A Vague Sense of Unease

Posted on Sat Mar 2nd, 2024 @ 6:18am by Lieutenant JG Calanthe 'Cal' Diaz & Ensign Duncan McManus

Mission: Contagion
Location: The Station
3141 words - 6.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Duncan had been very silent since Gerhard had pulled them all aside and explained to them about the illness that was on the base. It filled him with worry as they were so far from home and help let alone out in the universe in the unknown. It was not something that he expected when they responded to a call for aid. It was human to answer the call but it was frustrating that the owners of the base had not responded. They would have come to the base a lot more prepared.

“You okay, Lieutenant?” He finally asked secure in the knowledge that the communication was established properly and they would be able to contact the ship whenever they wanted too.

Calanthe wasn't sure whether her current tendency towards numbness was a good thing and indicative of maintaining a level head under pressure, or if it pointed towards are far more insidious psychological acceptance that her life was just going to be a series of gut punches from hereon in. She hope for the former, at least, and was currently operating under the assumption that it was too soon to panic. It wasn't as if Medical had been given a chance to properly analyse the risk to outsiders, and as much as Avira's precautions leading into the mission had been limited to bolstering current immunisation protocols in the hope that it would be enough, at least it was something. The decision not to wander around in contamination suits had worried the brunette at the time but there were supply issues, she knew that. Maintenance issues. Power issues. Always issues.

She lifted her gaze to meet Duncan's and offered him a rueful smile. "No green spots yet."

Duncan could not help but smile at her comment about green spots. Darru had gone through the symptoms that the Lumanri had been able to supply. Luminescent skin discolouration, chromatic vision shifts, rapid fluctuation in body temperature, emotional-dysregulation and memory loss and or with confusion. The science officer had warned them that it could be very different if the sickness crossed species but until science and medical got to look at it all in more depth it was up in the air. “I was hoping for pink spots. Can wind Cusack up.” He grinned.

It earned him an immediate deadpan, followed by an amused scoff. "Laryngitis would have been better in that case." Despite everything, and the history between them, Cal knew that she liked Nate and actually valued his friendship, but there was something grating about the fact that he managed to be both utterly infuriating and effortlessly charming. His current levels of disdain for their situation were genuinely irritating and yet she worried still, that he and the others were risking further exposure.

“Maybe if we are infected that will be a humanoid symptom.” Duncan said brightly before he stood from where he had decided to to sit on the floor whilst helping to merge communication systems together better. “They said we could explore right? Shall we go for a wander?” He knew he would like to wander somewhere different.

Calanthe was a little more reserved. "They did, yes, but I don't know if it's that wise. Not without knowing how bad this might be." Her hesitation was accompanied by a frown as she realised she also held a degree of cynicism for the Luminari's willingness to just allow them to traipse around, unattended. It took realising that she sounded like Cusack to coax the brunette to her feet. "It might not be a terrible idea to try and find some kind of messhall though, or figure out where we're going to sleep if we're stuck here for a while."

“Yes Ma’am.” The engineer declared glad that she had seen how wise the exploring would be. “I hope it’s as nice as the future ship. I had the best night's sleep in one of those beds.” Duncan had tried to get one of the mattresses past Gerhard with Elegy but it had not been meant to be. He was trying to maintain his mood with the impending idea of being infected with sickness.

"Weren't a fan of the underwater rooms on Relea?" Calanthe offered Duncan a half-grin. It had been a disconcerting experience, one that she hadn't been at all disappointed to bypass once one of the self-contained igloo-esque apartments closer to the Archives had been made available to her, to cut down the travel time.

“They were not bad but I preferred the Caelestis. It was just nice.” Duncan grinned and picked a direction to go with his scanner in tow. “I think the difference between Relea and the Caelestis was the view. There was a lot of fishes on Relea.” He had spent hours just watching the scene.

"It was cold but it was lovely." The wistfulness in Diaz's tone was unmistakable, though it was all she said. Leaving had been difficult, morale had taken a dip and Calanthe wasn't immune just because she'd been busy.

Duncan would have leant over and covered a half hug if she had been a member of engineering but he just gave her a look that he understood her feelings on the situation. “So which way?”

"I'm not sure it matters that much if the architecture decides to shift again." It had seemed to Calanthe that there had never really been a definitive explanation as to why the walls had shifted, with the assumption being that the Luminari had triggered the mechanism intentionally but something niggled at her about that, an interpretation of body language that she couldn't trust because she didn't know the species well enough yet to make judgement calls. "Left?"

"I heard them assure Gerhard that it would not shift on us now that they knew who are and what our reason for being here was but..." He left the thought out there. He was not quite as suspicious but he certainly was not sure about it all. Something felt off like when his brother used to come back with girls and sneak them into the house and lie to his face. The vibe just felt the same but he could not pin it down. "You are the boss." He reminded grinning as he glanced back to where they had left the others behind.

If the look she'd given him earlier hadn't withered him to a sultana, Cal sought to try again. "Shut up," she eventually laughed, at least not disappointed by the company she'd been left with. Since Ben's passing, Duncan had been the one member of the engineering team Calanthe had really spent any time with. She suspected he'd guessed at what she hadn't even confessed to Lexi at the time, a matter of 'right place, right time' given he'd ended up next to her at the funeral service, but he'd never brought it up and had been more or less content to occasionally poke his head around a corner to give her a mouthful of cheek when she needed it. Though she doubted it was true, he seemed almost unperturbed by their situation, which probably just meant he was one of life's hopeless optimists. There had been a time where Cal would have hoped for a similar title, but time had proven her still in need of practise.

"Do you get the feeling," she asked after a while, "that this station doesn't actually belong to the Luminari?" It had been something Cusack had muttered and though she'd elbowed him for the audacity, Cal hadn't been able to shake the thought since.

Duncan could be seemed by a lot of people as the person who seemed unaffected by the whole situation but he gave himself 30 days at the beginning to sort his head out. It had worked in his favour as it had given him the space to adjust and move in the direction he needed. It was not perfect but it allowed him at the very least to build connections. Duncan mused the question that she had and raised an eyebrow. He was not at all convinced 100% but the vibe of the place was very much that.

“I am not one hundred percent sure but there are certainly things that lean more towards it not belonging to them or… I do not know it just feels that something is off.” He admitted holding the rifle just a little tighter to himself.

"Nate has a theory," Cal found herself saying and, intercepting Duncan's look, held up a hand in defense. "I know, believe me, I know. But, he has a theory that they're trespassers who bit off more than they could chew. He's naturally suspicious so I take the paranoia with a grain of salt, but he does have a point about the way they greeted us at first. Almost as if they weren't actually expecting anyone to show up." She frowned as they rounded a corner into another non-descript corridor, too distracted to wonder if they were going to find anything specific in a landscape that strove so hard to be uniformly mundane. A glance sideways sought to watch Duncan's reaction as she lowered her voice and asked, "Have we actually any proof that this distress signal is theirs?"

Duncan laughed a little at the way she said Nate had a theory despite his look but stayed quiet. He was surprised that she was leaning into the theories that the MACO had but who was he to nudge until he had heard them all properly? "I do not know maybe something to ask O'Connery as she is studying the transmission. Maybe she could compare languages and dialects," He was not at all sure that he was phrasing it correctly but he hoped she understood that it could be investigated.

"You know they never taught us at university how to tell if a ten-foot tall alien is lying." With a huff of wry laughter, Cal allowed her gaze to wander curiously up the full length of a seamless wall and then scrutinised the ceiling as they rounded another corner. "This feels like a situation where trying to claim the other person is behaving weirdly qualifies as stating-the-obvious but why would they send us to 'look around' on our own?" Her gaze dropped to meet Duncan's. "Think about it. If you come over to my house, I don't sit in the living room and invite you to go explore on your own."

“I do not know Ensign. I am still trying to get my head around the whole ten-foot tall alien let alone if they are lying. But maybe we can by the colours they glow.” He offered with a shrug. “The house is pretty big. I would say this is like one of those times you wander around a grand house.” He offered before he thought it might be a British thing. The whole island was full of grand houses open to public.

"Those still have a security team overseeing things." Calanthe stared at one of the elegant shapes that repeated ad nauseum along the corridor, a curled flourish not unlike calligraphy that seemed fashioned from the wall itself, like a dollop of icing on a decorated cake. It might have been ornamentation but since Nate had pointed out they'd be a perfect place to hide a security camera, she couldn't unsee the possibility.

“So do you.” The man raised the rifle he was carrying again in an almost mock sure to her before he stopped to look at what she was looking at. “Looks familiar.” He finally settled on leaning out to trace the calligraphy.

"It repeats but isn't consistent." Calanthe turned back to look down the corridor they'd just covered. Evidence of the same decorative embellishment appeared on several of the walls, though there seemed no specific symmetry to the placement. "You'd think if it was just for decoration that it would have some sort of pattern at least."

Duncan could not help but agree there. “Even I know a decoration only works with a pattern.” He commented tracking the placement himself. “It’s like … you know we have deck and compartment numbers on the walls like that.” He explained thought not convinced it was that but it was the best he had.

"These are all the same though, as far as I can tell. And if the walls are designed to move around..." Calanthe wasn't convinced that simple location coordinates were the answer, but she also couldn't convince herself of Nate's level of 'spying walls' paranoia. "That could be why they aren't uniform," she conceded, stretching up to full height and still failing to reaching high enough to actually touch one of them. Not for the first time, she was glad it was Duncan watching her struggling and not Nate, or Will. "Give me a hoist up?"

The engineer side eyed her before he realised she was very much serious and dropped to his knee awkwardly. It was hard to keep the weapon close and offer her his hand to hoist her up but he managed it. “Don’t be telling everyone I do this, ma’am. They will all want me doing this.” The man said.

"I guarantee nothing if you keep calling me ma'am."

Finally worn down, Calanthe took the opportunity to point out the ridiculousness of his deferential treatment, which was likely a McManus-brand jab at her expense simply because she technically outranked him now. She wobbled a little too much to continue her protest, focusing instead on inspecting the indentation for the few seconds of balance she could muster. Though her stature wasn't particularly impressive, a year's worth of taking her frustrations out on a punching bag had made her a little more solid than expectations allowed for. Under-estimation saw her teeter before relying on her agility to twist and step down beside him rather than sit on his head.

She reached down to ruffle his hair.

"Someone skipped arm day."

"Skipping a lot of days at the moment, working nights." He muttered weakly as he stretched a little more but it did not get rid of the tingling sensation nor the feeling that he was feeling overwhelmed. "...Ma'am."

"It's Calanthe, or even better, Cal." The brunette's tone was curt, perhaps a shade over-sensitive about the constant formality though that likely could be traced back and blamed entirely on Cusack as well. She'd already given up on exploring the wall embellishments, distracted by what the change in perspective of being flat against the surface had revealed. "Come on, there's a room just here."

It was strange, the way the architecture played tricks with the eyes. From a certain standpoint, it seemed as if the Communications Chief simply disappeared into the wall, but closer examination revealed the gap that she'd located and, beyond it, the function of the space was immediately confusing.

At best, Calanthe would have guessed it to be a residential space, for all it appeared to be one continual room that simply tried to fill itself with areas best suited to personal quarters. One corner seemed to be a kitchen, the other featured what appeared at first glance to be a large sunken bathtub, whilst the centre of the room housed the largest bed Calanthe had ever seen. Nothing seemed quite complete, though; there were no other facilities to denote an actual bathroom, and the table and chairs that might have been used for dining seemed proportionally awkward. This might have seemed less weird had it been too large for them, given the Luminari's size, but the problem quite the opposite. Cal couldn't figure out how she'd fit her knees under the table and she was considerably shorter than her companion. Other additions seemed like afterthoughts; a bookcase without any books on it, a desk and chair with only an odd-looking plant on it, a large pile of cushions were it might have made more sense to have a sofa. Calanthe stood, waiting for Duncan to arrive, and found it difficult to express just how immediately uncomfortable she felt.

"I think...this is actually giving me a headache."

Duncan could not help but smirk. She was very much not Calanthe or Cal, he had been trained over and over in Earth Starfleet rules and regulations. He knew the chain of command but there and then he supposed he could let her order him into it just this once. He raced after as she disappeared out of sight and was relieved when he realised how much of an optical illusion it was. “Yeah…” he said blinking trying to understand it but could not. “Let’s get out of here.” He said firmly backing up.

The trouble with the chain of command, Cal had decided a while back, was that it didn't really give you many tips on how to navigate relationships that threatened to extend indefinitely into a combined future within a confined space. She knew, for instance, that she really shouldn't have been quite so quick to treat Will with the flippancy he sometimes received from her but the alternative was too impersonal, too lonely, for her to really want to even try. Right now, Duncan's persistence was enforcing a rift that Cal had zero interest in cultivating, especially if she was about to lose her breakfast because the landscape couldn't figure out what a chair was supposed to look like.

"What even was that?," she protested once they were back outside, a hand settled over her stomach as she grimaced in distaste. "I don't think I've ever felt physically ill just from looking at something."

Duncan whilst not feeling sick rubbed his eyes as if that would help him sort out the images that he had seen. “It just felt wrong.” And that was all he could describe it as but he could not quite explain why it did. “It was like it was creating a room for us both and got confused which is impossible.” He said trying to assure himself more than anything.

"I don't know if impossible is a word I even believe in anymore." Staring back at the gap in the wall, Diaz half expected to see it vanish.

“I think we need to find Commander Gerhard and the others.” He mumbled reaching around in his pack for some water to help the strange feelings that he felt.

"Agreed." As much as McManus was decent company, Calanthe suddenly felt like two wasn't quite the safest group size. Steeling herself to retrace their steps, she shared a glance with the man as he took a swig from his canteen, and then jerked her head in the direction they'd just come from. "Come on, that's enough exploring for now."