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CSO's Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty

Posted Jan. 29, 2020, 4:53 p.m. by Cadet Anders Taurean (Scientist) (Nicholas Tardive)

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 Lieutenant Junior Grade Garth (Chief Science Officer) in CSO’s Office - Cadet Taurean Reporting for Duty
Posted by… suppressed (4) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

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)

A co-author to an old L’Vors paper? Maybe the name Garth sounded more familiar than Anders remembered, but his memory decided to withhold that information for a time being. He felt the urge to get his personal library up and running to take a look back through Captain L’Vors’ earlier work. She always spoke up on the inability of his arrogant youth to mine beyond the surface. He read more introductory books than any in his field, but more often than not failed to go beyond that introduction. Oh, how he wanted to sample it all and let those samples go to waste.

Upon introduction to the portable stellar telescope, the Cadet leaned his long body in past the Lieutenant, palms spread on the table. Looming over the forearm-length invention, which wasn’t quite as portable as advertised. However, if the gadget did what Lieutenant Garth claimed it could, Anders couldn’t imagine being able to make it any smaller than it was. He rolled it over on the table, bent over lower with one eye closed, looking at every centimeter of the gadget. Then Anders picked it up, feeling its impressive lack of weight, and found a panel on the side. Exposing the circuitry of the telescope, the cadet carefully took an inside view of the pathways of its wiring; all the side-streets and avenues and dead-ends that did one thing or another. Without breaking concentration on his up-close review, Anders said:

“All in-field astrophysicists say they prefer practical and applicable– the tangible, and all that. But without theory and one’s philosophical side attempting to grasp beyond the how, there would be little to practice or apply. Without solid grasp of theory, we would not be traveling at warp speed through the stars, Lieutenant.”

Garth’s hand reached out reflexively as Anders held the telescope, the universal “be careful with that” motion. He watched Anders’ inspection closely, as if preparing at any second to dive forward to catch the contraption should the cadet drop it.

He finished taking a look at the stellar telescope and stood with his back straightened once more, letting out a small nod of approval as he closed the side-panel.

“Yes, yes, this is an intriguing, nifty trinket,” Anders said, “Young me wishes he had this device to carry all through the streets of Buenos Aires, plotting the most luxurious course for my elegant starship.”

After he finished speaking, the cadet realized this answer was not what the Lieutenant was looking for. Indeed, it seemed as bad an answer as he could give, but he chose to stand by it. Instead, Anders chose to follow up with a quick question as a preemptive strike.

“How long term are these away missions?” Then he followed that up with, “Aren’t starships supposed to remain in planetary orbit unless under duress of harm to its crew while in immediate orbit? Or then are these telescopes automated in nature and designed to be planted, aimed, and left for a designated period of time?”

(Cadet Anders Taurean, Science Division)

Garth’s eyes narrowed as the scientist fumed silently at the ‘nifty trinket’ comment. Perhaps his response was not as explosive as Anders’ might have suspected. Garth was a man who had become accustomed to his inventions being underestimated and trivialized. Of course to Garth, it was simply because he was an unappreciated genius, whose ideas were lost on those not quite on his level.

“There are cases,” Garth began in a very measured tone with obviously tested patience, “when a ship will leave an away team on the surface of a class M planet to conduct surveys while it pursues another objective, to return for them later or to rendezvous with them via shuttle.” He paused. “Automation of the telescope is of course the next logical step in its development.” But Garth’s gaze shifted, suggesting that he had not actually considered this idea before.

Garth shambled across the lab to check on a set of bubbling beakers, adjusting the temperature of the hotplates beneath them in what was pretty clearly just a way to keep his hands busy. “So your specialty. Astrophysics, even after working with Andiue?”

(Lt. J.g. Garth)

OOC: Next trick to the trade! “Snipping.” Threads like this can get pretty long, so we snip them to keep the words we have to scroll past to get to the most recent post more manageable. This is especially important for people viewing the site on mobile devices. There are a couple ways people do this. I personally prefer snipping down to the six most recent posts of a thread. But you can also snip to the most important post someone needs to know to jump into the thread. As a general rule though, when snipping in a multiperson thread, you want to make sure each person in the thread’s last reply is still on the page. I’ve snipped your first post in this thread as an example. You don’t need to snip every post, just when things start to get especially long. Try out snipping my first post (which should be the first after my snip). To do this, just delete the post with 7 arrows next to it in your reply, delete the post line with the 7 arrows at the top of the page, and add a (snip) after that.

The young cadet’s words seem to strike a sour note with the Tellarite Lieutenant, though it hadn’t quite soured as poorly as Anders anticipated. And he couldn’t help but stroke his internal ego, wondering if the invention’s automation was indeed the telescope’s next logical step or if it were one that hadn’t quite occurred to Garth but sounded useful. Either way, Anders thought this introduction was going well enough. He never seemed to win people over right away, often aiming to prove some positive value instead. Starfleet was a realm dictated by command chains rotten with oxidation, wrapped in red tape to cover up the flaws. Proving value was more important than proving a delighted and sought-after presence. In truth, such a thing made Cadet Taurean’s skin crawl. That didn’t stop him from taking such necessary advantages of the situation however.

“Yes, Lieutenant, it’s what I’ve been told I’m best at, and what my major ended up being,” Anders replied, watching the smaller officer in an attempt at keeping himself occupied; experimenting could be an advanced, personal meditation process. “Though I have studied in variances; Botany, Command, Warp Theory, Ancient Philosophies, Intraspecies Politics and Diplomacy, even a writing course…”

He trailed off because Garth knew exactly what came next: As many of those classes I aced, I dropped completely. L’Vors heeded me to pick and choose with more care, but too much of one thing closes as many lanes as it might open. I was just happy to be studying whatever textbook my eyes could glue themselves to.

There was a short pause, where Anders remembered the time L’Vors forced him to take the minimum number of courses he could in a given semester– three. And all of them were Astrophysics related. She gave him no choice in declaring it a formal Major, as opposed to accruing empty credit for what was then less a premeditated career than it was an escape mechanism. Snapping from past to the present, Anders realized Garth didn’t want to hear a lick about any course he took not related to scientific pursuits.

“Three years ago, Captain L’Vors and I arranged with the Academy Brass to spend two years between the Academy on Earth and Hekaras Corridor. Several decades ago reports were written and tests were ran in the corridor that depicted warp drive as an imminent threat to the astrophysical state of subspace in the corridor. If you believe rumors, a Hekaran scientist gave her life to prove that warp drive would create a subspace rift in space.”

Anders didn’t have to mention that not much came of this incident but the burying of those reports and tests.

“Now, while it was posited that subspace in the corridor itself was weakened by nature, and warp drive’s effect there wouldn’t be the same the rest of the galaxy. After a few confusing nights in the library reading what surface-level information a cadet is granted, Iasked the Captain if the natural state of baryon asymmetry in the known universe was being thrown off by our warp core’s 1:1 matter/anti-matter ratio. Maybe, I suggested, our warp engines were flooding space and with an unnatural amount of antimatter, which could carry into subspace and intensify certain tetryon fields to the point of destabilizing and the formation of a rift.”

Again the cadet drifted off. Captain L’Vors had told him his introductory theory paper was worthy of publication, with a few more edits. He was going to do that on the ship headed for the Hekaras Corridor. Instead, Anders never stepped foot on the ship. L’Vors conducted some research on her own, occasionally reporting back to Anders when he was on his leave of absence. She returned, the Academy insisted whatever findings she brought back were insignificant and refused to publish the paper. Both he and the Captain wondered if her promotion to the Eratosthenes was meant as consolation. His original theory paper lie dormant somewhere in the depths of the undergrad library, forgotten even more than he was.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he apologized, “I didn’t mean to ramble.”

(Cadet Anders Taurean, Science Division)


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