Secondary Student Mi'shune sh'Sonora: Thermal Stress Test
d.reinhart
(( Trinity City - Commercial Sector - Starbase 118))
What first hit Mi’shune’s senses, once the transporter coalesced her body from solid matter to communications signal and back again, was the sweltering, oppressive heat.
From what she could tell they were above ground and in an area where the sun, much like the skybound villain of an old retro videogame desert level she played last week, felt actively out to kill them. Its unrelenting brightness shone down on the ground, reflecting off the many windowed towers and buildings, radiating from the heated ground, wilting the heat-punished plants and trees.
Adult Mi’shune would call Trinity City’s heat a little too much, and she experienced SoCal weather while at Starfleet Academy. Teenage Mi’shune, used to the above ground cold and below-ground geothermal comforts of Andoria, had no such reference.
It was, as Buster Pointdexter would put it, hot, hot, HOT!
Adjusting to the glare of summertime sunshine, Mi’shune saw they were in one microclimate among many. Storms were in other sections of the city, some rainy, another blizzarding strong enough to give her and her fellow Andorians pause.
McLaren: That's the central weather control tower. Something must be going on in there...
Mi’shune had to take McLaren’s word. On a strange alien space station, sectors away from her home on equatorial Andoria, she didn’t know the weather control tower from any other tower in Starbase 118’s artificial biome. With hardly time to adjust and barely a clue what was going on, all she could do was follow McLaren and react.
Didn’t mean she was having the time of her life.
sh'Sonora: ::Pants, her antennae sagging as sweat drips down her face.:: Gods, it’s hotter than a Mugato’s taint out here. ::She fans her face with her toolbox.::
Munshi: Response?
McLaren led the team of memory-addled officers to the weather control tower, a building that could have been mistaken for one of her thaan-father’s many owned office buildings. The lobby could have been lifted from any planet in the federation, complete with lobby, waiting room furniture of the most durable and least comfortable materials, marble and glass walls polished to a mirror shine, and plants with a one in two chance of being made from synthetic plastics.
Cool, rich air-conditioned climate control. How delicious it felt after walking the artificial urban desert!
Having walked through the urban office park rendition of Dante’s Inferno, Mi’shune beelined to the replicator, ordering a bottle of ice water faster than she’d ever done in her life.
She spied two security officers were in place, staring ineffectively at the warning screen indicating a locked out turbolift.
McLaren: Well... I think our first problem is going to be getting up to the control room... Looks like the lift might be out of the question.
Mi’shune gasped after taking a large pull from her water bottle, taking away the taste of heat, dust, and fear bile from the day’s traumatic events. Water never tasted so good!
The idea of climbing stairs to get to a control room, assuming she knew the floor, didn’t appeal to her in the slightest.
sh’Sonora: I nearly got heat stroke out there, Commander McLaren ma’am. There’s gotta be some way to override the lift.
Munshi: Response?
Setting down her water bottle, Mi’shune set her toolbox on the ground and popped off the clamshell lid. She stared down many tools, some familiar, others not, and chose a hyperspanner, because every fix needed a hyperspanner for reasons unexplained, and a tool she couldn’t identify but looked broad and flat, perfect for prying.
The access panel under the lift display popped open easily once the hyperspanner loosened the molecular bonds and the flat-edged tool pried the panel off.
sh’Sonora: Taaaa-da! Alright, let’s jerry-rig this….
She stared dumbfoundedly into an unfamiliar mess of wires, duotronics, and circuitry.
sh’Sonora: ::looked back to her companions and giggled sheepishly:: …on second thought, maybe someone else can have a look at this?
Any: ?
Peering over the shoulder of her emergency peers, Mi’shune watched, fascinated, by their work. Familiar hands pulled and switched, swapped and tinkered, until the turbolift’s red-alert style warning screen turned back to a friendlier and more functional amber, flashing ‘system online’.
Any: ?
Once again Mi’shune relied on the guidance of her compatriots. She didn’t know what she would encounter, riding up the elevator, waiting for unknown dangers while her sweat cooled and the water bottle pressed against her forehead stopped the cranial pulsing caused by the outside’s thermal onslaught.
She felt a return to temperature normalcy by the time the elevator stopped to disgorge the team onto the floor containing the weather control system’s main operations area. The corridors matched the downstair’s lobby, all except for the lighting, switched to an after-hours dimness.
TAG / TBC
Ensign Mi’shune sh’Sonora
Helm Officer
Starbase 118 - Ops Department
O240208MS1