Too Many Options

Posted on Sat Jan 18th, 2025 @ 3:02pm by Curtis Vaan & Delaney O'Callaghan

Mission: Shackles
Location: Messhall
1728 words - 3.5 OF Standard Post Measure

"Well, if it isn't the guy with too many options."

If Delaney was forced to guess, she almost would have accused Curtis of avoiding her. It had started with the rain-check on a holodeck session to work on their current joint creation and, at the time, that had seemed reasonable given communications issues and the fact he was likely working overtime. But now that the problem seemed to been rectified and there were no more impromptu guest readings of people's private thought processes to look forward to, the Risian had been painfully annoying to track down. In the end, she'd resorted to relying on the one constant; Curtis' stomach was usually about as predictable as hers when it came to mealtimes. Setting her second-breakfast tray down on the table he was attempting to hide away in the back on, she slid into a chair and fixed him with an over-chipper smile brimming with beguiling innocence.

"And yet, you're sat here alone. How does such a travesty even happen?"

"I'm trying to avoid certain pointy-eared women with lots of much sharper pointy things in their pockets," Curtis replied, by way of explanation. He poked at the mostly-finished plate of food and then looked at her again, wondering if she was actually staying. "I'm not avoiding you. Fixing the comms system is just messy, you know?" he asked, hopefully assuming his charismatic powers of bold persuasion would succeed in convincing her.

Tilting her head to the side, Delaney looked at him for just the right amount of time to be annoying and then said, "I didn't say you were." She'd lived with a telepath, and now visited an entire planet of them, long enough to know what it felt like when information left her head and bounced directly into another. Curtis was either taking a lucky stab in the dark about her suspicions or he had a guilty conscience. "And if this is your best effort to hide from a Romulan then I don't rate your survival chances. Though, let's be honest, this is Liha and Kali we're talking about." Picking up her fork, Delaney stabbed a slice of tomato and held it up for inspection. "If they wanted you dead, you'd never know it."

Curtis looked down at his own half-eaten plate for a moment, then pushed it away with his other hand instinctively touching his stomach. "You don't think they would...n-no, they wouldn't..." he mumbled to himself, then shot her a narrow-eyed look. "Thanks for that. I bet Leiddem is having the time of his life living with you."

"Leiddem has the common sense not to gossip about his crewmates in any recorded format." On the one hand, it was hard not to feel sympathy for those caught up in the communications breach, but there was always the point that objectification deserved to be challenged. "I thought you were puffing up your chest trying to impress the new bar manager, when did you decide to try your chances with death-in-heels?"

Pfft...like I have a death-wish... Curtis mentally responded without airing the retort. Instead he screwed up his face and propped up his chin with an elbow. "I don't know. Maybe we're avoiding each other. I think she's got eyes for Rick-for-brains now, anyway," he mused sullenly.

A look of sheer incredulity at least switched Delaney's tact a little. "You can't be serious, why would he be her type? He's..." She wrinkled her nose. There was nothing specific about the guy that was objectionable; he cracked jokes, and did his job well, and seemed for the most part to be a capable human being, but something about him irritated her and that wasn't something Delaney was used to. As much as she gave Curtis a hard time and felt infinitely frustrated with his pessimistic attitude, she still considered him a friend and generally held out hope that he'd live up to his potential. Optimism was her natural default so to be so swiftly unimpressed by someone without probable cause felt like a her-problem. "No Curtis Vaan, that's for sure. You're giving up too easily."

"Of course I am," he replied, nose wrinkled in mirror to hers as he considered it. "I'm obviously far too free-spirited to be locked-down. Yeah, that's it: it'd definitely cramp my style. And you know how I am with commitment. It's like my anti-matter; boom-boom."

"Oh, for sure, you'd rather be tied up and flogged." A much as it was a call back to her previous teasing, Delaney didn't waste the opportunity to roll her eyes. "I thought you liked her?," she persisted. "You're not being all weird again because she's a Risian, are you?"

"No! Well...no...I mean...no..." he tailed off. "Maybe." It came out unwillingly. "Okay, look, you know as well as I do that I will never admit any sort of affection for anyone in public. Hence why I have already put in several contingencies to quickly end my life if Liha or Kali come anywhere near me. Whether they have whips or chains. But that's not the point. What I'm trying to say is-"

"...that you're self-sabotaging again because at least when the inevitable failure occurs, you can say you predicted it." Delaney's eyebrow twitched in disbelief that he'd be trying that line of justification with her. "At what point do you get tired of creating self-fulfilling prophesies though? It's not as if rejection is an automatic guarantee, you could try just talking to her like a normal person." The Irishwoman's smile fell just shy of a condescending brightness, if only because she'd had genuine hopes that Curtis might actually be employing a shred of optimism for once. "If nothing else, you need to distract her from letting Creepy Rick get his claws into her."

"Normal person..." He rolled his eyes. "Have you seen this ship's history? Vampire monsters, dragons, zombies, twisted alternate time versions, the list goes on. Nothing about this place is normal, is it? Even for an antique spaceship hurtling through the quadrant working for a loose group of vigilantes." Curtis let his arms flop, his eyes lifted to the proverbial heavens. "Do I have to?" he asked finally.

"You're the reason she's here, doofus. You can't just drag a damsel towards the dragon and ditch her." Delaney paused and then added, "As much as that very much sounds like something you'd do and have possibly rehearsed a dozen times over." Relenting finally, the redhead sighed. "Would it be easier if you just got her to come out with Leiddem and I? Double-date without actually calling it that."

"Third-and-fourth wheeling?" His face screwed up a little again as he tried to think of a way to say no to that idea. But none came to mind; certainly not when she was looking at him like that. "Fine. But it has to be somewhere fun. And Leiddem better not make it lame. I mean it."

The final qualification only earned a roll of eyes. "You decide what's fun enough," Delaney replied, pushing a mound of food onto her fork now that her attention was suitably divided between chastising her friend and appeasing her stomach. "And we'll be there." As she chewed, she watched him with an expression that never boded well for his pride and felt it necessary to add, once she'd swallowed, "Just going to veto any use of whips or chains, if that's okay with you."

Curtis' face scrunched into something akin to him sticking his tongue out and gurning at her. "Fine. Fiiiiine. This week. Sometime. When we're not blowing up or being turned into goo or something..."

Delaney raised an eyebrow. "That's surprisingly optimistic of you. It does remind me though..." Taking a moment to chew on a mouthful, though there was perhaps some justification in suspecting the pause was also for dramatic effect, the redhead continued, "We need to rework the sequence for the first sea battle chapter, if we're talking about priorities that keep getting interrupted by things blowing up." It was fair to say that the combined project had slowly morphed into a magnum opus already triple the size of any of the holo-novels Delaney had constructed on her own, but that was partially due to the pair of the continually deciding to create very specific assets that paid homage to the people around them. The trip to Betazed had put things on hiatus for a while but at least there was fresh inspiration now for some of the NPC depictions. "Where did you get with coding the Greek fire?"

"Not far. It keeps blowing-up. Literally. The programming is finnicky." His brow furrowed as he recalled the somewhat poor combination of fire and wooden sailing ships. "Maybe..." A hopeful expression replaced the frown. "We can grab some time to fix that too?"

There was casual nonchalance to the shrug of Delaney's shoulder that suggested she missed the wistfulness in her friend's tone. The trip to Betazed to deal with her surgery and meet Leiddem's family had preoccupied her so much in the lead-up that she hadn't really noticed, perhaps, the lack of consideration she'd given for the other people in her life. "I'm off this evening," she offered.

"Perfecto!" Curtis grinned. "Bring snacks. And the good ones, this time, not the ones you got from Leiddem," he added pointedly, making sure the subject of brain food was taken deeply seriously.

"So you end up in a sugar coma and I wind up doing all the work again?"

Having eaten the world's fastest second breakfast, due mostly in part to the fact she technically wasn't on meal break, Delaney shoved the last of her food into her mouth and allowed the chair to scrape against the floor as she swept crumbs onto the floor and gathered up her plate. "Straight after dinner, or get here early enough to eat with me. In fact, yes, do that, I can make sure you eat something that actually classifies as food before you start shovelling flavoured starch into your mouth. Good luck dodging knives," she added as a throwaway, expressed loudly enough as she left that several heads turned. With the redhead's swift departure, the only place for eyes to turn was the solitary figure left glowering in her wake.

 

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