The Arboretum Expedition

Posted on 13 Mar 2015 @ 5:11am by Seleya Qellar Ph.D. & Ensign Arandon Khnailmnae Ph.D.

2,913 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Episode 08 - NIMBUS
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 7, Arboretum
Timeline: MD -03: 1225 hrs

ON:

Seleya entered the arboretum with an upturned nose. She could detect trees, flowers, plants, and freshly tilled soil; in short, it smelled like Nature, and she absolutely detested Nature. As much as she enjoyed her work as an agricultural biotechnologist and, on rare occasions, also enjoyed a field excursion, she was definitely much more in it for the research than the practical application. The discipline appealed to her for the power and control it offered over Nature, to tame that which at all times struggled against the sentient. Its humanitarian benefits were definitely of a distant and secondary concern.

She took one step into the room, felt the soft crunch of stones beneath her heels, and immediately began to reconsider coming here. She'd felt compelled to seek out the young man as a matter of social custom, to introduce herself at the very least or perhaps offer him some conversation in their native tongue. It was difficult enough to be a Romulan in the Federation, so a Romulan in Starfleet was almost unimaginable for her. But she wasn't sure her sympathy extended to wandering too much through the arboretum, or, worse, discovering he was one of those "harmony with nature" botanists that supposed to pass themselves off as scientists.

"Jolan tru?"

"Brhon mnekha," Arandon said, almost without thinking. He registered Romulan in his head and he instantly thought of the greeting. The language was still fresh in his mind and he still repeated it in his head to gain greater fluency, the response to a prompt was nearly autonomic. But just who had done so? Looking up from his gardening work Arandon saw an impeccably dressed woman of a light green coloring, distinctive of some of his father's people. Arandon's people if you felt like it. "I'm sorry, who are you?" His tone was inquisitive and direct, intent on getting an answer from the strange Romulan woman.

Hidden beneath the heavy curtain of her bangs, Seleya raised an eyebrow at the directness of the question. She smoothed down the stiff jacquard textured fabric of her lavender dress and adjusted one of the box pleats of the skirt, as if she was somehow his superior and not obligated in the least to answer his question in anything other than her own time.

"Dr. Seleya Qellar," she said, finally shifting her eyes away from her clothing and to him. Her eyes cut to take in the gardening, which she saw as a mess. Her face didn't change but the length of time she spent looking at the dirt and tools seemed to speak volumes. "And you must be Ensign Khnailmnae. Or, at the very least, someone who has bothered to learn Rihannsu."

Arandon nodded. "Yes," he said in his quick, mumble tone of voice. After that there was silence and for a while and Arandon still didn't have much of an answer to his previous question. Looking down once again, he returned to his work, if the Doctor wished to keep talking, she could.

Seleya pursed her lips in annoyance. Being the young man's elder, she'd taken his move as a sort of self-dismissal that didn't sit well. She'd expected to command his undivided attention for more than a fraction of a second, given their shared heritage. Nevertheless, she chalked it up to youthful impertinence and a poor upbringing and let the matter drop without a word. "Imagine my surprise upon discovering that a member of a family once so dedicated to the Imperial Navy was serving aboard a Starfleet vessel. You must indulge me and tell me how you ended up here of all places."

Arandon did look up but raised an eyebrow, not that she would see it. "I don't know what you're talking about Doctor.... Qellar?" He did look up at that last part. Part of him was feigning ignorance, he did know that his father was a Romulan officer of the Galae, but he knew comparatively little about other members of his family. A weird ancestress and ties to Royalty, but his father didn't cover that in their language lessons. In fact his father taught him comparatively little about being Rihannsu or about House Khnailmnae. Well he assumed there was a House in there somewhere.

Seleya stared at him for a long moment, allowing her eyes to systematically rove over his features and make an assessment. Eventually, she folded her arms behind her back and clasped her hands; her face remained completely controlled and impassive, though from the tone of her voice it was clear she was disappointed in the results of her visual investigation. "My apologies, I should have realized sooner you were a half-caste. A bastard, then? Refugee? Exile?"

Arandon somtimes made jabs at himself for being mixed, a 'half-breed'. Part of it was to deal with his self-otherizing nature, injecting some humor into being between two worlds in a sense. The first term she used caused a minor stirring of offense, but only when Arandon considered himself in the context of his Romulan blood. Risians never made such jabs, not matter how much Arandon might have invented their internal, racist thoughts to mimic their sometimes stand-offish nature towards him. No they didn't mind his mixed parentage. And having been raised in a family of bastards, the next term didn't elicit much reaction. The other two, he was immune to, and they read innocuously enough. "The second." Arandon half-mumbled, returning his gaze to his work. She of all people wasn't going to lord this over him.

The muscles in her jaws bulged as she clenched her teeth in annoyance; youthful impertinence had graduated to the sort of brash audacity that wore on her passive veneer. She stared at the back of his head for a long moment and ran her tongue across the front of her teeth as she thought of how best to respond. She was feeling marginally more patient than usual and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt - it was possible he hadn't spent much time among his own people or harbored some lingering emotional trauma from the dissolution of their nation. It was either a weakness or a deficiency that encouraged his poor behavior and either was pitiable enough to keep her from being too caustic.

"I was an asylum seeker myself, shortly after the Hobus incident," Seleya revealed, trying to strike a sympathetic tone. "You were raised in the Federation, then? Which planet, if I may inquire?"

"Risa." Arandon said, moving some soil in over the recently planted specimen. "It must have been hard, having to leave everything you knew behind. Having to seek shelter in the arms of a foreign power. Being humbled." His words and tone were a miasma of ambiguity. Were they meant to insult? To rub salt in the wound? Or were they musings from experience, just the mumblings of an young man who lacked some social graces. Arandon's own father had a similar situation. Perhaps he was associating and comparing the two. The fact that he was engaging and provoking weighty, personal conversation was perhaps an indicator of his intentions however.

"Ah, Risa. The idol worshippers. How quaint." Seleya bent down next to him, picked up a trowel and made a half-hearted effort at turning over some soil as if she gave a damn about its composition. She gave the hint of a smile before speaking again, "Yes, quite humbling. You might even think of it as humiliating, but those of us who had to endure such hardships found ourselves in intimate connection with the resilience for which my people are known." While he was turned away, she looked more than a little pleased at being able to produce commentary on both his heritage - her people, not his - and what must have been a relatively trouble-free upbringing among the material comforts of the Federation's premier pleasure planet.

Arandon didn't respond, he really had nothing to say to that. He continued working with the Doctor beside him, who had little idea what she was doing but appeared to be working at it well enough. After a while he broke the silence. "So where were you from?" He asked, trying to engage in small talk to fill the silence.

"Romulus. My father was Senator Tomalan Qellar, so I spent my childhood and formative years in the capital city," she replied, shifting the balance on her heels to make sure she didn't slip into the filth beneath her. "But I was on Ralatak for a conference when the incident occurred, so I was fortunate in that respect. And you? How did you manage? I understand despite your family's declining political fortunes the majority of your house was still based on Romulus as well, is that correct?"

"I don't really know. I believe my father had other children but they are apparently all dead, I don't know if that reflects the state of the other members of the family." He said all of this without any particular emotion, after all he knew very little and he hardly had an emotional connection to it.

Seleya gave the trowel an artful toss in the air, grasped the handle while it was mid-air and then buried it to the hilt in the dirt. She stood up and dusted off her hands while staring down at the young man next to her. "You seem almost entirely ignorant of your heritage, Ensign. I find that quite curious, even for a half-caste. Your father is alive, is he not?"

Arandon was entirely unimpressed with her display, like he was with her entire personality. "Yes he is." He replied.

"Then has he simply failed in his duties, or do you choose to remain willfully ignorant?"

Arandon looked up at the woman's outburst. "I am no half as ignorant as you portray me to be," Arandon said with a neutral tone. "I am not willfully ignorant, I willfully refuse to play your game Doctor." He said with a slight flick of his eyes.

"Game?" Seleya asked, laughing as she did so. It faded into a broad smile, and she shook her head. "I do not play games. Games are for children, my dear boy. I brought myself down here, in the midst of all this..." She gestured around her, but mostly at the dirt. "...in an effort to learn more about you and seek your companionship. It seems only natural that two members of a dying nation should gravitate toward one another, does it not? It must have been sentimental naivete that made me think I might find someone who would reciprocate."

Her lies did her no credit, but that was what Mnhei'sahe was all about, saving face, for the benefit of the other. Not that she had done him any credit with her lib comments about his parentage that just bounced off him. Looking up at her, Arandon's eyes were crystalline, like ice, not cold, but vibrant in their vitreous lacquer. "It must have been." His tone was robotic and eerily distant, dazzling and cutting like diamonds through the air, if a sound could take on such qualities.

"A weakness of mine, I suppose," Seleya said, staring down at him with unflinching features. For a moment she wavered in place, as if making a decision about whether or not to leave. The young man very obviously had some sort of hostility toward Romulans or, perhaps, to other sentient humanoids in general. The entire trip was shaping up to be just short of a complete waste of time, so she decided to make one more effort at salvaging the conversation. "Do you tend the ship's arboretum, or is this some manner of field research?" She motioned casually to the plants he'd been working on.

"Well everyone else seems a bit... well their strengths lie elsewhere." Arandon said, moving some soil around. Commander Kohl couldn't get simple, wild plants to grow and no one outside himself and Mr. Van Zyl showed much particular interest in the Arboretum, all the while enjoying the flowers.

"We are certainly each suited to different tasks," Seleya said, turning in place to take in the arboretum. When she'd completed the circle, she smiled down at Arandon like she was keeping some sort of secret joke. "My speciality is agriculture, and yet I would most assuredly kill everything in here if it were my responsibility."

It certainly wasn't what Arandon had pegged her as but to each her own. "I take it you don't like the minutia of plant life then? You work better on the larger scale?" He asked, still absorbed in his work.

"Much smaller scale, actually," Seleya replied, giving a genuine smile as they moved on to a subject that was actually of interest to her. "I'm a biotechnologist, so I think I concern myself with the minutiae of the minutiae, gene manipulation and the like. Largely, constructing seeds suitable for specific colonial environments. But I just make them - the planting and nurturing are done by others far more qualified than myself. I understand it takes a certain touch. Something to do with one's thumb, the humans say, isn't it? Utter nonsense, of course, as if one gardened with only the thumb."

"Well I guess that's where our fields overlap." Arandon said with a quick glance of acknowledgement. "I do quite a bit of genetic splicing and selective breeding. I formerly worked on terraforming projects so I get where your coming from. It's the details, but in a grand context."

"The work is small, but the vision is monumental. I've always felt it's like taking hold of raw power then molding and shaping it to your purpose. Nature is powerful in its own right but too imprecise and inelegant for my liking. There's so much potential and so much to be improved upon if you can tame it. Or design it, as the case may be." Her eyes focused somewhere off in the distance for a brief moment, then she turned her attention back to Arandon.

"It really is the closest thing to being god isn't it? Molding new worlds, new life." Arandon mused, looking up as he pulled a weed out of the ground. "And hey, terraforming never hurt anyone." He gave a quick, puzzled look on his face, remembering the Genesis device and Dr. Marcus. "Well that one time."

"The Genesis Project?" Seleya said derisively, as if it were someone's abortive secondary school science fair project. "Federation incompetence. No offense, of course."

"No offense taken," Arandon said, dropping the weed in a waste pile he had next to him. "My world has an advanced weather and seismic control net and we do just fine. And on Mars, all they did was smack asteroids into the polar ice cap. Simpler methods often prove the best ones."

The corner of Seleya's mouth turned upward in a half-smile at the mention of 'my world,' as if she was amused by it, but she listened attentively until he was finished before commenting. "You really have no attachment to Romulus, do you? You consider yourself...Risian?"

Arandon gave a bit of a shrug as he turned his gloved hands elsewhere. "It's the only world I know, and Romulus is gone, so..." Arandon trailed off.

"Well, the planet is gone," Seleya conceded, pursing her lips. "But the people endure. So, your family never discussed your heritage with you? Never once mentioned House Khnailmnae? House Rllailieu? What a tragedy to deny you such a high pedigree. Or, half a high pedigree, at least." She twirled a hand dismissively in the hand, as if to clear the air of her own statement. "You have no interest in that half of you?"

"I never said any of that," Arandon stated. "I'm quite aware of Romulan history, philosophy, I just don't have much of a personal connection to it. I think my father was a bit thankful to leave rank and title behind." Arandon said it all with a matter of fact tone. "I'm aware of House Rllaillieu and Lady Dhivael, but only in their context in Romulan history."

"Thankful to leave rank and title behind?" Seleya repeated, adding a laugh to the end. "My goodness, what a black sheep he must be. Nevertheless, it's heart-warming to know you haven't rejected us entirely." The corner of her mouth tugged up again in the amused half-smile. She allowed a silence to settle between them for a moment before taking a small step back away from him. "Well. I'll leave you to your work, ensign. It was a pleasure to meet you. And, naturally, I am always available for a decent cup of Ralatakan tea if you find yourself in need of a familiar face."

She gave him a quick, parting smile and turned away to set herself back on the gravel path leading to the arboretum's main door. There were plenty more questions to ask but now that she'd learned a bare minimum about the somewhat icy young man there was little reason to stay in this humid hellhole with its earthy smell of dirt and decaying bark. Just thinking about it, feeling it assault here nostrils, made her quicken her pace along the gravel path, back to the pristine, sterile environment of a laboratory space and back to proper civilization.

OFF:

Seleya Qellar, Ph.D.
Biotechnologist
USS Galileo
[ PNPC - Mott ]

Ensign Arnadon Khnailmnae, Ph.D.
Botanist
USS Galileo

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