JP: Cmdrs Karrod Niac & Adriana Morgan - Piecemeal - Part 1
Karrod Niac
((OOC: Doing a bit of scene blending here to handle the big swap, enjoy! Tags will pick up and be responded to normally!))
((Main Engineering - Deck 12))
Niac: Just another day in the fleet, Chief. Besides, it took me three weeks to get out here. I'm not all that excited by the prospect of another three weeks in a shuttle...::Karrod gestured to himself::...I don't fit in the overhead compartment all that well.
Yellir: Considering that Type 9 shuttles are essentially cabinets with warp cores, I don’t blame you. Those things are terrible to spend a mission in, let alone sleep in. I had a sore back after I slept in one of the passenger chairs. Horrible away mission.
Karrod chuckled in sympathy.
Niac: Remind me to tell you about the time I got stuck in one of those damnable things with six other people for the better part of a month. There were days all of us wondered if a few minutes of vacuum exposure would be worth it just to vent the smell.
Yellir: At least Runabouts are built for comfort, thankfully, and also proper research. Plus they have a Captain’s chair. Also— before we get to work on repairs, it might be wise to get some tricorders. There might be some residual particles we might be unaware of, which might hint us to a way to develop a countermeasure.
Karrod nodded and started towards an equipment cabinet before realizing he had absolutely no idea where the gear racks were in this massive engineering bay. He scanned the room somewhat sheepishly and turned back to the worktable as a wave of unusually strong disorientation washed over him.
Niac: …I’m sorry, Chief…you said…tricorders…
Yellir: Trelium is always on the table, I just worry since it’s very toxic towards some of our more logical crewmembers.
….Karrod found himself suddenly unable to focus on the console in front of him and gripped the table edges hard enough to make the composite bend, desperately trying to anchor himself. Niac was howling in confusion and fear but the voices of Horvu, Sencha, Armo and Rostil were distant in a way they’d never been. His eyelids fluttered, his knees buckled and his last coherent thought was an especially profane Andorian obscenity that Rostil had loudly shouted when burned in the kitchen.
~~~
((Deck 1 - Main Bridge))
Time had passed and things were unceremoniously and very strikingly calm. The shuttle was back. Things seemed to be settling, despite the chaos of the morning, and despite the concerns of the injured, nothing major seemed to be happening. Of course, those were famous last thoughts. As Adriana did yet another scan of the planet in search of something, some answer to some of the mystery of not only why they had been sent here, but what had transpired, and what the strange thing was that had passed by at such high speed, she found herself drifting. Thoughts compiled against thoughts. Ideas and emotions bombarded her, though rebuilding the mental walls was relatively simple, it still grew tedious.
It was almost distressing, the way that the waves of thought and feeling washed up against the shoreline of her mind as time wore on. Morning became afternoon, and time marched onwards, with it, dragging along an ever growing pitch of what she could only describe as panic. Cautiously, carefully, she let her mind take some of it in, and only grew more confused. A strange fatigue overtook her, and as she focused on the feelings and how their colors clashed in her mind in all of the wrong ways, she closed her eyes.
If only for a moment.
~~~
For one single blessed moment, there was silence again. Karrod floated somewhere, not asleep and not awake, but aware enough to feel himself drifting in solitude. The chorus of voices that had haunted him even in his sleep were mercifully quiet and Karrod briefly felt a relaxed contentment he’d last known in San Francisco. Perhaps, he thought to himself as he drifted through a formless void, he’d fallen asleep in his comfortable leather armchair and the last few months had been nothing but a convoluted expression of all his worst fears and anxieties, played out in great detail by his subconscious with shocking levels of verisimilitude. He’d soon fall back into himself, he was sure, awake in his favorite chair and spend a few moments at the window, taking in the Bay air to refresh himself before wandering off to bed.
It was a very pleasant moment. The one that followed was, alas, less so.
Karrod’s drifting took on a sudden sense of terrible velocity and direction. He was falling, tumbling, spinning out of control towards some uncertain destination. He could feel something pass him within the void, an ethereal presence gone almost too fast to perceive, hurtling away into the darkness. Then, the voices came back. But there were not the voices of Niac’s past lives and they invaded his consciousness like a misaligned subspace radio, overlapping and incomprehensible. He snapped back to consciousness with jarring suddenness, no transitory state between what had been and what was, simply aware again of the physical universe in a way that he had not been a moment before. Weight and heat and touch and gravity all reasserted themselves with horrendous insistence. By reflex alone his eyes snapped open and he nearly wretched from the intensity of it.
TBC
================================
Commander Karrod Niac
Chief of Operations
USS Excalibur - NCC-41903-A
Commodore Kali Nicholotti, Commanding
V239509GT0
&
Commander Adriana Morgan
Communications Specialist
as simmed by:
Commodore Kalianna Nicholotti
Commanding Officer
USS Excalibur - A
R238605KN0