Alone in an (Unseen) Crowd

[Raumuk 0]

shiKame bumped along, slung over Lieutenant Commander Brown’s shoulder, her stomach jolting unpleasantly. She didn’t really need to be carried to sickbay, just guided, but she couldn’t manage to come up with the ability to say so. All her thoughts and words were scattered under the unceasing, irritating, infuriating noise.

 

For some time now, she’d been annoyed by odd whispers, footsteps, the sense that someone was just behind her. The way your shoulder blades itched when someone was staring at your back. The movement out of the corner of your eye as you turned, just too late. The awareness of, well, somebody else’s awareness of you.

 

Andorian antennae were not precisely sound organs, as many people assumed, although they did help contribute to an acute sense of hearing. They were more sensitive to pressure, to minute changes in air currents, sometimes to temperature. With them, she could “sense” the shape of a room, the objects in it by the way they took up space, the people by their movements, their solidity. The taste/color/feel of it – there really wasn’t a word in Federation Standard to describe a sense her people had developed to a fine pitch. She would rather have done without her eyes than her antennae.

 

Commander Brown stumbled as the lights flickered again, lurching into a wall and bumping shiKame’s hands off of her tightly curled antennae. She swore (or tried to swear – she didn’t know if the words had come out or not) and quickly replaced them.

 

But recently, when someone (or several someones?) had whispered to her, there was no one there. When she’d identified several people in the room, her eyes told her there was only one or two. She supposed she’d have to apologize to Cheatle – the poor Denobulan had an irritating habit of standing just over her shoulder, but he hadn’t deserved the times (several times?) that she’d snapped at him, and then discovered he’d been the one across the room. And, again, no one had been behind her.

 

Was this the Summer Madness? It didn’t sound like it. From the stories the warriors told, Summer Madness made you crazy, yes, but you always knew who your enemy was. And now she was hearing laughter- nasty, teasing, sniggering laughter – but she still didn’t know who her enemy was.

 

 

shiKame hunched down yet farther, trying to protect her most sensitive organs. Whether her problem was related to the odd sensor fluctuations and power problems or not, she was going to have to get a really good pair of earmuffs to be able to do anything about it. Or, if she was crazy, just a good sedative and a padded room……

 

And voices whispering her name followed her down the corridor………………

 

 

 

(P.S. btw, it is highly unlikely that I will be attending next week’s sim, so please assume that Raumuk is in a quiet, dark corner somewhere – or a brightly lit biobed in sickbay – with her hands over her head.)

 

(P.P.S. It’s fun to be the drama queen sometimes!)