Lt. Commander Yogan Yalu — The mission to scan stuff
Yogan Yalu
(( First officer’s office, Deck 2, USS Artemis ))
Yogan was dead inside. Starfleet’s response to “Your ship was almost commandeered during a training exercise gone wrong” seemed to be “We will give you the most boring mission in Federation history and let you stew on it for a while.” Yogan enjoyed exploring space as much as the next person, but their current orders had taken “space exploration” to the extreme. The tedious extreme.
Day after day, the state-of-the-art Luna-class vessel plied the Borderlands, scanning one parsec after another to get a comprehensive reading of the levels of space dust, background radiation, and–gasp!–stellar gasses present throughout the region. He knew every officer and crewman aboard was climbing the walls for something interesting to do, as evidenced by the increasingly terse language in their daily status reports:
Everything’s fine. No changes since yesterday.
All systems reporting operation condition green. Still.
We good.
Yogan rested his head on the smooth, glassy surface of his desk. Another week of this and they’d have a boredom-induced mutiny on their hands. He half-sighed, half-spoke, his voice muffled from the awkward, reclined position of his head on the desk.
Yalu: Please, give me something to do. Anything.
Just then an alert popped up on his desktop viewer. When there are no existential threats facing the crew, most of them took advantage of the lull to conduct various experiments. What had become a good opportunity to run some tests had quickly spiraled into a scramble for sensor power.
Yalu: =/\= Yalu to Adea. You know that group of new arrivals? I was wondering if you might intercept one of them for me. We’ve got an interesting issue afoot. =/\=
Describing the situation as an “interesting issue” gave it far more mystery and gravitas than it deserved. Still, when there was nothing else to do, sometimes you had to create your own intrigue.
(( Timeskip - A few minutes later ))
The door slid open and Genkos stepped through the doorway accompanied by a young, male human. Yogan recognized him from the new transfer PADDwork as one of the bright upstarts fresh from Starfleet Academy. The personnel cycle never ceased; for every Luxa Lorana who departed the crew, a Jaseb Chevalier arrived. From Yogan’s seating position it was hard to tell, but he guessed the new ensign was about his same height. The most striking thing about him was a noticeable heterochromia.
Genkos’ visit was fortuitous for a second reason. Yogan had been meaning to ask about that weird patch of stained carpet in the corner that defied all attempts to clean.
Adea: Love what you’ve done with the place, Yogan. ::he coughed:: Commande Yalu, may I present Ensign Chevalier?
Chevalier: Sir. :: he straight his stand and nodded in direction of Commander Yalu::
Yogan stood, smoothed his uniform jacket, and held out his hand for Chevalier to shake.
Yalu: Ensign Chevalier, welcome aboard the USS Artemis. I understand you’ve just graduated from the Academy. ::beat:: Operations, if I’m not mistaken?
Chevalier: response
Yalu: I’m afraid I must put you to work right away.
Adea / Chevalier: response
Yogan activated the holographic display viewer on his desk. A schematic of Artemis hovered a half-meter above.
Yalu: Artemis is currently engaged in a deep-level sensor sweep of various corners of the Borderlands. Our sensors are running every minute of every hour of the day, and the requests for access outnumber our capacity. Astrometrics, Stellar Cartography and Astrophysics all have high-priority experiments running, and diverting sensor power from any of them could impact the collection of their data.
Adea / Chevalier: response
Yogan set three PADDs on the desktop, each one highlighting a science experiment in progress. As he set a fourth down beside, Yogan relied on his memories of his fourth host to add some additional drama to his presentation.
Yalu: And just this morning, a request came in from one of the medical technicians, a Crewman… Hamsan… asking to run an experiment on the effects of decompression on various types of tissues. ::beat:: Ensign Chevalier, as our resident operations expert, how do you propose we manage all these requests?
Adea / Chevalier: response
Tags/TBC
Lieutenant Commander Yogan Yalu
First Officer
USS Artemis NCC-81287
D238804DS0