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Check-Ins | Step 1: Bug the Captain

Posted April 4, 2021, 3:43 p.m. by Lieutenant Tal Abara (Senior Researcher (Cognitive Science)) (Trin S)

Posted by Captain Zachariah Cobb (Commanding Officer) in Check-Ins | Step 1: Bug the Captain

Posted by Lieutenant Tal Abara (Senior Researcher (Cognitive Science)) in Check-Ins | Step 1: Bug the Captain

Posted by Captain Zachariah Cobb (Commanding Officer) in Check-Ins | Step 1: Bug the Captain
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Tal Abara – accomplished nurse practitioner, ceramic frog collector, and champion of wrong turns.

Directionally challenged and without the internal compass to point her ‘North’, Tal found herself bewildered and staring awkwardly at a PADD nestled between her fingers. ‘Lost’ hardly fit what she was experiencing. Eyebrows knit together, Tal shifted her gaze from the Leviathan’s layout to the corridors, searching for something familiar. Slowly, a frown tugged at the corners of her lips and pulled her features into a grimace.

“Hmm,” she tapped the display then waved her finger hopefully at a nearby door. “You’re..” she leaned forward, tilting her head enough to catch the plaque perched at its side, “yes! Okay. Then the turbolift must be..” She whipped around and hesitantly gestured down the hallway. “..that way.”

Feigned confidence infecting her gait, Tal found her way through a sea of metal doors and the occasional tight-lipped officer. It felt like an aeon before she happened upon the destination of her (purely professional) dreams. A grin quickly replacing her frown, Tal hurried her pace and waved to the Ensign just about the step before her. “Wait!” She called out, earning a confused glance which happened to last just long enough for her to slip into the turbolift. “Thanks. Where are you headed?”

“Deck 24,” he tersely informed. “You?”

“Uhm,” Tal regarded the PaDD once more. “23 – that works out great.” Respective requests made, Tal settled against the far wall and submitted to the patience of a short, silent ride.

By the time the doors peeled open, and she bade farewell to her companion, Tal had regained her composure. She trusted – as long as she didn’t meet the same difficulty finding Cobb’s ready room – composure would grant the gift of persistence. Seconds passed like minutes before Tal wandered up to the Captain’s ready room doors. Promptly, as not to encourage the strange concoction of curiosity and ambivalence bubbling in her belly, Tal raised a hand to chime and palmed it.

– Tal Abara, Cognitive Researcher

Zachariah Cobb was not a patient man. Nor had there ever been occasion to describe him as gentle or delicate, or even stable a great deal of the time. Which is why his latest obsession had been met by raised eyebrows and disbelieving glances from almost every soul he dared impart the details to.
Tal Abara, being newly arrived on the Leviathan, would not yet have been confided in on the nature of this obsession. Although while she waited for a response to her hail, she might consider the CIC to be unusually quiet. As if every officer at their station was listening intently for sounds from the captain’s ready room…

Tal’s stormy gaze flickered between the CIC and Cobb’s ready room. There was an odd silence consuming the cacophony of idle chatter that Tal had come to associate with duty officers. She pursed her lips in thought and followed the wayward glances occasionally cast her way. Curiously, she meandered a step closer and tilted her chin…

At the exact moment that her chime rang out, the sounds finally came.
“Bloody ridiculous, irritating, meaningless, waste of time contraption! Damn you!”

Tal thrust her head back, her eyelids lifted in innate shock, but the subtle familiarity in his curse afforded her a flicker of nostalgic amusement.

Seconds later and the doors would slide open, to reveal a silver-haired and red-faced man slumped at the desk, surrounded, for at least four feet in all directions, by what appeared to be small, thin pieces of silver metal. And on his desk, a crystalline base, now broken (or possibly snapped) into two.

Sensing he had company, the man at the desk looked up and, with a desperate sigh gestured to the scattered debris and roared, “Who the bloody hell was it that invented kal-toh? Because I would like to ring his bloody neck!”

  • Captain Zachariah Cobb

“I’m sure 90% of the galaxy would join you,” Tal meandered forward, knelt and reached out to snag a stray t’an. Patience was a virtue Kal-toh exploited. Though she suspected everyone aboard Leviathan had found some semblance of ‘order’ among the profound disarray of their work, it wasn’t quite comparable to a game of sticks and crystalline bases.

“Frankly,” she set the rod by his snapped base and gestured to the debris, “the t’an are much better as decor than game pieces.”

Mirth danced in the echoes of her gaze, but it soon faded into a sense of schooled professionalism. She thought to offer him a glass of water or something to ease the red plaguing his cheeks, but she thought better of it, choosing to advance her status from ‘stranger-in-my-ready-room’ to ‘maybe-a-familiar-name?’

“I’m Tal Abara,” she stepped back and leaned against her cane, managing a slight smile. “If you’re.. preoccupied, I can return later, Captain.”

– Tal Abara, Cognitive Researcher

At the woman’s threat to leave him alone with the infernal puzzle, Cobb’s eyes widened in desperate horror. “No call to leave! Please, sit. Whatever you have come to talk to me about will be preferable to this Vulcan instrument of misery!”

“Mm. Leaving you to suffer at the whim of this.. torturous instrument would be a tad cruel.” She weighed his plea, her grin consuming any semblance of sobriety she’d schooled to that point. “I suppose I’ll say.”

Rising to his feet, Zachariah rounded the desk and drew out a chair for his guest, before heading for the tall, antique cabinet on the far right wall and producing from somewhere within it a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He filled both without confirming her preference. If she wanted tea then he would just drink both whiskeys to himself.

Tal propped her buoyant cane against the chair, lowered herself to its cushion and let her gaze wander after Zachariah. The eerie calm in her eyes tempered by curiosity, she edged forward just enough to steal a glimpse of his liquor cabinet. Abara wasn’t sure from where he’d produced the whiskey or on what authority he possessed it, but she wasn’t about to complain. His ship, his rules. Right?

“Tal Abara,” he echoed her name from his tongue as if it were a liquour to be savoured, returning to the desk and placing one of the glasses in front of her, before settling back into his own seat.
“Or there is tea, if you prefer…” he murmured quickly, while neglecting to specify exactly where such tea might be found.

Tal quickly shook her head. She’d endured enough finicky replicators to know that, without water boiling on a nearby stove or the aroma of loose herbs rising from a metal jar, it wasn’t safe to accept the tea. That is unless she was aching for another cup of ectoplasm-chamomile delight. The very thought of it sent a shiver scaling her spine.

“I’ll stick with the whiskey,” Tal assured.

The captain was pleased at her choice and he made no attempt to hide the fact from his expression.

“Tal Abara,” Cobb said again, then almost instantly the recognition was etched across his face. “You’re our new researcher. I have been studying your file. Or, what little detail I have been graced with, anyway. But perhaps you might fill in some of the gaps. Like…” he shrugged as if the question was not already burning a pit into his brain, “…what is it that you hope to study onboard my ship? Is it the anomalies? Or does your interest lie with the crew ourselves?”

  • Captain Zachariah Cobb

“Both, sir,” Tal hummed. “My research – cognitive research – shouldn’t be limited to ‘anomalous’ or ‘non-anamlous’. To comprehend the effect one has on the other, we must first understand what makes them tick. How do they respond to external stimuli? What effect do their responses have on the environment, the people around them? What subtle and vast elements separate their neuropsychology from a humanoid’s – from each other?” She shrugged, but it wasn’t enough to mask the unfounded enthusiasm dancing behind her feigned composure.

“How they respond to external stimuli?” Zachariah repeated. “You mean like a phaser?” He shrugged and shook his head, a few strands of long, silvery hair disrupting his attempt at a dignified hairstyle. “I’m not serious. I know as well as anyone on this ship that the lives of these things we have in containment rank far higher than the lives of any members of this crew. Myself included.”
There was no anger in the man’s tone as he admitted knowledge of his own, lowly ranking in the scheme of things. Merely apathetic resignation.

Untempered by idealism as she’d come to associate with Starfleet Officers, Cobb’s words struck harder than she’d expected. They didn’t shock her. Tal was disquieted by the familiarity she found within them. She refused to entertain a daydream, knowing on ships like Leviathan that apathy was as much a weapon as a means to survive. Abara couldn’t bring herself to question it. Instead, she offered an earnest smile and nodded.

“I have limited data on these anomalies, so I cannot detail elaborate hypotheses or experiments just yet.” She was tossing a match into a cavernous abyss, hoping to illuminate something she knew almost nothing about. Tal Abara was a woman driven by wonder and concern. “But.. I can say I’m interested in examining the effects of anomalous encounters on the humanoid psyche, and vice versa.” She paused. “My service aboard the Viking has rendered me a little more.. conscious of methods to improve these encounters. I believe a key factor is recognising the behaviour, motivations and needs of these beings. Well.. at least the anomalies that take corporeal form.”

– Tal Abara, Cognitive Researcher

“The Viking?” And now Cobb’s own interest was piqued. “Its former crewmembers seem to be gathering on my ship like stem bolts to a magnet. Oh, I’ve heard the rumours. I know some of what occurred on that ship.”
He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “There are some who believe that the ship itself is an anomaly. Or…was. Its current whereabouts are entirely unknown. But I suppose you already know that.”

Tal made no effort to hide the smile teasing her lips. However faint, she had a hope a certain half-Klingon was among Cobb’s ‘bolts’.

“You say that as if there’s any doubt,” Tal downed the contents of her glass and inched forward to present Cobb a clandestine grin. “Viking’s got everyone suspended by string,” the former counsellor hummed, “she’s smart. She understands our mortal condition – conceivably better than we ever could – and she exploits it.”

Viking braved the waves of her subconscious, eclipsed by deep and impenetrable darkness, but never managed to escape. And though contempt ached to torment her words, reverence hypnotised them before it had the chance. Viking wasn’t a knight in shining armour fortified by Starfleet’s finest, but she’d been their ship, and her crew was the closest Tal had to family. She didn’t have it in her to regret knowing them.

Reclining back into his seat, the captain sipped silently at his whiskey for a time. There was no denying the woman’s enthusiasm for the role. Or her intelligence. But the Leviathan was a ship like no other. And very few could predict their own reactions to their very first containment breach.

“Your service record and published research speaks for itself, Miss Abara,” he finally continued. “And I have no doubts that your work onboard this ship will be valued most highly by the ARU. But I am no captain of science, Lieutenant. I am a captain of people. I have witnessed firsthand what an encounter with one of these anomalies can do to a human, especially one who is tired or stressed or otherwise distracted. So while I feel confident that you will have ample research data to draw conclusions from, I would not want to find you a statistic of your own experiment.”

There was a strange dichotomy between being equally valued and expendable, but Tal suspected that was the price of admission.

His smile was mischievous, less distinguished starship captain and more backwater rogue. With a wink, he refilled both of their glasses then asked, “So, what does a specialist in cognitive science do for fun on a ship like the Leviathan then, eh?”

  • Captain Zachariah Cobb

Tal hadn’t expected the question. Leviathan and fun resonated on opposite sides of the spectrum, but she understood their dependence on one another. On ships like Leviathan, she suspected a work-life balance – or work-fun balance – was as much as a necessity as food or sleep. Without it, she couldn’t begin to consider the damage it would have on the crew’s psyche.

“If you’re asking whether I people-watch? The answer’s a hard no.” A flicker of humour infected her otherwise sober cast. “I’ve never been one for idle fun. Hand me a novel, and I’ll probably lose interest by the third chapter. Challenge me to a spar– different story.” Abara, though branded by her intuition and composure, came from restless roots. “I guess you could say my mind is best tamed by a rush of adrenalin or instability curiosity.”

“I used to kayak and scuba dive,” Tal admitted. “There’s nothing quite like the spray of river water on sunburnt cheeks or the feeling of wonder when you’re 15 metres below. Of course, most of the places I’ve served don’t have rivers. And the holodecks were always too dangerous to bother.” A glint in her eye suggested it hadn’t for lack of trying. “So, I guess the only way to answer your question is to say.. if it sounds fun, I’ll try it.”

Some insisted Tal was woefully incapable of consistency – that its permanence terrified her – but she contended her restlessness was fundamental, intrinsic. Tal refused to let habit stop her from enjoying a fleeting existence. So, from mok’bara to Battleships and line dancing to Klingon Opera, Tal pursued, however impetuously, whatever sounded fun. Caution was for the office.

“Beyond playing ‘52 pick-up’ with Vulcan rods..” Her grin enlivened her features, scaling the sides of her flat nose until it reached her eyes “..what does the captain of people do in his downtime?”

– Tal Abara, Cognitive Research


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