RESIM PNPC Ensign Ceylan Graves - Excogitate I

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Ras El'Heem

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May 25, 2025, 7:07:06 PM5/25/25

to USS Khitomer – StarBase 118 Star Trek PBEM RPG

((OOC: Apologies, Hobart’s sim didn’t show up when I was writing this up. Resimming with the new tags.))

((Astrometrics / Stellar Cartography, Deck 16, USS Khitomer, the Lagoon Nebula ))

The artificial gravity had only foundered temporarily but returned soon enough. The ship had gone quiet in a way that felt almost ecclesiastical. Not silent but hushed. As though the hull itself were holding it’s breath.

Ceylan sat cross legged beneath the dormant stellar array, wrapped in a rustling emergency foil blanket that clung to him like a second skin. The thermal layer caught the pale glow of his wrist lamp, refracting faintly off the smooth curvature of the walls and casting long shadows like creeping roots. He had remained in the lab, not from duty so much as inertia. That place, normally aglow with dynamic cartographic models and stellar telemetry had become a sanctum of stillness. With the main systems offline, even emergency power snuffed out for a time, there was little to do but wait.

Still, he tried. A notepad rested a top a closed console covered in erratic scribbles. Actual paper. He’d been attempting to reconstruct Sencha wave behavior from memory and what he could see out the window, backtracking signal dispersal and imagining permutations through gravitic interference. It was mostly conjecture. But conjecture with flourish. The act of thinking and doing kept the disquiet of what was happening at bay.

Sitting this close to an outward-facing window had allowed the room to drop a few degrees. He paused to gently blow on his fingers. They were growing stiff despite the blanket. He sighed. It wasn’t approaching a dangerous realm of cold, but it was inconveniently corporeal. To his left, a display flickered weakly once. Then again. It stuttered to life with a soft ascending tone that sounded almost apologetic for disturbing his peace. The hololith engaged with a sudden, sterile flare and projected a static star map that rotated slowly. Somewhere deep in the ship’s belly, a hum returned.

Ceylan get up. He simply sat the notepad to his side and watched the stars resume their eternal spin above him, his expression unreadable.

Semara: =/\= Lieutenant Semara to Ensign Graves. How's my favorite stellar cartographer? =/\=

Ceylan winced. He had hoped to suffer his time in the stellar nursery alone, contributing to the ever expanding database of star maps in Starfleet’s archives. He didn’t respond for a moment and instead shirked the foil off his shoulders and sighed again. Eventually he tapped his combadge.

Graves: =/\= You..you hhave a f-favorite? =/\=

The Kelpien was particularly bedraggled of the countless enthusiastic and charismatic officers on that vessel. Semara had inserted herself into on of his charting projects sometime ago and he feared she latched onto him for one reason or another. Her boisterousness made it hard to computate the way he was used to. In repose.

Semara: =/\= How'd you like to help me map a real weird subspace anomaly on the bridge? Could really use it. =/\=

The prospect of departing the confines of his safe space sent a chill down his spine. And to beset upon the bridge, no less. Ceylan mouthed the words before he said them.

Graves: =/\= If there is no…no preferred altern- ative. If it is r-requisite, then… =/\=

The ensign trailed off, dejected. He inhaled deeply through his nose and hoped his hesitance would be conveyed.

Semara: =/\= Great! I think you'll get a kick out of it. The anomaly kinda looks like a certain bowl of noodles... :: A soft giggle :: =/\=

Again, another sigh embarked from his mouth. Or rather deep in his chest.

Graves: =/\= A r-rather callow interpretation. =/\=

Ceylan sat there as silence returned and stared out the window towards the singularity. Eventually, he hoisted himself and skulked out of the room.

((Timeskip, 12 hours later, Bridge, Deck 1, USS Khitomer, the Lagoon Nebula))

The stars on the main view screen were an illusion. Or at least, a forgery. Flattened and stilled by the limits of the Khitomer’s external sensors. Behind that sedate screen, the stellar nursery boiled. Ceylan stood at the science station, his posture languid from hours of uninterrupted work, though his fingers continued their darting choreography across the interface without pause. He had forgone sitting. Too sedentary a position for the mental strain this demanded.

He was beyond exhausted. The constant flinching as engineers walking past them to repair gel packs and run ship diagnostics was taking it’s toll. The sensors were limping in their function and it had set back what should have been an hour of work, at most. The singularity throbbed a the heart of the nursery, sending out it’s tendrils like ancient god. Unknowable. Capricious and enigmatic, impossible to map without much effort in their current predicament.

Twelve hours prior, he and Lieutenant Semara had deployed a modified Type-7 sensor drone into the fold. Thay had laced it’s emission trail with a particulate cloud of graviton bound isotopes to be used as a synthetic tracer field designed to respond to spatial distortion with color-coded interface. Like illuminating capillaries within a thickened fog. Some of the string like structures, Ceylan could see with his naked eye, but that put his partner at a disadvantage.

Semara loomed over his shoulder as he worked, eating a bowl of something pungent. He felt it was primitive to work while eating, but she was the commanding officer.

Semara: Yeah, yeah, I know. I wasn't promoted yesterday you know... :: A cheeky grin. :: That's why I'm keepin' it away from the consoles.

The Kelpien blinked and shifted like he was about to be stuck by the woman. But she moved away as the second science console signaled it’s equationary work was completed.

Semara: Dang... We lost Rapunzel again. :: Beat :: Sorry, that's Sencha strand Kappa-seven-three.

He pulled where the strand should have been on his screen. Instead it was empty space. The data that had been trickling in showed a fractal web of distortions blooming slowly across the grid. Veins of invisible gravity, briefly visible under the tracer’s touch. He zoomed in on a vicinal strand, watched it pull taught, convulse, and recede like tidal currents caught in a time-lapse.

Graves: Pathway sta-stability at junction theta-six is c-collapsing. Temporal refraction increasing b- ::he froze and took a moment then tried again:: by point two-three percent per-per cycle.

Zerva: Response

Hobart: Problem with the scanner, or the strand?

Semara: :: Working at the consoles :: We were doin' great chartin' the anomaly for a bit after we got our gel packs replaced, but we keep loosin' strands after a while. We find one, scan the path of the knot til we get a plot we can use for navigation, and move on. But they keep collapsin' after a while, then re-appearin' as isomorphs of the original strand. They usually keep their average orbital distance, but that's about it. I still think somethin' about the probe's destruction destabilized things. The only thing that's stayin' fairly fixed is center hole, so far. But scannin' that's been a devil...

She was right. The singularity had been elusive in material data. The radioactive concentrate decayed well before it arrived at the hole.

Hobart: Then wrap up your work. Record as much data as you can on the center, you can analyze it on the way home.

The man looked up, frustrated with the sentiment. Science took time and they couldn’t just choose to make something happen if it was not possible.

Zerva / Semara: Response

Ceylan remained quiet and tried to avoid the attention of the captain.

Hobart: “Aye, Captain, understood” is what I just heard, I think.

Zerva / Semara: Response

Ceylan bit down on his cheek and thought for a moment.

Graves: If-if Sencha is disrupting the singu- larity’s reach, why don’t we-we do the sssame?

He stared at his map, not realizing the other’s had grown silent for a second.