A Little Touch of Homesickness in the Night

Posted on 02 Jun 2023 @ 5:19am by Crewman Apprentice Unknown 'Weirdo' & Commander Lucsa Myan

2,073 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Deus ex Machina
Location: Stellar Cartography: Lower Bay

It was far from being a mountaintop, but it did well enough.

While the ship was at yellow alert, the mission advisor didn't have a lot to do when the alert didn't have anything to do with her areas of specialty. As such, she was down in the lower bay of stellar cartography. She had the star pattern on the display, as it looked from her home on Sal'kiir. She knew that the holodecks were capable of recreating the mountainside city itself, but she could never feel it was close enough to reality. This did better, because she was looking up at a picture of something that felt like a picture at home.

It was the innate nature of all Sal'kiirans to want to remain close to their home system. Some couldn't even leave Sal'kiir as far as one of the colonized other worlds in the Kiir System, but some were able to leave like she had...and yet, it didn't mean they didn't feel home calling for them in their blood. It was moments like those, which she felt rather keenly after discussing her people with Commander Petrova before they were interrupted, that drove her here. To look up at this picture and feel just a little closer to Sal'kiir again.

The tall man with the mop of unruly curls strolled in, PADD in hand, humming some tune under his breath that he had caught here and there – no idea where, maybe he had heard it a day or a week ago, maybe it had come somewhere out of the depths of his own fractured mind. He wore something which resembled a Starfleet uniform but without any rank markings and had attempted to tie his hair back with a ribbon, but several curls had escaped and framed his face.

He smiled as he saw there was someone else in the room already. "Am I disturbing?" he asked, taking the pale woman in with his sea-coloured eyes. "I can always come back later."

"I always find something interesting," he answered somewhat cryptically, with that bright grin again. "Comparing starmaps to actual views, calculating distances and stellar drifts… So this is what you saw at night, looking up at the stars?" He looked back at her.
Lucsa turned, just enough to take in the newcomer. As ever, each movement and expression was austere and economical. She considered him for a moment, and then she remembered his somewhat random appearance in that staff briefing not all that long ago. "Not at all," she said. "I was simply admiring the view from home." She waved at the star map on the display overhead.

"Ah, right…" He nodded and with three long strides he had covered the distance to the middle of the room. He looked around at the spectacular display, taking it in, then turned to look at her again. Where most people seemed to run several things through their mind while doing something else entirely, he seemed to focus all of his attention on her. "You are the mission specialist, right? From Sal'kiir?"

"Correct," she said with a small nod. "Lucsa Myan. And you are this ship's rather...mysterious guest." This was less of a question than his response had been. "I don't believe I've heard you referred to, as yet, by a name."

The man suddenly grinned widely, as if that comment by itself was vastly amusing. "Oh, I'm sure I might have one, but I don't recall it. So it's kind of hard to refer to me by name, though I've picked up a few by now." His eyes twinkled. "Feel free to add to the collection."

Lucsa's pale brows knit together slightly as she considered this. "I have never named any living creature," she stated after a moment. "I don't know I feel qualified to do so for a fully-grown sentient being. So, rather, which of your given names would you like me to refer to you as?"

"Well, currently the choice goes between Ref, though that's technically not a name but short for a reference number in a database, Tychon, Riddle, Weirdo and Yel-flekh, which is Vulcan for 'stranger from the stars'." He smiled again and looked around at the stars again, turning around slowly, switching his attention between the view and the padd in his hand. He seemed to be comparing the two. But at the same time he didn't ignore Lucsa either, strange as it sounded.

The Sal'kiiran woman didn't much know what to do about the name matter, so she determined to take a different tact when she noticed the way he looked at his PADD and the stars. "Find something interesting in my view from home?" she asked curiously.

"I always find something interesting," he answered somewhat cryptically, with that bright grin again. "Comparing starmaps to actual views, calculating distances and stellar drifts… So this is what you saw at night, looking up at the stars?" He looked back at her.

"It was, yes," she agreed, turning back to the view herself. "This is the sky over the mountain I called home during the latter portion of the year. High on the mountains, as we were, our seasons did not change quite so much as they do for other areas of the planet. It is rather always cold and windy. Just sometimes, it is colder and windier." A ghost of a smile flitted over her thin lips.

"Did you do that often?" he asked. Again he wondered what it would be like to actually live on a planet. He had visited holodecks and they were a nice experience, but it couldn't compare to the real thing. Not that he would like to live on one permanently, there was just too much to see, too much to explore. But spending some time on one would be nice for a change. Feel actual wind which had been carried for miles and miles, not a computer-generated simulation. Experience rain falling from real clouds. "Look up at the stars and wondering what was out there?"

The ghost flitted over her mouth again. "I looked up often. My people, the Arrkun, are the most technologically advanced on Sal'kiir so many of us did. We like to understand things. I never wondered what was out there, because we knew--as much as any spacefaring race--but I did want to see it for myself. Something rather unlike most of my fellow Sal'kiirans, in truth."

"A rarity even among your own people? Or there not so much?" The man looked at her with interest again.

"There's forces to the planet of Sal'kiir and the Kiir System that makes my people tend to stay home," she explained simply. "It's rare that anyone leaves either. I'm one of a handful, as the human saying goes, that have chosen to do so. Most of those that have are of my kind, the Arrkun, however."

The man nodded, listening with fascination. A fragmented race, forces which tended to make them stay at home… How unique every world, every life was, even though it often looked alike at first glance! "What forces?" he asked. That certainly sounded interesting.

That actually drew a small laugh from her. "Well, to give the full story would be a scientific journal article, but it's available to anyone aboard the ship if you want to read more. The foremost force has to do with the strength of our sun and each planet's electromagnetic forces. Our genetic makeup is more in tune with these than the average human's is, so we have learned. Comparative between us and humans, the latter aren't in tune with their planet at all and that is perhaps why they have such space wanderlust."

Lucsa paused briefly, eyeing her conversational companion for a moment. "I suppose you don't recall much as toward your own species as yet?"

"Nothing whatsoever," the man replied cheerfully. "And any databases I have accessed have been singularly unhelpful in that regard as well. But until that riddle is solved, there are plenty of other strange things and mysteries in the universe to keep me busy. What you're telling is very interesting, for one. I'll make sure to look up the article later tonight."

"I hope you find it interesting," she said sincerely. "I am on this ship as the mission advisor and ad hoc ambassador to my people, so if you have any other questions about the Sal'kiirans, I'd be happy to answer you."

"Oh, so many!" he replied instantly. "What do you people do for fun? To relax? What kind of sports do you play? What qualities do your people value most? To name just a few." He rattled off the questions without even seeming to think. "You don't have to answer them all at once," he added.

She looked at him for a few moments, processing all the different questions. "The last is the easiest, I suppose," she began. "My people, the Arrkun, value intellect and curiosity above all. We are the most technological and scientific of all four groups of Sal'kiir, and those are the traits that have pushed along on that road."

"Understandable," he nodded. "But that is a generalisation, I take it? There must be people among the other groups of Sal'kiir who are more curious and adventurous than the average, and vice versa. Do the groups mingle at those points, or are there more strata within each group?"

"On the whole, it tends to be strata within the groups," she replied. "We are not so diverse as to not share some traits, but we are diverse enough that we do not mingle commonly. You will only find it in the cities, where the predominant population is still the Arrkun, but you will see Hylcin and Qaiin. The Chaaran, however, are the rarer to find mixing with the other groups. They are very impetuous, aggressive, and it can make the mixing troublesome sometimes."

He listened with his usual fascination as he tried to imagine what living on her world would be like. "Did you all evolve from one common ancestral race, or was there a very early divergion point where it was more like a parallel evolution which took place?" His questions were seemingly endless, one answer would lead to only more questions. Maybe it was because he had so little answers regarding himself that the well of questions never seemed to run dry.

Lucsa did not mind talking about her people, because when all was said and done, that was the reason that she was here. There were a few such mission advisors on other ships in the fleet, all with the main purpose of helping their new Federation comrades understand the people they would be working with.

"Scientifically," she began, "we do know that there was a common ancestor. There are many biological and physiological traits that we share. However, different groups began to live primarily in specific areas. These geographical areas are extreme by comparison of almost any other world that can support life, and that extremity had an equally extreme effect on the evolution of the groups therein, to the point where you would not know from a glance that we were the same species."

She gestured to herself, "As you can see, I am very pale. There is a thin layer of fur covering all of my skin, and that's because the mountainsides our cities are on are cold. The Qaiin lives in regions that are mostly water, so they have tints of blue and green to their skin as well as gills and lungs so they are amphibious."

The man listened with rapt attention. He opened his mouth to ask the next question when quietly, without any fuss, the starscape around him died. He raised an eyebrow at his companion. "Did you set a timer?" Almost immediately he shook his head at his own question. "No, that would hardly make sense." He had spent – well, not countless hours in here, but more than his fair share since he came on board, using this room to virtually navigate through Federation space and the surrounding areas. One could set a timer, he supposed, but few people ever did that.

Then the lights in the room began to flicker. "That's not good," he muttered.

Lucsa lifted her pale eyes to look around the walls and ceiling in a slow circuit. Her brows knit. "No... No, that's not good at all."

 

RSS Feed