Untitled Draia Meets Michael JP

Posted on Tue May 5th, 2020 @ 1:45pm by Chief Engineer Michael Burnstein & Draia Theroh

Mission: Mission 11 - Prospecting
Location: SS Mary Rose - Deck 3, Dining Mess
Timeline: MD 10 - 0730 hours
2552 words - 5.1 OF Standard Post Measure

The first impression that Draia Theroh made with her new Chief Engineer was neither a hi, nor a hello, nor a good morning to you. Clad in her turquoise overalls, she weaved and bobbed between tables in the mess hall to reach the one where Michael Burnstein was sitting. All the while, she balanced her food tray in one hand and a mug of frothy iced coffee in the other. She was slurping at the coffee rather than watching where she was going, or making any effort at all to avoid bumping into tables with her hips. Draia’s tray was piled high with a mound of omelet and a stack of marbled toast. Captain Gregnol, meanwhile, had put great effort into easing Draia back into her life aboard the Mary Rose. He tried to very hard indeed. Gregnol had quietly cleaned up the mess she had made of the hangar bay and had suggested this breakfast date for Draia and her new Chief. The first impression that Draia Theroh made with her new Chief Engineer was neither a hi, nor a hello, nor a good morning to you.

“Sorry, boss,” Draia said flatly as she dropped into the chair opposite Michael. She dropped her tray on the table and set down her mug too. Draia looked him dead in the eyes, and she admitted, “I think I broke one of the food synthesizers.”

Burnie paused, a bagel smeared with cream cheese halfway to his lips. He looked at the new/returning engineer who had trashed the hangar bay with a crash in return, then at the mound of food on her tray. And burst out laughing - he couldn't help it; it had to be a joke, either intentional on her part or some cosmic prank by the universe itself (just the fact that she was Cardassian, which meant he'd have to keep a prickly Romulan from provoking or being provoked by her, was proof the Creator had a twisted sense of humor).

When he got the reaction far enough under control to speak, he gestured at her tray. "Looks like you didn't lock it to Cardassian food, so I'm not too worried."

Squinting at Burnie, Draia couldn't suss out if that comment was a slight against Cardassian food or an honest assessment. "No, I didn't do that," Draia said guardedly, distracted by her earlier interaction with the food synthesizer. She explained, "I think it called me fat? So I punched it?" And then she shrugged, and started forking large curds of egg into her mouth. Latching onto what Burnie had said, Draia asked, "Hey, did you guys add Cardassian food patterns to the library computer? Because this would smell way better with regova eggs, rather than chi-ken. Honestly."

"Nope, hasn't been much call for Cardassian cuisine. Most of us prefer chicken eggs in fact," Burnie replied. Honestly the only non-Cardassian he'd ever met who'd willing eat it had grown up in a region where they ate things like lutefisk, so his bar had been set pretty low to begin with. However if she was punching replicators, it seemed safer not to share that. "But to each their own. Though if you're going punch out equipment for imagined insults we're going to have to have a 'you punch it, you fix it' rule."

Throwing her hands up in a helpless shrug, Draia promised, "I'll fix it; duh." She shook her head slightly and then she dug into her eggs with a fork. Draia had mostly finished swallowing her first big bite when she raised her gaze to look Burnie in the eyes. "Is this going to be a problem...?" she asked, raising an eye-ridge. "Me being Cardassian? Did you all lose family in the War or whatever?"

Burnie cocked an eyebrow back at her. "Cardassian has nothing to do with it. If you're going to be the kind of hothead who punches inanimate equipment because you... " he paused, the word caught in a brief bout of aphasia, and waved a hand in a circular motion near his head, trying to express it, "...think... it insulted you, yes, we're going to have a problem."

Tilting her head to the left, Draia breathed out a sigh that said, oh boy, here we go again, without saying anything at all. "I didn't imagine the insult," Draia insisted, echoing Burnie's earlier choice of words. She shrugged, saying, "Maybe I inferred it when it gave me a health warning about the number of calories in my meal?"

"Uh-huh." Burnie leaned forward, brow lifting higher. "So, despite being an engineer, and one with prior experience on this ship, you still somehow 'inferred' an insult from a standard pre-programmed warning?"

Squinting back at him, Draia scoffed and she asked, "Are you my psychiatrist now? Is that what's happening" in an incredulous tone. She blinked at Burnie and she sat back in her chair. "What are you trying to say exactly?" Draia asked, utterly baffled by the intensity of Burnie's figurative sensor scan.

Xenopsychology was not Burnie's strong suit, but he'd dealt with a few Cardassians, both as friend and foe. Unfortunately this one didn't seem to fit anything he'd learned from any of them (at least he hoped not - he'd hate to think she was trying to flirt with him). Containing a sigh, he sat back. "At the moment, what I'm trying to say is that the idea that a replicator was knowingly insulting you strikes me as somewhat ...irrational. To be clear, there are types of insanity I'm fine with and even consider a positive strength in engineers. But wrecking stuff over imagined insults isn't one of them."

"Okay, you caught me," Draia said, deflated. She raised her hands dramatically, as if Burnie were a chief of security. "I lied about the replicator. It's fine. I made a bad joke, because I was nervous to meet you, and when you took it so seriously, I doubled-down. ...What happens next? Are you going to water-board me for being irrational?"

Burnie blinked. Then burst out laughing. "Nope," he said, and lifted mug. "But I am going to have more coffee, since I'm clearly not awake enough to have caught that you were joking."

"That's perfectly natural. You don't know me yet. I don't know you yet," Draia said, giving into the wild rapids of a new working relationship, including all the peaks and waterfalls that came with it. She slurped at her coffee too, as her throat had gone dry. Leaning into the table, Draia said, "That's why we're here! How did you end up on the Mary Rose?"

"Indeed." He grinned, and swallowed more coffee. "I know this might sound like a joke, but I met the Captain and his wife during a bar fight."

Draia's mouth opened in an expression of surprise, rather than amusement, and her eyes widened too. Her lips struggled to form words, but no sounds came out, as she kept stopping herself and restarting with another imagined question. Finally, she leaned in further and she spoke in a low and conspiratorial tone. "Did you punch either of them?" she asked.

"What? No!" Burnie laughed. "I'm not the punching type. That's more Liha." He paused. Well, they'd meet eventually. "The person traveling with me. Romulan, a little ...hot tempered... I was just trying to fix the drink dispenser to prevent the fight, but... well, things got out of hand quickly. But we did help the Captain and his wife duck out at the end." He took a swallow of coffee. "How about you?"

After swallowing another mouthful of eggs, Draia replied, "I was lugging a coil spanner on a mining vessel," --and she mimed like she was repairing the driver coils in an impulse engine array-- "when the Mary Rose swung on by to purchase deuterium." Animatedly, Draia looked left and she looked right, before she returned her gaze to Burnie to continue her story. "I thought this ship looked cleaner," she said, conspiratorially adding the commentary: "Less work." She sipped at her coffee again, adding, "I just got lucky Captain Gregnol remembered he owed me a favour."

Burnie took a bite of his bagel, chewing on it as he mentally chewed on her answer. She might be joking, or at least playing things up a bit for humorous effect, but intentionally coming off as rather lazy and self-interested was an interesting choice. "Why exactly did the Captain owe you a favor?"

Draia's response --the movement of her facial muscles-- could only be called a smile by Mona Lisa. "Now," she said melodically, "that would be telling..."

"Riiight..." Burnie snorted a laugh. He was really torn between keeping her and Liha apart to prevent potential mayhem or sticking them together just to see what would happen. The potential for epic explosions was tempting... He shook off the thought. Liha had a doctor to torment to keep her amused. "well, how ever you've gotten the job, I need figure out where to put you to use. So far, it sounds like you know how to use a coil spanner," he smirked, "and how to jump ship if there's too much work."

Cheerily, Draia replied, "I also know how to quit when my electroplamsa systems schooling used antiquated educational modalities," --and she started counting her skills off on her fingers-- "how to walk away from mining dilithium from haunted mines, and how to break the prime directive when maintaining Starfleet tactical systems bored me to tears."

Burnie tipped his head side-to-side, mouth actually turning down at the corners with the effort to counter an amused smile. "Not exactly engineering skills, but potentially useful..." Letting the grin break through, he leaned forward. "But tell me, how many ways can you rig an explosive from just what's in your quarters?"

Draia waggled her fork through the air as she spoke, but she was careful not to lose the hunk of egg on the tongs. "I think it depends..." Draia started to say. For once, her response came out slowly, almost thoughtfully. She bit the bit of omelet off her fork and then she raised her free hand beside her face. Elaborating, Draia said, "On how deeply I can dig into the bulkheads... Wrist-deep, elbow-deep, or shoulder-deep. But it's not just a matter of quantity. What's the fastest bomb you could build in your quarters?"

"Tsk, tsk." Burnie wagged a finger. "If you have to reached into the bulkheads it doesn't count. But how fast with just what's in my quarters?" He grinned, the sort of grin that sometimes put people off, but he felt that Draia might appreciate. "That depends - with or without the power on?"

"I'm a generous soul," Draia replied. She waved her hand in a tumbling circle; a gesture that encouraged Burnie to go ahead. She grinned back at him with just as unsettling a grin. She answered with, "I'll give you the power's still on."

"Too easy," Burnie scoffed. "Jam a magna-spanner in the desk terminal. Boom. With it off, fastest would be to stick a micro flux coupler in my aftershave. It'll go up 3 second flat." He sat back, pulling a thoughtful moue. "Of course, that's small, more of a flash-bang than a bomb. There are about a half dozen other things just in the medicine that I could combine into a better explosive, but that would take a second or two longer."

Explosive might be how one might describe Draia's reaction. A peal of delighted laughter escaped her lips; her whole body shook while she let it out. There may have even been a snort or two. "Remind me not to get on your bad side, naughty boy," Draia remarked. She shook her head like a schoolmarm, but her wicked grin revealed how much she approved. Draia set down her fork and she looked at Burnie, looked right at him. The snickering and the innuendo were gone. Almost bashfully, she asked, "Why do you think you need to fix things?"

"Hey, I didn't even mention using the C8 stashed in my desk," he laughed, grinning back at her. "Figured that would be cheating."

He took another bite of bagel, considering her follow up question. The easy flippant answer he was apt to give most people was 'Well, when you blow something up, it usually needs fixing afterwards' but somehow the question seemed too earnest, too unexpectedly sincere, for that. "Honestly, I'm better at taking things apart. My mom used to despair of keeping me from prying stuff open and breaking it down, piece by piece. But it's all part of the same impulse I suppose... like not being able to walk away from a puzzle when there's still pieces to put in place."

"...Like you absolutely need to know how the universe works?" Draia said softly, although it wasn't terribly obvious if she was talking about him or about herself. "If you can't see all the joins --if you can't see how the a-tabs slot into the b-tabs-- then it's all too much chaos... And who can abide chaos at their door?" --She cleared her throat-- "I mean, aside from chaos of your own making, of course."

"Yeah," Burnie nodded. "And how to... well, rewire the controls, or work out how to put the open slots and tabs together." It was the one bit of the religious education forced on him that had really meant anything - the idea that if people were created in the Creator's image, then they had a need to create, and so God had left things a little incomplete, or maybe a little broken, to us the opportunity to satisfy that need. However, that wasn't an idea he shared with people he'd just met, and often not even ones he'd known for years. "But my own chaos, yeah, that's just good fun."

He took another sip of coffee. "How about you? Did you get into engineering to fix things, control them, or just figure them out?"

"I needed to know," Draia said, with absolute certainty at first, and progressively less the more she said. "How things work. Why things work. If things work. Y'know? Space, time, speed..." --She blinked and she looked down at her plate, and she chewed on another bite of eggs-- "But I guess that came later. It wasn't my choice, at the start. My mother thought her family could stand to appear more... relatable. An engineer in the family was the solution. Family is all. I didn't get a say in the matter. I suppose she would have rathered me designing starships than repairing them in the most efficient manner possible."

"I got a say in the matter, but my family wasn't overly thrilled with my choice. My parents are both academics, and my sister is the respectable one - she became an architect, got married, had a kid..." His mouth went a little sideways. "But I went into Starfleet engineering, and ...now I'm here."

[truncated]

Michael Burnstein
Chief Engineer
SS Mary Rose