Confined

Posted on Mon Nov 23rd, 2015 @ 8:39am by Captain Charybdis MacGregor
Edited on on Mon Nov 23rd, 2015 @ 6:22pm

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Taking Chances
Location: USS Bonne Chance, Deck Five, Lt. Charybdis' quarters
Timeline: 2265
Tags: bonnechance,Suval

Well, as plans to win over her supervisor went, that had certainly backfired. Work hard, show him you can do the work and are capable... commendation for initiative and dedication? No, instead get reprimanded for not observing procedures... well, not observing all of them, at least... and get relieved of duty with an official reprimand.

Charybdis somehow lacked the capacity for surprise.

She paused outside the turbolift and put her hands above her head, still holding her tricorder and pdd. She stretched her arms upward to loosen her ribs up as well, then began to slowly bend at the waist when the security officer coughed and started. "Uh, ma'am?" She had sensed them tensing up, but she wasn't going anywhere and wouldn't be taking any hostile actions, so it was irrelevant to her. Better to establish the reputation now so that it could serve her later. She kept to slow and deliberate movements, put her the tricorder strap over her shoulder, rested the pdd on one hip and dropped her hand casually onto her naked hip above the makeshift wrap skirt. Charybdis smiled wearily over her shoulder back at the red-shirted masses of muscle, then covered her mouth as a strong yawn overcame her.

The security officers didn't manhandle her as the turbolift arrived; and as long as she didn't try to go anywhere but the direction they were all traveling they were content to let her ambulate on her own. She briefly considered brawling with them to burn off some stress, but she was really very tired, and she wanted to be alone right now anyway to relax. Even the possibility of sex was not appealing to her right now- not that the Security officers would be particularly likely to oblige her.

But an escort to her quarters was just fine by her, thank you very much. When Security escorts you down the hall, people would get out of your way. She threw a little extra hip swivel into her walk. May as well look like a million aureus. Besides, being combative with them would earn her a reputation amongst Security that she definitely did not want.

Internally, though she was trying very hard not to, she was driving herself crazy trying to figure out where she had gone wrong and what the rest of the science department would have to do working with engineering in repairing and correcting her mistakes implied. Her training kicked in and reminded her that while the logical Vulcans never lied, their propensity for exaggeration was remarkably well-known. In calculating an answer to the seventeenth decimal point, simply cutting off the answer at the sixteenth point and not saying 'approximately' was a 'grevious and shameful error' to them. So that could just be Suval being an ass. Or she might have actually screwed something up.

Had she not shunted the emitters in the gamma ray telescope? No, no, she had done that... set the firing sequence on the wide-angle EM sensors? No... she had drifted off after that, so she had not left the array crippled. Had she drooled on the thermal imaging array's duotronic coupling when she had fallen asleep and shorted it out? She was embarrassed about falling asleep on the job... losing track of time had apparently not been her smartest strategy, but once she was in there, it was like a wonderland that she did not want to leave. So many fascinating devices...

The door slid open and she shuffled inside, pulling what was left of her uniform off and tossing it over her shoulder onto the Security officer's head and shoulders before she even crossed the threshold, then the door slid shut behind her. Would that she could do that more figuratively, she sighed internally as she dropped the remainder of the ruined clothing into the recycler. No sense worrying about what was done... she had begun her gambit, and now she had created her opportunity. If she prostrated herself and he chose to be flattered then he could be won over, and all she had to do was play the part of the fawning pupil studying at the hands of the master and he would spend his time being that much more condescending to her, but he would also give her more responsibilities as his sycophant.

If that ploy failed, which was likely, then she had the backup plan of another department to transfer to... Security? probably not. It had been intriguing to her that Suval had made his decision to view her attempt at overcompensation as a failure likely from the moment that he became aware of it, yet he had still chosen to leave her working down there. Thus her scheme had crashed and burned because it was doomed before it had begun, just as she had suspected that it would. She tossed the tricorder and the pdd on her desk then wandered into the bathroom to sit down on the chamber pot. Once she had relieved herself- .ooooh, how long have I been holding that... the sonic shower began cleaning off the accumulated sweat and grime of a very long day's work.

She had now tutored herself in the long range scanners... she knew their capabilities according to their technical specifications, their operational tolerances, their maintenance schedules and procedures...well, at least somewhat, apparently. The Federation's most advanced long-range sensors and she had toured them all... well, as far she knew at least. There were who knew how many science packages and experiments that could be plugged into the sensor bays for specific purposes- that was the key to their versatility.

There were still the lateral and navigation sensors to investigate, but she had time. Next time she'd read up on them in advance instead of on the spot and save herself some time. Since all of the manuals were available on tape in the ship's libraries, as well as her tricorder and her ppd they were at her convenience now. How thoughtful of Suval to give her some spare time, she thought with a smirk. One thing was for certain... she knew considerably more than before she'd begun the job, and her career crash-course had taught her more in one day than the pedantic Vulcan would have likely allowed her in hands-on experience in a year.

Meditate and get her emotions under control. Hah! She hadn't shot him. Not that she'd had a weapon, but the security personnel had been carrying phasers, and they certainly wouldn't expect her to go for one just over a reprimand. She could have claimed alien mind control as a defense... a longshot at best, but might still be fun to try someday. She hadn't flipped his desk over onto him to pin him, cracked the security personnel's xiphoid process to collapse their ribcages and then proceed to use the heel of her boot to tear his throat out.

Emotions not under control indeed. Suval had so very little idea of just how wrong he was... and he needed to stay that way.

As she spread her fingers and drew them through her hair in the shower, she pulled a loose screw out of a knot in her mane. I wonder what panel that came from... Wherever she had not put it back, she knew it was something else she'd hear about later, of course. She set it on the bathroom counter to return to Engineering. While Suval would surely disagree ad nauseum, she somehow doubted that one access panel screw out of place would doom the ship.

She hadn't argued... frankly she'd been too tired, and she already knew that he was going to twist whatever she said or did into a negative. He spoke so quickly... she chuckled to herself as she relaxed in the shower. He was afraid of what I might say, so he talked too fast for me to get a word in edgewise, then had them haul me away. Or maybe not afraid... maybe he just didn't feel like putting up with me defending myself. One would think the purely logical Vulcan would want to illustrate and demonstrate to the other party just how wrong they were in every possible way... it was the cultural basis, after all. Instead he's putting the argument off until he feels like having it. He's going to wait until something else frustrates him or angers him, or he turns out to be wrong about something, then he'll come find me.

He was a Kolinahr, after all. She had played this game before, and this was just the pawn's volley. He had no idea just how under control her emotions truly were. If he did, he would likely have an emotion or two of his own, she suspected.

She giggled as she exited the shower and flopped down on the luxuriant throne of a bed. Relieve her of duty so that she could have time to adjust to how things are done... 'things' being the operation of the ship and how the chain of command was to be followed or how the crew communicated or what the ship's regulations were? .Those would DEFINITELY be lessons learned with unsupervised time off... Charybdis stretched on the bed then pulled the large pillow she had made from stuffing linens into a spare pillow case over to her body so that she could curl up around it.

Not instruct her or inform her, no no, that wasn't the way to deal with the emotional... just isolate them. Put them away, push the ball of emotions and activity away from the perfect calm of logic. Logic was easy to maintain when there was perfect order. It got harder with chaos about, and unpredictability and emotional responses where the embodiment of chaos to Vulcans. The brilliant Vulcan solution for anything they deemed 'abberrant behavior' was to defend their logic, by denying chaos, physically in this case. Get it out of sight and away from 'right-thinking' individuals so it could be quarantined, limiting the chance for contamination. And out of sight out of mind, and you could speak of it as inferior without it arguing.

Almost dozing, Charybdis snorted a bit in her sleep as she analyzed it from a Federation perspective. Better to have a department that he complained about than one that took initiative and worked hard. Then what would he have to complain about and lord his superiority over if the department was excellent? Other departments? The Starfleet efficiency evals would have a field day with that one... or the pysch profilers, she suspected. Such leadership he showed... she wouldn't entrust him with command of a waste disposal barge.

The one element in her favor was that this was not a Vulcan vessel... it was a Federation vessel. She had fled Vulcan for so many reasons, but being trapped in a tin can in space full of them would have most certainly been intolerable. Just one was irritating her plenty... a ship full of them would require her to research breaching a warp core, she suspected.

Yes, there were rules and regulations and procedures... but there were also humans involved in them here, who understood the value of feelings, of following hunches, of being more than just logical drones. Humans she could at least understand... they had a zest for life and they fearlessly hurled themselves where no human had gone before, rather than plodding over the same ground repeatedly for fear of being ostracized by their peers. They were still aliens, but at least they were aliens that didn't move her to violence. They felt. They laughed, loved, lusted. They were alive.

Her section chief was not her Captain. He was not the only officer above her on this vessel- he outranked her only by time in rate, in fact. Engineering looked interesting, now that she thought about it... all those burly redshirts. She wouldn't even have to transfer out of Science to be a part of the engineering department, but she would still answer to a different supervisor and only occasionally come into contact with Suval. She liked that idea as a back-up plan, and murmured as she hugged her pillow to her body tightly and smiled. She wondered who the chief engineering officer was, and what his rank was...

Suval would come for her when he needed a punching bag... likely within the next forty-eight hours, she guessed. To lecture her, to belittle her, to explain her shortcomings to her in infinite detail with flawless logic. She had no allies here yet, just herself, and his assault would be unrelenting- the question would be just how self delusional he was versus how good an actress she could be.

She knew all of this, and accepted it with a shrug as she sighed... he was a Vulcan, after all. Their minds were like the stone of their deserts- hard, dry and boring. It was all that his limited intellect and lack of imagination could conceive, whereas she would flow like water. Build pressure, exploit faults to seep through cracks, carry vibrations of things greater than herself to deliver them with devastating force... or simply erode over time, seeming to become placid while maintaining hidden currents in her murky depths. Water always won, in time.

She had nothing but time, and she drifted off to sleep with a smile, hoping to dream of better times.

 

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