into place and stop incessantly blinking. "You speak it... as a native would. Your accent is more of Romulus than my own." He tried to maintain a light tone. "My accent is nnui rehvie - of the fringes. I grew up on a borderworld." He walked closer and leaned against a console. "Did your... foremother tell you anything of my people?" He asked with what he was sure was an exceptionally casual tone.

Sera stilled. She looked over to Montgomery and studied him for a moment. Why did she feel as if she was alone with a ley-matya all of a sudden?

"I...was not aware of such details regarding my speech pattern, Montgomery. It was the pronunciation utilized by my ko'mekh-il during our lessons."

Our private lessons. Our lessons which once discovered by my mother were halted immediately.

Vulcan propriety demanded she answer his inquiry; however the level of transparency in the response was always up for debate. It was a constant consideration, weighing truth versus privacy, and his questions were bordering on...well...rudeness, if one were to use Vulcan cultural mores.

"She did not often speak of her life before joining our clan. Much that was spoken was...obscure to me; she never clarified when speaking of something I had no reference for." She answered in compromise and then returned back to her repairs.

"It is certainly a very fine accent for a non-native, make no mistake. Your foremother taught you exceptionally well." Vala put emphasis where it was due. Sera's other response was very specifically vague. Devoid of detail. Everything and nothing. It was probably not the occasion to press, but he filed it away under 'important' for later. "Well perhaps, if curiosity ever takes you, I may be able to shed some light. As a Romulan myself I am a fountain of context for such things." He peered over her shoulder. "How badly is it broken?"

Sera silently sighed in a modicum of relief. He was not pressing any further which was...preferred. She looked back down into the heavily damaged device.

"There is a saying amongst the engineering division, Montgomery. It is FUBAR. Although the usage of colorful metaphors are, generally speaking, alien to me, it is a most apt description of the current functionality of the chrono-synaptic analyzer."

Vala sighed. "Well I hardly knew her." He mocked sadness. "Time of death?"

Something about his statement struck her as irrationally humorous. She made a small sound, which definitely was not a choked note of amusement.

"Consider it on...life support." She quipped without thinking.

Was that... Was that a joke? The previous evening at the banquet flashed through his memory - it wasn't the first time. He had to remind himself that sometimes Vulcans were inadvertently funny in their supremely dry way of approaching things. But still... she was a very unusual Vulcan. "Life support is better than nothing. Good thing you made it here so quickly, hopefully she has a fighting chance now."

"We do not have a replacement analyzer in inventory, so although perhaps irrational, I must agree with your sentiment." She began pulling out all of the faulty parts to take them back to engineering to have them replicated.

"May I ask what you were doing when the device malfunctioned?"

He pointed at the notes he had provided to her. "I had just gone through the process of reconfiguring it, and I felt that a test cycle would be appropriate. Then the crunching began..."

"Very well. I would like to see the QC logs then to ensure the proper calibrations were being performed prior to usage of this device. This is an significant amount of damage." Sera responded, all business. "I will also require temporary usage of the work bench. It will be more efficient than working on the floor...Montgomery."

"Be my guest." He gestured to an empty section of the bench. "And... well the calibrations are of my own design." He gave a slightly awkward look. "So they may not have been strictly..." He coughed a little. "... proper. But they always worked perfectly well in the past. I have to assume it is faulty equipment in this case."

Sera raised a brow in non-verbal response, but she did not make any rebuke for with the damage inside of the machine - it was more than a programming misadventure. Her arms were deep within the guts of the device at this point and he saw her brows furrow and body tense slightly. After a number of small jerks, the engineer's arms yanked out a badly deformed power source.

"I believe this is the source of your device malfunction." Sera reached her hand out and showed him the melted power supply.

"It looks rather... crispy." It smelled acrid too. "Is it salvageable?" He stared at the melted object. "Uhm... would you characterise my calibrations as being the cause?"

"Salvageable? No. However, I highly doubt that your...instructions told the power source to self-immolate."

Her mental checklist was complete for the replicated parts needed to repair the chrono-synaptic analyzer.

"Or did I?" Vala gave a disarming look. "No... no I didn't." He smiled weakly. "Thank you so much for your help Sera. Or perhaps khnai'ra would be more apt."

Sera dipped in chin in acknowledgement of his thanks. "I come to serve, Montgomery." She crouched back down and returned her tools to the satchel she brought and stood, slipping the strap over her shoulder. "I will return once the replacement parts have been replicated in engineering."

"Jolan'tru, Sera." Vala smiled. "I will see you soon."

OFF

--

Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor
Deputy Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A

Lieutenant Montgomery Vala
Deputy Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

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