Everything Is Magic! I

Posted on 08 Mar 2013 @ 4:14am by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sergei Petrov

2,018 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 4, Multi-purpose Laboratory
Timeline: MD04: 2300 Hours

[ON]

Rarely if ever did Liyar seem to stop working, or moving, or really stop in general, and it was no different now. The multi-purpose lab had become something of a second home to the Vulcan or at least one of his more preferred ones. (Considering he's made every area of the ship but his actual home a home to wander aimlessly.) Since Meridian had allowed him to fully detoxify his body from the medication he'd spent the majority of his shift in the labs, calculating star systems and charts and trade routes and impacts and projections.

The projections went for walls and walls, grids and subgrids and tucked in programs. With divergent outcomes depending on the consequences of the decisions that were made. It was like a tree of numbers that he sporadically added onto, lost in the haze that had become, to anyone who knew him even remotely, a normal sight. He had a stylus in hand and he was writing on one of the grids in front of him, surrounded in three dimensional space with the holographic projector suspended in the air in front of him. He walked to and fro, and the grid moved with him, allowing him to roam around and pace as he saw fit. And as anyone who remotely knew him at all, it wasn't surprising that he was too distracted to notice the doors opening and someone walking through.

Lilou wavered in the doorway, watching the projections spinning out on all the walls. She didn't want to disturb him, but he was here and she had the machine and... she took another step inside, tracking the numbers spinning across the wall as though it were a mythic monument of grace and beauty. Which it was. To her. Like art. The only art she'd ever appreciated anyway.

Barely pausing in movement at all, Liyar continued on the same track as he was. Well, whatever that was. It shifted and changed in ways that were completely random, to an outsider, but in his head there was a rather nonsensical plan of motion, a way that things always led back to one another. He moved the panel in front of him with a wave of his hand to reflect the first starting point and wrote several columns out, striding forward as though he'd forgotten something, straight across the room and consequently, distracted, almost directly into Lilou. He blinked. There was a face in his numbers. That did not happen very often. Why was it the chief engineer? He had a small, barely discernible look of contemplation on his face while he tried to puzzle that out. He moved the panel out of the way to a blank one, and stepped over beside her, leaning down to examine her like some kind of science project. Her energy flew through the room as his concentration started to refocus and he realized, belatedly, that she was in fact very real and very much in front of him. Another blink. "Ensign Peers," he greeted, straightening a bit and folding his hands behind his back. The hologrid remained suspended, surrounding them both.

Lilou blinked a couple times, looking up at him. She had not anticipated the staring that had frozen her in her tracks like a deer, but it was over now - thank the spirits - and she could breathe again. "Lieutenant Liyar. I was going to-" her gaze flicked back to the numbers; they were still being decoded and puzzled out in the back of her head. "I wasn't going to inter-" PV(ga)=PMT(1-e -(r-g)t)/e(r-g)-1... She shook her head and thrust the small mechanism out towards him, "I brought you this."

"PV(ga)=PMT(1-e -(g)t)/e(r-g)-1," Liyar corrected absently, gently picking up the piece of equipment as though it were fragile, uncertain as to what it was. It looked a little like the fereikek reh in front of him, except it was smaller. As though it could attach. He eyed the port nodes on both machines and lifted it up, allowing the fereikek reh to destabilize and fall back into his hand. The numbers disappeared while he popped it open with the press of a button to reveal the odds and ends of the inside. They were obviously designed by a Vulcan, and in such a way that it was a marvel the thing functioned at all. "What is the function?" he asked, in suitably Vulcan fashion, lifting his gaze back toward her for a bare moment before studying both components in his hands.

Lilou felt a tug on her heart strings as the Vulcan pulled apart her contraption. Please don't break it; she bit her lip. "It's- you were talking about not being able to hear the music right. This should help."

Liyar frowned. This was in matching design to the fereikek reh. It was designed for it. Which would be impossible unless she had pulled the personal database. Which was impossible unless she had gone directly through the Federation database and through the VSA archives. (Impossible unless is not an accurate terminology, but he is confused.) Which were not necessarily encrypted, but not easy to get into, either. She was an engineer. Chief engineer. He thought all that over while he turned the new sphere over in his hand and peeked inside, before closing it over and attaching it to the larger. "You hacked into my files."

"Ah..."

"And reconstructed the design of the fereikek reh-bikuv-sayek." Was he sterner? He could have been a little sterner.

Oh, spirits, not Vulcan, she thought despairingly.

"To create a device I would find," he gave her a somewhat deer-ish look in return, "Useful." He really did not appear to understand.

"I wanted to help," she whispered. If she'd been a turtle, her head would have shrunk into her neck. She wasn't a turtle, but she tried anyway.

Liyar connected the two pieces with a small snap and held the completed version out, allowing it to switch over to the musical/instrumental side and resume its position floating in front of them both. He selected one of the randomized recordings from the psi-null column that still stood in the saved position and arched his eyebrows as it played back through the room. Whether or not he was concerned about the hacking, he didn't really either remember or care. The opening chords of Welcome to Lunar Industries by Clint Mansell reverberated across the room. It wasn't perfect. He didn't know if it ever would be, considering the alternative, but it was... "Fascinating."

He was going to kill her. He was going to put her in a box, cut her into pieces, then feed those pieces to Stone, who would feed the remaining bits to Captain Saalm and she would spend the rest of her days sitting useless in a metal bubble in space and would never fly on a single ship again. Unless she found a merchant ship. Maybe she could engineer one of the civilian classes. It wasn't her dream, but it was better than being stationary and not in space. "I wanted to help," she said again, her voice nearly a whisper.

Liyar remained a little half-phased with dual focus until he realized the odd sensations coming from the music were not coming from the music, they were coming from her. He paused playback and tilted his head down at her. "I see that," he said, attempting to sound less what Athlen would call frighteningly robotic. As always, his inflection came about mechanically. He reached out slightly with his own mind to combat her wave of hysterical paranoia with one of his own - curiosity. Not rage, or anger. He would not do what he did before, but it was second nature to him to broadcast, and it was more than instinctive to meet emotions battering at his shields with minor projections. "I can hear it," he added to himself almost under his breath, or unconsciously, shaking his head. It was unusual music. Like Athlen, he shared a predilection for the novel. Unusual, new. Jarring, in its own way, or maybe that was still his fuzzy perception.

Her shoulders actually sagged down from her ears at the mental touch; a small relieved smile curving her lips. If she could have purred, she might have. The stimulus to her neurotransmitters was very pleasant.

In the corridor, outside the lab, Maenad was walking at a brisk enough pace to catch her hair and frill her skirt. "How many times must I tell you, Mister Petrov? The answer is no." They rounded a corner, Petrov at her heels.

"Miss Panne, I can assure you that if we pull up the grass, retill the soil, and use a mixture of--"

Maenad stopped on a dime and Petrov almost ran into her, moving his head so it didn't hit the square of her shoulder. She hadn't noticed, and spun around with her PADD held up. "Do you have any idea how much work that would take? Have you?" She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I am not converting the arboretum into a K class environment with a carbon dioxide atmosphere just so you can see what it's like."

"Miss Panne, if you will just look at my data," Petrov held out his PADD, a patient smile on his lips. "I think that,"

"I don't think that you think anything, Mister Petrov," she grumbled as she snatched the PADD from his hands and started looking over his writings.

He tilted his head, the same patient smile as always and a glint in his blue eyes. "Come now, you don't really believe that," he said back to her.

Maenad raised her green eyes from the screen to meet his and said that she didn't, but she easily could have. "In order to do this, everything in the arboretum would have to die," she said. "And a lot of people like the arboretum the way it is, myself included." She returned the PADD and resumed her trip to the lab.

Petrov followed, but he hadn't given up just yet. He knew her too well to give up; she seemed rigid, but she was softer than she looked. As they came upon the lab she was leading them to, he tried again once the doors had opened. "I think it would be very prudent to conduct such a study, Miss Panne. We are on the eve of exploring a system that will likely be filled with K class environments; Captain Saalm would be most pleased if--"

Inside the lab now, and not even noticing all the floating numbers floating around and the darkness, Maenad turned around again. "I said no, Mister Petrov, and that is final. We are not turning the arboretum int--" She cut herself off, staring around the room as she finally noticed that it looked nothing like the science lab she knew. Liyar and Ensign Peers were on the far side and it looked like... she had to squint, but it looked like she was wearing something similar to the device that Liyar had given her.

She pointed her finger at Petrov. "No," she said again, and then walked over toward the Trill and Vulcan. "What is going on in here?" Maenad demanded, her hands on her hips. Petrov still beside her and a step back, but his smile had faded into a curious sort of graveness.

[OFF]:

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

ENS Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

SWO Sergei Petrov
Science Officer/Geologist
USS Galileo

RSS Feed