Ensign Ivalyan Keros - Show Time

[Leia Stretz]

((Small Conference Room - MTF Maximum Thrusters))

The correction landed cleanly and Ivalyan accepted it the way she accepted most things she hadn’t anticipated — quietly, and with the particular internal efficiency of someone who had learned early that visible embarrassment cost more than silent recalibration.

Leda first. Yes. Of course.

Ivalyan: S-sirs.

She didn’t elaborate. Agreement was agreement. She wasn’t going to perform gratitude for being corrected.

Sylvax/Willow: Response

When the question of attire surfaced she looked down at herself briefly. Practical. Layered. Nothing that announced anything. For once the instinct to disappear into a room might actually serve the mission rather than just her own discomfort. She filed that observation somewhere useful.

Ivalyan: ::evenly:: Hard to look c-coordinated when you packed like you weren’t sure you were c-coming back.

It was almost a joke. She didn’t quite commit to it.

Sylvax/Willow: Response

A cloak. Practical. Ivalyan looked at Willow a half second longer than necessary — the counselor part of her brain cataloguing without permission, the way it always did. Solutions-oriented. Aesthetic and functional simultaneously. Useful thing to know.

Ivalyan: ::a single nod:: Unifies without m-matching. That works.

Sylvax/Willow: Response

Playing pretend. She almost said something about that — about how the hardest deception was always the internal one, convincing yourself the role fit before anyone else had to believe it. She didn’t. It wasn’t the moment and she wasn’t sure yet if these people were the ones to say it to.

Ivalyan: ::quietly:: The c-costume is the easy part.

She left the rest of it unspoken. Let them wonder what she meant. Or not. Either way.

Sylvax/Willow: Response

((Timeskip — Elder’s Chamber — Temurian Settlement))

The cold was immediate in a way the briefing documents had failed to communicate.

Ivalyan had read the atmospheric data. She had known what to expect in the technical sense — temperature, frost accumulation, low light conditions. But knowledge and sensation operated on different frequencies entirely, and the frost crunching beneath her boots felt like a small, pointed reminder that she was very far from anything familiar. She had borrowed a cloak, dark and worn at the hem, someone else’s history in the fabric, and she pulled it close without thinking about it.

She did not stare at the Temurians watching them move through the settlement. She was careful about that. But she watched anyway, the way she always watched — peripherally, thoroughly, cataloguing the quality of their attention. Not hostile. Precise. The particular stillness of a people who had survived long enough to know the difference between a threat and an unknown, and who were currently deciding which category the away team occupied.

She understood the impulse completely.

In the Elder’s Chamber she positioned herself slightly behind and to Sylvax’s left without being directed to. Observation position. Old habit, new room. Leda did not rise. Her ears twitched once beneath her hood and her silence had the specific weight of someone who used it intentionally — who understood that the shape of a pause could tell you more about visitors than anything they said into it.

Ivalyan was paying attention.

Sylvax: Elder Leda. Thank you for agreeing to meet with us.

Willow/Leda: Response

When the moment opened she lowered her hood in a single unhurried motion. Not mirroring Willow exactly, she had made the decision before Willow moved, but landing in the same register of deliberate respect.

Ivalyan: Ivalyan. ::The stutter was gone. She was working now, and work was the one place she had never had to fight herself.:: We’re aware that allowing strangers into a settlement like this isn’t a small thing. We don’t intend to make you regret the decision.

It was not a pleasantry. She meant it as information, about their intentions, yes, but more specifically about the fact that she understood what it had cost Leda to say yes. That she had noticed. That it wouldn’t go unacknowledged.

The counselor brain was fully online now. Everything else could wait.

Leda/Sylvax/Willow: Response

Ensign Ivalyan Keros

Counselor

SB 118 Ops

O240304IK3

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