Immanence

Posted on 28 Jan 2013 @ 6:07pm by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Petty Officer 3rd Class Thanis Rothgra & Nesh Saalm

4,678 words; about a 23 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 2, Mess Hall
Timeline: MD01: 0840 hrs

[ON]

The sea was purple, rolling and froth-tipped. To the west, an outcropping of rocks gathered nesting djiaros; birds with plumage that matched the seas of Trill itself. Aubergine and dusky white. He'd been running for hours, but he'd landed here, at the sea, with the waves and the djiaros squawking and he wouldn't run any more. He couldn't, even if he wanted to. Sinking, torn and bloody, he collapsed on the beach, feeling the sand like velvet under his fingers, and waited for the Klingons to find him.

"Thanis... Thanis..."

The Klingons sounded strangely like the Chief, he thought.

"Thanis."

"Huh-what-" he wobbled up and hissed as his head made contact with the undercarriage of the Hunley Class. "Aaaah," he moaned as he was rolled out from beneath the shuttle and found himself being studied by Chief Peers. "I wasn't sleeping," he lied, pathetically, in Trill.

She looked at him archly. "You've taken up snoring when you're awake?"

"I... ah... I had something in my nose. Ah choo. There. Got it." He waited for her expression to do the little dance between amusement and exhaustion that usually happened when he pushed her buttons. And there it was.

"As it happens," she drawled in Standard. "You should be sleeping now. In your quarters." She showed him her PADD, "You napped right into the shift change."

"Oh, right. Well. Overtime?"

"Nice try. Get."

He clamored to his feet and shook his head to clear the cobwebs out.

"You're on call today, Apprentice. Get some sleep while you can."

She said that every day. And even on the days she didn't say it, he was still always on call. Which he didn't mind. No, not at all. Every job she gave him, every lesson she walked him through, he got better. Every time Willis talked his ear off, he learned something. Day by day, he was less likely to electrocute himself again. And more likely to work on something really cool. He grinned, saluting her, "Yes, sir!" And took off.

Sleep was the first... His stomach grumbled as he stepped onto the turbo lift. Second order of business. "Deck two, thank you," he said, mimicking the way he'd heard Chief Peers talk to the ship. He thought it was funny, the way she talked to Galileo as though the ship were a person who had a very temperamental attitude. Especially because he'd never seen her talk that friendly or polite to any actual people. Not that she wasn't friendly. Well. She wasn't friendly; not exactly. But she was nice, in her own way. Kind of hard to read, always thinking about something, but she answered his questions and she took time out to teach him about the shuttles and help him build models and draw schematics. He was starting to get really good at hand-replicating schematics from memory, which she said was one of the keys to being a great engineer. Just because copies were easy between PADDs and the LCARS didn't mean he could slack on that. It was kind of an old school way of thinking, he figured, but then she had crossed from engineer to Chief Engineer in a single mission on one of the top ships in the Fleet, so he couldn't really say for certain she was wrong.

Deck two smelled like bacon, yes. And kava. Oh, it would be so good. And maybe there would be danishes out; he could eat about twelve of those if they were fresh. Ten if they weren't. Eight if they were stale. And they were not fresh, he discovered when he reached the line and picked one up to sniff. But they weren't stale either. Baked a couple days before. He took a bite. No. Just the day before. Eleven danishes it was. He began to stack them on his tray.

Collating. Collaborating. Codices. Matrices. Matrixes? Codexes?

She swiveled around on her chair, at the office desk of her teeny tiny quarters. Okay, so it was a closet. She looked around, frowning. It was definitely a closet. She knew they housed her by herself in the enlisted rooms, so that was good. And hey, you know, it was her closet. And she decided she was perfectly happy with that. Nice enclosed space. Cozy. Comfy. She was the one who told Lirha not to bother switching it out. She liked it. She'd hung a small dimlight above and it shone over her, bathing her closet in a nice warm glow. She'd also hung up some paintings. Not her own, of course. She was too ridiculously shy to put her own up, but they were just... nice. Nice things that she liked, and this was her closet, and she could put what she wanted in it. It was... private. Yes, it was. Nobody would be coming and banging and demanding things of her.

Nope.

She would show up, report to Maenad and Kiri, get her orders for the day and then go about doing them. Most of them were silly. Organize this. Fix this report. Send that report. Go watch science lab 2. (She does, by the way, and that Vulcan? He is definitely insane, and nothing will convince her otherwise. She watches him talk to himself for an hour before she realizes she's late and rushes off, hopefully undetected. Fascinating fellow, but he's still a cranky Vulcan.) She grinned to herself at the thought. Anyway, she was getting off track. Then, she would go to her closet, hers, and do the rest of the Things To Be Done. Honestly, Nesh liked it. It was strange, but she really honestly liked it. Liked having her own little space to collate and collaborate and index her own little files. She'd even learned enough from Kiri to access the terminal's graphic arts program. Which she'd used in her off-time to create some of her own work.

And like any teenager with a terminal, she did make sure to lock up the file with a password. (Okay, so her password is 'fuzzy monkey' but at least she knows enough to know that the space will slow them down! Although, she supposes, these Starfleet people probably have better technology than the beat up terminal in her room on Earth.) Her own, real, true art was hidden in a portfolio behind her desk. The one that would get her into Jmhari. The one that almost was going to get her into Jmhari. They'd narrowly avoided disaster and the school had accepted her into their preparatory program, on a conditional basis, considering her tutelage was going to be kept aboard a starship. So her schoolwork was on another terminal. It encompassed the grade level stuff she was used to, and then the Jmhari stuff that she would be working on in the process.

Nesh breathed out slowly. She was on what they called 'alpha shift'. That meant, that every morning at 0745, she 'reported for duty' to Maenad and Kiri. Today's 'report' had come in over her commbadge, so that was nice. She looked at her chronometer, still dressed in her 'makeshift uniform' of black pants and a blue shirt with a communicator over it. She just finished with her collating and organizing work for Kiri, and that had left her in a pickle. Breakfast. She needed it. Like, now. Because collating, people, took a lot of time. And it was boring. (Well, okay, some of it's cool, but for the most part, it's lame.) As she'd spent the majority of her morning in her quarters doing work, she did not actually go get breakfast when she was supposed to. Her fault. Again. Whatever.

Breakfast was calling. She stood up and grabbed the box with her pheromone neutralizers in it. She really didn't like the way they made her feel, but she'd been told that she'd get over it in time. Lirha told her, and Lirha usually didn't lie. Much. So, she took them, and then took the other one that made it not feel so bad, and hopped on down to the mess hall. Fortunately she'd put some good use into the computer locating technology, and she could often be heard in the mornings yelling things like, "Computer! Where's the mess hall!" and look, those blue lights would show up. And off she went, down the hall, this way and that, until she filed into the - wow, she guessed that morning shift had already cleared out because there was like, nobody there. Except one guy. A teenager guy.

Nesh perked up instantly in her head. No, not because of that. But because she just realized... that guy might be her age! Maybe she wouldn't be friendless after all! She niggled that in the back of her mind while she went up to the buffet counter. Real fruit. From Earth, from Vega Nine (Nine, not Eye-Ex like she'd stupidly called it), and even from Botchok oh wow, Lirha must have went and got some imported to Vega Nine! Nesh was super eager to try the fluffy breakfast contraptions. Some of them she knew, mom made them all the time before school. But some of these, she knew, had come straight from Botchok and that meant they were really Orion. She loaded her plate full of the goodies and set it aside on a tray. She also added some fruit. Apples were her favorite, followed by sliced mangoes. Then she picked up another plate and loaded it up with one of those gigantic fluffy waffles in the corner. She drizzled it with an overabundance of whipped cream and grabbed a heaping of fresh kiwis and strawberries and pineapples and blueberries to place on top of it before heading over to Teenager Guy's table and sitting down right across from him.

"Hi! She said perkily, as she said most things. "My name's Nesh Saalm. I work as the Scientist's Mate thing, for the ship, a civilian kind of job, you know. Anyway, I'm sixteen, and you look like you're not that much older than me, so we are totally going to be friends? Kay? Kay. Cool. Hey, you want to try one of these? They're from Botchok, my mom's homeworld. They're like heaven in your mouth, I swear to god." She handed the Trill (man, there's a lot of Trill's on this ship), a couple of her chirich pastry balls using her fork and then dug her fork into the whipped cream of her waffle, pulling out some of the fruit. Man, the topping was the best part.

Thanis had noticed the girl when she'd come in. Well, obviously, he had because there wasn't anyone else in here and she was green so... he'd have had to have been blind to be ignorant of her presence. Which he wasn't. No, indeed. And he wasn't an idiot. There were only two Orions on this ship, they were sisters, and one of them was the Captain. He knew that because he listened. He listened to everyone, all the time, and most people tended to not even notice he was there. Because he was a 'kid'. Or because he was working on something in the background. Whatever the reason. Anyway, he knew who she was. All of that, who she was and that she was there, he was totally on board with. Still, he hadn't expected her to actually talk to him. Because - Captain's sister - why would she? But then she was and he couldn't really help but grin.

He'd never actually spoken to the Captain before, and he'd never seen an Orion before Captain Saalm, but Nesh - he'd already known her name, too - was not what he had expected. Not that he'd really known what to expect; he'd grown up pretty insularly on Trill. She reminded him of his sister Gemma, even though Gemma was older. Kind of like a tidal wave.

He grabbed one of the better danishes - a sweet cheese filled one with lida berries mixed into it - and dropped it unceremoniously onto her plate as she passed him the pastry ball. He'd been eyeing them, but ever since Slak had tricked him into eating Gagh on the last mission, he'd gotten nervous about trying things he didn't recognize. Food was so much easier where he came from; none of it was alive when it reached your plate and none of it tried to bite you. "I'm Thanis," he said, sticking a fork in the pastry and lifting it up to check it for teeth or tentacles. "Crewman Apprentice," he added, then "Rothgra." Because he'd forgotten to say that and she wouldn't know if he didn't tell her, obviously. "Thanis Rothgra," he repeated, in order. The pastry didn't bite him, or sting his lips, and it didn't seem alive, and it was good. All puffy and fried - he had learned that he loved fried things. He sniffed, rubbing the sugar from his nose with his wrist, and grinned again. "If heaven tastes like this, it's probably not there to be gotten to anymore," he joked and no one ever got his jokes, but he laughed to himself anyway, then took another bite and ended up with yet more sugar on his nose.

Nesh snorted into the gigantic bite of waffle she'd cut off to herself, a genuine one, because Nesh's fake laugh was much nicer and refined than her real laugh, which was a cross between a hacking baby seal and a snorfle of some kind. She looked up, grinning with whipped cream on the end of her nose. She crossed her eyes and poked it off with her finger, and then popped it in her mouth, because it was whipped cream, and nobody wasted that stuff. "Which is really unfortunate, but at the same time, not really, because as long as it's not there anymore, it's here," she rose her fork as if to say hurrah. "And if it's here, I can eat about six of them at a time. Which I will do - hey, danish," her eyes lit up again at the bit of food that had been placed on the side of her tray. She picked it up and cut off a slice of that as well, chasing down her waffle with another bite of danish. Whatever propriety she was supposed to have when it came to eating, she - well - didn't. Food was food. And food was good. "You are like seriously the third or fourth Trill I've seen on this ship," she said after swallowing, poking her fork benignly at him. "And those spots? Way cool. Kiri tells me they even go down to your feet. Aliens are cool," she mused to herself with a smile. Of course, she too was an alien, but she didn't really think that whole coolness factor applied to her, since she was her, after all.

"Yeah," Thanis shrugged good-naturedly. "But it's a science vessel, so what do you expect, really? I was actually surprised there weren't more of us. Or more Vulcans. But mostly us. I knew a bunch of guys who were applying - actually for your job. But I guess they were shipped off to other ships." He stuffed the rest of the pastry in his mouth and tapped her fork with his while he chewed. Chewed. Chewed. Swallowed. "Dermatoglyphics," he said with a chuckle. "Not 'spots'. They're our 'prints', you could say. Like humans have signifying characteristics on their fingertips. Spots are... just... spots. Randomly." He paused, "You realize you're green, right?"

"Dermatoglyphics," Nesh repeated, arching her eyebrows and leaning back in amusement. Almost unconsciously, she looked at her fingers, which did not have prints like her classmates did. "Hm, yeah, but I've always been green," she pointed out reasonably. "Never had spots! The grass is always greener," she smirked at the lame pun of her own. "I don't even know why I got this job," she sighed and slumped a little. "I mean, I'm not really a science-y kind of person? But I guess it's that whole, Captain's sister thing," she winced apologetically on behalf of Thanis's friends who probably were science-y people.

"Well, I've always had dermatoglyphic pigmentation. And I've never been green. So I guess that makes us even." He flashed a grin at her and picked up one of his remaining danishes. "You're not enlisted, either. They were. A whole crew of us batched in our enlistment forms right out of tertiary academy. Maybe they wanted to give the job to an outside eye." He bit into his danish. "And maybe you're smarter."

Nesh shrugged. Maybe she was, but she didn't like showing it. People usually zoned her out. Back on Earth, it was best to just play dumb. But here, it seemed like people preferred it if you were smart. So, she shrugged, quirking her lips slightly and moved to consume another chirich ball. Still as good as she remembered. "Maybe," she granted with a small smile after thinking on it for a while. Just not in a science-y kind of way. But that was all right with her. She had the belief that everyone was smart in their own way. "So what do you do here? Like, on the ship. You're a Crewman Apprentice, so what're you apprenticing?" she asked, in her bluntly curious way.

"Engineering," he told her. "Sorry. I thought I'd said." He shook his head, "I must be more tired than I thought. You know what helps with that?" he grabbed one of the pastry balls from her tray and took a bite. "This." He took a swig of his kava, "And this." He wasn't sure what to say about himself. He was enlisted, yes, but he'd only been on this job for a short time and it wasn't like he'd done anything he could really brag about... "I got electrocuted," he said, excitedly. "It sucked, but Chief Quinn and Chief Peers both said that's something that most engineers can expect at least once. Good ones, only once, they said, so hopefully I'm done, but..." He held out his hand, "Look, no scars."

Nesh grabbed his hand, bringing it over with her to examine it with wide eyes. "That is so weird," she proclaimed in the kind of voice a child might use while eagerly trying some new and gross experiment. "The captain," she said, because she'd finally trained herself out of calling Lirha just Lirha even if it still happened sometimes, "Said that you guys were in some kind of major mission thing. Wicked." The only exciting thing Nesh had ever done, she looked up and tilted her head innocently, "I crashed a shuttle. Well, Markus crashed the shuttle. I was in it, though! Probably not as heroic as yours..." she lamented in good nature. "You were probably out saving the ship from peril or, whatever. I just had a sucky boyfriend. Hey, you think something cool will happen on this mission?" she asked. They were going to some nebula. Or planet. Planets? "Rojar," she remembered. She'd categorized and collated it enough to remember it by now. She helped herself to some more danish and waffle. Really, they were quite good mixed together.

Thanis thought hard. Tell the girl that he'd gotten fried grabbing a live sensor relay during repairs before they'd even really started their first mission, or let her think he did something heroic... "Yeah, it was pretty... yeah," he agreed, trying to be cool, even though that 'major mission thing' was still giving him nightmares and he hadn't even done anything. Not really. He'd been squirreled away in a Jefferies tube for most of the fighting because he didn't know how to use a phaser and they wanted him to stay safe and out of the way. "I hope so. As long as it's not like the last one, you know? That was pretty... huh." He returned to his half-finished danish. "It's a whole new solar system, right? That's the word in the corridors. And if that's what we're going to then it's got to be cool. How many people do you know who've been on one of the first ships into a newly discovered solar system? That's-" he grinned at the thought of it. "It's going to be awesome. No way for it not to be."

A whole new system. Thanis was right. That had to be cool. What if they found aliens?! Nesh was realizing very quickly that she must have had some kind of fascination for the subject, since she was inordinately focused on it ever since she'd gotten aboard and actually met some of the more diverse crewmembers. The people on board didn't really find it as interesting as she did. They'd mostly met her enthusiasm with boredom. Of course, they lived and worked in space, on a science ship, so it was probably an every day thing to them. But to her, it was phenomenal. The fact that so many different creatures grew and evolved and spread out and they could talk to eachother and visit new worlds. Nesh grinned. "I can definitely see the appeal of living out here. Like, in space. Are you going to stay here? Or is this just like, a temp thing?"

"We all live in space, don't we?" he asked, grinning. "Ever expanding, potentially retracting." He shook his head, "No, I enlisted. I'm in until I die or retire. Then... I guess I'll figure it out when I get there, but I don't want to leave. Not the ships. Not these ships. They're so..." He sighed, looking around the mess hall with a fond eye. "Have you seen the hangar? The shuttles? Or the core? Have you ever seen a ship's core? All that energy harnessed like a living thing to power us through this relative void? I don't understand how anyone could not want this-" he paused, looking at her, "Course if you don't, that's cool, I just- I've got a big family and everyone's back on Trill. I mean, they all have their own things, my brothers and sisters, but their brains do all the traveling. Not their bodies. I want both. I want it all. You know?"

Nesh nodded, spilling dark tendrils of hair over her shoulders. She cursed under her breath and flung it back, tying it up haphazardly and then flashing a quick, rueful smile. "Stupid thing. Anyway, I dunno, really." She had a little frown on her face. "I sort of want to be an artist," she blurted out with an eyeroll. "Not so cool or whatever, but I mean," she paused, pressing her fingers to her lips while she thought. "I've never seen really the inside of a ship. Uh, you know," she gestured around the mess hall, "I've seen this. But engineering? No. I bet it's awesome, though," she said sincerely. "Taking something, putting it down on paper. Or even a computer. I've kinda always thought the universe was one gigantic piece of like, artwork or something. And everybody sees it all day long. And one day, we won't be here. So it's like, we have this short amount of time, to show people what we see." She knew she wasn't explaining it well. "Everyone sees things differently. So it's like a personal footprint, or something. I'm thinking this place has some neat spots to draw," she smiled. She then frowned, again. She wasn't really sure why she admitted that. Maybe because Thanis was so enthusiastic about his engineering thing. It was hard not to meet enthusiasm with enthusiasm. Or something. She shrugged and decided More Breakfast.

"You should do it," he said, peeling apart yet another danish. "Sure, why not? Especially because - yeah - people see it all day long from every angle, but people don't really see things, you know? Not really. I read that something between sixty and eighty percent of what the average citizen of the Federations sees is just... made up. You know? From expectations. We absorb a little and make up the rest. Which - I mean - is crazy. It is kind of like art. I think you're right. Only I can't go art. I can build stuff, but... actually, I have been learning to free-draw schematics, but that's not art. That's keeping track of distances and angles and filling in the details. What kind of art do you want to do?"

"Some people could, like, call it that, though. There's no real definition. Hmmm." Nesh had her thinking cap on this morning it seemed. But a philosopher, she was not, so it came out rather garbled. "Maybe nothing has any meaning, so we're all floating in a big bubble. Like amoebas. Hello!" she waved, one Amoeba to another. "Anyway, whatever we do, we're just trying to like, I don't know. Find whatever meaning we're..." she quirked an eyebrow and stuffed her fork into her mouth, "Finding." Yeah, not so good with the words. "Looking for," she corrected. That was it. "Mostly I just, I dunno, paint? Like really old school stuff. And the computer terminal has all these programs on it you can get to do most of the same thing, but it's all, you know. Kinda like what you do. Lines and angles. But it's still art. It's whatever, you know?" she said, as if that sentence absolutely made sense. Which it did. To her. She wished she had a PADD. "I'm much better with the drawing than I am with the talking," she told him with a grin. "Just, for the record there."

"Then your drawing must be pretty awesome," he said, then hid behind his danish to yawn for a couple seconds. "I don't though, it's just a step, for me, training, so I can be able to build the three-dimensional image of a space in my head." He swigged more kava. "I'd like to see it. Your drawings."

"Maybe you will," Nesh said with a secret smile, as if it were her own private world. It was, in a way. She frowned as a beep started coming from her uniform. "Oh, crap!" she muttered, looking at the chrono. "I've gotta jet. They've run out of things to organize and collaborate and file I guess." The Orion stood, smile still planted firmly on her features. "Tell you what, you show me that warp core, I'll give you a drawing." She rose a hand in farewell but not before offering him the rest of the chirich pastry balls on her plate. "Take em, good for the soul! And get some sleep! I can hear your eyes from here!" she called over her shoulder as she hit the reclamator. She popped the last one into her mouth and turned to wave once again.

"Good luck with all the collaborating!" He picked up one of the donated pastry balls and bit into it as she headed out. "Nesh!" he called, tossing one of the pastry balls to her, "Zero-hundred! Deck seven!"

[OFF]

Nesh Saalm
Scientist's Mate, CIV
USS Galileo

CA Thanis Rothgra
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo
(NPC)

ENS Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

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