Post by Ensign Mandy Bergin on Mar 28, 2014 16:05:13 GMT -8
The moments right after an alert went away were always odd. There was the shuffle as the ordinary shift crew tried to reassert themselves, shoving the supplemental crew out of the way, and the supplemental crew shifted about, trying to decide what they were supposed to do. It didn't matter how many theoretical lessons she'd sat through in the Academy on that situation, it never ended up quite as smooth as she always envisioned it. Someday. Someday she'd be used to it, this endless cycle of madness and boredom. Maybe.
She'd found herself abruptly cut loose, in any case, drifting through the ship, which suddenly felt far too large for her comfort. She'd caught snatches about the station and Etimon, something about a sun from two science officers who'd been standing in the hall. That and a gravitic anomaly, the nature of which Mandy still wasn't quite sure about. It happened, things like that. Space was weird.
Finally, she'd ended up in the mess hall, mostly because she didn't want to go back to her quarters or anywhere else in particular. She'd briefly wondered where some of the people who could be loosely termed 'friends' were and what they were doing, but Grace was probably on duty or busy with casualties, if there had been any, and nobody else's name drifted from the ether in time. So she stood in the nearly-empty mess hall--there were a couple chefs in there, she thought, sitting at a table in the corner and casually discussing some item of workplace drama with an easy abandon as to who might be listening.
She was leaning against the windowsill, forehead almost touching the glass. Etimon slowly turned beneath them--though, of course, scientific exactness interfered to amend that thought to the Talon slowly orbiting the planet, which only appeared to be turning because the ship was moving at such a high rate of speed compared to the planet--all purple and shining. It was a beautiful planet, really, and Mandy was beginning to consider herself a little bit of an expert on the subject of planets that looked nice from orbit. That was pretty much the only way she'd seen most of them. Everybody else was perennially going off on adventures, getting shot at or nearly blown up or kissed by aliens. Mandy ended up in awkward one-sided conversations with people who wanted to make sand castles with her.
It had seemed so exciting, when she'd been thinking about it years ago. Go and see the stars, explore the universe. And here she was, hands still shaking from adrenaline, a bad feeling still lurking in the pit of her stomach because it couldn't be this easy, just showing up at Etimon and everything being okay. Her eyes drifted to the station. Maybe it was her imagination, but there didn't seem to be as many lights on as there should have been.
Once, all this had sounded like a great adventure. Now, it just seemed like an easy way to get yourself killed. Mandy turned away briefly, pulling a chair over to settle in on top of it, sitting on her knees. She folded her arms on the sill again and rested her chin on them, looking up past the station and the planet, trusting the opacity of the windows to save her eyes from the sunlight, and looked out at the field of stars that spread out past it.
That, at least, still took her breath away in the precise best way.
Tag: Any
She'd found herself abruptly cut loose, in any case, drifting through the ship, which suddenly felt far too large for her comfort. She'd caught snatches about the station and Etimon, something about a sun from two science officers who'd been standing in the hall. That and a gravitic anomaly, the nature of which Mandy still wasn't quite sure about. It happened, things like that. Space was weird.
Finally, she'd ended up in the mess hall, mostly because she didn't want to go back to her quarters or anywhere else in particular. She'd briefly wondered where some of the people who could be loosely termed 'friends' were and what they were doing, but Grace was probably on duty or busy with casualties, if there had been any, and nobody else's name drifted from the ether in time. So she stood in the nearly-empty mess hall--there were a couple chefs in there, she thought, sitting at a table in the corner and casually discussing some item of workplace drama with an easy abandon as to who might be listening.
She was leaning against the windowsill, forehead almost touching the glass. Etimon slowly turned beneath them--though, of course, scientific exactness interfered to amend that thought to the Talon slowly orbiting the planet, which only appeared to be turning because the ship was moving at such a high rate of speed compared to the planet--all purple and shining. It was a beautiful planet, really, and Mandy was beginning to consider herself a little bit of an expert on the subject of planets that looked nice from orbit. That was pretty much the only way she'd seen most of them. Everybody else was perennially going off on adventures, getting shot at or nearly blown up or kissed by aliens. Mandy ended up in awkward one-sided conversations with people who wanted to make sand castles with her.
It had seemed so exciting, when she'd been thinking about it years ago. Go and see the stars, explore the universe. And here she was, hands still shaking from adrenaline, a bad feeling still lurking in the pit of her stomach because it couldn't be this easy, just showing up at Etimon and everything being okay. Her eyes drifted to the station. Maybe it was her imagination, but there didn't seem to be as many lights on as there should have been.
Once, all this had sounded like a great adventure. Now, it just seemed like an easy way to get yourself killed. Mandy turned away briefly, pulling a chair over to settle in on top of it, sitting on her knees. She folded her arms on the sill again and rested her chin on them, looking up past the station and the planet, trusting the opacity of the windows to save her eyes from the sunlight, and looked out at the field of stars that spread out past it.
That, at least, still took her breath away in the precise best way.
Tag: Any