Awkward Conversationalists

Posted on 10 Aug 2015 @ 4:43pm by Ensign K'os Beaumont & Lieutenant JG Cyrin Xanth
Edited on on 14 Aug 2015 @ 10:29pm

2,902 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Episode 09 - Empires
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 3, Multipurpose Laboratory 1
Timeline: MD02, 0830 Hours

[ON]

The screen shut down for what must have been the tenth time since Cyrin had started working on it again. Well, perhaps he was exaggerating in his mind, it just took so long to work through the equations he was dealing with that every time the system went down and he lost everything it certainly felt like the problem was more frequent than it really was. With a heavy sigh that bordered on snarl, he sat back and rubbed at his red-rimmed eyes. "Why do you hate me so much, Computer?" he whined, softly, as once again all the computations he'd been working on were erased.

"Please restate the question," came the maddeningly neutral and innocent voice of his nemesis. Oooh, so she mocked him now? Cyrin had half a mind to go into the computer's innards and see if he could fix whatever Engineering had missed when they'd come through to fix up the lab after their trip through the singularity. She wouldn't like that much. If Cyrin got his hands on that kind of circuitry, terrible things were likely to happen. Her only hope - and therefore the hope of everyone onboard who relied on the computer - was that Engineering would finally respond to his requests for assistance soon before Cyrin actually got annoyed enough to take matters into his own hands.

K'os walked in to the multipurpose lab at that moment. While it appeared as though Engineering had indeed finally responded to Cyrin's request for assistance when K'os said a quick hello, he instead continued on his way to a panel hiding a damaged EPS conduit. It was clear he wasn't here to help Cyrin. He dropped his tool kit by the panel and rubbed his sore and tired shoulders before rummaging for a tool. "How is your morning going so far, Xanth?" K'os said with a quiet voice.

At the first sight of the engineer, Cyrin's face lit up in a happy grin. Finally he would be able to get something done around here. K'os Beaumont would make all his troubles go away! That smile quickly slid from his face though as he watched the man bypass the damaged terminal and make his way to some other section. This time, Cyrin did actually snarl, though it was a quiet sound that might be missed over the soft beeps from the computers in the lab.

"I...but you...I need...uh...I thought you were..." Cyrin took a breath, trying to focus, to slowly work his way through things. "I'm okay, Beaumont. How are you?" Despite the seeming offer of pleasantries, the Trill continued on without pause. "Do you think, maybe, if you get a chance after you, uh, finish whatever it is you're, um, doing over there...I mean to say, could you take a look at my console please? It keeps losing power and for some reason the memory buffers get wiped in the process."

K'os had hesitated at the words. He'd known Cyrin for awhile, and while they weren't friends or even saw each other that much, K'os recognized the change in his tone. Rather than seeing the usual hues of purple Cyrin's words usually produced in his mind, they were muted with...the gray of frustration perhaps? K'os returned his attention to the panel as he worked it free. He really didn't have time for fixing computers while the ship as a whole had much larger issues. He hadn't slept since before entering the vortex and it showed on his face. Even now, he was working on the seemingly endless list of work orders while those on the rest of the team got some rest.

"Well," K'os started to say, exposing the EPS conduit, "I'm a bit busy..." He said carefully. He instantly felt guilty when he said it and he looked over his shoulder as if reconsidering what he said.

Frustration indeed, Cyrin's expression left little room for missing that, "B-b-but I c-can't work." That frustration, however, had already worked itself up enough that combined with having to put himself forward like this the Trill wasn't going to be able to explain easily. The hapless engineer was going to have to listen to him fumble his way along until either Cyrin reached the end of his explanation or he was cut off, and any attention that his attempt brought his way only made his stuttering worse.

"C-C-Comm-mander K-Kohl, he w-wanted me t-to review the d-data th-that w-w-we got g-going th-through the sing-sing-ula...er, singularity." Crewman Thelin had risked her life to get it too, making it all the more precious. "H-he...I mean...w-w-we hope th-that we c-c-can f-f-figure out what hap-happened and f-find a w-way b-b-back. B-but my c-c-console keeps f-f-failing and I...I c-c-can't g-get any-anywhere." It would take even longer for him to explain why he didn't work out of Astrometrics, but that section had been more heavily damaged than this lab and Cyrin didn't want to go back to a place that had nearly been a colleague's crypt so recently. Already it had taken him just a few minutes to get out these few sentences, and the struggle was plain to see on his face as he tried to figure out what to say and how to say it to get K'os to help him.

K'os had stood almost immediately at the mention of Kohl but didn't make any attempt to move from his spot. He had patiently waited for Cyrin to finish as he took in the details of the Trill's face. He watched the way his mouth moved, the way his eyes crinkled as he stuttered out the words. When he'd finished, K'os waited a long pause as if considering his words. With a sigh, he reached up and rubbed at his eyes. "Okay." He said, sounding defeated. He moved towards Cyrin, "Okay." He said again. "Have you...does it give you an error or just shut off?"

Cyrin let out an audible sigh of relief, and began to relax some. It helped that K'os hadn't tried to rush him along, or finish his sentences for him. Sometimes, Cyrin's mind just moved far quicker than he could get his mouth too, thinking not just about what he was saying but about ten other things at the same time. What was K'os working on in here, anyways? Would the engineer find him to be a nuisance because of his request? If so, how would that affect things down the road? This was such a small ship, and rumours spread fast, so the last thing Cyrin wanted was some reputation as a whiner. Was there a different way he should have handled his request? Why had the engineer been watching him so intently as he spoke? Had K'os not been sleeping? He certainly looked tired. All of that, even before he got to the parts of his mind still churning away at his work, numbers and equations and dimensional geometry forming patterns and enigmas in his mind.

"Thank you," Cyrin said, sounding more than grateful for just that K'os was going to take a look at his station. "It um...it just shuts off without w-warning. But it's h-happened at r-roughly the same inter-ah-intervals each time, about forty-five m-minutes into things.

K'os nodded. Though it was uncertain if it was from understanding what the problem was or for indicating that he'd heard the man. He was glad that the purple colour had returned to Cyrin's words. The hybrid had a natural need to help, and didn't like frustrating anyone for any reason. "Power supply." K'os muttered as he ran his hands along the top of the console feeling the texture and the associated sounds it produced in his mind. "Mhm." He said to himself before seemingly snapping out of his thoughts. "Yes, sounds like a power supply issue." He gave Cyrin a tight-lipped grin deepening the dimples in his cheeks. K'os ducked down behind the console out of Cyrin's sight, making banging and clanging noises as he worked. After a moment his head popped up into view. "You said this data you're working on is important? About the singularity?"

As the engineer got to work, Cyrin hovered over and nearby but was careful not to touch anything. Sometimes, it seemed to him, computers and machines went out of their way to make a fuss whenever he touched them, and he certainly didn't want to make matters any worse than they were already. For all he knew, he'd caused the problem himself in the first place. K'os' smile helped him relax a little further, and soon enough he was talking along without any sort of extreme problems.

"That sounds like an easy fix then. Right? I hope it's not too much trouble, and I uh, I really appreciate you helping out, Beaumont. Its been driving me um, a little crazy, the past few hours. But you're right, the data is involving the singularity. We're trying to understand it. What caused it, ya know? What its effects on the ship and on us were, what its effects were on space itself. And if it might have taken us further through space than we realized..." Cyrin trailed off, wondering if he should have spoken of his suspicions so soon. He hadn't even informed Commander Kohl yet, and had no proof since his terminal kept wiping out his work each time. "I mean, we have to learn everything we can about it. That's my orders. Is there anything I can do to help out?"

"Not unless you know how to fix a heatsink that's been crushed free." K'os chuckled, knowing the answer already. K'os stood and walked back towards his tool kit to retrieve what he'd need to fix the power supply in the console. As he walked he looked over his shoulder at Cyrin, "You think we might have been affected too? Not just the ship?"

That was a task far beyond Cyrin's skills. While he might be brilliant with numbers, could make sense of twelve-dimensional physics, and could list all the dozens of different classifications of stars in his sleep, the scientist had issues even putting a tricorder back together and those things were made to be easy. "Well, it might be possible that we were affected somehow by the gravitational distortions," Cyrin said, choosing to focus on what he could talk about, "but I would have guessed we would have seen sign of it by now. But whatever is strong enough to nearly shake the ship apart, and rupture the hull, could make short work of people as squishy as you or me. I'd like to check that out, amongst other things." There, and not a single hesitation or stutter this time. The Trill obviously worked best when discussing business and wasn't put on the spot or had much immediately expected of him.

If K'os had caught the change in the man's lack of stutter, he didn't show it. He didn't point it out or recognise it as an anomaly. He instead continued to act the same way he had when Cyrin had been stuttering. He continued to watch the man's face in a practiced intentional sort of way. There was a time a few years ago that making eye contact for this long would have overwhelmed him and allow his emotions to cascade. Faces were strong conveyors of information, especially for emotions. Making eye contact with people now was a deliberate move in order to constantly practice control over his mind and being able to do it for this long was possibly as satisfying to K'os, as speaking stutter free was for Cyrin. That made K'os grin again. He blinked once. Then twice. Then realised that he'd been staring; a common occurrence for people having a conversation with K'os who had a tendency to become quite lost in his own mind.

Being a common occurrence or not it didn't make it any less embarrassing and K'os' ears turned red as a result. "Gravitational distortions..." He finally said thoughtfully to convey that he'd been listening. "Not to mention all the other forces we may have been bombarded with. It's not known at what point the ship lost power traveling through...the singularity? Vortex?" K'os made a mental note to pin down the appropriate word for it, "High levels of radiation for instance; or exotic matter?" K'os walked back to the console to continue his work as he spoke. Cyrin had hit upon one of K'os' second favourite subjects to talk about. Next to hyperspanner models and tweaks, talking science was nearly a passion for the engineer. "I've read that exotic matter composes any non-baryonic matter. That should be worrisome. The ship's shields are designed to protect from regular old baryonic matter. Who knows what we were subjected to as the ship scraped along the geodesics of...whatever we passed through. Or what we picked up along the way."

Eye contact wasn't something Cyrin was very practised at himself currently, so he missed the embarrassed look the other had as he'd been sort of looking at K'os' collar. Just as it was far too easy to get the Trill stuttering, it was just as easy to put him at ease and the hybrid engineer had managed it without trying hard at all. Being patient with him, letting him say what he needed to without rushing him - or worse, completing his sentences for him - was a great start. Talking about work and science was another, especially when Cyrin could share in his enthusiasm for them without feeling like he was being put on the spot or had so much expected of him. Cyrin was fully aware of his own behaviour, was so often confused by it too, but he was grateful towards anyone who just let him be as awkward as he was at times. That was probably why he avoided counselors like the plague though.

"Yes, exactly," he replied, nodding and growing a bit more animated as he talked. His hands gestured to emphasize certain points. "With such an uncontrolled, unfocused creation of that singularity, there was no way of knowing what we might have been subjected to during our passage through. Thankfully, if there was anything immediately dangerous, we would know about it by now. I haven't detected any lingering radiation or trace particles that are harmful with my tricorder, and the logs that Crewman Thelin saved show the same even if there are holes in the data. There were some spikes in x-rays, but the hull was able to deflect the vast majority of them. We snagged some interesting Bose-Einstein condensates as well, but those won't cause any problems as they are so non-reactive." Cyrin took a deep breath, let it out in an audible sigh. "We got lucky, Beaumont, we really did. With shields down, things could have turned out very different. Still, next time we go through something like that, I hope we can keep the shields up. That'll make me feel a whole lot better. I don't want to calculate the odds of us getting that lucky again."

K'os closed up the back of the console and stood, watching it power back on, he pushed a few keys as it rebooted, logging into the LCARS administrator's submenu. After checking a few quick settings he was satisfied with the results. "It won't overheat anymore." He said to Cyrin over his shoulder before turning to face the man. "And I hope we can keep the shields up too." He added. Though the idea of having to cross back through it didn't seem to sit well with him.

"Thank you!" Cyrin enthused, his face splitting with a happy grin, and this time certainly met the other man's eyes. It was such a relief to know that he was going to be able to continue his work now. The enthusiasm dropped off though when he saw way K'os looked and it took a moment to figure it out. "Oh. Hey, don't worry," Cyrin tried, both his smile and tone encouraging. "We're going to be okay, I'm sure of it. We'll figure everything, no problem."

"I'm sure with that kind of infectious optimism, we will." K'os mimicked the smile - a quirk of his he did with others. He began making for the door, but seemed flustered when he remembered he was still here for a different job. He gave Cyrin a half smirk before returning to the EPS conduit he had come to repair in the first place. Sleep deprivation was certainly setting in. He took up a tool and began his work, though stole a few quick glances over his shoulder to watch Cyrin.

After a moment, Cyrin's smile slipped and he ducked his head, smoothed down his uniform jacket though it wasn't really needed. Prolonged smiles and eye contact brought heat to his cheeks as his overactive mind began coming up with dozens of possibilities for the motivations behind it. Plus, he felt a little guilty as he wasn't sure exactly how confident he was in his boast to the other man. Cyrin's jaw tensed. This was a challenge that he could help solve though, and it wouldn't do to let Beaumont down now.


[OFF]

Ensign Cyrin Xanth
Astrophysicist
USS Galileo

Ensign K'os Beaumont
Assistant Chief Engineer
USS Galileo

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