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CSO's Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty

Posted Jan. 28, 2020, 12:39 p.m. by Lieutenant Junior Grade Garth (Chief Science Officer) (Ben Z)

Posted by Cadet Anders Taurean (Scientist) in CSO’s Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Garth (Chief Science Officer) in CSO’s Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty

Posted by Cadet Anders Taurean (Scientist) in CSO’s Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Something about the name Challenger felt performative. When humans last launched a ship named Challenger, they posited all the signs of a race destined to drive itself into the dirt. Instead, a new Challenger stood as a testament to all the apocalyptic vices humankind had shrugged from its shoulders. It seemed Starfleet was intending to say: “We will not succumb to the hubris of our ancestors. We were made to know the stars.” Now newly christened a Cadet, Anders Taurean wasn’t sure if he was buying into it or not. He had to admit, however, that in his excitement to be assigned to a starship, Anders remained unprepared for the assignment to begin.

Walking with wide strides toward the Chief Science Officer’s office, the Cadet suddenly found himself forgetting the man’s name. As he drew near, he passed another Cadet in the hallway; another Cadet who definitely heard him muttering to himself with a lack of confidence, “…Brad?”

There wasn’t any more time to lose steam. Anders believed it’d come to him in the moment, as most things tended to. His teachers always expressed disdain for his ability to conjure an impressive result from an unsteady and sometimes bumbling attempt. Don’t think about school don’t think about school! he scolded himself, reaching a hand to press the door chime. Rushing with his index finger, Anders jammed the metal just above the chime. The Cadet let out a low breath of displeasure and, upon gathering himself, hit the button successfully.
(Cadet Anders Taurean)

The doors to the Challenger’s main science lab hissed open automatically as Cadet Taurean pressed the chime, apparently requiring no permission to enter.

Although it was located on deck one, the flagship science lab was starkly different from the other areas of the ship’s premiere deck. Whereas the bridge, observation lounge, and captain’s ready room were kept neat and tidy, Garth’s workspace was a scrapyard of miscellaneous metal parts, half-constructed analysis equipment, and seemingly unattended bubbling test tubes and beakers. Walking through the space would require some careful maneuvering as to not knock anything from their precarious perches at the edges of the long, low tables that lined the room.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Garth was hunched over a small contraption in the corner of the congested room. As Cadet Taurean entered, Garth snapped his head around to look over his shoulder, revealing the furrowed brow of an aging tellarite man. Garth’s eyes were obscured by thick black goggles that pushed into the wide bridge of his swine-like snout.

“Grab that particle stabilizer and bring it here, quickly!” Garth barked as he turned back to his work, leaving no indication of where the tool he was referring to was located among the mess.

(Lt. J.g. Garth, CSO)

OOC: Welcome aboard Nicholas! So happy to have you with us! Great first post, and it looks like you’re picking things up quickly with your thread title and use of a character signature! I’m looking forward to writing with you!

One note: If you go to the “Profile” tab, you will be able to add a background for your character. This is a great place to put in a detailed physical description, general personality traits, and medical/psychological information for the CMO and CNS (head doctor and ship’s councilor) to draw from in your threads with them. These pages can help someone get a feel for your character. Cadets also sometimes includes things such as “got great grades at the Academy” (or the opposite) to give their DH some background into the cadet’s resume, if you will. Here is an example of my background page for Garth: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/character/987/

The instant the door swooshed open and Taurean stepped inside, he found himself being verbally accosted by a frantic Tellarite. Before he could bring himself to react to the Lieutenant’s order, Anders froze, and the name Garth popped inside his head. Snapping to in an instant after that, the Cadet took in as much of the science lab into his overstimulated brain as possible.

Seeing the disarray the lab lie in, Anders felt relief. He was not the neatest of people– least of all when he was deep in the throes of an important project or a passion piece. So, the Cadet again scanned the room and compartmentalizing what he could make out in the cluttered laboratory. He needed a particle stabilizer. That meant the CSO needed a tool designed for precise micromolecular repair. So, Anders scanned the room with his eyes looking for such other equipment, moving gracefully through aisles of unattended tests and indiscernible metal pieces. When he was younger, Anders always managed to amaze his friends on the basketball court with nimble, clean footwork and steady, fast-moving hands. Such skills could prove invaluable in environments where cautious-but-sure movement had meaning.

Wading over to the complete opposite end of the room from Lt. Garth, Anders spotted a neutron infuser sitting under the view-piece of a well-worn atomic microscope. With a few deliberate steps showing off his long stride, Cadet Taurean tore through the contents of the desk until the particle stabilizer rest in his hand. His foot caught on a box of more random metal pieces, but the young cadet caught his balance and returned to the Tellarite officer as quickly as he could. No doubt, though, the Lieutenant would find some gripe about how long it took. It seemed a rite of passage for the inexperienced officers. Fire under pressure and all that, Anders understood.

Garth appeared to be intently focused on whatever project he had in front of him, but his ears were listening closely for any disruption to his workspace. After a moment passed without disturbance, Garth was tempted to turn and look with curiosity. It was rare that someone was able to move through his lab without knocking at least one piece of equipment to the ground. But then Cadet Taurean’s foot hit the box of scrap, and Garth snorted to himself in amusement.

“Here you are, Lieutenant; my apologies for the delay.” After handing off the stabilizer, Anders forced himself to stand at attention and announce, “Cadet Taurean reporting for duty, Lieutenant…Garth.”

(Cadet Anders Taurean, Science)

OOC: Thank you for the useful tip! As I said in Discord, I’d have never discovered that on my own and it would be pretty nice for other people to know at least what Anders looks like!

Garth snatched the stabilizer and used it to fuse a microfracture in a forearm-length metal cylinder that had been spewing sparks. He leaned down to put his nose directly in front of the contraption, examining it through his goggles. Only after a few long seconds of silence did Garth right himself and turn toward Anders.

Garth looked up, and up into the face of the much taller man, with his chest pushing outward instinctively. “Ah yes, the cadet who took a year off,” Garth stated bluntly. “Who was your mentor at the academy?” The tellarite crossed his arms as his magnification goggles dilated to zoom in on Anders’ face with a low whirr.

(Lt. J.g. Garth, CSO)

OOC: As I’ve demonstrated here, you can insert reactions in between the paragraphs of previous posts. Usually it’s best if the inserts don’t change things TOO much, for obvious reasons. But sometimes it’s necessary if your character would have done something or responded to a question posed a couple posts back. This is especially common in 3 or 4 or more person threads. To do this, you just need to make sure that there is no arrow before the inserted paragraph, and also a line of space both before and after the insert (also with no arrows).

Snapping his head back out of instinct at the whizz of the smaller man’s ridiculous goggles, Anders was more caught off guard by the Lieutenant’s brusque questioning. He wasn’t familiar with Tellarites, and tried to decide if this was the nature of the man or the nature of the species. Yet he caught himself in his hesitation again, as he just had when entering the room a moment before.

“Oh, well, the first time I was studying under Commander L’Vor,” he said, trying to sound prouder than he was, “When I, uh, returned…she was was Captain of the Eratosthenes. So the last year I was studying with Captain Andiue, working on a project compounding theoretical astrophysics and stellar cartography attempting to map the recombination epoch. He-“

He sounded insane and the theory itself was half-cocked, Anders knew that. He always asked Andiue:

“If we’re looking something at the molecular level, what does it matter that we’re looking at stars and moons and comets or if we’re looking at our own hand in the telescope?”

“Because we’re putting together a puzzle. An endless puzzle, yes, but one whose pieces we have many of.” Andiue responded back then, “At one point our universe was infinitely large and infinitely small. Which leads me to believe that, being, in part, infinitely small, much of the pieces of our space we cannot track the creation of might have some molecular footprint proving a connection in spite of vast light years separating their connection.”

”…Captain?” He never missed the unrelenting Vulcan commander more than his first meeting with the near-crazed Harley Andiue.

Sighing, the Captain said: “We still have not found the gap species between the Big Bang, CMB radiation and the formation of physical matter that became the sun and stars and the blackness between them.”

“Captain, you’re talking about Recombination-“

“Yes! Scientists theorized the Big Bang and discovered CMB and proposed Recombination, but when everyone turned their eyes to reaching the stars they forgot the creation of it all. And when I realized that in my youth, at the Academy myself, I couldn’t let that idea go. As all devoted scientists are unable to do…”

The only thing that seemed to connect the two was their inability to shake the past and its effect on feeling uncertain of the future. Anders never really felt committed to the project himself, but felt devoted to the old man’s fever dream of “putting the puzzle pieces together” and discovering the molecular map to some “cosmic Pangaea”. The truth was that nobody had published one of Andieu’s papers in fifteen years, and Anders couldn’t wait to hop on the closest starship and get away from that study. Now, though, standing in this cluttered lab with a strange and unfamiliar Tellarite, Anders wanted to be pouring back over maps of all four quadrants again, looking at cosmotic surveys at any and every point a Federation ship had bothered to take one.

Welcome to Challenger, Cadet, he thought to himself, half-wondering what lie behind the Lieutenant’s googles.

As if to answer the cadet’s unspoken question, Garth reached up and pulled the goggles off his face to sit high on his balding head. Two small, beady eyes squinted at Anders for a moment, his pupils darting to focus on one of the cadet’s eyes, then the other.

“I was a co-author on one of… Captain L’Vor’s fledgling papers, but that was many years ago when she was a lieutenant,” Garth grumbled as he rummaged through the refuse.

After a moment of searching and apparently not finding what he was looking for, Garth grunted and turned back to Anders. “Astrophysics is my specialty as well. But practical and applicable astrophysics, not… ‘theoretical’.” He said this with a twinge of distain, perhaps hinting that he had heard of Captain Andiue’s studies and didn’t hold them in the highest regard.

“For example,” Garth said as he turned back to the contraption on the table in front of him, “this is a portable interstellar telescope meant for observation of stellar phenomenon without the use of standard ship sensors. Designed for long-term away missions on class M planets close to systems that have reoccurring events that warrant more than a fly-by.” Garth paused, as if waiting for Anders to praise his invention.

(Lt. J.g. Garth, CSO)


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