"One-Hundred Twenty Days, Pt. VI"

[Guest Laarell]

Day One Hundred

 

Months passed quickly. Laarell waited for them to become the proverbial blur with no discernible beginning or end, waiting for the haze to fall over her like the San Francisco fog.

 

It never came, but, with repetition came familiarity, and Laarell finally stopped waking midway through the night, disoriented. And, quietly, she began to accept the real possibility that she wouldn't be returning to offworld duty. The other faculty -- and students -- seemed to like her; Laarell felt... uncomfortably settled.

 

The finals finished, and the Orion bid fond (and occasionally less-than fond) farewells to cadets, confident that Starfleet was getting a lot of 'em now possessing all Laarell's programming, linguistic, and scientific flaws as well as their own.

 

What was also lovely was the fact that she'd been asked, should the Fleet not need her elsewhere (and it seemed there was little chance in that) to return for the following semester.

 

Laarell resigned herself to faculty life, albeit unhappily, and finally admitted such to Kahrak, who suddenly became its greatest proponent.

 

"It's good, you know," he said on the way out the door. "You can't be stung to death by Scorpiad. Or found drained of blood by a jealous vampire."

 

"True," Laarell allowed, and sighed. "We're still on for tomorrow, right?"

 

"Cooking here, at your place, though. My apartment's not set up for large dinners. We're still doing Orion food?"

 

Teykier shrugged. "I've had human Thanksgiving food for two years. Every year I've sent home recipes for Orion variants. This year I'm actually eating what I've proposed."