"One-Hundred Twenty Days, Pt. I"

[Guest Laarell]

Day One, Early Evening

 

It was a shock, in all truths. After all, good ships were never mothballed, right? Refit and relaunch -- that was the ticket. Pop in fancy new sensor pallets, install a new-shaped chair for Corizon, and change the paint scheme. It'd fool anyone, really, and if they went that extra Starfleet mile and moved the turbolifts, anyone besides the Trill below decks might think they actually had a new ship.

 

Back up, Laarell. Excalibur wasn't a good ship. No no -- Excalibur was a very bad ship, in Fleet Command's eyes anyway. Very, very bad. Or, at the least, unpopular. Though she didn't know if it was particularly more reassuring to know that she was unpopular rather than bad. Had to be if they were getting kicked off the ship that'd been their home for... hells, years.

 

No, not really. Didn't really help at all.

 

Laarell slumped out of the turbolift onto her quarters' deck, looking down the familiar corridor with a sigh of concern she'd forgotten she'd had for the ship itself. What did they do to ships once they were proverbially mothballed? They gutted it out, melted down anything reusable, pulled the wires, yanked the computers... what about the shell and hull? You just didn't see "Made from one-hundred percent recycled Starfleet vessels" on the so-called "green" products.

 

That's because they got taken out and blown to dust.

 

Now Laarell, she chided, that was just downright negative.

 

She waited a long moment when she stepped into her quarters before instructing the computer for lights, letting the dull glow from computer and starlight (well, more technically, Earth and dock-light) from the window serve as the illumination she needed. It'd been a good run on the ship -- that was certain. Not always, no, but overall, yeah, as far as assignments went, she could have always been sent out to Jupiter as the head of computer operations.

 

... not that she still wasn't about to be.

 

"Lights," and finally she cast about her relatively-neat quarters for direction in where to continue from, her gaze falling past the open door to the bedroom. She had to clean out, and frankly wanted to get it over and done with rather than mope about and procrastinate and worry about her future for a few hours over a glass of wine.

 

Well, the wine she could do. She hunted down a glass and the bottle she'd been nursing for a good month, gave a long sigh, and decided against the glass. The bottle of the white zin was done for after this; she may as well just finish it alcoholic-style, right out of the bottle. And it was safer, in case she tipped it over in the packing hubbub.

 

Better armed and already in the slightest of better moods, she managed to drag her sorry bum back to the task at hand, pulling out a few old and stowed packing crates that'd last seen action when she'd moved out of the juniors' crew deck.

 

Damn. If Starfleet was forcing the transfer, they should have at least had a team of movers do the hard, manual labor so that she didn't have to feel like she was the head of "Orion Movers, Incorporated."

 

Damn. Starfleet movers probably would have been cute, too, and sweaty guys flexing their muscles always made for a good show.

 

Tossing the crate on the floor, she started absent-mindedly clearing out uniform after uniform after the occasional cocktail dress. Maybe she'd be somewhere she could actually wear it, in this next posting. Hmm. One could hope, after all.

 

The lid snapped on securely, and Laarell turned, caught the sight of the bed in its infinite shambles of disarray, and grimaced faintly.

 

Dammit, this little diaspora came at a bad time. Hell, she'd had her eye on the vampire's Trill for months, and, goal had been easily achieved with the vampire now out of the way -- but that would be the end of it. She and Segami would probably be on cargo-convoys headed in opposite directions, and all her work would have gone for nothing.

 

The Orion allowed herself a wide, saucy smirk. No, no, definitely not "nothing". Ohhh, no, "nothing" wasn't the word to use. It was regret for the fact that the afternoon wouldn't repeat that she felt, and that certainly wasn't brought about by "nothing".

 

What was more, if word got out, it'd seal her reputation as the resident green whore. Pick up, use, and discard a fellow senior officer, all in a day's time. Even if it wasn't by choice, it came out about to the same to the casual observer.

 

Not that she really expected him to mention it to anyone. Even if he was a... what was it she'd scolded him for being, back on the outpost? Renegade? Scoundrel? Thug? Probably all three of them. Amusingly enough, the on-duty opinion hadn't ever really changed, but she'd come to appreciate the qualities. He was honorable enough.

 

Most of the time, though when he pulled stunts like he sometimes did and went off rashly...

 

Laarell sighed, not following through with the thought as she tossed assorted knicknacks into a smaller crate haphazardly without much care for their packing -- transporters went easily enough with breakables, after all. The small collection of blades topped the box, and she sighed, collecting up the padds and decors outside the bedroom.

 

It didn't take terribly long -- between repeated returns to the near-gone wine bottle, Laarell managed bouts of efficiency. There. That was all she had to do, right? Right?

 

Gods be damned, she was going to miss the ship. She was actually getting sentimental about an inanimate object. And she wasn't even an engineer.

 

The temperature in the demon realms had lent itself well to ice-skating.

Edited November 29, 2007 by Laarell

[EJ Pilot 0]

Very Nice Log Laarell, :D I mean Commander Teykier.