Poking Around

Posted on Sat Feb 7th, 2026 @ 10:06am by Captain Jaivir Vohra & Lieutenant Jennifer Matthews

Mission: Royal Mail
Location: Engineering, USS Atlantis
Timeline: Day 450, Evening
3319 words - 6.6 OF Standard Post Measure

It was probably fair to say that, of all the places likely to draw an appreciative crowd, Engineering occupied a space near the bottom of the list. There was no shortage of oversight to the lack of regard, of course; as far as function went, it was arguably the most important place on the ship, but it took an uncommon mind to view it as any kind of aesthetic achievement.

The man, hovering inside the main hatchway, hands stuffed in his pocket, seemed to fit the bill.

He had the uncommon ability to just appear, which is to say his arrival hadn't been marked by anyone currently on duty, and yet that seemed somehow odd given how conspicuously out-of-place he seemed once noticed. It was probably for the best that his entrance had been ignored; a grown man taking delight in how a door opened and closed was bound to lead to a bunch of questions nobody had any time to ask. Right now, he was poking the hull with an index finger as if expecting it to be squishy.

Jenni had half a billion concerns and to-do's happening within her realm. And while much of that had to do with the sudden and not-so-surprising request to get the ship ready for passengers, there was still the matter of making sure that the ship would remain stable while carrying these passengers, especially as they continued to add more and more non-human elements to the ship. This particular moment found Jenni atop the warp core's control station, and it wasn't until she turned to take the steep staircase down that she found an unexpected person nearby... poking... at a bulkhead.

"It's not going to poke back," Jenni cautioned, coming down the staircase. "Though I do hear that it can bite those not authorized to do the poking, Captain."

Already in the process of biting his bottom lip like a naughty schoolboy caught in the act, Vohra screwed up his nose in a rather animated display of oops and then promptly shoved his hands back into his pockets.

"It's such a normal-looking thing, don't you think?," he countered, presumably talking about the wall. "To be responsible for keeping the entire universe out. Standard liquefaction test," he continued, features resorting to their usual good-natured beam. "If your walls wobble, then you've got problems you should probably address. Luckily for you, Atlantis seems to be wibble-free."

Jenni came to a stop beside the man and she thumbed the display of her datapad to the off position. "Thank you?" she cautiously offered as a response to what she assumed was a compliment. Though she herself could not take full credit for Atlantis remaining in one piece as that responsibility was shared not just with her team but her prior supervisors, she could still acknowledge the unusual platitude. "You're awfully philosophical for someone wandering about. Perhaps we should get you to the medbay where the good doctor can make sure you're not on something."

The insinuation prompted several startled blinks, mostly because there was something eerily familiar about the besmirchment of his character and Vohra took a moment to study the engineer's head for signs of horns. To be on the safe side, he held his hands up in a conciliatory offering of good behaviour.

"Not unless you're serving something in the tea I should have been warned about." Dropping a hand, he motioned a cross over his sternum. "Pinky-promise, I'm only interested in learning a little bit more about my temporary new home," he reassured, hesitating before adding, "It feels a bit weird not to be on the Bridge, if I'm honest."

"Yes," Jenni offered with a smile of her own, putting on the welcoming facade that Captain Leroux had encouraged them all to wear. "I heard you and a few others would be staying on board for a few days. Believe me, the bridge doesn't offer that much. Hails, navigation adjustments... none of that really compares to the room that makes the ship go."

"And you must be," Vohra jabbed a delighted finger towards the engineer, "the brains holding the whole kit-and-kaboodle together. Jaivir Vohra," he thrust his hand forward entirely, which he would consider much later to be an unfortunately familiar greeting given their relative distance from anywhere likely to favour it. "Gosh, it must be nice to have a ship that doesn't answer back."

Jenni eyed the hand for a moment, wondering if accepting the handshake was a good idea. The Captain's voice echoed in her hand once more, and Jenni cautiously reached out with her own to complete the gesture. "Jennifer Matthews," she introduced herself using her full name. The nickname would be reserved for familiarity, which did not yet exist here. "Though I'm not so sure I deserve the moniker of brains since this is a role I recently inherited."

"Inheritance is a viable means of demonstrating competency," Vohra responded immediately, as if speaking from personal experience. "Even better if you manage not to mess everything up within the first week, right?" Craning his head to peer over the top of hers, the man scrutinised the room beyond and declared, "Nothing seems to be on fire, that's a good start."

Jenni chuckled. "You must not have experience with good engineers. If something's not smoking, then we're not doing our jobs right." She nodded towards the bulkhead Vohra had been so freely poking, hoping to find it as thin as a sheet of foil. "Besides, one never knows how many things are cross-circuited or patched behind unsuspecting covers."

For whatever reason, this revelation seemed to delight Vohra even more. "I had my suspicions," was all that he said before the hunch of his shoulders saw him convey a boyish exhuberance that didn't take long to bubble over into a fairly simple request. "So, is there somewhere I can sign up for a guided tour? Rent an audio-guide maybe, though it's hard to beat a personal touch."

She wanted to wince, and it took all of her mental strength to not allow how she felt to manifest on her face. Giving tours was not Jenni's specialty or preference, but two thoughts lingered in her mind. The first was that Captain Leroux had given clear orders regarding their guests. And the second was that if Vohra had wandered into engineering without being stopped, then she could only wonder where else he had been. Perhaps there could be two goals with the tour, the first being that Vohra had an escort, and the second being that she could see what else wasn't being adequately protected.

"You know, we don't have an audio guide," Jenni said, offering a half smile. "And if we did, it'd be a little out of date with all of the modifications we had to make to the ship over the last year. "But a guided tour is something I could provide."

"Only if you won't get you into trouble." A furtive glance over his shoulder seemed mostly pantomime, though it wouldn't take too long for it to become entirely apparently why Jaivir Vohra was a tiny bit paranoid about being snuck up on. "And if you have the time, of course." This time, his smile was a little less theatrical, veering more towards a wry kind of acceptance of the universal nature of being overworked..

Jenni found herself remembering a saying, the lesser of two evils. She could either get in trouble by providing a tour, or allowing Vohra to be left alone to his own devices, especially after he'd wandered into engineering. Containing the damage was more desirable than letting him walk off. Besides, at least this way, she could learn more about those who would be tagging along for a while. "That's the thing about us engineers," she said, raising the datapad in her hand, "One is always on the clock. Just a moment."

The woman nodded to Vohra so that she could move over to her desk to set down the device. Though it would be easy for her to carry it throughout the tour, it felt awkward to keep it so close.

Against all previous evidence, Vohra was still waiting patiently once she returned, hands to himself and his gaze fixated only on the floor. There was a suggestion in the way his attention shifted that this had been more a feat of introspection than intentional scrutiny. His features switched instantly to a familiar broad smile.

"So," he ventured, content to keep pace and follow the engineer's lead, "tell me about this ship of yours. What brings her all the way to this side of the soup bowl?"

"Would you believe we made it all this way by accident?" Jenni remarked, leading Vohra out the door. The corner of her eye caught a patch of warped and discolored bulkheads, a leftover from events from months ago. She winced as her pride suffered a soft blow, and did her best not to show it. "Atlantis was designed for deep space missions, but definitely not like this."

A pair of overtly-raised eyebrows bought the fledgling tourist a moment to gather his wits, which seemed to culminate in the decision to waggle them rakishly as he settled on being just as confused as when he'd started. Vohra's flamboyance was persistent enough to be relatively tolerated by his crew these days but, to an unsuspecting audience, it seemed just as circumstance would suggest; a pantomime, though it was anybody's guess for who benefited from the charade.

"Accidental sight-seeing sounds like it ought to be more fun than it probably is." There was time enough for him to scratch his nose before the next question arrived, each word plucked carefully from an assortment of possibilities that quite possibly would have made any random sequence just as much a failure in the nonchalance department as the next. "So, I take it home is a fair hike away then?"

Jenni offered a gentle smile, not to provide a bit of comfort or ease, but to mask her own discomfort with the situation. "And then some," she confirmed. "This ship was fitted with our latest generation of technology, all the way down to the engines and life support." Her eyes looked over to Vohra for a moment as they trekked down the corridor towards an intersection. "Some of us still write letters home, even though there's a good chance they'll never be seen or read."

A wrinkled nose seemed unsure of what to do with that information, a hint of awkwardness that seemed uncharacteristic for all it was conveyed with a healthy amount of very visible sheepishness to confirm its existence. "Booking a one-way trip is bound to come with some regrets." There seemed a moment as the man mulled over his next words, grappling with the diplomacy his ship liked to insist he was terrible at. "You, uh, can't go back the way you came then, I take it?"

"Something like that," Jenni said with a wince. For a brief moment, she wondered if she had shared far too much information. The Atlantis had been more than a year away from the Sol System, and while those in this region could tell the Earth ship had overstayed its welcome, Jenni had little to no idea what the Captain had shared with those who possessed they space the Atlantis wandered. "How about you? How long has it been since you... well... came the way you came?"

The silence was immediately deafening. It lasted just long enough to be obvious and involved an intense amount of studying the ceiling as if the overhead conduit configuration was suddenly the most interesting thing Vohra had seen all day. It was the kind of hesitation that made it blatantly obvious that an invisible line had been scuffed over, and if Matthews hadn't realised before that the man's origins were still an unvoiced suspicion at best, she knew now.

Bio-scans were traitorous things. They sure put a huge dent in plausible deniability.

"Probably not as long as it feels." The eventual response was about as evasive as it could have been, complete with an easy grin to match. "Or a lot longer than it should have been, depending on who you ask. I joined the Kama Nova about..." The putter of lips seemed to struggle with local time conversions. "Tink claims it's been 58 cycles but, between you and me, I don't actually know how long a cycle is in Beligerant Blue Bandit terms."

The silence had been just as uncomfortable as it had been deafening. Jenni was normally not one to pick up on nuance, but even she couldn't help but see that her simple question had struck something in the man beside her. For a moment that was not all too brief, she felt a twinge of sympathy for Vohra. Perhaps the crew of the Atlantis weren't the only ones brought out here against their will, and if Vohra was another victim, how many more were there?

"Well, that keeps me from asking how long a cycle is then," Jenni remarked, trying to keep things in a light-hearted vein. "There are some days though I wish I could pop on a spacesuit and take a trip down Lovell's Trail." Her eyes blinked, realizing a bit of context was needed. "That's a, uh, that's on Earth's moon. I used to go there with my family when I was young."

For a moment, Vohra seemed to consider the information, circumspect enough to purse his lips in thought. "There are a few decent moons in this sector," he mused, the scan of his eyes along an invisible line that roamed the ceiling overhead tracking a mental catalogue that seemed, in places, to provoke a slight grimace of uncertainty. "And a few less-than-decent-ones. Not quite the same," he added, and with that acknowledgement came a flicker of something decidedly more sympathetic than his usual antics conveyed. "But anything's got to be better than being cooped up on a ship all the time. You guys have been here a long time not to have made more friends."

Jenni chuckled, finding a bit of irony in Vohra's remarks. Jenni herself was a loner by nature, and it had taken her a while to warm up to much of the Atlantis' crew. By the time she had warmed up, she'd been promoted. Most of the crew didn't seem to care about how rank and position affected friendships. Jenni somehow found the situation uncomfortable, but perhaps that was because she was still holding out hope that one day they'd be able to return. "I can't speak to why we as a ship haven't made friends," she explained, pivoting from her own thoughts. "That's all up to the Captain."

"Which is the bigger mystery," Vohra ventured, "because she seems far more personable than half the big-knobs in this region." The flash of an easy grin wasn't so overstated that it ruined the sincerity of the observation too much. "Not that it would take much really."

With a screwed up nose, the man turned his attention back to their surroundings and, more specifically, the intention behind this stroll. That it became a perfect way to side-step the previous conversation entirely was just a coincidence, obviously. "I bet a ship like this is earning some sideways glances at least. Go on," he nudged sideways, bumping his shoulder into Jen's arm. "You can tell me, what's her best feature?"

Jenni chuckled, and somehow managed to stop herself from blurting out the answer. She seemed to be connecting well with the foreign captain, but reality still prompted caution. Their banter hadn't loosened her up enough to reveal what she knew to be the ship's best feature. "Easy," she lied, "a ship is only as effective as its crew. If you can't trust the person beside you, then it doesn't matter how reliable antimatter injectors or phase inducers are."

"Oh come on, there's got to be a special broom closet around here somewhere."

Amiable despite the neatly side-stepped question, Vohra cast his admiration around in vague sweeps, less concerned about actually extracting tactical information than he was just trying to understand how Atlantis and her crew could even exist. A long way from home was a pretty ambiguous origin story, and though it was fair to say that his own ship was unique enough to be considered the weirder of the two, Atlantis had one distinct attribute that set it way ahead in the 'shit he'd like to understand' stakes.

She was from Earth. For obvious reasons, you didn't get a lot of that out here.

"The Novus is a little light on broom closets," he continued, an olive branch in the form of information freely offered. "But she's got a heck of a neural-interface if you're ever interested in meeting it."

At the mention of a broom closet, Jenni immediately thought of the one place aboard the ship that few people knew about. It was not a feature or something begging for attention, but somewhere she did like to retreat to when the universe felt overwhelming.

But then Vohra said something that caught her attention and snapped her back from her mental drift.

"Neural interface?" Jenni asked, surprised by such technology. Then again, this region of space was full of surprises and technological advancements, many of which leaps above the Atlantis. One could spend a lifetime trying to unlock and understand it all. "It? Are you talking about a holographic construct or something like that?"

A hesitant wince, by now a relatively frequent habit, saw Vohra way up the accuracy of the description a little later than would have been helpful since he had instigated it. "Something like that," he agreed. "They say ships have personalities, right?" He paused as if trying that on for size and then nodded, apparently satisfied. "Well, it just so happens that mine actually does." Another facial tic warranted a correction. "And, technically, she's not my ship. It is my command though," he hastened to add, index finger held aloft to drive home the point. "Helm and navigation are the purview of the...owner? Wrangler? Boss Lady. She and the ship work in tandem, kind of a...symbiosis deal."

It was becoming blatantly clear that Vohra was bluffing his way through an explanation. Whatever the situation on the Kama Novus actually was, its Captain didn't seem to really understand half of it.

Jenni raised an eyebrow, finding herself brushed by mystery. She hadn't the slightest idea what he was describing, but there were enough hints to know that Vohra lacked a enough of a grasp to properly express this interface. What mattered here was that, while indeed a commander of a vessel, Vohra himself was someone's agent. She'd have to be careful with what remained of this tour as there was no telling what Vohra would keep to himself, and what he would pass upward.

But that didn't mean that she could leave her own curiosity unsatisfied. Minutes ago, Vohra had been a stranger wandering around engineering. Now here he was with a rather tasty carrot, a foreign technology that could be leaps above Atlantis's own.

"A ship with an expressive personality?" Jenni asked, echoing some of his words. "I'd like to see that for myself one day."

The afiable grin was back and, though it wasn't entirely obvious when they'd found their way out, Vohra's hands slipped back into his pockets to permit a boyish shrug.

"I'll get her to give you a call."

Jen's smile brightened, encouraged by the possibility of interacting with something she hadn't thought possible. "I look forward to it."