Patching Up Best You Can

Posted on Wed Dec 1st, 2021 @ 8:08am by Commander Kaleetha Sloan (*) & Chief Helmsman Kalahaeia t'Leiya

Mission: Mission 14: Holoworld
Location: SS Holoworld
Timeline: MD -04 10:00
2188 words - 4.4 OF Standard Post Measure

Several days of milling around and waiting had not settled well with Kaleetha at all. She hated not having anything to occupy her at all other than cooking, trying to figure out how to get off the ship or get help. It was disconcerting to walk around the ship and not be noticed by any of the holograms at all. “I really hate when they look straight through you,” Kaleetha commented as a hologram walked by them and ignored them. "In here should be the vest view," The science officer said pointing to one of the small lounges with a good view of the moon and the crashed section of the ship. She was multi-tasking with a drink and trying to see where the damage was so they could explore that area.

"Yeah; super creepy." Kali agreed, then smirked for a moment. "Though I feel like my father would be busy telling me it's an amazing advantage to use somehow, if he were here." She glanced at the door in question, then reached out her left hand and yanked the emergency release for the door, which seemed to consider them as invisible as the holograms did; eyes flicking to the windows as it sprung open to admit them. "Huh. That's the direction I came from originally. The casino must be a lot further towards the more damaged section of the ship." Thinking back towards the condition of the room she'd woken up in, she supposed that made sense.

Kaleetha pushed the door behind them close with a shrug. It was easier to close doors behind them so they knew where they had been. Holograms just went through there if there were emitters in that compartment. “I was in the big lounge when it ended or started depending on your view.” Kaleetha said with a shrug.

"But you said you woke up somewhere else?" A perplexed look crossed Kali's face for a moment; high points of her eyebrows trending down as her nose wrinkled, half at the bizarre puzzle that implied and half at catching her own reflection in the windows; she'd kept her original pants as nothing else they'd found yet had fit, but changed out the cocktail-stained shirt and tablecloth-sling for a cleaner version of the latter, and an oversized t-shirt to replace the former that slid easily over her right arm entirely, which combined with her left one poking out one sleeve and the fact that it came nearly to her knees made her look ridiculous. "....Or was it just somewhere else in the room?" That last one would at least make sense; a space that large was a bad proposition in a crash.

“I did but that doesn’t mean I did not wander there and collapse,” Kaleetha explained as she collapsed onto the lush sofa and frowned. “Self-defence mechanism. I have a habit of sleepwalking.” She shrugged looking the woman over. They really needed to get her something better than what she was wearing but she was not going to suggest it when she seemed a lot more uptight by the day.

"....How are you not more, you know...angry about this?" Kali asked, lowering herself down into the cushions on the other side of the couch rather more carefully given her injuries. "I swear if it turns out anyone did evacuate this place, and they left us behind without so much as checking me for a pulse, I'm gonna be really hard-pressed not to want to find them and slap them, if nothing else." She sighed. Maybe by the time you had however much human Kaleetha had in her genetic mix, you just didn't feel things as strongly? Or maybe every judgemental eyebrow her parents had ever raised at her growing up was accurate, and she was unhinged even for one of her own.

“Because I’ve had nearly a week by myself. I am just relieved to have someone with me right now.” Kaleetha said. Maybe she should feel something more or maybe she was in shock. “Or maybe I am in shock or something. I just cannot break down when there is so much going on. I am a scientist and I have to look at everything and analyse it for judgement.”

"Oh, one of those." Kali grinned sardonically for a moment. "I'm plenty good at analyzing things for judgement but I started out thirty years ago or so as a combat pilot fighting the Dominion, so after I analyze the situation I generally like to deliver the judgement, too. Probably why I only made a middling analyst, later. I'd look over the data, write up the report, and then want to punch a wall because I couldn't go and act on my own conclusions."

“How is your arm?” Kaleetha wondered wishing she could help more.

"Definitely not up for punching any walls; at least the right one. Have to settle for kicking them, if the urge strikes." Kali joked, half shrugged with her left shoulder, and stopped partway through when it still made her right side of her collarbones twinge. "Near as I can tell the arm itself is fine, just the collarbone is broken." The joking tone was back in her voice with her next words. "Luckily basic first aid on yourself for the kinds of injuries that might result from ship meeting surface at speed is one of the sort of things Starfleet liked to teach in flight school."

Kicking was safer in her opinion than punching but who was she to judge. “Well, the offer to look it over is still there.” Kaleetha offered looking at the woman for a moment before returning her attention to the scene below them from the window. It looked like they would be able to get into the compartment as long as it was not breached.

"....Sure. Thanks." Kali leaned forward slightly and peeled off the huge t-shirt with her free hand, discarding it in a wad on the floor for the moment, revealing a sleek black camisole tank below, with a variety of torn cloth wrapped and tied around her chest and looped over her arm and around her neck over it, bracing her ribs and taking the weight of her arm off her collarbone. Also revealed was the soft of fairly sleek harness-and-pouch setup that might be sold to paranoid tourists worried about being pickpocketed, with a small pouch to store valuables under clothes, but this one was clearly a custom job with an extra feature, too; a slot to store the dagger she'd flashed on their first meeting with the elegant engraved, inlaid hilt, and a built-in holster for the small phaser. This all she unlatched in it's entirety and set aside rather more carefully than the purloined t-shirt.

“You should have taken it up days ago,” Kaleetha commented as she got a first aid kit that was squirrelled away in the compartment. The hybrid shook her head and returned to where the woman sat not at all sure what she should be feeling. “Well, you are prepared.” She laughed a little as she started to use the tricorder.

"My parents would disagree I'm anything even close to prepared enough." Kali said dryly, shifting slightly on the sofa. "Though, they'd probably at least give me partial points for waiting this long before disarming myself this close to someone after meeting them." She laughed slightly in turn. "Reasonably certain they still subscribe to the whole 'have a plan to kill everyone you meet, just in case; and assume they've made one for you as well' thing." Though she had to admit, after a lifetime of rolling her eyes at it occasionally; she'd discovered the last decade or so that such a mentality could actually be a pretty useful mode of operating out on the 'fringes' of 'civilized space'.

“Partial points are better than nothing.” Kaleetha commented with a small smile. Her mother had never been like that at all, Caithlin Sloan had brought her children up in a museum and subscribed to the free spirit method of parenting. “Cannot say my mother would agree.” She admitted scanning the basic medical tricorder over her shoulder before passing it to her so she could see the damage.

"....Yeah that's about what I thought." Kali grimaced, looking over the tricorder data. "...Your family has been in the Federation for a few generations, I'm guessing, then?" It would certainly explain the rather more...relaxed...behavior Kaleetha was describing for her parents.

“2156,” Kaleetha said simply as she set to work on helping the woman. She might be trying to keep the scientist at arm's length but everyone needed help and support once in a while. 2156 would only mean one thing to a Romulan other than the war it was the Atlantis incident.

Kali shifted slightly on the couch to provide better access to her injuries, flipping through information in her head to try and place the statement and year, finally coming to the same conclusion Kaleetha had thought she'd draw, albeit through a different route, with exactly zero days growing up in Romulan space, but multiple years of exposure to SFI records. "So, around Federation species for a long time; but Federation space only half of that." Kali laughed softly, then hissed through her teeth at an unexpected spike of pain for a moment. "I was born on Earth in '53, but my parents had only left the Empire earlier that same year. I think they probably still despair of half my behavior." Including undoubtedly this for that matter if they knew of it; giving away this much information this easily. Both her prior words and her next ones were deliberately flippant, like someone trying to gloss over an old hurt. "Though, everyone else on Earth despaired of the other half, so."

"Yes. My great grandfathered and my grandmother." Kaleetha answered with a shrug. It was nothing to her but she often thought about what her Great Grandfather and Grandmother had gone through living and breathing that bit of history for humans and Romulans. "Sorry. You need to stay still the best you can. I won't be able to repair it all with this shitty first aid kit but I can make it easier." She explained. "I feel like wherever you go you should pick up the habits of the people around you. You have to adapt." But as a scientist, it was easier for her.

"Oh, I've been adapting back and forth and throughout since before I was knee-high to a Ferengi. But the habits of the people around me were extremely different inside the house and outside the house. If the distance between those personas or habits is great enough, balancing them or adapting them back and forth just leaves you wondering at the end of the day who the hell you really even are half the time." Kali started to shrug again, remembered the directive to hold still, and instead just waggled her eyebrows up-and-down, and held herself rigidly still now, putting any and all emotion just into her voice instead as she laid out at the most basic level in fact what one might go through living such a situation, then stopping with a discongruent sudden burst of scientific or analytical insight herself to follow it. "Though; I mean, I was a kid. I grew up that way. Probably an entirely different set of problems if you're an adult at the time. Adults know who they are, they just have to figure out how to adapt their actions to survive in a world that wasn't built for them. Feel like I learned how to be two different people, and ended up being neither of them particularly well. You adapt well enough to halfway belong everywhere; but never enough grounding in any of them to truly belong anywhere."

The younger woman nodded sadly. It sounded tough in her mind to be somewhere and not belong. “That sounds tough for a child to go through. Finding your people to thrive is hard for one person let alone something belonging to two worlds.” She said running a device over the woman’s shoulder until it run out. Kaleetha shoved it back into the first aid kit with a sigh.

"Remind me to write a nasty letter to the cruise company about how much their emergency supplies suck." Kali joked, glaring for a moment at the kit, then flicking her eyes back up at the window as she reached her left hand over for the sleek little harness and shrugged it back on, buckling it one-handed but leaving the wadded up t-shirt three times her size on the floor, debating putting it back on--it wasn't really warm enough to go around with just the tank top, longer term, but the nearly Gorn-sized shirt wasn't really that much better. "Maybe we'll find a better shirt exploring the rest of the ship..."